by Dean Koontz
“Yes, he’s comatose. Not from any fever associated with a bad infection of the wound. Too early for that. And now that he’s gotten treatment, there probably won’t be an infection. It’s traumatic coma from being shot, the loss of blood, the shock and all. He shouldn’t have been moved, you know.”
“I had no choice. Will he come out of it?”
“Probably. In this case a coma is the body’s way of shutting down to conserve energy, facilitate healing. He’s not lost as much blood as it appears; he’s got a good pulse, so this probably won’t last long. When you see his shirt and lab coat soaked like that, you think he’s bled quarts, but he hasn’t. Not that it was a spoonful, either. He’s had a bad time of it. But no major blood vessels were torn, or he’d be in worse shape. Still, he should be in a hospital.”
“We’ve already been through that,” Laura said impatiently. “We can’t go to a hospital.”
“What bank did you rob?” the physician asked teasingly, but with noticeably less twinkle in his eyes than there had been when he had made his other little jokes.
While he waited for the pictures to develop, he had cleaned the wound, flooded it with iodine, dusted it with antibiotic powder, and prepared a bandage. Now he got a needle, another implement she could not identify, and heavy thread from a cabinet and put them on a stainless-steel tray that he had hung on the side of the examination table. The wounded man lay there, unconscious, propped on his right side with the help of several foam pillows.
“What’re you doing?” Laura asked.
“Those holes are fairly large, especially the exit wound. If you insist on endangering his life by keeping him out of a hospital, then the least I can do is throw a few stitches in him.”
“Well, all right, but be quick about it.”
“You expect G-men to break down the door any minute?”
“Worse than that,” she said. “Far worse than that.”
Since they had arrived at Brenkshaw’s, she had been expecting a sudden, night-shattering display of lightning, thunder like the giant hooves of apocalyptic horsemen, and the arrival of more well-armed time travelers. Fifteen minutes ago, as the doctor had been X-raying her guardian’s chest, she’d thought she heard thunder so distant that it was barely audible. She hurried to the nearest window to search the sky for far-off lightning, but she saw none through the breaks in the trees, perhaps because the sky over San Bernardino already had a ruddy glow from city lights or perhaps because she had not heard thunder in the first place. She had finally decided that she might have heard a jet passing overhead and, in her panic, had misinterpreted it as a more distant sound.
Brenkshaw stitched up his patient, snipped the thread—“sutures will dissolve”—and bound the bandages in place with wide adhesive tape that he repeatedly wound around the guardian’s chest and back.
The air had a pungent, medicinal smell that made Laura slightly ill, but it did not bother Chris. He sat in the corner, happily working on another Tootsie Pop.
While waiting for the X-rays, Brenkshaw also had administered an injection of penicillin. Now he went to the tall, white, metal cabinets along the far wall and poured capsules from a large jar into a pill bottle, then from another large jar into a second small bottle. “I keep some basic drugs here, sell them to poorer patients at cost so they don’t have to go broke at the pharmacy.”
“What’re these?” Laura asked when he returned to the examination table, where she stood, and gave her the two small plastic bottles.
“More penicillin in this one. Three a day, with meals—if he can take meals. I think he’ll come around soon. If he doesn’t he’ll begin to dehydrate, and he’ll need intravenous fluid. Can’t give him liquid by mouth when he’s in a coma—he’d choke. This other is a painkiller. Only when needed, and no more than two a day.”
“Give me more of these. In fact give me your whole supply.” She pointed to two quart jars that contained hundreds of both capsules.
“He won’t need that much of either one. He—”
“No, I’m sure he won’t,” she said, “but I don’t know what the hell other problems we’re going to have. We may need both penicillin and painkillers for me—or my boy.”
Brenkshaw stared at her for a long moment. “What in the name of God have you gotten into? It’s like something in one of your books.”
“Just give me—” Laura stopped, stunned by what he had said. “Like something in one of my books? In one of my books! Oh, my God, you know who I am.”
“Of course. I’ve known almost from the moment I saw you on the porch. I read thrillers, as I said, and although your books aren’t strictly in that genre, they’re very suspenseful, so I read them, too, and your photograph’s on the back of the jacket. Believe me, Ms. Shane, no man would forget your face once he’d seen it, even if he’d seen it only in pictures and even if he was an old crock like me.”
“But why didn’t you say—”
“At first I thought it was a joke. After all, the melodramatic way you appeared on my doorstep in the dead of night, the gun, the corny, hard-boiled dialogue... it all seemed like a gag. Believe me, I have certain friends who might think of such an elaborate hoax and, if they knew you, might be able to persuade you to join in the fun.”
Pointing to her guardian, she said, “But when you saw him—”
“Then I knew it was no joke,” the physician said.
Hurrying to his mother’s side, Chris pulled the Tootsie Pop from his mouth. “Mom, if he tells on us ...”
Laura had drawn the .38 from her waistband. She began to raise it, then lowered her hand as she realized the gun no longer had any power to intimidate Brenkshaw; in fact it had never frightened him. For one thing she now realized he was not the kind of man who could be intimidated, and for another thing she could not convincingly portray a lawless, dangerous woman when he knew who she really was.
On the examination table her guardian groaned and tried to shift in his unnatural sleep, but Brenkshaw put a hand upon his chest and stilled him.
“Listen, Doctor, if you tell anyone what happened here tonight, if you can’t keep my visit a secret for the rest of your life, it’ll be the death of me and my boy.”
“Of course the law requires a physician to report any gunshot wounds he treats.”
“But this is a special case,” Laura said urgently. “I’m not on the run from the law, Doctor.”
“Who are you running from?”
“In a sense ... from the same men who killed my husband, Chris’s father.”
He looked surprised and pained. “Your husband was killed?”
“You must’ve read about it in the papers,” she said bitterly. “It made a sensational story there for a while, the kind of thing the press loves.”
“I’m afraid I don’t read newspapers or watch television news,” Brenkshaw said. “It’s all fires, accidents, and crazed terrorists. They don’t report real news, just blood and tragedy and politics. I’m sorry about your husband. And if these people who killed him, whoever they are, want to kill you now, you should go straight to the police.”
Laura liked this man and thought they shared more views and sympathies than not. He seemed reasonable, kind. Yet she had little hope of persuading Brenkshaw to keep his mouth shut. “The police can’t protect me, Doctor. No one can protect me except me—and maybe that man whose wounds you just sewed up. These people who’re after us ... they’re relentless, implacable, and they’re beyond the law.”
He shook his head. “No one is beyond the law.”
“They are, Doctor. It’d take me an hour to explain to you why they are, and then you probably wouldn’t believe me. But I beg of you, unless you want our deaths on your conscience, keep your mouth shut about our being here. Not just for a few days but forever.”
“Well...”
Studying him, she knew it was no use. She remembered what he had told her in the foyer earlier, when she had warned him not to lie about the presence of other people in
the house: He did not lie, he said, because always telling the truth made life simpler; telling the truth was a lifelong habit. Hardly forty-five minutes later, she knew him well enough to believe that he was indeed an unusually truthful man. Even now, as she begged him to keep their visit secret, he was not able to tell the lie that would placate her and get her out of his office. He stared at her guiltily and could not tease the falsehood from his tongue. He would do his duty when she left; he would file a police report. The cops would look for her at her house near Big Bear, where they would discover the blood if not the bodies of the time travelers, and where they would find hundreds of expended bullets, shattered windows, slug-pocked walls. By tomorrow or the next day the story would be splashed across the newspapers....
The airliner that had flown overhead more than half an hour ago might not have been a passing jet, after all. It might well have been what she had first thought it was—very distant thunder, fifteen or twenty miles away.
More thunder on a night without rain.
“Doctor, help me get him dressed,” she said, indicating her guardian on the table beside them. “Do at least that much for me, since you’re going to betray me later.”
He winced visibly at the word betray.
Earlier she’d sent Chris upstairs to get one each of Brenkshaw’s shirts, sweaters, jackets, slacks, a pair of his socks, and shoes. The physician was not as muscular and trim as her guardian, but they were approximately the same size.
At the moment the wounded man was wearing only his bloodstained pants, but Laura knew there would not be time to put all the clothes on him. “Just help me get him into the jacket, Doctor. I’ll take the rest and dress him later. The jacket will be enough to protect him from the cold.”
Reluctantly lifting the unconscious man into a sitting position on the examination table, the doctor said, “He shouldn’t be moved.”
Ignoring Brenkshaw, struggling to pull the wounded man’s right arm through the sleeve of the warmly lined corduroy jacket, Laura said, “Chris, go to the waiting room at the front of the house. It’s dark in there. Don’t turn on the lights. Go to the windows and give the street a good looking over, and for God’s sake don’t let yourself be seen.”
“You think they’re here?” the boy asked fearfully.
“If not now, they will be soon,” she said, working her guardian’s left arm through the other jacket sleeve.
“What’re you talking about?” Brenkshaw asked, as Chris dashed into the adjoining office and on into the dark waiting room.
Laura didn’t answer. “Come on, let’s get him in the wheelchair.”
Together, they lifted the wounded man off the examination table, into the chair, and buckled a restraining strap around his waist.
As Laura was gathering up the other clothes and the two quart-sized jars of drugs, making a bundle, padding the clothes around the jars and tying it all together in the shirt, Chris raced back from the waiting room. “Mom, they’re just pulling up outside, it must be them, two cars full of men across the street, six or eight of ’em, anyway. What’re we going to do?”
“Damn,” she said, “we can’t get to the Jeep now. And we can’t go out the side door because they might see us from the front.”
Brenkshaw headed toward his office. “I’ll call the police—”
“No!” She put the bundle of clothes and drugs on the wheelchair between her guardian’s legs, put her purse there, too, and snatched up the Uzi and .38 Chief’s Special. “There’s no time, damn you. They’ll be in here in a couple of minutes, and they’ll kill us. You’ve got to help me get the wheelchair out the back, down the rear porch steps.”
Apparently her terror was at last conveyed to the physician, for he did not hesitate or continue to work at cross purposes to her. He grabbed the chair and wheeled it swiftly through a door that connected the examination room to the downstairs hall. Laura and Chris followed him along the gloomy corridor, then across a kitchen lit only by the illuminated digital clocks on the oven and microwave oven. The chair thumped over the sill between the kitchen and the back porch, badly jarring the wounded man, but he had been through worse.
Slinging the Uzi over her shoulder and jamming the revolver into her waistband, Laura hurried around Brenkshaw to the bottom of the porch steps. She took hold of the wheelchair from the front, helping him trundle it to the concrete walk below.
She glanced at the areaway between the house and garage, half expecting to see an armed man coming through there already, and she whispered to Brenkshaw, “You’ll have to go with us. They’ll kill you if you stay here, I’m sure they will.”
Again he offered no argument but followed Chris, as the boy led the way down the walk that struck across the rear lawn to the gate in the redwood fence at the back of the long property. Having unslung the Uzi from her shoulder, Laura came last, ready to turn and open fire if she heard a noise from the house behind them.
As Chris reached the gate, it opened in front of him, and a man dressed in black stepped through from the alley, darker than the night around them except for his moon-pale face and white hands, every bit as surprised by them as they were by him. He’d come along the street beside the house and into the alley to cover the place from the back. In his left hand, gleaming darkly, was a submachine gun, not at the ready, but he started to bring it up—Laura could not blow him away, not without cutting her son down as well—but Chris reacted as Henry Takahami had spent months teaching him to react. The boy spun and kicked the assassin’s right arm, knocking the gun out of his grasp—it hit the lawn with a thump and soft clatter—then kicked again at his adversary’s crotch, and with a grunt of pain, the man in black fell backward against the gatepost.
By then Laura had stepped around the wheelchair and interposed herself between Chris and the killer. She reversed the Uzi, raised it overhead, and brought the stock of it down on the assassin’s skull, struck him again with all her might, and he dropped to the lawn, away from the walk, without having had a chance to cry out.
Events were moving fast now, too fast, they were on a downhill ride, and already Chris was going through the gate, so Laura followed, and they surprised a second man in black, eyes like holes in his white face, a vampiric figure, but this one was beyond the reach of a karate kick, so she had to open fire before he could use his own weapon. She shot over Chris’s head, a tightly placed burst that pounded into the assassin’s chest, throat, and neck, virtually decapitating him as it catapulted him backward onto the alley pavement.
Brenkshaw had come through the gate behind them, pushing the wheelchair into the alley, and Laura felt bad about having gotten him into this, but there was no going back now. The back street was narrow, flanked by the fenced yards of houses on both sides, with a few garages and clusters of garbage cans behind each property, poorly revealed by the lamps on the intersecting streets at each end of the block, with no lights of its own.
To Brenkshaw, Laura said, “Wheel him across the alley and down a couple of doors. Find a gate that’s open and get him into somebody else’s yard, out of sight. Chris, you go with them.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll follow you in a second.”
“Mom—”
“Go, Chris!” she said, for the physician had already rolled the wheelchair fifty feet, angling across the alleyway.
As the boy reluctantly followed the doctor, Laura returned to the open redwood gate at the rear of Brenkshaw’s property. She was just in time to see two dark figures scuttle out of the areaway between the house and garage, thirty yards from her, barely visible, noticeable only because they were moving. They ran crouched, one of them heading toward the porch and the other toward the lawn because they didn’t yet know exactly where the trouble was, where the gunfire had come from.
She stepped through the gate, onto the walk, and opened up on them before they saw her, spraying the back of the house with bullets. Though she was not on top of her targets, she was in range—ninety feet was not f
ar—and they dove for cover. She could not tell if she hit them, and she didn’t continue to fire because even with a magazine of four hundred rounds expended in short bursts, the Uzi could empty quickly; and now it was the only automatic weapon she still possessed. She backed out of the gate and ran after Brenkshaw and Chris.
They were just going through a wrought-iron gate at the back of a property on the other side of the alley, two doors down. When she got there and stepped into the yard, she found that old eugenias were planted along the iron fence to the left and right of the gate; they had grown into a dense hedge, so no one would spot her easily from the alley unless they were directly in front of the gate itself.
The physician had pushed the wheelchair all the way to the back of the house. It was Tudor, not Victorian like Brenkshaw’s, but also built at least forty or fifty years ago. The doctor was starting around the side of the place, into the driveway, heading toward the next major street.
Lights winked on in houses all over the neighborhood. She was sure that faces were pressed to windows, including those where lights had not appeared, but she didn’t think anyone would see much.
She caught up with Brenkshaw and Chris at the front of the house and halted them in shadows near some overgrown shrubbery. “Doc, I’d like you to wait here with your patient,” she whispered.
He was shaking, and she hoped to God he didn’t have a heart attack, but he was still game. “I’ll be here.”
She took Chris out to the next street, where at least a score of cars were parked at the near and far curbs along that block. In the rain of bluish light from the streetlamps, the boy looked bad but not as awful as she had feared, not as frightened as the physician; he was growing accustomed to terror. She said, “Okay, let’s start trying car doors. You take this side, I’ll take the far side. If the door is open, check the ignition, under the driver’s seat, and behind the sun visor for keys.”
“Gotcha.”
Having once done research for a book in which a character had been a car thief, she had learned among other things that on average one out of seventeen drivers left his keys in his car overnight. She hoped the figure might be even more in their favor in a place like San Bernardino; after all, in New York and Chicago and LA and other big cities, nobody but masochists left their keys in their cars, so for the average to work out to one in seventeen, there had to be more trusting people among other Americans.
She attempted to keep an eye on Chris as she tried the doors of the cars along the far side of the street, but she soon lost track of him. Out of the first eight vehicles, four were unlocked, but no keys were in any of them.
In the distance rose the wail of sirens.
That would probably drive off the men in black. Anyway, they were most likely still searching along the alleyway behind Brenkshaw’s house, moving cautiously, expecting to be fired upon again.
Laura moved boldly, with no caution whatsoever, not concerned about being seen by residents in the flanking houses. The street was lined with mature but squat, stunted date palms that provided a lot of cover. Anyway, if anyone had been aroused at this dead hour of the night, they were probably at second-floor windows, not trying to look down at their own street through the palms but over toward the next street, toward Brenkshaw’s place, where all the shooting had been.
The ninth vehicle was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, and there were keys under the seat. Just as she started the engine and pulled her door shut, Chris opened the door on the passenger’s side and showed her a set of keys that he had found.
“Brand new Toyota,” he said.
“This’ll do,” she said.
The sirens were closer.
Chris pitched the Toyota’s keys away, hopped into the car, and rode with her to the driveway of the house on the other side of the street, farther up toward the corner, where the doctor was waiting in the shadows along the driveway of a house in which no lights had yet come on. Maybe they were in luck; maybe no one was home at that place. They lifted her guardian out of the wheelchair and laid him on the rear seat of the Cutlass.
The sirens were very close now, and in fact a police cruiser shot past at the far end of that block, on the side street, red beacons flashing, heading toward Brenkshaw’s block.
“You’ll be okay, Doctor?” she asked, turning to him as she closed the back door of the Cutlass.
He had dropped into the wheelchair. “No apoplexy, if that’s what you’re afraid of. What the hell is going on with you, girl?”
“No time, Doc. I have to split.”
“Listen,” he said, “maybe I won’t tell them anything.”
“Yes, you will,” she said. “You may think you won’t, but you’ll tell them everything. If you weren’t going to tell them, then there wouldn’t have been a police report or a newspaper story, and without that record in the future, those gunmen couldn’t have found me. ”
“What’re you jibbering about?”
She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “No time to explain, Doc. Thanks for your help. And, sorry, but I’d better take that wheelchair too.”
He folded it and put it in the trunk for her.
The night was full of sirens now.
She got behind the wheel, slammed her door. “Buckle up, Chris.”
“Buckled,” he said.
She turned left at the end of the driveway and drove to the far corner of the block, away from Brenkshaw’s end of the neighborhood, to the intersecting street on which a cruiser had flashed by only a moment ago. She figured that if police were converging in answer to reports of automatic-weapons fire, they would be coming from different areas of the city, from different patrols, so maybe no other car would approach by that same route. The avenue was nearly deserted, and the only other vehicles she saw were not fitted with rooftop emergency beacons. She turned right, heading steadily farther away from the Brenkshaw place, across San Bernardino, wondering where she would find sanctuary.
3
Laura reached Riverside at 3:15 in the morning, stole a Buick from a quiet residential street, shifted her guardian to it with the wheelchair, and abandoned the Cutlass. Chris slept through the entire operation and had to be carried from one car to the other.
Half an hour later, in another neighborhood, exhausted and in need of sleep, she used a screwdriver from a tool pouch in the Buick’s trunk to steal a set of license plates from a Nissan. She put the Nissan’s plates on the Buick and put the Buick’s plates in the trunk because they would eventually turn up on a police hot sheet.
A couple of days might pass before the Nissan’s owner noticed his plates were missing, and even when he reported them stolen, the police would not treat that