The City: A Novel

by Dean Koontz

  That last possibility, if the cops jumped to it quickly enough, could mean trouble for Drackman. Boldness was the hallmark of his style, however, and now he pulled up the hood of his jacket, got out of the van, and hurried forward through the driving rain, intent on giving them little time to think.

  No traffic on the street just now. Everyone preferring home and hearth in the storm. Perfect.

  He didn’t know if the new-shift guys had a way of talking to the old-shift guys, van to van, by radio or walkie-talkie. He didn’t have a radio or a walkie-talkie, and he didn’t want to talk to them, anyway, because his cover would be blown the moment he said the wrong thing or didn’t say the right thing.

  He had a badge, a shield, a real one, a heavy chunk of gold-plated bronze that he’d taken off a detective he’d killed eighteen months earlier. When he reached the driver’s door of the stakeout van, he bent down and, with his left hand, held the shield to the window. The tinted glass offered a clear view from inside but not much from outside. He could see a shape, a paleness of face, the guy in there checking out the shield, seeing it was real, but it could go badly wrong at any moment.

  The driver began to crank down the window, a good sign, and now the big question was, Both guys in front or one in front and one in the back? They were running a two-man stakeout for maybe a couple of weeks, and nothing to show for it. So one guy might be napping in back, although it was a violation of department policy, or maybe he was back there taking a leak in a bottle, whatever. The window came down far enough that Drackman saw two in front, the ideal situation, because in his right hand he had a pistol fitted with a state-of-the-art sound suppressor. As the cop lowering the window started to say something, raising his voice above the incessant rain, Lucas Drackman pumped six rounds into the interior of the van, aiming down to spare the windows. A shattered window would be as revealing as a scream to anyone who might drive by.

  He knew the driver was dead, but he couldn’t be certain of the cop in the farther seat. He opened the door, and the ceiling light came on, and the moment he saw the passenger’s broken face, he knew he’d gotten them both.

  After rolling up the window, he closed the door and waved at the van he’d been driving. The hood of his jacket raised, reminiscent of a monk in a movie Drackman had once seen, Tilton came toward him, carrying the little kit that contained the glass-cutter, the suction cup to keep the cut piece from falling into the house, and several other burglary tools that they might need.

  Fiona turned the corner behind them, drove past them in the rental Dodge, and parked two houses beyond the Bledsoe place. They would abandon the van and leave in her car when they had concluded their business.

  Two vehicles passed in the street, but neither of them slowed. As far as he could tell, no one thought he and Tilton were sinister.

  They could have skulked through backyards, dodging from tree to tree, over fence after fence, but in Drackman’s view, that was riskier than walking straight to the front door. Even at that hour, you never knew who might be looking out a window. If they saw you lurking about and trying to blend with the shadows, they knew you were up to no good. A bold approach appeared less suspicious.

  According to Fiona, telephone service in the neighborhood came above ground at the front right corner of each residence. When she got out of her car, not having bothered with a jacket, as wild as the storm itself, she walked directly to the Bledsoe place, lashed by rain and buffeted by a sudden wind that seemed to spring up just to welcome her. At the house, she squatted to find and cut the phone-service line. As Drackman and Tilton climbed the porch steps, Fiona rose, her task completed, and rounded the porch to join them.

  As hard as the rain had fallen, it fell now harder still, in thick tropical skeins, and Drackman thanked whatever unknown mystic had devised the Tarot deck as far back as at least the thirteenth century. The Tarot, juju, countless disciplines of magic, fate, the stars, the weight of history, and the power of progress—all were behind his crew this night, and there would be no stopping them.

  100

  Mr. Smaller, who actually was ten pounds smaller than when he had walked out of the superintendent’s job forever, drove past the apartment building, scanning for stakeout vehicles, pretty sure he would recognize one, keenly suspicious, not to say paranoid, but he didn’t see anything that alarmed him.

  He turned left at the corner, left again at the alleyway, and cruised behind the place. Nothing there got his hackles up, either. After parking on a side street a block from the building, he returned to the alley on foot, shoulders hunched, head held low, grumbling to himself about the intensity of the storm that pummeled him and the wind that dashed rain under his hood and into his face.

  Before leaving his position as building superintendent, he had made a copy of the passkey that operated every lock in the building, and he had no doubt that it still worked. The swine who owned this empire of tenements and the black-hearted company men who licked their boots and did their vile work for them would have rather slit their wrists than hire a smith to reconfigure every lock in that moldering pile of masonry.

  At the rear of the building, at the door to the back stairs, as the key turned smoothly and as he felt the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the jamb, Mr. Smaller grinned and said, “Cheap bastards.”

  Inside, he closed the door quietly. He stood there dripping and listening. He heard a TV in the distance. Faint. Water racing through the old pipes as someone took a late shower.

  The trick now was to get up to the fifth floor unseen, do the deed, waste the sneaky little creep, pull a little Pearl Harbor on him, and then get out without encountering anyone. After the bank and the heist, he was already wanted for murder; it hardly mattered if they hung one more capital charge around his neck. If he was seen by a tenant, however, they would surely recognize him in spite of his shaved head and mustache and weight loss, and then he would have to kill again, just to ensure that he would have time to get out of the city before the police knew he’d been there.

  He started up the stairs.

  101

  In the storage shed at the back of Grandpa Teddy’s property, he sat on a stool in the gloom, holding the door open a few inches, watching the dark house. Sears had done a good job when they erected the shed, and it had served him without problem for years. But right now he would have cursed it if he had been a cursing man, because the rain pounding on the metal roof deafened him, as if he were standing in a giant snare drum inside an even more giant kettle drum.

  He’d been on leave from his night gig for a week, ever since Jonah came home, which is why he had told George Yoshioka the fib about every restaurant reservation being sold out, so that the tailor wouldn’t come to see him play and discover he wasn’t there. Grandpa Teddy had begun to think that he might be a fool. Well, every man was a fool—how could it be otherwise in a fallen world?—but Teddy Bledsoe thought he might be an even bigger fool than he had ever previously imagined. He trusted the police, he really did. To a point. To an extent. With some reservations. You didn’t live more than half a century as a black man in this world and be completely trusting of authority. This was his house, his family; and if the police made a mistake, he would suffer the loss. There had been enough losses lately. He didn’t believe he could live through another one and still face the days ahead with his usual enthusiasm. But on this eighth night of his vigil, he thought perhaps the police were wrong when they predicted this Drackman character, given what was now known about his worthless life, would come busting in sooner than later. They had done some psychological profile and swore on it as Grandpa Teddy would have sworn on the Bible in a courtroom. But a profile was a guess—a bunch of guesses, really. It seemed now that every one of those guesses had been wrong.

  Well, if after this night he called it quits, at least no one would know that he’d been playing detective or security guard, or whatever it might be that he thought he was doing. He’d left home every evening in his show tux. He�
�d driven to a service station and changed into clothes more suitable for a storage shed and for the rough-and-tumble encounter he anticipated. He’d returned by the weedy vacant lot that backed up to his property, scaled the fence as if he weren’t but a decade away from Social Security, and ducked into the shed to stand guard until it was time for him to change back into his tux and pretend to come home from a session on the bandstand.

  Maybe something had gone wrong with his mind. A man could take only so much. When you lost your angel of a wife, when a grandson who should have had the world at his feet suddenly can’t walk on the feet that he has, when all those most precious to you in the world seemed to have their necks through the lunette of a guillotine, a man could be excused for going a little crazy, secretly changing clothes like Clark Kent becoming Superman, sneaking among the trash and trees in a weedy lot, hiding in a shed with a weapon he was loath to use.

  He sighed and said softly, “Old man, you’re a musician, you aren’t muscle.”

  102

  Boy. I woke from a dream, but it seemed to me that the word had not been spoken in the world of sleep, that someone had whispered it in my ear.

  I realized that I had left the penlight shining when I’d gone to sleep. The pale beam passed across the bedclothes … just to the right of an object I couldn’t identify, a shadowy roundness at the edge of the light.

  Pushing with my left arm, I eased up from the pillow, reaching with my right hand for whatever lay there. I plucked the object off the sheet and knew at once what it was, even before I brought it into the light: the stuffed-toy eye.

  “Snoop and liar,” Fiona Cassidy said.

  I tried to cry out but couldn’t. My throat was like an organ pipe in which a grab knob had been engaged, cutting off the flow of air and sound.

  Looming out of the dark, she switched on my bedside lamp and smiled at me. Neither kindness nor humor informed that smile.

  She had cut her hair and dyed it and gotten a deep tan, but I would have recognized her if she’d made twice as many changes to her appearance. The steel edge of the switchblade gleamed in the light.

  “Get in your wheelchair, crip.”

  When I didn’t at once obey, she slashed the air in front of my face, and I flinched away from the flashing blade.

  With contempt, she said, “There’s no juju in you, boy, and there never was. No juju in the fetishes you keep in that candy box.”

  I almost reached to touch the Lucite heart that I wore under my pajamas, but I stopped myself, for I knew that she would understand and find the pendant and take it from me.

  “Get in your chair, crip!”

  103

  Mr. Smaller reached the fifth floor without encountering anyone. At Apartment 5-C, the passkey smoothly opened the deadbolts of the double locks.

  His remaining concern was that the security chain would be engaged. Using his fingers, he should be able to reach through the gap and, with enough time and patience, finesse the slide bolt out of the doorplate, but it was likely to be a noisy effort. He smiled to find the chain hanging loose from the retainer. How careless. He eased the door open.

  He knew that Yoshioka left early for work, even before sunrise in winter, and that by now he must be sleeping. Expecting darkness, Smaller came with a flashlight, but in the living room, the ivory carving of the court lady in her elaborate kimono was brightened by a light from above. The ivory babe was probably some sacred thing that had to be kept lit around the clock, according to whatever alien religion the weird little tailor embraced.

  A faint light came from the kitchen, too, but no sound issued from there, no suggestion that Yoshioka might be preparing a late night snack.

  Silencer-equipped pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left, softening the beam with two fingers over the lens, Smaller crossed the living room to the hall. He’d been here several times to deal with plumbing problems, a stuck window.… Yoshioka’s bedroom was behind the first door on the right, which stood open.

  A small lamp about ten inches tall, with an amber glass shade, stood on an altar table against one wall, another 24/7 deal to keep lit the photos of a middle-aged Japanese man and woman, another of a teenage girl. When he’d seen them before, Smaller had assumed they were relatives, but he hadn’t cared enough to ask.

  The tailor lay sleeping.

  104

  “Here comes the hero,” Fiona Cassidy said as she wheeled me fast out of the bedroom that had been a dining room. “Savior of bankers and other low types.” She pushed me into the living room, where the shades had been drawn at the windows. A single lamp burned low, next to Grandpa’s armchair, its light glimmering in puddles of rainwater on the hardwood floor.

  I was relieved to see Mrs. Lorenzo alive, sitting on the sofa in a kind of muumuu that she evidently wore to bed. She looked terrified but also embarrassed.

  Standing near to her, Lucas Drackman was recognizable in spite of his jet-black hair. And standing beside the piano, my father.

  “You’re a troublesome boy,” Drackman said to me. “How can such a skinny-minnie twerp like you be so much trouble?”

  I could breathe again, but I still couldn’t speak. I suspected that silence was the best response, anyway.

  “Your Jap friend will be dead by now, skinny minnie. What do you think about that?”

  I felt sick and weak and defeated, but I bit my tongue to keep from crying. I wouldn’t give him tears.

  To my father, Drackman said, “I think you should do it,” and indicated the pistol that Tilton held at his side, muzzle toward the floor.

  No matter what he was or what he had become, no matter how often he’d abandoned my mother and me, even if he could love only himself, I thought he would shoot Drackman then. I knew he would.

  Instead, avoiding my eyes, Tilton said, “Do we have to do this? Why do we have to do this?”

  “We’re known now,” Drackman replied. “Because of this skinny minnie. We’re known, and we’re hunted, and we have nothing to lose. The one advantage still available to us is terror. Everybody needs to be scared shitless of us, afraid to speak against us, because we’ll do anything. Keep them so scared that when they come looking for us, they’ll be nervous, not fully in control of themselves, so maybe they don’t really search for us as hard as they could. Terror, man. It’s our friend. You made this skinny minnie, you erase him.”

  My father shook his head. I thought again he would shoot Lucas Drackman. He shook his head once more.

  Drackman said, “You wanted to get rid of him before he was born. She wouldn’t do it, your Sylvia, but you wanted to. If you wanted to have the little bastard scrubbed away before he was born, what’s so hard about doing him now?”

  My father would not look at me, would not, and I knew then that he would never shoot me—nor would he shoot Drackman. In spite of all his talk about owning a chain of restaurants and being boss over an army of employees one day, there was no such capacity in him. He was not a leader, which was in the end the reason his dreams were always beyond his reach. He was a follower, and he would follow whoever made him feel useful and knew how to manipulate him.

  When Tilton put his pistol on the lid of the piano and sat on the bench, his posture wasn’t that of defeat, only that of a weary man who wanted this moment to be over so that he could get on to something better.

  Lucas Drackman stepped close and let me peer down the elongated barrel of the silencer-equipped pistol.

  Mrs. Lorenzo sobbed and pleaded with them and prayed all at the same time. As scared as I was, I also thought how terrible it would be for her to see me shot in the face.

  I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t. He would just call me skinny minnie again or something worse.

  He walked behind the wheelchair, and I wondered what he was doing, and then he put the muzzle of the gun against the back of my head.

  When I looked at Fiona Cassidy, what I saw so terrified me that I had to look away. In her leering, twisted countenance, I glimpsed so
mething other than the woman herself, something that had for a long time lived within her and that now rose like some beast out of deep dark water.

  To taunt me further, Drackman took the gun away from my head, grabbed the wheelchair, and spun me, and I wished that I had the pistol that my father had put aside on the piano.

  The gun roared, and I was kicked sideways in my chair, and a pain of great intensity rocked me. A blackness came upon me, and I fell away, as off a cliff, accelerating by the second, breathless and plummeting, until someone seemed to catch me, and a voice said, “Not yet, Ducks. It’s not your destiny to be tossed dead into a car trunk with that woman.” As I was lifted higher, higher, light formed around us. She materialized at my side. She wore an amazing white dress more layered than the kimono of the court lady in Mr. Yoshioka’s living room. And the dress flowed out in all directions, to every horizon, where there had been only darkness, and the dress was light. I met her eyes and felt a chill. She blew upon my face. Her breath smelled of roses, a sweet breath that had weight and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was in the wheelchair, without pain, and apparently Drackman had not yet fired the shot that killed me. Make of all that what you will, though I do have more to say about it later.

  Reflexively, my right hand had gone to the Lucite heart. I don’t know why I fished it out of my pajama top, whether perhaps I thought there might be magic in it just when magic was most needed. But that would have been asking too much after my resurrection, too much.