by Dean Koontz
She gave him no chance to respond, closed the door, locked it, and left the key in the keyway.
Immediately, she could hear him rummaging through the closet in search of the hammer and screwdriver.
She holstered the pistol and the silencer separately. She picked up her tote bag and hurried downstairs. On her way out, she slammed the front door so that he would be sure to hear it.
After the glittering starfield of the previous night and the pellucid sky of dawn, the blue vault over the San Gabriel Valley was surrendering to an armada of towering thunderheads sailing in from the northwest, on course for Los Angeles. Among the densely leafed branches of nearby Indian laurels, song sparrows were already sheltering, issuing sweet trills and clear notes to reassure one another, but the crows were still chasing down the sky, raucous heralds of the storm.
11
* * *
Over sixteen hundred air miles from Los Angeles, in Minnesota, the digital clock on Cora Gundersun’s oven read 11:02 when she closed her journal. She was no less mystified by this most recent session of furious writing than she had been by the one that had preceded it. She didn’t know what words she had set down on those pages or why she had felt compelled to write them, or why after the fact she dared not read them.
The still, small voice within her counseled serenity. All would be well. More than two days without a migraine. By this time next week, she would most likely return to her sixth-grade classroom and the children whom she loved nearly as much as if they had been her own offspring.
The time had come for Dixie Belle’s late-morning treat and second toileting of the day. In consideration of the bacon granted to her earlier, the dog received just two small coin-shaped cookies instead of the usual four. She seemed to understand the rightness of the ration, for she neither begged for more nor grumbled, but padded across the kitchen to the back door, nails clicking on the linoleum.
Shrugging into her coat, Cora said, “Good heavens, Dixie, look at me, still in my pajamas with the morning nearly gone. If I don’t get back to teaching soon, I’ll become a hopeless layabout.”
The day had not warmed much since dawn. The frozen sky hung low and constipated, providing no evidence of the predicted storm except a bare minimum of white flakes slowly spiraling down through the becalmed air.
After Dixie peed, she didn’t scamper back to the house, but stood staring at Cora on the porch. Dachshunds didn’t need much exercise, and Dixie in particular was averse to long walks and to more than an occasional experience of the outdoors. Except for her first visit to the yard in the morning, she always hurried inside after completing her business. On this occasion, she required coaxing, and she returned hesitantly, almost as though she wasn’t sure that her mistress was her mistress, as if both Cora and the house suddenly seemed strange to her.
Minutes later, after Cora showered, she vigorously toweled her hair. There was no point in using a blow-dryer and a styling brush. Her curly tresses resisted shaping. She entertained no illusions about her appearance and long ago made peace with the fact that she would never turn heads. She looked pleasant and presentable, which was more than could be said for some less fortunate people.
Although it was not suitable to the season, she put on a white rayon-crepe dress with three-quarter sleeves, a semifitted bodice with a high, round neckline, and a skirt with knife pleats stitched down to hip level. Of all the dresses she had ever owned, this one came the closest to making her feel pretty. Because high heels did nothing for her, she wore white sneakers.
Only after she had put on the shoes did she realize that this outfit was what she wore in the fire-walking dream, which she’d had the previous night again, for the fifth night in a row. In addition to feeling almost pretty, she now channeled at least a measure of the sense of invulnerability that made the dream so delightful.
Although Dixie Belle usually lay on the bed to watch her mistress dress, on this occasion she was under the bed, only her head and long ears poking out from beneath the quilted spread.
Cora said, “You’re a funny dog, Miss Dixie. Sometimes you can be so silly.”
12
* * *
At nine o’clock there began to be a minor risk of a Realtor escorting clients on a tour of the empty house. But on a weekday like this, most working buyers would schedule an appointment after five o’clock.
Anyway, if an agent showed up with clients, Jane wouldn’t need to pull a gun on them. There was an attic access in the ceiling of the walk-in closet next to the master bedroom, a segmented ladder, which she pulled down now in preparation, just in case. At the first sound of voices downstairs, she would retreat to the upper realm of spiders and silverfish, and pull the folding ladder up behind her.
In the bedroom once more, she took a compact FM receiver from the tote bag and plugged it into an outlet under the window from which she had earlier conducted surveillance of the Hannafin place. This special receiver, which incorporated an amplifier and recorder, operated below the commercial band where radio stations plied their trade, and it was pre-tuned to an unused spot on the dial that matched the carrier wave issued by the transmitters that she had secreted in Hannafin’s four phones.
She would need this receiver only if the journalist used one of the landline phones to call someone. If he needed to talk to anyone before she spoke to him at noon, he would most likely resort to his smartphone. Most people thought that cellphone calls were far more difficult to tap. In fact, they were difficult, though not in all circumstances and not when the person conducting the surveillance made the proper preparations.
From the tote, Jane extracted a disposable cellphone, one of three that she currently owned, each of which she had purchased weeks earlier at different big-box stores. A programmed electronic whistle, approximately the size of a rifle cartridge and capable of reproducing any sound code, was taped beside the cell’s microphone.
After parting the draperies six inches, giving her a view of the Hannafin residence, she entered the journalist’s landline number in her disposable cell. She pressed SEND and an instant later triggered the electronic whistle.
The chip she had wired into Hannafin’s four phones offered two functions: first, as a standard line tap to listen in to calls; second, as an infinity transmitter. The sound code produced by the electronic whistle triggered the infinity transmitter, which stopped the journalist’s phones from ringing. Simultaneously, it turned on their microphones and broadcast sounds in the house over the phone line—to Jane.
The phones in Hannafin’s kitchen, living room, and study had nothing but silence to transmit, which meant she could hear clearly what was happening in the master bedroom. The tap-tap-tap of hammer against screwdriver handle and the thin shriek of a pivot pin being driven out of the barrel of a hinge confirmed that he had found the tools that she had hidden among his clothes.
Not long after the hammering had stopped and the pins had been removed from the three hinges, she heard the door rattling in its frame as he struggled with it. A sudden quiet followed by muffled cursing meant he realized a hard truth: Although the knuckles that formed the barrel hinges—three on the door leaf, two on the frame leaf—would part now that the pins no longer held them together, the door would not open more than an inch because it remained secured by the blind deadbolt.
That was why she had provided him with a sturdy screwdriver and a twenty-ounce steel claw hammer rather than lighter tools. To open the solid-core door, he would now need to split and gouge the wood either to pry loose the door-mounted hinge leafs or to dig his way even deeper to expose the guts of the blind deadbolt, which would be an exhausting job.
She had told him he would be able to free himself in fifteen or twenty minutes, but that had been a lie. He would need perhaps an hour to break out of the closet. She wanted him to have plenty of time to think about her proposal before he could get to a phone. And she hoped that, in his exhaustion, he would realize that in every moment of their brief relationship, she ha
d been several steps ahead of him—and always would be.
13
* * *
Five years earlier, Cora had completed a training course with Dixie Belle that qualified the dachshund as a therapy dog. Since then, she’d taken her best friend to school every day. Her students were all special-needs kids suffering developmental disabilities and a wide range of emotional problems. With her well-feathered tail and soulful eyes and vibrant personality, Miss Dixie did heroic duty in the classroom, letting herself be petted and hugged and teased while invariably calming the children, assuaging the fears that afflicted them, and thereby helping them to focus.
Indeed, Cora took Dixie with her everywhere.
In the small laundry room off the kitchen, the dog stood under the perfboard from which hung a few collars and leashes. She wagged her tail and looked up expectantly at her mistress. If she cared little for the outdoors, Dixie loved the classroom and going for rides in the Ford Expedition.
Cora took down a red collar and a matching leash. She knelt to dress the dachshund…and found her hands shaking too violently to match the halves of the collar clasp and click them together.
She was meant to bring the dog. She understood that she was meant to bring precious Dixie. Understood that having the dog with her was for some reason a crowning detail, part of the portrait of herself that she was meant to paint on this eventful day. But her hands would not obey her; the collar clasp defeated her.
The dog whined and backed through the open door into the kitchen, where she halted and watched and did not wag her tail.
“I don’t know,” Cora heard herself say. “I don’t know…I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I should do.”
The still, small voice—which she had thought of as being the expression of her intuition and her conscience—had not heretofore been audible. Rather, it had been more like a text message, words of light forming compelling sentences across a virtual screen in some dark office of her mind. But now the message translated from light into sound, and a seductive male voice whispered inside her skull.
No time to delay. Move, move, move. Do what you were born to do. Fame escaped you as a writer, but fame will be yours when you do this that you were born to do. You will be famous and adored.
She could resist the urge to take the dog, but she could not resist this voice. In fact, she was overcome by a desire to obey her conscience, her intuition, whatever it was—God?—that spoke to her and stirred her heart with a promise of the fulfillment that had been so long denied her.
When she returned the leash and collar to the perfboard, her hands at once stopped shaking.
To Dixie, she said, “Mommy won’t be gone long, sweetheart. You be good. Mommy will be back soon.”
She opened the door between the laundry room and the garage, and a cold draft washed over her. She had forgotten her coat. She hesitated, but she must not delay. She needed to move, move, move.
“I love you, Dixie, I love you so much,” Cora said, and the dog whimpered, and Cora closed the door as she stepped into the garage.
She didn’t bother to switch on the fluorescent panels, but went directly to the driver’s door of the snow-white Ford Expedition that stood softly glowing in the shadows of the only stall.
She got behind the wheel and started the engine and used a remote to put up the big overhead door.
Wintry daylight flooded into the garage as the segmented door clattered upward on its tracks, and it seemed to her that this was akin to the scintillant influx of light in movies that always announced a wondrous arrival, whether a fairy godmother or a benign extraterrestrial or some Heaven-sent messenger.
In her quiet, mundane life, momentous events were impending, and she thrilled to the expectation of some not-quite-defined moment of glory.
The faintest smell of gasoline induced Cora Gundersun to turn and peer into the back of the Expedition. The rear seat had been put down. In the expanded cargo space, fifteen bright-red two-gallon cans were lined up in three rows. The previous evening, she had unscrewed the top cap and the spout cap from each full can and had replaced them with double-thick swatches of plastic wrap secured with rubber bands.
She forgot she had made these preparations. She remembered now, and she was not shocked. She surveyed the cans and knew that she should be proud of what she had done here, for the seductive voice praised her and spoke of what she had been born to do.
On the front passenger seat stood a large metal stockpot in which she had cooked many soups and stews over the years. In the bottom of the pot were green bricks of the wet foam that florists used as the foundation of their arrangements, which she had bought at a garden store. Standing upright in the foam were two bundles of long-stemmed wooden matches, ten per bundle, each group held together by two rubber bands, one under the match heads and the other toward the bottom of the thick stems. Beside the stockpot lay a small butane lighter.
She thought the matches looked like three bunches of tiny withered flowers, magical flowers that, when a bewitching word was spoken, would bloom into bright bouquets.
Scattered among the gasoline cans behind her were two hundred match heads that she had scissored from their sticks.
When she drove out into the gray day, she did not bother to pick up the remote and put down the garage door behind her. The lovely voice said that time was of the essence, and Cora was eager to see why that might be so.
By the time she reached the end of the driveway, the heat issuing from the vents took the chill off her bare skin, and she had no need of a coat.
At the end of the driveway, she turned right onto the two-lane blacktop county road and drove toward town.
14
* * *
As she waited in the vacant house across the street, listening on her disposable phone, Jane found it interesting that during the forty-seven minutes Lawrence Hannafin required to break out of the closet, he never shouted for help.
Placed near the center of the house, the closet lacked windows, and maybe the journalist knew the residence was so well constructed that no one beyond its walls would hear him calling out. Or maybe he had already decided that the story she’d offered him was too big to turn down, regardless of the risks, in which case he would not want to summon help and explain who had locked him away.
She dared to hope.
With a final crash, the distant closet door flew open or more likely collapsed onto the bedroom floor, followed by Hannafin’s labored breathing, which swelled louder as he crossed the room, approaching the phone on his nightstand, but then grew softer as he evidently stepped into the master bathroom, leaving the door open behind him.
A new sound arose, and she needed a moment to decide that it must be water running in the bathroom sink. He would be thirsty after his exertions, and he might wish as well to splash cold water on his sweaty face.
After a minute, he turned off the water, and there was only a faint series of unidentifiable noises until a clank was followed by the unmistakable sound of him taking a piss. The clank had probably been the toilet seat knocking against the tank.
Evidently he didn’t bother to wash his hands.
He returned from the bathroom. Judging by the nearness of his agitated breathing and the soft twang of box springs, he sat on the edge of the bed, within arm’s reach of the telephone and its open mic.
If he picked up the handset to make a call, she would have to disconnect at once, shutting down the infinity transmitter by which she was listening to him, so that he would receive a dial tone. At that point, the two-purpose chip that she had planted in his phone would switch to a simple line-tap transmission, and the conversation he held with whomever he called would come to her by way of the combination FM receiver, amplifier, and recorder that stood on the windowsill.
As though trying to calm himself, he took a series of slow, deep breaths. Apparently, that didn’t work, because he could not contain his fury when from him erupted a colorful volley of obscenities.
And the
n he must have switched on his smartphone, because across the open line came the signature welcoming music of his telecom provider. He evidently believed that a wireless call would be private and far less vulnerable than one made on a traditional landline.
She’d hoped that he wouldn’t reach out to anyone, that he would wait for her to ring him up at noon, as she had said she would. He might be placing an innocent call, perhaps to cancel an appointment he no longer wished to keep, something like that. But the odds were she was going to be disappointed in him.
No key tones sounded to suggest that he entered a telephone number to place a call. Instead, he muttered bitterly to himself. “Crazy, syphilitic bitch. Yeah, I have a pair, you twat, and they aren’t just decoration.”
She suspected that she knew about whom he was speaking.
Another sound might have been a drawer opening.
“Try me again, bitch, I’ll put one right between your tits.”
Maybe he had removed the revolver from the nightstand drawer.
For about a minute, he undertook some task that she could not identify, for there were only soft rustling sounds.
Then came a series of key tones as he made a call.
Evidently, he had put his cell on speakerphone, because a woman answered after the second ring: “Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto.”
A law firm.
Hannafin said, “Randall Larkin, please.”
“One moment, please.”
Another woman’s voice: “Randall Larkin’s office.”
“Lawrence Hannafin for Randy.”
“He’s on another call, Mr. Hannafin.”
“I’ll hold.”
“He may be a while.”
“Use your whisper line. Let him know it’s urgent. It’s a matter of life and death.”
Standing at the window of the vacant house, burner phone to her ear, waiting for Randall Larkin to take the journalist’s call, Jane Hawk watched the storm front, dark as iron, as it conquered the sky and pressed a menacing, shadowed stillness from Glendora to Pasadena and points in between.