Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  Rasmussen long enough to discover to whom he would pass the Wizard files

  when he got them; they intended to prosecute the money man who had hired

  Rasmussen, for no doubt the hacker's employer was one of Decodyne's

  primary competitors.

  They had allowed Tom Rasmussen to think he had compromised the security

  cameras, when in fact he had been under constant observation. They also

  had allowed him to break down the file codes and access the information

  he wanted, but unknown to him they had inserted secret instructions in

  the files, which insured that any diskettes he acquired would be full of

  trash data of no use to anyone.

  Flames roared and crackled, consuming the van. Julie watched chimeras

  of reflected flames slither and caper up the glass walls and across the

  roof and coalesce there in the form of gargoyles.

  Raising her voice slightly to compete with the fire and with the shriek

  of approaching sirens, she said, "Well, we thought he believed he'd

  circumvented the videotape records of the security cameras, but

  apparently he knew we were on to him."

  "Sure did."

  "So he also might've been smart enough to search for an anticopying

  directive in the files-and find a way around it."

  Bobby frowned. "You're right."

  "So he's probably got Wizard, unscrambled, on those diskettes.

  "Damn, I don't want to go in there. I've been shot at enough tonight."

  A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and sped toward them,

  siren screaming, emergency lights casting off alternating waves of blue

  and red light.

  "Here come the professionals," Julie said. "Why don't we let them take

  over now?"

  "We were hired to do the job. We have an obligation. honor is a sacred

  thing, you know. What would Sam Spade think of us?"

  She said, "Sam Spade can go spit up a rope."

  "What would Philip Marlowe think?"

  "Philip Marlowe can go spit up a rope."

  "What will our client think?"

  "Our client can go spit up a rope."

  "Dear, 'spit' isn't the popular expression."

  "I know, but I'm a lady."

  "You certainly are."

  As the black-and-white braked in front of them, another police car

  turned the corner behind it, siren wailing, and entered Michaelson Drive

  from the other direction.

  Julie put her Uzi on the pavement and raised her hand to avoid

  unfortunate misunderstandings.

  "I'm really glad you're alive, Bobby."

  "You going to kick me again?"

  "Not for a while."

  FRANK Pollard hung on to the tailgate and rode the truck nine or ten

  blocks, without drawing the attention of the driver.

  Along the way he saw a sign welcoming him to the city of Anaheim, so he

  figured he was in southern California, although he still didn't know if

  this was where he lived or whether he was from out of town. Judging by

  the chill in the air, it was winter-not truly cold but as frigid as it

  got in these climates. He was unnerved to realize that he did not know

  the date or even the month.

  Shivering, he dropped off the truck when it slowed and turned onto a

  service way that led through a warehouse district. Huge,

  corrugated-metal buildings-some newly painted and some streaked with

  rust, some dimly lit by security lamps and some not-loomed against the

  star spattered sky.

  Carrying the flight bag, he walked away from the warehouses. The

  streets in that area were lined with shabby bungalows. The shrubs and

  trees were overgrown in many places: untrimmed palms with full skirts of

  dead fronds; bushy hibiscus with half-closed pale blooms glimmering

  softly in the gloom; jade hedges and plum-thorn hedges so old they were

  more woody than leafy; bougainvillea draped over roofs and fences,

  bristling with thousands of untamed, questing trailers. His soft-soled

  shoes made no sound on the sidewalk, and his shadow alternately

  stretched ahead of him and then behind, as he approached and then passed

  one lamppost after another.

  Cars, mostly older models, some rusted and battered, were parked at

  curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of

  some of them, and he could have jump started any he chose. However, he

  noted that the cinder block walls between the properties-as well as the

  walls of a decrepit and abandoned house-shimmered with the

  spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosphorescent graffiti of Latino gangs,

  and didn't want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one

  of their members. Those guys didn't bother rushing to a phone to call

  the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they

  just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck. Frank had enough

  trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured,

  so he kept walking.

  Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better

  cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to

  boost. The tenth vehicle he tried was a one year-old green Chevy,

  parked near a street lamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the

  driver's seat.

  Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted

  apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer,

  Frank switched on the Chevy's heater and drove from Anaheim to Santa

  Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his

  familiarity with the streets. He seemed to know the area well. He

  recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past

  while he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his

  burnt-out memory. He still could not recall who he was, where he lived,

  what he did for a living, what he was running from or how he had come to

  wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.

  Even at that dead hour-the car clock indicated it2:48-he figured his

  chances of encountering a traffic cop was greater on a freeway, so he

  stayed on the surface street through Costa Mesa and the eastern and

  southern fringes of Newport Beach. At Corona Del Mar he picked up the

  Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach

  encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed

  southward.

  Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists' colon shelved down a

  series of steep hillsides and canyon walls toward the sea, most of it

  cloaked now in the thick fog. Only an occasional car passed him, and

  the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force

  him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.

  Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the

  highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two story, gabled,

  Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes. He

  wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere,

  he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards. For the first

  time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well. He searched

  the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.

  He switched on the overhead light, pulled the
leather flight bag onto

  his lap and opened it. The satchel was filled with tightly banded

  stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

  THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker

  stew. A couple of miles closer to the ocean the night probably was

  clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.

  Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the

  fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned

  against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as

  she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown

  leather jacket. He never got tired of looking at her. They had been

  married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked an

  played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys

  at a bar or ball game-partly because it was difficult to find other guys

  in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared

  about: big-ban music, the arts and pop culture of the '30s and '40s, and

  classic Disney comic books.

  Julie wasn't a lunch-with-the-girls type either, because not many

  thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers

  cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of

  spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and

  she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever

  known.

  "What's taking them so long?" she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted

  windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.

  "Be patient with them, dear, Bobby."

  "They don't have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They're just a

  humble SWAT team."

  Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicle cars and

  vans-were scattered along the street. The chill night crackled with the

  static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An

  officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men

  were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at

  the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for

  Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner's office were

  photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.

  "What if he gets away with the diskettes?" Julie asked.

  "He won't."

  She nodded. "Sure, I know what you're thinking-Wizard was developed on

  a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there's

  another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn't there?

  What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them

  out by phone?"

  "Can't. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different

  from the one on which Wizard was developed. Incompatible."

  "Rasmussen is clever."

  "There's also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut

  down."

  "Rasmussen is clever," she repeated.

  She continued to pace in front of him.

  The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel

  when she'd jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it

  looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of

  dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her

  right eye and along her jaw line. Each time Bobby focused on those

  stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him

  at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.

  Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated

  her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious.

  Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so

  to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his

  eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it

  was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair

  was usually thick and lustrous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as

  semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally as toffee ice cream,

  and a generous mouth that always taste sweet to him. Whenever he

  watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his

  attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image

  of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food:

  chestnuts, chocolate toffee, cream, sugar, butter. He found this

  amusing, but he always understood the profundity of his choice of

  similes: She reminded him of food because she, was more than food, she

  sustained him.

  Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away at the end

  of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie's attention and then Bobby's.

  Someone from the SWAT team had closed the doors to report to the guards

  stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie

  and Bobby to go forward.

  When they joined him, he said, "They found this Rasmusen. You want to

  see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?"

  "Yeah," Bobby said.

  "Definitely," Julie said, and her throaty voice didn't sound at all sexy

  now, just tough.

  KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running

  graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from

  the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted

  fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds.

  He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred

  bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with

  $140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it

  belonged to him.

  The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded

  another surprise-a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but

  two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a

  California driver's license. With the wallet was a United States

  passport. The photographs on the passport and license were of the same

  man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an

  easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked

  like, he tilted the rear view mirror and was able to see enough of his

  face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was... the

  license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.

  He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found

  another Social Security card, passport, and California driver's license.

  These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of

  Frank.

  James Roman meant nothing to him.

  George Farris was also meaningless. And Frank Pollard, whom he believed

  himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could

  recall.

  "What the hell am I tangled up in?" he said aloud.

  He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in

  fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for one to which

  death had entitled him.

/>   As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night

  beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him.

  He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere which he could

  retreat and be assured of safety. A man with a past was also a man

  without a future.

  WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor,

  in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom

  Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the

  wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a

  length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was

  pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of

  dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd's

  office he had cold-bloodily given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet

  here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel

  face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his

  yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if

  anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated

  Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into

  his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.

  The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had

  rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently,

  standing at Ackroyd's window to watch the fireworks, he had been

  surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the