by Dean Koontz
In the bathroom, I opened the sheet on the floor.
Being dead and therefore indifferent to my problems, Robertson could not be expected to make my job easier; however, I was surprised when he resisted being hauled out of the tub. This wasn’t the active counterforce of conscious opposition, but the passive resistance of rigor mortis.
He proved to be as stiff and difficult to manage as a pile of boards nailed together at odd angles.
Reluctantly, I put a hand to his face. He felt colder than I’d expected that he would.
Perhaps adjustments needed to be made in my understanding of the events of the previous evening. Unthinkingly, I had made certain assumptions that Robertson’s condition didn’t support.
To learn the truth, I had to examine him further. Because he had been lying facedown in the tub when I’d found him, before I’d turned him over, I now unbuttoned his shirt.
This task filled me with loathing and repugnance, which I had anticipated, but I wasn’t prepared for the abhorrent sense of intimacy that spawned a slithering nausea.
My fingers were damp with sweat. The pearlized buttons proved slippery.
I glanced at Robertson’s face, certain that his gaze would have refocused from some otherworldly sight to my fumbling hands. Of course his expression of shock and terror had not changed, and he continued staring at something beyond the veil that separates this world and the next.
His lips were slightly parted, as though with his last breath he had greeted Death or had spoken an unanswered plea.
Looking at his face had only made my heebie-jeebies worse. When I lowered my head, I imagined that his eyes tracked the shifting of my attention to the stubborn buttons. If I had felt a fetid breath exhaled against my brow, I might have screamed, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.
No corpse had ever creeped me out as badly as this one. For the most part, the deceased with whom I interact are apparitions, and I am spared too much familiarity with the messy biological aspect of death.
In this instance, I was troubled less by the scents and sights of early-stage corruption than by the physical peculiarities of the dead man, mostly that spongy fungoid quality that had marked him in life, but also by his extraordinary fascination—as revealed in his files—for torture, brutal murder, dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism.
I undid the final button. I folded back his shirt.
Because he wore no undershirt, I saw the advanced lividity at once. After death, blood settles through the tissues to the lowest points of the body, giving those areas a badly bruised appearance. Robertson’s flabby chest and sagging belly were mottled, dark, and repulsive.
The coolness of his skin, the rigor mortis, and the advanced lividity suggested that he had not died within the past hour or two but much earlier. The warmth of my apartment would have accelerated the deterioration of the corpse, but not to this extent.
Very likely, in St. Bart’s cemetery, when Robertson had given me the finger as I’d looked down on him from the bell tower, he had not been a living man but an apparition.
I tried to recall if Stormy had seen him. She had been stooping to retrieve the cheese and crackers from the picnic hamper. I had accidentally knocked them from her hands, spilling them across the catwalk….
No. She hadn’t seen Robertson. By the time she got up and leaned against the parapet to look down at the graveyard, he had gone.
Moments later, when I opened the front door of the church and encountered Robertson ascending the steps, Stormy had been behind me. I had let the door fall shut and had hustled her out of the narthex, into the nave, toward the front of the church.
Before going to St. Bart’s, I’d seen Robertson twice at Little Ozzie’s place in Jack Flats. The first time, he had been standing on the public sidewalk in front of the house, later in the backyard.
In neither instance had Ozzie been in a position to confirm that this visitor was a real, live person.
From his perch on the windowsill, Terrible Chester had seen the man at the front fence and had strongly reacted to him. But this did not mean that Robertson had been there in the flesh.
On many occasions, I have witnessed dogs and cats responding to the presence of spirits—though they don’t see bodachs. Usually animals do not react in any dramatic fashion, only subtly; they seem to be totally cool with ghosts.
Terrible Chester’s hostility was probably a reaction not to the fact that Robertson was an apparition but to the man’s abiding aura of evil, which characterized him both in life and death.
The evidence suggested that the last time I’d seen Robertson alive had been when he’d left his house in Camp’s End, just before I had loided the lock, gone inside, and found the black room.
He had haunted me since, and angrily. As though he blamed me for his death.
Although he’d been murdered in my apartment, he must know that I hadn’t pulled the trigger. Facing his killer, he’d been shot from a distance of no more than a few inches.
What he and his killer had been doing in my apartment, I could not imagine. I needed more time and calmer circumstances to think.
You might expect that his pissed-off spirit would have lurked in my bathroom or kitchenette, waiting for me to come home, eager to threaten and harass me as he had done at the church. You would be wrong because you forget that these restless souls who linger in this world do so because they cannot accept the truth of their deaths.
In my considerable experience, the last thing they want to do is hang around their dead bodies. Nothing is a more poignant reminder of one’s demise than one’s oozing carcass.
In the presence of their own lifeless flesh, the spirits feel more sharply the urge to be done with this world and to move on to the next, a compulsion that they are determined to resist. Robertson might visit the place of his death eventually, but not until his body had been removed and every smear of blood had been scrubbed away.
That suited me fine. I didn’t need all the hullabaloo associated with a visitation by an angry spirit.
The vandalism in St. Bart’s sacristy had not been the work of a living man. That destruction had been wrought by a malevolent and infuriated ghost in full poltergeist mode.
In the past, I’d lost a new music system, a lamp, a clock radio, a handsome bar stool, and several plates during a tantrum by such a one. A short-order cook can’t afford to play host to their kind.
This is one reason why my furnishings are thrift-shop rejects. The less that I have, the less I can lose.
Anyway, I looked at the lividity in Robertson’s flabby chest and sagging belly, quickly made the aforementioned deductions, and tried to button his shirt without looking directly at his bullet wound. Morbid interest got the best of me.
In the soft and livid chest, the hole was small but ragged, wet—and strange in some way that I didn’t immediately grasp and that I didn’t want to contemplate further.
The nausea crawling the walls of my stomach slithered faster, faster. I felt as if I were four years old again, with a dangerously virulent case of the flu, feverish and weak, staring down the barrel of my own mortality.
Because I had enough of a mess to clean up without reenacting Elvis’s historic last spew, I clenched my teeth, repressed my gorge, and finished buttoning the shirt.
Although I surely know more than the average citizen about how to read the condition of a corpse, I am not a specialist in forensic medicine. I couldn’t accurately determine, to the half hour, the exact time of Robertson’s death.
Logic put it between 5:30 and 7:45. During that period, I had searched his Camp’s End house and explored the black room, had driven Elvis to the chief’s barbecue and subsequently to the Baptist church, and had cruised alone to Little Ozzie’s house.
Chief Porter and his guests could verify my whereabouts for part of that time, but no court would look favorably on the claim that the ghost of Elvis could provide me with an alibi for another portion of it.
The extent of my vu
lnerability became clearer by the moment, and I knew that time was running out. When a knock at the door eventually came, it would most likely be the police, sent here by an anonymous tip.
THIRTY-FOUR
A SENSE OF URGENCY BORDERING ON PANIC gave me new strength. With much grunting and the invention of a few colorful obscenities, I hauled Robertson out of the bathtub and flopped him onto the sheet that I’d spread on the bathroom floor.
Remarkably little blood had spilled in the tub. I cranked on the shower and washed the stains off the porcelain with steaming-hot water.
I’d never be able to take a bath here again. I would either have to go unwashed for the rest of my life or find a new place to live.
When I turned out Robertson’s pants pockets, I found a wad of cash in each: twenty crisp hundred-dollar bills in the left pocket, twenty-three in the right. Clearly, he hadn’t been killed for money.
I returned those bankrolls to his pockets.
His billfold contained more cash. I stuffed that money in one of his pockets, as well, but kept the wallet with the hope that it might contain a clue to his murderous intentions when I had time to examine its remaining contents.
The corpse gurgled alarmingly as I wrapped it in the sheet. Bubbles of phlegm or blood popped in its throat, disturbingly like a belch.
I twisted the ends shut at the head and feet, and tied them as securely as possible with the white laces that I stripped out of a spare pair of shoes.
This package looked like an enormous doobie. I don’t do drugs, not even pot, but that’s what it looked like, anyway.
Or maybe a cocoon. A giant larva or pupa inside, changing into something new. I didn’t want to dwell on what that might be.
Using a plastic shopping bag from a bookstore as a suitcase, I packed a change of clothes, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, electric razor, cell phone, flashlight, scissors, a package of foil-wrapped moist towelettes—and a roll of antacids, which I was going to need to get through the rest of the night.
I dragged the body out of the bathroom, across my dark room, to the larger of the two south-facing windows. If I had lived in an ordinary apartment house, with neighbors below, the tenants’ committee would have met first thing in the morning to draft a new rule forbidding corpse-hauling after 10:00 P.M.
The body weighed far too much for me to carry it. Tumbling it down the outside stairs would have been a noisy proposition—and a memorable spectacle if someone happened to be passing in the street at an inopportune moment.
A half-size dinette table and two chairs stood in front of the window. I moved them aside, raised the lower sash, removed the bug screen, and leaned out to be sure I correctly remembered that the backyard could not be seen from neighboring houses.
A board fence and mature cottonwood trees provided privacy. If a narrow line of sight between branches gave neighbors a sliver of a view, the moonlight alone didn’t brighten the scene enough to lend credibility to their testimony in a courtroom.
I muscled the sheet-wrapped cadaver off the floor, into the open window. I shoved him out feetfirst because though he was inarguably dead, I felt squeamish about dropping him on his head. Halfway out the window, the sheet hung up on a protruding nail head, but with determination, I maneuvered him far enough to let gravity take over.
The drop from the windowsill to the ground measured twelve or thirteen feet. Not far. Yet the impact produced a brutal, sickening sound that seemed instantly identifiable as a dead body plummeting to hard earth from a height.
No dogs barked. No one said, Did you hear something, Maude? No one said, Yes, Clem, I heard Odd Thomas drop a corpse out his window. Pico Mundo slept on.
Using paper towels to avoid leaving fingerprints, I plucked the pistol off the carpet. I added the gun to the contents of the plastic shopping bag.
In the bathroom once more, I checked to be sure that I hadn’t missed anything obvious during the cleanup. Later I would need to do a more thorough job than I had time for now: vacuum for incriminating hairs and fibers, wipe every surface to eliminate Bob Robertson’s prints….
I wouldn’t be helping the killer get away with the crime. By all indications, he was a cool professional who would have been too smart and too self-aware to have left fingerprints or any other evidence of his presence.
When I consulted my wristwatch, what I saw surprised me. One-thirty-eight A.M. The night had seemed to be racing toward dawn. I’d thought it must be two-thirty or later.
Nonetheless, time was running out for me. My watch was digital, but I could hear my opportunity for action tick-tick-ticking away.
After turning off the bathroom light, I went to the front window once more, cracked the blind, and studied the street. If anyone was standing vigil, I still couldn’t spot him.
Carrying the shopping bag, I went outside and locked the front door behind me. Descending the steps, I felt as intently watched as a Miss America contestant during the swimsuit competition.
Although pretty much certain that no eyes were on me, I balanced a load of guilt that made me self-conscious. I nervously scanned the night, looking everywhere but at the steps in front of me; it’s proof of miracles that I didn’t fall and break my neck and leave a second body for the police to puzzle over.
You might wonder what I had to feel guilty about, considering that I hadn’t killed Bob Robertson.
Well, I never need a good reason to embrace guilt. Sometimes I feel responsible for train wrecks in Georgia, terrorist bombs in distant cities, tornadoes in Kansas….
A part of me believes that if I worked more aggressively to explore my gift and to develop it, instead of merely coping with it on a day-by-day basis, I might be able to assist in the apprehension of more criminals and spare more lives from both bad men and brutal nature, even in places far removed from Pico Mundo. I know this is not the case. I know that to pursue much greater involvement with the supernatural would be to lose touch with reality, to spiral down into a genteel madness, whereafter I would be no good to anyone. Yet that chastising part of me weighs my character from time to time and judges me inadequate.
I understand why I am such an easy mark for guilt. The origins lie with my mother and her guns.
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it. The Chamber of Unreasonable Guilt is part of my mental architecture, and I doubt that I will ever be able to renovate that particular room in this strange castle that is me.
When I reached the bottom of the steps without anyone rushing forward to shout J’accuse!, I started around the side of the garage—then stopped, struck by the sight of the nearby house and the thought of Rosalia Sanchez.
I intended to use her Chevy, which she herself seldom drives, to move Robertson’s body, then return the vehicle to the garage without her being the wiser. I didn’t need a key. As a high-school student, I may not have paid as much attention in math class as would have been advisable, but long ago I had learned to hot-wire a car.
My sudden concern about Rosalia had nothing to do with the possibility of her seeing me at this nefarious bit of work, and everything to do with her safety.
If another man, with murder on his mind, had gone with Robertson into my apartment between 5:30 and 7:45, they’d done so in daylight. Bright Mojave daylight.
I suspected that the two men had arrived as conspirators and that Robertson thought they were engaged on a bit of nasty business aimed at me. Perhaps he believed they were going to lie in wait for me. He must have been surprised when his companion drew a gun on him.
Once Robertson was dead and I’d been set up for murder, the killer would not have hung around to try on my underwear and sample the leftovers in my refrigerator. He would have left quickly, also in daylight.
Surely he had worried that someone in the nearby house might have seen him entering with his victim or departing alone.
Unwilling to risk a witness, he might have knocked on Rosalia’s back door after he had dealt with Robertso
n. A gentle widow, living alone, would have been an easy kill.
In fact, if he were a thorough and cautious man, he probably would have visited her before bringing Bob Robertson here. He would have used the same pistol in both instances, framing me for two murders.
Judging by the swiftness and boldness with which he had acted to eliminate a compromised associate, this unknown man was thorough, cautious, and much more.
Rosalia’s house stood silent. No lights shone at any of her windows, only a ghostly face that was, in fact, merely the reflection of the westering moon.
THIRTY-FIVE
I STARTED ACROSS THE DRIVEWAY TOWARD Rosalia’s back porch before I realized that I had begun to move. After a few steps, I halted.
If she was dead, I could do nothing for her. And if Robertson’s killer had visited her, he had surely not left her alive.
Until now I had thought of Robertson as a lone gunman, a mental and moral freak scheming toward his bloody moment in history, like so many of those infamous scum in his exquisitely maintained files.
He might have been exactly that at one time, but he had become that and more. He had met another who thrilled to the same fantasies of mindless slaughter, and together they had grown into a beast with two faces, two hateful hearts, and four busy hands to do the devil’s work.
The clue had hung on the study wall in Robertson’s house, but I had not understood it. Manson, McVeigh, and Atta. None of them had worked alone. They had conspired with others.
In the files were case histories of numerous serial killers and mass murderers who acted alone, but the three faces in his shrine were men who had found meaning in a brotherhood of evil.
My illegal visit to Robertson’s residence in Camp’s End had somehow become known to him. Maybe cameras were hidden in the house.
Sociopaths are frequently paranoids, as well. If he chose to do so, Robertson had financial resources large enough to equip his home with well-concealed, state-of-the-art videocams.