Mr. Murder

miles.
        The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken his life.
        Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives the lines of power connecting them.
        He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats into himself, shuts down. He isn't quite ready to re-engage the enemy in combat and doesn't want to alert him to the fact that another encounter is only hours away.
        He closes his eyes.
        Smiling, he drifts into sleep.
        Healing sleep.
        At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves-his sweet wife, his beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo. , Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.
        Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a spasm that shook him from head to foot.
        He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn't wake.
        He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window, cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but that was the only movement in the night.
        In the wall opposite the front window, draperies covered a pair of sliding glass doors beyond which lay a balcony overlooking the sea.
        Through the doors and past the deck railing, down at the foot of the bluff, lay a width of pale beach onto which waves broke in garlands of silver foam. No one could easily climb to the balcony, and the sward was deserted.
        Maybe it had been only a nightmare.
        He turned away from the glass, letting the draperies fall back into place, and he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Three o'clock in the morning.
        He had been asleep about five hours. Not long enough, but it would have to do.
        His neck ached intolerably, and his throat was mildly sore.
        He went into the bathroom, eased the door shut, and snapped on the light. From his travel kit he took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin.
        The label advised a dosage of no more than two tablets at a time and no more than eight in twenty-four hours. The moment seemed made for living dangerously, however, so he washed down four of them with a glass of water drawn from the sink tap, then popped a sore-throat lozenge in his mouth and sucked on it.
        After returning to the bedroom and picking up the short-barreled shotgun from beside the bed, he went through the open connecting door to the girls' room. They were asleep, burrowed in their covers like turtles in shells to avoid the annoying light of the nightstand lamp.
        He looked out their windows. Nothing.
        Earlier, he had returned the reading chair to the corner, but now he moved it farther out into the room, where light would reach it.
        He didn't want to alarm Charlotte and Emily if they woke before dawn and saw an unidentifiable man in the shadows.
        He sat with his knees apart, the shotgun across his thighs.
        Although he owned five weapons-three of them now in the hands of the police although he was a good shot with all of them, although he had