by Dean Koontz
Although happiness is not within his grasp, he experiences an unprecedented gratification, perhaps even satisfaction. As he rolls, rolls, rolls along, he has a taste, the barest taste, of what freedom might be like.
Full night has fallen, but even in darkness, even in alleyways, the world beyond Mercy is filled with more sights, more sounds, more smells than he can process without spinning into panic. Therefore, he looks neither to the left nor the right, focuses on the cart before him, on the sound of its wheels.
He keeps moving.
The shopping cart is like a crossword-puzzle box on wheels, and in it is not merely a collection of aluminum cans and glass bottles but also his hope for happiness, his hatred for Arnie O’Connor.
He keeps moving.
CHAPTER 92
IN THE BUNGALOW of the seashell gate with the unicorn motif, behind the windows flanked by midnight-blue shutters decorated with star shapes and crescent moons, Kathy Burke sat at her kitchen table reading a novel about adventure in a kingdom ruled by wizardry and witchery, eating almond cookies and drinking coffee.
From the corner of her eye, she saw movement and looked up to discover Jonathan Harker standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dark hall.
His face, usually red from the sun or from anger, was whiter than pale. Disheveled, sweating, he looked malarial.
Although his eyes were wild and haunted, although his nervous hands plucked continually at his stretched and saturated T-shirt, he spoke in a meek and ingratiating manner weirdly out of sync with his aggressive entrance and his appearance: “Good evening, Kathleen. How’re you? Busy, I’m sure. Always busy.”
Taking her lead from his tone, Kathy calmly put a bookmark in her novel, slid it aside. “It didn’t have to be this way, Jonathan.”
“Maybe it did. Maybe there was never any hope for me.”
“It’s partly my fault that you are where you are. If you’d stayed in counseling—”
He took a step into the room. “No. I’ve hidden so much from you. I didn’t want you to know…what I am.”
“I’ve been a lousy therapist,” she said by way of ingratiation.
“You’re a good woman, Kathy. A very fine person.”
The weirdness of this exchange—her self-effacement, Harker’s flattery—in light of his recent crimes, was impossible to sustain, and Kathy thought furiously about where the encounter might lead and how best to manage it.
Fate intruded when the phone rang.
They both looked at it.
“I’d prefer you didn’t answer that,” said Harker.
She remained seated and did not challenge him. “If I’d insisted that you keep your appointments, I might have recognized signs that you were…heading for trouble.”
A third ring of the phone.
He nodded. His smile was tortured. “You would have. You’re so insightful, so understanding. That’s why I was afraid to talk with you anymore.”
“Will you sit down, Jonathan?” she asked, indicating the chair across the table from her.
A fifth ring.
“I’m so tired,” he acknowledged, but he made no move toward the chair. “Do I disgust you…what I’ve done?”
Choosing her words carefully, she said, “No. I feel…a kind of grief, I guess.”
After the seventh or eighth ring, the phone fell silent.
“Grief,” she continued, “because I so much liked the man you were…the Jonathan I knew.”
“There’s no going back, is there?”
“I won’t lie to you,” she said.
Harker moved tentatively, almost shyly toward Kathleen. “You’re so complete. I know if only I could look inside you, I’d find what I’m missing.”
Defensively, she rose from her chair. “You know that makes no sense, Jonathan.”
“But what else can I do but…keep looking?”
“I only want what’s best for you. Do you believe that?”
“I guess…Yes, I do.”
She took a deep breath, took a risk: “Then will you let me call someone, make arrangements to turn you in?”
For an anguished moment, Harker looked around the kitchen as if he were trapped. He might have snapped then, but his tension subsided into anxiety.
Sensing that she was winning him over to surrender, Kathy said, “Let me call someone. Let me do the right thing.”
He considered her offer for a moment. “No. No, that wouldn’t be a good thing.”
He looked across the kitchen, intrigued by something.
When Kathy followed the direction of his gaze, she saw the knife rack filled with gleaming blades.
LEAVING HARKER'S APARTMENT, Michael hadn’t made any attempt to get behind the wheel. He tossed the keys to Carson.
He rode shotgun—literally, holding the weapon between his knees, the muzzle toward the ceiling.
By habit, as they rocketed through the night, he said, “Stop trying for the land-speed record. The dispatcher will have someone there ahead of us, anyway.”
Accelerating, Carson came back at him: “Did you say something, Michael? ‘Yes, Carson, I said, Faster, faster.’ Yeah, that’s what I thought you said, Michael.”
“You do a lousy imitation of me,” he complained. “You’re not nearly funny enough.”
WITH ONE HAND on his abdomen, as if suffering a stomachache, Harker prowled the kitchen, moving toward the knife rack and then away, but then toward it once more. “Something’s happening,” he said worriedly. “Maybe it’s not going to be like I thought it would.”
“What’s wrong?” Kathy asked warily.
“Maybe it’s not going to be good. Not good at all. Something’s coming.”
Abruptly his face wrenched with pain. He let out a strangled cry and clasped both hands to his abdomen.
“Jonathan?”
“I’m splitting.”
Kathy heard tires squeal and brakes bark as a fast car pulled to a stop in her driveway.
Looking toward the sound, terror trumping his pain, Harker said, “Father?”
INSTEAD OF THE WALK-in unicorn gate, Carson favored the driveway and slid to a stop so close to the garage door that even a wizard couldn’t have charmed himself thin enough to fit between the building and the sedan’s bumper.
She pulled her piece from her paddle holster as she exited the car, and Michael chambered a shell in the shotgun as he came around the back of the car to join her.
The front door of the house flew open, and Kathy Burke ran onto the porch, down the steps.
“Thank God,” Carson said.
“Harker went out the back,” Kathy said.
Even as she spoke, Carson heard running footsteps and turned, seeking the sound.
Harker had come along the farther side of the garage. He was off the lawn, into the street, before Carson could draw down on him.
By now he was in too public an area—houses across the street—to allow her to take a shot. The risk of collateral damage was too high.
Michael ran, Carson ran, Harker ahead of them, down the middle of the residential street.
In spite of the doughnuts and the grab-it dinners eaten on their feet, in spite of the ass-fattening time spent at desks filling out the nine yards of paperwork that had become the bane of modern police work, Carson and Michael were fast, movie-cop fast, wolf-on-a-rabbit fast.
Harker, being inhuman, being some freak brewed up in a lab by Victor Frankenstein, was faster. Along Kathy’s block to the corner and left into another street, along another block and right at the next corner, he opened up his lead.
Lightning tore the sky, magnolia shadows jumped across the pavement, and a blast of thunder rocked the city so hard that Carson thought she could feel it rumbling in the ground, but the rain did not fall at once, held off.
They traded the neighborhood of bungalows for low-rise office and apartment buildings.
Harker ran like a marathon man on meth, moving away, away—and then mid-block he made the mistake of veeri
ng into an alleyway that proved to dead-end in a wall.
He came to the eight-foot-high brick barrier, flung himself at it, scrambled up like a monkey on a stick, but abruptly screamed as if torn by horrendous pain. He fell off the wall, rolled, sprang at once to his feet.
Carson shouted at him to freeze, as if there were a hope in hell that he would, but she had to go through the motions.
He went at the wall again, leaped, grabbed the top, too fast for her to sight on him, and clambered over.
“Get out in front of him!” she shouted to Michael, and he raced back the way they had come, looking for a different route into the street beyond the wall.
She holstered her pistol, dragged a half-filled garbage can to the end of the alley, climbed onto it, gripped the top of the wall with both hands, levered up, got a leg over.
Although she was sure that Harker would have escaped, Carson discovered that he had fallen again. He was lying faceup in the street, wriggling like a snake with a broken back.
If their kind could turn off pain in a crisis, as Deucalion claimed, either Harker had forgotten that option or something was so wrong with him that he had no control of it.
As she came off the wall, he got to his feet again, staggering toward an intersection.
They were near the waterfront. Ship-chandlers’ offices, ship brokerages, mostly warehouses. No traffic at this hour, businesses dark, streets silent.
At the intersection, Michael appeared in the street ahead.
Trapped between Carson and Michael, Harker turned toward the alleyway on the left, which led toward the waterfront, but it was fenced to twelve feet, with a wide padlocked gate, so he veered toward the front of a warehouse.
When Michael closed on him with the shotgun, Carson held back, giving him a clear approach.
Harker built speed toward the man-door at the front of the warehouse, as if he didn’t see it.
Following the usual protocol, Michael shouted for Harker to stop, to drop, to put his hands behind his head.
When Harker hit the door, it held, and he screamed, but he didn’t bounce off and go down as he ought to have done. He seemed to stick to it.
The crash of impact was followed at once by Harker’s cry of rage and the shriek of tortured metal.
Michael shouted again, five steps from point-blank position.
The warehouse door sagged. Hinges snapped with reports as loud as gunshots. The door went down, and Harker disappeared inside just as Michael halted and brought the 12-gauge into firing position.
Carson joined him at the entrance. “He’s going to try to get out the back.”
Once Harker was on the waterfront—the docks, the boats, the cargo esplanade—there were a thousand ways for him to disappear.
Offering Michael her pistol, grip first, she said, “You two-gun him at the back when he comes out. Gimme the shotgun, and I’ll move him through to you.”
This made sense because Michael was taller than she, stronger, and therefore could scale the twelve-foot alleyway fence faster than she could.
He took her pistol, gave her the shotgun. “Watch your ass. I’d hate for anything to happen to it.”
The mantle of the black sky cracked. Volcanic blaze of light, volcanic boom. At last the pent-up rain fell in a volume to inspire ark builders.
CHAPTER 93
TO THE RIGHT of the broken door, Carson found switches. Light revealed a reception area. Gray-tile floor, pale-blue walls. A few chairs. Low railings to the left and right, desks beyond.
Directly ahead was a service counter. At the left end, a gate stood open.
Harker might have been crouched against the farther side of the counter, waiting for her, but she doubted she would find him there. His priority wasn’t to waste her, just to get away.
She cleared the gate fast, swiveling the 12-gauge to cover the area behind the counter. No Harker.
A door stood ajar behind the clerical pen. She pushed it open with the shotgun barrel.
Enough light came from behind her to reveal a short hallway. No Harker. Deserted.
She stepped inside, flicked on the hall light. She listened but heard only the thunder and the insistent crash of rain on the roof.
To each side stood a door. Signs identified them as men’s and women’s lavatories.
Harker wouldn’t have stopped to take a pee, wash his hands, or admire himself in a mirror.
Assuring herself that he would have no desire to get behind her and take her by surprise, that he only wanted to escape, Carson went past the lavatories toward another door at the end of the hall.
She glanced back twice. No Harker.
The end door featured a traffic-check window through which she saw darkness beyond.
Conscious that she was a backlit target as long as she lingered on the threshold, Carson cleared it fast and low, scanning left and right in the flush of light that accompanied her. No Harker.
The door fell shut, leaving her in darkness. She backed up against the wall, felt the switches pressing into her back, slid aside, held the 12-gauge with one hand, snapped on the lights.
Suspended from the thirty-foot ceiling, a series of lights in cone-shaped shades revealed a large warehouse with goods stacked on pallets to a height of twenty feet. A maze.
She turned right across the open ends of the aisles, looking into each. No Harker. No Harker. No Harker. Harker.
Thirty feet from the mouth of the aisle, moving away from her, Harker hobbled as if in pain, bent forward, cradling his torso with both arms.
Thinking of the people he’d sliced open, thinking of the makeshift autopsy table in his bedroom, where he had been prepared to dissect Jenna Parker, Carson went after him with no intention of cutting him any slack. Closing to within twenty feet before shouting his name, she brought up the shotgun, finger on the trigger rather than on the guard.
If he dropped like he should, she’d cover him, use her cell phone to get Michael, get backup.
Harker turned to face her. His wet hair hung over his face. The shape of his body seemed…wrong.
The son of a bitch didn’t drop. From him came the eeriest sound that she had ever heard: part a cry of agony, part excited laughter, part an expression of brute rage.
She fired.
The pellets hit him in a tight group, where his cradling arms crossed his abdomen. Blood sprayed.
So fast that it seemed as if he were not a real figure but one in a time-lapse film, Harker clambered up a wall of crates, out of the aisle.
Carson chambered another round, tracked him as if he were a clay disk in a skeet shoot, and blew a chunk off the top crate, missing him as he vanished over the palisade.
SAYING A PRAYER for the family jewels, Michael jammed Carson’s pistol into his waistband, scaled the fence at the mouth of the alleyway, wincing as an ax of lightning chopped the night, figuring it would whack the steel chain-link and electrocute him.
He got over the fence, into the alley, unfried, and ran through drenching rain and the rolling echoes of thunder to the rear of the warehouse.
A concrete ramp led up to the loading dock at the back. A big roll-up door and a man-door served that deep platform. Harker would come out of the smaller door.
He drew Carson’s pistol but left his own holstered. He was not literally going to two-gun the fugitive, one pistol in each hand. For the best possible placement of shots, he needed a two-hand grip on the weapon.
If as advertised Harker proved to be as hard to bring down as a charging rhino, Michael might empty a magazine trying to pop both his hearts. If after that Harker was still on the move, there would not be time to eject a magazine and slap in a fresh one. He’d drop Carson’s piece, draw his own, and hope for the kill with the next ten rounds.
Embracing this strategy, Michael realized that although the Frankenstein story seemed like a can of Spam, he had gone for it as eagerly as if it had been filet mignon.
Inside, the 12-gauge boomed. Almost at once, it boomed again.
Thrusting one hand into his jacket pocket, he felt spare shotgun shells. He’d forgotten to give them to Carson. She had one round in the breach, three in the magazine. Now only two left.
The 12-gauge boomed again.
She was down to one round, with no backup handgun.
Waiting for Harker on the loading dock wasn’t a workable plan any longer.
Michael tried the man-door. It was locked, of course, but worse, it was steel plate, resistant to forced entry, with three deadbolts.
Movement startled him. He reeled back and discovered Deucalion at his side—tall, tattooed, totemic in the lightning.
“Where the hell—”
“I understand locks,” Deucalion interrupted.
Instead of applying the finesse his words implied, the huge man grabbed the door handle, wrenched it so hard that all three of the lock assemblies pulled out of the steel frame with a pop-crack-shriek of tortured metal, and threw the torqued door onto the loading dock.
“What the hell,” Michael asked, “was that?”
“Criminal trespass,” Deucalion said, and disappeared into the warehouse.
CHAPTER 94
WHEN MICHAEL FOLLOWED Deucalion into the warehouse, the giant wasn’t there. Whatever he might be, the guy gave new meaning to the word elusive.
Calling out to Carson would alert Harker. Besides, the storm was louder in here than outside, almost deafening: Rain roared against the corrugated metal roof.
Crates of various sizes, barrels, and cubes of shrink-wrapped merchandise formed a labyrinth of daunting size. Michael hesitated only briefly, then went searching for the minotaur.
He found hundreds of hermetically sealed fifty-gallon drums of vitamin capsules in bulk, crated machine parts, Japanese audio-video gear, cartons of sporting equipment—and one deserted aisle after another.
Frustration built until he thought maybe he would shoot up a few boxes that claimed to contain Kung Fu Elmo dolls, just to relieve the tension. If they had been Barney the Dinosaur dolls, he would more likely have acted on the impulse.