by Dean Koontz
They’ve got a big case. That always means some overtime.
“He’s going to take ya out to dinner, and says to tell ya it’s been an incredible day. I guess that’s about the case, huh? Must be fascinating, married to a detective. And he’s sweet, too. You’re lucky, kid.”
Yes. But so is he.
Alice laughed. “Right on! And if he comes home this late another night, don’t settle for dinner. Make him buy ya diamonds.”
Felina thought of the red gem he had brought home yesterday, and she wished she could tell Alice about it. But Dakota & Dakota business, especially concerning an ongoing case in which the client was in jeopardy, was as sacred in their house as the privacies of the marriage bed.
“Saturday, our place, six-thirty? Jack’ll cook up a mess of his chile, and we’ll play pinochle and eat chile and drink beer and fart till we pass out. Okay?”
Yes.
“And tell Clint, it’s okay—we won’t expect him to talk.”
Felina laughed, then signed: He’s getting better.
“That’s ’cause you’re civilizing him, kid.”
They hugged again, and Alice left.
Felina closed the door, looked at her wristwatch, and saw that it was seven o’clock. She had only an hour to get ready for dinner, and she wanted to look especially good for Clint, not because this was a special occasion, but because she always wanted to look good for him. She headed for the bedroom, then realized that only the automatic lock was engaged on the front door. She returned to the foyer, twisted the thumbscrew that slid the dead bolt home, and slipped the security chain in place.
Clint worried about her too much. If he came home and found that she hadn’t remembered the dead bolt, he’d age a year in a minute, right before her eyes.
50
AFTER BEING off duty all day, Hal Yamataka responded to a call from Clint and came to the offices at 6:35 Tuesday night, to stand a watch in case Frank returned after the rest of them had left. Clint met him in the reception lounge and briefed him there over a cup of coffee. He had to be brought up to date on what had happened during his absence, and after he heard what had gone down, he again wistfully considered a career in gardening.
Nearly everyone in his family either had a gardening business or owned a little nursery, and all of them did well, most of them better than what Hal made working for Dakota & Dakota, some of them a great deal better. His folks, his three brothers, and various well-meaning uncles tried repeatedly to persuade him that he should work for them or come into business with them, but he resisted. It was not that he had anything against running a nursery, selling gardening supplies, landscape planning, tree pruning, or even gardening itself. But in southern California the term “Japanese gardener” was a cliché, not a career, and he couldn’t abide the thought of being any kind of stereotype.
He had been a heavy reader of adventure and suspense novels all his life, and he yearned to be a character like one of those he read about, especially a character worthy of being a lead in a John D. MacDonald novel, because John D’s lead characters were as rich in insight as they were in courage, every bit as sensitive as they were tough. In his heart Hal knew that his work at Dakota & Dakota was usually as mundane as the daily grind of a gardener, and that the opportunities for heroism in the security industry were far fewer than they appeared to be to outsiders. But selling a bag of mulch or a can of Spectricide or a flat of marigolds, you couldn’t kid yourself that you were a romantic figure or had any chance of being one. And, after all, self-image was often the better part of reality.
“If Frank shows up here,” Hal said, “what do I do with him?”
“Pack him in a car and take him to Bobby and Julie.”
“You mean their house?”
“No. Santa Barbara. They’re driving up there tonight, staying at the Red Lion Inn, so tomorrow they can start digging into the Pollard family’s background.”
Frowning, Hal leaned forward on the reception-lounge sofa. “Thought you said they don’t figure ever to see Frank again.”
“Bobby says he thinks Frank is coming apart, won’t last through this latest series of travels. That’s just his feeling.”
“So then who’s their client?”
“Until he fires them, Frank is.”
“Sounds iffy to me. Be straight with me, Clint. What’s really got them so committed to this one, especially considering how crazy-dangerous it seems to get, hour by hour?”
“They like Frank. I like Frank.”
“I said be straight.”
Clint sighed. “Damned if I know. Bobby came back here spooked out of his mind. But he won’t let go of it. You’d think they’d pull in their horns, at least until Frank shows up again, if he does. This brother of his, this Candy, he sounds like the devil himself, too much for anyone to handle. Bobby and Julie are stubborn sometimes, but they’re not stupid, and I’d expect them to let go of this, now that they’ve seen it’s a job big enough for God, not a private detective. But here we are.”
BOBBY AND JULIE huddled with Lee Chen at the desk, while he shared with them the information he had thus far obtained.
“The money might be stolen, but it’s spendable,” Lee said. “I can’t find those serial numbers on any currency hot sheets—federal, state, or local.”
Bobby had already thought of several sources from which Frank might have obtained the six hundred thousand now in the office safe. “Find a business with a high cash flow, where they don’t always get to a bank with the receipts at the end of the day, and you’ve got a potential target. Say it’s a supermarket, stays open till midnight, and it’s not a good idea for a manager to tote a lot of cash to a bank for automatic deposit, so there’s a safe in the market. After the place closes, you teleport inside, if you’re Frank, and use whatever other powers you have to open that safe, put the day’s receipts in a grocery bag, and vanish. You’re not going to find big chunks of cash, a couple hundred thousand at a time, but you hit three or four markets in an hour, and you’ve got your haul.”
Evidently Julie had been pondering the same question, for she said, “Casinos. They all have accounting rooms you can find on the blueprints, the ones the IRS gets into with a little effort. But they’ve got hidden rooms, too, where the skim goes. Like big walk-in safes. Fort Knox would envy them. You use whatever minor psychic abilities you have to figure the location of one of those hidden rooms, teleport in when it’s deserted, and just take what you want.”
“Frank lived in Vegas for a while,” Bobby said. “Remember, I told you about the vacant lot he took me to, where he’d had a house.”
“He wouldn’t be limited to Vegas,” Julie said. “Reno, Tahoe, Atlantic City, the Caribbean, Macao, France, England, Monte Carlo—anywhere there’s big-time gambling.”
This talk of easy access to unlimited amounts of cash excited Bobby, though he was not sure why. After all, it was Frank who could teleport, not him, and he was ninety-five-percent sure they were never going to see Frank again.
Spreading a sheaf of printouts across the desktop, Lee Chen said, “The money’s the least interesting thing. You remember, you wanted me to find out if the cops are on to Mr. Blue?”
“Candy,” Bobby said. “We have a name for him now.”
Lee scowled. “I liked Mr. Blue better. It had more style.”
Entering the room, Hal Yamataka said, “I don’t think I trust the style judgment of a guy who wears red sneakers and socks.”
Lee shook his head. “We Chinese spend thousands of years working up an intimidating image for all Asians, so we can keep these hapless Westerners off balance, and you Japanese blow it all by making those Godzilla movies. You can’t be inscrutable and make Godzilla movies.”
“Yeah? You show me anybody who understands a Godzilla movie after the first one.”
They made an interesting pair, these two: one slender, modish, with delicate features, an enthusiastic child of the silicon age; the other squat, broad, with a face as blunt as
a hammer, a guy who was about as high-tech as a rock.
But to Bobby the most interesting thing was that, until this moment, he had never thought about the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of Dakota & Dakota’s small staff was Asian-American. There were two more—Nguyen Tuan Phu and Jamie Quang, both Vietnamese. Four out of eleven people. Though he and Hal once in a while made East-West jokes, Bobby never thought of Lee and Hal and Nguyen and Jamie as composing any subset of employees; they were just themselves, as different from one another as apples are different from pears and oranges and peaches. But Bobby realized that this predilection for Asian-American co-workers revealed something about himself, something more than just an obvious and admirable racial blindness, but he could not figure out what it was.
Hal said, “And nothing gets more inscrutable than the whole concept of Mothra. By the way, Bobby, Clint’s gone home to Felina. We should all be so lucky.”
“Lee was telling us about Mr. Blue,” Julie said.
“Candy,” Bobby said.
Indicating the data he had extracted from various police records nationwide, Lee said, “Most police agencies began to be computerized and interlinked only about nine years ago—in any sophisticated way, that is. So that’s all the further back a lot of electronically accessible files go. But during that time, there have been seventy-eight brutal murders, in nine states, that have enough similarities to raise the possibility of a single perp. Just the possibility, mind you. But FBI got interested enough last year to put a three-man team on it, one in the office and two in the field, to coordinate local and state investigations.”
“Three men?” Hal said. “Doesn’t sound like high priority.”
“The Bureau’s always been overextended,” Julie said. “And over the last thirty years, since it’s been unfashionable for judges to hand out long criminal sentences, the bad guys outnumber them worse than ever. Three men, full time—that’s a serious commitment at this stage.”
Extracting a printout from the pile on the desk, Lee summarized the essential data on it. “All of the killings have these points in common. First—the victims were all bitten, most on the throat, but virtually no part of the body is sacred to this guy. Second—many of them were beaten, suffered head injuries. But loss of blood, from the bites—usually the jugular vein and carotid artery in the throat—was a substantial contributing factor to the death in virtually every instance, regardless of other injuries.”
“On top of everything else, the guy’s a vampire?” Hal asked.
Taking the question seriously—as, indeed, they had to consider every possibility in this bizarre case, regardless of how outlandish it seemed—Julie said, “Not a vampire in the supernatural sense. From what we’ve learned, the Pollard family is for some reason generously gifted. You know that magician on TV, The Amazing Randi, who offers to pay a hundred thousand bucks to anyone who proves they have psychic power? This Pollard clan would bankrupt his ass. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything supernatural about them. They’re not demons, or possessed, or the children of the devil—nothing like that.”
“It’s just some extra bit of genetic material,” Bobby said.
“Exactly. If Candy acts like a vampire, biting people in the throat, that’s just a manifestation of psychological illness,” Julie said. “It doesn’t mean he’s one of the living dead.”
Bobby vividly remembered the blond giant charging him and Frank on the rainswept black beach at Punaluu. The guy was as formidable as a locomotive. If Bobby had a choice of going up against either Candy Pollard or Dracula, he might choose the undead Count. Nothing as simple as a clove of garlic, a crucifix, or a well-placed wooden stake would effectively deter Frank’s brother.
Lee said, “Another similarity. In those instances where victims didn’t leave doors or windows unlocked, there was no indication of how the killer gained entrance. And in many instances police found doors dead-bolted from the inside, windows locked from the inside, as if the murderer had gone up the chimney when he was done.”
“Seventy-eight,” Julie said, and shivered.
Lee dropped the paper onto the desk. “They figure there’re more, maybe a lot more, because sometimes this guy has attempted to cover his trail—the bite marks—by further mutilating or even burning the bodies. Though the cops weren’t fooled in these cases, you can figure they were fooled in others. So the coun ’s higher than seventy-eight, and that’s just the last nine years.”
“Good job, Lee,” Julie said, and Bobby seconded that.
“I’m not done yet,” Lee said. “I’m going to order in a pizza, do some more digging.”
“You’ve been here more than ten hours today,” Bobby said. “That’s already above and beyond the call. Got to have downtime, Lee.”
“If you believe, as I do, that time is subjective, then you’ve got an infinite supply. Later, at home, I’ll stretch a few hours into a couple of weeks and return tomorrow quite rested.”
Hal Yamataka shook his head and sighed. “Hate to admit it, Lee, but you’re damned good at this mysterious oriental crap.”
Lee smiled enigmatically. “Thank you.”
AFTER BOBBY and Julie went home to pack an overnight bag for the trip to Santa Barbara, and after Lee returned to the computer room, Hal settled on the sofa in the bosses’ office, slipped off his shoes, and put his feet up on the coffee table. He still had the paperback of The Last One Left, which he’d read twice before, and which he had started to reread last night in the hospital. If Bobby was right when he said they might never see Frank again, Hal was in for an uneventful evening and would probably get half the book read.
Maybe his happiness at Dakota & Dakota had nothing to do with the prospect of excitement, avoiding a stereotypical job as a gardener, and having the admittedly slim chance to be a hero. Maybe the thing that most affected his career decision was the realization that he simply could not mow a lawn or trim a hedge or plant fifty flats of flowers and read a book at the same time.
DEREK SAT in his chair. Pointed the raygun at the TV and made it be on. He said, “You don’t want to watch news?”
“No,” Thomas said. He was on his bed, propped up with pillows, looking at the night being dark outside the window.
“Good. Me neither.” Derek pushed buttons on the raygun. A new picture came on the screen. “You don’t want to watch a game show?”
“No.” All Thomas wanted to do was snoop on the Bad Thing.
“Good.” Derek pushed buttons, and the invisible rays made the screen show a new picture. “You don’t want to watch the Three Stooges pretending to be funny?”
“No.”
“What you want to watch?”
“Don’t matter. Whatever you want to watch.”
“Really?”
“Whatever you want to watch,” Thomas repeated.
“Gee, that’s nice.” He made lots of pictures on the screen until he found a space movie where spacemen in spacesuits were poking around in some spooky place. Derek made a happy sigh and said, “This is good. I like their hats.”
“Helmets,” Thomas said. “Space helmets.”
“I wish I had a hat like that.”
When he reached out into the big dark again, Thomas decided not to picture a mind-string unraveling toward the Bad Thing. Instead he pictured a raygun, shooting some invisible rays. Boy, did that work better! Wham, he was right there with the Bad Thing in a flash, and he felt it stronger, too, so strong he got scared and clicked off the raygun and got all of himself back into his room with the rest of himself right away.
“They got telephones in their hats,” Derek said. “See, they’re talking through their hats.”
On the TV, the spacemen were in an even spookier place, poking around, which was one of the things spacemen did the most, even though something ugly-nasty was usually in those spooky places just waiting for them. Spacemen never learned.
Thomas looked away from the screen.
At the window.
; The dark.
Bobby was scared for Julie. Bobby knew stuff Thomas didn’t know. If Bobby was scared for Julie, Thomas had to be brave and do What Was Right.
The raygun idea worked such a lot better it scared him, but he figured it was really good because he could easier snoop on the Bad Thing. He could get to the Bad Thing faster and get away from it faster, too, so he could snoop on it more often and not be scared about it maybe grabbing the mind-string and coming back to The Home with him. Grabbing an invisible raygun ray was harder, even for a thing as fast and smart and mean as the Bad Thing.
So he pictured pushing buttons on a raygun again, and a part of him went through the dark—wham!—and to the Bad Thing right away. He felt how mad the Bad Thing was, madder than ever, and thinking lots of thoughts about blood that made Thomas half sick. Thomas wanted to come right back to The Home. The Bad Thing felt him, you could tell. He didn’t like the Bad Thing feeling him, knowing he was there with it, but he stayed just a couple clock ticks longer, trying to see any thoughts about Julie in all those thoughts about blood. If the Bad Thing had thoughts about Julie, Thomas would TV a warning right away to Bobby. He was happy he couldn’t find Julie in the Bad Thing’s mind, and he quick raygunned back to The Home.
“Where you think I could get a hat like that?” Derek asked.
“Helmet.”
“Even has a light on it, see?”
Rising up a little from his pillows, Thomas said, “You know what kind of a story this is?”
Derek shook his head. “What kind of story?”
“It’s the kind where any second something ugly-nasty jumps up and sucks off a spaceman’s face or maybe crawls in his mouth and down his belly and makes a nest in there.”
Derek made a disgusted face. “Yuck. I don’t like that kind of stories.”
“I know,” Thomas said. “That’s why I warned you.”
While Derek made a lot of different pictures come on the screen, one quick after the other, to get far away from the spaceman who was going to get his face sucked off, Thomas tried to think how long he should wait before he snooped on the Bad Thing again. Bobby was real worried, you could tell, even if he tried to hide it, and Bobby was not a Dumb Person, so it was a good idea to check on the Bad Thing pretty regular, in case maybe it all of a sudden thought about Julie and got up and went after her.
“You want to watch this?” Derek asked.
On the screen was a picture of this guy in a hockey mask with a big knife in his hand, going quiet-like across a room where a girl was asleep in a bed.
“Better raygun up another picture,” Thomas said.
BECAUSE THE rush hour was past, because Julie knew all the best shortcuts, but mainly because she was not in a mood to be cautious or respect the traffic laws, they made great time from the office to their home on the east end of Orange.
On the way Bobby told her about the Calcutta roach that had been part of his shoe when he and Frank had arrived on that red bridge in the garden in Kyoto. “But when we popped to Mount Fuji, my shoe was okay, the roach was gone.”
She slowed at an intersection, but she was the only traffic in sight, so she didn’t obey the four-way stop. “Why didn’t you tell me about this at the office?”
“Wasn’t time for every detail.”
“What do you think happened to the roach?”
“I don’t know. That’s what bothers me.”
They were on Newport Avenue, just past Crawford Canyon. Sodium-vapor streetlamps cast a queer light on the roadway.
Atop the steep hills to the left, several huge English Tudor and French houses, blazing like giant luxury liners, looked wildly out of place, partly because the insanely high value of such upscale real estate ensured the construction of immense houses out of proportion to the tiny lots they stood on, but partly because Tudor and French architectural styles clashed with the semitropical landscape. It was all part of the California circus, some of which he hated, most of which he loved. Those houses never bothered him before, and given the serious problems he and Julie faced, he couldn’t figure why they bothered him now. Maybe he was so jumpy that even these minor disharmonies reminded him of the chaos that had almost engulfed him during his travels with Frank.
He said, “Do you have to drive so fast?”
“Yes,” she said curtly. “I want to get home, get packed, get to Santa Barbara, learn what we can about the Pollard family, get finished with this whole damn creepy case.”
“If you feel that way, why don’t we just drop it here? Frank comes back, we give him his money, his jar of red diamonds, tell him we’re sorry, we think he’s a prince of a guy, but we’re out of it.”
“We can’t,” she said.
He chewed on his lower lip, then said, “I know. But I can’t figure why we’re compelled to hang in there with this one.”
They crested the hill and speeded north, past the entrance to Rocking Horse Ridge. Their own development was only a couple of streets ahead, on the left. As she finally began to brake for the turn, she glanced at him and said, “You really don’t know why we can’t bug out of it?”