by Dean Koontz
Even though the connecting door between rooms was closed, Twyla pulled Jolie into their little bathroom and closed that door before she said, “What the hell is going on? She doesn’t call me, she calls Sherry, my roommate, we talk on Sherry’s phone about how I’m to come to Chicago first thing tomorrow, which is now today, and I’m to use Sherry’s phone to make the reservation—oh, and be sure I’m not followed to the airport in Boston. What is all this huggermugger?”
“Wow, Twy, that’s a fabulous word for someone who’s far more oriented to images than to language. College is opening your horizons.”
“Don’t jerk my chain, Jo. Tell me what you know.”
“Are you too sophisticated now? Jerking each other’s chains is such fun.” Jolie was sincere. Her sister was better with visuals than with words, but she could give as well as she got. “Twy, it’s a key part of our relationship.”
Twyla looked grim. “Tell. Me. What. You. Know.”
“Okay, okay. But I don’t know that much more than you, only what happened yesterday in Rockford. Mother is—”
The ringtone of Twyla’s smartphone was muffled inside her handbag, which stood on the counter beside the sink.
Jolie said, “Mom wouldn’t want you to answer that. We’re only using disposables.”
Withdrawing the phone from the bag, checking caller ID, Twyla said, “Gotta take this. It’s a guy.”
“You’ve got a boyfriend? You never said!”
“Scoot, go, get out,” Twyla ordered, opening the door to push her sister into the bedroom. She closed the door between them.
Jolie heard her say, “Hello.” A silence: “All right.” Another silence. “We’re in Lake Forest, this place called the Deerpath Inn.”
Then Twyla must have turned her back to the door and lowered her voice. Jolie could understand only a word here and there.
It wasn’t a long call, and when Twyla opened the bathroom door, Jolie said, “Why’d you tell him where we are?”
“You were eavesdropping.”
“I couldn’t help but hear when we’re like two feet apart. Why’d you tell him where we are?”
“Whyever wouldn’t I?”
“Mom told you not to tell anyone.”
“Oh, Jolie dear, you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
Pulling her into the bathroom once more, closing the door, Twyla said, “You don’t understand how it is between men and women.”
“Well, Miss Hotlips, I’ve had boyfriends,” Jolie reminded her.
“That’s high school, Jolie. It’s a lot different when you get out in the world.”
“How’s it different?”
“You’ll see one day.” Twyla turned to the mirror. “God, I’ve got vampire eyes. I need some drops.”
“What’s his name?” Jolie asked.
Extracting a bottle of Visine from her bag, Twyla said, “Who?”
“The stud. The guy. The boyfriend.”
Twyla squeezed Visine into one eye, blinking rapidly. She seemed to be taking time to think. Then she said, “Charles.”
“Charles what?”
“You’ll just tell Mother. I’m not ready to tell her yet. I shouldn’t have told you even Charles.”
As Twyla dripped Visine into her other eye, Jolie said, “Oh, shit. You’re hiding his last name because he’s married.”
“He’s not married.”
“You’re dating a married man.”
“I am not.”
“Oh, shit. You’re pregnant.”
Putting away the Visine, regarding her sister’s reflection in the mirror rather than turning to her, Twyla said, “You are such a child, Jo. Everything’s a melodrama with you. I’m not pregnant. He’s not married.” She switched on the bathroom fan. “Daddy’s going to be calling Mother in a few minutes. Then we’ll be off to dinner.” She opened the door. “You want to freshen up first or should I?”
“I don’t need to freshen up. I’m already as fresh as it gets.”
Gently pressing her sister backward across the threshold, Twyla said, “So give me some privacy, please. And I haven’t forgotten that you dodged telling me what you know about this. I’ll want a full report later.” Once more she closed the door between them.
Something was wrong. All that stuff about being as fresh as it gets—that was a setup, teeing the ball so that Twy could come back with something funny, one of the hard shots that were her trademark. She would never miss such an opportunity. Not the old Twyla. Not the pre-guy Twyla. She was dating a married man, she was pregnant, and she was dying of cancer. Something like that.
Worried, still smarting from that you-are-such-a-child comment, Jolie picked up her suitcase and put it on the bed and opened it to get a cashmere scarf to wear against the evening cold. She stood in confusion for a moment, looking at clothes that weren’t hers and at a flat clear-plastic snap-latch case held in place by the suitcase’s stretchy cross-straps. Even as she realized that she had opened her sister’s bag by mistake—it being identical to hers—the contents of the soft plastic case registered with her: four hypodermic syringes.
Jolie felt as though some ghost in the room had reached its cool ectoplasmic hand into her body to clutch her heart.
In disbelief, she touched the case. It was real, not imagined, and cold to the touch. Why cold?
She opened the clasp on the suitcase cross-straps and picked up the case of syringes and saw a seven-inch-square metal box, perhaps five inches in depth. The box felt colder than the syringes.
The tightly fitted hinged lid was difficult to open even after Jolie released the little latch. The box and lid were lined with a half inch of dense insulation, so that the interior dimensions were maybe six by six by four, and upon exposure to the air, a cold vapor rose from a perforated plastic packet that filled the bottom half of the container.
“Dry ice?” she murmured.
Nestled on the packet were nine sleeves of silvery insulation, each about the size of a finger.
She picked up one of them, and it was so cold it almost burned her fingers.
The sleeve had a tiny Velcro closure at one end. She opened it, and into her palm slid a sealed-glass ampule containing a cloudy amber fluid.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushed.
Jolie returned the ampule to the sleeve of insulation, put the sleeve in the box, closed the lid, and engaged the latch.
Water running in the sink, Twyla washing her hands.
Jolie tucked the box in the suitcase, put the syringes atop it, and engaged the cross-straps. She closed the suitcase. Stood it on the floor. Put her own suitcase on the bed and opened it.
Whether the surnameless Charles was married or not, whether or not he had gotten Twyla pregnant, she was doing drugs. Not anything as small-time as marijuana, which would have been plenty bad enough. Drugs that you mainlined. Like heroin or something. Twyla had gone away to college and fallen in with the wrong crowd. Whoever Charles was, whether he was married or not, he was a bad influence who had gotten Twyla on drugs. Jolie was shaken, heartsick, and not sure what to do.
The sound of running water no longer issued from the bathroom. But the door didn’t open. Twyla could take forever adjusting makeup and redoing her lipstick.
Jolie wondered if she ought to go into the next room and tell her mother what she’d found. No. She shouldn’t act precipitously. In a lot of novels, young women got themselves in serious trouble by acting impetuously, out of ignorance or a misunderstanding.
Jolie sat on the edge of the hotel bed, elbows on her thighs, face in her hands, trying to think what action she should take next. Usually, when Twyla was prepping herself to go out, she sang one song or another. She wasn’t singing now.
Something was so wrong.
Everything was so wrong.
29
* * *
In the last half hour of light, the broad western sky gathered itself toward what promised to be a colorful sunset facilitated by
discrete, attenuated clouds.
On Interstate 10, Jane Hawk drove five miles per hour under the speed limit, wanting nothing more than to avoid calling attention to herself, although she carried on her person everything required to get her through a confrontation.
Many miles earlier, Nadine Sacket had given her a thermos of hot black coffee, for which she was grateful, and a bag of homemade sugar cookies, which she didn’t intend to eat. The cookies gave off a pleasant aroma, however, as did the coffee, and the Ford Escape felt almost cozy, a little high-speed haven from a hostile world.
She needed to get to Nogales, Arizona, to trade the car back to Enrique de Soto for another that would likewise be one thing on the exterior and a different beast altogether under the hood, that would have no GPS and a new set of plates.
Another fourteen or fifteen hours of road separated her from Nogales. Allowing for a night’s sleep, she didn’t expect to be bargaining with Enrique before late Saturday morning.
After dark, when she arrived in Sonora, she would boost the plates off a parked car, switch them to the Ford, and have greater peace of mind during the run to Nogales.
When her luck changed, the sun was hanging swollen near the horizon, the red-veined orange of a bloody yolk, seeming to tremble as if it might burst when it settled to the low, fractured ridge rock of this sere landscape. The highway patrol car came out of the east in a faster lane than hers, with neither its siren nor its roof-mounted lightbar engaged. If the trooper meant to pass her, he changed his mind, abruptly reduced speed, and swung in behind the Ford.
She neither sped up nor slowed, and he paced her for a mile.
Maybe the NCIC had been provided with a description of her car, after it was captured by a traffic cam in Iron Furnace. Or maybe the mud on the license plate intrigued him. Even if he couldn’t read the plate, a lone woman in a black Ford Escape might be enough to remind him of America’s most sought-after murderer and traitor, motivating him to call for backup before taking action.
She dared not wait and hope that he’d have second thoughts, swing around her, and go on his way. Better to deal with one cop than two or three. She let the Ford stray into the faster lane, then yanked it sharply back, angling off the highway, onto the shoulder. The right front bumper knocked hard against the guardrail, and the car jolted to a halt. She shifted into park but left the engine running.
The patrol car eased off the pavement and halted eight or ten feet behind her.
Jane thrust a hand into the bag of cookies, broke one of the big treats in half, and stuffed it into her mouth. She plucked the thermos cup from the cup holder and filled her mouth with coffee.
When highway patrolmen pulled you over, they didn’t like you getting out of the vehicle until they told you to do so. She at once stepped out of the Ford, leaving the door open.
When she saw that he was watching from behind the wheel, she bent over and spewed part of the thick mush of cookie and coffee onto the ground. She spouted the last of the soupy mess and gagged and wiped at her mouth with her coat sleeve. She turned and put her left hand on the Ford as if for support and moved toward the back of the vehicle.
The cruiser’s lightbar began flashing now, warning westbound traffic out of the slow lane.
She pretended to change her mind about approaching the patrol car, instead climbed into the backseat of the Ford, and left that door standing open, too.
If the make of the car and the muddied plate gave the trooper one idea from which he’d imagined a scenario, she needed to throw a curve into the story line that he foresaw and get him to follow her script instead.
Lying prone on the seat, she heard him get out of his car.
A moment later, he spoke to her through the open door. “You havin’ a problem, ma’am?”
His right hand would be on the grip of his weapon.
Facedown, head away from him, she spoke with a slur and a hint of Texas, but strove not to exaggerate. “Go away an’ lemme sleep.”
“You need to sit up and have a little talk with me, ma’am.”
“You’ll jus’ be mean to me. Lemme sleep some.”
“Don’t make this any harder on yourself than it has to be. You hear me now?”
“I don’t hear nobodys.”
He said something, but an eighteen-wheeler went by and masked his words in engine roar and the rumble of rubber on asphalt.
The slipstream of the big truck washed through the open door, and Jane said, “Aw, shit, gonna puke again.”
She scrambled across the seat and threw open the back door on the passenger side.
“Hey, hey, hey,” the trooper said, “you just wait there.”
She got out of the car and bent forward and stood with her back to him and made retching noises. She stumbled sideways, then put her back to the car and slid down and sat on the ground.
He wouldn’t like leaving both port-side doors open. They were traffic hazards. He wouldn’t want to leave the engine running. But he couldn’t risk dealing with any of that.
When he came around the back of the Ford, gravelstone crunching under his shoes, he was probably following protocol, his right hand on his gun, or maybe he had even taken the precaution of drawing the weapon.
She sat with legs splayed and head hung. She didn’t look up at him, because drunks who avoided eye contact were generally much less belligerent than those who tried to stare you down.
“Come on, now, lady,” he said. “You don’t want to be resistin’ an officer of the law.”
She said, “Mr. Man…you ’cepted Jesus?”
“Have I accepted Jesus? Yes, ma’am, I guess I have. So you’ve nothin’ to fear by workin’ with me here.”
“I ’cepted Jesus,” she said, “but He’s done gone all mad at me, an’ He’s got every damn right to be.”
“Jesus doesn’t get mad, ma’am. He wants you to cooperate here, wants you to get up and talk to me now.”
“Does He? Yeah, but I can’t up my ownself.”
“You fixin’ to be sick again?”
She finally tilted her head back and looked up at him, wearing as sorrowful an expression as she could manage. “I wish’t I could puke some more, but seems I can’t.”
Face flushed with sunset light, he was handsome, maybe thirty, a recruiting poster for the Texas Highway Patrol in his dark-tan uniform with blue stripes and red piping on the pant legs, blue-and-red epaulettes on his shirt. Felt cowboy hat. Black patent-leather gun belt with a silver buckle—his pistol in its holster.
“Why don’t you take my hand here and get up from there.”
“Mr. Man, you figurin’ on bein’ mean to me?”
“You don’t need mean, you need soberin’. Come on, now.”
She hated to do this to him. He was young enough to have a little trust left in him, at least for pitiable drunk women, if for no one else; therefore, he wasn’t handling this strictly by the book. Jane didn’t like being the one who might knock enduring cynicism into him.
She took his hand, pretending awkwardness as she got up.
Maybe he caught a glimpse of the shoulder rig under her coat or maybe he realized that he didn’t smell either alcohol or vomit, but for whatever reason, he said, “Oh, shit.”
He might have successfully pulled away from her if she hadn’t already unclipped the handheld Taser from her belt. She buzzed him through his uniform shirt, and he dropped beside the car as if every hinged joint became unhinged and every ball-and-socket separated, his cowboy hat slipping off and rolling against the guardrail.
Jane bent down and Tasered him again, this time on the neck. She pulled the small plastic bottle from an inner coat pocket and sprayed his nose and mouth with chloroform. He stopped spasming and fell unconscious.
She recovered his hat and tilted it over his face to trap some of the fumes, leaving half his mouth and his dimpled chin exposed.
30
* * *
Heart rate elevated only slightly, breathing deep and slow, Jane had no
reason for fear. The worst that could have happened didn’t happen, and everything would move along now from one minor crisis to another, all of them manageable, until she was out of Texas—barring another nasty twist of luck’s dagger.
The sky shading from midnight blue in the east to azure and gold in the west, the tattered strips of cloud blazing like flags afire, the land as red as some apocalyptic battlefield, elongated shadows strewn like wounded and dying combatants…
The Ford blocked the fallen officer from view. Passing traffic at that hour and in that remoteness consisted mostly of truckers and others driving to demanding schedules, with no time for curiosity. Casual travelers were holed up for the night, loath to venture into the thinly populated wasteland after dark. Nevertheless, the tableau of police car and stopped Ford with no trooper visible was peculiar enough to inspire some fearless Samaritan to stop to assist.
In addition to the holster and pistol, the trooper’s gun belt was equipped with spare-magazine pouches and a Mace holder and a handcuff case. She took the handcuffs.
He was too big to move any great distance. She dragged him a couple feet, until she was able to lift his right arm and cuff him to the front passenger-door handle of the Ford.
When she checked his breathing, he was having no respiratory difficulty, so she spritzed him lightly with more chloroform and canted the hat on his face.
She went around to the open driver’s door and reached inside and switched off the engine and took the keys. She closed the door as an eighteen-wheeler roared past, its windy wake peppering her with grit and dust and fumes.
She went to the open rear door and got into the backseat and fished the plastic-wrapped bundles of cash and gold coins from under the front seats. She didn’t know what the coins were worth, but the money that she had taken from Bertold Shenneck’s house in Napa, more than ten days earlier, amounted to $160,000 in hundred-dollar bills.
There was satisfaction in knowing that the inventor of the brain implant was in part paying for her assault against the new world order of which he had dreamed.