by Dean Koontz
I broke the paralyzing grip of dread and shouted it this time—“Bomb! Bomb!”—and started toward Amalia. “Get out! Go! There’s a bomb!”
She appeared startled, confused, and Malcolm looked at me in disbelief, as if he thought I must be pulling some stupid stunt.
By then I wasn’t just shouting, I was screaming—“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!”—and my fright must have been convincing. Suddenly electrified, the crowd cried out in many voices and rushed toward the exits.
Even in the thrall of terror, I thought there would be time for everyone to get out, that Fiona Cassidy wouldn’t have set the bombs to detonate so soon after she and my father departed, that she would not have taken such a risk with their lives.
As we would eventually learn, the bank wasn’t their primary target. It was but a distraction, a misdirection, a blood-drenched tactic, and the success of their operation depended on the bombs going off just as she and my father reached the bottom of the exterior steps.
I was twenty feet from Amalia and Malcolm when the briefcase placed by my father detonated. I don’t know what shrapnel took her, whether it might have been part of the bomb, bolts and nails included to increase its deadliness, or whether it might have been slivers and chunks of the room’s elaborate architectural details. I don’t know why some nights I lie awake thinking about that. Whichever it was, it changes nothing, doesn’t diminish the monstrousness of the deed or reduce to any degree my father’s guilt.
In the days immediately after, I hoped that he had never seen me there in the bank. I found it too terrible to think that he saw me and went ahead with the plan anyway. That was a possibility so dark, if true, it might make me wish that I had never been born.
Amalia looked surprised—eyes wide, mouth an O—as the blast wave lifted her off her feet and flung her forward, and I do not believe she lived long enough to feel a moment of pain. That is a thing I must believe.
Poor devastated Malcolm, standing no more than two feet from her, driven to his knees by the blast, glasses knocked off, hair disarranged, but suffering only minor lacerations, while she lies slain before him, between him and me. One moment she is beautiful, vibrant, in love with life. An instant later she is a tumbled heap, clothes torn and bloody, dazzling green eyes wide and sightless.
They say five seconds elapsed between the first blast and the second. All I know is that it was time enough for Malcolm to look up from her body and meet my eyes, his face a wretched portrait of disbelief, horror, and piercing grief.
I have no memory of the second blast. Malcolm says it threw me harder and farther than the first one threw Amalia, that I came to the floor very near to her, my left arm outstretched, three fingers atop her right hand, as if I were imploring her to take me with her.
Because of her green stare and the breathless O of her mouth, he could have no doubt that his beloved sister was dead. But my eyes were closed, and he thought he saw plaster dust stir on the floor in front of my mouth, as if moved by my breath. He scrambled past Amalia and came to me and took my wrist and found my pulse. When he saw my back, he knew that he dared not move me—and that I would never walk again.
78
As the police later pieced it together, Fiona and Tilton waited to enter the bank until Mr. Smaller, stationed a block away, told them by walkie-talkie that the armored car had turned the corner onto National Avenue. Past observation had shown them that it would arrive in front of the bank in no less than three minutes and no more than five. Traffic that Monday suggested to Mr. Smaller that the armored car—actually a truck of the Colt-Thompson Security fleet—would be there in four.
Tilton was sitting on a bus-stop bench near the corner of 52nd Street and National Avenue when he received that message. Fiona stood under a tree toward the south end of the bank, with a walkie-talkie of her own. Each briefcase featured a four-tumbler combination lock, which she had converted into a timer for the detonator. They had only to click each tumbler to zero, and with the fourth, the clock in the briefcase began the countdown.
They entered opposite ends of the busy bank. She put her briefcase on the floor beside her and under one of the tall marble tables. He did the same. They picked up blank deposit slips from the supply each table provided and pretended to fill them out, but after two minutes or less, they left First National without approaching a teller’s window.
The armored truck stood at the curb when they came out of the bank. Because the nation had recently been plagued with race riots and violent street demonstrations, Colt-Thompson Security’s revised protocols required three—rather than the usual two—men per vehicle on certain routes in selected cities: two up front, the third in back with the money, bonds, and other valuables.
As Tilton and Fiona came down the steps from the bank, the street-side door of the truck opened, and the driver was the first out of the vehicle, which was standard procedure. The door locked automatically when he closed it, and the ignition key was in his pants pocket, on a long chain fixed to a metal ring on his belt buckle.
Lucas Drackman, in hospital whites, carrying a white first-aid kit with a red cross on it, as if he were a medical technician on an errand, turned the corner from 52nd Street onto National Avenue as the driver got out of the truck.
As soon as the driver exited and the truck wasn’t at risk of being hijacked through a curbside assault, that door opened, and the second guard got out.
In the bank, the first bomb went off, glass shattered in a flash of light, the muntins in a pair of bronze doors distorted as if they were made of plastic, one door tore loose of its hinges, clanged and clattered halfway down the steps, and the sidewalk vibrated underfoot as if, deep in the earth, something massive and Jurassic were waking from a hundred million years of sleep.
Everyone on the street pivoted toward the bank, except those who had known what was coming.
Lucas Drackman reached under his loose white shirt, drew a pistol from a cloth holster sewn to the inside of his waistband, turned to the shocked and distracted guard, shot him twice in the chest, and tucked the weapon under his shirt once more as the dead man dropped.
As Drackman was drawing the gun, the driver reached the back of the truck. Fiona came off the bank steps as the first bomb exploded, angling toward him, her right hand under her suit jacket, where she carried a pistol in a shoulder rig.
Just then, Mr. Smaller pulled to the curb behind the ColtThompson vehicle in a gray paneled van on the sides of which were emblazoned the name and logo of the armored-car service. Wearing a counterfeit Colt-Thompson uniform, he got out and headed toward the driver of the truck.
Fiona reached the driver first, and when he glanced at her, she came in close, doing her best to look terrified, saying, “Please, can you help me?” The second blast occurred, and the driver flinched, looked away from her. She shoved the muzzle in his gut and shot him dead, and Mr. Smaller arrived just in time to help her manage the body to the pavement, as if they were assisting a fellow worker who had suddenly been taken ill.
Pandemonium. People screaming, running, not sure what might happen next, oblivious to the heist in progress.
Lucas Drackman knelt next to the fallen guard on the sidewalk, by the open door of the armored truck, and popped the lid of his first-aid kit as if the man weren’t dead but merely in need of medical assistance.
At the back of the truck, Mr. Smaller dropped to both knees beside the dead driver. He used a small bolt cutter to sever the chain that connected a ringbolt on the man’s belt to the ignition key in his pocket.
After taking the key from Smaller, Fiona went to Drackman and tossed it to him. She quickly followed him into the truck as he clambered into the driver’s seat, and she pulled the door shut behind her. For security reasons, the windows were heavily tinted.
Mr. Smaller got up from the dead driver and once more got behind the wheel of the paneled van.
For use in an emergency, the Colt-Thompson truck had an array of flashing blue lights and an oscillating siren di
fferent from that of any police- or fire-department vehicles. Drackman switched them on and drove away from the curb just as the passing traffic began to jam up because of motorists gawking at the smoke now billowing from the shattered doors of the bank.
Mr. Smaller followed close behind in the paneled van. They turned right onto 52nd Street, where traffic was lighter.
When the remaining guard, closeted in the cargo hold, couldn’t get a response on the in-vehicle intercom, he made the mistake of assuming that twenty years of drama-free experience in his job must be predictive of twenty more. Curious but not sufficiently alarmed, he violated standard procedures and slid aside the steel plate that covered a two-inch-by-six-inch slot in the heavily armored wall between his redoubt and the forward compartment, calling out to the driver, “Hey, Mike?”
Prepared for this possibility, Fiona Cassidy thrust the muzzle of her pistol through the gap and emptied the magazine into the cargo hold. Following the roar of gunfire and the shriek of ricochets in the enclosed space, there was only silence from the third guard.
One block east of the bank, Drackman switched off the flashers and the siren, and at the end of the second block, as the truck and the van stopped for a red traffic light, my father got up from the bus-stop bench to which he had walked from the bank, and he joined Mr. Smaller in the second vehicle.
79
When Mrs. Nozawa finished recounting her confrontation with Dr. Mace-Maskil and laying out her suspicion that Lucas Drackman had killed the professor’s wife, Mr. Tamazaki, in good spirits after his holiday, knew that he had enough circumstantial evidence to ensure that Mr. Otani could open his case file and obtain a warrant.
He worried, however, that if Mace-Maskil had warned Drackman about the woman’s interest, both she and Mr. Yoshioka, and perhaps others, might be in danger.
“Another good reason for my written report,” she said, “and now a good reason to have it notarized so it will serve as evidence if anything happens to me, though nothing will. I’m a tough cookie.”
After commiserating with Mrs. Nozawa about Toshiro Mifune’s poor health, he called Mr. Otani at the homicide division of the central police command, only to be told that the detective had taken the day off. When he tried Mr. Otani’s home number, no one answered.
Mr. Tamazaki shivered with a presentiment of tragedy.
80
Unconscious all the way in the ambulance to Saint Christopher’s Children’s Hospital, I have no memory of being taken into surgery. I have one hazy recollection of the recovery room, when I came out of general anesthesia, although I was then, by way of intravenous drip, immediately on painkillers that fogged my mind. I remember only my mother beside the gurney, looking down at me, so very beautiful. She appeared to be terribly aggrieved, as I’d never seen her before. My thinking was so muddled, I worried that something awful must have happened to her. I tried to speak but lacked the wit and energy. I remember also turning my head toward her, whereupon I could see she was holding my left hand in both of hers, and I thought how odd it was that I could not feel her hands pressed around mine. But then, when I wished to feel them, I could. Her warm fingers. Although she clasped my hand tightly, I detected her tremors, and I saw that she was shaking badly, not just her hands but her entire body. She said something, her voice far away, like voices in dreams that sometimes call to us from some far shore, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me, and so I slept.
81
I was in the ICU for the first forty-eight hours, until they could be certain that all my vital signs were stable, but I remained in a painkiller haze—I don’t know what—maybe a morphine derivative. I slept more than not, and though my every dream should have been a nightmare, they were with one exception pleasant, although I barely recalled them when I woke. Nurses attended me from time to time, as did a man in a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck.
Although friends and family were usually restricted to short visits in the ICU, someone I knew seemed always to be there in a bedside chair when I rose from the slough of forgetfulness that was as real as the mattress on which I lay. I always knew who I was, of course, and approximately where I must be, and I knew these visitors and loved them, but the why of being there eluded me, or I eluded it, choosing amnesia over the intolerable truth. I think that I could have spoken there in the ICU, that my silence was not a consequence of either my injuries or the drugs. Perhaps I feared to speak because words mattered in our family—in the beginning was the Word—and when I spoke, thereafter would come conversation and with conversation the reality, the why. Mom was there, watching, sometimes putting cold wet compresses on my brow, sometimes giving me a sliver of ice with the admonition to let it melt in my mouth. In her absence, Grandpa Teddy appeared, and although I’d never previously seen him with a rosary—Grandma Anita, but not him—he always clung to one now, his fingers traveling from bead to bead, his lips moving and the words whispered. I should not have been surprised to see Donata Lorenzo, once our neighbor, my sitter, who in her widowhood had been counseled by my mother, heavier now than when I’d last seen her, wiping at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief prettily embroidered at the corners or twisting it into knots around her fingers. When I opened my eyes and saw Mr. Yoshioka in the chair, I thought of the photos of his mother and sister in the book about Manzanar, and I spoke for the first time since the bomb: “I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t know to what those words referred, but he came to the bed and took one of my hands and held it as my mother had held it. He said softly, “ ‘The summer storm / Hid in the bamboo grove / And quieted away.’ ” I thought I must be getting the hang of this haiku thing, because I understood that he was saying the worst had passed, that all would be better from now on. Something serious had happened to me, but nothing mortal yet.
Sometime in those hours after surgery, I came to realize that I couldn’t move my legs or feel them. I would have been afraid if my arms had also been unresponsive, if my hands refused to obey me. But I thought of what Mr. Yoshioka had lost in his life, of what Mrs. Lorenzo had lost, of Grandpa without his Anita, and I flexed my hands and played imaginary chords and melodies on the bedsheet, and I knew, no matter what, I’d be all right, though there was still the matter of the damper, sostenuto, and una corda pedals. Don’t think about that, not now, not yet. Even then, I held at bay the why of being in the hospital, held tenaciously to forgetfulness.
The one nightmare came, so they tell me, at nine o’clock the second night. In sleep, my mind approached what it couldn’t admit when I was awake: I am in the bank, under the airborne stampede of steel horses, following the golden feather to the briefcase. Fiona moves toward an exit. My father in business attire makes his escape. I turn to see Amalia and Malcolm. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” The blast. The sweet girl seems almost to take flight, angel that she is. But does not rise on white wings. Does not rise. Collapses and does not rise, a girl no more, a broken bird, a tangle of ragged clothes and torn flesh and lifeless bones.
I woke screaming and couldn’t stop, and the nurses rushed to my cubicle, and soon they brought my mother. “Amalia’s dead!” I told her as she sat on the bed and took me in her arms. “Amalia’s dead, oh, God, she’s dead, Mama.” Of course they knew that she had perished—and not she alone. The only revelation I had for them was what I said next: “I killed her! It’s me, I did it, I killed Amalia!” My mother held me and assured me that I had killed no one, but I refused to accept absolution so easily. “You don’t know, you don’t. I should have told you, you don’t know everything I should have told you.” She said that Mr. Yoshioka had explained everything to her, that nothing I’d done had been sinful or even wrong, that I’d done what any child my age might have done under those circumstances, that perhaps if I’d done anything differently, Fiona Cassidy might have killed me long ago. What happened at the bank was something else altogether, one of those terrible things that seemed to be happening more every year.
I couldn’t rely upon the
excuse that I’d done what any child my age would have done, for as I had once said to Mr. Yoshioka, I was not my age, an assertion to which he had agreed.
“But you don’t understand,” I insisted. “Maybe even Mr. Yoshioka doesn’t. They didn’t just steal all that jade stuff at City College. They did worse. It was them at the bank. Fiona … and Tilton. I saw them. They had briefcases. They put down the briefcases and left.”
She stiffened with shock, and I believed that she must realize what had become clear to me: that if she had never become pregnant with me, if my father hadn’t married her but instead had followed some other path in life, Amalia would be alive, Amalia and however many others had died at the bank. Because I was born, Amalia died.
From where I sit nearly half a century later, I understand the fallacy of that reasoning. But in the aftermath of the bank, in my grief, I believed that it must be inarguably true.
After a while, when I couldn’t be adequately calmed, a nurse injected a sedative into the IV port, and I fell into an unwanted sleep in my mother’s arms. I did not dream again that night.
In the morning, when Mom visited, I asked her if anyone knew what had happened to the Lucite pendant that I’d been wearing.
To my surprise, she said, “It was still around your neck when the paramedics found you, sweetie. They took it off you in the ambulance.”
She produced it from her purse and gave it to me. Within the shapen heart, the feather lay soft and white.
82
Wednesday, with all my vital signs stable, they moved me from the ICU into a private room. I didn’t need traction, or an orthopedic corset. Mine wasn’t what they called an “unstable injury” that needed time to heal. It was plenty stable, all right. My spinal cord had been severely impacted, and that was the end of the story. No surgeon in the world, then or now, could repair the damaged nerve tracts.