by Dean Koontz
“Something did. But I’m here.”
“You have three times usual money?”
Jane held up the paper bag that had contained her truck-stop sandwiches.
“Come in, darling. Sit. I see if Pete have everything ready.”
The house reeked of cigarette smoke that would have dropped little grandchildren like malathion felled mosquitoes, had there been any grandchildren, which there weren’t. The interior—darkish, with far too much heavy antique furniture and brocade draperies and Persian carpets—offered none of the kitsch that fancified the front yard and served as a disguise.
The woman went to her husband’s large workroom at the back of the house, leaving Jane alone with the two white cats as big as bobcats. One was lying on a sofa, the other on a La-Z-Boy recliner. They watched her as if she were prey.
Jane moved toward a leather armchair, but the yellow-eyed cat leaped off the sofa and sprang onto that seat before she could occupy it.
As she turned toward the now-empty sofa, the green-eyed cat abandoned the recliner and took the first cat’s original perch.
When Jane looked at the La-Z-Boy, both cats hissed.
She said, “I’ll just stand,” which stopped the hissing.
At the back of the rambling house, where visitors were rarely wanted, Pete Jones—who was also John White and perhaps numerous other people—worked with several antique presses, laser printers, laminating machines, and so much other, more exotic equipment that the place had a Frankenstein air. Instead of reanimating the dead, however, he produced impeccably forged documents of all kinds.
The vision in leopard sweats reappeared in the archway between the living room and dining room, carrying something like a dress box that contained Jane’s order. “I put on table. You look, darling.” She set the box on the table and removed the lid.
In the center of the dining-room table stood a crystal ball on a silver plinth. Beside it lay a deck of Tarot cards fanned out and ready for shuffling.
Jane examined everything in the box. “Very good. Very nice. My compliments to Pete.”
“Better than nice.”
“Yes, you’re right. It’s all excellent.”
The woman accepted the sandwich bag and took from it the two bricks of hundred-dollar bills held by rubber bands. She riffled the edges of the bills across her thumb, twice with each brick, cocking her head toward the sound.
“No need count, you always honest,” she said, though she had probably done an accurate count with her devilishly sensitive thumb and hearing.
“It’s so nice to be trusted,” Jane said.
“You want to know?”
“Know what?”
Judy Lois White Jones nodded her head at the crystal ball and the cards. Her smile was humorless, feline. Her eyes were as black and her stare as viscid as pools of tar.
Jane said, “I don’t believe in all that.”
“Don’t have to believe to be true. Will be rich, will be poor? Will be happy, will be sad? Will live, will die? Just have to ask.”
At the front door, as she stepped outside, Jane turned and met the woman’s eyes. “I make my own future. So do you.”
“But what is future? Crystal and cards could tell.”
“Have a nice day, Mrs. White-Jones. I know I will.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” the woman said, and closed the door.
43
THE JEEP WRANGLER AND THE Rhino GX are making good time until, north of Austin and south of Georgetown, they come upon an eighteen-wheeler that, minutes earlier, jackknifed on Interstate 35. The thin-skinned cargo trailer has split open, spilling a load of colorful athletic shoes designed by the nation’s current number one rap star. Maybe a hundred large cartons have tumbled onto the roadway, and most of these have burst open, casting forth uncountable shoeboxes emblazoned with the rapper’s face, and in turn the lids have flown off these smaller containers. A Day-Glo rainbow of expensive footwear is drifted across what little of the roadway the overturned vehicle itself does not block, and in fact the sudden avalanche of high-priced gotta-have sneakers seems to have overwhelmed a less-than-substantial Mini Cooper, smashing it into the guardrail. Two Texas Highway Patrol officers have recently arrived on scene, and beyond the barricade of truck and shoes, a southbound ambulance is flashing its way along the shoulder of the road.
Traffic backs up so quickly in Egon Gottfrey’s wake that before he quite knows what has happened, he’s locked in, bumper to bumper, with the vehicles behind and in front of him.
He sits for a minute, wondering what the Unknown Playwright expects of him. Then he gets out of the Rhino to assess whether he might be able to maneuver out of his lane, onto the shoulder of the highway, and then reverse southward to the nearest exit.
Just then a third highway patrol officer comes along, putting down flares along the outer edge of the lane, to keep the shoulder open for emergency vehicles inbound from the south.
Gottfrey halts the trooper, presents his Bureau ID, and says, “You’ll have to help us here. I—and my men in that Jeep Wrangler—urgently need to get past this mess.”
The trooper is maybe six feet four, built like a pro wrestler. He stares down at Gottfrey in silence for a moment, frowning as though he has been addressed in a language known only by people on another planet. Then he says, “Sir, in these circumstances, your D.C. badge means about as much to me as your library card. We got people hurt and a road to open.”
As the officer turns away, Gottfrey says, “I want your full name and badge number. There will be grave consequences if we don’t get to Killeen within an hour.”
The trooper seems to swell two inches taller as he turns on Gottfrey. “Sir, with all due respect, if you’ve just got to be in Killeen inside an hour, may I suggest you best stick a propeller in your ass and fart your way there.”
Gottfrey does not know what to say to that, and perhaps wisely he chooses to say nothing.
After going forward three vehicles to the Jeep Wrangler and conferring with Rupert, he walks back to the Rhino and gets behind the wheel. He turns on the engine and powers down the windows and switches off the engine and tells himself that this delay doesn’t matter.
None of this has any meaning, anyway. The overturned truck is not real. The shoes are not real. The rude highway patrol officer is not real. Killeen is not real.
Gottfrey is only along for the ride. The delay means nothing to him. So…it’s curious, then, that he has the urge to get out of the Rhino and draw his pistol and shoot the trooper in the back.
He is reasonably sure, however, that if he did such a thing, he would be going off script to such an extent that he would inevitably be punished for misinterpreting the playwright’s work.
As Egon Gottfrey strives to be only a disembodied mind with no stake in these events, other drivers and their passengers in some of the surrounding vehicles realize the nature of the treasure that has spilled out of the overturned Peterbilt. Doors are flung open and people spring out. They dash forward into the heaps of ruptured cardboard containers, snatching up three-, four-, and five-hundred-dollar Day-Glo sneakers, some still in their boxes, others loose and surely mismatched as to size. In a kind of ecstasy, they hurry back to their cars and SUVs with armfuls of celebrity footwear, only to return to the melee for more, while those people who remain in their vehicles look on with shocked and fearful expressions, as if they find themselves trapped in a traffic jam during a zombie apocalypse.
The shoe shoppers are not real. The sneakers are not real. It all has no meaning.
Egon Gottfrey is only along for the ride. But when he thinks of Killeen, where perhaps Ancel and Clare can yet be found, he looks at the collapsible baton lying on the passenger seat, and he remembers the drunken cowboy outside Nashville West, and he is overcome with the urge to use that effective weapon on a few of these greedy shoe
collectors, an urge that must be resisted.
44
PALM SPRINGS. THE SANTA ROSA and San Jacinto Mountains stark and mostly barren, plunging dramatically to the idyllic valley floor, palm trees stirring gently in the warm currents of the day, glittering shops and restaurants lining Palm Canyon Drive, all sun-splashed and palm-shaded, with an air of unhurried living…
Places like this—built with tradition as much as with wood, stone, nails, and mortar—had once made Jane feel safe, places where the storied past flowed through the present, where a way of life was largely preserved, evolving but slowly and with grace.
These days, perhaps such impressions were illusions. Maybe no place could long sustain against whatever new theory and collective madness was championed by the lords of the electronic and social media that saturated life. As their highest principle, those shapers of the future believed that the past was in all ways unspeakably primitive, that all change was for the better.
A block back from Palm Canyon Drive, she found a modest motel charging immodest prices, even on a weekday in April when the in-season rates slowly began to phase toward the off. The afternoon temperature was eighty-four degrees. A month from now, it might be a hundred and ten, and nearly as hot at midnight as at noon. The clerk took her cash, xeroxed her driver’s license, gave her a key card.
The luggage she carried from the Explorer to Room 17 included a titanium-alloy attaché case containing $210,000, about half of what she had taken from a creep named Simon Yegg three days earlier.
All the higher-echelon Arcadians squirreled away large sums of cash, getaway money that, in a crisis, would see them through to new lives under different names in distant countries. In spite of their arrogant confidence that they could establish Utopia, they couldn’t rid themselves of a tumor of doubt that prickled in their brains.
Flanking a small table were a pair of skirted armchairs. Jane lifted part of one skirt and slid the attaché case under the chair.
She hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and engaged the deadbolt.
She parted the draperies enough to see the Explorer and watched for ten minutes, but no one showed an unusual interest in the SUV.
For a while, she sat on the edge of the bed, holding the burner phone that Travis had called last night. She pressed it to her chest, as if it were some magical object that would compel her boy to pick up his phone down there in Borrego Valley, as if the mere fact of holding their phones at the same time would conjoin their hearts and minds so that she would feel him close and know that he was safe.
She dared not call him. Her enemies, who were legion, had surely by now established continual surveillance of Borrego Valley by aircraft equipped to fish from the air those carrier waves that were reserved for cellphones. The latest technology even allowed them to focus on transmissions from disposable phones within a fifty-mile radius. An analytical scanning program, customized for this operation, would search the transmissions for key words like mom and love and dad and sweetheart and Travis.
As she’d warned her boy when he called the previous night, it was now too dangerous to use even disposable phones.
Reluctantly, she returned the phone to one of her suitcases.
45
ABOVE THE FLATNESS OF THE city of Killeen, the sky appears likewise flat as it shades toward sapphire prior to twilight, and not only flat but also heavy, as if it is a massive descending slab that might crush everything on the earth under it.
Arriving less than five minutes after Rupert and Vince, but woefully late, Egon Gottfrey parks on the north side of the street. When he steps out of the Rhino GX, he feels oppressed under that too-solid-looking sky.
The historic district of Killeen, Texas, dating to the 1880s, features one- and two-story buildings with common walls, so it appears as if many enterprises occupy one long construct. The squat structures are mostly brick, painted brick, and stone. Substantial iron railings separate the sidewalks from the street. It’s as if the locals are aware the sky is descending with tremendous weight and therefore build low and solid as a defense against calamity.
The meterless parking is vertical to the sidewalk, and the Longrins’ white Mercury Mountaineer is angled nose to the curb in front of a Realtor’s office, across the street from Egon’s Rhino GX.
For a city of more than 140,000, there is little traffic on East C Street at this hour, perhaps because some businesses closed at five o’clock—a loan company, law offices—and because others are evangelical operations like Friends of Jesus Apostolic Ministries and the Upper Room Deliverance Center. Some storefronts with heavily tinted windows are unidentified, maybe occupied or maybe not.
Gottfrey interprets the light traffic and the lack of business signage as just more evidence of the Unknown Playwright’s periodic laziness when it comes to sketching in the details of a scene.
There are also a karaoke bar and a Mexican restaurant with bar, however, so things might be livelier after night has fully fallen.
As if the Unknown Playwright is aware of Gottfrey’s criticism and wishes to tweak him, the crosswalk at the end of the block is a swath of highly detailed brick in an intricate diagonal basket-weave pattern that only a master mason could have executed so precisely.
Eight or nine pedestrians are afoot, half in Army uniforms, no doubt stationed at Fort Hood, which is adjacent to Killeen and nearly surrounds it. On his journey to the Mountaineer, where Rupert and Vince wait, Gottfrey passes three soldiers, each of whom greets him—“Howdy” and “How’re y’all?” and “Evenin’, sir.” He takes this as further tweaking, and he replies, “Yeah, yeah” and “Right back at ya” and “Yada-yada.”
“Vehicle’s unlocked,” Rupert reports to Gottfrey. “We’ve combed through it. Nothing. Except the key was left under the front seat.”
“We think that means they’re not coming back for it,” Vince adds. “Abandoned it. Just walked away. Maybe hiding in Killeen or maybe got some other wheels somehow. Seems like a dead end.”
“There’s no such thing as a dead end,” Gottfrey says.
However, he has noticed there are no traffic cams in this area and no evident security cameras over entrances to these businesses. This fact, more than the historic buildings, makes him feel as though he has been thrown back in time to the Wild West when, to keep tabs on the population, authorities were limited to just their own eyes.
A tall, white-haired, distinguished-looking man is watching them through the glass door of the nearby real-estate agency.
Because Gottfrey is highly attuned to the rhythms of the role he is expected to play, he recognizes that this man is an important walk-on character who might have information that will swing the pursuit of Ancel and Clare in a new and more fruitful direction.
“Wait here,” he tells Rupert and Vince.
When Gottfrey approaches the door of the real-estate agency, it opens, and the white-haired man steps outside. “Unless I’ve lost my nose for righteousness, you gentlemen have the look of the law.”
“FBI,” says Gottfrey, and presents that ID.
The man insists on a handshake. “Jim Lee Cassidy. I’m honored, Agent Gottfrey.” He nods at the Mountaineer. “That handsome vehicle was driven by a down-home church-clean shoulders-back couple who couldn’t have been nicer if’n you held a gun to their heads. But bein’ a suspicious old fart, I felt somethin’ wasn’t right about ’em.”
“They wanted to rent a property or something?”
“No, sir. As they get out of that Mountaineer, it just happens I’m goin’ from my car to my office, carryin’ a valise not latched right. It comes open, spillin’ an embarrassment of private papers on the sidewalk here. A mischievous breeze scatters stuff every which a way, so those two go scramblin’ after everythin’ as if’n the wind is takin’ their own admission papers to Heaven. They hadn’t helped, I would’ve lost some things of considerable consequence.”
From an inner coat pocket, Gottfrey produces a photograph of Ancel and Clare.
“That’s the very pair,” Jim Lee Cassidy confirms.
The Hawks have striven to keep as low a profile as possible, and the Arcadians have used their influence with the media to keep Jane’s in-laws out of the story, hoping to foster in them the false idea that they are not being intensely observed.
He says, “What was it about them that made you suspicious?”
“Well, sir, once the papers was gathered up, me and him fell into conversation, just two minutes or three, but the woman kept tuggin’ his sleeve and remindin’ him they had reservations. Plus it seemed every passin’ vehicle worried her, the way she looked after it. And when a police car cruised by, it made ’em both jumpy.”
“When was this?” Gottfrey asks.
“I was comin’ back from showin’ a house to this young couple as sweet as two dill pickles. Had an appointment with a good client in my office at ten-thirty, so it was maybe five minutes past the hour.”
“This morning? These reservations she was worried about—they wouldn’t have been for lunch in some restaurant, not at that hour. Did you see where they went from here?”
Jim Lee Cassidy taps the side of his head with a forefinger as if to say he is always thinking. “I contrived to linger till I saw ’em go all the way to Second Street and turn right. From there, it’s not another block to the bus station. Maybe a bus reservation?”
“If they wanted a bus, why not park nearer the station?”
“You’re just askin’ to be polite. I figure they didn’t want it known they left Killeen by bus. Wanted to look like they was still here somewhere. Could you tell a helpful fella what they done?”
“Child pornography,” Gottfrey lies.
Cassidy’s face tightens with righteous anger. “I’d known that, they’d never made it to the bus station.” He shakes his head. “They looked clean-cut as if’n they was baptized every day of their lives. You just never know about people anymore, who they really are.”