The Vision (20 page)

Behind him, Holtzman cleared his throat and said, “We don’t have a warrant.”

Patmore stopped, looked back at him, and said, “Rudy, your ass, get it in here.”

* * *

Syrupy darkness. A
coppery odor. Barbed wire twisting inside him.

His tongue hurt. He’d bitten it. A coppery taste.

He was lying on his stomach. On the macadam parking lot. Near the Mercedes. His arms flung out in supplication. Head to one side. Ear against the ground as if listening for the approach of an enemy.

He opened his eyes but just barely. A pair of shoes were in front of his face. Inches from him. Gucci loafers. They turned and walked away. Toward the pavilion. In seconds they were out of sight, but he could still hear footsteps.

He tried to raise his head. Couldn’t.

He tried to remember how many times he’d been stabbed in the stomach. Three, maybe four times. Could have been worse. But it was surely bad enough. He was dying. He had no strength at all; and now even his weakness was draining out of him.

I’m such an idiot, he thought bitterly. How could I have been so careless? A damned fool. The closest I’ll ever come to a brainstorm is a light drizzle.

Should have known who the killer was. Should have known the moment the Ouija board said the target was the queen of the boat parade. She was one of his old girlfriends. Seemed to get along with a woman for only a few months. So now he was going to kill one of his old girlfriends. Probably had killed others. Why? No matter why. Should have known.

He felt as if thousands of insects were crawling inside of him, stinging and biting his guts.

He closed his eyes and thought, I don’t want to die. I
won’t!

Then: You fool. Do you think you have a choice?

A coppery odor. Syrupy darkness.

It didn’t look bad.

Inviting, actually.

He floated in the inviting darkness. He sank down and down, away from the pain, away from everything.

* * *

Curious, John Patmore
paged through the spiral-bound notebook that lay open beside the Ouija board on the dining room table. The ruled pages were filled with neat, feminine handwriting that he supposed belonged to Mary Bergen.

Mostly she had recorded questions and answers that appeared to be connected with the case she claimed to be investigating. In the middle of the notebook, however, there was a page that contained only five hastily scrawled words:
Mary! Run for your life!

The same message was repeated in the center of the following page. And then on a third.

Under the third warning there were more questions and answers:

When did I write these warnings?

Don’t know.

What do I mean by them?

Don’t know.

Who am I afraid of?

Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know!

Am I going crazy?

Maybe.

Where can I run to?

Nowhere.

Strange.

It made him nervous.

There was a notepad at the other side of the Ouija board. Patmore began leafing through it.

A-L-L-O-U-R-Y-E-S-T-E-R-D-A-Y-S

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L

BEAUTIFUL

T-H-E-A-I-R-I-S-B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L

THE AIR IS BEAUTIFUL

He glanced at the Ouija board, at the trivet, then down at the notepad again. He remembered working a board with his mother when he was a boy. He began to read every other line of the transcript.

When he finished, he thought of Erika Larsson and realized she matched the description of the girl whose death Mary Bergen had predicted. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that perhaps the clairvoyant was not a fake after all. “Holtzman!”

Rudy Holtzman returned from the far end of the house. “No one’s here.”

“Max Bergen intends to kill the queen of the boat parade.”

Blinking in surprise, Holtzman said, “
What?
Jenny Canning?”

“Apparently Mary Bergen doesn’t realize her husband’s the man she’s after.” Patmore looked at his watch. “We might be too late.” He ran through the cluttered living room, out the front door.

* * *

Marie Sanzini.

Unbidden, the name came to Mary.

Marie Sanzini
.

Marie Sanzini was one of the nurses killed in Anaheim— and suddenly her name was familiar. Mary knew it, but she didn’t know where she’d heard it before. Marie. Marie Sanzini. It teased her.

She closed her eyes, tried to see the woman’s face, but it eluded her.

She thumbed the button on her watch.

7:33.

No signal from Lou.

Was tonight just another wild-goose chase?

* * *

Standing in absolute
blackness, Max began to feel that he was closed inside a coffin. Then he heard the coffee shop doors grating noisily on their hinges, and his claustrophobia was replaced by an even more elemental fear. Quietly, he stepped out of the archway into the arcade, the gun in his right hand.

A hundred feet away a man with a flashlight came out of the curved corridor that served the restaurant and gift shops. He kept the beam pointed at the floor ahead of him; behind it he, too, was in darkness.

Mustn’t have come across the parking lot, Max thought. Lou hadn’t blown the car horn. Must have sneaked between two buildings farther north along the harbor, and then down the boardwalk.

Max intended to wait until they were only fifty feet apart before ordering the killer to stop. Fifty feet would give him safety, room to maneuver. And if he’s fifty feet from the corridor, Max thought, I’ll have time to pull off a few good shots if the bastard tries to dodge out of sight.

Seventy feet now.

Sixty.

Fifty.

The killer spoke first, a hoarse, whispered:
“Max?”

Shocked at being called by name, Max took one step into the darkness and asked, “Who’s there?”

The man kept walking, hidden behind the light.

Forty feet.

“Who’s there?” Max demanded.

Again, a forced whisper:
“It’s me. Lou
.
”

Thirty feet.

Max lowered his gun. “Lou? For God’s sake, it’s only a few minutes past seven-thirty. We can’t quit yet.”

Lou said, still whispering,
“Trouble
.
”

Twenty feet.

“What trouble?” Max asked. “What do you mean?”

Ten feet.

Suddenly Max knew it wasn’t Lou Pasternak.

The killer jerked the flashlight up, in the direction of Max’s voice, temporarily blinding him.

Although for an instant he could see nothing, Max raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. The shots crashed like cannon fire in the huge, high-ceilinged room.

Simultaneous with the explosion, perhaps even a fraction of a second prior to it, the flashlight spun up and up, out to the right.

I hit him!
Max thought.

Even before he completed the thought, the knife ripped into him, rammed out of the darkness and into him, felt like the blade of a shovel, enormous, devastating, so devastating that he dropped the gun, feeling pain like nothing he’d ever known, and he realized that the killer had pitched the flashlight aside as a diversion, hadn’t really been hit at all, and the knife was withdrawn from him, and then shoved hard into him again, deep into his stomach, and he thought of Mary and his love for Mary and about how he was letting her down, and he grappled with the killer’s head in the dark, got handfuls of short hair, but the bandage came off his finger and the cut was wrenched open again and he felt that pain separate from all the others, and he cursed the sharp edge on the car’s jack, and the flashlight hit the floor ten feet away, spun around, cast lunatic shadows, and the knife ripped loose from him again, and he reached for the hand that held it, but he missed, and the blade got him a third time, explosive pain, and he staggered back, the man all over him, the blade plunging again, high this time, into his chest, and he realized that the only way he could hope to survive now was to play dead, so he fell, fell hard, and the man stumbled over him, and he heard the man’s rapid breathing, and he lay very still, and the man went for the flashlight and came back and looked down at him, stood over him, kicked him in the ribs, and he wanted to cry out but didn’t, didn’t move and didn’t breathe, even though he was screaming inside for breath, so the man turned away and went toward the arch, and then there were footsteps on the tower stairs, and, hearing them, he felt like such a useless ass, outsmarted, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to recover his gun and climb those stairs and rescue Mary because stuff like that was for the movies, pain was pulverizing him, he was leaking all over the floor, dripping like a squeezed fruit, but he told himself he had to try to help her and that he wasn’t going to die, wasn’t going to die, wasn’t going to die, even though that was exactly what he seemed to be doing.

* * *

She stood up
when the shots were fired. She went to the head of the tower stairs, and within a minute she heard footsteps.

“Max?”

No answer.

“Max?”

Just footsteps coming up.

She backed away from the stairs, across the observation deck, until her buttocks encountered the low wall.

Wicka-wicka-wicka!

Marie Sanzini.

She saw Marie’s face, and she knew it.

Rochelle Drake. She knew Rochelle, too.

Erika Larsson. That was the name of the fuzzy-haired blonde—the delicate, ethereal woman who had been in the vision in the mirror at Lou’s place.

Mary had known them all along, but she had forced the knowledge into her subconscious. If she cared to pursue it, the answer was there now, waiting. But she still didn’t want to face the truth.
Couldn’t
face it.

She reminded herself of her announced determination to find her own strength, her own solutions to the problems of life. Defeated already? But she couldn’t shame herself; right now, she would accept perpetual weakness and dependence and continued ignorance of the past for a chance to get out of here.

From the stairwell: the slow ascent of footsteps.

“No,” she said desperately. She pressed back against the low wall, eyes fixed on the entrance to the stairs. “I don’t want to know.” Her voice was high, tremulous. “Oh, God. No. Please!”

Lightning slashed the sky, sharp and bright. Thunder cracked. At last the storm broke: scattered pellets of rain testing the earth; then a sudden downpour; stinging, eroding sheets of water slanting in from the ocean.

The wind drove the rain under the overhang of the belfry roof. Fat droplets pummeled the back of her leather coat, soaking her long black hair. But she didn’t care if she got wet. The only thing that worried her now was the past, for it kept coming back to her against her will:

The living room of Berton Mitchell’s cottage. Windows with paper blinds drawn almost to the sills. Lacy curtains. The only light, gray light, filtering in from a cloudy afternoon. Shadowy corners. Pale yellow walls. A dark brown davenport with a pair of matching, overstuffed chairs. Pine floor, rag-twist rugs.

A six-year-old girl lying on the floor. Long dark hair tied into two ponytails with orange ribbons. Beige dress with Kelly-green piping and buttons. Me. The little girl is me. On my back. Dazed. Confused. The side of my face hurts real bad. And the back of my head. What did he do to me? My legs are spread. I can’t move them. Each of my ankles is tied securely to a different foot of a bulky armchair. My arms are stretched out behind me. My wrists are tied to the feet of another chair. Can’t move. Try to raise my head to look around. Can’t.

Maybe Mrs. Mitchell will come untie me. No. She’s gone away. Visiting relatives with Barry. Mr. Mitchell is off someplace trimming hedges.

Scared. So scared.

Footsteps . . . Just him. Nothing frightening. Just him. But what’s he want? What’s he doing?

He kneels beside me. He has a pillow in his hands . . . big feather pillow . . . he shoves it . . . in my face . . . presses down on it. This isn’t a good game . . . not good at all. This is wrong . . . scary. No light . . . no air . . . I scream . . . but the pillow muffles my voice. Try to breathe . . . can’t draw in anything but linen. I thrash in my bonds. Daddy, help me! And then he pulls the pillow away. He’s giggling. I gulp air and start to cry. He rams the pillow into my face again. I twist my head, can’t get out from under. I bite and chew the pillow. Spinning. Dizzy. Weightless. Dying. Hollering in my mind for Daddy, thinking oh-so-hard of him, knowing he can’t hear me. And then the pillow is taken away again; cool, delicious air rushes over my face, into my hot lungs. And the pillow is jammed onto me again. And in the final moment before I faint it’s removed. Repeatedly reprieved on the verge of suffocation, I reach the thin red line between sanity and madness. And he’s giggling as he tortures me. But finally he lifts the pillow and tosses it aside, finished with the game.

But there are worse games to come:

He takes my head in both hands . . . his fingers like iron claws. The ache at the back of my skull is getting infinitely worse . . . unbearable. He forces my head to one side . . . descends upon me . . . breathes across my face . . . hissing like a snake . . . moves toward my exposed neck . . . lips on my neck now . . . he takes a pinch of my skin between his teeth, bites hard, bites it off, swallows. I cry out at the sharp little pain . . . struggle . . . the cords bind. He puts his mouth to the tiny wound in my neck . . . sucks . . . draws blood. And when he finally raises his head and lets go of me . . . and I turn . . . I see him grinning, blood smeared around his mouth and streaks of blood on his teeth.

He is only nine years old, three years older than me, but his face is carved with a very adult hatred.

Weeping, choking, I say, “What are you doing?”

He leans even closer, inches from my face. His breath is fetid, corrupted by my own blood.