by Dean Koontz
the door.
The French restaurant had less atmosphere than the Italian place. They were shown to a corner table too near the kitchen, and Daniel’s saturated shoes squished and squeaked all the way across the room.
“You’ll catch pneumonia,” she worried when they were seated and had ordered two Dry Sacks on the rocks.
“Not me. I’ve got a good immune system. Never get sick. One time in Nam, during an action, I was cut off from my unit, spent a week on my own in the jungle, rained every minute, I was shriveled by the time I found my way back to friendly territory, but I never even got the sniffles.”
As they sipped their drinks and studied the menu and ordered, he was more relaxed than Laura had yet seen him, and he actually proved to be a coherent, pleasant, even amusing conversationalist. But when the appetizers were served—salmon in dill sauce for her, scallops in pastry for him—it swiftly became clear that the food was terrible, even though the prices were twice those at the Italian place that they had left, and course by course, as his embarrassment grew, his ability to sustain his end of the conversation declined drastically. Laura proclaimed everything delicious and choked down every bite, but it was no use; he was not fooled.
The kitchen staff and the waiter were also slow. By the time Daniel had paid the check and escorted her back to the car—lifting her across the puddle again as if she were a little girt—they were half an hour late for the movie they had intended to see.
“That’s all right,” she said, “we can go in late and stay to see the first half hour of the next showing.”
“No, no,” he said. “That’s a terrible way to see a movie. It’ll ruin it for you. I wanted this night to be perfect.”
“Relax,” she said. “I’m having fun.”
He looked at her with disbelief, and she smiled, and he smiled, too, but his smile was sick.
“If you don’t want to go to the movie now,” she said, “that’s all right, too. Wherever you want to go, I’m game.”
He nodded, started the car, and drove out to the street. They had gone a few miles before she realized that he was taking her home.
All the way from his car to her door, he apologized for what a lousy evening it had been, and she repeatedly assured him that she was not in the least disappointed with a moment of it. At her apartment, the instant she inserted her key in the door, he turned and fled down the stairs from the second-floor veranda, neither asking for a goodnight kiss nor giving her a chance to invite him in.
She stepped to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, and he was halfway down when a gust of wind turned his umbrella inside out. He fought with it the rest of the way, twice almost losing his balance. When he reached the walk below, he finally got the umbrella corrected—and the wind immediately turned it inside out again. In frustration he threw it into some nearby shrubbery, then looked up at Laura. He was soaked from head to toe by then, and in the pale light from a lamppost she could see that his suit hung on him shapelessly. He was a huge man, strong as two bulls, but he had been done in by little things—puddles, a gust of wind—and there was something quite funny about that. She knew she should not laugh, dared not laugh, but a laugh burst from her anyway.
“You’re too damned beautiful, Laura Shane!” he shouted from the walk below. “God help me, you’re just too beautiful.” Then he hurried away through the night.
Feeling bad about laughing but unable to stop, she went into the apartment and changed into pajamas. It was only twenty till nine.
He was either a hopeless basket case or the sweetest man she had known since her father died.
At nine-thirty the phone rang. He said, “Will you ever go out with me again?”
“I thought you’d never call.”
“You will?”
“Sure.”
“Dinner and a movie?” he asked.
“Sounds good.”
“We won’t go back to that horrible French place. I’m sorry about that, I really am.”
“I don’t care where we go,” she said, “but once we sit down in the restaurant, promise me we’ll stay there.”
“I’m a bonehead about some things. And like I said... I never have been able to cope around beautiful women.”
“Your mother.”
“That’s right. Rejected me. Rejected my father. Never felt any warmth from that woman. Walked out on us when I was eleven.”
“Must’ve hurt.”
“You’re more beautiful than she was, and you scare me to death.”
“How flattering.”
“Well, sorry, but I meant it to be. The thing is, beautiful as you are, you’re not half as beautiful as your writing, and that scares me even more. Because what could a genius like you ever see in a guy like me—except maybe comic relief?”
“Just one question, Daniel.”
“Danny. ”
“Just one question, Danny. What the hell kind of stockbroker are you? Any good at all?”
“I’m first-rate,” he said with such genuine pride that she knew he was telling the truth. “My clients swear by me, and I’ve got a nice little portfolio of my own that’s outperformed the market three years running. As a stock analyst, broker, and investment adviser, I never give the wind a chance to turn my umbrella inside out.”
2
The afternoon following the placement of the explosives in the basement of the institute, Stefan took what he expected to be his next to last trip on the Lightning Road. It was an illicit jaunt to January 10, 1988, not on the official schedule and conducted without the knowledge of his colleagues.
Light snow was falling in the San Bernardino Mountains when he arrived, but he was dressed for the weather in rubber boots, leather gloves, and navy peacoat. He took cover under a dense copse of pines, intending to wait until the fierce lightning stopped flaring.
He checked his wristwatch in the flickering celestial light and was startled to see how late he had arrived. He had less than forty minutes to reach Laura before she was killed. If he screwed up and arrived too late, there would be no second chance.
Even while the last white flashes seared the overcast sky, while hard crashes of thunder still echoed back to him from distant peaks and ridges, he hurried away from the trees and down a sloping field where the snow was knee-deep from previous winter storms. There was a crust on the snow, through which he kept breaking with each step, and progress was as difficult as if he had been wading through deep water. He fell twice, and snow got down the tops of his boots, and the savage wind tore at him as if it possessed consciousness and the desire to destroy him. By the time he reached the end of the field and climbed over a snowbank onto the two-lane state highway that led to Arrowhead in one direction and Big Bear in the other, his pants and coat were crusted with frozen snow, his feet were freezing, and he had lost more than five minutes.
The recently plowed highway was clean except for the wispy snow snakes that slithered across the pavement on shifting currents of air. But already the tempo of the storm had increased. The flakes were much smaller than when he had arrived and were falling twice as fast as they had been minutes ago. Soon the road would be treacherous.
He noticed a sign by the side of the pavement—LAKE ARROWHEAD 1 MILE—and was shocked to discover how much farther he was from Laura than he had expected to be.
Squinting into the wind, looking north, he saw a warm glimmer of electric lightning in the dreary, iron-gray afternoon: a single-story building and parked cars about three hundred yards away, on the right. He headed immediately in that direction, keeping his head tucked down to protect his face from the icy teeth of the wind.
He had to find a car. Laura had less than half an hour to live, and she was ten miles away.
3
Five months after that first date, on Saturday, July 16, 1977, six weeks after graduating from UCI, Laura married Danny Packard in a civil ceremony before a judge in his chambers. The only guests in attendance, both of whom served as witnesses, were Dann
y’s father, Sam Packard, and Thelma Ackerson.
Sam was a handsome, silver-haired man of about five ten, dwarfed by his son. Throughout the brief ceremony, he wept, and Danny kept turning around and saying, “You all right, Dad?” Sam nodded and blew his nose and told them to go on with it, but a moment later he was crying again, and Danny was asking him if he was all right, and Sam blew his nose as if imitating the mating calls of geese. The judge said, “Son, your father’s tears are tears of joy, so if we could get on with this—I have three more ceremonies to perform.”
Even if the groom’s father had not been an emotional wreck, and even if the groom had not been a giant with the heart of a fawn, their wedding party would have been memorable because of Thelma. Her hair was cut in a strange, shaggy, style, with a pompom-like spray in front that was tinted purple. In the middle of summer—and at a wedding, yet—she was wearing red high heels, tight black slacks, and tattered black blouse—carefully, purposefully tattered—gathered at the waist with a length of ordinary steel chain used as a belt. She was wearing exaggerated purple eye makeup, blood-red lipstick, and one earring that looked like a fishhook.
After the ceremony, as Danny was having a private word with his father, Thelma huddled with Laura in a corner of the courthouse lobby and explained her appearance. “It’s called the punk look, the latest thing in Britain. No one’s wearing it over here yet. In fact hardly anyone’s wearing it in Britain, either, but in a few years everyone will dress like this. It’s great for my act. I look freaky, so people want to laugh as soon as I step on the stage. It’s also good for me. I mean, face it, Shane, I’m not exactly blossoming with age. Hell, if homely was a disease and had an organized charity, I’d be their poster child. But the two great things about punk style is you get to hide behind flamboyant makeup and hair, so no one can tell just how homely you are—and you’re supposed to look weird, anyway. Jesus, Shane, Danny’s a big guy. You’ve told me so much about him on the phone, but you never once said he was so huge. Put him in a Godzilla suit, turn him loose in New York, film the results, and you could make one of those movies without having to build expensive miniature sets. So you love him, huh?”
“I adore him,” Laura said. “He’s as gentle as he is big, maybe because of all the violence he saw and was a part of in Vietnam, or maybe because he’s always been gentle at heart. He’s sweet, Thelma, and he’s thoughtful, and he thinks I’m one of the best writers he’s ever read.”
“And when he first started giving you toads, you thought he was a psychopath.”
“A minor misjudgment.”
Two uniformed police officers passed through the courthouse lobby, flanking a bearded young man in handcuffs, taking him to one of the courtrooms. The prisoner gave Thelma a looking over as he passed and said, “Hey, mama, let’s get it on!”
“Ah, the Ackerson charm,” Thelma said to Laura. “You get a guy who’s a combination of a Greek god, a teddy bear, and Bennett Cerf, and I get crude propositions from the dregs of society. But come to think of it, I never even used to get that, so maybe my time is coming yet.”
“You underrate yourself, Thelma. You always have. Some very special guy’s going to see what a treasure you are—”
“Charles Manson when he’s paroled.”
“No. Someday you’re going to be every bit as happy as I am. I know it. Destiny, Thelma.”
“Good heavens, Shane, you’ve become a raging optimist! What about the lightning? All those deep conversations we had on the floor of our room at Caswell—you remember? We decided that life is just an absurdist comedy, and every once in a while it’s suddenly interrupted with thunderbolts of tragedy to give the story balance, to make the slapstick seem funnier by comparison.”
“Maybe it’s struck for the last time in my life,” Laura said.
Thelma stared hard at her. “Wow. I know you, Shane, and I know you realize what emotional risk you’re putting yourself at by even just wanting to be this happy. I hope you’re right, kid, and I bet you are. I bet there’ll be no more lightning for you.”
“Thank you, Thelma.”
“And I think your Danny is a sweetheart, a jewel. But I’ll tell you something that ought to mean a lot more than my opinion: Ruthie would have loved him too; Ruthie would have thought he was perfect.”
They held each other tightly, and for a moment they were young girls again, defiant yet vulnerable, filled with both the cockeyed confidence and the terror of blind fate that had shaped their shared adolescence.
Sunday, July 24, when they returned from a week-long honeymoon in Santa Barbara, they went grocery shopping, then cooked dinner together—tossed salad, sourdough bread, microwave meatballs, and spaghetti-at the apartment in Tustin. She’d given up her own place and moved in with him a few days before the wedding. According to the plan that they had worked out, they would stay at the apartment for two years, maybe three. (They had talked about their future so often and in such detail that they now capitalized those two words in their minds—The Plan—as if they were referring to some cosmic owner’s manual that had come with their marriage and that could be relied upon for an accurate picture of their destiny as husband and wife.) So after two years, maybe three, they would be able to afford the down payment on the right house without dipping into the tidy stock portfolio that Danny was building, and only then would they move.
They dined at the small table in the alcove off the kitchen, where they had a view of the king palms in the courtyard in the golden late-afternoon sun, and they discussed the key part of The Plan, which was for Danny to support them while Laura stayed home and wrote her first novel. “When you’re wildly rich and famous,” he said, twirling spaghetti on his fork, “then I’ll leave the brokerage and spend my time managing our money.”
“What if I’m never rich and famous?”
“You will be.”
“What if I can’t even get published?”
“Then I’ll divorce you.”
She threw a crust of bread at him. “Beast.”
“Shrew.”
“You want another meatball?”
“Not if you’re going to throw it.”
“My rage has passed. I make good meatballs, don’t I?”
“Excellent,” he agreed.
“That’s worth celebrating, don’t you think-that you have a wife who makes good meatballs?”
“Definitely worth celebrating.”
“So let’s make love.”
Danny said, “In the middle of dinner?”
“No, in bed.” She pushed back her chair and got up. “Come on. Dinner can always be reheated.”
During that first year they made love frequently, and in their intimacies Laura found more than sexual release, something far more than she had expected. Being with Danny, holding him within her, she felt so close to him that at times it almost seemed as if they were one person—one body and one mind, one spirit, one dream. She loved him wholeheartedly, yes, but that feeling of oneness was more than love, or at least different from love. By their first Christmas together, she understood that what she felt was a sense of belonging not experienced in a long time, a sense of family; for this was her husband and she was his wife, and one day from their union would come children—after two or three years, according to The Plan—and within the shelter of the family was a peace not to be found elsewhere.
She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.
Six weeks before their first wedding anniversary, Laura finished a novel, Jericho Nights, and sent a copy to a New York literary agent, Spencer Keene, who had responded favorably to a query letter a month earlier. Two weeks later Keene called
to say he would represent the book, expected a quick sale, and thought she had a splendid future as a novelist. With a swiftness that startled even the agent, he sold it to the first house to which it was submitted, Viking, for a modest but perfectly respectable advance of fifteen thousand dollars, and the deal was concluded on Friday, July 14, 1978, two days before Laura and Danny’s anniversary.
4
The place he had seen from farther up the road was a restaurant and tavern in the shadows of enormous Ponderosa pines. The trees stood over two hundred feet tall, bedecked with clusters of six-inch cones, with beautifully fissured bark, some boughs bent low under the weight of snow from previous storms. The single-story building was made of logs; it was so sheltered by trees on three sides that its slate roof was covered with more pine needles than snow. The windows were either steamed over or frosted, and the light from within was pleasingly diffused by that translucent film on the glass.
In the parking lot in front of the building were two Jeep wagons, two pickup trucks, and a Thunderbird. Relieved that no one would be able to see him through the tavern windows, Stefan went directly to one of the Jeeps, tried the door, found it unlocked, and got in behind the steering wheel, closing the door after him.
He drew the Walther PPK/S .380 from the shoulder holster he was wearing inside his peacoat. He put it on the seat at his side.
His feet were painfully cold, and he wanted to pause and empty the snow out of his boots. But he had arrived late, and his original schedule was shot, so he dared not waste a minute. Besides, if his feet hurt, they weren’t frozen; he wasn’t in danger of frostbite yet.
The keys were not in the ignition. He slid the seat back, bent down, groped under the dashboard, located the ignition wires, and had the engine running in a minute.
Stefan sat up just as the owner of the Jeep, breath reeking of beer, pulled open the door. “Hey, what the hell you doing, pal?”
The rest of the snowswept parking lot was still deserted. They were alone.
Laura would be dead in twenty-five minutes.
The Jeep’s owner reached for him, and he allowed himself to be dragged from behind the steering wheel, plucking his pistol off the seat as he went, and in fact he threw himself into the other man’s grasp, using the momentum to send his adversary staggering backward on the slippery parking lot. They fell. As they hit the ground, he was on top, and he jammed the muzzle under the guy’s chin.
“Jesus, mister! Don’t kill me.”
“We’re getting up now. Easy, damn you, no sudden moves.”
When they were on their feet Stefan moved behind the guy, quickly reversed his grip on the Walther, used it as a club, struck once, hard enough to knock the man unconscious without doing permanent damage. The owner of the Jeep went down again, stayed down, limp.
Stefan glanced at the tavern. No one else had come out.
He could hear no traffic approaching on the road, but then again the howling wind might mask the sound of an engine.
As the snow began to fall harder, he put the pistol in the deep pocket of his peacoat and dragged the unconscious man to the nearest other vehicle, the Thunderbird. It was unlocked, and he heaved the guy into the rear seat, closed the door, and hurried back to the Jeep.
The engine had died. He hot-wired it again.
As he put the Jeep in gear and swung it around toward the road, the wind shrieked at the window beside him. The falling snow grew denser, blizzard-thick, and clouds of yesterday’s snow were whipped up from the ground and spun in sparkling columns. The giant, shadow-swaddled pines swayed and shuddered under winter’s assault.
Laura had little more than twenty minutes to live.
5
They celebrated the publishing contract for Jericho Nights and the otherworldly harmony of their first year of marriage by spending their anniversary at a favorite place—Disneyland. The sky was blue, cloudless; the air was dry and hot. Virtually oblivious of the summer crowds, they rode the Pirates of the Caribbean, had their pictures taken with Mickey Mouse, got dizzy spinning in the Mad Hatter’s teacups, had their portraits drawn by a caricaturist, ate hot dogs and ice cream and chocolate-covered frozen bananas on sticks, and danced that evening to a Dixieland band in New Orleans Square.
The park became even more magical after nightfall, and they rode the Mark Twain paddlewheel steamboat around Tom Sawyer’s Island for the third time, standing at the railing on the top level, near the bow, with their arms around each other. Danny said, “You know why we like this place so much? ‘Cause it’s of the world yet untainted by the world. And that’s our marriage.”
Later, over strawberry sundaes at the Carnation Pavilion, at a table beneath trees strung with white Christmas lights, Laura said, “Fifteen thousand bucks for a year’s work... not exactly a fortune. ”
“It isn’t slave wages either.” He pushed his sundae aside, leaned forward, slid her sundae aside, too, and took her hands across the table. “The money will come eventually because you’re brilliant, but money isn’t what I care about. What I care about is that you’ve got something special to share. No. That’s not exactly what I mean. You don’t just have something special, you are something special. In some way I understand but can’t explain, I know that what you are, when shared, will bring as much hope and joy to people in far places as it brings to me here at your side.”
Blinking away sudden tears, she said, “I love you.”