"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.

West and south. Not far. A few 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 written many stories in which policemen and other characters handled weapons with the ease of familiarity, Marty was surprised by how unhesitatingly he had resorted to guns when trouble arose. After all, he was neither a man of action nor experienced in killing.

His own life and then his family had been in jeopardy, but he would have thought, before learning differently, that he'd have reservations when his finger first curled around the trigger. He would have expected to experience at least a flicker of regret after shooting a man in the chest even if the bastard deserved shooting.

He clearly remembered the dark glee with which he had emptied the Beretta at the fleeing Buick. The savage lurking in the human genetic heritage was as accessible to him as to any man, regardless of how educated, well-read, and civilized he was.

What he had discovered about himself did not displease him as much as perhaps it should. Hell, it didn't displease him at all.

He knew that he was capable of killing any number of men to save his own life, Paige's life, or the lives of his children. And although he swam in a society where it was intellectually correct to embrace pacifism as the only hope of civilization's survival, he didn't see himself as a hopeless reactionary or an evolutionary throwback or a degenerate but merely as a man acting precisely as nature intended.

Civilization began with the family, with children protected by mothers and fathers willing to sacrifice and even die for them.

If the family wasn't safe any more, if the government couldn't or wouldn't protect the family from the depredations of rapists and child molesters and killers, if homicidal sociopaths were released from prison after serving less time than fraudulent evangelists who embezzled from their churches and greedy hotel-rich millionairesses who underpaid their taxes, then civilization had ceased to exist.

If children were fair game-as any issue of a daily paper would confirm they were-then the world had devolved into savagery. Civilization existed only in tiny units, within the walls of those houses where the members of a family shared a love strong enough to make them willing to put their lives on the line in the defense of one another.

What a day they'd been through. A terrible day. The only good thing about it was-he had discovered that his fugue, nightmares, and other symptoms didn't result from either physical or mental illness. The trouble was not within him, after all. The boogeyman was real.

But he could take minimal satisfaction from that diagnosis. Although he had regained his self-confidence, he had lost so much else.

Everything had changed.

Forever.

He knew that he didn't even yet grasp just how dreadfully their lives had been altered. In the hours remaining before dawn, as he tried to think what steps they must take to protect themselves, and as he dared to consider the few possible origins of The Other that logic dictated, their situation inevitably would seem increasingly difficult and their options narrower than he could yet envision or admit.

For one thing, he suspected that they would never be able to go home again.

He wakes half an hour before dawn, healed and rested.

He returns to the front seat, switches on the interior light, and examines his forehead and left eye in the rearview mirror. The bullet furrow in his brow has knit without leaving any scar that he can detect.

His eye is no longer damaged-or even bloodshot.

However, half his face is crusted with dried blood and the grisly biological waste products of the accelerated healing process. A portion of his countenance looks like something out of The Abominable Dr.

Phibes or Darkman.

Rummaging in the glove compartment, he finds a small packet of Kleenex.