by Dean Koontz
The concern that the perpetrators have fled the scene is at once allayed when the front door of the house opens and a naked woman steps onto the porch. Her hair is a wild, tangled mane. Her hands appear to be gloved in blood. She is Minette Butterworth, one of the adjusted people, whose wheelchair-bound sister Dubose shot three times the previous night.
9
THUNDER AVALANCHES DOWN THE SKY, shuddering the bones of the hotel in Beaumont, and shatters of rain break against the windows, near one of which Egon Gottfrey sits at a small table in the living room of his suite, working on the late Rupert Baldwin’s laptop.
He begins with a list of names. Jim Lee Cassidy, the Realtor in Killeen, who saw Ancel and Clare Hawk heading on foot toward the bus station. Sue Ann McMaster, the clerk at the bus station who ticketed them through to Houston. Lonnie John Bricker, the driver behind the wheel of the bus from Killeen to Houston. Tucker Treadmont, the discourteous Uber driver in Beaumont, who for $121.50 led them to an isolated rural property containing an abandoned house, reeking chicken coop, and ramshackle barn.
The one name Gottfrey needs and doesn’t have is that of the bus-station manager in Beaumont, such a nondescript character in an obvious walk-on role that, at the time, there seemed to be no reason to remember her. Using the NSA’s bottomless data troves and back-door connections to thousands of government and private-industry computer systems nationwide, he requires six minutes to discover that the station manager’s name is Mary Lou Spencer.
Assuming that Ancel and Clare Hawk indeed borrowed the Mercury Mountaineer belonging to the Longrins, and assuming that in fact they drove it to Killeen, where they abandoned it, the question then becomes: Did they really go from Killeen to Houston?
The Unknown Playwright has thrown Gottfrey into a puzzle pit, and if he doesn’t figure his way out of it, there is inevitably going to be pain.
Gottfrey is as sure as he can be about anything that the portly Tucker Treadmont, with his pointy-toed boots and man breasts and calculating greenish-gray eyes, never took the Hawks anywhere, let alone to that rotting house, stinking chicken coop, and tumbledown barn.
The easiest course of action is to track down Treadmont and torture the truth out of him. But that might be a mistake. If it’s expected he will take such action, he could be walking into a trap.
The Unknown Playwright wants him to be an iconic loner and a violent force. But the U.P. also doesn’t want anything to be easy for Gottfrey; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been sent chasing across half of Texas.
Apocalyptic, multifigured bolts of lightning flare and flare over Beaumont, as if some giant otherworldly spider is skittering through the city on white-hot electric legs. Runnels of rain on the window glass quiver with mercurial reflections.
Egon Gottfrey starts with Jim Lee Cassidy, the white-haired Realtor in Killeen, and rapidly builds a profile. Cassidy is sixty-six. Born in Waco, Texas. Served twenty years in the Army before retiring and taking up a career in real estate at the age of thirty-nine. Married to Bonnie Cassidy, maiden name Norton. Two children: Clint, thirty-three; Coraline, thirty-five.
Because Clint is approximately the age of the late Nick Hawk and because of his father’s military record, Gottfrey is keen to learn if the son volunteered with the Marine Corps, where he might have served with Nick. But Clint has no military history. He was born with talipes equinovarus, the worst kind of clubfoot. Early surgery corrected the condition but not enough to make him soldier material. Coraline has not been in any of the services, either.
Egon Gottfrey is patient. He is certain a connection exists between one of these people and the Hawks that will reveal where Jane’s in-laws went between Killeen and Beaumont. He will find it.
He likes being a loner. No chattering fools. No bolo ties.
Soon he moves on to the second name on his list. Sue Ann McMaster, the bus station clerk in Killeen.
To Gottfrey, the battlefield sky full of flash and flame and cannonade is not merely a storm, but also a celebration of his reinterpretation of his role. The Unknown Playwright is pleased. From time to time, Gottfrey turns from the laptop screen to the window and stares at the weather-racked day, which seems so real, but is painted in thrilling detail just for him.
10
A HOLLOWNESS IN CARTER JERGEN’S CHEST, as though something has fallen out of him…The oppressive heat, the sun glare, the deep strangeness of the situation together inspiring alarm, a sense of mortal peril impending…
Minette Butterworth stands tall and naked on the porch, staring not at the five people riveted by her sudden appearance, but at her hands, which she raises before her face as though bewildered to find them slick with blood.
To Carter Jergen, Radley Dubose murmurs, “He is one lucky guy.”
“Who?”
“Old Bob Butterworth, of course. The way she was dressed last night, who could know a body like that was under her clothes? Purely delicious.”
Although some effort is required to look away from the goddess of death on the porch, although Dubose should long ago have ceased to have the power to astonish and appall, Jergen stares at him in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“My friend, when it comes to making the beast with two backs, I’m always serious.”
“Where is Bob?” Jergen suddenly wonders.
“I suspect his luck ran out.”
Minette lowers her crimson hands and moves off the shaded porch, slowly descending the steps with the measured grace of a high-fashion model, and even the hard desert sunshine flatters her. She stops on the walkway and at last directs her attention to those who have been transfixed by her.
The younger of the deputies declares, “She’s hurt,” and starts forward to render assistance.
Dubose seizes him by one shoulder, halts him. “Whoa, not your jurisdiction, son. This is part of what happened at the market Sunday afternoon. This is our turf now.”
“But she’s hurt.”
“I don’t think so.”
As if to confirm what Dubose says, Minette Butterworth lets out a full-voiced shriek as eerie and chilling as the cry of a coyote with blood on its breath celebrating the rending of prey. Then from her issues a vicious stream of obscenities braided through with hisses and guttural sounds, a rant as furious as it is incoherent.
This is a female voice, but otherwise Jergen feels as though he’s listening to Ramsey Corrigan, who slaughtered his parents, his brother, and an Arcadian who was also a Homeland Security agent.
As if conjured, a phone appears in Dubose’s hand. He’s already into his contacts directory. With one touch, he calls the Desert Flora Study Group that occupies the tent and the cluster of trucks along Borrego Springs Road. “Kill Ramsey Corrigan. Kill him now! He’s transmitting psychological disintegration through the whispering room.”
Minette falls silent, staring as if she expects a response.
Carter draws his pistol.
One of the deputies says, “What’s happening?”
Mrs. Atlee starts backing away, toward her Buick.
To the on-duty officer at the Desert Flora Study Group, Dubose says, “Roadblocks. Fast. Every highway leaving the valley.”
They have not established traditional roadblocks because, if possible, they want Jane Hawk to enter Borrego Valley by whatever deception she devises, perhaps let her feel a little cocky before closing the exits behind her.
As Jergen reminds the big man of this, Dubose cuts him off. “It’s not just about Hawk now. We injected fifty people last night.”
The hollow feeling in Carter Jergen’s chest expands to his gut. His alarm escalates into fright, but he dares not succumb to fear. “Maybe they’re not all as far gone as this crazy bitch.”
“Maybe not. Maybe nanowebs aren’t in every case facilitating the breakdown and repurposing of highly complex neural pathways. But the human brain ha
s a high plasticity, which makes it vulnerable as hell to this. Maybe the fifty we brain-screwed are in a variety of psychotic states, some of them still able to pass for normal. But none of the freaks will play nice just because we say, ‘Do you see the red queen?’ Gotta contain this fast, take ’em down.”
“Contain it? Fifty dead isn’t containment.”
“Not just fifty. Fifty plus collateral damage.”
Collateral damage. Jergen realizes that he is potentially collateral damage.
“Let them out of the valley,” Dubose says, “it’ll be harder to impose a news blackout on whatever they do. And if we have to check every vehicle going out, we’re revealing our hand to the Hawk bitch, so we might as well check everyone coming in, nail her if we can.”
“Maybe she’s already here.”
“I’d bet on it,” Dubose says.
Although it seems as if Minette Butterworth will at any moment charge them in a fit of savage fury, instead she turns and leaps up the porch steps and disappears into the house, gone in two seconds.
11
A FADED BLUE SKY. SUN-BLASTED SAND and rock. Sparse, seared vegetation in scraggly configurations that suggested the mutant consequence of some long-ago incident involving a devastating release of deadly radiation…
The land seemed to speak, seemed to say, The boy is mine now and forever.
They were on County Highway S22, the Salton Sea behind them, maybe twenty-seven miles from the heart of Borrego Springs, when Jane spotted the big highway department truck parked ten feet off the road, about fifty yards ahead of them. No pavement repairs were under way. No workers were attendant to the vehicle.
“Slow down,” she told Bernie, “but don’t stop.”
As they drifted toward the truck, she saw what she expected: the lens hood of a camera in a motion-detector-activated video-and-transmitter package mounted under the bumper of the truck. Their license plate was scanned and instantly sent to whatever special operations post the Arcadians had set up in Borrego Valley.
She had no concern that Enrique de Soto had let her down this time. A check of the DMV would show that the Tiffin Allegro was registered to Albert Rudolph Neary.
“Okay, up to speed.” As Bernie accelerated, she said, “What’s your name again?”
Instead of answering simply, he elaborated. “Well, Mama named me Albert Rudolph, and she called me Al, but I never did much like Al, even though I loved Mama. So ever since she died when I was just seventeen, I’ve gone by Rudy.”
Still perched on the Euro recliner behind Jane, Luther Tillman said, “So where you from, Rudy?”
“Born in Topeka, left Kansas after Mama died. My dad passed from a heart attack when I was a baby. Came west and been here ever since. Right now I live in Carpinteria, a pretty town, a true little slice of Heaven. Penny, my wife—Jesus bless her soul—she died four years ago. Penny loved the desert, so I spread her ashes there, like she wanted, and I come back every April to visit with her.”
Jane was impressed that Bernie had changed his speech patterns and vernacular, which required a sustained conscious effort. “All that detail—where’d that come from?”
He smiled. “In the wig business, a person has to be something of—you should excuse the expression—a bullshit artist.”
12
BEAUMONT FLOATING IN THE FLUX of the storm and Egon Gottfrey swimming in an ocean of data, fingers stroking the laptop keys…
Sue Ann McMaster, Killeen bus-station clerk, twenty-nine years old, born in Vidor, Texas, is married to Kevin Eugene McMaster, who is the manager of a landscaping company. Sue Ann is the mother of two children, eight-year-old Jack and six-year-old Nancy. Nothing in her life suggests she is connected in any way to the Hawk family.
Gottfrey almost misses a fact that links her not to the Hawks but to at least another person in the chain of deceit that resulted in his being led to that desolate property where Baldwin and Penn now lie dead—assuming one believes they ever existed. Sue Ann McMaster was born Sue Ann Luckman. But following her marriage to Kevin nine years earlier, when she applied for a revised driver’s license to reflect her married name, her previous license was not in the name Luckman, but in the name Spencer. Further digging reveals that a first marriage, at the age of seventeen, to one Roger John Spencer, of Beaumont, ended after eight months, when he was killed in a traffic accident.
Spencer. The fifth name on Gottfrey’s list is Mary Lou Spencer, the bus-station manager here in Beaumont. He needs only five minutes to learn that she is the mother of three, that one of her children was Roger John Spencer, the very same who died in a traffic accident eleven years ago.
If Gottfrey didn’t understand that the world and everything in it is illusionary, he might think it unremarkable that this link between Sue Ann and Mary Lou exists.
Obviously, if Mary is working in the bus business in Beaumont and Sue is, back in the day, perhaps employed at the same station, it is the most natural thing for Roger to encounter his mother’s young coworker, be smitten by her, and eventually marry her. Two years after Roger’s death, when Sue meets Kevin McMaster and marries him and moves to Killeen, it is also logical that she would seek employment at the bus station, perhaps even arrange for a transfer from Beaumont.
If you believe the world is real, intricately detailed, and infinitely layered, you might expect an endless series of minor coincidences of this nature and find nothing suspicious in them.
Because Gottfrey is aware that the world is an exceptionally clever conceit, not as complex and deep as it seems, but merely a narrative spun by the Unknown Playwright for his/her/its enjoyment, he knows at once that this link between Sue and Mary is evidence of a nefarious conspiracy.
In addition, he is certain that the three other names on his list are also players in an elaborate campaign of misdirection with the intention of concealing the true whereabouts of Ancel and Clare. All he needs to do is find their connections and, upon reviewing the material he gathers on them, determine which of them is most likely to know where Jane Hawk’s in-laws have gone. Then he can cut the truth out of the deceitful bastard or bitch, whichever proves to be the case.
Because Gottfrey enjoys back-door access to the NSA’s Utah Data Center and all its myriad connections across the country, he expects to wrap this up in an hour or less.
A prolonged nova of lightning explodes across the day, as if the illusion of a storm sky and a universe beyond has in an instant been ripped away and the searing truth of existence revealed. The thunder, crashing close in the wake of the first flare, rocks the foundations of this world.
The Unknown Playwright approves. The fun will soon begin.
13
BERNIE SLOWED FOR A SUDDEN backup in traffic.
The vehicles in line were mostly cars and SUVs. From the high cockpit of the motor home, Jane Hawk had a clear enough view of the obstruction to identify it. She said, “Police roadblock.”
As the motor home came to a halt, she disconnected her safety harness, swiveled the copilot’s chair, and thrust to her feet.
Luther was on the move, heading toward the bedroom at the back of the Tiffin Allegro.
Jane stepped past the dinette booth to a sofa that doubled as a pull-out bed, opposite the fridge and cooktop.
“Give a shout, you need help,” said Bernie.
“I can take care of this. You just be the best Albert Rudolph Neary you can be.”
The sofa bed was on a platform that Enrique de Soto had raised from thirteen inches to fifteen. He had taken the folding bed and its mechanism out of the platform, so that it was now hollow. In its original condition, thick sofa cushions had to be removed to access the pull-out bed and unfold it. Now that it had been remade, the seat cushions were glued to a slab of inch-thick particleboard, the edge of which was concealed with welting.
When she pushed on the welted edge of th
e particleboard, she released a pressure latch that freed the entire slab to which the pillows were glued. It glided forward on hidden roller tracks, exposing the hiding place beneath.
Jane stepped over the cushions and sat in the cavity. She stretched out flat on her back, head against one sidewall of the sofa, feet against the other.
In the bedroom, in similar fashion, Luther would be secreting himself within the larger platform of the queen-size bed, the box springs having been removed by Enrique and replaced by particleboard that supported the mattress.
With one hand, Jane slid the pillowed platform shut, and the pressure latch clicked. She would be able to release the latch from this position when the time came to climb out. In the confining darkness, she listened to the low rumble of the engine as, in fits and starts, the vehicle moved forward toward the roadblock.
If the motor home had been transporting illegal drugs and if this had been a border crossing with experienced DEA agents, they would have found the secret stashes in about three minutes, even without the assistance of dogs. But the men manning the roadblock were FBI or Homeland Security, or maybe NSA, not drug-enforcement types, and they were probably not familiar with human-trafficking techniques, either. With Bernie Riggowitz behind the wheel, the least likely getaway driver in the annals of crime, any search of the Tiffin Allegro was likely to be perfunctory.
14
HAVING TAKEN REFUGE IN THE driver’s seat of her Buick, doors locked and engine running, Mrs. Atlee stares out at Carter Jergen and the others as though she is in a deep-sea submersible, watching the strange marine creatures in an oceanic crevasse as they go about their watery business unaware that they are about to be torn apart and swallowed by some approaching leviathan.