by Dean Koontz
I sighed in exasperation.
“Probably something really bloody, strange, and scary,” Milo said. “Or a sex thing, ’cause from what I know about it, that’s totally weird.”
“How do you know anything about sex?” Penny asked.
“Collateral information. While I’m reading about other things.”
“How much collateral information?”
“Not much,” Milo said. “Relax. I’m not interested in it.”
“You better not be interested in it.”
“It’s boring,” Milo said.
“It’s even more boring than it is weird,” Penny assured him.
“It’s not all that boring,” I said.
Milo said, “I guess someday it finally won’t bore me.”
“Someday,” Penny agreed, “but that’s decades from now.”
“I figure seven years,” Milo said.
“When you’ve conquered the problem of time travel,” Penny informed him, “then I’ll let you date.”
“I don’t think time travel is possible,” Milo said.
“Then I won’t need to worry about having a daughter-in-law with two nose rings, a pierced tongue, seven tattoos, jeweled teeth, a shaved head, and attitude.”
“Never bring home a girl with attitude,” I advised Milo. “Your mother will just have to beat the crap out of her.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t just go to a hotel,” Penny said. “But if we can’t—then where do we go? Maybe to my folks’ place?”
“No. Somewhere Waxx is unlikely to look.”
“What about Marty and Celine’s place?”
Marty and Celine were good friends who lived only a mile from us. They had flown to Wyoming to take care of Celine’s parents, who had been nearly killed in an avalanche.
Since Monday, Penny had been checking on their house once a day, taking in mail and newspapers, watering plants as needed.
“I feel a little funny about it,” I said.
“Marty and Celine won’t mind.”
“I mean … I wonder if friends as close as Marty and Celine are too much of a connection to us. Clitherow seemed adamant that we had to drop off the radar.”
“But if somehow Waxx could find out who our closest friends are,” she said, “he’d still need time, a lot of time, to do it.”
“Maybe he already knows,” Milo said.
The boy’s suggestion was the intellectual equivalent of a shock from a Taser.
In spite of what Clitherow had told me about the many similar phrases in the reviews of Mr. Bluebird and One O’Clock Jump, I had continued to operate under the assumption that John had become a target for destruction because of the letter he had written to Waxx’s editor and that I had earned a promise of doom merely by conspiring to get a look at the great man in Roxie’s Bistro.
Waxx’s assaults on John and on us were no less psychotic but a great deal more logical, strategically and tactically, if we assumed that he had planned to kill us and our families before he published reviews of our novels. Harder to credit was that his violation of our house twice, the planting of sophisticated packages of explosives, and the Tasering were part of an impromptu response to the encounter in the bistro men’s room, all within fourteen hours of Milo’s brief misdirection of his stream.
I remembered what Clitherow had said about Waxx being less a critic with opinions than one with an agenda. Understanding that agenda would be key to survival.
“What about the Balboa sinkhole?” Penny said as she turned onto Pacific Coast Highway.
Marty was an architect and Celine was a Realtor, but they were primarily entrepreneurs. Over the years, they carefully acquired prime properties for the land value, tore down the existing houses, built new houses, and sold for a profit.
Usually they had two projects going at once, sometimes three. Fortunately, they foresaw the coming real-estate bust. By the time values began plummeting, they had only one project left to sell. Because it was a harborside house on Balboa Peninsula, because it had been on the market two years without an offer, and because they would make no profit from it, they called it the Balboa sinkhole.
When they left their keys with Penny before flying to Wyoming, they also left the keys to the peninsula house on the same ring, in the unlikely event that someone wanted to tour the place. Like many high-end homes, this one could be shown by appointment only and strictly to qualified buyers; therefore, no key was left on-site in a lockbox.
“Sounds plausible,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”
From the street, the Balboa sinkhole was a handsome contemporary structure faced in limestone, with two double garage doors.
A remote-control fob on the house key operated the roll-up doors. Penny parked in the only available space, beside three pickup trucks, all fully restored classics. Marty had a collection of these vehicles too large to fit in his own garage.
From the luggage in the Explorer, we took only two overnight bags for Penny and me, and one of the huge suitcases with wheels, nearly as big as a steamer trunk, which Milo insisted he needed.
Penny had the code to the alarm system.
In the house, Lassie scampered off to investigate every room, as any dog will when set loose in a new place.
The residence spanned two lots, and the side facing the harbor featured floor-to-ceiling glass. A private pier led to a boat slip that would accommodate at least a sixty-foot craft.
The view enchanted. Pleasure boats of all sizes plied the near and farther channels, though not as many as on a summer day.
A sleek white yacht motoring out to the Pacific, perhaps a 120-footer, filled me with envy, not of the owners’ fortune, but of their carefree existence and of the freedom that the open sea offered them. Impossible to imagine that they would ever be stalked by a bow-tied psychopath or in fact by a lunatic favoring another kind of neckwear.
Because empty rooms are off-putting, the sinkhole had been professionally staged. This hadn’t lured a buyer, but the furnishings made the house almost as cozy as our own.
While Penny, Milo, and Lassie settled in, I went out to cash a check for living money and to buy a disposable cell phone. We also needed sandwich fixings, snacks, and sodas to last a couple of days.
I was loath to leave them alone. But Penny insisted that Waxx had no way of knowing where we had gone.
A baseball cap made an adequate disguise for a quick shopping trip. Bestselling writers are not as widely recognized as actors. My hair is my most memorable feature. In articles about me, it has been described as “unruly” by the kinder journalists, although the cheap-shot artists have called it a “weird thatch” and a “convincing argument for shaved heads.” A simple cap rendered me anonymous.
I drove one of Marty’s classic trucks: a 1933 Ford V8, turquoise with bright yellow wire wheels. If I had not been worried about my wife and son being murdered, I would have felt so cool.
Midmorning, when I returned to our plush hideout, I found Penny in the huge kitchen, at the secretary, online with her laptop.
Because the house offered a few dazzling entertainment centers, including a home theater, cable service was maintained to allow the best possible demonstration of those features to potential buyers. Consequently, we had quick Internet access by cable.
In the vast family room to which the kitchen opened, Milo sat on the floor at a half-acre coffee table on which he had established his laptop and had linked it to an array of other devices, some of which he had designed and constructed from items I had purchased for him. A spiderweb of extension cords radiated to a series of wall plugs.
He looked like an elf who had forsaken his traditional magic spells and charms for techno wizardry. I trusted that he would not turn out to be a pint-size Frankenstein.
Earlier, Penny turned on one of three Sub-Zero refrigerators, in which I now stowed most of the food and beverages I had bought.
Focused on her computer, Penny said, “Did you know Shearman Waxx is an enema?
”
“Yes. Milo informed me of that the day before yesterday.”
“Same source says he was born in 1868.”
“Wow, almost a decade before Edison invented the light bulb.”
She said, “All his reviews from the past ten years are archived. Forcing terrorist suspects to read them aloud would be a form of torture more cruel than applying pliers to their genitals.”
“It’s the bad syntax,” I said, pulling up a dinette chair to the secretary and sitting beside her.
“Partly. But it’s also two other things. The butt-kissing factor is so high, when you’re reading, you can hear his lips smacking.”
“Whose butt is he kissing?”
“The literary Brahmins and whatever writer is the darling of the hour. The other thing is his seething hatred, which he disguises as a concern for quote ‘cultural truths and societal evolution.’”
“What does he hate?”
“Everything before the twentieth century and most of everything thereafter. I’m still getting a handle on him.”
Swiveling her chair toward me, taking her hands, lowering my voice to spare Milo from the story, I told Penny about my phone conversation with John Clitherow.
Her beautiful blue eyes, which were of a shade for which I had never found an adequate adjective, did not cloud or darken, or do any of the things that eyes are sometimes said to do in works of fiction. When I told her that Clitherow’s parents had been murdered, however, I saw in the directness of her gaze, in the stopped-time steadiness of it, a solemnity more profound than I had ever seen before.
Upon hearing that Margaret Clitherow and her two daughters were likewise murdered, Penny closed her eyes. As I told her the rest of what I knew, I studied her pale lids, wondering if, when those two curtains raised, I would infer from her eyes fear or, worse, despair, or the steely resolve that would be more in character.
Without opening her eyes, she asked, “How did they die?”
“He didn’t say. I’m going to research it.”
“You’re certain it was really Clitherow?”
“I’ve never heard his voice, but I’m sure it was him.”
“It couldn’t have been Waxx, another bit of terrorist theater?”
“No. This voice was different from what I know of Waxx’s.” After a silence, she opened her eyes, which were as clear as ice water, and said, “The sonofabitch can’t have Milo.”
“He won’t get any of us,” I assured her. I wondered how I could deliver on such a promise, but I would not hesitate to die trying.
She squeezed my hands once, let go of them, and turned to her computer. “I want to read more of this bullshit, see if I can better understand the bull himself. Meanwhile … put on the alarm system.”
From the kitchen, I went into the adjoining family room to have a word with Milo.
On an overcast day like this, the polarized glass of the large triple-pane windows was not tinted. The house faced southeast, and on a bright morning, the glass would darken to control incoming sunlight without diminishing the view, which seemed no less spectacular now than in the moment when I had first seen it, during construction.
Sitting on the sectional sofa, overlooking Milo at his coffee-table workstation, I said, “You okay?”
“Pretty much.”
“But not entirely.”
He shrugged but kept his attention on the computer. “The house— that hurts.”
“We’ll get another house.”
“I know. But it won’t be the same.”
“It’ll be better,” I promised.
“Maybe. I guess it could be.”
On his computer screen, something that might have been a three-dimensional blueprint of an elaborate silo-like structure with numerous stacked chambers rotated to his command.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Where did it come from?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
After a silence, I said, “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No.”
“Sooner or later,” I told him, “every kid thinks his old man’s an idiot.”
Six-year-olds openly express affection. Most teenagers go through a period of sullen withdrawal or open hostility. Twenty-somethings have recovered from teenage hormonal madness, but have acquired a certain reserve.
Milo was chronologically six, intellectually twenty-something, and emotionally maybe ten or eleven. Expressions of affection at times embarrassed him but did not yet offend him.
Without looking away from the computer screen, he said, “I’m never gonna think you’re an idiot.”
“Just wait. You’ll see.”
“Never,” he said, and chewed on his lower lip.
“Love you, Milo.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
When I discovered I was chewing my lower lip, too, I changed the subject. “Where’s Lassie?”
He pointed to a pair of cabinet doors to the right of the big plasma screen in the entertainment center.
“She’s in the cabinet?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you put her there?”
“No.”
“Your mom didn’t put her there.”
“No.”
“She got in there herself?”
“I think so. She likes it.”
I went to the entertainment center and opened the cabinet doors to which Milo had pointed.
Lassie sat in the deep cabinet, facing out, grinning, wagging the tip of her tail.
“Why would she want to sit in a cabinet?” I asked Milo.
“I think she didn’t like this thing.”
“What thing?”
“This thing on the computer that I don’t know what it is.”
“So she hid from it in a cabinet?”
“I don’t think she’s hiding.”
“Then what’s she doing?”
“Maybe meditating,” Milo said.
“Dogs don’t meditate.”
“Some do.”
To Lassie, I said, “Come out of there. Come on, girl.”
She would not move.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to leave her in there, but I’m not going to close the doors on her.”
“Whatever,” Milo said.
Before I had crossed half the room, the stunning harbor view drew me once more to the windows.
Between the near and farther channels, scores of sailboats and motor cruisers were tied up at midwater moorings. To board and disembark, an owner needed a smaller craft to use as a tender.
Beyond the far shore of the harbor, hills rose to the Pacific Coast Highway. Beyond the highway, other hills ascended, and over all, the sky loomed dramatic, bruised and swollen and scarred, and full of threat.
No one could know where we were, but prudence—and my paranoia—required that before twilight I would have to put down the motorized shades encapsulated in the first of the two air spaces in the triple-pane windows. After dark, the interior house lights would make clear targets of us to anyone on the seawall or aboard one of the boats in the harbor.
Behind me, at the entertainment center, the cabinet doors thumped shut.
When I looked back, Milo remained at his computer, but the dog was nowhere to be seen.
In the study, which had no water view and which had been staged with furniture too contemporary for my taste, I sat in a steel-and-leather chair, at a steel-and-glass table that served as a desk.
Earlier, I had activated the disposable phone. It came with prepaid minutes, so I didn’t have to give my name or a credit card.
Now I took a deep breath and phoned Penny’s parents. Grimbald— formerly Larry—answered. “Boom.”
“Hi, Grim, it’s me, Cubby.”
Grimbald had a formidable voice with a resonant timbre that made him sound like I imagined a hearty Viking would have sounded. “Hey, Cupcake,” he called out to Clotilda, “it’s our fair-haire
d boy, the famous writer.”
“I’m not that famous, Grim.”
“You’re a damn sight more famous than me, in spite of the fact I’ve been blowing up stuff all my life.”
“Listen, Grim, I wanted to get to you before you saw it on the news later today.”
“You know we don’t watch news, Cub. Last time we watched news, Cupcake shot the TV. Too damn expensive, buying TVs all the time.”
“Well, someone else might see it and call you. So I wanted you to know we’re all right. Penny, Milo, me, and Lassie—we all got out just fine, not a scratch.”
“Got out of what?”
“The house. Our house blew up, Grim.”
“Cupcake, they’re all fine, but their house blew up.” I could hear Clotilda in the background, and then Grimbald said, “Cupcake says isn’t that ironic, considering your in-laws’ profession. What the hell were you doing that your house blew up?”
“Nothing. They’ll probably decide it was a gas-line leak.”
“Not terrible damn likely.”
“Grim, I’d like you to call the fire department, tell them you just heard about the explosion and you want them to know we weren’t in the house, we’re traveling in Florida, by car, a long road trip.”
“Where are you in Florida? I’ve blown up a bunch of things down there.”
“We aren’t in Florida. That’s just what I want you to tell them—to explain why we aren’t there dealing with the aftermath.”
After a hesitation, Grimbald said, “Cub, tell me you didn’t blow up your own house.”
“Of course I didn’t. I’m not a criminal type, Grim. I don’t do insurance scams.”
“I didn’t mean on purpose. I meant like maybe you were using the vacuum cleaner the wrong way or something.”
“Even I can’t blow up a house with a vacuum cleaner.”
“Like if you thought you could use it to clean the burner rings on the gas furnace, but you didn’t turn the furnace off—”
“It would never cross my mind to clean the burner rings.”
“That’s good. Because they don’t need to be cleaned. Or maybe you thought you could use the portable barbecue indoors.”
Staring down at my reflection in the glass tabletop, I thought my faint smile was a remarkable testament to the affection that I had developed for my in-laws over the years.