Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Mr. Murder(Lit)

  my wallet."

  Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his

  hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of

  the patrol car.

  He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels.

  It was decidedly not a good feeling.

  The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling

  static and tinny voices of police-band radios.

  "You have any photo ID in here?" asked the cop who had taken his

  wallet.

  Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above

  knee-level. "Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a

  driver's license."

  In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they

  hadn't committed, they were often worried and afraid.

  But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience.

  Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers,.he was

  mortified as never before in his life, even though he'd done nothing

  wrong. The situation itself--being in a position of utter submission

  while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority--seemed to

  trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability identified,

  feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he

  knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.

  "How old is this picture on your license?" asked the cop with his

  wallet.

  "Uh, I don't know, two years, three."

  "Doesn't look much like you."

  "You know what DMV photos are like," Marty said, dismayed to hear more

  plea than anger in his voice.

  "Let him up, it's all right, he's my husband, he's Marty Stillwater,"

  Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios' house.

  Marty couldn't see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense

  of reality to the nightmarish moment.

  He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops

  would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the

  house and in neighbors' yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive

  at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.

  "He's my husband," Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could

  sense the cops staring at her as she approached.

  He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at

  even when rain-soaked and distraught, she wasn't merely attractive but

  smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great

  kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly

  enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.

  Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet,

  even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was

  acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to

  nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed

  places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next

  attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been

  sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if

  he'd gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the

  battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to

  come.

  No.

  No, that wasn't instinct speaking. That was just his overactive

  imagination at work. The curse of the writer's imagination. Always

  searching for the next plot twist.

  Life wasn't like fiction. Real stories didn't have second and third

  acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements.

  Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life

  went on as usual.

  The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.

  He thought he saw hostility in their faces.

  Another siren swelled in the distance.

  He was so cold.

  The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both

  sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was

  so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an

  enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the

  sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.

  He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle.

  Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with

  which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New

  York, but he had never visited Central Park, those fields and vales were

  encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and

  bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering

  forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets

  were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he

  slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the

  metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was

  comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled

  manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets

  even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the

  glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The

  continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk

  of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself

  in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and

  introspection.

  Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies

  of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.

  Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew

  Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the

  state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.

  The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of

  rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette

  lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television

  set, mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of

  control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background,

  interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in

  yellow, and county roads in blue, unpaved dirt and gravel byways were

  represented by broken black lines. Population centers--precious few in

  this part of the world--were pink.

  Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen.

  The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate

  40.

  "About four miles ahead now," Oslett said.

  Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times,

  Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more

  talkative.

  The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale,

  displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile

  grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off,

  replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles

  on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill
the

  screen.

  The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than

  before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the

  right side.

  Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking

  white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of

  Interstate 40. X marked the prize.

  Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful,

  like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a

  lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places

  were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with

  strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps,

  tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music,

  and oscillating electronic tones.

  Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked

  sound effects altogether.

  Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the

  device which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It

  wasn't sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant

  that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly.

  Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict

  national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the

  map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and

  surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were

  currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and

  intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar

  organizations in co

  "Three miles," he told Clocker.

  The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply.

  Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter

  suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved

  windshield. A locus of microminiature electronics in the base of the

  cup was the transmitter and receiver of a satellite up-link package.

  Through coded bursts of microwaves, the SATU cculd quickly interface

  with scores of geosynchronous communication and survey satellites owned

  by private industry and various military services, override their

  security systems, insert its program in their logic units, and enlist

  them in its operations without either disturbing their primary functions

  or alerting their ground monitors to the invasion.

  By using two satellites to search for--and get a lock on--the unique

  signal of a particular transponder, the SATU could triangulate a precise

  position for the carrier of that transponder. Usually the target

  transmitter was an inconspicuous package that had been planted in the

  undercarriage of the surveillance subject's can-sometimes in his plane

  or boat--so he could be followed at a distance without ever being aware

  that someone was tailing him.

  In this case, it was a transponder hidden in the rubber heel and sole of

  a shoe.

  Oslett used the SATU controls to halve the area represented on the

  screen, thereby dramatically enlarging the details on the map.

  Studying the new but equally colorful display, he said, "He's still not

  moving. Looks like maybe he's pulled off the side of the road in a rest

  stop."

  The SATU microchips contained detailed maps of every square mile of the

  continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. If Oslett had been

  operating in Europe, the Mideast or elsewhere, he could have installed

  the suitable cartographical library for that territory.

  "Two and a half miles," Oslett said.

  Driving with one hand, Clocker reached under his sportcoat and withdrew

  the revolver he carried in a shoulder holster. It was a Colt .357

  Magnum, an eccentric choice of weaponry--and somewhat dated--for a man

  in Karl Clocker's line of work. He also favored tweed jackets on the

  elbows, and on occasion--as now--leather lapels. He had an eccentric

  collection of sweater vests with bold harlequin patterns, one of which

  he was currently wearing. His brightly colored socks were usually

  chosen to clash with everything else, and without fail he wore brown

  suede Hush Puppies. Considering his size and demeanor, no one was

  likely to comment negatively on his taste in clothes, let alone make

  unasked-for observations about his choice of handguns.

  "Won't need heavy firepower," Oslett said.

  Without saying a word to Oslett, Clocker put the .357 Magnum on the seat

  beside him, next to his hat, where he could get to it easily.

  "I've got the trank gun," Oslett said. "That should do it."

  Clocker didn't even look at him.

  Before Marty would agree to get out of the rainswept street and tell the

  authorities what had happened, he insisted that a uniformed officer

  watch over Charlotte and Emily at the Delorios' house. He trusted Vic

  and Kathy to do anything necessary to protect the girls.

  But they would not be a match for the vicious relentlessness of The

  Other.

  He wasn't sanguine that even a well-armed guard was enough protection.

  On the Delorios' front porch, rain streamed from the overhang.

  It looked like holiday tinsel in the glow of the brass hurricane lamp.

  Sheltering there, Marty tried to make Vic understand the girls were

  still in danger. "Don't let anyone in except the cops or Paige."

  "Sure, Marty." Vic was a physical-education teacher, coach of the local

  high-school swimming team, Boy Scout troop leader, primary motivator

  behind their street's Neighborhood Watch program, and organizer of

  various annual charity fund drives, an earnest and energetic guy who

  enjoyed helping people and who wore athletic shoes even on occasions

  when he also wore a coat and tie, as if more formal footwear would not

  allow him to move as fast and accomplish as much as he wished. "Nobody

  but the cops or Paige. Leave it to me, the kids will be okay with me

  and Kathy. Jesus, Marty what happened over there?"

  "And for God's sake, don't give the girls to anyone, cops or anyone,

  unless Paige is with them. Don't even give them to me unless Paige is

  with me."

  Vic Delorio looked away from the police activity and blinked in

  surprise.

  In memory, Marty could hear the look-alike's angry voice, see the flecks

  of spittle flying from his mouth as he raged, I want my life, my Paige .

  . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  "You understand, Vic?"

  "Not to you?"

  "Only if Paige is with me. Only then."

  "What--"

  "I'll explain later," Marty interrupted. "Everybody's waiting for me."

  He turned and hurried along the front walk toward the street, looking

  back once to say, "Only Paige."

  . . . my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  At home, in the kitchen, while recounting the assault to the officer who

  had caught the call and been first on the scene, Marty allowed a police

  technician to ink his fingers and roll them on a record sheet.

  They needed to be able to differentiate between his prints and those of

  the intruder. He wondered if he and The Other would prove t
o be as

  identical in that regard as they seemed in every other.

  Paige also submitted to the process. It was the first time in their

  lives that either of them had been fingerprinted. Though Marty

  understood the need for it, the whole process seemed invasive.

  After he got what he required, the technician moistened a paper towel

  with a glycerol cleanser and said that it would remove all the ink. It

  didn't. No matter how hard he rubbed, dark stains remained in the

  whorls of his skin.

  Before sitting down to make a more complete statement to the officer in

  charge, Marty went upstairs to change into dry clothes.

  He also took four Anacin.

  He turned up the thermostat, and the house quickly overheated.

  But periodic shivers still plagued him--largely because of the unnerving

  presence of so many police officers.

  They were everywhere in the house. Some were in uniforms, others were

  not, and all of them were strangers whose presence made Marty feel

  further violated.

  He hadn't anticipated how utterly a victim's privacy was peeled away

  beginning the moment he reported a serious crime. Policemen and

  technicians were in his office to photograph the room where the violent

  confrontation had begun, dig a couple of bullets out of the wall, dust