by Dean Koontz
On the packhack readout, four numbers appeared, followed by an asterisk. The disarming code.
Rainer pushed a button.
The code blinked off the screen, one number at a time, and the asterisk disappeared last.
The tiny red indicator lamp, signifying that the system was armed to HOME, went dark.
The five tones, which would have accompanied the manual use of the keypad, were not sounded.
Proof that Rainer was superior to all other men. It gave him a little rush.
* * *
Pogo stood at the French doors in the family room, adjacent to the kitchen, at the back of the house. He had not fully closed the draperies because, on his patrol, he wanted to be able to survey the patio and backyard.
Of course, according to Makani, if Rainer Sparks used his mojo, he would not be seen or heard when he arrived. The murderer might be standing on the other side of the door, inches from the glass, face-to-face with Pogo, and be as invisible as the power-mad man in H. G. Wells’s novel.
At Pogo’s side, Bob stared out at the night, and he seemed not in the least concerned, which suggested that no one stood there. Or could Sparks cast his spell over animals as easily as upon people?
Shivering, Pogo pulled shut the draperies.
* * *
The door between the garage and the residence featured a deadbolt lock.
Not to fret.
From an inner pocket of his stylish khaki coat, Rainer Sparks withdrew a LockAid lock-release gun, a device sold only to law-enforcement agencies.
It was amazing what an unauthorized citizen could obtain if he was willing to bribe and kill for it.
Rainer inserted the thin pick into the keyway, under the pin tumblers.
There would be a little noise. Not much. Unavoidable.
He pulled the trigger. The LockAid’s flat steel spring made the pick jump, lodging some of the pins at the shear line. Three more attempts were required to fully disengage the lock.
Beyond the door lay a shadowy laundry room, revealed only by the hallway light spilling through an inner door that stood open a few inches. Washer. Dryer. Scrub sink.
He stepped inside. Waited. Listened. Closed the door to the garage behind him.
Easy-peasy, sweet and neat.
* * *
In the family room, when Pogo drew shut the draperies at the French doors, Bob suddenly turned away and stiffened. The dog raised his big black head, turned it slowly left and right and left again, as the dish of a radar telescope might turn, seeking data from the stars. His ears were pricked as much as a Labrador could prick them, but it was his talented nose with which he sought information. The nostrils flared and quivered, and the double dozen muscles in his noble snoot worked vigorously.
Pogo whispered, “What is it, dude?”
The dog looked at him and seemed puzzled.
“What do you smell?”
Bob lifted his head higher and once more turned his attention to the air that was, for him, if not for Pogo, alive with a symphony of scents. He mewled softly, as if less alarmed than puzzled.
* * *
Standing in the archway, Rainer watched the man and dog at the farther end of the family room.
The man was not Ollie Watkins. He didn’t appear to be the kind who would play competition bridge and go antiques shopping.
The guy had a gun. He held it somewhat awkwardly. As if he had seldom—or never—used one.
The dog was intrigued. He had caught a scent. Of what, of whom, he seemed not to be certain.
Rainer, too, had a pistol. And a Taser. And an excellent knife.
He was tempted to let them see him for just a moment, the better to terrify them when he disappeared an instant later.
In the interest of winning the game, such impulses had to be controlled.
The dog lowered his head and sniffed the carpet, padding this way and that, clearly confused.
Neither man nor animal posed a threat.
Rainer returned to the hallway and went in search of Makani.
14
Thunder Crusher
Tail held high but not wagging, nose to the floor, Bob padded out of the family room, and Pogo followed.
The dog was intent on pursuing a scent, but he didn’t seem to be in the least distressed, as presumably he would be if an imminent threat existed. Curious, yes, and perhaps puzzled, he sniffed rapidly, deeply, sweat dripping from his black nose, which could gather and hold scents better when it was wet.
In the hallway, Bob paused, looked left, right, left, and then continued to the right, claws clicking on the wood floor. His snout was now so close to the mahogany that he left an almost continuous smear of nose sweat, like a snail trail.
The laundry-room door was ajar. As lithe as smoke drawn by a draft, the swivel-hipped dog squeezed through the narrow gap, into the dark room beyond. In the absence of a bark, Pogo trusted that no one waited behind the door, and he pushed it open. Bob pawed at the next door, the one to the garage, remembered that his surfing buddy was with him, and looked up beseechingly.
Wondering if he might be attributing the wrong motive to the Labrador’s urgency, Pogo said, “Hey, dude, you sure this isn’t just about taking a pee?”
Bob chuffed.
Choosing to interpret the chuff as a declaration of serious intent, Pogo opened the door. Bob dashed across the threshold, into the darkness, his sniffing amplified as it echoed off the cars and the garage walls.
Finding the switch and flipping on the fluorescent ceiling panels took maybe ten seconds, by which time Bob had wound among the three vehicles, which included Pogo’s thirty-year-old primer-gray pity-the-poor-boy Honda, and had begun to return to the laundry room. He was a canine on the hunt, no doubt about that. However, he continued to seem more excited and more puzzled than anxious, not in an obviously protective state of mind.
* * *
Makani slept in soft lamplight, fully dressed, on her back, atop the bedclothes. Head turned to her left. Arms at her sides. One palm turned up, the other flat to the blanket.
Standing bedside, gazing down at her, Rainer felt triumphant, powerful, indestructible.
The woman’s eyes moved rapidly behind their lids, a sign of dreaming.
No doubt she dreamed of him.
She feared him, but she wanted him.
She would never admit to the desire.
But he knew.
Power and sex were linked. People wanted both equally and more than anything else.
Likewise, power and death were two sides of the same card. The purpose of power was to control others. And to get rid of them if you couldn’t effect control.
Therefore sex and death were linked as well.
He had known women who wanted him to take them, by which they really meant kill them. And he had done both.
Rainer had thought about this a lot. He was a deep thinker. A philosopher. You knew you were a serious philosopher when you were always right, and he had never yet found himself to be wrong.
The bedroom door opened.
The not-Ollie and the dog entered.
* * *
When Bob sniffed and snorted along the main hallway, past the public rooms, toward the bedrooms, Pogo became alarmed even if the dog was not yet growling or making other sounds of distress. He dashed past the Labrador, reached the T intersection, and turned right into the guest-bedroom wing.
By the time Pogo opened the door to Makani’s room, the dog had caught up with him. Bob padded first across the threshold.
Lying asleep on the bed, the radiant daughter of Oahu reminded Pogo of a fairy-tale princess, bespelled and awaiting a kiss to free her from her dark enchantment. As a fantasy fan, he had read many such tales when he was a young boy, always secretly, so that his ambitious parents wouldn’t discover that his dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and problematic IQ were all pretense, all elements of a scam to ensure that he could escape higher education in favor of a life on the beach.
Although Pogo knew that Rainer Sparks, with the powers Makani had attributed to him, might be in the bedroom at this minute, it was hard to believe that the creepy wanker was indeed present. Makani hadn’t been assaulted. She looked as peaceful as she was beautiful. With whatever weapons Sparks possessed in addition to a Taser, he could already have shot Pogo, his position revealed by nothing but the muzzle flash a fraction of a second before the bullet found its target. If he had murdered as many people as Makani’s psychic vision had implied, as often as he had claimed, he wouldn’t hesitate to add one more to his scorecard.
In her sleep, the dear girl murmured and then sighed.
The dog seemed to have raveled up the last of whatever pursued scent had frenzied him. He stood at the foot of the bed, sniffing the blanket, the carpet, the air to his left, the air to his right, but with less enthusiasm than he had exhibited en route. He looked at Pogo as though to say, Pray thee, m’lord, what brought me here and has now steeped my senses in forgetfulness? Or perhaps only, Dude, wha’sup?
The comic quality of the dog’s bewilderment melted some of the ice in Pogo’s veins. He found it difficult to hold on to the sense of imminent peril that had brought him to the guest room in a rush. Near the window stood an armchair in which he could sit guard, the pistol ready in his lap, the dog at his feet. If he brewed another pot of Armenian coffee and chose a book other than On the Road, he could counter the tendency to doze off in a comfortable chair.
Just then, pleased by a turn of events in her sleep, Makani issued a sound of amusement softer than a laugh and more melodious than a chuckle, a charming childlike expression, and then sighed as if with gentle regret or gentler satisfaction.
It seemed to Pogo that a psychic, even one with limitations to her power, would not be able to lie in happy dreams if her would-be killer was near at hand. Besides, he began to feel that he had been too swept up in the dog’s excitement, that he had missed something along the way because of being thereby misdirected. When Bob began to wander from one corner of the room to another, in an evident state of perplexity, Pogo whispered to him, calling him to the door, and together they retreated into the hallway.
* * *
Other than violent sex and murder, nothing pleased Rainer Sparks quite as much as observing the inadequacies of lesser men when they were foiled by his power.
Clearly, Makani had told the not-Ollie that someone wished to do her harm.
He had chosen to be her guardian.
Hooray for the hero.
Perhaps Makani had broken her own rule of secrecy. Perhaps she had also told not-Ollie about her power.
And about Rainer’s as well.
The guardian’s behavior suggested a suspicion of things not seen.
Yet the fool had convinced himself of Makani’s safety.
In Rainer’s immediate presence, the dog could not see or hear or smell him. His power shrouded him completely.
Elsewhere in the house, however, Rainer had left spoor.
Spoor. The tiny particles of skin that people continuously shed. Loose hairs. Microdrops of perspiration. Atomized skin oil. With every breath were expelled particles of sinus secretions so minute as to be visible only under the highest magnification.
Each thing that spalled from Rainer bore his DNA signature.
Every dog’s sense of smell was thousands of times greater than that of any human being. In some breeds—tens of thousands of times greater.
Retrievers, like Labradors and goldens, had a highly refined olfactory sense.
Out of Rainer’s line of sight, beyond his power’s sphere of influence, the dog could smell the spoor.
This had never before exposed Rainer to danger.
It would not be a problem this time, either.
Bob was not smart enough to matter.
Although the dog might have been smarter than not-Ollie.
On the bed, in sleep, Makani groaned softly.
Rainer whispered a promise to her. “I’ll make you groan, little bitch, when you’re under me. And then I’ll make you scream.”
Gazing down on her, he wanted to cut off her face and feed it to her.
But this was only Round Two. The face-off would have to wait until Round Three.
Perhaps his whisper found its way into the world of her dream. She opened her eyes.
* * *
The moment that Bob left the bedroom, he was again electrified by some scent. He set off in urgent pursuit of its source, his paws digging frantically at the carpet runner, displacing it, so that it slid out from under him, curling against one wall, and sent him skidding along the hardwood floor.
As Pogo quietly closed the door behind him and saw the dog launch across the T intersection where the two hallways met, he thought he had made a grave mistake earlier. He’d been sure that Bob was following the scent to Makani’s room, and he’d raced ahead of him, leading the way. But there were two lengths to the bedroom wing, with guest quarters in one and the master suite in the other. Now it appeared that, left to his own devices, the dog would have turned left at the intersection, not right toward the guest bedrooms.
As Bob disappeared into the master suite, through a door that should have been closed but was not, Pogo followed, the pistol in a two-hand grip.
* * *
Makani did not see Rainer standing bedside.
He did not allow her to see him.
She yawned.
She turned her head to look at the digital clock in the fall of buttery light from the nightstand lamp.
How tender she was. How succulent.
She sat up. Swung her legs off the bed. Perched on the edge.
Such a lithe girl. Yet full-figured. Provocative.
Those vivid blue eyes. Blind to him.
As she stood up, he Tasered her.
All grace abandoned the maiden. Her body jerked, arms flailed, head tossed back to expose her throat, which he Tasered, triggering one shock, two.
Palsied, wild-eyed, teeth clacking together, hands scrabbling uselessly at herself, as if to peel off and throw away the alien current that jigged along her nerve paths, she tried to scream, but gagged out only a throttled sound.
Pocketing the stun gun with his left hand, Rainer seized her dark hair with his right, twisted it in his fist, turned her, and pressed her down onto the bed.
When he fell upon her, twice her weight, she was as effectively pinned as a dead butterfly to a specimen board.
He forced her face into the pillows. Familiarized her with the fear of suffocation.
Lying atop her, his face next to hers, he let her see him.
Her left eye bulged like that of a frightened horse.
She struggled to suck in air, got instead the taste of a cotton pillowcase, perhaps the faintest flavor of feathers.
He was reading her, savoring the panic that overwhelmed her mind.
She was reading him, too, terrified not only of suffocating, but also of the images of his many victims with all the indignities and wounds that he had inflicted on them.
Into her exquisitely shaped ear, Rainer whispered, “The cat wins Round Two.”
He licked the lobe, the curve of helix.
“Better run, little mouse. Far and fast.”
He licked again.
“Round Three comes later today,” he whispered. “After the last light.”
His hot breath flushed back to him out of the delicate shell of her ear.
“Enjoy your final sunset.”
He clambered off her, to his feet, still jamming her face into the pillow.
To leave her with a reminder of his great strength, he lifted her off the bed by the twist of hair and by the belt that held her jeans, and he threw her aside as if she weighed nothing and were of no consequence.
* * *
Pogo followed as the excited Labrador toured the master suite, bedroom and bath and walk-in closet, snout to the floor, sneezing to refresh his nasal passages, now whimpering as some quality of the spoor disturbed him.
Earlier, when Makani first arrived, Bob had with great interest sniffed her shoes, her jeans, her hair. He would have made himself familiar with Rainer Sparks’s scent, which Makani carried on her from the encounter that she’d had with the sonofabitch in her house.
But was that the scent troubling him now? And how would Sparks have found her so quickly? How could he have gotten into the house without setting off the alarm?
Moments ago, leaving Makani in the guest bedroom, Pogo had wondered if he had been so caught up in the dog’s excited searching that he had missed something along the way. Suddenly he knew what had not registered with him.
The alarm was set in the at-home mode. Sensors on all perimeter doors and windows were activated, but not any of the interior motion detectors. The garage doors were omitted from the system, so that Ollie Watkins wouldn’t set off the alarm every time he drove home and wouldn’t have to make a mad dash to the control pad to enter the disarming code. However, the door between the garage and the laundry room was included when the alarm was set in either the at-home mode or the away-from-home mode. Pogo had forgotten that detail. When he had opened that door to let Bob continue the search into the garage, the alarm had not sounded.
Someone had turned it off without triggering the through-house tones that accompanied every entry made in any security-system keypad.
Having made his way through the house from the laundry room, and having found the bedroom wing, Sparks might have gone first to the master bedroom. Maybe the dog had wanted to follow the spoor path as it had been laid down.
But Sparks had not found his quarry here. He would not be in the master suite now.
He would be in the second of two guest bedrooms. With Makani.
“Bob, let’s go!”
Berating himself for in fact being the dimwit that he’d long pretended to be, Pogo sprinted into the hallway and back to the room that he had left two minutes earlier. He threw open the door and crossed the threshold with the pistol in a two-hand grip, just in time to see Makani levitate inexplicably from the bed and seemingly fling herself six or eight feet across the room, where she hit the floor and tumbled against the armchair.