by Dean Koontz
As if Bob heard that same voice, he went to the shower without comment.
Useful. At eighteen, Minette had been a frivolous girl, but she had become a serious adult almost overnight. For the past fifteen years, her happiness had depended on doing penance in one way or another. She needed to be useful. She earned a living as a teacher but spent nearly as much time in volunteer activities—counseling troubled children and working with organizations that served people with disabilities.
Her freshman year in college, on her own for the first time, she had slipped the belaying lines of family. She dated a guy named Mace Mackey, who was in the first year of the master’s program. Mace fancied himself bad to the bone, although in truth he possessed no moral substance, either bad or good, deeper than his skin. She found him so exciting that she didn’t go home for the three-month break before her sophomore year, but told her parents that she’d landed a good summer job with the university. There was no job; there was Mace, who came from a wealthy family and took care of Minette’s finances, while she took care of his even more basic needs.
Minette and her younger sister, Glynis, had always been close. Glynis missed Minette. Sixteen that summer, she wanted to come visit for a week. Minette, who thought of herself as sophisticated, looked forward to showing off her cute apartment and older boyfriend. The second night of the visit, the three were returning from a death-metal concert when unearned sophistication proved to have a high price. Behind the wheel of his Maserati, Mace was flying on some pills he’d been popping all day. Minette didn’t insist on driving because that would annoy him; he was no fun when annoyed. Anyway, she had a bit of a buzz on herself, from a joint and from sipping chocolate-flavored vodka. Mace totaled the Maserati. Fate proved to have a cruel sense of humor when he walked away without a scratch, Minette broke a finger—and Glynis, the only innocent among them, suffered a spinal injury that left her a paraplegic for life.
Minette, who had felt enchained by her parents’ old-fashioned middle-class ways, discovered that the chain of deserved guilt came with an immense anchor at the end and couldn’t be cast off as easily as bourgeois values. Fifteen years later it still encumbered her.
Useful. After the accident, she’d found happiness again only when she was useful, helping Glynis and then others, always giving more than she received. Now she could be useful by helping the authorities find the endangered boy.
In the bedroom, after Minette pulled on a pair of panties, as she was shrugging into a bra, she saw the bruise in the crook of her right arm. The diameter of a bottle cap. Somewhat red, too, inflamed and swollen. When touched, the spot proved tender. She looked closer and saw a puncture centered in the discoloration, directly over a vein, as if she’d had blood drawn, which she hadn’t.
Maybe a spider bite. A spider or some other insect. Nothing serious. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Forget about it.
After she dressed and went into the kitchen and fired up the coffeemaker, while she waited for Bob, she walked down the hall to the guest room to make the bed. At the threshold, as she began to open the door, she realized no guest was in residence at the moment.
Puzzled by her confusion, she pulled the door shut and turned away from it—and felt the terrible pull of that enduring anchor chain of guilt. Something was wrong. Something awful had happened. She must do the right thing. She must be useful. And somehow…being useful in this case required her to go into the guest room.
She turned to the door. Opened it. The room lay in darkness except for a few thin blades of light with which the sharp sun of the desert pierced the venetian blinds.
She stepped across the threshold and stood tense and blinkless in the gloom, listening. Then she flipped up the wall switch, and a nightstand lamp brightened the space.
To her left, the bedclothes were in disarray. Someone had spent the night here, after all.
Perplexed, she took another step into the room, turned to her right, and saw a dead woman in a wheelchair. Oh God, her face. It was less a face than a wound, ravaged flesh and shattered bone, her skull misshapen. But…not just a woman, not a stranger, Glynis.
Minette’s heart—
As Minette took a mug from a kitchen cabinet, her heart was suddenly thudding as if she had run a race. She put the mug on the counter, pressed a hand to her breast, and felt the systole of that vital pump. She detected no irregularity, only a healthy rhythm.
Frowning, she raised her eyes from the mug to the cabinet door. She could not remember opening it.
The kitchen was richly scented with the aroma of a fine Jamaica blend.
Minette turned her attention to the burbling coffeemaker. It was nearly finished brewing, having filled the Pyrex pot almost to the eight-cup line.
Disquieted but unsure why, she crossed the kitchen to the swinging door, which stood open.
She went into the dining room, from there into the living room, and the house was less than entirely familiar to her, as though its angles and dimensions had subtly changed.
On the brink of the hallway, she stared at the farther end.
Her racing heart still could not find a calmer rhythm.
As she moved along the hallway, she felt almost weightless, drawn inexorably toward the room at the end, which seemed to have the gravity of an entire planet contained within its walls.
Halfway to the guest bedroom, Minette was halted by a vivid memory: the Maserati fishtailing at high speed, the back end jumping a curb, the car airborne, slamming into the oak, rebounding with the violence of the impact. Shaken, she tries the front passenger door, surprised to find it still works. She gets out, stumbles a few feet from the vehicle before regaining her balance, and turns….The rear passenger-side door is crumpled like cardboard, jammed into the backseat; beyond the cocked and glassless window, Glynis’s face rises moon-white, and blood sprays on her breath when she screams.
Minette stands trembling in the hallway, wondering why this horrendous memory should recur to her now in such graphic detail.
Something was wrong with her. She wasn’t herself, moving past perplexity toward a frightening bewilderment.
She was also moving along the hall again. The guest-room door. She opened it. Stepped into the room. She flipped the light switch.
The bedclothes were tangled and spilling off the mattress. Someone had slept here last night.
Other signs of a visitor were to the right of the door: carpet stains and small pieces of debris. In the deep-pile forest-green carpet, the stains appeared black. Although the debris resisted identification, Minette became queasy at the sight of it, and she looked away.
The door to the walk-in closet stood ajar. She stepped around the stains, crossed the room, opened the closet door, and discovered a wheelchair. The woman in the chair faced away from Minette, into the closet, her head tipped to the right. The back of the woman’s head was broken open. A dangling chunk of skull bone was suspended by a flap of skin and strands of hair.
Minette remembered this, remembered seeing the face now turned away from her. In fact, she herself had moved the wheelchair into the closet.
Minette’s heart—
Sitting at the kitchen table, hands clasped around a mug of hot coffee, Minette Butterworth felt her heartbeat subside from a gallop to a more ordinary pace, and it no longer knocked against her breastbone. Paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, an acceleration of the heart when no cause was evident, had troubled her grandmother, and perhaps she had inherited a propensity for it. The condition wasn’t life-threatening. Ventricular tachycardia, on the other hand, could lead to a sudden cessation of the heartbeat and was far more serious than the supraventricular form, requiring a pacemaker. But her grandmother hadn’t needed one, and neither would Minette.
She didn’t worry about the episode, because an inner voice said she had nothing to fear. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing. Nothing. All would be
well if she made herself useful.
When Bob came into the kitchen, showered and shaved and dressed for the day, he drank his coffee while standing. “We’ve got to get moving, Min. We have our assignment, places to look, people to see. A helluva lot of them.”
Getting up from the table, Minette said, “That poor little boy must be terrified. What kind of people kidnap a helpless child?”
“We have more damn crime in this country than the big shots in Washington will ever admit,” Bob grumbled. “It’s only going to get worse.”
He drove their Toyota Tacoma pickup. She didn’t need to give him directions. He’d memorized the assignment, which was unusual. Minette had a facility for memorization, especially when it came to poetry, but not her Bobby. He was an excellent teacher, but if she didn’t give him a written list, if she just rattled off five items for him to pick up at the market, he would forget one or two. Yet he remembered every detail of their complicated assignment as if he were programmed.
Happily, they didn’t need to check on any of the folks in the other three residences on their little lane. Those people, too, had volunteered to assist in the search. They were darn good neighbors, and they were darn good people. Thinking about all of them wanting to help save that precious little boy, Minette was filled with a warm sense of community. She almost wanted to cry.
14
AT 10:38, AHEAD OF SCHEDULE, Enrique de Soto’s deliveryman, Tio, arrived with the Tiffin Allegro motor home, towing a white Chevrolet Suburban. The gate guard instructed him to park at the back of Ferrante Escobar’s fenced four-acre property and summoned Elinor Dashwood—Jane—from the client lounge.
Tio was maybe thirty, the ideal height and weight to be a Thoroughbred-racing jockey. A white welt of scar tissue across his throat suggested an encounter in which his adversary had failed either to kill him or rob him of his voice.
The man who would drive Tio back to Nogales, Arizona, followed in a Porsche 911 Turbo S. He parked near the motor home with the engine running and the air-conditioning on, and he never got out of the car.
The repainted Allegro was a sparkly midnight blue, not a color in the Tiffin catalog. The company decorated their vehicles with bold multicolor wind-stream stripes flaring along the flanks. Ricky had refined this motif so that there were fewer and smaller stripes of lower contrast with the base color, rendered in a single shade of high-gloss ruby red. The vehicle was so eye-catching that no one would imagine that it was on a clandestine mission.
Carrying her tote bag, Jane followed Tio into the motor home. Except for the windshield, the windows were tinted, and the vehicle carried a cargo of shadows.
She and Tio settled into the dinette booth, facing each other across the table.
She gave him the plastic-wrapped brick of money. “A hundred twenty K, as agreed.”
Tio put the cash in a tote bag of his own. “Enrique, he tells me don’t check is it funny money and don’t do a count. He wants you should know he trusts you like no one else. You should trust him the same once you’re over this widow thing.”
Jane smiled. “He’s one hell of a romantic guy, my Ricky.”
“Yeah, all the ladies love him, and that’s no shit. Plates on both vehicles, registration and proof of insurance in the consoles. Special plates for the Suburban and the other stuff you wanted”—he gestured toward the rear of the motor home—“it’s all there in the bedroom.”
Sliding out of the booth, she said, “Wait here.”
“You really gonna look it’s all there?”
“I really am.”
When nervous, Tio fingered the scar on his throat. “I tell Ricky you don’t take it on faith, it’s gonna break the man’s heart.”
“I’m sure it’s all there. But before I’m in the middle of this business deal I’m setting up, I want to be certain I’ve got exactly what I need, that there’s been no misunderstanding about what I asked Ricky for. Anyway, let’s not tell him I had to do inventory, spare him the heartbreak.”
“That’s good with me. I hate to see the man sad.” He stopped fingering the scar. “You never know what crazy shit he’s gonna do when he’s sad.”
When she returned from the bedroom, Jane said, “Everything’s just as it should be.”
Tio gestured to the booth she had vacated. “Park yourself and let me say some shit.”
She sat but said, “I’m expecting my partners very soon.”
“I’ll keep it quick. I want you should know some important truths about the man.”
“Ricky?”
“What other man we been talkin’ about?”
“Go on.”
“First, he’s hung like a horse. Un enorme garañón.”
Jane said, “I’m willing to believe that—but how do you know?”
“I stood beside him at urinals a hundred times. Understand, I don’t look on purpose. I mean, I don’t have no interest. But you take a piss with a guy often enough, you notice sooner or later.”
“Understood.”
“The first couple times with a new girl, maybe he goes off too quick. But after that, she’s not so fresh to him, then he can last longer than any stud you ever knew. Twice as long.”
“And how would you know that? Not saying I doubt you.”
Tio held out his right hand, so she could see the tattoo on the back. A red heart was enwrapped with a rippling blue ribbon on which red letters declared in Spanish, MAYA OWNS TIO FOREVER. “She’s my girl.”
“She made you put her brand on you?”
He regarded Jane with an expression of pity. “Maybe you don’t read guys too good. No bitch makes Tio do nothin’. I did it myself for love.”
“That’s very moving.”
Tio ducked his head, embarrassed by his sentimentality. “Maya, she was Ricky’s best girl, but he moved on. So then me and Maya, we found this special thing together, like destiny or somethin’. She’s hotter than hot.”
“And that’s how you know Ricky has staying power. Pillow talk between you and Maya.”
Tio shrugged. “You know how it goes. You get off together, it’s so great, and then after, while you’re layin’ there, you gotta talk about somethin’.” He realized Jane might infer the wrong thing from what he’d said. “Just so you know, I’m a marathon guy in the sack, just like Ricky. Lo puedo hacer por horas.”
“I can tell just by looking at you,” Jane said.
“Yeah, but I’m not talkin’ me here. I’m talkin’ Enrique, what you need to know.”
Jane felt as though she had been swept into the role of Roxane in a grotesque parody of Cyrano de Bergerac, with Tio as a less than eloquent Cyrano, Enrique offstage as the even less verbally gifted Christian de Neuvillette.
Smiling, Tio put his hands together in prayer mode as if to suggest that God was witness to the truth of his words. “Ricky, he never hit no bitch in his life. He never would hit no bitch. He treats them all like ladies.”
“If he ever hit me,” Jane said, “he’d have one less hand.”
Tio’s smile froze.
“I’m just sayin’,” Jane added.
Tio’s prayerful hands separated, and he nervously fingered his scarred throat. “I don’t see no reason to share that with Ricky.”
Jane smiled and nodded. “We don’t want to make him sad. You just tell Ricky that I said nothing you told me about him was news to me. I’ve always admired him from a distance, first as a married woman with vows to respect and now as a widow in mourning.”
When Jane rose to her feet, Tio said, “I also gotta tell how Ricky is crazy about music, you bein’ a piano player and all.”
“Come along now. I’ve got work to do before I, like Roxane, take myself off to a nunnery.”
As Jane was speaking, Tio got out of the booth with the tote full of money. When she got to the word nunnery, h
e flinched as if he’d been slapped. “No, usted no puede! You cannot! I tell you Maya is hotter than hot, and you’re so very hotter than her. This is a crazy thing for you. For my sister, yes, but never for you.”
Of course he did not get the reference and therefore did not get the joke, but Jane saw value in his lack of understanding, a way to keep Enrique at bay if she should need another vehicle from him in the future. With great solemnity, she said, “If I survive this business I’m caught up in, considering all the violence to which I’ve been a party, I’ll be most at peace if my in-laws raise my son and I withdraw from the world. There is an order at a monastery in Arizona, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. I believe I would be happy there. After all, Audrey Hepburn became a nun.”
Tio was doubly nonplussed. “Audrey who?”
“She was the most gorgeous movie star of her time, the Jennifer Lawrence of her day, but even more beautiful, and she became a nun, Sister Luke. She served the poor in the Congo, where she contracted tuberculosis.” Jane neglected to add that this occurred in a movie, The Nun’s Story.
Clearly distressed, Tio said, “I am broken to hear you’ll do this.”
She squeezed his shoulder as if with affection and moved him toward the front door of the motor home. “Just be happy for me, Tio. Be happy for me and go back home to Maya. After all, you are hers forever.”
15
MINETTE AND ROBERT BUTTERWORTH WERE assigned to pay surprise visits to the homes of their students, who would now be in school. In the case of well-behaved and studious kids, Min and Bob would represent to the parents that the child was being evaluated as a possible recipient for a full college scholarship under a program sponsored by a wealthy philanthropist. As regarded ill-behaved or underperforming kids, the visit supposedly would be about evaluating them for possible placement in a program funded by a philanthropist who developed new high-tech methods of instruction for struggling students.