by Dean Koontz
She went to the west wide of the house. At the midpoint of that long wall, a single French door faced onto a pocket garden where two wrought-iron chairs flanked a basin-and-pedestal fountain that was currently not operating.
No lamp brightened the room beyond the door, but an interior door admitted some light from a hallway. The room appeared to be a study: the shadowy suggestion of a desk, bookshelves, an armchair.
Jane holstered the pistol. A quick flicker of flashlight revealed a mortise lock with a deadbolt cylinder in the escutcheon.
Earlier, she’d tethered the lock-release gun to her belt with a shoelace. Now she eased its thin pick into the keyway, under the pin tumblers. When she pulled the trigger, the flat spring snapped the pick upward, throwing some pins to the shear line, out of the way. She pulled the trigger four times before the lock was disengaged.
Drawing the pistol, she stepped inside. Closed the door behind her. A study. Computer on the desk. Instead of books on the shelves, there were high-end collectible Star Wars figures.
From the back of the house came the squeal of tires, racing engines, gunfire, music scored to insist on excitement even if the visuals and story didn’t deliver any.
She eased into the brightly lighted hallway, hesitated, and moved toward the front of the house for a quick reconnoiter. From the foyer, she could see into the dining room on one side and the living room on the other, both lamplit and cozy and deserted.
Returning along the hall, she reached the kitchen doorway just as a young blond woman appeared from the family room and opened the refrigerator, back to Jane, unaware of an intruder.
The girl was dressed to seduce in tight silky pants and a midriff-baring blouse with lacework.
Jane holstered the gun, took in hand the small spray bottle of chloroform, entered the big kitchen, and moved past the archway that provided a clear view of the family room, counting on the movie to keep the attention of the guy in there.
Fortune favors the bold, except when it doesn’t.
She stepped behind the fridge browser, who was deciding which of five soft drinks to choose.
Before the blonde might have a can of soda in hand and drop it, Jane said softly, “Pepsi.”
Startled, the browser turned into the first stream from the spray bottle. Sweet-tasting chloroform wet the girl’s pink lipstick and the tip of her tongue, whispered up her nostrils. Her eyes went wide but rolled back in her head before she could cry out. Jane got one arm around her and held her against the refrigerator to prevent her from folding noisily to the floor, put the spray bottle on the counter, and lowered the unconscious girl to the ceramic tiles.
Chloroform was highly volatile. Already it had evaporated from the blonde’s lips. Traces glistened only around the edges of her nostrils. What she’d inhaled would keep her out for several minutes. Maybe long enough, maybe not.
Jane tore two paper towels from a nearby dispenser. She folded them together, spritzed one side lightly with chloroform, and placed the barely dampened side over the girl’s face. The makeshift mask fluttered slightly with each exhalation. Jane watched long enough to be sure there was no breathing problem.
Then she put the spray bottle in an inner jacket pocket, drew her pistol, and returned to the archway between kitchen and family room. He was still sitting in the overstuffed gray sectional, feet up on a coffee table, enthralled. On the TV, one guy on a motorcycle chased another guy on a motorcycle along a highway, weaving among numerous other speeding vehicles, in a scene that required the brain of a titmouse to write and a demented genius to stage.
The cacophony masked what sounds she made as she circled behind him. When one of the motorcycles went over a cliff and the other one shrieked to a halt at the brink, the bombastic music faded to a mere ghost of sound, to emphasize the long death drop.
Jane said, “Got any Oreos, Bobby?”
Surely her voice wasn’t identical to that of the anesthetized blonde on the kitchen floor, yet he didn’t react to her question except to gesture impatiently with one hand and say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he watched the plummeting motorcyclist narrowly escape death when what had appeared to be a backpack proved instead to be a parachute from which bloomed an acre of life-saving silk.
She rapped his head with the barrel of the .45, and he said, “What the hell,” and turned and saw her and sprang off the sofa and nearly fell into the coffee table.
“You tried to nail me in the park. Then you stuck it in my eye with the last item about Shenneck. ‘Weird brothel’ and nothing more. I have questions. Lie or evade—you get a bullet in the head. Got it, Robert? Jimmy? Whoever you want to be?”
8
* * *
IN THE FAMILY ROOM, the movie had gone from stunts to romance. The sex had fewer sound effects than the chase scene, softer music.
In the kitchen, the adult Kewpie doll, who had once been Jimmy Radburn and had always been Robert Branwick, sat in a dinette chair, his hairless and rubber-smooth android hands folded on the kitchen table. His baby-smooth face paled with fear, but his gray-eyed stare glinted like a pair of ice picks.
Jane had screwed the sound suppressor onto the pistol. As she intended, the silencer intimidated him no less than the gun itself did. He took it to mean she was serious.
On the table lay a notepad and pen that Jane had taken from the counter under the wall phone.
She stood between him and the blonde, who breathed shallowly under her paper-towel mask. “Shenneck’s brothel has a website?”
“It’s Dark Web. Like the gig we just closed up. Except it’s so dark it makes us look like we were Walmart. The Web address isn’t officially registered, it’s a blind pig.”
“Which to you means what?”
“It piggybacks the domain system, dot org, but nobody managing the system sees it. The site name is a long series of random letters and numbers, so no search engine can take you there. Hundreds of millions of possible combinations. Typing such a long random address by chance is epsilon. You’d need centuries even with an automated search. In short, you can’t get there unless you already have the address. Friends tell friends, I guess.”
“How did you get there, Jimmy Bob?”
“Maybe one of my clients didn’t adequately protect his address book.”
“While you hacked someone for this guy, you hacked him, too.”
“Win, win.”
In her sleep, the blonde snorted, and paper towels fluttered over her face.
“You know the address?” Jane asked.
“It’s forty-four random letters and numbers. It’s bletcherous. I can’t memorize something like that. Hardly anyone could.”
“You’ve got it in your files from Vinyl.”
“But they aren’t accessible right now. We’re down. Remember?”
“Have you been to this dark site?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“You get a black screen. Then the name Aspasia.”
“Write it down. And don’t make me pull teeth.”
Printing the name on the notepad, he said, “I looked it up. She was the mistress of the mayor of Athens or something, like in four hundred B.C. Then the screen gives you eight languages to choose from. A worldwide operation. In English you get three promises—‘Beautiful girls. Totally submissive. No desire too extreme.’ ”
“Sounds like your dream bordello, Jimmy Bob.”
“It says one more thing that’s too creepy—‘Girls incapable of disobedience. Permanent silence assured.’ ”
“What—you use her, then they kill her?”
“I said it was too creepy. I’m not the sleaze you think I am. Then there’s the membership fee. A serious bignum. Like joining some ultraexclusive country club. Three hundred thousand bucks.”
“Bullshit.”
“They don’t make it impossible to find the place just so they can pull a practical joke. The guy whose address book I raided could afford that a hundred times over.”
“H
ow do you know Bertold Shenneck’s involved with it?”
“The guy who had the address is an investor in Shenneck Technology. He has office, home, cell, and all kinds of alternate phone numbers for Shenneck. He didn’t list Aspasia under Aspasia. He listed it under ‘Shenneck’s playpen.’ ”
“Write the guy’s name down.”
“You’re bustin’ my balls here.”
“Not yet. But I’d be happy to do the job. Write it down.”
Scowling, he printed the name. “William Sterling Overton. He’s a lawyer, a shakedown artist, wins huge settlements. Lives mostly in Beverly Hills. Married twice to hot actresses. Dates supermodels. If he also needs Aspasia, he must be so saturated with testosterone, you could wring it out of him like water from a sponge.”
“You have millions, Jimmy Bob. You sure you didn’t sign up?”
“I don’t pay for sex.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I don’t. Not anymore. Anyway, I’m not in these guys’ league.”
“How does a new member pay the fee? Doesn’t seem like something any rich freak would want linked to him by a paper trail.”
“Screen said, ‘Anonymity assured. Tracing payment impossible.’ Plus people like Overton have foreign accounts, paper corporations.”
“You didn’t get payment details? Tell me true now.”
Staring into the muzzle of the .45 instead of at Jane, he said, “Before they lay out the payment arrangements, they ask who you are, who referred you. I could’ve used Overton’s name as my sponsor, but I figured they have the referral before you call. If you claim a referral they don’t have, you’re in deep shit with megabad people.”
“You’re a hacker genius,” Jane said. “You go in anonymous.”
“Maybe not with these people. Maybe you go that one last step, and they have a dragon with a long tongue, it licks all the way back to where you are and takes a taste. Because when I tried the site a day later, I didn’t even get the name Aspasia. The first screen just said, ‘Die,’ went black, stayed black. I never went back again.”
“So you don’t have a physical address for this brothel.”
“You’d have to be a member to know it.”
Elsewhere in the house, a toilet flushed.
The sound was muffled but unmistakable, possibly originating from a downstairs powder room off the hallway to which the nearby kitchen door stood open. Someone had won a war with irregularity after a nice long sit-down with a magazine.
As Branwick flipped his pen in her face, he thrust to his feet, seizing the chair to swing it at her, thinking he could take her, shouting, “KIPP, SHE HAS A GUN! KILL THE BITCH!”
Killing another human being would have been impossible if she hadn’t believed in the reality of evil, if she hadn’t encountered it before, if she hadn’t been trained to act reflexively in desperate circumstances. But she knew evil and reacted and shot him in the head point-blank.
His knees buckled, and as Jane rounded the end of the table to get a line of sight on the hallway, his corpse toppled backward into the life that had splashed out on the floor behind him.
9
* * *
JANE AT THE THRESHOLD, pistol in a two-hand grip, eyes on the front sight and the hallway beyond. At the midpoint of that narrow passage, a door stood open that had not been open before. On the left. Across from the study where she had gained entrance to the house. The door to the half bath.
Kipp, whoever Kipp might be, could have crossed the hall into the study, could have gone forward to the living room or the dining room. Could still be in the half bath, playing her for stupid.
Hallways were shooting galleries almost as bad as staircases. And all those doorways to clear.
Better to leave by the patio door, split by the nearest exit. She had no further business here. No confrontation was necessary.
She backed off the hallway, glanced to the left, toward the gray sectional and the TV. If there was another route from the front of the house to the family room, he might come at her that way.
The thunder of running feet overhead. He had gone to the second floor. Now he was coming back. Coming with evident enthusiasm for a fight. A sudden change in the quality of the thunder, a hollow booming: He was bounding down the front stairs.
He must have gone up there for a weapon. He was returning with it, heedless of all risk. He could have fled the house; instead, he raced toward her as if he were a crazed bull and she caped in red.
She stepped to the dinette table, snatched the top page off the notepad, stuffed it into a pocket of her jeans.
The sound of him louder, in the ground-floor hallway now.
Jane turned toward the back door.
The shotgun blast rocked the house. A storm of pellets slashed into the kitchen, the spread constrained by the doorjamb, which spat off splinters. A sleet of lead shattered the glass panes in upper display cabinets, snapped against granite countertops, plinked off the stainless-steel hood above the cooktop.
She would never make it to the back door in time. He was here, she heard him cursing, he seemed insane with rage. He would enter the kitchen shooting.
She dropped to the floor, the table between her and the hallway door. The exit to her left and behind her. Dead man to her right, his remaining features distorted and seeming to be pulled by some black-hole gravity toward the wound where his nose had once been.
Peering under the table, between clusters of chair legs that allowed her no sure shot, she saw a pair of black-and-white man-size designer sneakers cross the threshold, and in the same instant the shotgun roared. The weapon was a pump-action because she heard him chamber the next shell, probably a short-barrel pistol-grip 12-gauge for home defense. The second blast was still echoing through the room, ringing in her ears when he squeezed off the third round, hosing the last section of the kitchen, intending to clear it of opposition, all three loads having cleaved the air at chest height, shattering or pitting everything that didn’t repel the buckshot.
Temporarily half deaf, she saw his fashionably clad feet pivot toward the family room. When he didn’t fire immediately, she knew—or thought she knew—the 12-gauge had a three-round magazine tube.
Jane got to her feet. The guy was a mountain. Had to be the one she’d seen chasing across Ocean Avenue after roller-skating Nona. He stood with his broad back toward her, calculating what family-room furniture someone might be hiding behind, thinking he had cleared the kitchen, not a guy trained at Quantico, his gun savvy learned from bad movies. He was digging spare shells from a pocket of his denim jacket.
From behind, she could have shot him through the heart, if that had been who she was. Instead she backed toward the exit, and though she trod on buckshot and other debris, the giant’s hearing was for the moment compromised, like hers, and loud music issued from the TV again.
He fumbled a shell, and instead of loading the other one in his hand, he stooped to snatch the dropped round from the floor, maybe because he was slow-witted, maybe because he was so big that no one had ever given him a reason to suspect that he was as vulnerable as any child born of a woman.
Jane labored under no illusion that he would fail to be aware of her opening the back door. Her hearing was fast returning, and so was his.
He rose with the dropped shell, and she squeezed off two shots into the ceiling over his head, popping a recessed lighting fixture. Glass and sparks from a shorting wire fell on him, but he also heard the shots, because no silencer fully lived up to its name.
The hulk ducked and half turned and saw her, his eyes lanterns of demented rage. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t compute why she hadn’t shot him instead of the ceiling. He didn’t have a round in the shotgun yet, and he believed himself to be her target, and he scrambled into the family room, putting a section of lower kitchen cabinets between her and him.
Jane fired twice again, into those cabinets, the .45s splitting the wood as if it were balsa, clattering pans and pots inside.
>
Then she was out, on the patio, gasping lungfuls of cool air, blowing them out hot, running for the west side of the house, into the cover of darkness, such as it was.
If he thought to load only one shell and came fast after her, he wouldn’t have any qualms about shooting her in the back. And if the first blast didn’t kill her, it would take her down and bleed her out, giving him time to load another shell and finish her.
As she passed the two chairs and fountain, and the French door where she had entered the house through the study, halfway along the side of the residence, she thought she felt something on the back of her neck. As if the red dot of a laser-sighting module guaranteed a bullet’s track to sever her spine and lacerate her brainstem. But of course the guy had a shotgun, which didn’t need a laser sight, and anyway you could not feel a laser dot when it marked you. All the training anyone could receive, at Quantico or anywhere else, couldn’t tame the imagination in a crisis.
She reached the front of the house. Fumbled for a breathless moment with the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. Shouldered open the gate. Glanced back, saw no one. Glanced toward the front door. He wasn’t there.
Shotgun fire, even contained within the house, would have been loud enough to stir the neighbors from their TVs and computers. If anyone happened to be at a window, Jane shouldn’t be seen running now that she emerged onto the front lawn where pathway lamps and nearby streetlamps cast enough light for a witness to observe some details of a suspect’s appearance. She detached the silencer, pocketed it, holstered the pistol. At a measured pace, she crossed the lawn and followed the sidewalk uphill under trees that whispered above her and trembled leaf shadows across the lamplit sidewalk.
She crossed the street to her Ford Escape and got behind the wheel and closed the door and picked up the binoculars with which she had been studying the house earlier.