From the Corner of His Eye (48 page)

Now, however, he was thinking not about what Agnes’s story might mean to Reverend White, but about what the minister might be able to do to provide at least a small degree of comfort to Agnes, who spent her life comforting others.

After supper in a roadside diner, Paul returned to his room and studied a tattered map of the western United States, the latest of several he’d worn out over the years. Depending on the weather and the steepness of the terrain, he might be able to reach Spruce Hills, Oregon, in ten days.

For the first time since walking to La Jolla to meet Jonas Salk, Paul planned a journey with a specific purpose.

Many nights, his sleep wasn’t half as restful as he would have wished, for he often dreamed of walking in a wasteland. Sometimes, desert salt flats stretched in all directions, with here and there a monument of weather-gnarled rock, all baking under a merciless sun. Sometimes, the salt was snow, and the monuments of rock were ridges of ice, revealed in the hard glare of a cold sun. Regardless of the landscape, he walked slowly, though he had the desire and the energy to proceed faster. His frustration built until it was so intolerable that he woke, kicking in the tangled sheets, restless and edgy.

This night in Weott, with the high solemn silence of the redwood forests out there now and waiting to embrace him in the morning, he slept without dreams.

Chapter 63

AFTER THE ENCOUNTER
with the quarter-spitting vending machines, Junior wanted to kill another Bartholomew, any Bartholomew, even if he had to drive to some far suburb like Terra Linda to do it, even if he had to drive farther and stay overnight in a Holiday Inn and eat steam-table food off a buffet crawling with other diners’ cold germs and garnished with their loose hairs.

He would have done it, too, and risked establishing a pattern that police might notice; but the still, small voice of Zedd guided him now, as so often before, and counseled calm, counseled focus.

Instead of immediately killing anyone, Junior returned to his apartment on the afternoon of December 29, and went to bed, fully clothed. To calm down. To think about focus.

Focus, Caesar Zedd teaches, is the sole quality that separates millionaires from the flea-ridden, sore-pocked, urine-soaked winos who live in cardboard boxes and discuss vintages of Ripple with their pet rats. Millionaires have it, winos don’t. Likewise, nothing but the ability to focus separates an Olympic athlete from a cripple who lost his legs in a car wreck. The athlete has focus, and the cripple doesn’t. After all, Zedd notes, if the cripple had it, he would have been a better driver, an Olympic athlete, and a millionaire.

Among Junior’s many gifts, his ability to focus might have been the most important. Bob Chicane, his former instructor in matters meditative, had called him intense and even obsessive, following the painful incident involving meditation without seed, but intensity and obsession were false charges. Junior was simply
focused.

He was focused enough, in fact, to find Bob Chicane, kill the insulting bastard, and get away with it.

Hard experience had taught him, however, that killing someone he knew, while occasionally necessary, didn’t release stress. Or if it did briefly release stress, then unforeseen consequences always contributed to even worse future stress.

On the other hand, killing a stranger like Bartholomew Prosser relieved stress better than sex did. Senseless murder was as relaxing to him as meditation without seed, and probably less dangerous.

He could have killed someone named Henry or Larry, without risk of creating a Bartholomew pattern that would prickle like a pungent scent in the hound-dog nostrils of Bay Area homicide detectives. But he restrained himself.

Focus.

Now he had to focus on being ready for the evening of January 12: the reception for Celestina White’s art show. She had adopted her sister’s baby. Little Bartholomew was in her care; and soon, the kid would be within Junior’s reach.

If killing the wrong Bartholomew had broken a dam in Junior and released a lake of tension, whacking the
right
Bartholomew would set loose an
ocean
of pent-up stress, and he would feel free as he’d not felt since the fire tower. Freer than he’d been in his entire life.

When he killed
the
Bartholomew, this haunting would finally end, too. In Junior’s mind, Vanadium and Bartholomew were inextricably linked, because it was the maniac cop who first heard Junior calling out
Bartholomew
in his sleep. Did that make sense? Well, it made more sense at some times than at others, but it always made a lot more sense than anything else. To be rid of the dead-but-persistent detective, he must eliminate Bartholomew.

Then it would stop. The torment would stop. Surely. His sense of drift, of sliding aimlessly through the days, would lift from him, and he would find purpose once more in determined self-improvement. He would definitely learn French and German. He would take cooking classes and become a culinary master. Karate, too.

Somehow, Vanadium’s malevolent spirit was also to blame for Junior’s failure to find a new heart mate, in spite of all the women he’d been through. Undoubtedly, when Bartholomew was dead and Vanadium vanquished with him, romance and true love would bloom.

Lying on his side in bed, clothed and shod, knees drawn up, arms folded across his chest, hands pressed under his chin, like a precocious fetus dressed and waiting for birth, Junior tried to recall the chain of logic that had led to this long and difficult pursuit of Bartholomew. That chain led three years into the past, however, which to Junior was an eternity, and not all the links were still in place.

No matter. He was a future-focused, focused man. The past is for losers. No, wait,
humility
is for losers. “The past is the teat that feeds those too weak to face the future.” Yes, that was the line from Zedd that Junior had stitched on a needlepoint pillow.

Focus. Prepare to kill Bartholomew and anyone who tries to protect Bartholomew on January 12. Prepare for all contingencies.

Junior attended a New Year’s Eve party with a nuclear-holocaust theme. Festivities were held in a mansion usually hung with cutting-edge art, but all the paintings had been replaced with poster-size blowups of photos of ruined Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

An outrageously sexy redhead hit on him as he selected from an array of bomb-shaped canapés on a tray held by a waiter dressed as a ragged and soot-smeared blast survivor. Myrtle, the redhead, preferred to be called Scamp, which Junior entirely understood. She wore a Day-Glo green miniskirt, a spray-on white sweater, and a green beret.

Scamp had fabulous legs, and her bralessness left no doubts about the lusciousness and authenticity of her chest, but after an hour of conversation about something or other, before suggesting that they leave together, Junior maneuvered her into a reasonably private corner and discreetly put a hand up her skirt, just to confirm that his gender suspicions were correct.

They spent an exciting night together, but it wasn’t love.

The phantom singer didn’t sing.

When Junior cut open a grapefruit for breakfast, he didn’t find a quarter in it.

On Tuesday, January 2, Junior met with the drug dealer who had introduced him to Google, the document forger, and he arranged to purchase a 9-mm handgun with custom-machined silencer.

He already had the pistol he had taken from Frieda Bliss’s collection, but it didn’t come with a sound-suppressor. He was preparing for all contingencies. Focus.

In addition to the firearm, he placed an order for a lock-release gun. This device, which could automatically pick any lock with just a few pulls of its trigger, was sold strictly to police departments, and its distribution was tightly controlled. On the black market it commanded such a high price that Junior could have bought the better part of a small Sklent painting for the same bucks.

Preparation. Details. Focus.

He woke several times that night, instantly alert for a ghostly serenade, but he heard no otherworldly crooning.

Scamp spent Wednesday ravishing him. It wasn’t love, but there was comfort in being familiar with his partner’s equipment.

On Thursday, January 4, he used his John Pinchbeck identity to purchase a new Ford van with a cashier’s check. He leased a private garage space in the Pinchbeck name, near the Presidio, and stored the van there.

That same day, he dared to visit two galleries. Neither of them had a pewter candlestick on display.

Nevertheless, Thomas Vanadium’s hostile ghost, that terrible prickly bur of stubborn energy, wasn’t done with Junior yet. Until Bartholomew was dead, the cop’s filthy-scabby-monkey spirit would keep coming back and coming back, and it would surely grow more violent.

Junior knew that he must remain vigilant. Vigilant and focused until January 12 had come and gone. Eight days to go.

Friday brought Scamp again, all of Scamp, all day, every way, wall-to-wall Scamp, so on Saturday he hadn’t enough energy to do more than shower.

Sunday, Junior hid out from Scamp, using his Ansaphone to screen her calls, and worked with such astonishing focus on his needlepoint pillows that he forgot to go to bed that night. He fell asleep over his needles at ten o’clock Monday morning.

Tuesday, January 9, having cashed out a number of investments during the past ten days, Junior made a wire transfer of one and a half million dollars to the Gammoner account in the Grand Cayman bank.

In a pew in Old St. Mary’s Church, in Chinatown, Junior took delivery of the lock-release gun and the untraceable 9-mm pistol with the custom-machined silencer, as previously arranged. The church was deserted at ten o’clock in the morning. The shadowy interior and the menacing religious figures gave him the creeps.

The messenger—a thumbless young thug whose eyes were as cold as those of a dead hit man—presented the weapon in a bag of Chinese takeout. The bag contained two waxed, white chipboard cartons (moo goo gai pan, steamed rice), one large bright-pink box filled with almond cookies, and—on the bottom—a second pink box containing the lock-release gun, the pistol, the silencer, and a leather shoulder holster to which was tied a gift tag bearing a hand-printed message:
With our compliments. Thanks for your business.

At a gunshop, Junior purchased two hundred rounds of ammunition. Later, that many cartridges seemed excessive to him. Later still, he purchased another two hundred.

He bought knives. And then sheaths for the knives. He acquired a knife-sharpening kit and spent the evening grinding blades.

No quarters. No singing. No phone calls from the dead.

Wednesday morning, January 10, he wired one and a half million dollars from the Gammoner account to Pinchbeck in Switzerland. Then he closed out the account in the Grand Cayman bank.

Aware that his tension was building intolerably, Junior decided that he needed Scamp more than he dreaded her. He spent the remainder of Wednesday, until dawn Thursday, with the indefatigable redhead, whose bedroom contained a vast collection of scented massage oils in sufficient volume to fragrantly lubricate half the rolling stock of every railroad company doing business west of the Mississippi.

She left him sore in places that had never been sore before. Yet he was more stressed out on Thursday than he’d been on Wednesday.

Scamp was a multitalented woman, with smoother skin than a depilated peach, with more delicious roundnesses than Junior could catalog, but she proved not to be the remedy for his tension. Only Bartholomew, found and destroyed, could give him peace.

He visited the bank in which he maintained a safe-deposit box under the John Pinchbeck identity. He withdrew the twenty thousand in cash and retrieved all the forged documents from the box.

In his car, currently a Mercedes, he made three trips between his apartment and the garage in which he’d stored the Ford van under the Pinchbeck name. He took precautions against being followed.

He stashed two suitcases full of clothes and toiletries—plus the contents of Pinchbeck’s safe-deposit box—in the van, and then added those precious items that he’d be loath to lose if the hit on Bartholomew went wrong, forcing him to leave his Russian Hill life and flee arrest. The works of Caesar Zedd. Sklent’s three brilliant paintings. The needlepoint pillows, to which he’d colorfully applied the wisdom of Zedd, constituted the bulk of this collection of bare essentials: 102 pillows in numerous shapes and sizes, which he had completed in just thirteen months of feverish stitchery.

If he killed Bartholomew and got away clean, as he expected that he would, then he could subsequently return everything in the van to the apartment. He was just being prudent by planning for his future, because the future was, after all, the only place he lived.

He would have liked to take Industrial Woman, as well, but she weighed a quarter ton. He couldn’t manage her alone, and he dared not hire a day worker, not even an illegal alien, to assist him, and thereby compromise the Pinchbeck van and identity.

Anyway—and curiously—Industrial Woman increasingly looked to him like Scamp. As various abraded and inflamed mucous membranes constantly reminded him, he’d had more than enough of Scamp for a while.

At last the day arrived: Friday, January 12.

Every nerve in Junior’s body was a tautly strung trigger wire. If something set him off, he might explode so violently that he’d blow himself into a psychiatric ward.

Fortunately, he recognized his vulnerability. Until the evening reception for Celestina White, he must spend every hour of the day in calming activities, soothing himself in order to ensure that he would be cool and effective when the time came to act.