by Dean Koontz
“What bitch?”
The judge is incensed. “What bitch are we talking about? Janis! Is that why you couldn’t see she had a screw loose—because you were so busy putting new screws to her?”
“No, sir. No, ma’am, judge. I’m not like that.”
“You better stop wasting your testosterone, Gottfrey. Keep your pants zipped, man up, start breaking heads, and get the job done.”
Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton terminates the call.
Following Tucker Treadmont to whatever unpleasant surprise will come next, Egon Gottfrey sourly wonders what the Unknown Playwright intends by layering on all these frustrations, what Gottfrey is meant to intuit about the direction his role should take.
He has so badly wanted to bludgeon so many people recently, not least of all Vince Penn and Tucker Treadmont. Judge Draper-Cruxton’s tirade suggests that in this regard if in no other, Gottfrey intuits what the Playwright wants of him. Maybe it’s time to be ruthless. If someone frustrates him, maybe he should answer them with violence. The previous night, he dreamed of shooting Ancel Hawk and slitting Clare’s throat. Now that he thinks about it, the Unknown Playwright has spoken to him in dreams before when Gottfrey has been floundering in his role, and thereafter everything was all right again.
4
PALM SPRINGS TO RANCHO MIRAGE, through Indian Wells, past La Quinta, Jane Hawk in a world of sand traps and water hazards, more than one hundred world-class golf courses in the six up-valley towns, but with no time for leisure, living now for one purpose, with one task at which she must not fail…
Indio was less about leisure, a center of industry and farm-servicing companies. Much of it looked dusty, weathered, and weary here on the edge of the San Andreas Fault.
Ferrante Escobar, nephew of Enrique de Soto, operated his legit business—customizing limousines, high-end SUVs, and other vehicles for wealthy clients—out of a four-acre fenced-and-gated property in an industrial area. The manned guardhouse and the tight security had less to do with the value of the vehicle inventory than with the illegal weapons business conducted from a secret basement under one of the three large concrete-block-and-corrugated-metal buildings in which vehicles were being rebuilt.
The workers started at seven o’clock. Jane arrived shortly thereafter in the pixie-cut chestnut-brown wig and the stage-prop glasses with black frames, her blue eyes made brown by contact lenses. She told the guard, “Elinor Dashwood to see Mr. Escobar,” and presented a California driver’s license.
The guard directed her to the third building. By the time she parked the Explorer, Ferrante had come out to greet her.
Slim, good-looking, well barbered, he had the lithe movements and erect posture of a matador. He stood where the shadow of the building and the morning sun together scribed a territorial boundary on the pavement. His soft, musical voice matched his smile: “I’m so pleased to meet you. So very pleased.”
He had a boyish quality, a fresh-scrubbed wide-eyed innocence that didn’t comport with his second career as an arms dealer. South of thirty, he was young to have created such a successful business. But of course his Uncle Ricky had floated him the start-up money.
He knew who she really was. There were no secrets between him and Enrique.
Jane said, “I appreciate the risk you’re taking by letting me put this thing together here. I’m grateful.”
He nodded. There was something shy about the nod, a kind of deference in the way he stood, a coyness in his stare that seemed simultaneously to engage her and retreat from her.
His handshake was firm. But when she met his eyes, he looked away. “The vehicles from my uncle will be here by eleven. Meanwhile, we have a comfortable client lounge. Coffee. Doughnuts. TV.”
“Ricky told you I’m also in need of a handgun?” She preferred to have two at all times. She’d disposed of the gun she had used to defend herself in Tahoe on Sunday, because it could be tied to the death of a major Arcadian. “A Heckler and Koch Compact .45?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Do you want to arrange that now?”
“Best get it out of the way. I’ll have a lot to do later.”
“Then, please, follow me.”
She got her tote from the car. It now contained the package of $120,000 for Enrique de Soto and $90,000 additional.
Ferrante led her out of sunlight into shadow.
As they stepped into a hallway, he said, “This building is devoted to the storage of vehicle parts, supplies, and my office.”
Ferrante’s sanctum was perhaps thirty feet square, with a fourteen-foot ceiling. The frosted-glass windows were ten feet off the floor, as if to ensure privacy even from drones. When he closed the door, an electronic lock shot home a deadbolt with a loud clack.
Jane saw two other doors, perhaps one to a bathroom and the other an exit directly to the outside.
The room featured sleek modern furniture—teak, steel, glass, black leather upholstery—all spotless, gleaming. Everything was of the same style except for an unusual bristling sculpture on his desk, presented on an acrylic plinth, and four disturbing four-foot-square paintings that formed a giant art block on one wall.
Each painting depicted a human heart in realistic detail: the glistening muscle so lovingly rendered that Jane could almost see it contract and expand. Blood dripped from three hearts, squirted in a rich stream from the fourth. Each organ was festooned with different severed veins and arteries: aorta, superior vena cava, descending aorta, pulmonary artery, inferior vena cava….Every heart was bound and cruelly pierced by a woven cincture of thorny brambles.
Enrique said his nephew was devout. These images were the sacred heart of Christ, but not as usually portrayed. The over-the-top details and lavish gore seemed to mock the subject, though if Ferrante was truly devout, mockery was out of the question.
“What do you think of the artist’s work?” Ferrante asked.
She said, “Striking.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Bold.”
“Some people don’t get it.”
“Colorful,” she said.
“If they don’t get it, I never preach at them.”
“That’s wise.”
Shyly, as before, he looked at her sideways, nodded, and then turned his attention to the paintings. “Every time I look at them, I’m deeply moved, inspired, justified.”
The last word in the series was peculiar and therefore the most significant. Jane couldn’t imagine any other meaning than that, to his way of thinking, his devotion justified or excused his criminal activity. His uncle Ricky wasn’t the only relative who operated on the wrong side of the law. The kid was born into a crime family of sorts; so maybe he felt compelled to uphold the tradition.
As she watched Ferrante smiling and nodding and gazing at the gruesome hearts, another possibility occurred to her. Ricky claimed his nephew attended Mass every day and “says his rosary like some old abuela who wears a mantilla even in the shower.” If Ferrante thought that being devout was adequate penance that allowed him to profit from the illegal sale of weapons, he might believe it also justified worse crimes.
Like rape and murder.
That thought wasn’t evidence of rampant paranoia. It was merely a consequence of her experience.
In her time at the Bureau, Jane had captured a serial killer, J. J. Crutchfield, who insisted that he was doing the Lord’s work, killing oversexed teenage girls who would corrupt teenage boys if he didn’t stop them. Thus he was saving both the boys and the girls from damnation. He preserved his victims’ eyes in jars, convinced—or so he claimed—that in each girl’s moment of death, she’d seen God. To J.J., the eyes were sacred relics. He found it difficult, however, to explain why God wanted him to rape the women before killing them to save their souls.
While Jane pretended to admire the paintings, she was aware of her host watc
hing her more directly than he seemed able to do when she was facing him.
As a last word on the art, she said, “Unforgettable.”
When she turned to him, his smile was of a peculiar character that disturbed her, although she couldn’t define the quality of it that she found unsettling.
She remembered what Enrique de Soto had told her on the phone the previous day: But I have to say he’s a weird duck…got this blood obsession.
He seemed about to speak but then broke eye contact again. He went around the desk, opened a drawer, and withdrew a Heckler & Koch Compact .45 still in its original sealed box.
New weapon, no history, no waiting period, no background check, no formal or de facto registration. The guns Ferrante sold probably came from his uncle Ricky, which meant they were stolen and provided a terrific profit margin.
“How much?” Jane asked.
He met her eyes directly and for the first time did not quickly look away. “I won’t accept money from you. There’s something else I want, something better than money.”
She put down the tote to have both hands free.
5
CARTER JERGEN FINDS THE PLACE abhorrent on first sight. In the passenger seat of the VelociRaptor, he shivers with cold disgust.
Rooney Corrigan, pooh-bah of sandsucker society, maintains a small carbon footprint by generating his own electricity. The most prominent structures on his property are two sixty- or seventy-foot-tall windmills. They aren’t the picturesque stone windmills with huge cloth sails seen in Holland, but ugly steel constructs, tripods reminiscent of the Martian death machines in The War of the Worlds.
The single-story green-stucco house—where the “crocodile incident” has occurred, whatever that might be—boasts a roof entirely of solar panels and stands on several acres of pale and sandy dirt, lacking even stones-and-cactus landscaping. The only evidence that the planet produces flora is three struggling king palms with more brown than green fronds and a misshapen olive tree lifeless for so long that its bleached, leafless limbs and weather-shredded bark might be an avant-garde sculpture wired together from the bones and brittle hair of dead men.
The long, unpaved driveway is defined only by parallel lines of stones arranged to mark its borders.
Parked near the house are two black Jeep Cherokees.
As Dubose brakes to a stop fifty yards from those vehicles and stares at the house with a dour expression, he says, “I call it a crocodile incident. He called it ‘the possible assertion and triumph of the reptile consciousness.’ There’s like a one-in-ten-thousand chance an adjusted person might have a catastrophic psychological collapse after the control mechanism activates.”
Jergen frowns. “I never heard such a thing. Says who?”
“The genius who invented the nanoimplants.”
“Bertold Shenneck is dead.”
“I’m not claiming he spoke to me at a séance. He worried about this from day one. He foresaw two kinds of psychotic breakdowns.”
“How do you know this, and I don’t?”
“I knew someone who knew the great man. Inga Shenneck.”
“His wife?”
“Before Shenneck and then for a while after she married him, she and I had this thing going.”
Jergen wants to deny the obvious intended meaning of the words this thing. “But she…she was a stunner.”
“Hot,” Dubose says. “A lot younger than Shenneck and so hot she was thermonuclear. And insatiable. She wore me out.”
Carter Jergen is not naïve. He doesn’t believe life has some grand meaning. He doesn’t believe in good and evil. He doesn’t see any issue in black-and-white, only in innumerable shades of gray. He doesn’t believe that life, society, and justice are fair or ever can be. He doesn’t believe they should be fair. Fairness is unnatural; it’s seen nowhere in nature. He believes in power. Those with the desire and the will to seize power are those best qualified to shape the future.
But it is so unfair that a backwoods cretin who surely got into Princeton on a fraudulently obtained scholarship, who at breakfast folds two strips of bacon into a thick bonbon of pig fat and pops them into his mouth with his fingers, who wouldn’t know which fork to use for the fish appetizer if the butler snatched it off the table in frustration and stabbed him in the face with it, so unfair that this kind of man could have had a woman like Inga Shenneck.
Jergen says, “I admired her grace, her style, her taste….”
Dubose nods. “Exactly why she was drawn to me.”
“You never told me about this.”
“I don’t talk about my ladies. A gentleman is always discreet.”
“Discreet? You just said she was insatiable.”
Dubose looked puzzled. “She’s dead. So what’s to be discreet about after she’s packed off in a coffin?”
For a moment, Jergen stares in silence at the windmills looming behind the house, their enormous blades carving the air and probably a significant number of birds in any twenty-four-hour period. The sun flares off the solar panels. The stucco is a bilious shade of green. A ragged dog of numerous heritages wanders into the driveway in front of them, squats, and takes a dump.
“I’m in Hell,” Jergen says. “I don’t believe in Hell, but what is this”—he sweeps one hand across the vista before them, where the dog craps in front of a house that by all appearances is built from the animal’s previous defecations—“what is this if it isn’t Hell?”
Dubose cocks his head and raises one eyebrow. “Are you going all dramatic on me? We can’t afford existential angst in our line of work. My advice is don’t watch those historical dramas on PBS, they just get your panties in a wad. Don’t watch, and you’ll be happier. I want you to be happy, my friend.”
“Comme vous êtes gentil!” Jergen butters the flattery and thank-yous with sarcasm. “Vous êtes trop aimable! Merci infiniment!”
Dubose sighs and shakes his head. “De rien, mademoiselle.”
Astonished by this revelation, Jergen says, “You speak French?”
“Do bears shit in the woods?” He places a hand on Jergen’s shoulder. “Buddy, calm yourself. If just the outside of this place freaks you, then you won’t be able to handle what’s inside.”
Enduring the hand on his shoulder because it will be there only a moment, Carter Jergen says, “Yeah? What’s inside?”
“Dead people.”
“I’ve seen plenty of dead people. Made a few of them myself.”
“Yeah, but these didn’t die pretty.”
6
AS THOUGH HE READ DISAPPROVAL in Jane’s face, Ferrante Escobar said, “We sell only to wealthy, reputable clients needing protection in an increasingly dangerous world. They don’t want to risk having their weapons known and confiscated if some crisis leads to martial law. Many of them have large security staffs, and they buy in bulk, but we don’t sell to anyone who might intend to resell.”
His self-justifications were self-delusions, but Jane couldn’t afford to alienate Ferrante Escobar. She must be in Borrego Valley this afternoon. She’d already needed more time to put together this operation than she would have liked. Further delay was unthinkable.
Nevertheless, instead of responding to his declaration that he would not accept money from her, that he wanted something else in return for the pistol, she said again, “How much?”
Anxiety molded his face. “This is a world of lies and always has been. We live in a time of even greater deceptions than in centuries past. So much of what we’re told, what we see on TV, what we read in the newspapers or on the Internet, is invented to conceal the truth, protect the wicked, increase the power of those who already have more power than all the kings of history combined.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said. “But what does that have to do with the price of a pistol?”
He became more
excited, speaking fast. Earlier he’d been unable to endure her stare for more than a moment. Now he was unable to look away.
“They claim you’re a true monster. No redeeming qualities. So dangerous, vicious, hateful. But all they’ve done is make you as unreal as the supervillain in some bad Batman movie. All over the Internet, they’re talking about what you really might be. They think you know something that could bring down a lot of powerful people.”
Ferrante continued to meet her eyes, but his demeanor changed. He pressed his right hand over his heart, his left over the right, as if his heart must be pounding so hard and fast that pressure needed to be applied to quiet it. With this strange posture came a change in his voice. He spoke neither as fast nor as loud as before, and there was a new tone that she could not at first name.
“They say maybe you have proof of something big. But you can’t find a way to use it or get it out to the public. Because everything is so corrupt these days. Because you have to run as fast as you can just to stay alive.”
When he fell silent, Jane said, “And what do you think?”
Anxiety faded from his face, and a tenderness replaced it. “I think you’re the truth in a sea of lies. There is a painting in the Louvre in Paris. I own a print of it. She’s shown in armor when Charles the Seventh was crowned the king of France.”
“No,” Jane said.
“You look nothing like her, but you’re armored, too.”
Disturbed by what she now realized was Ferrante’s reverence, she said, “I am nothing like her. God talked to Joan of Arc, or she thought He did. He’s never talked to me. I got into this for selfish reasons, to restore my husband’s good name, to save my son’s life. If it’s grown into something larger than that, it’s not anything I ever wanted. I’m not made to carry that kind of weight. I can’t save an entire freaking nation. I could be dead tomorrow. Chances are I will be dead. I’m tired and lonely and scared, and I’m under no illusion that God or some guardian angel will spare me from a bullet in the head if the bastard who pulls the trigger knows how to aim.”