The Face

by Dean Koontz

  “He’s a ten-year-old boy, my new project. You’ll be surprised at his identity when I introduce you.”

  After replacing the infusion bag, he went to the drug cabinet, from which he withdrew a packaged hypodermic syringe and two small bottles of drugs.

  “I’ll strap him in a chair next to your bed. And if he can’t watch what I’ve got planned for you, I’ll tape his eyes open.”

  Laura Moonves could find no rap sheet for Vladimir Laputa, not even a history of unpaid parking tickets. But when, after less than fifteen minutes, she called Hazard back, she had interesting news.

  Robbery/Homicide had an open case under the name Laputa. The investigation wasn’t currently active, due to a lack of evidence and leads.

  Four years ago, a woman named Justine Laputa, age sixty-eight, had been murdered in her home. The crime-scene address proved to be the residence that Hazard now had under surveillance.

  Watching the house as he spoke with Laura, Hazard said, “How did she die?”

  “The entire file isn’t on computer-network access, just the open-case extract. According to that, she was bludgeoned to death with a fireplace poker.”

  Mina Reynerd had been shot in the foot, but the actual cause of her death had been bludgeoning with a marble-and-bronze lamp.

  A fireplace poker. A heavy lamp. In both cases, the killer had resorted to a blunt instrument near at hand. This might not be proof enough of one modus operandi, one killer, but it was a start.

  “Justine’s murder was savage, unusually violent,” Laura said. “The medical examiner estimates the killer delivered between forty and fifty blows with the poker.”

  Mina Reynerd’s death, by lamp, had been likewise brutal.

  “Who were the detectives on the case?” Hazard asked.

  “Walt Sunderland, for one.”

  “I know him.”

  “I got lucky,” Laura said, “caught him on his cell phone five minutes ago. Told him I couldn’t right now explain why I needed to know, then asked if he’d had a suspect in that case. Didn’t hesitate. Said Justine’s son inherited everything. Walt says he was a smug creep.”

  “The son’s name is Vladimir,” Hazard guessed.

  “Vladimir Ilyich Laputa. Teaches at the same university that his mother retired from.”

  “So why isn’t he in some hard-time joint, trading romance for cigarettes?”

  “Walt says Vladimir had an alibi so six-ways airtight that an astronaut could go to the moon and back in it.”

  Nothing in this world was perfect. A designer alibi with triple-stitched seams always cocked the trigger of a cop’s suspicion because it looked made, not found.

  The house waited in the rain, as though alive, alert, its few lighted windows like irregularly positioned eyes.

  In the syringe, Corky blended a paralytic cocktail of drugs to keep his captive quiescent, immobile, but alert.

  “By dawn you’ll be as dead as Rachel and Emily, and then this will be the boy’s room, his bed.”

  He didn’t administer either a sedative or a hallucinogenic. When he returned well before midnight, he didn’t want Dalton to be fuzzy-minded or lost in illusions. The vile man must be clearheaded to experience every subtle nuance of his long-planned death.

  “I’ve learned so much from this adventure of ours.”

  Corky introduced the hypodermic needle into the drug port on the IV drip line.

  “It’s given me so many good ideas, better ideas.”

  With his thumb, he slowly depressed the plunger, feeding the contents of the syringe into the saline solution that seeped into Dalton’s vein.

  “The boy’s experiences in this room will be only somewhat like yours, but more colorful, more shocking.”

  Having administered the full dosage, he withdrew the needle from the port and discarded it in the trash can.

  “After all, the whole world will be watching the videos I send out. My little movies must have tremendous entertainment value if I’m to keep so many millions of people enthralled.”

  Already, Stinky Cheese Man’s wobbly teeth had begun to chatter. For some reason, this brew of paralytic drugs gave him spasmodic chills.

  “I’m sure the boy will be thrilled when, in his first starring role, he fascinates the masses in greater numbers than his father ever has.”

  The storm lost its strength, became a windless drizzle. Fog plumed through the street, like cold breath come down out of the hidden moon.

  Alerted now to the nature of the individual with whom he was dealing, Hazard sat in the car, mulling over how best to approach Vladimir Laputa.

  His cell phone rang. When he answered it, he recognized the voice that he had heard a short time ago, in the street, issuing from the apparition.

  Dunny Whistler said, “I’m Ethan’s guardian, not yours, not Aelfric’s. But if I save him—if I can—there’ll be no point to it if either you or the boy dies.”

  Usually able to draw upon a rich account of words, Hazard found himself bankrupt in this case. He had never talked to a ghost before. He didn’t want to start.

  “He’ll blame himself for the loss of either of you,” Whistler continued. “And then the shadow on his heart will become a darkness deep within it. Don’t go in that house.”

  Hazard found a voice not too much thinner and shakier than the one he usually could rely upon: “Are you dead or alive?”

  “I’m dead and alive. Don’t go in that house. The Kevlar vest won’t matter. You’ll be head shot. Two bullets in the brain. And I have no authority to resurrect you.”

  Dunny hung up.

  Corky in the kitchen, stylishly outfitted to storm the castle of Hollywood’s reigning king, glanced at the wall clock and saw that he had less than an hour until his rendezvous with Jack Trotter in Bel Air.

  Murder and mayhem sharpened the appetite. On his feet, roaming back and forth from refrigerator to pantry, he made a makeshift meal of cheese, dried fruit, half a doughnut, a spoonful of butterscotch pudding, a taste of this, a bite of that.

  Such a chaotic dinner was well suited to a man who had brought so much disorder into the world in one day, and who still had much work to do before lying down to sleep.

  The Glock, with sound suppressor attached, lay on the kitchen table. It would just fit in the deepest pocket of his storm suit.

  In other pockets, he had spare magazines, far more ammunition than he ought to need, considering that he didn’t expect to have to kill anyone else today except Ethan Truman.

  If Hazard had been nothing more than a man who wanted to live, he would have driven away without crossing the street to ring that doorbell.

  He was, however, also a good cop and Ethan’s friend. He believed that police work was not just a job, that it was a calling, and that friendship required commitment exactly when commitment was hardest to give.

  He opened the door. He got out of the car.

  CHAPTER 73

  UPON RECEIVING THE CALL, DUNNY AT ONCE responds to it not by automobile this time but by highways of fog and water, and by the idea of San Francisco.

  In a Los Angeles park, he pulls about him a cloak of earthbound cloud, and hundreds of miles to the north, he arrives through the soft folds of another fog, having traded the footpath in the park for the planking of a wharf.

  Because he is dead but has not yet moved on from this world to the next, he inhabits his own corpse, a strange condition. After he died in a coma, his spirit had resided briefly in a place that had felt like a doctor’s waiting room with neither tattered magazines nor hope. Then he was readmitted to the world, to his familiar mortal shell. He is no mere ghost, nor is he a traditional guardian angel. He is one of the walking dead, but his flesh is now capable of whatever amazing feat his spirit demands of it.

  In this more northern and colder city, no rain falls. Water laps at the pilings of the wharf, an unpleasant chuckling that suggests mockery, conspiracy, and inhuman hunger.

  Perhaps the thing about being dead that most sur
prises him is the persistence of fear. He would have thought that with death came freedom from anxiety.

  He trembles at the sounds of the water beneath the wharf, at the ponk of his footsteps on the dock planking wet with condensation, at the briny semen scent of the fertile sea, at the frosty rectangles, fluorescent in the mist, that are the large windows of the bay-view restaurant where Typhon waits. For most of his life, he had perceived no meaning in anything; now dead, he sees meaning in every detail of the physical world, and too much of it has a dark significance.

  One finger of the wharf leads past the restaurant windows, and at a prime table sits Typhon, in the city on business but currently alone, beautifully dressed as always, regal in demeanor without appearing pretentious. Through the pane of glass, their eyes meet.

  For a moment, Typhon regards him somberly, even severely, as though with displeasure certain to have consequences that Dunny does not wish to consider. Then his plump face dimples, and his winning smile appears. He makes a gun of thumb and forefinger, pointing it at Dunny as if to say, Gotcha.

  By way of fog and glass and the candlelight on the table, Dunny could in a wink travel from the wharf to the chair opposite Typhon. With so many people in the restaurant, however, that unconventional entrance would be the essence of indiscretion.

  He walks around the building to the front door and follows the maitre d’ through the busy restaurant to Typhon’s table.

  Typhon graciously rises to greet Dunny, offers a hand to be shaken, and says, “Dear boy, I’m sorry to have summoned you at such a critical moment on this night of all nights.”

  After he and Typhon settle into their chairs and after Dunny politely turns aside the maitre d’s solicitation of a drink order, he decides that disingenuousness will not play any better here, and perhaps far worse, than it had the previous night at the hotel bar in Beverly Hills. Typhon had explicitly required integrity, honesty, and directness in their relationship.

  “Sir, before you say anything, I must tell you that I know I’ve stretched my authority to the snapping point again,” Dunny says, “by approaching Hazard Yancy.”

  “Not by approaching him, Dunny. By the directness with which you approached him.” Typhon pauses to sip his martini.

  Dunny starts to explain himself, but the white-haired mensch begs his patience with a raised hand. Blue eyes twinkling merrily, he takes another sip of his martini, and savors it.

  When he speaks, Typhon first addresses a matter of deportment: “Son, your voice is raised just a tad too loud, and there’s an anxiety in it that’s likely to make you an object of interest among those of our fellow diners who are too curious for their own good.”

  The clink of flatware and china, the almost-crystal ring of wineglasses lightly knocked together to the accompaniment of toasts, the graceful music of a piano caressed rather than pounded, and the murmur of many conversations do not swell to the pitch that had so conveniently masked Dunny’s and Typhon’s exchanges in the hotel bar.

  “Sorry,” Dunny says.

  “It’s admirable that you wish to ensure not only Mr. Truman’s physical survival but also his emotional and psychological well-being. This is within your authority. But in the interest of his client, a guardian such as you must act by indirection. Encourage, inspire, terrify, cajole, advise—”

  “—and influence events by every means that is sly, slippery, and seductive,” Dunny finishes.

  “Precisely. You have pushed the limits by the way you’ve handled Aelfric. Pushed against them but haven’t yet exceeded them.”

  Typhon’s manner is that of a concerned teacher who finds it necessary to provide remedial instruction to a problem student. He seems neither wrathful nor riled, for which Dunny is grateful.

  “But by bluntly telling Mr. Yancy not to go into that house,” Typhon continues, “by informing him that he would be shot twice in the head, you have interfered with what was his most likely destiny at that point in time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yancy may now survive not because of his actions and choices, not because of his unfettered exercise of free will, but because you revealed to him the immediate future.” Typhon sighs. He shakes his head. He looks sad, as though his next words sorrow him a little: “This is not good, dear boy. This is not good for you.”

  Only a moment ago, Dunny had been grateful for his mentor’s lack of anger. Now he’s made apprehensive by Typhon’s quiet dismay and expression of regret, for they suggest that a judgment has already been reached.

  Typhon says, “There were many tricks with which you could have turned Mr. Yancy away from that house by indirection.”

  The older man’s cheerful nature cannot be long suppressed. He breaks into a smile again. His blue eyes twinkle with such merriment that, with a fake beard to match his white hair, and with a suit less elegant, he might board a sleigh two nights hence and harry wingless reindeer into flight.

  Leaning conspiratorially across the table, Typhon says, “Son, any of a thousand bits of spooky business would have sent him running from that house, to his Granny Rose or to a bar. You didn’t need to be so direct. And if you continue in this fashion, you will certainly fail your friend, Ethan, and in fact may yourself be the cause of his death and the death of the boy.”

  They stare at each other.

  Dunny is hesitant to ask if he will be allowed to remain on the case, for fear that he already knows the answer.

  After Typhon tastes his martini again, he says, “My, but you are a firecracker, Dunny. You’re headstrong, impetuous, frustrating—but you’re also a hoot. You tickle me. You do.”

  Uncertain how to interpret those statements, Dunny waits, still and silent.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Typhon says, “but my dinner guests will shortly be arriving. Your lean and hungry look—to quote the Bard—and your rough edges might alarm them. They are a wary group, and skittish. One politician and two of his handlers.”

  Dunny dares to ask, “May I continue to protect Ethan?”

  “After your repeated breaches, I’d be justified in removing you now. There must be standards for guardian angels, don’t you think? Something more than good intentions. The position ought to require greater ethics than those of United States senators and cardsharps.”

  Typhon rises from his chair, and Dunny gets quickly to his feet, as well.

  “Nevertheless, dear boy, I’m inclined to cut you some slack this one last time.”

  Dunny accepts his mentor’s offered handshake. “Thank you, sir.”

  “But understand that you’re on a minute-by-minute reprieve. If you can’t operate within the terms of agreement, then your authority and powers will be at once revoked, and you will instantly be sent home for eternity.”

  “I’ll abide by our deal.”

  “And when you’re sent home, Ethan will be fending for himself.”

  “I’ll walk the line.”

  Putting one hand on Dunny’s shoulder, squeezing affectionately, like a father counseling a son, Typhon says, “Dear boy, you’ve walked a crooked line so long that keeping to a straight one isn’t easy. But now, minute by minute, you must watch your step.”

  By foot, Dunny leaves the restaurant and follows the wharf into mists reverberant with the low, hollow notes of boat horns. Traveling by fog, by the moonlight above the fog, and by the idea of Palazzo Rospo in Bel Air, he departs and makes his journey and arrives all at the same time.

  CHAPTER 74

  TWO BULLETS IN THE BRAIN.

  Wearing his Kevlar chest protector and conscious of what an easy target his lionesque head would make, Hazard closed the car door and crossed the street.

  The house of the mother-killer seemed to attract the incoming fog, which moved not in a monolithic bank but in curious eddies and lithe plumes: one quick-footed vaporous slinkiness after another, tail following tail of Angora mist, as though here were a thousand cats drawn home by the scent of tuna fresh from the can.

  The aura of the house
so entranced Hazard that he had crossed the street and followed the private walkway while remaining oblivious of the rain. Only when he reached the foot of the front-porch steps did he realize that he had approached with such deliberation that he had gotten wet to the skin.

  Ascending the porch steps, he felt something in his hand—and discovered the cell phone on which he had spoken to Dunny Whistler.

  I’m dead and alive, Dunny had said, and Hazard at the moment was of much that same sentiment.

  At the top of the steps, instead of proceeding straight to the door and ringing the bell, he paused, realizing that he had neglected to do a standard bit of follow-up to Dunny’s call that he would have done had he received a menacing message from anyone else who should not have had his mobile number. He pressed *69.

  The call was answered on the second ring, but the person at the far end of the line said nothing.

  “Somebody there?” Hazard asked.

  A hard voice came back at him: “Oh, somebody here. Somebody here, sure enough, you hook nigger.”

  Gang talk: hook meaning phony, imitation.

  “I be here, got lit up by you, punched twice, and still taste pencil.”

  Pencil meaning lead, meaning bullets.

  Hazard had never heard this voice before, but he knew to whom it might belong. He could not speak.

  “When you come across after me, you wannabe ofay, better get ready for a million nightmares of eastlies. You know eastly, man?”

  “Yeah. An ugly person,” Hazard said, surprised that he had spoken, sensing at once that responding was a bad idea, that it was an invitation.

  “Worse than ugly, man. Extreme butt-ugly. This crib ain’t got nothin’ but eastlies. I be here when you come across, ofay. I be first in line.”

  Hazard wanted to press END, clip the phone to his belt, but grim fascination held it to his ear.