by Dean Koontz
In addition, the warning they had given her was both over-the-top vicious and delivered with unnerving confidence that they could fulfill the threat and convey the boy into the embrace of the most savage murderers and worst child molesters on the planet, half a world away. Such transport wasn’t something the standard malevolent banker or wicked businessman, so familiar in modern fiction, would in real life be able to pull off. Mr. Droog was letting her know that he had connections, perhaps corrupt people in the intelligence services or the State Department, who could and would convey Travis into a new life far from home, a life of brutal rape and endless humiliation, just to keep her silent or to spite her if she would not be silenced.
The problem with such a vile threat, however, was that it convinced her of the perfection of their evil. You couldn’t make deals with the devil, because the devil had no honor and would never adhere to the terms of the contract. If the warning dissuaded her from seeking the truth, if it reduced her to the purest cowardice, they would eventually reward her by killing her and Travis anyway, when in time she felt safe and let her guard down.
She was left with one role to play: David to their Goliath. She had no illusions that she could bring them down with one stone and a slingshot. They were not one giant. They were an army of Goliaths, as far as she knew, and her chances of coming out of this triumphant and alive were a decimal point away from zero.
Nevertheless, you played the cards you were dealt, and if jokers were wild, you hoped to get one before the game was done.
Now she returned to the armchair and put her legs up on the footstool. She drew the blanket over herself.
She could see the bedside clock—11:36.
Her eyes at last grew heavy, and on the backs of her lids were projected faint constellations of stars that in their turning made her pleasantly dizzy and spiraled her toward sleep.
7
* * *
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, she half woke to the sound of one of the dogs snuffling along the threshold of the closed bedroom door.
Gavin claimed that when he and Jess went to bed, the dogs rarely both slept at the same time, but spelled each other, taking turns on patrol of the house. They had not been trained to do this, but an instinct to assume guard duty was in shepherd genes.
Whether this was Duke or Queenie, the dog satisfied itself that Travis remained abed and all was well. Its nails clicked faintly on the mahogany floor as it continued on its rounds.
As Jane fell into sleep again, she also fell into the past and was a child, cozy in blankets, snow falling past the windows, dogs nearby to keep her safe. This wasn’t the truth of her childhood, but a fantasy version, for she’d had no dogs or sense of safety.
8
* * *
JANE SET THE COFFEE to brewing, toasted the bread and buttered it. Gavin cracked the eggs and scrambled them, and tended to the skillet of cottage fries. Jess fried sliced ham with slivers of yellow peppers and onions, piled it on a warming platter.
Although they had been fed first, the dogs remained alert and hopeful, though they did not get underfoot.
As they had busied themselves with the cooking, making it seem more of a task than it had really been, making of it a distraction from the fact of Jane’s impending departure, so they also made much of eating, as if they were all starving. And the conversation was a little too loud, too fast, some of the laughter forced.
Travis talked of what they could do with their day, as if his mother would be there for all of it, including dinner and a game of glowing Frisbee in the dusk. He suggested names for the pony, spoke about saddling it for the first time as if Jane would see him take his inaugural ride days from now. She let him talk, joined him in the pony naming, because he knew that for all their talk, she would be leaving; this was only heartfelt wishing, while there was still time to wish away the day that must be and hope to conjure in its place the day that ought to be.
When the time came, after she’d said good-bye to Jess and Gavin, the boy alone accompanied her to the Ford Escape. He thought the car was cool, and he sat in it with her for a while, as they recalled for each other moments of the drive they had made across the country back in January, in a less reliable car.
When he sensed that there would be no more delay, he turned his face away from her, toward the side window, and knuckled his eyes. He put one salty knuckle in his mouth to bite on it. She could see that he bit hard, biting back more tears.
She didn’t patronize him by telling him not to cry. His self-control would mean more to him if he managed it on his own.
Neither did she assure him that everything would be all right in the end. She could not lie to him. He would know a lie at once, and it would frighten him that she felt the need to pretend things must be better than they were.
“You’re safe here,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you feel safe here?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve always wanted dogs.”
“They’re good dogs.”
“They are. They’re special.”
“When can you arrest somebody?”
“I’m making progress.”
“You’re FBI. You can arrest them.”
“Gathering evidence comes first,” she said, wondering if she would ever unravel enough of it. “You know evidence?”
“Proof,” he said.
“That’s right. You’re a regular FBI kid, knowing all this cop stuff.”
He looked at her again. His eyes were red, but his lashes were not beaded with fresh tears. He was something, this little toughie.
From a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew part of a broken cameo locket: a woman’s face in profile, carved of soapstone and embedded in a silver oval. Half a hinge was fixed to one side of it. Perhaps a lock of a loved one’s hair had been kept in the small case when it had been intact and hanging on a silver chain.
“Last time you came here, like after you left, I found this down at the creek, washed up on some stones. She looks like you.”
There was no remarkable resemblance, but Jane said, “She sort of does, doesn’t she?”
“I knew right away it was good luck.”
“Like finding a shiny new penny.”
“Bigger luck. You came back and all.” He was solemn when he held the cameo out to her. “So you’ve got to have it.”
She understood the necessity of matching his solemnity. She accepted the charm. “I’ll always keep it in my pocket.”
“You gotta sleep with it, too.”
“I will.”
“Every night.”
“Every night,” she agreed.
The idea of one last kiss, one last touch, seemed too much for him. He opened the door, scrambled from the car, closed the door, and waved good-bye.
She gave him a thumbs-up and then drove off. As she followed the long graveled driveway to the state route, he was always there in the rearview mirror, watching after her, a small figure becoming quickly smaller, until the lane curved and the colonnade of oak trees intervened between them.
9
* * *
DURING THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, the valley had come to seem remote to her, as she wished it to be, a refuge beyond the horizon of the modern world, where the civilization of the mechanized hive did not encroach, where each individual could exist unto himself or herself, free from the forced intimacy of the digital collective—therefore safe.
As she drove west once more, she soon ascended on an undulant ribbon of blacktop, through the chaparral-stubbled hills that were as they had been ten thousand years earlier. In the hard clear light of morning, the borderline desert landscape did not seem natural, appeared instead to be devastated, as if the final war at world’s end had raged across this terrain long ago.
The consequences of that conflict were to be found in the endless busy cities of the coast, and as she came within sight of them, the truth of the valley’s—and her child’s—proximity to all the dangers of this troub
led age couldn’t be denied.
She could only hope that Travis would be safe there until she might be able to understand the nature and intent of the conspiracy behind the country’s escalating suicides and obtain enough evidence to break the story to the public. Even in the darkest darkness, hope was a lifeline, though sometimes as thin as a thread.
10
* * *
FROM CAPISTRANO BEACH, Jane followed the Coast Highway north to Newport Beach, and then headed inland to the city of Santa Ana.
Although the Ford Escape was less likely to catch the eye of a passing cop now that the Canadian plates had been stripped off, the vehicle would draw even less attention if it wore California tags.
Stealing plates wasn’t an option. If the victim filed a police report, the number would be on a nationwide hot sheet in an hour.
The National Crime Information Center database maintained continuously updated lists of wanted persons with outstanding arrest warrants in all fifty states; missing persons; and stolen property that included cars, trucks, boats, aircraft, securities, guns, and license plates. Local, state, and national law-enforcement officers had access to the NCIC and used it regularly.
She intended to buy rather than steal plates. A seller was more likely to be found in Santa Ana than elsewhere in Orange County.
This once-prosperous city had long been in decline before recently undergoing some gentrification. In spite of the best efforts of those who would bring Santa Ana back to its glory days, there were many deteriorated neighborhoods, some of them dangerous.
Wherever decay and poverty flourished, there tended to be less money for public services. Where the police were not properly funded—and often disrespected—gangs thrived like mushrooms in any moist, dark place, and it was easier to obtain whatever you might want.
She cruised until she found a manufacturing district beaten down by foreign competition, bad economic policy, and regulators who acted with the best of intentions but never walked the streets where their destruction was manifest. Abandoned plants with stained and spalling stucco walls. Rusted metal roofs. Shattered windows.
Once filled with employees’ cars, parking lots stood empty, the blacktop swaled with depressions reminiscent of grave sites that sank when coffins and their contents moldered away.
A long building of slumpstone and corrugated steel had been divided into twelve double-wide garages, over which a roof-mounted sign offered SECURE GARAGE AND WORK SPACES FOR RENT. Five of the big doors were rolled up, and men were working on cars either inside those units or on the concrete apron in front of them.
They appeared to be young, mostly in their twenties, and Jane assumed that some of them were operating small car-repair shops without business licenses. Others might have been working on their own vehicles: all-stops-pulled street rods, low-riders with engines on steroids, and ordinary flash wheels.
She parked out of the way and chose a young Hispanic man who was kneeling on Velcroed joint protectors, using gel wax and a power buffer on a pearl-gray ’60 Cadillac convertible that had been fully restored and lightly customized. As she approached him, he switched off the buffer and got to his feet.
The guys at other units had turned from their work to watch her. Maybe because she looked good. Mostly because she didn’t look as though she belonged there, and people who looked as though they came from outside the neighborhood could be trouble.
The man with the Caddy had close-cropped hair and a Zapata mustache. He wore engineer boots, jeans, a tank tee, and an expression as impassive as a slab of concrete.
His muscular arms were sleeved with vivid tattoos, but the images weren’t prison work in either subject or style. On his right arm, a flight of angels swarmed up from the back of his hand to his biceps, where they gathered around a radiant depiction of the Holy Mother with child. An exquisitely depicted tiger climbed his left arm, its head turned at the top to look back; its fangs were not bared in a snarl, but its golden eyes conveyed a pointed warning.
“Sweet car,” she said, indicating the Caddy.
He said nothing.
“Those are Dayton wire wheels, huh? And radial tires made to look like bias ply, right for the period.”
His brown eyes with faint yellow striations had been flint on the verge of striking a spark. The threat of fire went out of them.
He said, “Coker Excelsior sport radials.”
“Your car?”
“I don’t steal.”
“That wasn’t my implication.”
“Stupid to think you could score anything in this place.”
“I don’t do drugs. And I don’t think everyone with Mexico in his family deals them.”
After a silence while he considered the flint in her eyes, he said of the car, “Yeah, she’s mine.”
“Beautiful job.”
When he didn’t reply, she looked around at the other guys, who were pretending to get back to work, then at the Caddy owner again. “I’m jammed in a corner. I can pay my way out. But I need help.”
He held her stare. “What do I smell?”
“You smell cop.”
“You’re a psychic lady, huh?”
She sensed that a pure lie would shut him down, that she needed to blend some truth in it. “I’m FBI on suspension.”
“Why’d they suspend you?”
“To pull my teeth while they set me up for a rap I didn’t do.”
“Maybe I’m the one bein’ set up.”
“Why you in all the world? No need to trick dudes to keep the prisons full when a million assholes are volunteering for a cell.”
After another silence during which they maintained eye contact, he said, “So I got to grope you.”
“I understand.”
He led her into the garage, to the shadowed back of the place.
He started at her ankles and worked his way up both legs, patting her down, searching for a wire. Inner thighs, buttocks, belt line, up the back, around the breasts, his strong hands exploring without apology, his face impassive and his manner businesslike.
When he found the pistol, he pulled aside her sport coat to examine rig and weapon, but he didn’t draw the .45 from the holster.
Taking a step back from her, he said, “So what is it?”
“I’ll give you five hundred for the license plates from the Caddy, and you don’t report them stolen for a week.”
He thought about it. “A thousand.”
Earlier, she had folded five hundred-dollar bills into each front pocket of her jeans. “Six hundred.”
“A thousand.”
“Seven hundred.”
“A thousand.”
“You’re cutting my throat here.”
“I didn’t come to you. You came to me.”
“Because you didn’t look like a pirate. Eight hundred.”
He considered and then said, “Count it out.”
She put eight bills in his open palm.
“I’ll bring my lady into the first bay. You pull your Ford into the second. We’ll do the swap in here.”
“Those guys out there are interested and hawk-eyed,” she said. “When I leave, they’ll see your plates on my wheels.”
“I’m not worried about them. They’re solid. But we don’t know who’s passin’ in the street.”
After the vehicles were in the garage, the big segmented door powered down, closing out fresh air, so the oil-grease-rubber odor intensified.
Jane felt isolated, wary but not alarmed.
When the owner of the Caddy switched the plates and the door groaned and rattled upward, he came to her. “I’ll keep her in here, drive my regular bucket instead. You want one week, I’ll give you two before I tell the cops the plates were ripped off.”
“Suddenly you’re generous, but I wonder…”
“I don’t lie about things this serious.”
“That wasn’t my implication. What I meant is, I know you can count to seven, but I’m not sure about fourteen.”
&
nbsp; A surprised laugh escaped him. “Bonita chica, if I knew where they make them like you, I’d move there tomorrow.”
11
* * *
THE SALESGIRL in the wig shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in trendy West Hollywood thought the midnight-purple number with the Chinese-red swags was a perfect complement to Jane’s complexion. “But then, anything would be with your great skin.”
They had a makeup section with midnight-purple lip gloss and glittery eye shadow. The salesgirl was excited that Jane was going from fade to flash. “The young-attorney look doesn’t do you justice. Your stuff is stashed in the right places, so might as well put it on parade before the long slide starts. What’ll they say at work?”
“I came into some money,” Jane said. “I don’t need to work anymore. I’m quitting tomorrow.”
“So you’re gonna—what?—go in there one last time, flash the hot new you, and tell ’em to screw themselves?”
“Exactly.”
“Sensational.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Beat them into the dirt with it.”
“I will,” Jane said, though she wasn’t sure what that meant.
Across the street and half a block farther east, in a boutique where the salesgirls looked like highly attractive cyborgs from the future, Jane bought a pair of Buffalo Inka flare jeans with a higher rise that gave them a retro look, and a lambskin biker’s jacket that, according to the girls, was a perfect knockoff of one by Comptoir des Cotonniers, whoever the hell that was.
She also chose snakeskin high-heeled platform shoes with ankle straps. They were said to be a drop-dead knockoff of a pair by Salvatore Ferragamo, of whom she believed she had heard, though she had been under the impression he was a hockey or soccer star.
Finally, she purchased a pair of black-silk wrist-length gloves with silver stitching. Without them, her working-cop fingernails would belie her flash-girl image. Besides, she was going where she didn’t want to leave fingerprints.