Whispers

by Dean Koontz

  torn shirts and ruined suits. But now that the bathroom door had been opened, they could not escape the odor without leaving the room altogether, so they went into the hallway.

  “Whoever did this really hates Bobby,” Frank said.

  “So you no longer think Bobby did it to himself?”

  “Why would he? It doesn’t make sense. Christ, this is about as weird as they come. The hairs are up on the back of my neck.”

  “Spooky,” Tony agreed.

  His stomach muscles were still painfully cramped with tension, and his heart was thumping only slightly slower than it had been when they’d first crept into the apartment.

  They were both silent for a moment, listening for the footsteps of ghosts.

  Tony watched a small brown spider as it climbed the corridor wall.

  Finally Frank put his gun away and took out his handkerchief and wiped his sweat-streaked face.

  Tony holstered his own revolver and said, “We can’t just leave it like this and put a stakeout on the place. I mean, we’ve gone too far for that. We’ve found too much that needs explaining.”

  “Agreed,” Frank said. “We’ll have to call for assistance, get a warrant, and run a thorough search.”

  “Drawer by drawer.”

  “What do you think we’ll find?”

  “God knows.”

  “I saw a phone in the kitchen,” Frank said.

  Frank led the way down the hall to the living room, then around the corner, into the kitchen. Before Tony could follow him across the threshold from the dining area, Frank said, “Oh, Jesus,” and tried to back out of the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Even as Tony spoke, something cracked loudly.

  Frank cried out and fell sideways and clutched at the edge of a counter, trying to stay on his feet.

  Another sharp crack slammed through the apartment, echoing from wall to wall, and Tony realized it was gunfire.

  But the kitchen had been deserted!

  Tony reached for his revolver, and he had the peculiar feeling he was moving in slow-motion while the rest of the world rushed past in frantic double time.

  The second shot took Frank in the shoulder and spun him around. He crashed down into the mess of maraschino cherry juice and dry spaghetti and cornflakes and glass.

  As Frank dropped out of the way, Tony was able to see beyond him for the first time, and he spotted Bobby Valdez. He was wriggling out of the cupboard space under the sink, a spot they hadn’t thought to investigate because it looked too small to conceal a man. Bobby was squirming and slithering out of there like a snake from a tight hole. Only his legs were still under the sink; he was on his side, pulling himself out with one arm, holding a .32 pistol in his other hand. He was naked. He looked sick. His eyes were huge, wild, dilated, sunken in rings of puffy dark flesh. His face was shockingly pale, his lips bloodless. Tony took in all of those details in a fraction of a second, with senses sharpened by a flood of adrenaline.

  Frank was just hitting the floor, and Tony was still reaching for his revolver when Bobby fired a third time. The bullet whacked into the edge of the archway. An explosion of plaster chips stung Tony’s face.

  He threw himself backward and down, twisting as he went, struck the floor too hard with his shoulder, gasped in pain, and rolled out of the dining area, out of the line of fire. He scrambled behind a chair in the living room and finally got his gun out of its holster.

  Perhaps six or seven seconds had passed since Bobby had fired the first shot.

  Someone was saying, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” in a quivering, high-pitched voice.

  Suddenly, Tony realized he was listening to himself. He bit his lip and fought off an attack of hysteria.

  He now knew what had been bothering him; he knew what they had overlooked. Bobby Valdez was selling PCP, and that should have told them something when they saw the state of the apartment. They should have remembered that pushers were sometimes stupid enough to use what they sold. PCP, also called angel dust, was an animal tranquilizer that had a fairly predictable effect upon horses and bulls. But when people took the stuff, their reactions ranged from placid trances to weird hallucinations to unexpected fits of rage and violence. As Eugene Tucker said, PCP was poison; it literally ate away at brain cells, rotted the mind. Supercharged on PCP, bursting with perverse energy, Bobby had smashed up his kitchen and had done all the other damage in the apartment. Pursued by fierce but imaginary crocodiles, desperately seeking refuge from their snapping jaws, he had squirmed into the cupboard under the sink and had pulled the doors shut. Tony hadn’t thought to look in the cupboard because he hadn’t realized they were stalking a raving lunatic. They had searched the apartment with caution, prepared for the moves that might be expected of a mentally-disturbed rapist and incidental killer, but unprepared for the bizarre actions of a gibbering madman. The mindless destruction evident in the kitchen and master bedroom, the apparently senseless writing on the walls, the disgusting mess in the bathroom—all of those were familiar indications of PCP-induced hysteria. Tony never served on the narcotics squad, but, nevertheless, he felt he should have recognized those signs. If he had interpreted them properly, he most likely would have checked under the sink, as well as anywhere else conceivably big enough for a man to hide, even if the quarters would be brutally uncomfortable; for it was not uncommon for a person on an extremely ugly PCP trip to surrender totally to his paranoia and try to hide from a hostile world, especially in cramped, dark, womblike places. But he and Frank misinterpreted the clues, and now they were up to their necks in trouble.

  Frank had been shot twice. He was badly hurt. Maybe dying. Maybe dead.

  No!

  Tony tried to push that thought out of his mind as he cast about for a way to seize the initiative from Bobby.

  In the kitchen Bobby began to scream in genuine terror. “Hay muchos cocodrilos!”

  Tony translated: There are many crocodiles!

  “Cocodrilos! Cocodrilos! Cocodrilos! Ah! Ah! Ahhhhh!” His repeated cry of alarm swiftly degenerated into a wordless wail of agony.

  He sounds as if he’s really being eaten alive, Tony thought, shivering.

  Still screaming, Bobby rushed out of the kitchen. He fired the .32 into the floor, apparently trying to kill one of the crocodiles.

  Tony crouched behind the chair. He was afraid that, if he stood up and took aim, he would be cut down before he could pull the trigger.

  Doing a frantic little jig, trying to keep his bare feet out of the mouths of the crocodiles, Bobby fired into the floor once, twice.

  Six shots so far, Tony thought. Three in the kitchen, three here. How many in the clip? Eight? Maybe ten.

  Bobby fired again, twice, three times. One of the bullets ricocheted off something.

  Nine shots had been fired. One more to go.

  “Cocodrilos!”

  The tenth shot boomed deafeningly in the enclosed space, and again the bullet ricocheted with a sharp whistle.

  Tony stood up from his hiding place. Bobby was less than ten feet away. Tony held the service revolver in both hands, the muzzle lined up on the naked man’s hairless chest. “Okay, Bobby. Be cool. It’s all over.”

  Bobby seemed surprised to see him. Clearly, he was so deeply into his PCP hallucinations that he didn’t remember seeing Tony in the kitchen archway less than a minute ago.

  “Crocodiles,” Bobby said urgently, in English this time.

  “There are no crocodiles,” Tony said.

  “Big ones.”

  “No. There aren’t any crocodiles.”

  Bobby squealed and jumped and whirled and tried to shoot at the floor, but his pistol was empty.

  “Bobby,” Tony said.

  Whimpering, Bobby turned and looked at him.

  “Bobby, I want you to lay face-down on the floor.”

  “They’ll get me,” Bobby said. His eyes were bulging out of his head; the dark irises were rimmed with wide circles of white. He
was trembling violently. “They’ll eat me.”

  “Listen to me, Bobby. Listen carefully. There are no crocodiles. You’re hallucinating them. It’s all inside your head. You hear me?”

  “They came out of the toilets,” Bobby said shakily. “And out of the shower drains. And the sink drain, too. Oh, man, they’re big. They’re real big. And they’re all trying to bite off my cock.” His fear began to turn to anger; his pale face flushed, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a wolflike snarl. “I won’t let them. I won’t let them bite off my cock. I’ll kill all of them!”

  Tony was frustrated by his inability to get through to Bobby, and his frustration was exacerbated by the knowledge that Frank might be bleeding to death, getting weaker by the second, in desperate need of immediate medical attention. Deciding to enter into Bobby’s dark fantasy in order to control it, Tony spoke in a soft and reassuring voice: “Listen to me. All of those crocodiles have crawled back into the toilets and the drains. Didn’t you see them going? Didn’t you hear them sliding down the pipes and out of the building? They saw that we’d come to help you, and they knew they were outnumbered. Every one of them has gone away.”

  Bobby stared at him with glassy eyes that were less than human.

  “They’ve all gone away,” Tony said.

  “Away?”

  “None of them can hurt you now.”

  “Liar.”

  “No. I’m telling the truth. All of the crocodiles have gone down the—”

  Bobby threw his empty pistol.

  Tony ducked under it.

  “You rotten cop son of a bitch.”

  “Hold it, Bobby.”

  Bobby started toward him.

  Tony backstepped away from the naked man.

  Bobby didn’t walk around the chair. He angrily pushed it aside, knocked it over, even though it was quite heavy.

  Tony remembered that a man in an angel dust rage often exhibited superhuman strength. It was not uncommon for four or five burly policemen to have difficulty restraining one puny PCP junkie. There were several medical theories about the cause of this freakish increase in physical power, but no theory was of any help to an officer confronted by a raging man with the strength of five or six. Tony figured he probably wouldn’t be able to subdue Bobby Valdez with anything less than the revolver, even though he was philosophically opposed to using that ultimate force.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” Bobby said. His hands were curled into claws. His face was bright red, and spittle formed at one corner of his mouth.

  Tony put the big octagonal coffee table between them. “Stop right there, dammit!”

  He didn’t want to have to kill Bobby Valdez. In all his years with the LAPD, he had shot only three men in the line of duty, and on every occasion he had pulled the trigger strictly in self-defense. None of those three men had died.

  Bobby started around the coffee table.

  Tony circled away from him.

  “Now, I’m the crocodile,” Bobby said, grinning.

  “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Bobby stopped and grabbed hold of the coffee table and tipped it up, over, out of the way, and Tony backed into a wall, and Bobby rushed him, shouting something unintelligible, and Tony pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore through Bobby’s left shoulder, spinning him around, driving him to his knees, but incredibly, he got up again, his left arm all bloody and hanging uselessly at his side, and, screaming in anger rather than agony, he ran to the fireplace and picked up a small brass shovel and threw it, and Tony ducked, and then suddenly Bobby was rushing at him with an iron poker raised high, and the damned thing caught Tony across the thigh, and he yelped as pain flashed up his hip and down his leg, but the blow wasn’t hard enough to break bones, and he didn’t collapse, but he did drop down as Bobby swung it again, at his head this time, with more power behind it this time, and Tony fired up into the naked man’s chest, at close range, and Bobby was flung backwards with one last wild cry, and he crashed into a chair, then fell to the floor, gushing blood like a macabre fountain, twitched, gurgled, clawed at the shag carpet, bit his own wounded arm, and finally was perfectly still.

  Gasping, shaking, cursing, Tony holstered his revolver and stumbled to a telephone he’d spotted on one of the end tables. He dialed 0 and told the operator who he was, where he was, and what he needed. “Ambulance first, police second,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  He hung up and limped into the kitchen.

  Frank Howard was still sprawled on the floor, in the garbage. He had managed to roll onto his back, but he hadn’t gotten any farther.

  Tony knelt beside him.

  Frank opened his eyes. “You hurt?” he asked weakly.

  “No,” Tony said.

  “Get him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  Frank looked terrible. His face was milk-white, greasy with sweat. The whites of his eyes had an unhealthy yellowish cast that had not been there before, and the right eye was badly bloodshot. There was a hint of blue in his lips. The right shoulder and sleeve of his suit coat were soaked with blood. His left hand was clamped over his stomach wound, but a lot of blood had leaked from under his pale fingers; his shirt and the upper part of his trousers were wet and sticky.

  “How’s the pain?” Tony asked.

  “At first, it was real bad. Couldn’t stop screaming. But it’s starting to get better. Just kind of a dull burning and thumping now.”

  Tony’s attention had been focused so totally on Bobby Valdez that he hadn’t heard Frank’s screams.

  “Would a tourniquet on your arm help at all?”

  “No. The wound’s too high. In the shoulder. There’s no place to put a tourniquet.”

  “Help’s on the way,” Tony said. “I phoned in.”

  Outside, sirens wailed in the distance. It was too soon to be an ambulance or a black-and-white responding to his call. Someone must have phoned the police when the shooting started.

  “That’ll be a couple of uniforms,” Tony said. “I’ll go down and meet them. They’ll have a pretty good first aid kit in the cruiser.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “But if they’ve got a first aid kit—”

  “I need more than first aid. Don’t leave me,” Frank repeated pleadingly.

  “Okay.”

  “Please.”

  “Okay, Frank.”

  They were both shivering.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” Frank said.

  “I’ll stay right here.”

  “I tried to sit up,” Frank said.

  “You just lay there.”

  “I couldn’t sit up.”

  “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Maybe I’m paralyzed.”

  “Your body’s taken a hell of a shock, that’s all. You’ve lost some blood. Naturally, you’re weak.”

  The sirens moaned into silence outside of the apartment complex.

  “The ambulance can’t be far behind,” Tony said.

  Frank closed his eyes, winced, groaned.

  “You’ll be okay, buddy.”

  Frank opened his eyes. “Come to the hospital with me.”

  “I will.”

  “Ride in the ambulance with me.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll let me.”

  “Make them.”

  “All right. Sure.”

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Okay,” Tony said. “I’ll make them let me in the damned ambulance even if I have to pull a gun on them to do it.”

  Frank smiled thinly, but then a flash of pain burned the smile off his face. “Tony?”

  “What is it, Frank?”

  “Would you . . . hold my hand?”

  Tony took his partner’s right hand. The right shoulder was the one that had taken the bullet, and Tony thought Frank would have no use of that extremity, but the cold fingers closed aroun
d Tony’s hand with surprising strength.

  “You know what?” Frank asked.

  “What?”

  “You should do what he says.”

  “What who says?”

  “Eugene Tucker. You should jump off. Take a chance. Do what you really want with your life.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You’ve got to save your energy for getting better.”

  Frank grew agitated. He shook his head. “No, no, no. You’ve got to listen to me. This is important . . . what I’m trying to tell you. Damned important.”

  “Okay,” Tony said quickly. “Relax. Don’t strain yourself.”

  Frank coughed, and a few bubbles of blood appeared on his bluish lips.

  Tony’s heart was working like a runaway triphammer. Where was the goddamned ambulance? What the hell was taking the lousy bastards so long?

  Frank’s voice had a hoarse note in it now, and he was forced to pause repeatedly to draw breath. “If you want to be a painter . . . then do it. You’re still young enough . . . to take a chance.”

  “Frank, please, for God’s sake, save your strength.”

  “Listen to me! Don’t waste any more . . . time. Life’s too goddamned short . . . to fiddle away any of it.”

  “Stop talking like that. I’ve got a lot of years ahead, and so do you.”

  “They go by so fast . . . so fucking fast. It’s no time at all.”

  Frank gasped. His fingers tightened their already firm grip on Tony’s hand.

  “Frank? What’s wrong?”

  Frank didn’t say anything. He shuddered. Then he began to cry.

  Tony said, “Let me see about that first aid kit.”

  “Don’t leave me. I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll only be gone a minute.”

  “Don’t leave me.” Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Okay. I’ll wait. They’ll be here in a few seconds.”