The Silent Corner

by Dean Koontz

  The doorman-valet on the portico looked astonished, and his astonishment increased when from a jacket pocket Jane withdrew a length of chain and a padlock that she bought earlier at a hardware store. She chained together the long vertical handles on the glass doors and padlocked them, so that the hotel could not be entered.

  In Nona’s wake, the traffic light had changed; and three guys were trying to cross Ocean—one of them the hulk—slowed by the need to dodge impatient motorists.

  Brakes squealed and one of the three was knocked off his feet.

  Nona had skated past Jane, across the terrazzo floor, past the entrance to the elegant Art Deco bar, into the elevator alcove. When Jane got there, the lift doors were gliding open.

  They boarded the car and pushed the button marked GARAGE.

  “That rocked,” Nona declared.

  “Sorry it got hairy.”

  “More hair, more fun.”

  “Was Barney hurt?”

  “Nah. That old guy’s tougher than he looks.”

  When the doors slid shut and the car started down, Jane thumbed the STOP button. They halted between floors.

  She reached into an inner jacket pocket and withdrew a folded heavy-duty forty-five-gallon green-plastic trash bag and handed it to Nona.

  As the skater shook open the bag, Jane checked the contents of the briefcases. Printouts packaged in clear, sealed plastic bags.

  “I thought it might be money,” Nona said as she sat on the floor of the car to pull off her skates.

  The lining of the briefcases probably concealed sophisticated transponders, allowing them to be tracked. Dumping the contents into the trash bag, Jane said, “Sorry to disappoint. I never said money.”

  “Don’t keep apologizing. It’s been a boring week till now.”

  Jane jabbed the STOP button again. As the car continued to the garage, she knotted the trash bag with its Smart Tie closure.

  Nona was first into the hotel garage, carrying her skates, the wheels clicking together, the bearings tick-tick-ticking.

  Pausing only to push 7 on the floor-selection panel, lugging the trash bag, Jane hurried out of the elevator.

  The valet-only garage smelled of automotive lubricants and the lime in the concrete and the lingering exhaust fumes of the most recent car to have been ferried in or out. Low ceiling. Inadequate lighting that allowed lurking shadows. Walls with water stains like huge distorted faces and twisted ghostly figures. She thought, Tomb, catacombs.

  They had been moving fast. But maybe not fast enough.

  27

  * * *

  CROSSING OCEAN AVENUE against the light, Zahid is knocked down but not run over by a blue Lexus. Sprawled on the pavement, he waves Kipp and Angelina on toward the hotel, saying, “Go, go, I’m okay.”

  Kipp doesn’t need to be encouraged onward, doesn’t care whether Zahid is okay or not, has no intention of stopping to administer first aid. The trap they intended to spring has instead been sprung on them, and a situation gone wrong needs to be made right. They are in a business where business always comes before personnel, with none of that romantic hokum from crime and mafia movies, none of that sentimental shit about family and honor among thieves. In this digital age, people are data troves; their primary value is whatever useful information they have that you need. At the moment, Zahid has no data they need; he has crashed.

  When Kipp reaches the hotel, the doorman is standing in front of the entrance, peering into the lobby. Kipp shoves him aside and grabs a handle and discovers that the doors won’t open.

  For the most part, Kipp Garner is a practical entrepreneur with an orderly approach to life’s problems. He isn’t a screamer, nor is he given to violent outrage when he does not get his way. He enjoys occasionally beating someone into submission and leaving him with one kind of damage or another that will ensure the guy always fears him, but his targets are strangers met in bars or chanced upon in lonely circumstances. When responsible operation of one of his businesses requires him to kill someone he knows, he performs the task efficiently, with little emotion.

  Kipp has engaged in much self-analysis during his thirty-six years, and he knows that his one weakness as a person, his one true fault, is that he cannot control his temper when a woman insults or in some way gets the better of him. Happily, most women sense this about him on first encounter and tread softly in his presence.

  But this Ethan Hunt—he glimpsed her briefly and at a distance as she opened the hotel door for her roller-skating accomplice—has played him for a fool. His face burns with embarrassment. A woman has mortified him in front of his people. He feels that his entire crew is secretly laughing at him. Not just his crew. Everyone in the park, the motorists on Ocean Avenue, the scrawny doorman whom he has shoved aside—they are all laughing at him.

  When this one fault, this singular weakness, manifests in Kipp Garner, he sometimes loses it and acts irrationally, never for long, for a minute, five minutes. This time, it’s a minute or so during which he grips the stainless-steel handles and pulls-pushes, pulls-pushes the hotel doors, shakes them till it seems they will shatter, the padlock knocking against one of the interior handles, the chain rattling against the glass.

  The red haze that clouds his thinking is finally penetrated by Angelina’s voice. “Big guy! Hey, stud, Mr. Big, you’ll want to see this.” She is one of the pretend students from the park, the kind of girl who always knows her place. She came across the street with him and Zahid. She’s waving her smartphone at him, because she’s using an app, one of Jimmy’s best, to track the briefcases. “They’ve gone vertical, big guy.”

  This app doesn’t just map-point the transponder and track it horizontal in any direction. It also has something that Jimmy calls three-dimensional cubic-space signal-awareness processing capacity.

  Kipp steps back from the doors and looks up at the hotel. “You mean they’re going up?”

  “Vertical, yeah,” Angelina confirms.

  “Up where?”

  “Maybe they’ve got a room here. Otherwise, the roof.”

  “There’s nowhere to go from the roof. They’ve got a room.”

  28

  * * *

  THE GARAGE HAD TWO access ramps, one for inbound vehicles, one for outbound. Jane carried the heavy-duty trash bag containing the research she’d ordered, and stocking-footed Nona carried her skates, and they sprinted up the outbound ramp and into the alley behind the hotel. Jane wouldn’t have been surprised to run head-on into some of Jimmy Radburn’s best buddies, but at the moment the backstreet was deserted.

  The hotel stood at the north of the block, and midway down the alley, on the farther side, lay a large parking lot that served an office building fronting on 2nd Street. The alleyway provided access; ninety minutes earlier, Jane had moved her Ford Escape from a meter on Arizona Avenue to a visitor slot in the parking lot, the closest space to the hotel that she could find.

  Racing along the alley with Nona, she expected to hear shouting behind them, but there was none. In the parking lot, she tossed the trash bag into the backseat of her car, and Nona got into the front passenger seat with her skates, and Jane got behind the wheel, and they were out of there, no pursuit visible in the rearview mirror.

  29

  * * *

  KIPP APOLOGIZES to the doorman for shoving him aside a moment earlier, and he folds a hundred-dollar bill into the man’s hand.

  He and Angelina retreat from the portico to the sidewalk as Zahid arrives, limping from his encounter with the Lexus, insisting that he is not seriously injured.

  “Apparently they have a room in the hotel,” Kipp says. “They can’t stay in there forever. We need to keep a watch on the front entrance and the back. Bring a car around to—”

  “Big guy,” Angelina says, focusing on her smartphone, “they’re coming back down.”

  “What?”

  “They were pretty high up, maybe one of the top two floors. This app isn’t perfect on the vertical. Now they’re c
oming down.”

  30

  * * *

  AT THE END of the alleyway, Jane turned left on Santa Monica and then right on 4th Street.

  Nona Vincent, formerly a sergeant in the United States Army, now retired, on a weeklong vacation alone from South Carolina, said, “That was the most fun I’ve had in a while. But when I kicked Balloon Guy’s cojones up to his Adam’s apple, I hope I was giving some comeuppance to a bad guy, not a halfway good one.”

  “All the way bad,” Jane assured her.

  “I told him I can call myself anything I like, but he can’t call me or anyone a dyke. I’m not sure he heard me, ’cause I said it after the kick, when he was off in a world of pain.”

  “I’m sure he got the message.”

  When Jane braked for a traffic light at the corner of 4th and Pico, Nona said, “So you’re on suspension from the FBI?”

  “Yeah,” Jane lied. “Like I said before.” She hadn’t said she was on leave, because she didn’t want to have to go into the whole story of Nick’s suicide.

  “Why did you say you were suspended?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  “You don’t seem rogue to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I know. I’m grateful you helped.”

  The light changed. Jane drove, Pico to Ocean Boulevard.

  “What I figure,” said Nona, “is you were on some corruption case involving a politician, and the powers that be told you to drop it, and you didn’t drop it, so they suspend you till you get your head on straight.”

  “You’re psychic.”

  “And you’re full of shit.”

  Jane laughed. “Totally.”

  “But I still think you’re a good woman.”

  Nona was staying at Le Merigot, a Marriott hotel with an ocean view, south of the Santa Monica Pier and maybe half a dozen blocks from where she had roller-skated Jimmy Radburn’s testicles. Jane didn’t enter the hotel drive, but stopped at the curb, in the meager midday shade of palm trees.

  Earlier, she had given Nona Vincent five hundred dollars with a promise of five hundred more. Now she offered the second payment.

  “I shouldn’t take it. You probably need it more than I do.”

  “I don’t welch.”

  “I shouldn’t take it, but I will.” Nona tucked the five hundred into her yellow sports bra. “When I get back home and tell this story to friends, I can always say I refused to take it.”

  “But you’ll tell the truth.”

  Nona regarded her with uncharacteristic solemnity. “You have a degree in psychology or something?”

  “Something. Listen, those guys will probably split the area, but you shouldn’t go out skating anymore today, ’cause they sure do hold a grudge.”

  “It’s my last day, anyway. Hotel’s got a spa. I’ll stay in and allow myself to be pampered.”

  Jane held out her hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  As they shook hands, Nona said, “When the day comes you’re out of whatever mess you’re in, call that number I gave you. I’ll want to hear the whole damn story.”

  “Truth is, I’ll throw away the number. If the wrong people found it on me, that might not be good for you.”

  Nona peeled one of the hundred-dollar bills from the wad of five and dropped it in Jane’s lap.

  Picking up the money, Jane said, “What’s this?”

  “I’m paying you to memorize the number. If I never hear from you what this is all about, I’ll die of curiosity.”

  Jane pocketed the hundred.

  “I’m almost twice your age,” Nona said. “When I was growing up back in the Jurassic, I never imagined the world would get so ugly.”

  Jane said, “I never imagined it ten years ago. Or one.”

  “Watch your back.”

  “Best I can.”

  Nona got out of the car. In her stocking feet, carrying her skates, she walked up the hotel drive.

  31

  * * *

  KIPP AND ANGELINA STAND in the hotel garage. By the elevator. They wait almost fifteen minutes. Neither of them speaks as they wait. Kipp isn’t in the mood to talk. Angelina understands his state of mind. As always.

  They are simpatico. He trusts her. She never wants to give him a reason not to trust her. He can have any kind of sex with her. Or with other girls. She isn’t jealous. She just wants to be the one he trusts most. Not his only girl. His best girl. His best friend. If sometimes he needs to hurt her, he can hurt her. One day, she will learn where he keeps his biggest stash of cash, and she will be so trusted that when she shoots him in the back of the head, he will go to Hell thinking some hit man has wasted her along with him.

  The hotel doorman has connected them to a bellman. The bell captain. Like he’s military or something. The elevator pings. The bell captain appears out of it. He doesn’t look like a bellman. He looks like a doctor. Wise, very serious. White hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. He says, “There were two empty briefcases in the elevator.”

  “Where are they?” Kipp asks.

  “Ms. Wyndham, she’s the general manager, she has them in her office. She says the FBI might want them.”

  Angelina feels Kipp’s alarm. A sudden electricity in the air.

  He says, “What’s the FBI got to do with anything?”

  “The lady who was with the roller-skater, she flashed an FBI badge or something at Ms. Wyndham. Ms. Wyndham thinks now it was phony ID, she needs to tell the FBI.”

  The situation is instantly clear to Angelina. The Ethan Hunt bitch is gone. Her dyke friend is gone. Time to forget them. Let them go. Get out of here.

  To Kipp, she says only, “Better melt Vinyl faster than fast.”

  Kipp blinks at her. He nods. He’s always like two seconds behind her.

  He gives two C-notes to the bell captain.

  The garage is quiet. Lonely.

  “A little muscle, too,” Angelina advises.

  “Yeah,” Kipp says, and he takes the bell captain by the throat. Rams him back against the wall. Gets in his face. “You never saw either of us. You never talked to either of us. You understand?”

  The bell captain’s voice is choked off. He can only nod.

  “You say a word about us, I’ll find you one night and cut your nose off and feed it to you. Same for the doorman. You tell him.”

  The red-faced bell captain nods. His eyes bulge. His mouth is an O as he sucks for breath. He doesn’t look like a doctor now. He looks like a red-faced fish. He’s nothing in his fancy uniform. He’s a big zero. A feeb.

  Kipp lets go of the feeb’s throat. Throws a punch hard into his gut. The feeb goes to his knees.

  Kipp lets the big zero keep the two hundred. It’s a way of humbling him. Like saying he took the two hundred to allow Kipp to beat him.

  Angelina and Kipp walk away.

  Behind them, the feeb vomits on the garage floor.

  Angelina will miss this when she kills Kipp. She will miss watching him show people how little they are, how nothing. And watching him hurt them.

  32

  * * *

  AT TWO O’CLOCK, as arranged, Barney was waiting for Jane on Oceanfront Walk, sitting on the platformed steps that led up to the indoor amusement center associated with the Santa Monica Pier. This was where she had first seen him earlier in the day. He was hunched under the weight of his backpack, the trash bag of his worldly goods at his side, staring at the pavement between his feet as though the meaning of life must be written in the concrete shaded by his body.

  That morning, by way of introducing herself, she had brought him a breakfast plate from a nearby café, which understandably would have been unwilling to serve him if he had entered in all his ragged splendor, for most of the other customers would have bailed upon his arrival.

  He had wondered at her motives, but he’d eaten what she brought him. After fifteen minutes of conversation, she had made her motives clear when she counted fi
ve twenty-dollar bills into his hand and told him about a man who would, at noon, walk through Palisades Park with briefcases and with a metallic balloon tied to one wrist.

  Barney was not as dirty as he appeared. His hands were careworn but reasonably clean, and in her company he had a few times lathered them with antibacterial gel. His hair and beard bristled as if with a dangerous electrical charge, but they were not matted with filth. She thought that he must shower at a shelter somewhere or else bathe in the sea at night.

  His clothes were every bit as dirty as they appeared to be, however, and it was necessary to talk to him at a three-foot remove to avoid being withered and prematurely aged by his horrific breath.

  Now she sat on the step he occupied, at the distance needed to avoid his halitosis. “You did a good job in the park.”

  He raised his bushy head and stared at her from under a tangled hedge of eyebrows, and for a moment it seemed that he did not know who she was. His watery eyes were a pale faded-denim blue, a shade she’d never seen before, and she wondered if too much alcohol and misfortune could have faded them from a darker hue.

  Although his eyes didn’t clear, awareness rose in them. “Most wouldn’t come like they said, but I knew you would.”

  “Well, I owe you another hundred dollars.”

  “You don’t owe me nothin’ but what you want to owe.”

  “Nona said you scared the hell out of Jimmy.”

  “The baby-face balloon guy? He’s an asshole. Pardon my French. He won’t give even just a dollar to a Vietnam vet.”

  “Are you a Vietnam vet, Barney?”

  “How old you think I look?”

  She said, “How old do you think you look?”

  “You’re a regular damn diplomat. I think I look seventy-eight.”