Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  As the fenced fields had been, the lawns were white and softly luminous in the platinum light of the partial moon. The evergreen shrubs were encrusted with snow. Its limbs jacketed in ice, a winter-shorn maple cast a faint moonshadow upon the yard.

  The two-story Victorian farmhouse was white with green shutters. A deep front porch extended from comer to corner, and the embracing balustrade had white balusters under a green handrail. A gingerbread cornice marked the transition from the walls to the dormered roof, and a fringe of small icicles overhung the eaves.

  The windows were all dark. The Dresmunds had cooperated with Duvall. For the night, they were staying in Vail, perhaps curious about events at the ranch but selling their forgetfulness for the price of dinner in a four-star restaurant, champagne, hot-house strawberries dipped in chocolate, and a restful night in a luxury hotel suite. Later, with Grant dead and no caretaker job to be filled, they would regret making such a bad bargain.

  Duvall and the twelve men under his supervision were scattered with utmost discretion across the property. Roy couldn't discern where a single man was concealed.

  "It's lovely here in the spring," said Steven Ackblom, speaking not with audible regret but as if remembering May mornings full of sun, mild evenings full of stars and cricket songs.

  "It's lovely now too," Roy said.

  "Yes, isn't it?" With a smile that might have been melancholy, Ackblom turned to survey the entire property. "I was happy here."

  "It's easy to see why," Roy said.

  The artist sighed. " 'Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain clings cruelly to us.' "

  "Excuse me?"

  "Keats," Ackblom explained.

  "Ah. I'm sorry if being here depresses you."

  "No, no. Don't trouble yourself about that. It doesn't in the least depress me. By nature, I'm depression-proof. And seeing this place again . . . it's a sweet pain, one well worth experiencing."

  They got into the limousine and were driven to the bam behind the house.

  * * *

  In the small town of Eagle, west of Vail, they stopped for gasoline. In a minimart adjacent to the service station, Ellie was able to purchase two tubes of Super Glue, the store's entire supply.

  "Why Super Glue?" Spencer asked when she returned to the pumps, where he was counting out cash to the attendant.

  "Because it's a lot harder to find welding tools and supplies."

  "Well, of course it is," he said, as though he knew what she was talking about.

  She remained solemn. Her fund of smiles had been depleted. "I hope it's not too cold for this stuff to bond."

  "What're you going to do with your Super Glue, if I may ask?"

  "Glue something."

  "Well, of course you are."

  Ellie got into the backseat with Rocky.

  At her direction, Spencer drove the pickup past the service bays of the repair garage to the edge of the station property. He parked beside a ten-foot-high ridge of plowed snow.

  Fending off the mutt's friendly tongue, Ellie unlatched the small sliding window between the cab and the cargo bed. She slid the movable half open only an inch.

  From the canvas duffel bag, she removed the last of the major items that she had chosen to salvage when the signal trace-back from Earthguard had made it necessary to abandon the Range Rover. A long orange utility cord. An adapter that transformed any car or truck cigarette lighter into two electrical sockets from which current could be drawn when the engine was running. Finally, there was the compact satellite up-link with automated tracking arm and collapsible Frisbee-like receiving dish.

  Outside again, Spencer put down the tailgate, and they climbed into the empty bed of the pickup. Ellie used most of the Super Glue to fix the microwave transceiver to the painted-metal cargo bed.

  "You know," he said, "a drop or two usually does the trick."

  "Got to be sure it doesn't pop loose at the worst moment and start sliding around. It has to remain stationary."

  "After that much glue, you'll probably need a small nuclear device to get it off."

  Head cocked in curiosity, Rocky watched them through the back window of the cab.

  The adhesive required longer than usual to bond, either Because Ellie used too much or because of the cold. In ten minutes, however, the microwave transceiver was fixed securely to the truck bed.

  She opened the collapsible receiving dish to its full eighteen-inch extension. She plugged one end of the utility cord into the base of the transceiver. Then she hooked her fingers into the narrow gap that she had left in the rear window of the cab, slid the pane farther open, and fed the electrical cord into the backseat.

  Rocky pushed his snout through the window and licked Ellie's hands as she worked.

  When the cord between the transceiver and the window was taut but not stretched tight, she pushed Rocky's snout out of the way and slid the window as tightly shut as the cord would allow.

  "We're going to track somebody by satellite?" Spencer asked as they jumped off the back of the truck.

  "Information is power," she said.

  Putting up the tailgate, he said, "Well, of course it is."

  "And I have some heavy-duty knowledge."

  "I wouldn't dispute that for a moment."

  They returned to the cab of the pickup.

  She pulled the utility cord from the backseat and plugged it into one of the two sockets in the cigarette-lighter adapter. She plugged the laptop into the second socket.

  "All right," she said grimly, "next stop—Vail."

  He started the engine.

  * * *

  Almost too excited to drive, Eve Jammer cruised the Vegas night, searching for an opportunity to become the completely fulfilled woman that Roy had shown her how to be.

  Cruising past a seedy bar where flashing neon signs advertised topless dancers, Eve saw a sorry-looking, middle-aged guy step out the front door. He was bald, maybe forty pounds overweight, with facial skin folds to rival those of any Shar-Pei. His shoulders were slumped under a yoke of weariness. Hands in his coat pockets, head hung low, he schlepped toward the half-full parking lot beside the bar.

  She drove past him into the lot and parked in an empty stall. Through her side window, she watched him approaching. He shuffled as if too beaten down by the world to fight gravity any more than he absolutely had to.

  She could imagine how it was for him. Too old, too unattractive, too fat, too socially awkward, too poor to win the favors of a girl like those he so much desired. He was on his way home after a few beers, bound for a lonely bed, having passed a few hours watching gorgeous, big-breasted, long-legged, firm-bodied young women whom he could never possess. Frustrated, depressed. Achingly lonely.

  Eve felt so sorry for that man, to whom life had been grossly unfair.

  She got out of her car and approached him as he reached his ten-year-old, unwashed Pontiac. "Excuse me," she said.

  He turned, and his eyes widened at the sight of her.

  "You were here the other night," she guessed, making it sound like a statement.

  "Well . . . yeah, last week," he said. He couldn't restrain himself from looking her over. He was probably unaware of licking his lips.

  "I saw you then," she said, pretending shyness. "I ... I didn't have the nerve to say hello."

  He gaped at her in disbelief. And he was slightly wary, unable to believe a woman like her would be coming on to him.

  "The thing is," she said, "you look exactly like my dad." Which was a lie.

  "I do?"

  He was less wary now that she had mentioned her dad, but there was also less pathetic hope in his eyes.

  "Oh, exactly like him," she said. "And . . . and the thing is ... the thing is that . . . I hope you won't think I'm weird . . . but the thing is ... the only men I can do it with, go to bed with and be really wild with . . . are men who look like my father."

  As he realized that he had stumbled into a bed of good fortune more exciting than any in his most t
estosterone-flooded fantasies, the jowled and dewlapped Romeo straightened his shoulders. His chest lifted. A smile of sheer delight made him look ten years younger, though no less like a Shar-Pei.

  In that transcendent moment, when the poor man no doubt felt more alive and happier than he'd been in weeks, months, perhaps even years, Eve drew the silencer-fitted Beretta from her big handbag and shot him three times.

  She also had a Polaroid in the handbag. Although worried that a car might pull into the lot and that other patrons might leave the bar momentarily, she took three snapshots of the dead man as he lay on the black-top beside his Pontiac.

  Driving home, she thought about what a fine thing she had done: helping that dear man to find a way out of his imperfect life, giving him his freedom from rejection, depression, loneliness, and despair. Tears melted from her eyes. She didn't sob or become too emotional to be dangerous behind the wheel. She wept quietly, quietly, though the compassion in her heart was powerful and profound.

  She wept all the way home, into the garage, through the house, into her bedroom, where she arranged the Polaroids on the nightstand for Roy to see when he returned from Colorado in a day or two—and then a funny thing happened. As deeply moved as she was by what she had done, as copious and genuine as her tears had been, nevertheless, she was abruptly dry-eyed and incredibly horny.

  * * *

  At the window with the artist, Roy watched the limousine as it headed back to the county road and away. It would return for them after the drama of the night had been played out.

  They were standing in the front room of the converted barn. The darkness was relieved only by the moonlight that sifted through the windows and by the green glow of the security-panel readout next to the front door. With numbers that Gary Duvall had obtained from the Dresmunds, Roy had disengaged the alarm when they'd come in, then had reset it. There were no motion detectors, only magnetic contacts at each door and window, so he and the artist could move about freely without triggering the system.

  This large first-floor room had once been a private gallery where Steven had exhibited the paintings that he favored among all those that he had produced. Now the chamber was vacant, and every faint sound echoed hollowly off the cold walls. Sixteen years had passed since the great man's art had adorned the place.

  Roy knew this was a moment he would remember with exceptional clarity for the rest of his life, as he would remember the precise expression of wonder on Eve's face when he had granted peace to that man and woman in the restaurant parking lot. Although the degree of humanity's imperfection ensured that the ongoing human drama would always be a tragedy, there were moments of transcendent experience, like this, that made life worth living.

  Sadly, most people were too timid to seize the day and discover what such transcendence felt like. Timidity, however, had never been one of Roy's shortcomings.

  Revelation of his compassionate crusade had earned Roy all the glories of Eve's bedroom, and he had decided that revelation was called for again. Journeying across the mountains, he had realized that Steven was perfect in some way few people ever were—although the nature of his perfection was more subtle than Eve's devastating beauty, more sensed than seen, intriguing, mysterious. Instinctively Roy knew that Steven and he were simpatico to an even greater extent than were he and Eve. True friendship might be forged between them if he revealed himself to the artist as forthrightly as he'd revealed himself to the dear heart in Las Vegas.

  Standing by the moonlit window, in the dark and empty gallery, Roy Miro began to explain, with tasteful humility, how he had put his ideals into practice in ways that even the agency, for all its willingness to be bold, would have been too timid to endorse. As the artist listened, Roy almost hoped that the fugitives would not come that night or the next, not until he and Steven were granted sufficient time together to build a foundation for the friendship that surely was destined to enrich their lives.

  * * *

  Outside Hamlet Gardens in Westwood, the uniformed valet brought Darius's VW Microbus from the narrow lot beside the building, drove it into the street, and swung it to the curb at the front entrance, where the two Descoteaux families waited, fresh from dinner.

  Harris was at the rear of their group, and as he was about to step into the Microbus, a woman touched his shoulder. "Sir, may I give you something to think about?"

  He wasn't surprised. He didn't back off, as he had done in the men's room at the theater. Turning, he saw an attractive redhead in high heels, an ankle-length coat in a shade of green complementary to her complexion, and a stylishly wide-brimmed hat worn at a rakish angle. She appeared to be on her way to a party or a nightclub.

  "If the new world order turns out to be peace, prosperity, and democracy, how wonderful for us all," she said. "But perhaps it will be less appealing, more like the Dark Ages if the Dark Ages had had all these wonderful new forms of high-tech entertainment to make them tolerable. But I think you'd agree . . . being able to get the latest movies on video doesn't fully compensate for enslavement."

  "What do you want from me?"

  "To help you," she said. "But you have to want the help, have to know you need it, and have to be ready to do what needs done."

  From inside the Microbus, his family was staring at him with curiosity and concern.

  "I'm no bomb-throwing revolutionary," he told the woman in the green coat.

  "Nor are we," she said. "Bombs and guns are the instruments of last resort. Knowledge should be the first and foremost weapon in any resistance."

  "What knowledge do I have that you could want?"

  'To begin with," she said, "the knowledge of how fragile your freedom is in the current scheme of things. That gives you a degree of commitment that we value."

  The valet, though standing just out of earshot, was staring at them oddly.

  From a coat pocket, the woman extracted a piece of paper and showed it to Harris. He saw a telephone number and three words.

  When he tried to take the paper from her, she held it tightly. "No, Mr. Descoteaux. I would prefer that you memorize it."

  The number was designed to be memorable, and the three words gave him no difficulty, either.

  As Harris stared at the paper, the woman said, "The man who has done this to you is named Roy Miro."

  He remembered the name but not where he had heard it before.

  "He came to you pretending to be an FBI agent," she said.

  "The guy asking about Spence!" he said, looking up from the paper. He was suddenly furious, now that he had a face to put on the enemy who had thus far been faceless. "But what in the hell did I do to him? We had the mildest disagreement over an officer who once served under me. That's all!" Then he heard the other part of what she had said, and he frowned. "Pretended to be with the FBI? But he was. I checked him out between the time he made the appointment and when he came to the office."

  "They are seldom what they seem to be," the redhead said.

  "They? Who are they?"

  "Who they have always been, through the ages," she said, and smiled. "Sorry. No time to be other than inscrutable."

  "I'm going to get my house back," he said adamantly, although he did not feel as confident as he sounded.

  "But you won't. And even if the public outcry was loud enough to have these laws rescinded, they'd just pass new laws giving them other ways to ruin people they want to ruin. The problem's not one law. These are power fanatics who want to tell everyone how they should live, what they should think, read, say, feel."

  "How do I get at Miro?"

  "You can't. He's too deep-cover to be easily exposed."

  "But—"

  "I'm not here to tell you how to get Roy Miro. I'm here to warn you that you must not go back to your brother's tonight."

  A chill shimmered through the chambers of fluid in his spine, working up his back to the base of his neck with a queer, methodical progression like no chill he had ever felt before.

  He said, "What's go
ing to happen now?"

  "Your ordeal isn't over. It isn't ever going to be over if you let them have their way. You'll be arrested for the murder of two drug dealers, the wife of one, the girlfriend of the other, and three young children. Your fingerprints have been found on objects in the house where they were shot to death."

  "I never killed anyone!"

  The valet heard enough of that exclamation to scowl.

  Darius was getting out of the Microbus to see what was wrong.

  "The objects with your prints on them were taken from your home and planted at the scene of the murders. The story will probably be that you disposed of two competitors who tried to muscle in on your territory, and you wiped out the wife, girlfriend, and kids just to teach other dealers a hard lesson."

  Harris's heart was pounding so fiercely that he would not have been surprised to see his breast shuddering visibly with each hard beat. Instead of pumping warm blood, it seemed to be circulating liquid Freon through his body. He was colder than a dead man.

  Fear regressed him to the vulnerability and helplessness of childhood. He heard himself seeking solace in the faith of his beloved, gospel-singing mother, a faith from which he had slipped away through the years but to which he now suddenly reached out with a sincerity that surprised him: "Jesus, dear sweet Jesus, help me."

  "Perhaps He will," the woman said as Darius approached them. "But in the meantime, we're ready to help as well. If you're smart, you'll call that number, use those passwords, and get on with your life—instead of getting on with your death."

  As Darius joined them, he said, "What's up, Harris?"

  The redhead returned the slip of paper to her coat pocket.

  Harris said, "But that's just it. How can I ever get on with my life after what's happened to me?"

  "You can," she said, "though you won't be Harris Despoteaux anymore."

  She smiled and nodded at Darius, and she walked away.

  Harris watched her go, overcome by that here-we-are-in-the-magic-kingdom-of-Oz feeling again.