by Dean Koontz
“I’m not lying. I got it for Christmas.”
“Jesus.”
He started to take it off. “Here, you can have it.”
“Leave it on,” she said scornfully.
“No, really.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“My folks. It’s the gold one.” He had taken it off. He held it out, offering it to her. “No diamonds, but all gold, the watch and the band.”
“What is that,” she asked incredulously, “fifteen thousand bucks, twenty thousand?”
“Something like that,” one of the hurt boys said. “It’s not the most expensive model.”
“You can have it,” the owner of the watch repeated.
Heather said, “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“You’re still in high school?”
“Senior. Here, take the watch.”
“You’re still in high school, you get a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch for Christmas?”
“It’s yours.”
Crouching in front of the huddled trio, refusing to acknowledge the pain in her right foot, she leveled the Korth at the face of the boy with the watch. All three drew back in terror.
She said, “I might blow your head off, you spoiled little creep, I sure might, but I wouldn’t steal your watch even if it was worth a million. Put it on.”
The gold links of the Rolex band rattled as he nervously slipped it onto his wrist again and fumbled with the clasp.
She wanted to know why, with all the privileges and advantages their families could give them, three boys from Beverly Hills would sneak around at night defacing the hard-earned property of a cop who had nearly been killed trying to preserve the very social stability that made it possible for them to have enough food to eat, let alone Rolex watches. Where did their meanness come from, their twisted values, their nihilism? Couldn’t blame it on deprivation. Then who or what was to blame?
“Show me your wallets,” she said harshly.
They fumbled wallets from hip pockets, held them out to her. They kept glancing back and forth from her to the Korth. The muzzle of the .38 must have looked like a cannon to them.
She said, “Take out whatever cash you’re carrying.”
Maybe the trouble with them was just that they’d been raised in a time when the media assaulted them, first, with endless predictions of nuclear war and then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, with ceaseless warnings of a fast-approaching worldwide environmental catastrophe. Maybe the unremitting but stylishly produced gloom and doom that got high Nielsen ratings for electronic news had convinced them that they had no future. And black kids had it even worse, because they were also being told they couldn’t make it, the system was against them, unfair, no justice, no use even trying.
Or maybe none of that had anything to do with it.
She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she even cared. Nothing she could say or do would turn them around.
Each boy was holding cash in one hand, a wallet in the other, waiting expectantly.
She almost didn’t ask the next question, then decided she’d better: “Any of you have credit cards?”
Incredibly, two of them did. High-school students with credit cards. The boy she had driven backward into the wall had American Express and Visa cards. The boy with the Rolex had a MasterCard.
Staring at them, meeting their troubled eyes in the moonlight, she took solace from the certainty that most kids weren’t like these three. Most were struggling to deal with an immoral world in a moral fashion, and they would finish growing up to be good people. Maybe even these brats would be all right eventually, one or two of them, anyway. But what was the percentage who’d lost their moral compass these days, not merely among teenagers but in any age group? Ten percent? Surely more. So much street crime and white-collar crime, so much lying and cheating, greed and envy. Twenty percent? And what percentage could a democracy tolerate before it collapsed?
“Throw your wallets on the sidewalk,” she said, indicating a spot beside her.
They did as instructed.
“Put the cash and credit cards in your pockets.”
Looking perplexed, they did that too.
“I don’t want your money. I’m no petty criminal like you.”
Holding the revolver in her right hand, she gathered up the wallets with her left. She stood and backed away from them, refusing to favor her right foot, until she came up against the garage wall.
She didn’t ask them any of the questions that had been running through her mind. Their answers—if they had any answers—would be glib. She was sick of glibness. The modern world creaked along on a lubricant of facile lies, oily evasions, slick self-justifications.
“All I want is your identification,” Heather said, raising the fist in which she clenched the wallets. “This’ll tell me who you are, where I can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by and spit on the front lawn, I’ll come after all of you, take my time, catch you at just the right moment.” She cocked the hammer on the Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. “Bigger gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you’re in a wheelchair the rest of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can’t bring any more like you into the world.”
The moon slid behind clouds.
The night was deep.
From the backyard came the coarse singing of toads.
The three boys stared at her, not sure that she meant for them to go. They had expected to be turned over to the police.
That, of course, was out of the question. She had hurt two of them. Each of the injured still had a hand cupped tenderly over his crotch, and both were grimacing with pain. Furthermore, she had threatened them with a gun outside her home. The argument against her would be that they had represented no real threat because they hadn’t crossed her threshold. Although they had spray-painted her house with hateful and obscene graffiti on three separate occasions, though they had done financial and emotional damage to her and her child, she knew that being the wife of a heroic cop was no guarantee against prosecution on a variety of charges that inevitably would result in her imprisonment instead of theirs.
“Get out of here,” she said.
They rose to their feet but then hesitated as if afraid she would shoot them in the back.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
At last they hurried past her, along the side of the house, and she followed at a distance to be sure they actually cleared out. They kept glancing back at her.
On the front lawn, standing in the dew-damp grass, she got a good look at what they had done to at least two and possibly three sides of the house. The red, yellow, and sour-apple-green paint seemed to glow in the light of the streetlamps. They had scrawled their personal tagger symbols everywhere, and they had favored the F-word with and without a variety of suffixes, as noun and verb and adjective. But the central message was as it had been the previous two times they’d struck: KILLER COP.
The three boys—two of them limping—reached their car, which was parked nearly a block to the north. A black Infiniti. They took off with a squeal of spinning tires, leaving clouds of blue smoke in their wake.
KILLER COP.
WIDOWMAKER.
ORPHANMAKER.
Heather was more deeply disturbed by the irrationality of the graffiti than by the confrontation with the three taggers. Jack had not been to blame. He’d been doing his duty. How was he supposed to have taken a machine gun from a homicidal maniac without resorting to lethal force? She was overcome with a feeling that civilization was sinking in a sea of mindless hatred.
ANSON OLIVER LIVES!
Anson Oliver was the maniac with the Micro Uzi, a promising young film director with three features released in the past four years. Not surprisingly, he made angry movies about angry people. Since the sho
otout, Heather had seen all three films. Oliver had made excellent use of the camera and had had a powerful narrative style. Some of his scenes were dazzling. He might even have been a genius and, in time, might have been honored with Oscars and other awards. But there was a disquieting moral arrogance in his work, a smugness and bullying, that now appeared to have been an early sign of much deeper problems exacerbated by too many drugs.
ASSASSIN.
She wished that Toby didn’t have to see his father labeled a murderer. Well, he’d seen it before. Twice before, all over his own house. He had heard it at school, as well, and had been in two fights because of it. He was a little guy, but he had guts. Though he’d lost both of the fights, he would no doubt disregard her advice to turn the other cheek and would wade into more battles.
In the morning, after she drove him to school, she would paint over the graffiti. As before, some of the neighbors would probably help. Multiple coats were required over the affected areas because their house was a pale yellow-beige.
Even so, it was a temporary repair, because the spray paint had a chemical composition that ate through the house paint. Over a few weeks, each defacement gradually reappeared like spirit writing on a medium’s tablet at a séance, messages from souls in hell.
In spite of the mess on her house, her anger faded. She didn’t have the energy to sustain it. These last few months had worn her down. She was tired, so very tired.
Limping, she reentered the house by the back garage door and locked up after herself. She also locked the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen, and punched in the activating code to arm the alarm system again.
SECURE.
Not really. Not ever.
She went upstairs to check on Toby. He was still sound asleep.
Standing in the doorway of her son’s room, listening to him snore, she understood why Anson Oliver’s mother and father had been unable to accept that their son had been capable of mass murder. He had been their baby, their little boy, their fine young man, the embodiment of the best of their own qualities, a source of pride and hope, heart of their heart. She sympathized with them, pitied them, prayed that she would never have to experience a pain like theirs—but she wished they would shut up and go away.
Oliver’s parents had conducted an effective media campaign to portray their son as a kind, talented man incapable of what he was said to have done. They claimed the Uzi found at the scene had not belonged to him. No record existed to prove he had purchased or registered such a weapon. But the fully automatic Micro Uzi was an illegal gun these days, and Oliver no doubt paid cash for it on the black market. No mystery about the lack of a receipt or registration.
Heather left Toby’s room and returned to her own. She sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the lamp.
She put down the revolver and occupied herself with the contents of the three wallets. From their driver’s licenses, she learned that one of the boys was sixteen years old and two were seventeen. They did, indeed, live in Beverly Hills.
In one wallet, among snapshots of a cute high-school-age blonde and a grinning Irish setter, Heather found a two-inch-diameter decal at which she stared in disbelief for a moment before she fished it out of the plastic window. It was the kind of thing often sold on novelty racks in stationery stores, pharmacies, record shops, and bookstores; kids decorated school notebooks and countless other items with them. A paper backing could be peeled off to reveal an adhesive surface. This one was glossy black with embossed silver-foil letters: ANSON OLIVER LIVES.
Someone was already merchandising his death. Sick. Sick and strange. What unnerved Heather most was that, apparently, a market existed for Anson Oliver as legendary figure, perhaps even as martyr.
Maybe she should have seen it coming. Oliver’s parents weren’t the only people assiduously polishing his image since the shootout.
The director’s fiancée, pregnant with his child, claimed he didn’t use drugs any more. He’d been arrested twice for driving under the influence of narcotics; however, those slips from the pedestal were said to have been a thing of the past. The fiancée was an actress, not merely beautiful but with a fey and vulnerable quality that ensured plenty of TV-news time; her large, lovely eyes always seemed on the verge of filling with tears.
Various film-community associates of the director had taken out full-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, mourning the loss of such a creative talent, making the observation that his controversial films had angered a lot of people in positions of power, and suggesting that he had lived and died for his art.
The implications of all this were that the Uzi had been planted on him, as had the cocaine and PCP. Because everyone up and down the street from Arkadian’s station had dived for cover at the sound of all that gunfire, no one had witnessed Anson Oliver with a gun in his hands except the people who died—and Jack. Mrs. Arkadian had never seen the gunman while she’d been hiding in the office; when she’d come out of the service station with Jack, she’d been virtually blind because smoke and soot had mucked up her contact lenses.
Within two days of the shootout, Heather had been forced to change their phone number for a new, unlisted one, because fans of Anson Oliver were calling at all hours. Many had made accusations of sinister conspiracies in which Jack figured as the triggerman.
It was nuts.
The guy was just a filmmaker, for God’s sake, not President of the United States. Politicians, corporate chiefs, military leaders, and police officials didn’t quiver in terror and plot murder out of fear that some crusading Hollywood film director was going to take a swipe at them in a movie. Hell, if they were that sensitive, there would hardly be any directors left.
And did these people actually believe that Jack had shot his own partner and three other men at the service station, then pumped three rounds into himself, all of this in broad daylight where there well might have been witnesses, risking death, subjecting himself to enormous pain and suffering and an arduous rehabilitation merely to make his story about Anson Oliver’s death look more credible?
The answer, of course, was yes. They did believe such nonsense.
She found proof in another plastic window in the same wallet. Another decal, also a two-inch-diameter circle. Black background, red letters, three names stacked above one another: OSWALD, CHAPMAN, MCGARVEY?
She was filled with revulsion. To compare a troubled film director who’d made three flawed movies to John Kennedy (Oswald’s victim) or even to John Lennon (Mark David Chapman’s victim) was disgusting. But to liken Jack to a pair of infamous murderers was an abomination.
OSWALD, CHAPMAN, MCGARVEY?
Her first thought was to call an attorney in the morning, find out who was producing this trash, and sue them for every penny they had. As she stared at the hateful decal, however, she had a sinking feeling that the purveyor of this crap had protected himself by the use of that question mark.
OSWALD, CHAPMAN, MCGARVEY?
Speculation wasn’t the same thing as accusation. The question mark made it speculation and probably provided protection against a successful prosecution for slander or libel.
Suddenly she had enough energy to sustain her anger, after all. She gathered up the wallets and threw them into the bottom drawer of the nightstand, along with the decals. She slammed the drawer shut—then hoped she hadn’t wakened Toby.
It was an age when a great many people would rather embrace a patently absurd conspiracy theory than bother to research the facts and accept a simple, observable truth. They seemed to have confused real life with fiction, eagerly seeking Byzantine schemes and cabals of maniacal villains straight out of Ludlum novels. But the reality was nearly always far less dramatic and immeasurably less flamboyant. It was probably a coping mechanism, a means by which they tried to bring order to—and make sense of—a high-tech world in which the pace of social and technological change dizzied and frightened them.
Coping mechanism or not, it was sick.
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br /> And speaking of sick, she had hurt two of those boys. Never mind that they deserved it. She had never hurt anyone in her life before. Now that the heat of the moment was past, she felt…not remorse, exactly, because they had earned what she’d done to them…but a sadness that it had been necessary. She felt soiled. Her exhilaration had fallen with her adrenaline level.
She examined her right foot. It was beginning to swell, but the pain was tolerable.
“Good God, woman,” she admonished herself, “who did you think you were—one of the Ninja Turtles?”
She got two Excedrin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, washed them down with tepid water.
In the bedroom again, she switched off the bedside lamp.
She wasn’t afraid of the darkness.
What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one another either in darkness or at high noon.
CHAPTER TEN
The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had not yet seared the grass.
Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a bentwood hickory rocking chair on the front porch. A new video camera, loaded with tape and fully charged batteries, lay on the porch floor beside the rocker. Next to the camera was a shotgun. He got up a couple of times to fetch a fresh bottle of beer or to use the bathroom. And once he went for a half-hour walk around the nearer fields, carrying the camera. For the most part, however, he remained in the chair—waiting.
It was in the woods.
Eduardo knew in his bones that something had come through the black doorway in the first hour of May third, over five weeks ago. Knew it, felt it. He had no idea what it was or where it had begun its journey, but he knew it had traveled from some strange world into that Montana night.
Thereafter, it must have found a hiding place, into which it had crawled. No other analysis of the situation made sense. Hiding. If it had wanted its presence to be known, it would have revealed itself to him that night or later. The woods, vast and dense, offered an infinite number of places to go to ground.