The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  enjoyed, and in particular could teleport more efficiently and swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from molecular resistance. Nevertheless, he was surprised that she had not gotten up to investigate, for the sounds he had made during arrival had been only one small room away from her and, surely, odd enough to prick her curiosity.

  She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to read.

  He could not see much of her from behind. Her hair was thick, lustrous, and so black it seemed to have been spun on the same loom as the night. Her shoulders and back were slender. Her legs, which were both to one side of the chair and crossed at the ankles, were shapely. If he had been a man with any interest in sex, he supposed he would have been excited by the curve of her calves.

  Wondering what she looked like—and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to know how her blood would taste—he stepped out of the open doorway and took three steps to her. He made no effort to be silent, but she did not look up. The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of her chair.

  He turned her around and was instantly excited by her. He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, the trimness of her waist, the fullness of her breasts. Though beautiful, it was not even her face that electrified him. Something else. A quality in her gray eyes. Call it vitality. She was more alive than most people, vibrant.

  She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or anger, then struck him furiously with both fists. She pounded his chest, battered his face.

  Vitality! Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, and her vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of sexual charms.

  He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-hum of the bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her without drawing the attention of the man—as long as he could prevent her from screaming. He struck her on the side of the head with his fist, hammered her before she could scream. She slumped against him, not unconscious but dazed.

  Shaking with the anticipation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back, on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge. He spread her legs and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting as that. As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him in confusion, still rattle-brained from the blows she had taken. Then her eyes began to clear. He saw horrified comprehension return to her, and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which was clean and sweet, intoxicating.

  She thrashed beneath him.

  She was so alive. So wonderfully alive. For a while.

  WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and Julie’s office and offered some to Hal.

  Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee table, Hal said, “You know what that stuff does to your arteries?”

  “Why’s everyone so concerned about my arteries today?”

  “You’re such a nice young man. We’d hate to see you dead before you’re thirty. Besides, we’d always wonder what clothes you might’ve worn next, if you’d lived.”

  “Not anything like what you’re wearing, I assure you.”

  Hal leaned over and looked in the box that Lee held down to him. “Looks pretty good. Rule of thumb—any pizza they’ll bring to you, they’re selling service instead of good food. But this doesn’t look bad at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins.”

  Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate. “There.”

  “You’re not going to give me half?”

  “What about the cholesterol?”

  “Hell, cholesterol’s just a little animal fat, it isn’t arsenic.”

  WHEN THE woman’s strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her. Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch another drop of it. The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him. He remembered his sisters’ cats, eating their own each time one of the pack died, and he grimaced.

  Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard a door open farther back in the house. Footsteps approached.

  Candy quickly circled the table, putting it and the dead woman between himself and the doorway to the dining room. From the vision induced by the dummy’s scrapbook of pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to handle as most people were. He preferred to put a little distance between them, give himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by surprise.

  Clint appeared in the doorway. Except for his outfit—gray slacks, navy-blue blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt—he looked the same as the psychic impression he had left on the book. He had pumped a lot of iron in his time. His hair was thick, black, and combed straight back from his forehead. He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes.

  Excited by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next. There were all sorts of ways it could go, and not one of them would be dull.

  Clint did not react as Candy expected. He did not show surprise when he saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table; he did not seem horrified, shattered by the loss of her, or outraged. Something major changed in his stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting under the mantle of the earth’s crust.

  Finally he met Candy’s gaze, and said, “You.”

  The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling. For a moment Candy could think of no way this man could know him—then he remembered Thomas.

  The possibility that Thomas had told this man—and perhaps others—about Candy was the most frightening turn in Candy’s life since his mother’s death. His service in God’s army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret that should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family. His mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud of doing God’s work, but that his pride would lead him to a fall if he boasted of his divine favor to others. “Satan,” she had told him, “constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in God’s army—which is what you are—and when he finds them, he destroys them with worms that eat them alive from within, worms fat as snakes, and he rains fire on them too. If you can’t keep the secret, you’ll die and go to Hell for your big mouth.”

  “Candy,” Clint said.

  The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble, though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

  He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had tilted his head and said, “Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?”

  As furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table, wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

  In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman’s murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired two shots.

  He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest, pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to head or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport, leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he’d stood. Those were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of that kitchen and back to his mother’s house alive.

  THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though
not as fast as she had earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare.”

  Bobby brooded, staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad dreams. Though exceptionally vivid, almost more real than real life, there had been nothing uncanny about it—or so he had convinced himself. But this was different. He could not believe that these urgent, lava-hot words had erupted from his own subconscious. A dream, with complex Freudian messages couched in elaborate scenes and symbols—yes, that was understandable; after all, the subconscious dealt in euphemisms and metaphors. But this wordburst had been blunt, direct, like a telegraph delivered on a wire plugged directly into his cerebral cortex.

  When he wasn’t brooding, Bobby was fidgeting. Because of Thomas.

  For some reason, the longer he dwelt on the blaze of words, the more Thomas slipped into his thoughts. He could see no connection between the two, so he tried to put Thomas out of mind and concentrate on turning up an explanation for the experience. But Thomas gently, insistently returned, again and again. After a while Bobby got the uneasy feeling there was a link between the wordburst and Thomas, though he had no ghost of an idea what it might be.

  Worse, as the miles rolled up on the odometer and they reached the western end of the valley, Bobby began to sense that Thomas was in danger. And because of me and Julie, Bobby thought.

  Danger from whom, from what?

  The biggest danger that Bobby and Julie faced, right now, was Candy Pollard. But even that jeopardy lay in the future, for Candy didn’t know about them yet; he was not aware that they were working on Frank’s behalf, and he might never become aware of it, depending on how things went in Santa Barbara and El Encanto Heights. Yes, he had seen Bobby on the beach at Punaluu, with Frank, but he had no way of knowing who Bobby was. Ultimately, even if Candy became aware of Dakota & Dakota’s association with Frank, there was no way that Thomas could be drawn into the affair; Thomas was another, separate part of their lives. Right?

  “Something wrong?” Julie said as she pulled the Toyota one lane to the left, to pass a big rig hauling Coors.

  He could see nothing to be gained by telling her that Thomas might be in danger. She would be upset, worried. And for what? He was just letting his vivid imagination run away with him. Thomas was perfectly safe down there in Cielo Vista.

  “Bobby, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why’re you fidgeting?”

  “Prostate trouble.”

  CHANEL No. 5, a softly glowing lamp, cozy rose-patterned fabrics and wallpaper ...

  He laughed with relief when he materialized in the bedroom, the bullets left behind in that kitchen in Placentia, over a hundred miles away. His wounds had knit up as if they had never existed. He had lost perhaps an ounce of blood and a few flecks of tissue, because one of the bullets had passed through him and out his back, carrying that material with it before he’d transported himself beyond the revolver’s range. Everything else was as it should be, however, and his flesh did not harbor even the memory of pain.

  He stood in front of the dresser for half a minute, breathing deeply of the perfume that wafted up from the saturated handkerchief. The scent gave him courage and reminded him of the abiding need to make them pay for his mother’s murder, all of them, not just Frank but the whole world, which had conspired against her.

  He looked at his face in the mirror. The gray-eyed woman’s blood was no longer on his chin and lips; he had left it behind him, as he might leave water behind when teleporting out of a rainstorm. But the taste of it was still in his mouth. And his reflection was without a doubt that of vengeance personified.

  Depending on the element of surprise and his ability to target his point of arrival precisely now that he was familiar with the kitchen, he returned to Clint’s house. He intended to enter at the dining-room doorway, immediately behind the man, directly opposite the point from which he had dematerialized.

  Either the experience of being shot had shaken him more than he realized, or the rage jittering through him had passed the critical point at which it interfered with his concentration. Whatever the reason, he did not arrive where he intended, but by the door to the garage, one-quarter instead of halfway around the room from his last position, to the right of Clint and not near enough to rush him and seize the gun before it could be fired.

  Except Clint was not present. And the woman’s body had been removed from the table. Only the blood remained as proof that she perished there.

  Candy could not have been gone more than a minute—the time he had spent in his mother’s room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way. He expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving or checking desperately for a pulse. But as soon as he realized Candy was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and ... And what? He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint thread of life remained unbroken in the woman, getting her out of the way in case Candy returned.

  Cursing softly—then immediately begging his mother’s and God’s forgiveness for his foul language—Candy tried the door into the garage. It was locked. If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn’t have paused to lock up behind himself.

  He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, toward the foyer off the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street. But he heard a noise from deeper in the house, and halted before he reached the front door. He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back to the bedrooms.

  A light was on in one of those rooms. He eased to the door and risked a glance inside.

  Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed. As Candy watched, the man pulled her skirt down over her knees. He still had the revolver in one hand.

  For the second time in less than an hour, Candy heard far-away sirens swelling in the night. The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and called the police.

  Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the gun. He did not say anything, either, and the expression on his stoic face remained unchanged. He seemed like a deaf-mute. The strangeness of the man’s demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.

  He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun at him in the kitchen, even though he had teleported out of there with the impact of the second slug. Most likely, he had fired every round reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was feeling. He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone, which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy and took the weapon away from him.

  But he stayed in the doorway. Either of those two shots could have been dead-center in his heart. The power within him was great, but he could not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.

  Instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched out beside the woman.

  “What the hell?” Candy said aloud.

  Clint took hold of her dead hand. His other hand held the .38 revolver. He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes glistened with what might have been unshed tears. He put the muzzle of the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.

  Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think what to do next. He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie, whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the dead man on the bed shared with them. If he ever hoped to learn who Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might slide out of it, he couldn’t waste this opportunity.

  He hurr
ied to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew the wallet from his pants pocket. He flipped it open and saw the private investigator’s license. Opposite it, in another plastic window, was a business card for Dakota & Dakota.

  Candy remembered a vague image of the Dakota & Dakota offices, which had come to him in Thomas’s room when he had obtained a vision of Clint from the scrapbook. There was an address on the card. And below the name Clint Karaghiosis, in smaller type, were the names Robert and Julia Dakota.

  Outside, the sirens had died. Someone was pounding on the front door. Two voices shouted, “Police!”

  Candy threw the wallet aside and took the gun out of the dead man’s hand. He broke open the cylinder. It was a five-shot weapon, and all of the chambers were filled with expended cartridges. Clint had fired four rounds in the kitchen, but even in his moment of vengeful fury, he had possessed enough control to save the last bullet for himself.

  “Just because of a woman?” Candy said uncomprehendingly, as if the dead man might answer him. “Because you couldn’t get sex from her any more now? Why does sex matter so much? Couldn’t you get sex from another woman? Why was sex with this one so important, you didn’t want to live without it?”

  They were still pounding on the door. Someone spoke through a bullhorn, but Candy didn’t pay attention to what was being said.

  He dropped the gun and wiped his hand on his pants, because he suddenly felt unclean. The dead man had handled the gun, and the dead man seemed to have been obsessed with sex. Without question, the world was a cesspool of lust and debauchery, and Candy was glad that God and his mother had spared him from the sick desires that seemed to infect nearly everyone else.

  He left that house of sinners.

  53

  SLUMPED ON the sofa, Hal Yamataka had a slice of pizza in one hand and the MacDonald novel in the other, when he heard the hollow flutelike warble. He dropped both the book and the food, and shot to his feet.

  “Frank?”

  The half-open door swung slowly inward, not because it was being pushed open by anyone but because a sudden draft, sweeping in from the reception lounge, was strong enough to move it.

  “Frank?” Hal repeated.

  As he crossed the room, the sound faded and the draft died. But by the time he reached the doorway, the unmelodic notes returned, and a burst of wind ruffled his hair.

  To the left stood the receptionist’s desk, untended at this hour. Directly opposite the desk was the door to the public corridor that served the other companies on this level, and it was closed. The only other door, at the far end of the rectangular lounge, was also closed; it led to a hallway that was interior to the Dakota & Dakota suite, off which were six other offices—including the computer room where Lee was still at work—and a bathroom. The piping and the wind could not have reached him through those closed doors; therefore, the point of origin was clearly the reception lounge.

  Stepping to the center of the room, he looked around expectantly.

  The flute sounds and turbulence rose a third time.

  Hal said, “Frank,” as he became aware, out of the comer of his eye, that a man had arrived near the door to the public hall, to Hal’s right and almost behind him.

  But when he turned, he saw that it was not Frank. The traveler was a stranger, but Hal knew him at once. Candy. It could be no one else, for this was the man Bobby had described from the beach at Punaluu, and whose description Hal had received from Clint.

  Hal was built low and wide, he kept in good shape, and he could remember no instance in his life when he’d been physically intimidated by another man. Candy was eight inches taller than he, but Hal had handled men taller than that. Candy was clearly a mesomorph, one of those guys destined from birth to have a strong-boned body layered with slabs of muscle, even if he exercised lightly or not at all; and he was clearly no stranger to the discipline and painful rituals of barbells, dumbbells, and slantboards. But Hal had a mesomorphic body type, as well, and was as hard as frozen beef. He was not intimidated by Candy’s height or muscles. What frightened him was the aura of insanity, rage, and violence the man radiated as powerfully as a week-old corpse would radiate the stink of death.

  The instant that Frank’s brother hit the room, Hal smelled his mad ferocity as surely as a healthy dog would detect the rabid odor of a sick one, and he acted accordingly. He wasn’t wearing shoes, wasn’t carrying a gun, and wasn’t aware of anything near at hand that might be used as a weapon, so he spun around and ran back toward the bosses’ office, where he knew a loaded Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol was kept in a spring clip on the underside of Julie’s desk as insurance against the unexpected. Until now the gun had never been needed.

  Hal was not the martial-arts whiz that his formidable appearance and ethnicity led everyone to believe he was, but he did know some Tai Kwan Do. The problem was, only a fool would resort to any form of martial arts as a first defense against a charging bull with a bumblebee up its butt.

  He made the doorway before Candy grabbed him by his shirt and tried to pull him off his feet. The shirt tore along the seams, leaving the madman with a handful of cloth.

  But Hal was wrenched off balance. He stumbled into the office and collided with Julie’s big chair, which was still standing in the middle of the room with four other chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of it, as Jackie Jaxx had required for Frank’s session of hypnosis. He grabbed at Julie’s chair for support. It was on wheels, which rolled grudgingly on the carpet, though well enough to send it skidding treacherously out from under him.

  The psycho crashed into him, ramming him against the chair and the chair against the desk. Leaning into Hal, with massive fists that felt like the iron heads of sledgehammers, Candy delivered a flurry of punches to his midsection.

  Hal’s hands were down, leaving him briefly defenseless, but he clasped them, with his thumbs aligned, and rammed them upward, between Candy’s pile-driving arms, catching him in the Adam’s apple. The blow was hard enough to make Candy gag on his own cry of pain, and Hal’s thumbnails gouged the madman’s flesh, skidding all the way up under his chin, tearing the skin as they went.

  Choking, unable to draw breath through his bruised and spasming esophagus, Candy staggered backward, both hands to his throat.

  Hal pushed away from the chair, against which he had been pinned, but he didn’t go after Candy. Even the blow he’d delivered was the equivalent of a tap with a flyswatter to the snout of that bull with the bee up its butt. An overconfident charge would no doubt end in a swift goring. Instead, hurting from the punches to his gut, with the sour taste of pizza sauce in the back of his