David Morrell - Double Image

“Remember, if you have even the slightest hint of trouble, don’t think twice – call us,” Lyle told her.

“Don’t worry. I’m a coward at heart. When I’m by myself, I don’t go anywhere without carrying the phone.”

Coltrane frowned. “Phone? But I thought it was out of service.”

“It is,” Walt said. “We’re talking about a cellular phone I bought for Tash and had activated in my name. Whoever this creep is, he keeps managing to find out the new numbers she gets in her name. But so far, he doesn’t know anything about this number.”

“Good idea,” Coltrane said.

“Let’s hope it stays a good idea. Tash, if you need anything, let me know.”

She touched his arm in a gesture of thanks.

“While you guys are still here…” Coltrane said.

They looked at him, wondering what he was leading up to.

“Can you wait another few minutes while I get my car? I don’t want to stumble around looking for it after dark. This way, Tash won’t be alone while I’m gone.”

“Yeah, I can stick around a little longer,” Lyle said.

“And I’ll make it quicker by driving you to your car.” Nolan motioned for Coltrane to follow him to the garage and the Explorer that remained in the stall next to Tash’s Porsche.

One of the policemen was in the passenger seat. Another policeman and one of the state troopers was in the back. While Nolan got behind the steering wheel, Coltrane climbed into the back. He saw Walt and Lyle talking to Tash in front of the house while Nolan left the garage, reached the road, and drove away.

“Our cars are parked behind a service station on the highway,” the policeman in the front seat explained. “That way, it didn’t look like we were having a convention at Tash’s place while we were waiting for him to show up.”

“You set it up well.”

“Too bad the wrong guy showed up.”

Uncomfortable, Coltrane changed the subject. “I’m on a street on that bluff.”

“You certainly had yourself lost,” Nolan said.

By the time Coltrane got back, it was dark. Lights glowed warmly in the house. The officers in the Mountaineer had gotten out and joined Walt and Lyle, speaking with Tash in her front hallway.

Tash smiled at Coltrane in welcome.

“Just as a precaution,” Lyle told him, “better put your car in the garage, where nothing will happen to it.”

“Right.”

Then Walt, Lyle, and the others said good-bye and drove away. As the gleam of taillights receded, the road became dark except for the pinpoints of lights in a house farther along.

Finally Coltrane and Tash were alone.

SHE BROKE THE SILENCE. “Would you like another beer?”

“Sounds good.” Coltrane had all kinds of questions, but he didn’t want to overwhelm her. Take it slow and easy, he thought.

She locked the front door, then opened the inside garage door and pressed a button that closed each stall. After that, she secured the inside garage door, too.

“Before I get you that beer, would you help me walk the picket line? You know, check the security?”

“Officer Coltrane reporting for duty.” He hoped it sounded like a joke, which apparently it did, because she looked amused as she started down the hallway.

“Carl and the others already locked up, but I feel more comfortable if I double-check,” she said. Past the stairway, they entered the living room and crossed to the sliding glass doors that led onto the deck. There, Tash tried to open the door. “Definitely secure.”

Pensive, she looked out past the white deck toward the darkness on the rocks and the whitecaps on the waves in the black ocean. “I used to love sitting out there, even when it’s cold like this, watching the waves hit the shore, listening to them. Sometimes I can see a freighter on the horizon, its lights moving, heading to mysterious places. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current… ’”

“‘… borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

She turned to him, surprised. “You know Gatsby ?”

Coltrane shrugged. “When I was at USC, one of my photography instructors insisted I take a few literature classes. For some reason, The Great Gatsby really stayed with me, that final image. Randolph Packard had an image like that in one of his photographs. The lights of a freighter on the horizon.”

“Heading to mysterious places,” Tash echoed. She had sounded melancholy, but now she mocked herself. “Probably only to Long Beach. Anyway, for a while, those nights are over.”

She pressed a button on the wall to the right. A faint rumble puzzled Coltrane until he saw metal shutters descending, blocking off the all-glass wall at the back of the living room.

“It makes me feel like I’m in a castle,” Tash said, “except I’m lowering the shutters instead of raising the drawbridge.”

Coltrane followed her into the kitchen, where she turned on an overhead light that reflected off white countertops, creating a pleasant luster. After confirming that a side door was locked, she leaned against a counter, stared down, shook her head, then roused herself. “Almost forgot that beer.”

There were several in the refrigerator. Presumably for the men helping her, Coltrane thought.

“Don’t bother about a glass. The can is fine,” he said.

“You sure?” She poured Chablis into a glass and touched it against the beer can she had given him. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“It doesn’t seem much like New Year’s, does it?”

“I have a friend who keeps emphasizing that it’s a matter of attitude,” Coltrane said, “that we should think of it as a chance for a new beginning.”

“Yeah.” Troubled, Tash sipped her wine. “The question is, a new beginning of what ? The start of the really bad times?”

“I don’t think that’s the attitude my friend had in mind.”

Leaning against the counter opposite her, Coltrane had a dizzying sense of unreality. Tash Adler even spoke like Rebecca Chance, her full-throated voice and engaging cadences the same as Rebecca Chance’s in The Trailblazer and Jamaica Wind . She seemed to be in her mid-twenties, the same age Rebecca Chance had been when she disappeared.

“Is something the matter?” Tash asked. “You’re looking at me as if… Have I got something caught in my teeth?”

He laughed. “Not at all. Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s a photographer’s habit. I can’t help imagining how I would take someone’s picture.”

“Is that what you want to do? Take my photograph?”

“There’s something about the way you’re leaning against that counter.”

“Oh?” She looked puzzled.

Coltrane realized that a compliment about her looks might sound as if he was coming on to her. The last thing he wanted was to alienate her. “The raspberry of the exercise suit you’re wearing is the only bright color in the room. Otherwise, everything’s white. Well, not totally. Those knives in that container have black handles. So do the handles on that toaster and the knobs on the stove.”

“I added those touches of black deliberately,” Tash said. “Without contrast, white isn’t effective.”

“That’s what intrigued me. Your suit makes this room a black-and-white photograph in color.”

Tash considered him. “You’re very observant.”

Coltrane made a modest gesture. “It comes from taking a lot of photographs.”

“No, I suspect taking photographs didn’t make you observant. The other way around. But I also suspect you often see more than you ever wanted to. Not everything’s beautiful.”

Coltrane remembered sighting through his telephoto lens as Ilkovic directed his men to grind up the bones of the corpses that the backhoe had dredged up from the mass grave in Bosnia. “Yes, not everything’s beautiful.”