by Dean Koontz
second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen. “You know who I am?”
Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.
“I’m Bobby Dakota’s wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It was my Bobby you tried to kill.”
He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.
She said, “Know what I’d like to do to you?” She held one of her hands down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails. “For starters, I’d like to grab you by the throat, hold your head against the wall, and ram two of these nice, sharp fingernails straight through your eyes, all the way in, deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever’s messed up in there.”
“Jesus, lady,” Sampson’s partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside anyone but Sampson, he would have been a big man.
“Well,” she said, “he’s too screwed up to get any help from a prison psychiatrist.”
Sampson said, “Don’t do anything foolish, Julie.”
Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be frightened by it. A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale. To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and quaverous to be as tough as he intended, Rasmussen said, “Keep this crazy bitch away from me.”
“She’s not actually crazy,” Sampson said. “Not clinically speaking, at least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I’m afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I wouldn’t say she’s crazy.”
Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, “Thank you so much, Sam.”
“You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about the other half of his accusation,” Sampson said good-naturedly.
“Yeah, I got your point.”
While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.
Everyone harbored a special fear, a private boogeyman built to his own specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights. Not confining spaces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was deteriorating, and he’d petitioned to be tested periodically for syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases that, untreated, could result in blindness. When not in prison—and he had been there twice-he had a standing, monthly appointment with an ophthalmologist in Costa Mesa.
Still squatting in front of Rasmussen, Julie took hold of his chin. He flinched. She twisted his head toward her. She thrust two fingers of her other hand at him, raked them down his cheek, making red welts on his wan skin, but not hard enough to draw blood.
He squealed and tried to strike her with his cuffed hands, but he was inhibited by both his fear and the chain that tethered his wrists to his ankles. “What the hell you think you’re doing?”
She spread the same two fingers with which she’d scratched him, and now she poked them at him, stopping just two inches short of his eyes. He winced, made a mewling sound, and tried to pull loose of her, but she held him fast by the chin, forcing a confrontation.
“Me and Bobby have been together eight years, married more than seven, and they’ve been the best years of my life, but you come along and think you can just squash him the way you’d squash a bug.”
She slowly brought her fingertips closer to his eyes. An inch and a half. One inch.
Rasmussen tried to pull back. His head was against the wall. He had nowhere to go.
The sharp tips of her manicured fingernails were less than half an inch from his eyes.
“This is police brutality,” Rasmussen said.
“I’m not a cop,” Julie said.
“They are,” he said, rolling his eyes at Sampson and Burdock. “Better get this bitch away from me, I’ll sue your asses off.”
With her fingernails she flicked his eyelashes.
His attention snapped back to her. He was breathing fast, and suddenly he was sweating too.
She flicked his lashes again, and smiled.
The dark pupils in his yellow-brown eyes were open wide.
“You bastards better hear me, I swear, I’ll sue, they’ll kick you off the force—”
She flicked his lashes again.
He closed his eyes tight. “—they’ll take away your goddamned uniforms and badges, they’ll throw you in prison, and you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, they get the shit kicked out of them, broken, killed, raped!” His voice spiraled up, cracked on the last word, like the voice of an adolescent boy.
Glancing at Sampson to be sure she had his tacit if not active approval to carry this just a little further, glancing also at Burdock and seeing that he was not as placid as Sampson but would probably stay out of it for a while yet, Julie pressed her fingernails against Rasmussen’s eyelids.
He attempted to squeeze his eyes even more tightly shut.
She pressed harder. “You tried to take Bobby away from me, so I’ll take your eyes away from you.”
“You’re nuts!”
She pressed still harder.
“Make her stop,” Rasmussen demanded of the two cops.
“If you didn’t want me to have my Bobby to look at, why should I let you look at anything ever again?”
“What do you want?” Perspiration poured down Rasmussen’s face; he looked like a candle in a bonfire, melting fast.
“Who gave you permission to kill Bobby?”
“Permission? What do you mean? Nobody. I don’t need—”
“You wouldn’t have tried to touch him if your employer hadn’t told you to do it.”
“I knew he was on to me,” Rasmussen said frantically, and because she had not let up the pressure with her nails, thin tears flowed from under his eyelids. “I knew he was out there, tumbled to him five or six days ago, even though he used different vans, trucks, even that orange van with the county seal on it. So I had to do something, didn’t I? I couldn’t walk away from the job, too much money at stake. I couldn’t just let him nail me when I finally got Whizard, so I had to do something. Listen, Jesus, it was as simple as that.”
“You’re just a computer freak, a hired hacker—morally bent, sleazy, but you’re no tough guy. You’re soft, squishy-soft. You wouldn’t plan a hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it.”
“I don’t have a boss. I’m freelance.”
“Somebody still pays you.”
She risked more pressure, not with the points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of his eyelids. He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain. He was shaking; his shackles clinked and rattled. More tears squeezed from beneath his lids.
“Delafield.” The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might. “Kevin Delafield.”
“Who’s he?” Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen’s chin with one hand, her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.
“Microcrest Corporation.”
“That’s who hired you for this?”
He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his eyes. “Yeah. Delafield. A nutcase. A renegade. They don’t understand about him at Microcrest. They just know he gets results for them. When this hits the fan they’ll be surprised by it, blown away. So let go of me. What more do you want?”
She let go of him.
Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision, the
n broke down and sobbed with relief.
As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned with the officer who had accompanied him downstairs to Ackroyd’s office. Bobby looked at Rasmussen, cocked his head at Julie, clucked his tongue, and said, “You’ve been naughty, haven’t you, dear? Can’t I take you anywhere?”
“I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen. That’s all.”
“He seems to have found it stimulating,” Bobby said.
Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping uncontrollably.
“We disagreed about something,” Julie said.
“Movies, books?”
“Music.”
“Ah.”
Sampson Garfeuss said softly, “You’re a wild woman, Julie.”
“He tried to have Bobby killed,” was all she said.
Sampson nodded. “I’m not saying I don’t admire wildness sometimes ... a little. But you sure as hell owe me one.”
“I do,” she agreed.
“You owe me more than one,” Burdock said. “This guy’s going to file a complaint. You can bet your ass on it.”
“Complaint about what?” Julie asked. “He’s not even marked.”
Already the faint welts on Rasmussen’s cheek were fading. Sweat, tears, and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.
“Listen,” Julie told Burdock, “he cracked because I just happened to know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap, like cutting a diamond. It worked because scum like him thinks everyone else is scum, too, thinks we’re capable of doing what he’d do in the same situation. I’d never put out his eyes, but he might’ve put mine out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I’d do him like he would’ve done me. All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes against him. Psychology. Nobody can file a complaint about the application of a little psychology.” She turned to Bobby and said, “What was on those diskettes?”
“Whizard. Not trash data. The whole thing. These have to be the files he duplicated. He only made one set while I was watching, and after the shooting started he didn’t have time to make backup copies.”
The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board. When the doors opened, a plainclothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer, stepped into the hallway.
Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.
She said, “This is evidence. The whole case might rest on it. You think you can keep track of it?”
Dainer grinned. “Gosh, ma’am, I’ll try.”
11
FRANK POLLARD—alias James Roman, alias George Farris—looked in the trunk of the stolen Chevy and found a small bundle of tools wrapped in a felt pouch and tucked in the wheel well. He used a screwdriver to take the plates off the car.
Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and even more quiet neighborhoods in fogbound Laguna, he parked on a dark side street and exchanged the Chevy’s plates for those on an Oldsmobile. With luck, the owner of the Olds would not notice the new plates for a couple of days, maybe even a week or longer; until he reported the switch, the Chevy would not match anything on a police hot sheet and would, therefore, be relatively safe to drive. In any case, Frank intended to get rid of the car by tomorrow night and either boost a new one or use some of the cash in the flight bag to buy legal wheels.
Though he was exhausted, he didn’t think it wise to check into a motel. Four-thirty in the morning was a damned odd hour for anyone to be wanting a room. Furthermore, he was unshaven, and his thick hair was matted and oily, and both his jeans and checkered blue flannel shirt were dirty and rumpled from his recent adventures. The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself, so he decided to catch a few hours of sleep in the car.
He drove farther south, into Laguna Niguel, where he parked on a quiet residential street, under the immense boughs of a date palm. He stretched out on the backseat, as comfortably as possible without benefit of sufficient legroom or pillows, and closed his eyes.
For the moment he was not afraid of his unknown pursuer, because he felt that the man was no longer nearby. Temporarily, at least, he had given his enemy the shake, and had no need to lie awake in fear of a hostile face suddenly appearing at the window. He was also able to put out of his mind all questions about his identity and the money in the flight bag; he was so tired—and his thought processes were so fuzzy—that any attempt to puzzle out solutions to those mysteries would be fruitless.
He was kept awake, however, by the memory of how strange the events in Anaheim had been, a few hours ago. The foreboding gusts of wind. The eerie flutelike music. Imploding windows, exploding tires, failed brakes, failed steering ...
Who had come into that apartment behind the blue light? Was “who” the right word ... or would it be more accurate to ask what had been searching for him?
During his urgent flight from Anaheim to Laguna, he’d not had the leisure to reflect upon those bizarre incidents, but now he could not turn his mind from them. He sensed that he had survived an encounter with something unnatural. Worse, he sensed that he knew what it was—and that his amnesia was self-induced by a deep desire to forget.
After a while, even the memory of those preternatural events wasn’t enough to keep him awake. The last thing that crossed his waking mind, as he slipped off on a tide of sleep, was that four-word phrase that had come to him when he had first awakened in the deserted alleyway: Fireflies in a windstorm. . . .
12
BY THE time they had cooperated with the police at the scene, made arrangements for their disabled vehicles, and talked with the three corporate officers who showed up at Decodyne, Bobby and Julie did not get home until shortly before dawn. They were dropped at their door by a police cruiser, and Bobby was glad to see the place.
They lived on the east side of Orange, in a three-bedroom, sort-of-ersatz-Spanish tract house, which they had bought new two years ago, largely for its investment potential. Even at night the relative youth of the neighborhood was apparent in the landscaping: None of the shrubbery had reached full size; the trees were still too immature to loom higher than the rain gutters on the houses.
Bobby unlocked the door. Julie went in, and he followed. The sound of their footsteps on the parquet floor of the foyer, echoing hollowly off the bare walls of the adjacent and utterly empty living room, was proof that they were not committed to the house for the long term. To save money toward the fulfillment of The Dream, they had left the living room, dining room, and two bedrooms unfurnished. They installed cheap carpet and cheaper draperies. Not a penny had been spent on other improvements. This was merely a way station en route to The Dream, so they saw no point in lavishing funds on the decor.
The Dream. That was how they thought of it—with a capital t and a capital d They kept their expenses as low as possible, in order to fund The Dream. They didn’t spend much on clothes or vacations, and they didn’t buy fancy cars. With hard work and iron determination, they were building Dakota & Dakota Investigations into a major firm that could be sold for a large capital gain, so they plowed a lot of earnings back into the business to make it grow. For The Dream.
At the back of the house, the kitchen and family room—and the small breakfast area that separated them—were furnished. This—and the master bedroom upstairs—was where they lived when at home.
The kitchen had a Spanish-tile floor, beige counters, and dark oak cabinets. No money had been spent on decorative accessories, but the room had a cozy feeling because some necessities of a functioning kitchen were on display: a net bag filled with half a dozen onions, copper pots dangling from a ceiling rack, cooking utensils, bottles of spices. Three green tomatoes were ripening on the windowsill.
Julie leaned against the counter, as if she could not stand another moment without support, and Bobby said, “You want a drink?”
“Booze at dawn?”
“I was thinking more of milk or juice
.”
“No, thanks.”
“Hungry?”
She shook her head. “I just want to fall into bed. I’m beat.” He took her in his arms, held her close, cheek to cheek, with his face buried in her hair. Her arms tightened around him.
They stood that way for a while, saying nothing, letting the residual fear evaporate in the gentle heat they generated between them. Fear and love were indivisible. If you allowed yourself to care, to love, you made yourself vulnerable, and vulnerability led to fear. He found meaning in life through his relationship with her, and if she died, meaning and purpose would die too.
With Julie still in his arms, Bobby leaned back and studied her face. The smudges of dried blood had been wiped away. The skinned spot on her forehead was beginning to scab over with a thin yellow membrane. However, the imprint of their recent ordeal consisted of more than the abrasion on her forehead. With her tan complexion, she could never be said to look pale, even in moments of the most profound anxiety; a detectable grayness seeped into her face, however, at times like this, and at the moment her cinnamon-and-cream skin was underlaid with a shade of gray that made him think of headstone marble.
“It’s over,” he assured her, “and we’re okay.”
“It’s not over in my dreams. Won’t be for weeks.”
“A thing like tonight adds to the legend of Dakota and Dakota.”
“I don’t want to be a legend. Legends are all dead.”
“We’ll be living legends, and that’ll bring in business. The more business we build, the sooner we can sell out, grab The Dream.” He kissed her gently on each comer of her mouth. “I have to call in, leave a long message on the agency machine, so Clint will know how to handle everything when he goes to work.”
“Yeah. I don’t want the phone to start ringing only a couple of hours after I hit the sheets.”
He kissed her again and went to the wall phone beside the refrigerator. As he was dialing the office number, he heard Julie walk to the bathroom off the short hall that connected the kitchen to the laundryroom. She closed the bathroom door just as the answering machine picked up: “Thank you for calling Dakota and Dakota. No one—”
Clint Karaghiosis—whose Greek-American family had been fans of Clint Eastwood from the earliest days of his first television show, “Rawhide”—was Bobby and Julie’s right-hand man at the office. He could be trusted to handle any problem. Bobby left a long message for him, summarizing the events at Decodyne and noting specific tasks that had to be done to wrap up the case.
When he hung up, he stepped down into the adjoining family room, switched on the CD player, and put on a Benny Goodman disc. The first notes of “King Porter Stomp” brought the dead room to life.
In the kitchen again, he got a quart can of eggnog from the refrigerator. They had bought it two weeks ago for their quiet, at-home, New Year’s Eve celebration, but had not opened it, after all, on the holiday. He opened it now and half-filled two waterglasses.
From the bathroom he heard Julie make a tortured sound; she was finally throwing up. It was mostly just dry heaves because they had not eaten in eight or ten hours, but the spasms sounded violent. Throughout the night, Bobby had expected her to succumb to nausea, and he was surprised that she had retained control of herself this long.
He retrieved a bottle of white rum from the bar cabinet in the family room and spiked each serving of eggnog with a double shot. He was gently stirring the drinks with a spoon to blend in the rum, when Julie returned, looking even grayer than before.
When she saw what he was doing, she said, “I don’t need that.”
“I know what you need. I’m psychic. I knew you’d toss your cookies after what happened tonight. Now I know you need this. ” He stepped to the sink and rinsed off the spoon.
“No, Bobby, really, I can’t drink that.” The Goodman music didn’t seem to be energizing her.
“It’ll settle your stomach. And if you don’t drink it, you’re not going to sleep.” Taking her by the arm, crossing the breakfast area, and stepping down into the family room, he said, “You’ll lie awake worrying about me, about Thomas”—Thomas was her brother—“about the world and everyone in it.”
They sat on the sofa, and he did not turn on any lamps. The only light was what reached them from the kitchen.
She drew her legs under her and turned slightly to face him. Her eyes shone with a soft, reflected light. She sipped the eggnog.
The room was now filled with the strains of “One Sweet Letter From You,” one of Goodman’s most beautiful thematic statements, with a vocal by Louise Tobin.