by Dean Koontz
Even if the blonde intended to buy only one or two items from the market, she would be gone at least five minutes. More likely ten. The convertible’s top was down, an invitation.
Makani opened the passenger door, slipped into the seat, and popped the lid on the console box. Chewing gum, a tin of breath mints, a matchbook-size folder of lens-polishing papers for those wraparound sunglasses, a ballpoint pen clipped to a small notepad, the required proof of insurance, about a dozen business cards from local shops and restaurants…She plucked out the vehicle registration, which revealed that the owner was Ursula Jean Liddon; there was a familiar street name that Makani knew to be located in a gate-guarded community in that neighborhood of Newport Beach known as Newport Coast.
Having taken less than three minutes for her investigation, she returned the registration to the console box, closed the lid, and got out of the convertible. Returning to her ’54 Chevy, she saw that the pickup once parked beside it was gone. The driver’s door stood open, and the long-legged blonde sat sideways on the driver’s seat, reading the vehicle registration.
Bob had either bolted to the backseat or had been moved there.
He hung his head out a window, looking aggrieved.
When she saw Makani, the blonde flung the registration onto the pavement.
Makani hurried to retrieve the crumpled paper before the light breeze skittered it across the parking lot. When Makani rose from a stoop, the registration in hand, Ursula Liddon was less than a foot away, looming over her.
That piercing blue stare, which had earlier been cold, was now hot, radiant with malice and contempt. “Makani, huh? Hisoka-O’Brien. Baby, sorry to tell you, the pretentious hyphen can’t disguise the fact that those are two mongrel races, which makes you a mongrel twice over.”
Makani did not respond, but neither did she look away.
Ursula Liddon said, “You think I’m stupid, I wouldn’t notice this souped-up joke car of yours? I told you, butch, I don’t want what you’re selling.”
Accepting the cover story that the blonde’s misapprehension offered her, Makani said, “You can’t know till you try.”
“You think there’s anything I haven’t tried? So you want me. So does everyone. Get over it. You come near me again, best you’ll get is a nasty scar.”
A four-inch blade flicked from the yellow plastic handle of a knife that appeared in the blonde’s right hand no less mysteriously than a dove might manifest from a magician’s silk handkerchief. The point was half an inch from Makani’s navel. They were standing so close together that anyone chancing past would probably not have seen anything amiss.
Although Makani’s first impulse was to take the weapon away from Liddon, she restrained herself for two reasons. First, there was a small chance she would fail, in which case the blonde, who seemed considerably less stable than a gyroscope, might in a panic slash and stab. Second, Makani’s display of physical competence and street smarts might suggest that she was not what Liddon had taken her to be, that her motivation had nothing to do with girl-on-girl romance or sexual desire. Anyone who would starve and murder her twin sister must see the world through a lens of paranoia; her ready suspicion, easily pricked, would cause her to abandon the perception of Makani as a gay-girl stalker and embrace the idea that she was a threat of an unknown nature.
Feigning more fear than she felt, though not overplaying it, Makani stepped back from the blade. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“Well, here I am.”
“I just thought…”
“I know what you thought, butch.”
“Don’t call me that. It’s mean.”
“Pathetic little butch.”
Makani focused on the knife as if with greater fear. Instead of glinting on the cutting edge, the bright midday light seemed to part around it, soft as butter.
The blade flicked into the handle. The blonde pocketed the weapon. “I’ve got your address, Hisoka-O’Brien.”
Makani meant her response to sound like a shaky pretense of confidence. “And I’ve got yours, Ursula Jean Liddon.”
The blonde’s smile served also as a sneer. “Why don’t you come around sometime? Bring a knife of your own.”
She surveyed the parking lot, the rows of shining vehicles, as though to assure herself that their confrontation had elicited no attention. Like much that Liddon had done, the subsequent blow was unexpected—a vicious slap in the face that stung, as did the harder backhand slap that at once followed and brought involuntary tears.
Makani’s instinct was to give worse than she got, but repaying violence with violence would reveal that she was not the meek and desire-besotted girl that Liddon took her to be. She let her mouth go loose, to suggest that the tears were tears of disappointment and humiliation.
The blonde winked and turned from Makani. Lithe, intentionally seductive, she walked away and didn’t once look back.
Each slap had been a touch. Each touch had revealed the same vicious desire. Ursula Liddon considered herself a man trap of singular effectiveness. To be mistaken for a girl’s girl cut her ego to the quick and infuriated her so much, she wished that she could pay back Makani by getting her alone and cutting out her eyes.
Makani got into the driver’s seat of the Chevy, leaving the door open. She plucked Kleenex from the console. She smelled blood, and tasted it when she licked her lips. The rearview mirror revealed a scarlet thread unraveling from her left nostril.
A few decades earlier, when pointed-nose surfboards had first become popular, injuries in wipeouts increased due to that dangerous point. The soft silicon-plastic glue-on nose guard was invented to solve the problem. Although she had allowed the blonde to dominate her for good reason, Makani felt as if she had just screwed up and gone through a wipeout without nose guard.
In the backseat, Bob whined.
“It’s not what it looks like, Bobby,” she assured him. “I allowed the bitch to biff me.”
Just then, Ursula Liddon drove by and tapped her horn twice, as if in a jaunty farewell.
When Bob whined again in a specific way, Makani recognized his meaning this time. He needed to pee.
She walked him on a leash to a grass sward past the parking lot, where he relieved himself against a signpost.
The sign declared REDUCE SPEED AHEAD. Having encountered absolute evil often before and having survived, Makani knew that the sign’s advice had no value for her, although with all her heart she wanted to heed it. However, the only way to deal with people like Ursula Liddon was to tramp on the accelerator and run them down.
3
Share a Kiss or Kick Some Butt?
The gulls were curiously quiet as they kited through a sky not quite as blue as Makani’s eyes.
The harbor water appeared more deep green than blue, every ripple silvered by the sun.
Fish were mostly shadows if one cared to lean over the railing and search for them below the surface. The occasional sea lion, in spite of its enormous size, slipped through the channel silently, swimming more than half submerged, skin glistening like wet rubber.
Wearing only khaki shorts and a good tan, in a comfortable lounge chair on the afterdeck of a sixty-eight-foot coastal cruiser, Pogo from time to time looked up from his copy of The Adventures of Augie March to watch one of the more beautiful yachts or racing boats cruise past. Thousands of vessels were moored in the harbor, hundreds of millions’ worth of watercraft, but he coveted none.
Pogo held a part-time job at Pet the Cat, a surf shop near the first of the two piers on Balboa Peninsula, but now that the summer season had passed, the shop was closed on Mondays. Usually he would have been on his board and in the water, whether the waves were double-overhead honkers or those small, fast inside zippers that were easy fun. This evening, however, he had a date, as they say, with an angel, and he chose to conserve his energy for romance.
By romance, he didn’t mean s
ex. His date was with Makani, and they were letting their relationship evolve slowly. He had known her for more than two years, but he’d learned about her psychic talent, her see-by-touch, only a month earlier. He had long liked her. But she’d always seemed reserved, holding back a significant part of herself. Now he knew why, and the knowledge bonded them as never before.
She said he was the only person she’d ever known in whom she had never glimpsed a dark intention or perverse desire. He didn’t know why that should be the case. Although all he wanted in life were sea, surf, sun, friends, good food of the diner or Mexican kind, a beer when he was thirsty, and books, he figured that he must have a dark intention now and then, though he could identify in himself no seriously perverse interests, or at least none that seemed perverse to him.
A lot of the time, he lived with two other surf rats, Mike and Nate, in a studio apartment above a thrift shop in Costa Mesa. But frequently he took jobs house-sitting or boat-sitting while the owners were away. In this case, he was looking after both a house on the fabled harbor and a sweet boat docked in front of it, living in luxury without cost or stress, without any need of a lawyer or an accountant or a living trust.
He didn’t hear Makani venture along the dock or come aboard—as quiet as the gulls, the fish—until she stepped through the gate in the railing, onto the afterdeck, and said, “Any beer aboard?”
“What kind of yacht would it be if there wasn’t?”
In blue Surf Siders, white slacks, and a blue halter top, her lustrous dark hair held back by two barrettes from which dangled blue silk ribbons, Makani looked like a sea goddess who had waded ashore to find a mortal mate.
“You look like a sea goddess who waded ashore to find a mortal mate,” he said, because he knew a good thought when he had one.
“Just tell me where to find the freakin’ beer,” she said.
He described the route to the galley, and a minute later, she returned with two ice-cold bottles of Corona.
By then he realized that she was in a state of distress, and though he wouldn’t have been surprised if she needed both beers, she gave one to him. She sat on the edge of the lounge chair next to Pogo’s, but he remained half reclining.
“Saul Bellow,” she said, indicating the book he had put aside. “What would your parents think?”
“They’d be ecstatic.”
Pogo came from a family of busy achievers who, had they been aware of his true IQ, would have arm-twisted him into law or medical school. From a young age, he had known that he needed only a life of common pleasures, that he was born to live in the moment, which was, by his assessment, the only place where anything was real. The formidable name on his birth certificate had Roman numerals after it and imposed upon him a weight he had no desire to carry. When still a child, he insisted on being called Pogo. He had escaped the expectations of his family by quietly pretending to be a simple soul of limited intellect, concealing his passion for books, scoring a consistent 2.0 in his schoolwork, remaining in character for so long that the greatest actors of stage and screen would have admired his performance.
“Sometimes,” he told Makani, “I feel bad about deceiving them. Then I think about a life of country clubs, imported cars, vacation homes, five-star restaurants—and I break out in a cold sweat.”
She shrugged. “They love you the way they think you are, and you love them. That’s as good as families get.”
“Which reminds me—where’s Bob?”
“On the dock. He likes to hang his head over the side and watch for fish.”
Pogo nodded. “I’m like the Bob of my family. So…what’s got you so torn up?”
“How do you know I’m torn up?”
“I can’t read your mind, O’Brien, but I can read your face.”
She watched a serrated formation of brown pelicans slice the sky and leave no scar.
A young couple oared past, standing up on paddleboards, perhaps headed all the way to the back bay.
Makani was never silent just for effect. Her silence must mean that what was on her mind had a terrible weight.
Pogo was the pattern of all patience. He gave her time.
* * *
Makani took small sips of her beer until she had finished half the bottle.
White sails raised on mainmast and mizzen, but for the moment motoring toward the harbor entrance and the open sea, a fifty-foot ketch passed, and she yearned for the freedom it represented, a freedom that her paranormal gift might never allow her.
At last she said, “If I tell you about it, you’ll say we have to do something.”
“You touched somebody,” Pogo guessed. “You saw something bad.”
“Story of my life.”
“Whether or not I say ‘Do something,’ you’ll do something.”
“I don’t have to.”
“You don’t have to, but you always do.”
“This one scares me.”
“You’ve been scared before.”
“Maybe not like this.”
“Who was he?” Pogo asked.
“Not he. She.”
“She who?”
“This hot blond psycho in the park along Ocean Boulevard.”
“How hot?”
“Some guys, the thought of doing her would melt the fillings in their teeth.”
“Can you hook me up with her?”
“Not funny, Gilligan.”
The last thing Pogo, the ideal California surfer boy, needed was a girl to pursue. In his case, they were the pursuers, and he was the pursued, a truth he seemed loath to acknowledge. He found his good looks to be an annoyance, in part because those drawn to him solely because of his appearance tended to be tiresome.
He was such a handsome guy that Makani could think of no word adequate to describe him. Even the Hawaiian language, with its tendency toward lyrical hyperbole, lacked the words. He wasn’t merely nohea or maika’i. Hua-pala kumu didn’t say it, either. When someone’s good looks had an element of sexual appeal, it would always be expressed poetically, through metaphor, with reference to rain or mist or spray, as Hawaiian had no word meaning sexy. In Pogo’s case, the closest she could come to describing him was to resort to the word glory as a synonym for male beauty: Hanohano Pali-uli i ka ua noe, which was said of handsome men and meant The glory of Pali-uli is the misty rain. Pali Lookout was the most dramatic place in the islands: a spectacular thousand-foot cliff at a low point in the Koolau Mountains, where the trade winds rushed through with tremendous force. But as far as Makani was concerned, even the great power of tropical rainstorms and fierce wind combined with the thrill of a thousand-foot drop did not convey the effect Pogo had on her the first time she saw him—or the ten-thousandth, for that matter.
If he could have read her thoughts, he would have been embarrassed. He wanted to be just one of the guys. As special as he was, he truly saw nothing special about himself. If he hoped to be admired for anything, it was his surfing skills. He rode hurricane waves, quaking monoliths, tore them up with style, allowing himself no fear, hooting with delight even when he realized he was skating across a hydrocoffin that would collapse and hammer him off his board.
He would have been mortified if she told him that his humility only made him more desirable to her—to any woman with half a brain.
“The blond psycho’s name is Ursula Jean Liddon,” Makani said. “She’s keeping her twin sister in a windowless room, tormenting her, starving her. She’s going to kill her soon.”
Pogo sat up, swung his legs off the lounge chair, sitting knee-to-knee with Makani. “What room? Where?”
“She lives in one of those gate-guarded communities in Newport Coast.”
He frowned. “Doesn’t seem like a place where that kind of thing happens.”
“Where does seem like a place such a thing happens? We’ve got to figure it’s her house until we search it and rule it out.”
An anonymous tip to the police would not be taken seriously, especially when the accused
was a person of means and, ostensibly, enjoyed a spotless reputation.
Makani dared not reveal her paranormal ability in a bid to gain credibility. She could read the darker secrets and desires of the police, thereby convincing them of her gift—but at what risk? She would be thought a freak…and a dangerous one.
As always, it would fall to her to do what needed to be done. And now, to her and Pogo.
“Tell me the rest,” he said.
She told him.
He shook his head. “She’s a lunatic, all right, turning you down like that.”
“She’s not into girls, and if you’ll think about it, you’ll remember that I’m not, either.”
“That’s no excuse,” Pogo declared. “I mean, look at you.”
Makani wanted to kiss him. She hesitated.
With each kiss, each touch, she risked reading him. Although she never saw in him any meanness or unworthy desire, he was human, and the possibility that he would one day disappoint or even shock her was not remote.
The heavier burden was his, because he knew that, for her, every kiss or touch might be a window into his mind, into the soul that dwelt there. With her he could keep no wicked secrets, conceal no corruption, conduct no fraud undetected, cloak no fault. He could never mislead or deceive her—unless what he intended was a surprise born of kindness or love, for she could read in others only their darker passages.
Pogo reached out, as did she. He held her hand, surrendering his privacy, and the sunny day was not shadowed by any disclosure that rose from him to her along the telepathic bridge that her terrible gift laid down between them.
She dared a kiss, and so did he.
Gulls flew in a bath of sunlight. Fish swam in the coolness of the harbor. The distant laughter of women was so musical floating across the water that it might have been from celebrants on one of the many boats—or in this moment of quiet magic, perhaps it was the delight of mermaids.
One kiss, and then she said, “One thing I saw that I didn’t tell you, and I should…This Ursula Liddon creature would cut out my eyes if she had a chance.”