“Mr. Mallon. Tell me exactly where you are.”
Mallon had a panicky feeling. He instinctively evaded the demand. “I’m on a cell phone. I can’t hear you very well.”
“Are you still armed? Do you have a gun?”
Mallon hesitated. He had never said he was armed. He said loudly, “I guess my battery’s gone. If you can still hear me, I’ll call you again from a regular phone later, when Lieutenant Fowler is in.” He pressed the power button to end the call. If the cop knew about the gun, he knew about Malibu. It had not sounded as though the cop had wanted to help. It sounded as though he wanted to get Mallon into custody.
Mallon was in trouble. He was driving the stolen car of a woman he had kidnapped. He was carrying three loaded guns-also stolen-and undoubtedly had powder residue on his hands from killing the men who had owned two of them. If he went to a police station anywhere, he was going into a cell. He would be in the newspapers, and the hunters would know exactly where he was. Even if the police released him on bail, the killers would be waiting for him. He had killed people. He had done it to stay alive, but at the moment he could hardly look less innocent. Tonight, he realized, the police were as dangerous to him as the hunters.
The term made him think about the people who were trying to kill him. The ones he had seen were spoiled rich people who were paying for the privilege of killing him for a thrill. But the others-Parish and his friends-were professionals who had made killing into a business. As he thought about them, he told himself it was because he was trying to decide what he would do about them, but he was not really considering anymore. He knew. He had to stop them from killing anyone else, and tonight was probably his last chance. He had to do it tonight.
He was calm, able to look at his own predicament from a distance. The facts that had been making him feel hopeless had not changed, but once he had gotten beyond hope, he could see other aspects of them. He was driving a stolen car, but it was Diane’s. It was a car the enemy probably knew. If they saw it coming, they would sense no threat.
Mallon drove on, watching the sights along the freeway to detect signs that the exit for Route 33 was coming. What he had wasn’t a plan. It was a reflex, a fighter’s simple physical movement to block an attacker by striking first, a lunge to rock him backward before he could straighten an arm into Mallon’s face. He was going to drive away from the ocean, northward past Ojai, and up into the hills to that camp. If there was any evidence to prove what these people had done, that was where it would be.
Mallon watched the rearview mirror for headlights, but he saw none after he had coasted off the freeway onto the exit ramp. He kept looking, because on a weeknight after one A.M., any other car on this stretch of road might be one of the hunters. There were no headlights coming toward him either, but the emptiness of the road ahead was little comfort.
The road meandered a bit as it came away from the coast above Ventura, and every time a new stretch presented itself to his sight he strained his eyes to see anything that might indicate someone was watching for him. He envisioned a car just off the highway, maybe parked on a narrow dirt road as though it belonged there, or shielded from view by bushes. If he had been running something like this camp, he would have defended it. After a time, he decided that he had not been thinking clearly. Ojai was still ahead. It was a good-sized town with plenty of traffic most hours of the day. If there was a sentinel somewhere, he would be on a smaller road somewhere north of the town.
Mallon came through Ojai at one-twenty A.M. He drove past the long, low row of stores along the main street, and reached the block with the overhanging roof and the tan fake adobe arches and pillars, still watching for a sign that anybody was awake and paying attention to him. The sight of the place brought back an old memory. During the brief period after the divorce, when he had discovered he was wealthier than he had imagined, he had considered Ojai as a place to live. He had driven along this street and liked the architecture. He had spent a day thinking about acquiring a block of businesses farther up the street and rebuilding them in the same Spanish-revival style, but his enthusiasm had faded with the sun. He’d had a quiet dinner in his hotel and admitted to himself that he could not go through with the project. It had seemed to him that going into another business was so unnecessary that it amounted to an absurdity, an indefensible vanity, like French aristocrats pretending to be shepherds and shepherdesses while real peasants starved.
Tonight those times seemed to Mallon to be distant, almost unimaginable, his concerns outgrown like the concerns of a child. Suddenly, he decided that he knew something more about Catherine Broward. He had never thought clearly about what happened when a person took the life of another human being. Now he knew, and he was beginning to understand why Catherine had been so determined to drown herself. Seeing what could be done to another person, the harm that needed to be done to a human body to kill it, was a minor revelation. The bigger revelation was that once a person had done that to someone, he was changed too.
Catherine must have felt different afterward. The knowledge, the memory of killing her boyfriend, had made her feel tarnished and diminished. She had wanted the feeling to end, but it didn’t end. That was why she had been so determined: she believed that if she lived another day or a decade, there would be no improvement. Mallon knew that he too had changed, but his change had been different, and it felt like a clarification of his vision. He did not feel regret, or mourn the loss of the men he had killed, or search for a way that he could have avoided it so he could accuse himself of not having tried hard enough. He hated them. He was relieved that they were dead, and that he was not. The reward of victory was being alive.
Mallon was already through Ojai, and the road to the north was narrower and darker. There were no cars now but his. He endured a long period when nothing looked familiar to him. The trees seemed thicker and taller than he remembered, the dark hills lay in new patterns. He wondered how he could have gotten onto the wrong road. But then he saw a configuration of rocks that he had seen when he’d come here with Lydia-just a flash in the headlights, but undeniably the same-and then the turnoff to the right that led eastward into the hills. He drove from there unerringly to the spot where the high chain-link fence around the self-defense camp began. He resisted the temptation to turn his headlights off. If anyone inside the camp was looking, a pair of headlights moving past on the road would probably cause no alarm, but a driver trying to keep his car from being seen would be worrisome. He kept going at a slow, constant speed, and continued far past the gate before he turned off the lights and let the car quietly roll to a stop on the layer of pine needles at the shoulder of the road.
He got out, walked to the fence, stared through it, and listened. He could just see the back of the long, low building where he and Lydia had gone to talk with Michael Parish. Diane had called it “the main lodge.” There were lights on, and now and then he saw something beyond the window shades that looked like movement. He was disappointed. He had felt confident that he would be able to find some piece of evidence in that building that connected Parish and his self-defense camp with at least one of the attacks on him. It had seemed likely that the staff would have retired to their quarters at this hour, leaving the building unoccupied.
He remembered the square blacktopped parking lot across the driveway from the building on the front side. He could see only part of it from here, but he could make out four or five cars, parked close to one another. Then he recognized one of them. It was the black Lexus that had blocked his way in the hotel parking garage, the one driven by the young man with the reddish hair. He could see no human shapes, hear no sound but the breeze in the upper boughs of the pine trees beyond the fence.