by Dean Koontz
She was heading toward a particular point on the crest, as if familiar with the terrain. Considering that no cars were parked along this section of the cemetery road, except for Joe’s Honda and the white van, she might have entered the memorial park by that route, on foot.
The men from the van had a lot of ground to make up if they were going to catch her. The tall one in the green shirt seemed in better shape than his partner, and his legs were considerably longer than the woman’s, so he was gaining on her. Nevertheless, the smaller guy didn’t relent even as he fell steadily behind. Sprinting frantically up the long sun-seared slope, stumbling over a grave marker, then over another, regaining his balance, he charged on, as though in an animal frenzy, in a blood fever, gripped by the need to be there when the woman was brought down.
Beyond the manicured hills of the cemetery were other hills in a natural condition: pale sandy soil, banks of shale, brown grass, stinkweed, mesquite, stunted manzanita, tumbleweed, scattered and gnarled dwarf oaks. Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.
If the woman got into the scrub before being caught, and if she knew her way, she could lose her pursuers by zigging and zagging from one narrow declivity to another.
Joe headed toward the abandoned white van. He might be able to learn something from it.
He wanted the woman to escape, though he wasn’t entirely sure why his sympathies were with her.
As far as he knew, she might be a felon with a list of heinous crimes on her rap sheet. She hadn’t looked like a criminal, hadn’t sounded like one. This was Los Angeles, however, where clean-cut young men brutally shotgunned their parents and then, as orphans, tearfully begged the jury to pity them and show mercy. No one was what he seemed.
Yet…the gentleness of her fingertips against his cheek, the sorrow in her eyes, the tenderness in her voice, all marked her as a woman of compassion, whether she was a fugitive from the law or not. He could not wish her ill.
A vicious sound, hard and flat, cracked across the cemetery, leaving a brief throbbing wound in the hot stillness. Another crack followed.
The woman had nearly reached the brow of the hill. Visible between the last two bristling pines. Blue jeans. Yellow blouse. Stretching her legs with each stride. Brown arms pumping close to her sides.
The smaller man, in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt, had run wide of his companion, whom he was still trailing, to get a clear line of sight on the woman. He had stopped and raised his arms, holding something in both hands. A handgun. The son of a bitch was shooting at her.
Cops didn’t try to shoot unarmed fugitives in the back. Not righteous cops.
Joe wanted to help her. He couldn’t think of anything to do. If they were cops, he had no right to second-guess them. If they weren’t cops, and even if he could catch up with them, they would probably shoot him down rather than let him interfere.
Crack.
The woman reached the crest.
“Go,” Joe urged her in a hoarse whisper. “Go.”
He didn’t have a cellular phone in his own car, so he couldn’t call 911. He had carried a mobile unit as a reporter, but these days he seldom called anyone even from his home phone.
The keening crack of another shot pierced the leaden heat.
If these men weren’t police officers, they were desperate or crazy, or both, resorting to gunplay in such a public place, even though this part of the cemetery was currently deserted. The sound of the shots would travel, drawing the attention of the maintenance personnel who, merely by closing the formidable iron gate at the entrance to the park, could prevent the gunmen from driving out.
Apparently unhit, the woman disappeared over the top of the hill, into the scrub beyond.
Both of the men in Hawaiian shirts went after her.
4
Heart knocking so fiercely that his vision blurred with each hard-driven surge of blood, Joe Carpenter sprinted to the white van.
The Ford was not a recreational vehicle but a paneled van of the type commonly used by businesses to make small deliveries. Neither the back nor the side of the vehicle featured the name or logo of any enterprise.
The engine was running. Both front doors stood open.
He ran to the passenger side, skidded in a soggy patch of grass around a leaking sprinkler head, and leaned into the cab, hoping to find a cellular phone. If there was one, it wasn’t in plain sight.
Maybe in the glove box. He popped it open.
Someone in the cargo hold behind the front seats, mistaking Joe for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, said, “Did you get Rose?”
Damn.
The glove box contained a few rolls of Life Savers that spilled onto the floor—and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” the guy in the cargo hold demanded.
Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.
He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shoot people in the back as were the other two.
With a clatter and a skreeeek of hinges, the single door at the rear of the vehicle was flung open.
Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.
Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.
Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.
More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another—darker—emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.
If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space, where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on people, he had seized the opportunity with disturbing enthusiasm.
Rubbing the top of his head, which hurt from butting the guy in the face, looking down at the unconscious hulk with the bleeding nose, Joe felt a satisfaction that he did not want to feel. A wild glee simultaneously thrilled and repulsed him.
Dressed in a T-shirt promoting the videogame Quake, baggy black pants, and red sneakers, the fallen man appeared to be in his late twenties, at least a decade younger than his two associates. His hands were massive enough to juggle cantaloupes, and a single letter was tattooed on the base phalange of each finger, thumbs excluded, to spell out ANABOLIC, as in anabolic steroid.
This was no stranger to violence.
Nevertheless, although self-defense justified a preemptive strike, Joe was disturbed by the savage pleasure he took from such swift brutality.
The guy sure didn’t look like an officer of the law. Regardless of his appearance, he might be a cop, in which case assaulting him ensured serious consequences.
To Joe’s surprise, even the prospect of jail didn’t diminish his twisted satisfaction in the ferocity with which he had acted. H
e felt half nauseated, half out of his mind—but more alive than he had been in a year.
Exhilarated yet fearful of the moral depths into which this new empowering anger might take him, he glanced in both directions along the cemetery road. There was no oncoming traffic. He knelt beside his victim.
Breath whistled wetly through the man’s throat, and he issued a soft childlike sigh. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not regain consciousness while his pockets were searched.
Joe found nothing but a few coins, a nail clipper, a set of house keys, and a wallet that contained the standard ID and credit cards. The guy’s name was Wallace Morton Blick. He was carrying no police-agency badge or identification. Joe kept only the driver’s license and returned the wallet to the pocket from which he had extracted it.
The two gunmen had not reappeared from the rugged scrub land beyond the cemetery hill. They had scrambled over the crest, after the woman, little more than a minute ago; even if she quickly slipped away from them, they weren’t likely to give up on her and return after only a brief search.
Wondering at his boldness, Joe quickly dragged Wallace Blick away from the rear corner of the white van. He tucked him close to the flank of the vehicle, where he was less likely to be seen by anyone who came along the roadway. He rolled him onto his side so he would not choke on the blood that might be draining from his nasal passages down the back of his throat.
Joe went to the open rear door. He climbed into the back of the van. The low rumble of the idling engine vibrated in the floorboard.
The cramped cargo hold was lined on both sides with electronic communications, eavesdropping, and tracking equipment. A pair of compact command chairs, bolted to the floor, could be swiveled to face the arrayed devices on each side.
Squeezing past the first chair, Joe settled into the second, in front of an active computer. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, but the seat was still warm because Blick had vacated it less than a minute ago.
On the computer screen was a map. The streets had names meant to evoke feelings of peace and tranquillity, and Joe recognized them as the service roads through the cemetery.
A small blinking light on the map drew his attention. It was green, stationary, and located approximately where the van itself was parked.
A second blinking light, this one red and also stationary, was on the same road but some distance behind the van. He was sure that it represented his Honda.
The tracking system no doubt utilized a CD-ROM with exhaustive maps of Los Angeles County and environs, maybe of the entire state of California or of the country coast to coast. A single compact disc had sufficient capacity to contain detailed street maps for all of the contiguous states and Canada.
Someone had fixed a powerful transponder to his car. It emitted a microwave signal that could be followed from quite a distance. The computer utilized surveillance-satellite uplinks to triangulate the signal, then placed the Honda on the map relative to the position of the van, so they could track him without maintaining visual contact.
Leaving Santa Monica, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, Joe had seen no suspicious vehicle in his rearview mirror. This van had been able to stalk him while streets away or miles behind, out of sight.
As a reporter, he had once gone on a mobile surveillance with federal agents, a group of high-spirited cowboys from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had used a similar but less sophisticated system than this.
Acutely aware that the battered Blick or one of the other two men might trap him here if he delayed too long, Joe swiveled in his chair, surveying the back of the van for some indication of the agency involved in this operation. They were tidy. He couldn’t spot a single clue.
Two publications lay beside the computer station at which Blick had been working: one issue each of Wired, featuring yet another major article about the visionary splendiferousness of Bill Gates, and a magazine aimed at former Special Forces officers who wished to make horizontal career moves from military service into jobs as paid mercenaries. The latter was folded open to an article about belt-buckle knives sharp enough to eviscerate an adversary or cut through bone. Evidently this was Blick’s reading matter during lulls in the surveillance operation, as when he had been waiting for Joe to grow weary of contemplating the sea from Santa Monica Beach.
Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.
When Joe climbed out of the van, Blick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.
Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.
Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.
He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.
The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.
As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.
Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.
He shifted into Reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tires squeal against the hot pavement. The Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into Drive again.
Tick, tick, tick.
Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.
He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.
Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy, pale as a risen corpse, was dressed for a margarita party.
Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky head, like a pit bull wounded in a dogfight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.
Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud, followed by a brief trailing twang.
With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.
Past one burial service, where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service, where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church—a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower—which cast a stunted shadow in the early-afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the memorial park.
He drove under the Ventura Freeway, escaping into the suburban hive of the San Fernando Valley.
At a stoplight, quaking with tension, he watched a procession of a dozen street rods pass through the intersection, drive
n by the members of a car club on a Saturday outing: an era-perfect ’41 Buick Roadmaster, a ’47 Ford Sportsman Woodie with honey-maple paneling and black-cherry maroon paint, a ’32 Ford Roadster in Art Deco style with full road pants and chrome speed lines. Each of the twelve was a testament to the car as art: chopped, channeled, sectioned, grafted, some on dropped spindles, with custom grilles, reconfigured hoods, frenched headlights, raised and flared wheel wells, hand-formed fender skirts. Painted, pinstriped, polished passion rolling on rubber.
Watching the street rods, he felt a curious sensation in his chest, a loosening, a stretching, both painful and exhilarating.
A block later he passed a park where, in spite of the heat, a young family—with three laughing children—was playing Frisbee with an exuberant Golden Retriever.
Heart pounding, Joe slowed the Honda. He almost pulled to the curb to watch.
At a corner, two lovely blond college girls, apparently twins, in white shorts and crisp white blouses, waited to cross the street, holding hands, as cool as spring water in the furnace heat. Mirage girls. Ethereal in the smog-stained concrete landscape. As clean and smooth and radiant as angels.
Past the girls was a massive display of zauschneria alongside a Spanish-style apartment building, laden with gorgeous clusters of tubular scarlet flowers. Michelle had loved zauschneria. She had planted it in the backyard of their Studio City house.
The day had changed. Indefinably but unquestionably changed.
No. No, not the day, not the city. Joe himself had changed, was changing, felt change rolling through him, as irresistible as an ocean tide.
His grief was as great as it had been in the awful loneliness of the night, his despair as deep as he had ever known it, but though he had begun the day sunk in melancholy, yearning for death, he now wanted desperately to live. He needed to live.
The engine that drove this change wasn’t his close brush with death. Being shot at and nearly hit had not opened his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life. Nothing as simple as that.
Anger was the engine of change for him. He was bitterly angry not so much for what he had lost but angry for Michelle’s sake, angry that Michelle had not been able to see the parade of street rods with him, or the masses of red flowers on the zauschneria, or now, here, this colorful riot of purple and red bougainvillea cascading across the roof of a Craftsman-style bungalow. He was furiously, wrenchingly angry that Chrissie and Nina would never play Frisbee with a dog of their own, would never grow up to grace the world with their beauty, would never know the thrill of accomplishment in whatever careers they might have chosen or the joy of a good marriage—or the love of their own children. Rage changed Joe, gnashed at him, bit deep enough to wake him from his long trance of self-pity and despair.
How are you coping? asked the woman photographing the graves.
I’m not ready to talk to you yet, she said.
Soon. I’ll be back when it’s time, she promised, as though she had revelations to make, truths to reveal.
The men in Hawaiian shirts. The computer-nerd thug in the Quake T-shirt. The redhead and the brunette in the thong bikinis. Teams of operatives keeping Joe under surveillance, evidently waiting for the woman to contact him. A van packed solid with satellite-assisted tracking gear, directional microphones, computers, high-resolution cameras. Gunmen willing to shoot him in cold blood because…
Why?
Because they thought the black woman at the graves had told him something he wasn’t supposed to know? Because even being aware of her existence made him dangerous to them? Because they thought he might have come out of their van with enough information to learn their identities and intentions?
Of course he knew almost nothing about them, not who they were or what they wanted with the woman. Nevertheless, he could reach one inescapable conclusion: What he thought he knew about the deaths of his wife and daughters was either wrong or incomplete. Something wasn’t kosher about the story of Nationwide Flight 353.
He didn’t even need journalistic instinct to arrive at this chilling insight. On one level, he had known it from the moment that he saw the woman at the graves. Watching her snap photographs of the plot markers, meeting her compelling eyes, hearing the compassion in her soft voice, racked by the mystery of her words—I’m not ready to talk to you yet—he had known, by virtue of sheer common sense, that something was rotten.
Now, driving through placid Burbank, he seethed with a sense of injustice, treachery. There was a hateful wrongness with the world beyond the mere mechanical cruelty of it. Deception. Deceit. Lies. Conspiracy.
He had argued with himself that being angry with Creation was pointless, that only resignation and indifference offered him relief from his anguish. And he had been right. Raging at the imagined occupant of some celestial throne was wasted effort, as ineffective as throwing stones to extinguish the light of a star.
People, however, were a worthy target of his rage. The people who had concealed or distorted the exact circumstances of the crash of Flight 353.
Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina could never be brought back. Joe’s life could never be made whole again. The wounds in his heart could not be healed. Whatever hidden truth waited to be uncovered, learning it would not give him a future. His life was over, and nothing could ever change that, nothing, but he had a right to know precisely how and exactly why Michelle and Chrissie and Nina had died. He had a sacred obligation to them to learn what had really happened to that doomed 747.
His bitterness was a fulcrum and his rage was a long lever with which he would move the world, the whole damn world, to learn the truth, no matter what