by Dean Koontz
“Easy, easy now,” Hazard said. “Calm down. Everything’s going to be all right now. You’re safe now, Professor.”
The hooked edges of the words pained Dalton as he spat them out, but he insisted on saying, “He’s…coming…back.”
“Good,” Hazard said, grateful to hear the ambulance siren rising in the night beyond the broken window. “We know just what to do with the sick son of a bitch when he shows up.”
Greatly distressed, Dalton managed to roll his head side to side and produce an anguished mewling.
Thinking Dalton might be worried about his wife and daughter, Hazard revealed that he had just sent a pair of uniformed officers to their house not only to inform Rachel that her husband had been found alive but also to give her and Emily protection until Laputa could be located and arrested.
In a hiss-and-hack voice, Dalton said, “Coming back with,” and winced in pain as his throat seized up.
“Don’t stress yourself,” Hazard advised. “You’re pretty fragile right now.”
At the end of the block, the shrieking ambulance turned the corner. The rainy night licked away and swallowed the last shrill note of the siren as the brakes barked on the blacktop in front of the house.
“Bringing back…a boy,” Dalton said.
“A boy?” Hazard asked. “You mean Laputa?”
Dalton managed a nod.
“He told you?”
Another nod.
“Said he was bringing a boy back here tonight?”
“Yes.”
As he heard the paramedics thundering up the steps, Hazard leaned closer to the withered man and said, “What boy?”
Crouching among mimulus and Mauna Loa spaths and ferns, Ethan heard a second burst of fire, three or four shots, from a weapon fitted with a sound suppressor, and after half a minute of silence, a third burst.
None of these rounds seemed to come near him. The gunman must have lost track of him. Or maybe the guy had never known where Ethan was, had fired blindly through the jungle, and had come close with the first spray of bullets solely by chance.
Gunman—singular. Guy—one.
Common sense argued that an assault against this estate required teamwork, that one man couldn’t jump the wall, deceive the electronic security measures, disable the guards, and breach the house. That was Bruce Willis on the big screen. That was Tom Cruise in makeup. That was Channing Manheim playing a role from the dark side. That wasn’t anyone real.
If a coordinated team of kidnappers had gotten inside Palazzo Rospo, however, there would be more than one gunman squeezing off short bursts of suppressing fire. They would have chopped at Ethan with one, two, three fully automatic carbines. Uzis or worse. By now he would be down, dead, and dancing in paradise.
When silence persisted after the third brief volley, he rose from cover and eased warily through the ferns, between the palms, to the edge of the pathway.
In any jungle movie, stillness like this always signaled the wilderness-savvy characters that villainy in one form or another had stepped into the natural world, silencing cricket and crocodile alike.
Green-juice smell of crushed vegetation rising from underfoot.
Muffled voice of a heating-system fan purring in the walls.
A gnat, a midge, hovering in the air before him, hovering.
Taste of blood in his mouth, the discovery that he’d pinched tongue with teeth when he dropped to the ground, the throb just now arising in the bite.
A flutter of foliage spun him around, and he brought the pistol toward the sound.
Not foliage. Wings. Through the jungle, high above the pathway, flew a flock of brightly colored parrots, blue and red and yellow and the iridescent green of certain strange sunsets.
No birds made their home in the conservatory. Neither a flock of parrots nor a single sparrow.
Plummeting in front of Ethan but then swooping high again, the colorful birds passed without one screech or squawk, and became white doves on the rise.
This was the phantom in the steam-clouded mirror. This was the impossible set of bells in his hand outside the flower shop. This was the heavy fragrance of Broadway roses in his study when no roses had been there, the precious voice of his lost wife speaking of ladybugs in the white room. This was the hand of some supernatural force held out to him and eager to lead.
After spiraling high in a frenzied flapping, down again came the swarming doves, feathering the air, toward him, past him, with a thrum that both exhilarated and frightened him, that plucked notes of wonder from his heart but also struck hard the jungle-drum terror of the primitive within.
They flew. He ran. They led. He followed.
“Wait,” Hazard told the paramedics as they came quickly to the bed in spite of the vile stink, as they stood wide-eyed and gaping in spite of all the horrors that they had seen day after day in the conduct of their vital work.
“Boy,” Dalton croaked.
“What boy?” Hazard asked, having taken the withered man’s hand once more, holding it in both of his.
“Ten,” said Dalton.
“Ten boys?”
“Ten…years.”
“A ten-year-old boy,” Hazard said, failing to understand why Dalton thought Laputa meant to return here with a boy, not sure that he was correctly interpreting what the wracked man meant to tell him.
Dalton strained to speak in spite of throat pain that threatened to convulse him: “Said…famous.”
“Famous?”
“Said…famous boy.”
And Hazard knew.
In the elevator, Moloch dropped Fric, and Fric tumbled in a loose heap on the floor, not sure what had happened to him. No mere pepper in that pepper spray. He could see but could not turn his eyes with the usual quickness, could blink but only slowly. He was able to move his arms and legs, but as though straining against the pressure of deep water, like a weary swimmer being pulled down by a relentless undertow. He couldn’t strike a blow in self-defense, couldn’t even fully close his hand into a fist.
As they descended toward the garage, Moloch grinned at Fric and brandished the little aerosol can at him. “Short-acting semiparalytic inhalant developed by a colleague with the help of a generous grant from the Iranian secret police. I wanted you docile but alert.”
Fric heard himself breathing. Not an asthmatic wheeze.
“That gazebo didn’t appear on the architectural plans,” said Moloch. “But the moment I saw it, I knew. I’m still in touch with the child in me, the wild spirit that we are when we’re born, and I knew.”
Fric didn’t hear the sound of healthy breathing, either. Clear but shallow, a faint whistle in his throat.
With scary face-twitching spasms of glee that would have caused Fric’s bladder to empty in a rush if he had not such a short time ago relieved himself on the potted palm, Moloch said, “I wanted you alert to experience all the terror of being snatched out of your posh digs, knowing that your big-shot daddy can’t swoop down in cape and tights or on a flying motorcycle like you once thought he could. Not all the muscled movie stars in the world, certainly not all the supermodels, not even all the beefed-up bodyguards in Bel Air can save your pampered ass.”
Fric knew then that he was going to die. No chance to sneak off to Goose Crotch, Montana. No hope of someday leading a real life. But maybe at last some peace.
As the shepherd to the sheep, as the hound to the posse, as the scout to the cavalry, the doves showed Ethan the way, bird by bird, out of the conservatory, into the east hall, past the indoor pool, to the north hall and then westward toward the rotunda.
Such a sight: thirty or forty luminous-white birds flowing along the corridor, a feathered river in this canyon of sumptuous decor, as might a party of freed spirits soar toward Valhalla.
Into the entry rotunda they flew, and circled there as if caught in the whirlpool currents of a forming cyclone, until Ethan caught up with them, whereupon the many birds swarmed closer to one another, closer, until they kni
tted together in one turbulent entity. They flowed down from the three-story heights to the floor, changing color as they came, changing form again, becoming that friend of childhood who had lost his way.
Standing but ten feet from Ethan, the apparition that was Dunny Whistler said, “If you die this time, I can’t bring you back. I am at the limits of my authority. He’s taking Fric down to the garage. He’s almost out of here.”
Before Ethan could speak, dead Dunny was not Dunny anymore, but doves again, exploding in a glory of radiant wings, knifing straight at the enormous Christmas tree. They fled not into the needled boughs but into the silvery and scarlet shine of the ornaments, no longer birds but only the shadows of birds, darkening across the glimmering curves, then gone.
By a fistful of his shirt, semiparalytic Fric was dragged across the garage floor, facing away from his captor, watching the elevator alcove recede into the distance.
Moloch had snared car keys from the pegboard, where every set hung under a label citing the make, model, and year. The kidnapper seemed to know his way around as well as if he had lived in Palazzo Rospo.
Also receding from Fric was his medicinal inhaler, his precious asthma drug. The device had come unclipped from his belt. He tried to grab the inhaler when first it rattled loose, but his limbs were jelly.
Moloch might be insane or just evil. But Fric couldn’t imagine what the Iranian secret police had against him.
In his ten years, he had known fear. In fact it had been nearly a constant. The fear familiar to him for so long, however, had been of the quiet variety, a nagging rather than threatening force, more like the persistent pecking of small birds than like the rending ferocity of a pterodactyl. Worry that his father’s absences would grow ever longer, until they stretched into years, like those of his mother. A gnawing concern that he would forever be the geek that he was now, that he would never figure out what to do with life or with himself, that he would grow old and still be more than anything else the son of Channing Manheim, the Face. During every second of the journey between the conservatory and the garage, however, a great dark terror thrashed its leathery wings in the cage of his heart, swooped through the hollows of body and soul, shivered flesh and blood, and bone.
For his getaway, Moloch could have chosen from the collection any of the older classic cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead he selected a more recent model, a favorite of Fric’s: the cherry-red 1951 Buick Super 8, with chromed fins and fender wings.
He heaved Fric into the front passenger’s seat, slammed the door, hurried around the Buick, and got in behind the wheel. The engine started at once because every vehicle in the collection was maintained in perfect condition.
Guardian angels apparently could not be relied on in a pinch. Mysterious Caller had never seemed much like an angel, anyway: too spooky looking, his style too ominous, and such sorrow in his eyes.
As Moloch backed out of the parking stall, Fric wondered what had happened to Mr. Truman. He must be dead. When he focused on the thought of Mr. Truman dead, Fric discovered that the semiparalytic inhalant didn’t prevent him from crying.
Entering the upper garage by way of the stairs, Ethan heard the growl of an engine, smelled exhaust fumes.
The Buick was poised for flight at the foot of the exit ramp, where the garage door had almost finished rolling up and out of its way.
A man behind the wheel. One man. No accomplices in the backseat. No gunmen elsewhere in the garage.
The passenger’s side of the car was nearest to Ethan as he ran toward it. Against the side window at the front, Fric’s tousled head was tipped against the glass. He couldn’t see the boy’s face, but the head seemed to loll, as if Fric were unconscious.
Ethan almost reached the Buick before the rising door provided clearance. Then the car jumped toward the door and the ramp beyond at such acceleration that a man on foot couldn’t catch it.
Stepping from a run into an isosceles shooting stance, squarely facing the target, right leg quartering back for balance, left knee flexed, both hands on the weapon, Ethan risked three quick shots, aiming low in fear of hitting Fric with a ricochet, targeting the rear tire on the passenger’s side.
The fender skirt shielded almost half the wheel, giving him a narrow window in which to place the shot. One round pocked metal, one went wide, but one popped the tire.
The car sagged back and to one side. Kept going. Still too fast to be chased down. The slap-slap-slap of loose rubber marked its ascent along the lower half of the ramp.
The quartzite paving provided good traction, dry or wet, but the Buick’s rear tires spun briefly, churning up a spray of dirty water and blue smoke, maybe because of the cant to the right.
As Ethan closed the gap once more, the Buick found its footing, lunged forward, upward. Spin-shredded rubber flapped louder than before, and the exposed wheel rim bit at the quartzite with a sound like a stone saw cutting cobbles.
When Ethan reached the top of the ramp, he saw the car following the driveway along the side of the mansion. Heading toward the front. Forty feet away. Making speed in spite of being crippled. Nothing to stop it from grinding all the way to the distant gate, which opened automatically from the inside when sensors buried in the pavement of the exit lane detected traffic.
Ethan gave chase. He couldn’t catch the car. No hope.
He pursued anyway because he could do nothing else. Too late to go back, get keys, another car. By the time he was driving out of the garage, the Buick would have cleared the main gate and vanished. He ran, ran, splashing through cold puddles, ran, pumping his arms and trying to compensate for the weight, the bulk, of the pistol in his right hand, because running well was a matter of balance, ran, ran, because if Fric were killed, then Ethan Truman would be a dead man, too, dead inside, and would spend the rest of his time in this world looking for a grave, a walking corpse as sure as Dunny Whistler ever had been.
CHAPTER 94
CORKY LAPUTA, PLEASED TO BE PROVING THAT Robin Goodfellow was as daring and as formidable as any real agent of the NSA, had always intended to leave the estate in one of the actor’s expensive classic cars. The complication of a blown tire would not force a change of plan; it qualified as a mere annoyance.
The ride was rough, the steering wheel pulled stubbornly in his hands, but as a connoisseur of chaos and a master of disorder, he met this challenge with the delight familiar to any child who had fought to control a vehicle in the bumper-car pavilion at a carnival. Every twitch and wobble gave him a thrill.
He needed only to nurse the Buick out of the gate and three blocks to the street on which he had parked the Acura. From there, the drive home would be quick. Within half an hour, the pampered boy would be introduced to Stinky Cheese Man, would understand the horror that he was about to inherit, and would begin his long ordeal as well as his own career as a media star.
If anything went wrong en route, if for the first time chaos failed to serve Corky, he would kill the boy rather than surrender him to anyone. He wouldn’t even use young Manheim as a trade for his own survival. Cowardice had no place in the valiant lives of those who would usher in the collapse of society and raise a new world from the rubble.
“Anyone stops me,” he promised the kid, “I’ll blow your brains out—pop, pop, pop—and make you the biggest object of worldwide mourning since Princess Di.”
He made the corner of the house. At some distance to the left lay the reflection pond at the center of the turnaround in front of the mansion. He was still traveling on the tributary driveway, which would join the main drive in fifty or sixty yards.
Just beyond the reach of the headlights, something so strange occurred that Corky cried out in surprise, and when the twin beams revealed the true nature of the obstacle ahead, terror seized him. He jammed his foot down on the brakes so hard that he put the car into a spin.
Moloch said that he would blow Fric’s brains out, but Fric had more immediate worries because the itching between hi
s shoulders was real this time, not imaginary, and it quickly spread to the back of his neck.
He had expected to suffer an attack the moment that he’d been spritzed in the face, but perhaps the drug that Moloch administered had, as a side effect, delayed the asthmatic response. Now here it came, and with a vengeance.
Fric began to wheeze. His chest tightened, and he couldn’t get enough breath.
He didn’t have his inhaler.
As bad, maybe worse: He remained semiparalyzed, unable to claw himself up from a slack-limbed slump into a full sitting position. He had to be more upright to use the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to squeeze out every trapped breath.
Worse still: The feeble effort he made to sit upright instead caused him to slide farther down. In fact he seemed about to slip off the seat. His legs buckled and twisted upon themselves, folding into the knee space in front of the dashboard, and his butt hung off the edge of the seat. From the waist to his neck, he was lying flat on the seat, his head tipped up against the back of it.
He felt his airways narrowing.
He wheezed, sucked, snorked for breath, drew in little, squeezed out less. That familiar hard-boiled egg settled in his windpipe, that stone, that blocking wad.
He could not breathe on his back.
He could not breathe. He could not breathe.
Moloch stomped the brakes. The car fishtailed, then spun.
On the driveway, running toward Corky as he sped toward them, were Roman Castevet, whom he’d killed and stored under a sheet in the cold locker at the morgue, and Ned Hokenberry come back to retrieve the locket that contained his third eye, and anorexic Brittina Dowd as naked and bony as he had left her on the floor of her bedroom but not burnt, and Mick Sachatone in Bart Simpson pajamas.