by Dean Koontz
“Check him out? How far? You want me to hold his privates while he turns his head and coughs?”
“Maybe not that far.”
“You want I should look for polyps in his lower colon?”
“I already know he doesn’t have any criminal priors—”
“So I’m not the first one you’re calling in a favor from.”
Ethan shrugged. “You know me, I’m a user. No one’s safe. It’d be useful to know, does Reynerd have any legally registered firearms.”
“You been talking to Laura Moonves over in Support Division?”
“She was helpful,” Ethan admitted.
“You should marry her.”
“She didn’t give me that much on Reynerd.”
“Even all us morons can see you and her would be as right as bread and butter.”
“We haven’t even dated in eighteen months,” Ethan said.
“That’s because you’re not as smart as us morons. You’re just an idiot. So don’t jive me. Moonves could get firearm registrations for you. That’s not what you want from me.”
While Hazard concentrated on lunch, Ethan gazed into the false twilight of the storm.
After two winters of below-average rainfall, the climatological experts had warned that California was in for a long and disastrous dry spell. As usual, the ensuing dire stories of drought, flooding the media, had proved to be sure predictors of a drowning deluge.
The pregnant belly of the sky hung low and gray and fat, and water broke to announce the birth of still more water.
“I guess what I want from you,” Ethan said at last, “is to take a look at the guy up close and tell me what you think of him.”
As perceptive as ever, Hazard said, “You’ve already knocked on his door, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Pretended I’d come to see who lived there before him.”
“He creeped you out. Something way different about him.”
“You’ll see it or you won’t,” Ethan said evasively.
“I’m a homicide cop. He’s not a suspect in any killing. How do I justify this?”
“I’m not asking for an official visit.”
“If I don’t wave a badge, I won’t get past the doorstep, not as mean as I look.”
“If you can’t, you can’t. That’s okay.”
When the waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything more, Hazard said, “I love those walnut mamouls. Give me six dozen to go.”
“I like a man with a big appetite,” she said coyly.
“You, young lady, I could gobble up in one bite,” Hazard said, eliciting from her a flush of erotic interest and a nervous laugh.
When the waitress went away, Ethan said, “Six dozen?”
“I like cookies. So where does this Reynerd live?”
Earlier, Ethan had written the address on a slip of paper. He passed it across the table. “If you go, don’t go easy.”
“Go what—in a tank?”
“Just go ready.”
“For what?”
“Probably nothing, maybe something. He’s either high wired or a natural-born headcase. And he’s got a pistol.”
Hazard’s gaze tracked across Ethan’s face as though reading his secrets as readily as an optical scanner could decipher any bar pattern of Universal Product Code. “Thought you wanted me to check for gun registration.”
“A neighbor told me,” Ethan lied. “Says Reynerd’s a little paranoid, keeps the piece close to himself most of the time.”
While Ethan returned the computer-printed photos to the manila envelope, Hazard stared at him.
The papers didn’t seem to fit in the envelope at first. Then for a moment the metal clasp was too large to slip through the hole in the flap.
“You have a shaky envelope there,” said Hazard.
“Too much coffee this morning,” Ethan said, and to avoid meeting Hazard’s eyes, he surveyed the lunchtime crowd.
The flogged air of human voices flailed through the restaurant, beat against the walls, and what seemed, on casual attention, to be a celebratory roar sounded sinister when listened to with a more attentive ear, sounded now like the barely throttled rage of a mob, and now like the torment of legions under some cruel oppression.
Ethan realized that he was searching face to face for one face in particular. He half expected to see toilet-drowned Dunny Whistler, dead but eating lunch.
“You’ve hardly touched your salmon,” Hazard said in a tone of voice as close as he could ever get to motherly concern.
“It’s off,” Ethan said.
“Why didn’t you send it back?”
“I’m not that hungry, anyway.”
Hazard used his well-worn fork to sample salmon. “It’s not off.”
“It tastes off to me,” Ethan insisted.
The waitress returned with the lunch check and with pink bakery boxes full of walnut mamouls packed in a clear plastic bag bearing the restaurant’s logo.
While Ethan fished a credit card from his wallet, the woman waited, her face a clear window to her thoughts. She wanted to flirt more with Hazard, but his daunting appearance made her wary.
As Ethan returned the check with his American Express plastic, the waitress thanked him and glanced at Hazard, who licked his lips with theatrical pleasure, causing her to scurry off like a rabbit that had been so flattered by a fox’s admiration that she had almost offered herself for dinner before recovering her survival instinct.
“Thanks for picking up the check,” Hazard said. “Now I can say Chan the Man took me to lunch. Though I think these mamouls are going to turn out to be the most expensive cookies I ever ate.”
“This was just lunch. No obligations. Like I said, if you can’t, you can’t. Reynerd’s my problem, not yours.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got me intrigued now. You’re a better flirt than the waitress.”
Midst a clutter of darker emotions, Ethan found a genuine smile.
A sudden change in the direction of the wind threw shatters of rain against the big windows.
Beyond the hard-washed glass, pedestrians and passing traffic appeared to melt into ruin as though subjected to an Armageddon of flameless heat, a holocaust of caustic acid.
Ethan said, “If he’s carrying a potato-chip bag, corn chips, anything like that, there might be more than snack food in it.”
“This the paranoid part? You said he keeps his piece close.”
“That’s what I heard. In a potato-chip bag, places like that, where he can reach for it, and you don’t realize what he’s doing.”
Hazard stared at him, saying nothing.
“Maybe it’s a nine-millimeter Glock,” Ethan added.
“He have a nuclear weapon, too?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Probably keeps the nuke in a box of Cheez-Its.”
“Just take a bagful of mamouls, and you can handle anything.”
“Hell, yeah. Throw one of these, you’d crack a guy’s skull.”
“Then eat the evidence.”
The waitress returned with his credit card and the voucher.
As Ethan added the gratuity and signed the form, Hazard seemed almost oblivious of the woman and did not once look at her.
With needles of rain, the blustering wind tattooed ephemeral patterns on the window, and Hazard said, “Looks cold out there.”
That was exactly what Ethan had been thinking.
CHAPTER 11
SLICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE SAME jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.
Although his shirt wasn’t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he’d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.
He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.
Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a n
ew order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.
Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.
He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.
He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.
To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.
Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.
Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.
In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.
She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.
Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.
Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.
Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.
If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.
She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.
In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.
She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.
Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.
He didn’t envy anyone, either.
Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.
Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.
Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.
The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.
Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.
His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.
Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.
He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.
When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.
Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.
Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.
The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.
Are there no other planets in the solar system, Corky had asked him, just because you can’t locate them in the sky?
When Ethan Truman, Manheim’s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.
As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.
Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.
He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.
Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.
He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.
An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.
With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.
The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.
Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.
These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy—or Extasy, if you’d gone to a public school—with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.
He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.
Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.
Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.
In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids’ jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.
Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.
Truth: He wasn’t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.
Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.
Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.
Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization o
vernight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.
He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.
Because he didn’t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn’t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.
At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.
After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.
CHAPTER 12
THE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.
Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.
This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.
Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.
Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs, and a table with a faux Tiffany lamp in red, amber, and green stained glass.
Although stairs served the five-story building, Ethan took the slow-moving elevator. Dunny Whistler lived—had lived—on the fifth floor.
Each of the first four floors held four large apartments, but the highest was divided into only two penthouse units.
A faint unpleasant odor lingered in the elevator from a recent passenger. Complex and subtle, the scent teased memory, but Ethan could not quite identify it.