by Dean Koontz
My statement compounded Mr. Sinatra’s annoyance. With one cocked eyebrow and a gesture, he seemed to say So what’s wrong with pride?
“Nothing is wrong with pride based on accomplishment, and your life was packed full of accomplishments. But justifiable pride can sometimes mutate into arrogance.”
Mouth tight, he stared at me. But then he nodded. He knew that in life he had sometimes been guilty of arrogance.
“I’m not talking about then. I mean now. You don’t want to move on to the next world because you’re afraid you won’t be special over there, that you’ll just be equal to everyone else.”
Although he resisted moving on, he wanted to make the journey, as do all of the lingering dead. He seriously considered my words.
I needed to channel him from polite consideration to a strong emotional response. I regretted what I was about to do, but his soul and my neck were on the line. Extreme measures were required.
“But it’s worse than that. You’re afraid to move on because you think maybe you’ll be starting over from nothing, with nothing, just a nobody, and all the struggle will begin again. You’re as scared as a little boy.”
His face knotted with offense.
“Your first breath was a struggle. Will it be again? To win any respect, you had to fight. You can’t stand the idea of being a nobody again, but you don’t want to fight your way to the top like you had to do the last time.”
He put up his fists.
“Sure, threaten to fight me. You know I can’t hurt a ghost, what courage does it take to threaten me?”
He rose from the chair and glared down at me.
“You want all the respect you won in this world, but you don’t have the guts to earn it again, if that’s the way it is over there.”
Never would I have believed that those warm blue eyes could have produced such an icy stare as the one with which he skewered me.
“You know what you’ve become in death? You’re a scared little punk like you never were in life.”
In anger, hands fisted at his sides, he turned away from me.
“Can’t handle the truth, huh?”
Treating him with such disrespect, when in fact I respected him, was difficult, and I was particularly afraid of revealing the falsity of my contempt by using the word sir.
I believed that I had in fact arrived at the reason that he lingered in this world, but I did not despise him for it. In other circumstances, I would have led him gently to accept the truth and to see that his fears were ungrounded.
Certain that Hoss Shackett would come through the door at any moment, I said witheringly, “Chairman of the Board, Old Blue Eyes, the Voice, famous big-shot singer, big cheese of the Rat Pack—and now all you are is another gutless punk from Hoboken.”
He turned toward me once more.
His mottled face, his dead-cold stare, his lips skinned back from clenched teeth, his head lowered like that of a bull that sees not one red cape but a hundred: As lingering spirits go, this one was as pissed off as any I had ever seen.
The steel door opened.
Chief Hoss Shackett entered. Utgard Rolf followed him, rolling a cart on which was mounted the polygraph.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IN MY ROOM AT HUTCH’S HOUSE, WHEN MR. Sinatra had levitated all the biographies of him and had spun them slowly around the room, out of my reach, he had shown poltergeist potential.
In my experience, only deeply malevolent spirits had been able to conjure the dark energy necessary to cause havoc. Mr. Sinatra had his moods, but he harbored no true malevolence.
Judging by the evidence of his life, however, his was a powerful spirit that might be able to bend the rules as I knew them.
The thing most certain to light a short fuse with Mr. Sinatra was unfairness. From his early years as an unknown singer, he had been angered by bigotry and had taken risks with his career to open doors and gain opportunities for black musicians in a era when many white performers were cool with the status quo.
The attack I had launched on him—calling him a gutless punk—qualified as grossly unfair. My first hope was that he would seethe as hotly when he was the target of unfairness as he did when he saw it being directed against others.
My second hope was that I had not cranked him so hard, so fast that he would blow like Vesuvius while I remained locked to the table.
As Utgard Rolf closed the steel door behind him and wheeled the polygraph, Mr. Sinatra turned his furious glare from me to the chin-bearded hulk.
“Spoke to the man,” Chief Shackett told me. “The money’s yours, as long as the machine says you’re the real deal.”
Because being shackled to the table would raise my stress levels and affect the reading, the chief kept his promise to free me. The cuff fell away from my ankle.
As Utgard readied the polygraph and the chief went around to the other side of the table, I said, “What do you think of Sinatra?”
“Think of what?” the chief asked.
Getting to my feet, I said, “Sinatra, the singer.”
The tone of Utgard’s bearish voice suggested that he did not like me, did not trust me, and did not want me in their game, no matter how much top-secret intelligence from Homeland Security I might be able to share with them: “What the hell do you care what we think?”
“Sinatra,” the chief said dismissively. “Who listens to that crap anymore?”
The Voice, voiceless since death, pivoted toward Shackett.
“I had this girlfriend,” I said, “she swooned for Sinatra, but I say he was just a gutless punk.”
“They’re all punks,” the chief said. “Fact is, they’re all pansies.”
“You think so?” I asked.
“Sure. The big rock stars, the heavy-metal idiots, the lounge lizards like Sinatra, they all act tough, want you to believe they’re true wise guys who made their bones, but they’re all light in the loafers.”
Here was contempt, bigotry, and insult served up steaming on a platter, and I was so grateful to the chief that I almost cried.
“In World War Two,” I told Shackett, “Sinatra dodged the draft.”
Mr. Sinatra snapped his head toward me so fast that had he been alive, he would have broken his neck. He knew that I knew this was a lie, which made my attack on his character especially unfair. His face contorted so extremely that it conveyed both astonishment and rage at the same time.
“Of course he dodged,” the chief said. “What would he have done if he’d come up against Nazi badasses—slap them with his perfumed handkerchief?”
Concentric rings of power, visible only to me, began to radiate from Mr. Sinatra’s fists.
“So,” I said to Hoss Shackett as, in blissful ignorance of the building storm, he settled on his chair, “then you think maybe he and Dean Martin were more than just friends?”
Utgard Rolf stepped around the polygraph, scowling. “What’re you going on about?”
In the corner, the third chair began to rock slowly side to side as the pulses of power from Mr. Sinatra disturbed it.
“I’m just saying he was a gutless punk,” I replied, wishing I could think of a new insult.
“Anyway,” the chief volunteered, “that old music—Rod Stewart sings it better.”
“That should just about do it,” I said.
Utgard’s yellow eyes were not half as scary as Mr. Sinatra’s blues had become. Looming over me, he said, “Why don’t you shut up?”
“Why? Are you a big Rod Stewart fan or something?”
He was such a solid package of bone and beef that most punches he took probably resulted in shattered hands for those who threw them.
With the menace of a grizzly suffering a toothache, he growled, “Sit down.”
“Hey, pal, take it easy, okay? We want the same thing. Don’t you want this stinking country nuked to its knees?”
Perhaps one of Grandma Melvina Belmont Singleton’s gorillas had been an ancestor of Utgard’s, because the big man�
�s instincts were closer to the jungle than were the chief’s. He knew something about me was wrong, and he acted on it.
Utgard backhanded me across the face so quick I hardly saw his arm move, and so hard that gorillas in Africa would be looking up in surprise from their bananas when the crack of the blow reached them at the speed of sound.
I thought I had taken the hit without losing my footing, but when I tried to run, I discovered that I was sprawled on the floor.
Licking my lips, tasting blood, I shouted inspiration to Mr. Sinatra: “God bless America!”
Denied the chance to fight for his country in World War II, Old Crazy-Whirling-Blue Eyes seized this opportunity. He went ballistic.
He opened his fists and held his arms out straight, palms bared, fingers spread. Pulses of power, pale-blue rings, flew from him and animated the inanimate.
In the corner, the third chair started spinning on one leg, striking from the concrete a shriek as shrill as a drill bit might have made.
Instead of decorating my face with repeated impressions of his shoe tread, Utgard turned toward the whirling chair.
Chief Hoss Shackett, about to face the consequences of comparing Rod Stewart and Mr. Sinatra to the latter’s disadvantage, rose from his chair in astonishment.
As a first strategic step toward the door, toward freedom, toward the hope of living to eat another bacon cheeseburger, I crawled under the table with the expectation that it would provide a temporary shelter while I calculated my next move.
The whirling chair exploded to the ceiling, ricocheted off the concrete, and bounced off the table with a boom! that made me feel as if I had taken refuge inside a drum.
A greater clatter arose, and I figured all three chairs must now be whacking around the room, a disturbing amount of crazed furniture in such a small space.
Hoss Shackett cursed, and Utgard topped him in the potty-mouth competition, and the chief followed his expletive with a grunt of pain that suggested justice was sometimes done in this world, after all.
As the metal table began to levitate off the floor, I scuttled on my hands and knees between its turning legs, which an instant later began to revolve so fast that they cut the air with a whirring worthy of a descending plague of locusts.
I abandoned my half-formed plan to reach the door in cautious stages, and I crawled as fast as a cockroach, eager to escape before the heavy table and the heavier wheeled polygraph began to carom from wall to wall with lethal enthusiasm.
Behind me, the chief spat out several astonishing words strung together in an order that was too imaginative for me to recall with accuracy, and Utgard Rolf shouted a bizarre knot of syllables that I had never heard before, though I knew at once that this, too, was not very suitable for print. I heard less anger than terror in their cursing.
As I reached the door, something slammed into the plastic panel that covered the ceiling fixture. The panel cracked, and the slamming something slammed again. Light bulbs shattered, and the interrogation room went dark.
Clawing up the slab of steel, I found the handle, levered it down, and pushed on the door. Ball-bearing hinges carried the great weight with ease, and I opened the door only wide enough to slip into the basement hallway.
I had some sympathy for Hoss and Utgard, although not nearly enough to hold the door open for them. In fact, I leaned against that steel barrier to shut it quickly, closing them in the perilous dark. I would have locked it, too, except that it locked from the outside only with a key.
In spite of the care the chief had taken to isolate noise within the room, the fusillade of furniture grew thunderous, especially when a chair or the table struck the steel door. I could hear the two men shouting, as well, because neither of them had a gag in his mouth and duct tape across his lips, as I would have had after failing the lie-detector test.
The basement hallway with the interestingly stained concrete floor was not a place I wanted to be discovered by whoever responded to the racket in the interrogation room. I hurried toward the stairs, down which the two young officers had earlier conducted me.
TWENTY-NINE
AS I REACHED THE STAIRS THAT LED UP FROM the basement of the police station, the muffled clatter-clang from the interrogation room erupted into a full-fledged cacophony as the steel door came open.
Glancing back, I saw neither Hoss Shackett nor Utgard Rolf. Mr. Sinatra did not appear, either.
Through the open door and into the hall came a collection of badly abused public property for which the police department should have to answer to taxpayers when submitting its next budget request: a mangled metal chair, bent and twisted parts of other chairs, shards of frosted plastic, a once sturdy metal table now folded in half like a slice of bread….
The whirling vortex of trash scraped and rattled off the walls, remaining just outside the interrogation room for a moment—and then proceeded toward me.
Addressing this indoor tornado, I declared, “I didn’t say Rod Stewart. He said Rod Stewart.”
Realizing the folly of defending myself to a cyclone of debris, I raced up the two flights of stairs.
I had done so much racing, jumping, crawling, running, dodging, scuttling, climbing, and swimming that I ached from head to foot and felt my energy ebbing.
During the evening, I had developed considerable admiration for Matt Damon. In spite of his amnesia and in spite of being opposed by numerous nefarious government goons with infinite resources at their command, he waded through squads of ruthless assassins, killing them or sometimes letting them live but making them wish they had never dedicated themselves to fascist ideologies, and he just kept going, indomitable and undiminished.
Here I was, a pathetic excuse for a paladin, complaining about exhaustion when I had not yet even been through a car crash. Already, Matt Damon would have been through six.
As I neared the top of the narrow stairs, a ferocious noise below indicated that into the stairwell had come the Office Furniture of Death. The crash-clang-shriek of the swiftly ascending junk storm suggested supernatural power so furious that it could have been summoned only by a Vegas headliner.
The stairhead door had not been locked when I had been escorted to the basement; and it was not locked now. I stepped into the long back hallway on the main floor.
Although I could not recall which door I’d been brought through from the alleyway, I thought it had been on the right. I opened the first that I came to, which was a storeroom. The second revealed a deserted office.
Whether they were responding to the escalating tumult, which had been heard at the front of the building, or to a frantic cell-phone call from Hoss Shackett, two uniformed officers appeared at the far end of the corridor. I had never seen them before, but they knew at once that I did not belong here, most likely because I was scuttling and furtive and looked harried.
One of them called out to me—Who was I, what was I doing here?—and I called back to them, “Just looking for the men’s room.”
They didn’t buy that even as I was saying it. One of them drew his gun, and the other told me to stop where I was, to lie facedown, but Matt Damon would never lie down on a floor that looked like blue-Slurpee upchuck, or on any floor whatsoever, for that matter, just because some guy with a gun told him to do it.
Fortunately, I did not have to improvise a deadly weapon out of my wristwatch or one of my shoes, because no sooner had the officer ordered me to lie down than the stairhead door behind me flew open. I did not have to turn and look to know that the wreckage from the interrogation room had spun out of the stairs like some motorized work of modern art by one of those sculptors who regularly conned museums into giving display space to the contents of a Dumpster.
The officers’ attention having been diverted from me, I dared to move forward, staying close to the wall, seeking the next door.
A new sound, a terrible ripping and slithering noise, grew in volume so rapidly that my curiosity got the best of me. I glanced back and saw that into the hallway h
ad come Polterfrank.
From his hands radiated pulses of power that stripped the blue linoleum tiles off the floor and whirled them into the air like a wind devil gathering drifts of autumn leaves to itself. The vinyl squares, in their wild waltz, whispered and clicked against one another.
Because the officers paralyzed by this sight could not see Mr. Sinatra, they were merely startled and frightened by the spectacle before them. They were not propelled at once into a state of blind terror because they were not able to appreciate the phenomenon in its terrible fullness. Had they been able to see the singer in all his glorious wrath, they would have thrown down their weapons in surrender and fled to their mothers.
Here he came, a punctured eardrum no longer an obstacle to his service to his country. He was feisty Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity, tough Tom Reynolds in Never So Few, courageous and determined Joseph Ryan in Von Ryan’s Express, and the righteous Sam Loggins in Kings Go Forth, but most of all he was Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra with a mad-on for the enemies of his country and the ignorant critics of his impeccable singing.
Spinning metal furniture and parts of furniture seemed to remain the primary danger in the tornado, because the vinyl tiles appeared too flexible and too soft to inflict serious damage. On the other hand, they were stiffened by the mastic with which they had been glued to the floor; and when a critical velocity had been achieved, every edge of every thin tile might be stropped into a lacerating blade.
Like a cresting wave, the floor peeled toward me, and from this tsunami of potentially lethal linoleum came an awful skirling like a thousand busy flensing knives scraping bone.
Spooked, the cops bolted from the corridor, back the way they had come.
The next door on the right led to the men’s restroom. The escalating tempest convinced me that I did not have time to explore farther.