by Dean Koontz
“You don’t need to say this.”
“Not because it makes me feel rebellious and noble to love you with all your troubles. Not because you’re different. I love you because you’re who you are.”
“Badger?” I said.
“What?”
I smiled. “Shut up.”
She let out a sound that was more laugh than sob, though it was composed of both. She kissed me on the cheek and settled into her chair, weak with relief but also still weak with fear for her missing son.
Sasha brought a fresh cup of tea to the table, and Lilly took her hand, held it tightly. “Do you know The Wind in the Willows?”
“Didn’t until I met Chris,” Sasha said, and even in the dim and fluttering candlelight, I saw the tracks of tears on her face.
“He called me Badger because I stood up for him. But he’s my Badger now, your Badger. And you’re his, aren’t you?”
“She swings a hell of a mean cudgel,” I said.
“We’re going to find Jimmy,” Sasha promised her, relieving me of the terrible weight of repeating that impossible promise, “and we’re going to bring him home to you.”
“What about the crow?” Lilly asked Sasha.
From a pocket, Sasha produced a sheet of drawing paper, which she unfolded. “After the cops left, I searched Jimmy’s bedroom. They hadn’t been thorough. I thought we might find something they overlooked. This was under one of the pillows.”
When I held the paper to the candlelight, I saw an ink sketch of a bird in flight, side view, wings back. Beneath the bird was a neatly hand-lettered message: Louis Wing will be my servant in Hell.
“What does your father-in-law have to do with this?” I asked Lilly.
Fresh misery darkened her face. “I don’t know.”
Bobby stepped inside from the porch. “Got to split, bro.”
By now the coming dawn was evident to all of us. The sun had not yet appeared above the eastern hills, but the night was doing a fade, from blackest soot to gray dust. Beyond the windows, the backyard was no longer a landscape in shades of black but a pencil sketch.
I showed him the drawing of the crow. “Maybe this isn’t about Wyvern, after all. Maybe someone has a grudge against Louis.”
Bobby studied the paper, but he wasn’t convinced that this proved the kidnapping was merely a crime of vengeance. “Everything goes back to Wyvern, one way or another.”
“When did Louis leave the police department?” I asked.
Lilly said, “He retired about four years ago, a year before Ben died.”
“And before everything went wrong at Wyvern,” Sasha noted. “So maybe this isn’t connected.”
“It’s connected,” Bobby insisted. He tapped one finger against the crow. “It’s too radically weird not to be connected.”
“We should talk to your father-in-law,” I told Lilly.
She shook her head. “Can’t. He’s in Shorehaven.”
“The nursing home?”
“He’s had three strokes over the past four months. The third left him in a coma. He can’t talk to anyone. They don’t expect him to live much longer.”
When I looked at the ink sketch again, I understood that Bobby’s “radically weird” had referred not only to the hand-lettered words but also to the crow itself. The drawing had a malevolent aura: The wing feathers bristled; the beak was open as if to let out a shriek; the talons were spread and hooked; and the eye, though merely a white circle, seemed to radiate evil, fury.
“May I keep this?” I asked Lilly.
She nodded. “It feels dirty. I don’t want to touch it.”
We left Lilly there with a cup of tea and with hope that, if it could have been measured, might not have equaled the volume of juice she could squeeze from the lemon wedge on her saucer.
Descending the porch steps, Sasha said, “Bobby, you better bring Jenna Wing back here as quick as you can.”
I gave him the sketch of the crow. “Show her this. Ask her if she remembers any case Louis worked on…anything that might explain this.”
As we crossed the backyard, Sasha took my hand.
Bobby said, “Who’s spinning music when you’re here?”
“Doogie Sassman’s covering for me,” she said.
“Mr. Harley-Davidson, the man-mountain love machine,” Bobby said, leading us along the brick walk beside the garage. “What program format does he favor—head-banging heavy metal?”
“Waltzes,” Sasha said. “Fox-trots, tangos, rumbas, cha-chas. I’ve warned him he has to stick with the tune sheet I gave him, ’cause otherwise, he’d just play dance music. He loves ballroom dancing.”
Pushing open the gate, Bobby stopped, turned, and stared at Sasha in disbelief. To me, he said, “You knew this?”
“No.”
“Ballroom dancing?”
Sasha said, “He’s won some prizes.”
“Doogie? He’s as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.”
“The old Volkswagen Beetle or the new one?” I asked.
“The new one,” Bobby said.
“He’s a big guy, but he’s very graceful,” Sasha said.
“He has a tight turning radius,” I told Bobby.
The thing that happens so easily among us, the thing that makes us so close, was happening again. The groove or rhythm or mood or whatever it is we so routinely fall into with one another—we were falling into it again. You can handle anything, including the end of the world as we know it, if at your side are friends with the proper attitude.
Bobby said, “I thought Doogie hangs out in biker bars, not ballrooms.”
“For fun, he’s a bouncer in a biker bar two evenings a week,” Sasha said, “but I don’t think he hangs out there otherwise.”
“For fun?” Bobby said.
“He enjoys breaking heads,” Sasha said.
“Who doesn’t,” I said.
As we followed Bobby into the alleyway, he said, “The dude is a way skilled audio engineer, rides a Harley like he came out of the womb on it, dates awesome women who make any Ms. Universe look like the average resident of an oyster shell, fights drunken psycho bikers for fun, wins prizes for ballroom dancing—this sounds like a bro we want with us when we go back to Wyvern.”
I said, “Yeah, my big worry has been what we’ll do if there’s a tango competition.”
“Exactly.” To Sasha, Bobby said, “You think he’d be up for it?”
She nodded. “I think Doogie’s always up for everything.”
I expected to find a police cruiser or an unmarked sedan behind the garage, and unamused authority figures waiting for us. The alley was deserted.
A pale gray swath of sky outlined the hills to the east. The breeze raised a chorus of whispers from the windbreak of eucalyptus trees along the canyon crest, as if warning me to hurry home before the morning found me.
“And Doogie has all those tattoos,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “he’s got more tattoos than a drunken sailor with four mothers and ten wives.”
To Sasha, I said, “If you’re getting into any hostile situation, and it involves a super-huge guy covered with tattoos, you want him on your side.”
“It’s a fundamental rule of survival,” Bobby agreed.
“It’s discussed in every biology textbook,” I said.
“It’s in the Bible,” Bobby said.
“Leviticus,” I said.
“It’s in Exodus, too,” Bobby said, “and Deuteronomy.”
Alerted by movement and by a glimpse of eyeshine, Bobby snapped the shotgun into firing position, I drew the Glock from my shoulder holster, Sasha pulled her revolver, and we swung toward the perceived threat, forming a manic tableau of paranoia and rugged individualism that would have been perfection if we’d just had one of those pre-Revolutionary War flags that featured a coiled serpent and the words Don’t Tread on Me.
Twenty feet north of us, along the eastern side of the alley, making no sound to compete with the soughing of th
e wind, coyotes appeared among the trunks of the eucalyptus trees. They came over the canyon crest, through the bunchgrass and wild flax, between bushy clumps of goatsbeard.
These prairie wolves, smaller than true wolves, with narrower muzzles and lighter variegated coats, possess much of the beauty and charm of wolves, of all dogs. Even in their benign moments, however, after they have hunted and fed to contentment, when they are playing or sunning in a meadow, they still look dangerous and predatory to such an extent that they are not likely to inspire a line of cuddly stuffed toys, and if one of them is chosen as the ideal photogenic pet by the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can be reasonably sure that the Antichrist has his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Slinking out of the canyon, among the trees, into the alley in the earliest ashen light of this cloud-shrouded morning, the coyotes looked post-apocalyptic, like the hellish hunters in a world long past its doomsday. Heads thrust forward, yellow eyes glowing in the gloom, ears pricked, jaws cracked in humorless serrated grins, they arrived and gathered and turned to face us in dreamlike silence, as though they had escaped from a Navajo mystic’s peyote-inspired vision.
Ordinarily, coyotes travel overland in single file, but these came in a swarm, and once in the alleyway, they stood flank-to-flank, closer than any canine pack, huddling together rather like a colony of rats. Their breath, hotter than ours, smoked in the coolish air. I didn’t attempt to count them, but they numbered more than thirty, all adults, no pups.
We could have tried to get into Sasha’s Explorer and pull the doors shut, but we all sensed that any sudden movement from us or any show of fear might invite a vicious assault. The most we dared to do was slowly reverse a step or two, until our backs were to some degree protected by the pair of parked vehicles.
Coyote attacks on adult human beings are rare but not unknown. Even in hunting pairs or in a pack, they will stalk and chase down a man or woman only if desperate with hunger because a drought has lowered the population of mice, rabbits, and other small wildlife. Young children, left unattended in a park or in a backyard adjacent to open range, are more often seized and savaged and dragged away, but these incidents are also rare, especially considering the vast expanses of territory that human beings and coyotes inhabit together throughout the West.
I was most worried not by what coyotes might usually do, but by the perception that these were not ordinary animals. They could not be expected to behave as usual for their kind; the danger was in their difference.
Although all their heads were turned in our direction, I didn’t feel we were the primary focus of their attention. They seemed to be raptly gazing past us, toward something in the distance, though for its eight-or ten-block length, the alley was quiet and deserted.
Abruptly, the pack moved.
Although living in families, coyotes are nonetheless fierce individualists, driven by personal needs, insights, moods. Their independence is evident even when they hunt together, but this pack moved with uncanny coordination, with the instinctive synchronization of a cruising school of piranhas, as though they shared one mind, one purpose.
Ears laid back flat against their skulls, jaws cracked wide as if to bite, heads lowered, hackles raised, shoulders hunched, tails tucked in and held low, the coyotes raced in our direction but not directly toward us. They kept to the east half of the alley, most of them on the blacktop but some on the dusty verge, gazing past us and straight ahead, as if focused intently on prey that was invisible to human eyes.
Neither Bobby nor I came close to firing on the pack, because we were at once reminded of the behavior of the flock of nighthawks in Wyvern. At first the birds seemed to have gathered with malicious intent, then for the purpose of celebration, and in the end their only violent impulse was to self-destruction. With these coyotes, I didn’t sense the bleak aura of sorrow and despair that had radiated from the nighthawks; I didn’t feel they were searching for their own final solution to whatever fever gripped them. They appeared to be a danger to someone or something, but not to us.
Sasha held her revolver in a two-hand grip as the pack streamed toward us. But as they began to pass without turning a single yellow eye in our direction and without issuing one bark or snarl, she slowly lowered the weapon until the muzzle was aimed at the pavement near her feet.
These predators, breath steaming from their mouths, appeared ectoplasmic here on the cusp of dawn. If not for the slap of paws on blacktop and a musky odor, they might have been only ghosts of coyotes, engaged in one last haunt during the final minutes of this spirit-friendly night, before making their way back to the rough fields and vales in which their moldering bones awaited them.
As the final ranks of the pack poured past us, we turned to stare after the swift procession. They dwindled into the distance, chased by the gray light from the east, as though following the night toward the western horizon.
Quoting Paul McCartney—after all, she was a songwriter as well as a deejay—Sasha said, “Baby, I’m amazed.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said. “We’ve seen way more than this tonight, stranger stuff.”
“A catalog of the mondo weird,” Bobby assured her.
In the darker distance, the coyotes seemed to shimmer out of existence, though I suspect that they slipped from the alleyway, over the canyon crest, returning to the deeper realms from which they had ascended.
“We haven’t seen the last of them,” Sasha predicted, and her voice was shaded by a disquieting note of precognition.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely,” she insisted with quiet conviction. “And the next time they come around, they’ll be in an uglier mood.”
Breaking open the shotgun and shaking the shell from the chamber into the palm of his hand, Bobby said, “Here comes the sun.”
He was not to be taken literally; the day was overcast. The relentless morning slowly stripped off the black hood of the night and turned its dead, gray face upon us.
A solid cloud cover affords me no substantial protection against the destructive force of the sun. Ultraviolet light penetrates even black thunderheads, and while the burn may build more slowly than on a searingly bright day, the irreparable damage to my skin and eyes nevertheless accumulates. Sunscreen lotions protect well against the less serious forms of skin cancer, but they have little or no ability to prevent melanoma. Consequently, I have to seek shelter from even a daytime sky as gray-black as the char and ashes in the cold bowl of Satan’s pipe after he’s smoked a handful of souls.
To Bobby, I said, “We’re no good without a little sleep. Grab some mattress time, then meet Sasha and me at my house between noon and one o’clock. We’ll put together a plan and a search party.”
“You can’t go back to Wyvern till sundown, but maybe some of us ought to get moving sooner,” he said.
“I’m for that. But there’s no point in quartering off Wyvern and searching every foot of it. That would take too long, forever. We’d never find them in time,” I said, leaving unspoken the thought that we might already be too late. “We don’t go back until we’ve got the tracker we need.”
“Tracker?” Sasha asked, fitting her revolver into the holster under her denim jacket.
“Mungojerrie,” I said, tucking away my 9-millimeter.
Bobby blinked. “The cat?”
“He’s more than a cat,” I reminded Bobby.
“Yeah, but—”
“And he’s our only hope.”
“Cats can track?”
“I’m sure this one can.”
Bobby shook his head. “I’m never gonna be at home in this brave new smart-animal world, bro. It’s like I’m living in a maximum-wacky Donald Duck cartoon, but one where, between the laughs, dudes get their guts ripped out.”
“The world according to Edgar Allan Disney,” I said. “Anyway, Mungojerrie hangs out around the marina. Pay a visit to Roosevelt Frost. He should know how to find our tracker.”
Out of the pool
of shadows in the canyon east of us, the eerie ululant cries of coyotes rose, a sound like no other on earth, like the tormented and hungry voices that banshees would have if banshees existed.
Sasha put her right hand under her jacket, as if she might draw her revolver again.
Such a frenzied choir of coyotes is a common sound at night, usually signifying that a hunt has reached its bloody end, that some prey as large as a deer has been brought down by the pack, or that the full moon is exerting its peculiar pull, but you rarely hear such a chilling chorus on this side of the sunrise. As much as anything that we had yet experienced, this sinister serenade, which escalated in volume and passion, filled me with foreboding.
“Sharky,” Bobby said.
“White pointers,” I said, which is surfer lingo for great whites, the most dangerous of all sharks.
I climbed into the passenger seat of the Explorer, and by the time Sasha started the engine, Bobby pulled past us in his Jeep, heading for Jenna Wing’s house across town.
I didn’t expect to see him for at least seven hours, but here at the dawn of April 12, we didn’t realize that we were entering a day of epic bad news. The nasty surprises were coming at us like a long series of triple overhead monoliths churned up by a typhoon in the far Pacific.
17
Sasha parked the Explorer in the driveway, because my father’s car was in the garage, as were boxes of his clothing and his personal effects. The day would come, with his death far enough in the past, when I would not feel that disposing of his belongings would diminish him in my memory. I was not at that day yet.
In this matter, I know I’m being illogical. My memories of my dad, which give me sustaining strength every day, are not related to what clothes he wore on any particular occasion, to his favorite sweater or his silver-rimmed reading glasses. His things do not keep him vivid in my mind; he stays with me because of his kindness, his wit, his courage, his love, his joy in life. Yet twice in the three weeks since I’ve packed up his clothes, I’ve torn open one of the boxes in the garage simply to have a look at those reading glasses, at that sweater. In such moments I can’t escape the truth that I’m not coping as well as I pretend to be. The cataract of grief is a longer drop than Niagara, and I guess I’ve not yet reached the river of acceptance at the bottom.