The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store: multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.
And at that point they had lost him for too long.
From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Anywhere.
Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.
But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.
Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.
Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe. By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn’t scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.
In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of People magazine.
Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said I’VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA—NOW I CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth Star Trek novelization.
Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.
MR. MURDER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.
The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds. Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.
The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha Christie’s old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereaclass="underline" Martin Stillwater’s Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products; a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in “Day-Glo” red; start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.
Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn’t see why the article had put the New York contact’s blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be “Mr. Tedium.” If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn’t need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.
Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them—especially novelists—had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had something to contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium. As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You didn’t have to put up with that in the movies. Movies never took you inside characters’ minds. Even if movies could show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon, anyway, for God’s sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn’t matter what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords: action and speed.
He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of Martin Stillwater.
“Holy shit.”
In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous pages.
Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever the hell it was called.
Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said, “Look at this.”
After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker glanced at People. “That’s Alfie.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, “Sure looks like him.”
“Something’s very wrong here.”
“Looks exactly like him.”
“The kiss of the iceberg,” Oslett said ominously.
Frowning, Clocker said, “Huh?”
In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or whatever the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the plane.
As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact in New York. “Okay, I’ve seen People.”
“Like a kick in the face, isn’t it?” New York said.
“What’s going on here?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?”
“No. Jesus, they’re like identical twins.”
“Why am I going to California—to get a look at this writer jerk?”
“And maybe to find Alfie.”
“You think Alfie’s in California?”
New York said, “Well, he had to go somewhere. Besides, the minute this People thing fell on us, we started trying to learn everything we could about Martin Stillwater, and right away we find out there was some trouble at his house in Mission Viejo late this afternoon, early this evening.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The police report’s been written up, but it isn’t logged into their computer yet, so we can’t just access it. We need to get our hands on a hard copy. We’re working on that. So far, we know there was an intruder in the house. Stillwater apparently shot somebody, but the guy got away.”