by Dean Koontz
37
* * *
With some legerdemain of the feet, the two boys popped their skateboards off the pavement, flipped them, caught them, and rushed the last few yards on foot. Faces bright with excitement and pride in having pulled off their part without a hitch, Guns and ZZ arrived breathless and saw the driver slumped in his seat, whereupon sudden concern clouded their expressions.
“What’s he doing in there like that, what happened?” Guns asked.
She faced them and let them see her blouse, her breasts all but spilling free, letting them think that maybe Larkin had pawed at her through the window, as illogical as that assumption was, letting them think anything they wanted, as long as it added confusion to the moment.
“Help me get him across the console into the passenger seat,” she said, pretending to be more breathless than they were.
“But why’s he like that?” Guns asked.
“He has seizures,” she lied. “I half expected this. He’ll come around. Go to the other door, help me move him, so I can pull the car out of the middle of the alley.”
A creature of his emotions, jazzed by the urgency in her voice, ZZ put down his skateboard and hurried around the back of the sedan.
Guns stood where he was. “Maybe he needs like an ambulance.”
“He doesn’t. It’s a seizure.”
This needed to be done fast, needed to fly, every second of delay increasing the chances someone would come along, something happen to upend the situation.
As ZZ opened the passenger door, Jane leaned into the car, shoving the attorney as the boy pulled him across the console and into the other seat, his limp legs flopping into the footwell.
Chloroform was highly volatile, but it hadn’t fully evaporated from the attorney’s face.
“What’s this stuff all over his mouth and nose?” ZZ asked.
Without answering, Jane left the driver’s door open, went around the sedan, pushed ZZ aside, relieved Larkin of his cellphone and buckled him into the safety harness. From a coat pocket, she drew a cloth handkerchief and draped it over the attorney’s face to slow the evaporation of the chloroform and trap the vapors.
“He looks like he’s dead,” Guns said, having joined them on the starboard side of the sedan.
“He’s not dead, he’s had a seizure.” Jane slammed the door, turned to face them, and drew the pistol from the shoulder rig under her sport coat.
The teenagers half froze, half recoiled, skateboarder grace giving way to the abject awkwardness of sudden terror, hands raised in helpless defense, then clutched to stomach and chest as if, by magic gestures, bullets could be deflected.
“Cool will get you killed,” she said. “Hip, cool, sly, rebel, flash—it’s all shit, it’s stupid, shallow, the deadest dead end.” With her left hand, she knocked the porkpie hat off ZZ’s head, and he almost folded to his knees. “Look at you in your cool tees and your ripped jeans and your fuck-you attitude, and all of it worth spit now, you can hardly keep from pissing your pants. If you don’t learn from this, if you don’t get smart, you’re gonna end up bitter and lost and old by thirty. Give me back my money.”
“But you…you owe us six hundred,” ZZ said.
This was taking too long, but to Jane it was as important as capturing Randall Larkin and getting away with him. She had to do this to keep herself on the right side of the thin red line between the darkness and the light.
“Give me the money or I’ll take it off you when you’re bleeding on the ground.”
“You won’t kill us,” Guns said.
“I’ll cripple you, though,” she lied. “Crippling you might be what you need to clear the shit out of your brains.” She held out her left hand. “Give me the money!”
Both were shaking when they surrendered four hundred each.
“They sell you cool to keep you stupid, to keep you down. Right now, you’re the dumbest pair of dickheads I’ve ever seen. Pick up your skateboards, get out of here, and for God’s sake, get smart.”
They backed away, scooped up their boards, and ran toward the dumpster with which they had blocked the alley, none the richer, maybe wiser, but probably neither.
On the driver’s side of the car, Jane dropped Larkin’s phone through a drain grille, plucked her handbag off the pavement, and holstered the pistol. She got behind the wheel of the S600 and pulled the door shut.
Taking the attorney’s limp hand, she timed his pulse. Good enough. She took the spray bottle of chloroform from a coat pocket and lightly spritzed the cloth over his face.
The engine was already running. She shifted into reverse and backed away from the stainless-steel garage door.
At the end of the alley, she paused to button her blouse and put on a pair of sunglasses. She turned right into the street.
To the multitudes in sun-sparkled cars around her this Friday morning, she was just a rich woman cruising in a high-end Mercedes, her husband napping in the passenger seat, his face protected from the sun, perhaps setting out on a festive holiday, their lives as chronicled by the glamour magazines, afloat on a river of money, without a care in the world.
1
* * *
Robins were mostly independent in summer months but flocked together in the winter. That Friday morning, as Booth Hendrickson drove away, while Luther was still standing at his open front door, as many as forty or fifty robins soared en masse from out of the protection of the conifer forest—smooth flicking wingbeats, short glides, in an arc descending—taking advantage of the change in the weather to look for patches of grass where wind had scoured away the snow and seeds were to be found.
They came in song, their high trilling flight calls sweet to the ear. He watched them settle where they might forage, blackish crowns and gray-black wings, red breasts bright in the snowscape. The sight of them cheered him for a moment, but then for no reason he could put into words, a chill of foreboding pierced him, and he feared for these birds, for all the birds, for all of nature, feared for himself and his wife and his children.
After returning to his study, he phoned Gunnar Torval, the undersheriff, and turned over the department to him for a week. “In spite of yesterday, we’re in glide mode, Gunnar. I’m not leaving you in a whirlwind. Feds won’t let us have the littlest part of this. If I’ve got the drift of what they’re doing, they’re going to wrap this so fast you would think the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, there wasn’t really anyone killed, let alone a governor.”
“What’re they up to?” Gunnar asked.
“I don’t know they’re up to anything,” Luther said, no longer sure he trusted the privacy of any phone conversation. “It’s just an open-and-shut case to them, and they don’t want to rub the public’s nerves raw with this one, considering everything else that’s going on these days.”
“I don’t know about open-and-shut. I can’t believe Cora could do such a thing. I don’t believe she did.”
“She did,” Luther assured him. “She did it, but she wasn’t herself when she did. And that’s as much as we’ll ever understand about it.”
“What happened to her house?”
“Burned down.”
“It more than burned down.”
“It burned down,” Luther said, “and the Feds have that one covered, too. All we’re doing this next week is traffic tickets and jaywalking lectures.”
After he hung up, he went upstairs and changed out of his uniform, into street clothes. He would be visiting a friend of Cora’s to make certain inquiries, and he didn’t want his curiosity to appear to be official.
When he came downstairs again, the kitchen smelled of cinnamon and custard already cooked and cooling.
Rebecca was rolling out dough to make walnut tarts and pecan tarts and pistachio tarts. “I’ve got to keep myself busier than usual or I just think too hard about the hotel.”
“Looks like we’ll be eating nut tarts the rest of our lives.”
“I’m making a lot so I can take t
hem all around. If I just show up with condolences, nothing else, I’ll fall right apart. Bringing food makes it about more than when’s the funeral.”
Dixie Belle, Cora’s long-haired dachshund, sat to one side of Rebecca, gazing up as if the nut tarts were intended only for her.
“She’s heartbroken,” Rebecca said. “She’ll only eat if you hand-feed her, and she just whimpers for no reason.”
“She’ll bond to you in time.”
“She will, I know, but she’s bewildered and heartbroken.”
“I’m taking the week off,” he said. “I can help you later when you go visiting.”
“Today’s the baking. Tomorrow’s the visiting. I sure would appreciate an arm to lean on.”
“Where’s Jolie?” The younger of their two daughters was a high-school senior. “I thought they’d cancel classes after this.”
“School’s bringing in therapists to help the kids cope.”
“Jolie was born coping,” he said. “She was good yesterday.”
“She’s okay. She’s just curious. Wonders what the therapists will have to say.”
“Less of value than what Jolie will say to them.” He opened the door to the adjoining mudroom. “I’m going out for a little while. You need anything from the market?”
“I’ll think on it while you suit up.”
A couple minutes later, he stepped into the mudroom doorway, wearing his heavy coat and boots and gloves. “Maybe it’s not a good idea anymore, Twyla being out there in Boston.”
Turning from the tart cups in which she had been forming the dough, Rebecca frowned. “She’s finishing her sophomore year, she’s made all new friends. Whatever do you mean?”
“Big cities aren’t the place to be right now. Philadelphia should be enough to convince anyone of that.”
Twelve days earlier, ISIS-related jihadists had crashed a jet with full fuel tanks into four lanes of bumper-to-bumper morning traffic on a Philadelphia expressway, turning one mile of highway into a sea of flames, cars and trucks and tanker trucks exploding, bridges collapsing….Hundreds of commuters had been crushed and burned to death, hundreds of others scarred and broken for life.
“There are colleges in Saint Paul, Saint Cloud, just as fine as those in Boston,” Luther said.
“And you know Saint Paul is safer than Boston—how?”
“The bigger and more famous the city, the bigger the risk. Vegas ever started giving odds on it, they’d call it that way.”
“Twyla would call it cut and run.”
“I guess she would.”
“If she’d been home yesterday, off to the luncheon at the Veblen Hotel, you’d have thought she was as safe as she would be under your own arm.”
“True enough,” he admitted. “But Boston is so damn far away.”
2
* * *
Sitting in the breakfast room overlooking the swimming pool with its fountain of Aphrodite pouring water from the chalice of desire, Diamanta Larkin has a mimosa before her food is served, not because she needs orange juice for its vitamin C or champagne for its alcohol. Experience has taught her that it is the most pleasant and effective way to get the taste of her husband out of her mouth.
She has been married to Randall for almost five years. She has no doubt that the marriage will last as long as she wishes, which will be until he is no longer of any value to D. J. Michael. She’s twenty-six, eighteen years younger than Randall, a perfect package of beauty and brains and ferocious ambition. She knows exactly why the marriage has been a success: Sexually, she is to Randall what a tornado is to the land that lies in its path; she is smart and well spoken, so he is never uneasy with her at his side on any occasion; she flatters him shamelessly, for he thrives on it and is incapable of discerning between sycophancy and sincere praise; and she craves power no less than he lusts after it.
Not least of all, before D.J. orchestrated Diamanta’s meet-cute with her husband to be—Randy unaware of D.J.’s hand at work—the billionaire considered dozens of girls for the role of the new Mrs. Larkin. He chose Diamanta when a computer found that psychological profiles of her and Randall matched on 103 of 112 points.
Another thing her husband doesn’t know is that one of D.J.’s tech wizards has inserted in his smartphone a function that doesn’t reveal its presence to Randy but that allows Diamanta to track him wherever he goes, whether the phone is on or not. She can ascertain his whereabouts through her own smartphone or from any computer.
She expects him to be in his office by 7:15, because that is his habit. When she checks at 7:41, she discovers that he is, according to his phone, in the alleyway behind his building in Beverly Hills. The GPS reports from this particular system are exquisitely precise; the screen currently shows a cartographic depiction of the alley with a tiny blinking red dot, like a sore pimple, that represents Randy.
She expects the dot to move in a timely fashion from the alley and merge with the building containing his law offices as he drives through the door into the subterranean garage, but a minute passes and then another, and the pimple does not move.
3
* * *
Certain that she would need it soon, Jane Hawk had two days earlier scouted for a place to conduct a serious intervention that might set right—and extract information from—someone who had fallen in with this bloody-minded crowd and had become enchanted by their cruelty. She required privacy and proof against interruption and a chamber from which sounds of distress would not escape to draw the interest of others.
Here California’s golden past and a possibly dark future wove together in present-day blight and disorder. Several square blocks of once-busy manufacturing facilities were now for the most part empty. Chain-link fences stood torqued and sagging and appliqued with colorful debris—scraps and streamers of plastic wrapping, torn and yellowed newspapers moldering into bellied forms suspended from the links like wasps’ nests, threadbare rags encrusted with filth as if they once had wound around the slow-rotting form of a mummified pharaoh, used condoms and broken hypodermic needles. The parking lots, back in the day busy with three shifts of workers, now lay cracked and potholed and desolate, snarled and brittle weeds of strange appearance growing out of stress cracks like the hair of some land-bound kraken or other legendary beast that slept beneath the blacktop until its time should come to rise and ruin.
The building she had chosen hulked dark in the bright morning, two acres of concrete block and corrugated-metal siding rusted and streaked with bird dung. About forty feet high. Three-quarters of the way up the walls, a row of yard-square windows turned a blind stare to the morning sun, the glass clouded with the phlegm of time.
The property gate appeared to be secured to the gatepost with chain and padlock. Two days earlier, however, she had severed the shackle of the lock with a bolt cutter.
Leaving Randall Larkin sedated, his exhalations fluttering the cloth over his face, Jane removed the chain and rolled aside the barrier. She drove inside, got out of the Mercedes, closed the gate.
She wheeled around to the back of the factory, where the car couldn’t be seen from the street. Because power-company service had not been maintained, she wasn’t able to drive inside through the truck-size roll-up.
Twenty yards away, beyond the chain-link, lay what Southern Californians called a river: a wide concrete channel designed for flood control. Most of the year it was a dry course, but now the flow ran deep from recent rains—fast, turbulent, treacherous.
When she got out of the car, the sluicing noise of water raging downhill sounded, in her current frame of mind, like an apocalyptic flushing, as if all the filth of the earth—but also all innocence caught up with it—was rushing into a last drain at the end of time.
She took a flashlight from her handbag and let herself into the building through a man-size door beside the roll-up.
The main room lay cavernous, wall-to-wall and soaring to the roof. Courtesy of the dirt-filmed high windows, more light traced the rafte
rs, joists, and collar beams than found its way to the floor, though no corner high or low was more than dimly shown.
Whatever bankrupted or otherwise dissolved enterprise had once busied itself here, its defeated owners had departed in contempt of anyone who might next occupy the place—though, as it turned out, no one had. All manner of trash had been left behind: a double score of empty barrels, some on their sides and some upright; broken wooden crates; odd shapes of particleboard; tangled masses of wire like sculptures of tumbleweed; empty soda cans and shattered beer bottles and drifts of paperwork.
On her previous visit, Jane had moved two of the barrels to the center of the room. They served as a table base on which she had placed a slab of slightly warped particleboard. A Coleman lantern and can of fuel stood on the table, both of which she’d bought at a sporting-goods store.
She placed the flashlight beside the lamp.
From her handbag, she took a pair of black silk gloves with decorative silver stitching, purchased as part of a disguise that she had worn the previous week, and she slipped her hands into them.
Once lit, the bag-style wick of the lantern swelled with a ghostly white glow that fanned out to all sides for perhaps fifteen feet, a small sphere of light in the vast darkness of the factory.
Also on the table stood four bottles of water and four plastic bowls used to serve dogs.
She had cleared the immediate area of trash. All that remained in it, other than the table, were two folding aluminum patio chairs with blue webbing for the seats and backrests. She had bought them at a thrift shop that carried used furniture.
Beside the door by which she had entered stood a wheeled flatbed cart, five feet long and three wide, which she had also gotten at the thrift shop. She rolled it outside to the car.