The Silent Corner

by Dean Koontz

  19

  * * *

  JANE WANTED TO DRIVE faster, but she feared being pulled over by the highway patrol. The armored vehicle was an eye-catcher that would tend to interest cops. Trahern—like some huge Bolshevik bomb-thrower displaced in time—did not remotely resemble a man who could pay nearly half a million for a set of wheels. If a patrolman asked them to step out of the car, he was likely to discover that they were packing concealed weapons. If Jane was taken into custody, she would have nothing to do but wait for her enemies to find her.

  This particular Gurkha offered all the amenities of a luxury sedan, including a first-class music system. But Jane deferred to Trahern’s preference for brooding silence.

  More than two hundred miles into what the GPS said would be a nearly five-hundred-mile trip, they left the interstate for a truck stop. With Trahern’s credit card, they filled up the nearly empty primary fuel tank. Jane bought four turkey-and-bacon sandwiches and two twenty-ounce bottles of Coke.

  Trahern took the wheel, eating and driving at the same time. When they were finished, he pulled off the pavement, so that she could drive again. She thought he intended to nap in the passenger seat. Instead, he remained awake, staring at the highway, although his stare was fixed, like that of a man self-tranced.

  Jane was weary. Aching back. Sore butt. In one interminable day, she’d driven from L.A. to San Diego and then from San Diego all this way, almost ten hours on the road since the morning. She wasn’t sleepy yet, but mental fatigue accompanied her physical weariness. Lively conversation would have helped her remain alert, but Trahern was not a raconteur with a trove of sparkling anecdotes.

  Seventy miles north of the truck stop, the night loosed a hard rain. The torrents washing across the road tugged at the tires. Jane didn’t know if four-wheel drive would help if they hydroplaned, but she shifted into that mode on the fly.

  In Trahern’s company, every mile of this journey had been strange. Now it became stranger, eerie. Gusts of conflicting winds shaped the falling water into pale-winged phantoms that billowed across the highway, and the world beyond this hurtling mass of armor seemed to melt away, until there was only the dark and nothing in it but a short length of pavement that might feather away into a void.

  Trahern broke his long silence to say, “You probably think it was war that made me the way I am, but it wasn’t.”

  She decided that if he needed to say something, he would more surely say it if she didn’t speak. He was less in conversation with her than in communion with himself, gazing at the windshield, where the wipers swept away the blur but could not sweep back into sight the washed-away world beyond the shoulders of the highway.

  “In fact,” Trahern said, “the Army was the best thing ever happened to me. It made me feel I had value and could do something worthwhile. I’d felt useless for a long time.”

  The taillights of an eighteen-wheeler loomed closer, and Jane followed the trucker’s lead by slowing from seventy to fifty.

  Trahern said, “When I was ten years old, I had to listen to my sister being murdered.”

  20

  * * *

  SEARCHING AHEAD for a room at the last minute, before he had flown out of Austin earlier in the day, Nathan Silverman had been given few choices. Most hotels around LAX and on the west side of Los Angeles were booked full. With only a few higher-end options to consider, he had splurged on a small suite—sitting room, bedroom, richly marbled bathroom—in a Beverly Hills establishment.

  Now, after checking in and being shown to his suite at nine o’clock—midnight his time—the quiet and comfort and pampering touches, like a plate of fresh fruit, seemed worth every penny.

  Although he had intended to be home in Virginia for the night, years in the Bureau had taught him to travel with toiletries and a change of clothes, just in case.

  The room-service menu was large, and as always when traveling, he preferred a meal in his suite to dining alone in a restaurant.

  By the time he showered, wrapped himself in the complimentary bathrobe, and opened a beer from the honor bar, his dinner arrived.

  Evidently new to his job, the young waiter ineptly dressed the round game table for dinner with a white tablecloth, a small vase of flowers, flatware, and napkins. With some clumsiness, he transferred dinner from the room-service cart. He was polite and well-meaning, apologizing for his errors, and Silverman tipped him too generously, as a way of saying, Don’t worry, everyone’s a beginner at your age.

  The filet mignon and side dishes were perfect. Strawberries and blueberries in cream. Excellent coffee in an insulated pot that kept it hot.

  He had arisen at four o’clock that morning, and it had been a long, stressful day. As tired as he was, however, he doubted that he would sleep well. Too many worries. Too many unanswered questions.

  After pouring a second cup from the insulated pot, but before taking a sip, he woke and realized he’d fallen asleep in the chair.

  Silverman’s weariness was profound, bone-deep. Getting to his feet required a conscious effort. The floor tilted, as if the hotel were a ship at sea. The bedroom eluded him. But then he found it. And the bed. The expectation of insomnia proved unfounded.

  He dreamed of an immense and silent Texas plain, flat to every distant horizon, the wild grass halfway to his knees and dead still except where he stirred it as he ran. The fierce sun was enthroned directly overhead, unmoving, so that he sprinted miles and miles, yet never cast a shadow. Although no pursuer was visible either at his heels or at the farthest limits of vision, he felt pursued. He feared the vastness of the cloudless sky and thought that something beyond all human experience would swoop down to seize, emasculate, and disembowel him. A door closed, an unmistakable sound. Silverman stopped, turned in place, 360 degrees, but no structure existed at any point on that eternal plain, no place with doors. A man spoke his name—Nathan? Can you hear me, Nathan?—but he remained alone, utterly alone. The sun. The sky. The grass. He ran.

  21

  * * *

  RAIN RATTLED LIKE VOLLEYS of buckshot against the bullet-resistant windshield.

  “Her name was Justine Carter,” Dougal Trahern said, “because her father was my mother’s first husband. Justine. My half sister. Four years old when I was born. I knew her all my life until…”

  For a minute, he fell silent, as if he had decided not to share his torment, after all.

  Jane suspected that he had not spoken of this for many years, perhaps not since it happened. A murdered sister was not part of what could be learned about him from the Internet, no doubt because his sister’s surname did not easily link her to him and because he was only ten when it happened, back in a day when children were rigorously protected by law from the curiosity of the media.

  “Justine,” Trahern continued, “was brilliant and kind and so funny. In spite of the four-year age difference, we were close, always close from as early as I can remember. Twins couldn’t have been closer.”

  A new quality had come into his voice. Gruffness had given way to tenderness, but a tenderness haunted by sorrow.

  When Jane glanced at him, she saw that his face glowed as pale as the streak of white that blazed through his beard. Fine drops of sweat beaded his brow. His eyes remained fixed on the highway, which at the moment led him not to the future but far into the past.

  “I was ten. She was fourteen. A Saturday. Our father…my father, her stepfather…away on business. Our mother was out, visiting a sick friend. Me and Justine at home. The doorbell rang. This normal-looking guy. I saw him through the sidelight, a man delivering flowers. Roses. A normal-looking guy with roses. We knew not to open the door for a stranger. We knew. I knew. I opened the door. He said, ‘Hey, kiddo, I got these here for some girl named Justine.’ He holds the roses out to me. I take them, and he punches past the roses, hits me in the face. He’s inside then. Pushes the door shut. I’m on the floor, roses scattered. He drops down, punches my face again. I don’t even have a chance to warn Justine.
I’m out. For…for a while, I’m out.”

  After their visit to the actor’s Malibu house, Jane had told Trahern that she needed to understand him. He had said that no one could understand anyone. Maybe there were times when it was better not to understand.

  “When I come around,” Trahern continued, his voice growing softer, “I’m trussed up with duct tape. Can’t move at all. In pain. Face swollen. Teeth missing. Blood in my mouth. I hear voices. They don’t make sense at first. My vision’s blurred. I blink it clear.”

  Rivulets of sweat trickled down Trahern’s chalk-white face, perhaps blended with tears. On his thighs, his hands clenched into fists, opened, clenched, opened, as though he was grasping for something to which he could hold tight and steady himself.

  “I’m on the floor in her…in Justine’s bedroom. After he subdued her, he carried me there. To her bedroom. Now he…he’s doing things to her.” The horror that contorted his face belied the quiet equanimity of his voice. “She begs him to stop. He won’t. She’s crying. Begging him. But he won’t stop. He sees I’m awake. Tells me to watch. No. I won’t. My eyes tight shut. Can’t move to help her. Duct tape. Can’t move. Hands numb. Feet numb. The duct tape. I can’t move, but I can’t stop hearing. Can’t make myself deaf. It goes on…for an hour. Longer. I’m sick with fear and rage…and self-hatred.” He whispered now. “I want to die.”

  Jane could not bear even to glance at him anymore, to see the depth of his suffering, for which the passage of time and all of his achievements could provide no balm. She focused on the highway, on the cataracts of rain and the slick pavement. The greasy highway and the rain were things with which she could deal.

  “I want to die. He kills her instead. He’s done with her. So he just…just throws her away. He does it…does it…with a knife.” The big man’s voice had grown small, from a whisper to a murmur, yet each word was too clear. “It takes a while. And then he says, ‘Hey, kiddo, look at this.’ No. I won’t look. He says, ‘You’re next. Look and see.’ ”

  Jane couldn’t deal with the rain and highway, after all. She had to pull to the shoulder of the road and stop. She leaned back in her seat, eyes closed, listening to the madness and the rain.

  Trahern continued in a voice louder than a whisper. “I never hear our mother come home. Neither does he. My dad keeps a gun in his study downstairs. My mother comes into the room. Shoots the killer. Once. Shoots him once. She picks up a paperweight from Justine’s desk. Throws it through a window. She screams. My mother screams. Keeps the gun on him and screams. Not just for help. She screams because she can’t not scream. She screams until her voice is raw, until the police come, and still she screams. She doesn’t shoot him twice. She doesn’t kill him. I don’t know why she doesn’t. I don’t know why she couldn’t.”

  Trahern opened the passenger door and got out into the night. He stood in the rain, staring out into the dark valley.

  Jane waited. There was nothing to do but wait.

  In time, he returned, pulled shut the door, sat sodden and dripping.

  She would have expressed her sympathy; but all the words that she could think to say were not merely inadequate but also offensive in their inadequacy.

  He said, “Our mother was a gentle person, not tough at all. She was never the same after that. Broken. Empty. Five years later, she died at forty-one. A blood clot broke loose from somewhere and went to her brain. I think she must have wished it on herself. I believe that’s possible. The killer was Emory Wayne Udell. He’d seen Justine walking home from school one day. He stalked her for a week, watched the house, waiting. He’s still alive. In prison for life, but alive, which isn’t right. Me, too. I’m still alive.”

  Jane said, “I’m glad you are.”

  He wasn’t angling for her endorsement. He sat in silence until she put the Gurkha in gear and returned to the highway. Then: “Why do some people—so many—need to control others, tell them what to do, use them if they can, destroy those who won’t be used?”

  She sensed that the question wasn’t rhetorical, that he cared what she would say. “Why Hitler, why Stalin, why Emory Wayne Udell? I don’t know. Demonic influence or just miswired brains? In the end, does it matter which? Maybe what matters is that some of us aren’t broken by it all, that we can take it to the Emory Udells and the William Overtons and the Bertold Shennecks, take it to them and stop them before they can do everything they dream about.”

  North of Stockton, the rain diminished. Two miles later, it stopped falling altogether.

  Although an hour of silence had passed since either had spoken, Dougal said, “If I’d had the gun, I would have shot him twice. I would have emptied the magazine into him. I would have killed him.”

  Jane said, “So would I.”

  In Sacramento, they transitioned from Interstate 5 to westbound I-80. An hour later, they arrived on the outskirts of Napa at 1:40 A.M., Sunday.

  A sprawling motor inn displayed a neon sign that promised VACANCY.

  To avoid the Gurkha being captured by the motel’s security cameras, Jane parked a block away. Because the sight of Dougal was more likely to alarm the night clerk, he remained with the vehicle while Jane walked back to the office. Using cash and a forged driver’s license, she signed the register as Rachel Harrington, booking two rooms for her, an imaginary husband, and two imaginary children. On the registration form, she identified her vehicle as a Ford Explorer and made up a license-plate number.

  The night clerk had a monk’s fringe of white hair. “Any pets?”

  “No. None.”

  “We allow pets in the north wing.”

  “We had a dog, but he passed away not long ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Losing one is always hard on kids.”

  “Hard on their dad and me, too,” she said.

  “What was it—the dog?”

  “A golden retriever. We called him Scootie.”

  “Wonderful dogs, golden retrievers.”

  “They are,” she agreed. “They’re the best.”

  They left the Gurkha a block away and walked to the motel with their luggage. Dougal carried his duffel bag to his door and one suitcase to hers. She carried the second suitcase and the leather tote that held sixty thousand dollars.

  He said, “All that back there on the road…”

  “Stays back there on the road,” she assured him.

  “Good.” He started toward his room, then turned to her again. “I’m going to say something, and you’re going to say nothing.”

  “All right.”

  “Somebody’s blessed to have you for a daughter.”

  He went into his room, and she went into hers.

  Later, lying in bed in the dark, with the pistol under the pillow next to hers, she thought about her father and about how he had made her who she was, though not by his example.

  For a few hours, she slept deeply, but hers was not the sleep of angels sublime in their innocence.

  22

  * * *

  NATHAN SILVERMAN WOKE with a headache and with a bitterness in his mouth, a taste like vinegar and ashes. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. Then he remembered Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Robert Branwick shot in the head, the hotel.

  A brief dizziness overcame him as he sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He wore an undershirt and boxer shorts. A luxurious complimentary robe lay in a heap on the floor, and he sat frowning at it, unable to remember taking it off.

  Nathan? Can you hear me, Nathan?

  Startled, he surveyed the room, but the voice was internal, remembered from…somewhere.

  The night maid had turned down the bed before Silverman had checked in, but he had fallen asleep on the blanket and top sheet rather than slipping under them.

  The bedside clock read 8:16 A.M. Morning light at the windows. He must have gone to bed around 10:30 in the evening, after dinner. Nine and a half hours? His best nights of sleep were seven hours, and his norm was six.

 
The room lights glowed. He’d left them on throughout the night.

  He felt dissipated, unclean, as if he had drunk too much, which he rarely did, or had been with a prostitute, which he never was.

  In the living room of the suite, he saw the empty bottle that had held the one beer he’d drunk. The empty dinner plate. A full cup of cold coffee. He had dropped his napkin on the floor.

  At the door to the hallway, he found the deadbolt as it should be. He wondered why he’d thought it might have been unlocked. The security chain hung loose; but he never engaged them because they were flimsy and easily defeated, supplied by hotels largely for psychological purposes, to assure guests that they were doubly safe.

  He took a short bottle of Pepsi from the honor-bar fridge and twisted off the cap and washed the bitter taste from his mouth.

  In the bathroom, standing at the toilet, he was surprised to see that his urine was unusually dark. He wondered what he might have eaten to have such an effect.

  At the sink, washing his hands, he saw the small red bruise in the crook of his right arm. At the center of it was a darker spot, like a pin prick. Directly over the vein. As if a phlebotomist had recently drawn his blood, though none had. He supposed it might be an insect bite coincidentally on the vein. He examined himself for other bites, but there were none.

  He always had aspirin in his kit of toiletries. With the Pepsi, he took two, and hoped this wasn’t a sinus headache, which aspirin never much relieved.

  After a long, hot shower, he felt better, more himself.

  Drying off, pulling on a fresh pair of boxers, he began to think about booking a flight back to Virginia.

  The telephone rang. Each room had a phone, and the one in the bathroom was wall-mounted. “Hello?”

  Booth Hendrickson said, “Good morning, Nathan. I wish you had reacted differently to what I told you in the Austin airport.”