Dean Koontz - (1989)
Page 9
Moonlight Cove police force, straddled the ditch, one foot on each bank,
and took a photograph of Eddie Valdoski For an instant the boy's glazed
eyes were silvery with a reflection of the flash.
Loman's growing inability to feel was, strangely, the one thing that
evoked strong feelings It scared the shit out of him. Lately he was
increasingly frightened by his emotional detachment, an unwanted but
apparently irreversible hardening of the heart that would soon leave him
with auricles of marble and ventricles of common stone.
He was one of the New People now, different in many ways from the man he
had once been. He still looked the same five-ten, squarely built, with
a broad and remarkably innocent face for a man in his line of work-but
he wasn't only what he appeared to be. Perhaps a greater control of
emotions, a more stable and analytical outlook, was an unanticipated
benefit of the Change. But was that really beneficial? Not to feel? Not
to grieve?
Though the night was chilly, sour sweat broke out on his face, the back
of his neck, and under his arms.
Dr. Ian Fitzgerald, the coroner, was busy elsewhere, but Victor Callan,
owner of Callan's Funeral Home and the assistant coroner, was helping
another officer, Jules Timmerman, scour the ground between the ditch and
the nearby woods. They were looking for clues that the killer might
have left behind.
Actually they were just putting on a show for the benefit of the score
of area residents who had gathered on the far side of the road. Even if
clues were found, no one would be arrested for the crime. No trial
would ever take place. If they found Eddie's killer, they would cover
for him and deal with him in their own way, in order to conceal the
existence of the New People from those who had not yet undergone the
Change. Because without doubt the killer was what Thomas Shaddack
called a "regressive," one of the New People gone bad. Very bad.
Loman turned away from the dead boy. He walked back along the county
road, toward the Valdoski house, which was a few hundred yards north and
veiled in mist.
He ignored the onlookers, although one of them called to him "Chief?
What the hell's going on, Chief'.?"
This was a semirural area barely within the town limits. The houses
were widely separated, and their scattered lights did little to hold
back the night. Before he was halfway to the Vaidoski place, though he
was within hailing distance of the men at the - 63 crime scene, he felt
isolated. Trees, tortured by ages of sea wind on nights far less calm
than this one, bent toward the two-lane road, their scraggly branches
overhanging the gravel shoulder on which he walked. He kept imagining
movement in the dark boughs above him, and in the blackness and fog
between the twisted trunks of the trees.
He put his hand on the butt of the revolver that was holstered at his
side.
Loman Watkins had been the chief of police in Moonlight Cove for nine
years, and in the past month more blood had been spilled in his
jurisdiction than in the entire preceding eight years and eleven months.
He was convinced that worse was coming. He had a hunch that the
regressives were more numerous and more of a problem that Shaddack
realized-or was willing to admit.
He feared the regressives almost as much as he feared his own new, cool,
dispassionate perspective.
Unlike happiness and grief and joy and sorrow, stark fear was a survival
mechanism, so perhaps he would not lose touch with it as thoroughly as
he was losing touch with other emotions. That thought made him as
uneasy as did the phantom movement in the trees.
Is fear, he wondered, the only emotion that will thrive in this brave
new world we're making?
After a greasy cheeseburger, soggy fries, and an icy bottle of Dos
Equis in the deserted coffee shop at Cove Lodge, Tessa Lockland returned
to her room, propped herself up in bed with pillows, and called her
mother in San Diego. Marion answered the phone on the first ring, and
Tessa said, "Hi, Mom."
"Where are you, Teejay?
" As a kid, Tessa could never decide whether she wanted to be called by
her first name or her middle, Jane, so her mother always called her by
her initials, as if that were a name in itself.
"Cove Lodge," Tessa said.
"Is it nice?"
"It's the best I could find. This isn't a town that worries about
having first-rate tourist facilities. If it didn't have such a
spectacular view, Cove Lodge is one of those places that would be able
to survive only by showing closed-circuit porn movies on the TV and
renting rooms by the hour.
"Is it clean?"
" Reasonably. If it wasn't clean, I'd insist you move out right now."
"Mom, when I'm on location, shooting a film, I don't always have luxury
accommodations, you know. When I did that documentary on the Miskito
Indians in Central America, I went on hunts with them and slept in the
mud."
"Teejay, dear, you must never tell people that you slept in the mud.
Pigs sleep in the mud. You must say you roughed it or camped out, but
never that you slept in the mud. Even unpleasant experiences can be
worthwhile if one keeps one's sense of dignity and style."
"Yes, Mom, I know. My point was that Cove Lodge isn't great, but it's
better than sleeping in the mud."
"Camping out."
"Better than camping out," Tessa said.
Both were silent a moment. Then Marion said, "Dammit, I should be there
with you."
"Mom, you've got a broken leg."
"I should have gone to Moonlight Cove as soon as I heard they'd found
poor Janice. If I'd been there, they wouldn't have cremated the body.
By God, they wouldn't! I'd have stopped that, and I'd have arranged
another autopsy by trustworthy authorities, and now there'd be no need
for you to get involved. I'm so angry with myself.
" Tessa slumped back in the pillows and sighed.
"Mom, don't do this to yourself. You broke your leg three days before
Janice's body was even found. You can't travel easily now, and you
couldn't travel easily then, either. It's not your fault. There was a
time when a broken leg couldn't have stopped me.
- 65 "You're not twenty any more, Mom."
"Yes, I know, I'm old," Marion said miserably.
"Sometimes I think about how old I am, and it's scary."
"You're only sixty-four, you look not a day past fifty, and you broke
your leg skydiving, for God's sake, so you're not going to get any pity
from me."
"Comfort and pity is what an elderly parent expects from a good
daughter. If you caught me calling you elderly or treating you with
pity, you'd kick my ass halfway to China."
"The chance to kick a daughter's ass now and then is one of the
pleasures of a mother's later life, Teejay. Damn, where did that tree
come from, anyway? I've been skydiving for thirty years, and I've never
landed in a tree before, and I swear it wasn't there when I looked down
on the final approa
ch to pick my drop spot."
Though a certain amount of the Lockland family's unshakable optimism and
spirited approach to life came from Tessa's late father, Bernard, a
large measure of it-with a full measure of indomitability as well-flowed
from Marion's gene pool.
Tessa said, "Tonight, just after I got here, I went down to the beach
where they found her."
"This must be awful for you, Teejay.
"I can handle it."
When Janice died, Tessa had been traveling in rural regions of
Afghanistan, researching the effects of genocidal war on the Afghan
people and culture, intending to script a documentary on that subject.
Her mother had been unable to get word of Janice's death to Tessa until
two weeks after the body washed upon the shore of Moonlight Cove. Five
days ago, on October 8, she had flown out of Afghanistan with a sense of
having failed her sister somehow. Her load of guilt was at least as
heavy as her mother's, but what she said was true She could handle it.
"You were right, Mom. The official version stinks."
"What've you learned?"
"Nothing yet. But I stood right there on the sand, where she was
supposed to have taken the Valium, where she set out on her last swim,
where they found her two days later, and I knew their whole story was
garbage. I feel it in my guts, Mom. And one way or another, I'm going
to find out what really happened."
"You've got to be careful, dear."
"I will."
"If Janice was . . . murdered "I'll be okay."
"And if, as we suspect, the police up there can't be trusted . . . Mom,
I'm five feet four, blond, blue-eyed, perky, and about as
dangerous-looking as a Disney chipmunk. All my life I've had to work
against my looks to be taken seriously. Women all want to mother me or
be my big sister, and men either want to be my father or get me in the
sack, but damned few can see immediately through the exterior and
realize I've got a brain that is, I strongly believe, bigger than that
of a gnat; usually they have to know me a while. So I'll just use my
appearance instead of struggling against it. No one here will see me as
a threat."
"You'll stay in touch?"
"Of course."
"If you feel you're in danger, just leave, get out."
"I'll be all right."
"Promise you won't stay if it's dangerous," Marion persisted.
"I promise. But you have to promise me that you won't jump out of any
more airplanes for a while."
"I'm too old for that, dear. I'm elderly now. Ancient. I'm going to
have to pursue interests suitable to my age. I've always wanted to
learn to water-ski, for instance, and that documentary you did on
dirt-bike racing made those little motorcycles look like so much fun."
"I love you to pieces, Mom."
"I love you, Teejay. More than life itself."
"I'll make them pay for Janice."
"If there's anyone who deserves to pay. Just remember, Teejay, that our
Janice is gone, but you're still here, and your first allegiance should
never be to the dead."
George Valdoski sat at the formica-topped kitchen table. Though his
work-scarred hands were clasped tightly around a glass of whiskey, he
could not prevent them from trembling; the surface of the amber bourbon
shivered constantly.
When Loman Watkins entered and closed the door behind him, George didn't
even look up. Eddie had been his only child.
George was tall, solid in the chest and shoulders. Thanks to deeply and
closely set eyes, a thin-lipped mouth, and sharp features, he had a
hard, mean look in spite of his general handsomeness. His forbidding
appearance was deceptive, however, for he was a sensitive man,
soft-spoken and kind.
"How you doing'?" Loman asked.
George bit his lower lip and nodded as if to say that he would get
through this nightmare, but he did not meet Loman's eyes.
"I'll look in on Nella," Loman said.
This time George didn't even nod.
As Loman crossed the too-bright kitchen, his hard-soled shoes squeaked
on the linoleum floor. He paused at the doorway to the small dining
room and looked back at his friend.
"We'll find the bastard, George. I swear we will."
At last George looked up from the whiskey. Tears shimmered in his eyes,
but he would not let them flow. He was a proud, hardheaded Pole,
determined to be strong. He said, "Eddie was playin' in the backyard
toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you could see
him if you looked out any window, right in his own yard. When Nelia
called him for supper just after dark, when he didn't come or answer, we
thought he'd gone to one of the neighbors' to play with some other kids,
without asking like he should've." He had related all of this before,
more than once, but he seemed to need to go over it again and again, as
if repetition would wear down the ugly reality and thereby change it as
surely as ten thousand playings of a tape cassette would eventually
scrape away the music and leave a hiss of white noise.
"We started looking' for him, couldn't find him, wasn't scared at first;
in fact we were a little angry with him; but then we got worried and
then scared, and I was just about to call you for help when we found him
there in the ditch, sweet Jesus, all torn up in the ditch.
" He took a deep breath and another, and the pent-up tears glistened
brightly in his eyes.
"What kind of monster would do that to a child, take him away somewhere
and do that, and then be cruel enough to bring him back here and drop
him where we'd find him? Had to've been that way, 'cause we'd have
heard . . . heard the screaming if the bastard had done all that to
Eddie right here somewheres. Had to've taken him away, done all that,
then brought him back so we'd find him. What kind of man, Loman? For
God's sake, what kind of man?"
"Psychotic," Loman said, as he had said before, and that much was true.
The regressives were psychotic. Shaddack had coined a term for their
condition metamorphic-related psychosis.
"Probably on drugs," he added, and he was lying now. Drugs-at least the
conventional illegal pharmacopoeia-had nothing to do with Eddie's death.
Loman was still surprised at how easy it was for him to lie to a close
friend, something that he had once been unable to do. The immorality of
lying was a concept more suited to the Old People and their turbulently
emotional world. Old-fashioned concepts of what was immoral might
ultimately have no meaning to the New People, for if they changed as
Shaddack believed they would, efficiency and expediency and maximum
performance would be the only moral absolutes.
"The country's rotten with drug freaks these days. Burnt-out brains. No
morals, no goals but cheap thrills. They're our inheritance from the
recent Age of Do Your Own Thing. This guy was a drug-disoriented freak,
George, and I swear we'll get him."
George looked down at his whiskey again. He drank some.
Then to himself more than to Loman, he said, "Eddie was playin' in t
he
backyard toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you
could see him if you looked out any window......... His voice trailed
away.
- 69 Reluctantly Loman went upstairs to the master bedroom to see how
Nella was coping.
She was lying on the bed, propped up a bit with pillows, and Dr. Jim
Worthy was sitting in a chair that he had moved to her side, He was the
youngest of Moonlight Cove's three doctors, thirty-eight, an earnest man
with a neatly trimmed mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a proclivity
for bow ties.
The physician's bag was on the floor at his feet. A stethoscope hung
around his neck. He was filling an unusually large syringe from a
six-ounce bottle of golden fluid.
Worthy turned to look at Loman, and their eyes met, and they did not
need to say anything.
Either having heard Loman's soft footsteps or having sensed him by some
subtler means, Nella Valdoski opened her eyes, which were red and
swollen from crying. She was still a lovely woman with flaxen hair and
features that seemed too delicate to be the work of nature, more like
the finely honed art of a master sculptor. Her mouth softened and
trembled when she spoke his name "Oh, Loman."
He went around the bed, to the side opposite Dr. Worthy, and took hold