We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?"
Clocker's eyes were rheumy. "None of us is ever fully awake."
"Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don't
have any patience for that right now."
Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, "You've got a
turbulent heart, Drew."
"Wrong. It's my stomach that's turbulent from having to listen to this
crap."
"An inner tempest of blind hostility."
"Fuck you," Oslett said.
The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the
stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its
approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their
seatbelts.
According to Oslett's Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was
back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until
it showed eight minutes to midnight.
By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb
clock counting down toward detonation.
The advance man--who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much
younger than Drew Oslett--was waiting in the lounge at the
private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomar, which
it most likely was not.
Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwood
Bumstead.
The contact didn't seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their
luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a
green Oldsmobile.
Lomar was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body
and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The
exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of
the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and
healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine.
However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had
been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still
the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks
of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only
certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to
exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomar had a neck
like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest
that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone,
and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.
Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the
air was still damp and chilly, Lomar was wearing just jeans and a
T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock
singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as
little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He
virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with
calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and
pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.
Oslett suspected Lomar was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain,
even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body
was the ego that inhabited it.
Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomar
was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the
two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was
enough. Actually, Lomar was probably only slightly--if at all--larger
than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison,
Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes
intimidated by Clocker's size, Oslett delighted at the thought of
Clocker intimidated by Lomar--though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was
at all impressed, he didn't show it.
Lomar drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.
Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard.
They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of
corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously
maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees,
all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.
"Under your seat," Lomar told Oslett, "you'll find a Xerox of the
Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house.
Wasn't easy to get hold of. Read it now, 'cause I have to take it with
me and destroy it."
Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they
followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett
studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay.
They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all
the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.
"This cop, this Lowbock," Oslett said, looking up from the report, "he
thinks it's all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn't even an
intruder."
"That's a break for us," Lomar said. He grinned, which was a mistake,
because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to
help the willfully stupid.
Oslett said, "Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked
down a drain here, I think we need more than a break.
We need a miracle."
"Let me see," Clocker said.
Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said
to Lomar, "How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how
did he find him?"
Lomar shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. "Nobody knows."
Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.
To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded
golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and
black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of
eternity.
Lomar said, "We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later
our man will turn up, and we'll recover him."
"Where's Stillwater now?"
"We don't know."
"Terrific."
"Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other
thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that
they seemed to . . . go into hiding, I guess you'd say."
"What other thing?"
Lomar frowned. "Nobody's sure. It happened right around the corner
from their house. Different neighbors saw different pieces, but a guy
fitting Stillwater's description fired a lot of shots at another guy in
a Buick. The Buick slams into a parked Explorer, see, gets hung up on
it for a second. Two kids fitting the description of the Stillwater
girls tumble out the back seat of the Buick and run, the Buick takes
off, Stillwater empties his gun at it, and then this BMW--which fits the
description of one of the cars registered to the Stillwaters--it comes
around the corner like a bat out of hell, driven by Stillwater's wife,
and all of them get in it and take off."
"After the Buick?"
"No. It's long gone. It's like they
're trying to get out of there
before the cops arrive."
"Any neighbors see the guy in the Buick?"
"No. Too dark."
"It was our bad boy."
Lomar said, "You really think so?"
"Well, if it wasn't him, it must've been the Pope."
Lomar gave him an odd look, then stared thoughtfully at the highway
ahead.
Before the dimwit could ask how the Pope was involved in all of this,
Oslett said, "Why don't we have the police report on the second
incident?"
"Wasn't one. No complaint. No crime victim. Just a report of the
hit-and-run damage to the Explorer."
"According to what Stillwater told the cops, our Alfie thinks he is
Stillwater, or ought to be. Thinks his life was stolen from him.
The poor boy's totally over the edge, whacko, so to him it makes sense
to go right back and steal the Stillwater kids because somehow he thinks
they're his kids. Jesus, what a mess."
A highway sign indicated they would soon reach the city limits of Laguna
Beach.
Oslett said, "Where are we going?"
"Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point," Lomar replied. "You've got a suite
there. I took the long way so you'd both have a chance to read the
police report."
"We napped on the plane. I sort of thought, once we landed, we'd get
right into action."
Lomar looked surprised. "Doing what?"
"Go to the Stillwater house for starters, have a look around, see what
we can see."
"Nothing to see. Anyway, I'm supposed to take you to the Ritz.
You're to get some sleep, be ready to go by eight in the morning."
"Go where?"
"They expect to have a lead on Stillwater or your boy or both by
morning. Someone will come to the hotel to give you a briefing at eight
o'clock, and you've gotta be rested, ready to move. Which you should
be, since it's the Ritz. I mean, it's a terrific hotel.
Great food too. Even from room service. You can get a good, healthy
breakfast, not typical greasy hotel crap. Egg-white omelets,
seven-grain bread, all kinds of fresh fruit, non-fat yogurt--" Oslett
said, "I sure hope I can get a breakfast like I have in Manhattan every
morning. Alligator embryos and chicken-fried eel heads on a bed of
seaweed sauteed in a garlic butter, with a double side order of calves'
brains. Ahhh, man, you never in your life feel half as pumped as you do
after that breakfast."
So astonished that he let the speed of the Oldsmobile fall to half of
what it had been, Lomar stared at Oslett. "Well, they have great food
at the Ritz but maybe not as exotic as what you can get in New York."
He looked at the street again, and the car picked up speed.
"Anyway, you sure that's healthy food? Sounds packed with cholesterol
to me."
Not a hint of irony, not a trace of humor informed Lomar's voice.
It was clear that he actually believed Oslett ate eel heads, alligator
embryos, and calves' brains for breakfast.
Reluctantly, Oslett had to face the fact that there were worse potential
partners than the one he already had. Karl Clocker only looked stupid.
In Laguna Beach, December was the off season, and the streets were
nearly deserted at a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning. At the
three-way intersection in the heart of town, with the public beach on
the right, they stopped for the red traffic signal, even though no other
moving car was in sight.
Oslett thought the town was as unnervingly dead as any place in
Oklahoma, and he longed for the bustle of Manhattan, the all-night rush
of police vehicles and ambulances, the noir music of sirens, the endless
honking of horns. Laughter, drunken voices, arguments, and the mad
gibbering of the drug-blasted schizophrenic street dwellers that echoed
up to his apartment even in the deepest hours of the night were sorely
lacking in this somnolent burg on the edge of the winter sea.
As they continued out of Laguna, Clocker passed the Mission Viejo Police
report forward from the back seat.
Oslett waited for a comment from the Trekker. When none was
forthcoming, and when he could no longer tolerate the silence that
filled the car and seemed to blanket the world outside, he half-turned
to Clocker and said, "Well?"
"Well what?"
"What do you think?"
"Not good," Clocker pronounced from his nest of shadows in the back
seat.
"Not good? That's all you can say? Looks like one colossal mess to
me."
"Well," Clocker said philosophically, "into every crypto-fascist
organization, a little rain must fall.
Oslett laughed. He turned forward, glanced at the solemn Lomar, and
laughed harder. "Karl, sometimes I actually think maybe you're not a
bad guy."
"Good or bad," Clocker said, "everything resonates with the same
movement of subatomic particles."
"Now don't go ruining a beautiful moment," Oslett warned him.
In the deepest swale of the night, he rises from vivid dreams of slashed
throats, bullet-shattered heads, pale wrists carved by razor blades, and
strangled prostitutes, but he does not sit up or gasp or cry out like a
man waking from a nightmare, for he is always soothed by his dreams. He
lies in the fetal position upon the back seat of the car, half in and
half out of convalescent sleep.
One side of his face is wet with a thick, sticky substance. He raises
one hand to his cheek and cautiously, sleepily works the viscous
material between his fingers, trying to understand what it is.
Discovering prickly bits of glass in the congealing slime, he realizes
that his healing eye has rejected the splinters of the car window along
with the damaged ocular matter, which has been replaced by healthy
tissue.
He blinks, opens his eyes, and can again see as well through the left as
through the right. Even in the shadow-filled Buick, he clearly
perceives shapes, variations of texture, and the lesser darkness of the
night that presses at the windows.
Hours hence, by the time the palm trees are casting the long
west-falling shadows of dawn and tree rats have squirmed into their
secret refuges among the lush fronds to wait out the day, he will be
completely healed. He will be ready once more to claim his destiny.
He whispers, "Charlotte . .."
Outside, a haunting light gradually arises. The clouds trailing the
storm are thin and torn. Between some of the ragged streamers, the cold
face of the moon peers down.
'. . . Emily. .."
Beyond the car windows, the night glimmers softly like slightly
tarnished silver in the glow of a single candle flame.
. . . Daddy is going to be all right . . . all right . . . don't worry
... Daddy is going to be all right.... " He now understands that he was
drawn to his double by a magneti.sen which arose because of their
essential oneness and which he perceived through a sixth sense.
He'd had no awareness that another self existed, but he'd been pulled
toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to
the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and
maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs
were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious
volition.
Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth
sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father
any time he wishes.
Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and
magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is
a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He
imagines his positive is aligned with the false father's negative.
Opposites attract.
He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of
force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.
West. West and south.
As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the
country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the
ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery
promise of its atmosphere.