woke up angry. Not shouting, kick the dog angry; cold, somebody will hurt down in their bones, angry. He made breakfast, his thoughts tangled in the strange events four days earlier. He felt no specific direction to his anger. He didn’t focus on Cotton or the bad cop. For him they weren’t people. They had no character against which moral judgment could be made. Badness, goodness, were not part of the equation. Danger, safety, and survival drove his life.
They ruined his visit with his family! That was all he needed to know to make an utter and final judgment. Sometime, somewhere, he would deal with them permanently.
He changed into a light running suit and soft, flexible sneakers. On a small knoll overlooking the garden and fruit trees below, he quieted unwelcome thoughts.
Tall eucalyptus trees and California Cypress enclosed his land such that no house closer than a mile could look onto his property.
Vincent stood straight, still. Faint muscular contractions rippled beneath the thin sweat suit. Combined with a regular flare of nostrils and expert would have recognized an elaborate breathing exercise.
The tension disappeared from his face. He moved in slow motion at first. The tension was back, but with control and purpose. The speed of his movements increased until, like a humming bird’s wings, the movements were more sensed than seen. It was a martial arts exercise; violence contained.
Without a signal of intent he ran straight downhill into the orchard at full speed. One moment he stood atop the knoll, the next he’d disappeared.
He didn’t think of exercise as a matter of health, or longevity, or survival. Pride, superiority, had no part in it. It must be a pure thing, separate, without thought: Activity without significance.
Over the years Vincent had evolved almost entirely without human contact. He read voraciously. This was permitted. The pages of a book did not contain pain. Pain came with contact.
After two hours of non-stop running and strenuous exercise, he ran up the hill around the side of the house to the pool. He stripped and swam naked for a half hour.
He never varied the routine. Heavy exercise every other day, light in between. Afterward he showered, dressed, ate sparingly of fruits and vegetables. He ate meat but never before five in the evening. Routine was important. The tenuousness of existence demanded a framework that could be physically experienced, that could be known with certainty.
Vincent began the workday. He was a computer programmer whose specialty allowed him to work exclusively from his home. The selection of an occupation had been driven partly by that fact. He occasionally talked to his customers on the phone, but the majority of the time he contacted them via computer e-mail.
His work rooms occupied one of the wings that spoked out from the tower. They were separated from the rest of the rooms by special anti-interference walls. That wing had its own air-conditioning unit, special back-up power source and four of the finest small system computers and peripherals money could buy. Two satellite dishes mounted on the garage connected him to the world through impersonal digital data streams.
For the first time in years he couldn’t get into it. Vincent, the specialist’s specialist, was swamped by anger and disappointment. In his life there had been little prediction. He needed prediction.
He made a decision. He would visit ‘family’.
In the early evening Vincent stood in the shadows across an alley from a seven foot block wall surrounding a nice house in the hills behind Glendale. A five story apartment building loomed behind him.
He stared up the alley toward the street. It seemed empty. Suddenly a jogger appeared at the mouth of the alley with a dog on a leash. An older woman in a pink jogging suit and matching sweat band, none of which had ever encountered sweat.
She bent down and retied her shoes. The dog ran down the alley only to be pulled up short by the leash, choking. The dog growled but did not bark.
The woman looked down the alley fearfully, saw nothing, shrugged, got to her feet and trotted out of sight dragging the dog, her arms and elbows held high like the wings of a plucked, psychedelic chicken.
Vincent didn’t move. He wasn’t afraid. He understood the dog better than its owner. He remained in the shadows for another ten minutes.
He decided. There was no hesitation between intention and action. He took one step, jumped to the top of the block wall in a single move and disappeared into the foliage of a locust tree next to the other side of the block wall.
In the tree, Vincent moved to a thick limb next to the trunk and settled himself. Through an opening in the leaves he looked toward the side of the house. From his vantage point he could see into the kitchen and living room.
The Peerson’s were all in the living room except Ken, who lay underneath a forty-one Chevy perched on blocks in front of the garage. He’d been restoring the car for the past five years.
His wife and children thought the whole exercise very funny and teased him about his ‘project’. Rose Peerson told him he’d be so old when he finished he wouldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing with it.
In the tree Vincent smiled. The pieces of his world fell into place.
“Hi, Ken, Rose, Sarah, Peter. It’s a fine evening,” he whispered.
Chapter 5
Teresa drove too fast. She left the 134 in Glendale, whipping the new VW Jetta, a birthday present from her father, around every turn viciously.
She was angry and didn’t know why. Like quicksand, the more she struggled, the deeper she sank. She needed anger to hide her inability to act sensibly.
She turned off Orchard into the entrance of the underground parking garage beneath her apartment house, tires squealing in protest.
The day began with a call from her mother complaining about Teresa’s shortcomings. In fifteen minutes Mrs. Keely covered everything including Teresa’s refusal to eat asparagus when she was three. Who could fight that? And it didn’t end there.
Five minutes after she arrived at the station the Watch Commander called her into his office and chewed her out for going into Chango’s Cafe alone. She couldn’t say anything in her own defense while he called her, ‘hotdog, glory hound, and dumbass bimbo’. The bimbo remark went to the bone.
She wrongly blamed it on Jaime who hadn’t said anything about the incident. The Watch Commander heard about it from an officer who interrogated the people at the cafe.
Jaime got pissed and wouldn’t talk to her and so they ended up working the Burbank Studio district in cold silence. It lasted through the entire shift. Teresa’s stubbornness wouldn’t let her admit she was wrong, again.
She was still muttering as she got out of the Jetta in the garage below her apartment building.
“Asshole, probably thinks I’m on my period. Chauvinist prick.”
She slammed the door and stalked across the cement to the elevator. She met the two poofs from the apartment next door outside her apartment. They started to say something, saw her expression and backed off. She slammed the door behind her and stood in the entry way scowling.
“Pretty
