But what about the horror comic?
As far as she could see, only one rational explanation presented itself. She must have glimpsed the grotesque figure of Death on the cover of the magazine when Danny first brought the issue home from the newsstand.
Except that she knew she hadn’t.
And even if she had seen the color illustration before, she knew damned well that she hadn’t read the story—The Boy Who Was Not Dead. She had paged through only two of the magazines Danny had bought, the first two, when she had been trying to make up her mind whether such unusual reading material could have any harmful effects on him. From the date on its cover, she knew that the issue containing The Boy Who Was Not Dead couldn’t be one of the first pieces in Danny’s collection. It had been published only two years ago, long after she had decided that horror comics were harmless.
She was back where she’d started.
Her dream had been patterned after the images in the illustrated horror story. That seemed indisputable.
But she hadn’t read the story until a few minutes ago. That was a fact as well.
Frustrated and angry at herself for her inability to solve the puzzle, she turned from the window. She went back to the bed to have another look at the magazine, which she’d left there.
The gas company workman called from the front of the house, startling Tina.
She found him waiting by the front door.
“I’m finished,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know I was going, so you could lock the door behind me.”
“Everything all right?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Everything here is in great shape. If there’s a gas leak in this neighborhood, it’s not anywhere on your property.”
She thanked him, and he said he was only doing his job. They both said “Have a nice day,” and she locked the door after he left.
She returned to Danny’s room and picked up the lurid magazine. Death glared hungrily at her from the cover.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she read the story again, hoping to see something important in it that she had overlooked in the first reading.
Three or four minutes later the doorbell rang — one, two, three, four times, insistently.
Carrying the magazine, she went to answer the bell. It rang three more times during the ten seconds that she took to reach the front door.
“Don’t be so damn impatient,” she muttered.
To her surprise, through the fish-eye lens, she saw Elliot on the stoop.
When she opened the door, he came in fast, almost in a crouch, glancing past her, left and right, toward the living room, then toward the dining area, speaking rapidly, urgently. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What’s wrong with you?”
“Are you alone?”
“Not now that you’re here.”
He closed the door, locked it. “Pack a suitcase.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here.”
“Elliot, is that a gun?”
“Yeah. I was—”
“A real gun?”
“Yeah. I took it off the guy who tried to kill me.”
She was more able to believe that he was joking than that he had really been in danger. “What man? When?”
“A few minutes ago. At my place.”
“But—”
“Listen, Tina, they wanted to kill me just because I was going to help you get Danny’s body exhumed.”
She gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Murder. Conspiracy. Something damn strange. They probably intend to kill you too.”
“But that’s—”
“Crazy,” he said. “I know. But it’s true.”
“Elliot—”
“Can you pack a suitcase fast?”
At first she half believed that he was trying to be funny, playing a game to amuse her, and she was going to tell him that none of this struck her as funny. But she stared into his dark, expressive eyes, and she knew that he’d meant every word he said.
“My God, Elliot, did someone really try to kill you?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, no. But we ought to lie low until we can figure this out.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe they’re part of it somehow.”
“Part of it? The cops?”
“Where do you keep your suitcases?”
She felt dizzy. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But—”
“Come on. Hurry. Let’s get you packed and the hell out of here before any more of these guys show up.”
“I have suitcases in my bedroom closet.”
He put a hand against her back, gently but firmly urging her out of the foyer.
She headed for the master bedroom, confused and beginning to be frightened.
He followed close behind her. “Has anyone been around here this afternoon?”
“Just me.”
“I mean, anyone snooping around? Anyone at the door?”
“No.”
“I can’t figure why they’d come for me first.”
“Well, there was the gas man,” Tina said as she hurried down the short hall toward the master bedroom.
“The what?”
“The repairman from the gas company.”
Elliot put a hand on her shoulder, stopped her, and turned her around just as they entered the bedroom. “A gas company workman?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. I asked to see his credentials.”
Elliot frowned. “But it’s a holiday.”
“He was an emergency crewman.”
“What emergency?”
“They’ve lost some pressure in the gas lines. They think there might be a leak in this neighborhood.”
The furrows in Elliot’s brow grew deeper. “What did this workman need to see you for?”
“He wanted to check my furnace, make sure there wasn’t any gas escaping.”
“You didn’t let him in?”
“Sure. He had a photo ID card from the gas company. He checked the furnace, and it was okay.”
“When was this?”
“He left just a couple minutes before you came in.”
“How long was he here?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“It took him that long to check out the furnace?”
“He wanted to be thorough. He said—”
“Were you with him the whole time?”
“No. I was cleaning out Danny’s room.”
“Where’s your furnace?”
“In the garage.”
“Show me.”
“What about the suitcases?”
“There may not be time,” he said.
He was pale. Fine beads of sweat had popped out along his hairline.
She felt the blood drain from her face.
She said, “My God, you don’t think—”
“The furnace!”
“This way.”
Still carrying the magazine, she rushed through the house, past the kitchen, into the laundry room. A door stood at the far end of this narrow, rectangular work area. As she reached for the knob, she smelled the gas in the garage.
“Don’t open that door!” Elliot warned.
She snatched her hand off the knob as if she had almost picked up a tarantula.
“The latch might cause a spark,” Elliot said. “Let’s get the hell out. The front door. Come on. Fast!”
They hurried back the way they had come.
Tina passed a leafy green plant, a four-foot-high schefflera that she had owned since it was only one-fourth as tall as it was now, and she had the insane urge to stop and risk getting caught in the coming explosion just long enough to pick up the plant and take it with her. But an i
mage of crimson eyes, yellow skin — the leering face of death — flashed through her mind, and she kept moving.
She tightened her grip on the horror-comics magazine in her left hand. It was important that she not lose it.
In the foyer, Elliot jerked open the front door, pushed her through ahead of him, and they both plunged into the golden late-afternoon sunshine.
“Into the street!” Elliot urged.
A blood-freezing image rose at the back of her mind: the house torn apart by a colossal blast, shrapnel of wood and glass and metal whistling toward her, hundreds of sharp fragments piercing her from head to foot.
The flagstone walk that led across her front lawn seemed to be one of those treadmill pathways in a dream, stretching out farther in front of her the harder that she ran, but at last she reached the end of it and dashed into the street. Elliot’s Mercedes was parked at the far curb, and she was six or eight feet from the car when the sudden outward-sweeping shock of the explosion shoved her forward. She stumbled and fell into the side of the sports car, banging her knee painfully.
Twisting around in terror, she called Elliot’s name. He was safe, close behind her, knocked off balance by the force of the shock wave, staggering forward, but unhurt.
The garage had gone up first, the big door ripping from its hinges and splintering into the driveway, the roof dissolving in a confetti-shower of shake shingles and flaming debris. But even as Tina looked from Elliot to the fire, before all of the shingles had fallen back to earth, a second explosion slammed through the house, and a billowing cloud of flame roared from one end of the structure to the other, bursting those few windows that had miraculously survived the first blast.
Tina watched, stunned, as flames leaped from a window of the house and ignited dry palm fronds on a nearby tree.
Elliot pushed her away from the Mercedes so he could open the door on the passenger side. “Get in. Quick!”
“But my house is on fire!”
“You can’t save it now.”
“We have to wait for the fire company.”
“The longer we stand here, the better targets we make.”
He grabbed her arm, swung her away from the burning house, the sight of which affected her as much as if it had been a hypnotist’s slowly swinging pocket watch.
“For God’s sake, Tina, get in the car, and let’s go before the shooting starts.”
Frightened, dazed by the incredible speed at which her world had begun to disintegrate, she did as he said.
When she was in the car, he shut her door, ran to the driver’s side, and climbed in behind the steering wheel.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded dumbly.
“At least we’re still alive,” he said.
He put the pistol on his lap, the muzzle facing toward his door, away from Tina. The keys were in the ignition. He started the car. His hands were shaking.
Tina looked out the side window, watching in disbelief as the flames spread from the shattered garage roof to the main roof of the house, long tongues of lambent fire, licking, licking, hungry, bloodred in the last orange light of the afternoon.
Chapter Nineteen
As Elliot drove away from the burning house, his instinctual sense of danger was as sensitive as it had been in his military days. He was on the thin line that separated animal alertness from nervous frenzy.
He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a black van pull away from the curb, half a block behind them.
“We’re being followed,” he said.
Tina had been looking back at her house. Now she turned all the way around and stared through the rear window of the sports car. “I’ll bet the bastard who rigged my furnace is in that truck.”
“Probably.”
“If I could get my hands on the son of a bitch, I’d gouge his eyes out.”
Her fury surprised and pleased Elliot. Stupefied by the unexpected violence, by the loss of her house, and by her close brush with death, she had seemed to be in a trance; now she had snapped out of it. He was encouraged by her resilience.
“Put on your seat belt,” he said. “We’ll be moving fast and loose.”
She faced front and buckled up. “Are you going to try to lose them?”
“I’m not just going to try.”
In this residential neighborhood the speed limit was twenty-five miles an hour. Elliot tramped on the accelerator, and the low, sleek, two-seat Mercedes jumped forward.
Behind them the van dwindled rapidly, until it was a block and a half away. Then it stopped dwindling as it also accelerated.
“He can’t catch up with us,” Elliot said. “The best he can hope to do is avoid losing more ground.”
Along the street, people came out of their houses, seeking the source of the explosion. Their heads turned as the Mercedes rocketed past.
When Elliot rounded the corner two blocks later, he braked from sixty miles an hour to make the turn. The tires squealed, and the car slid sideways, but the superb suspension and responsive steering held the Mercedes firmly on four wheels all the way through the arc.
“You don’t think they’ll actually start shooting at us?” Tina asked.
“Hell if I know. They wanted it to appear as if you’d died in an accidental gas explosion. And I think they had a fake suicide planned for me. But now that they know we’re on to them, they might panic, might do anything. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is they can’t let us just walk away.”
“But who—”
“I’ll tell you what I know, but later.”
“What do they have to do with Danny?”
“Later,” he said impatiently.
“But it’s all so crazy.”
“You’re telling me?”
He wheeled around another corner, and then another, trying to disappear from the men in the van long enough to leave them with so many choices of streets to follow that they would have to give up the chase in confusion. Too late, he saw the sign at the fourth intersection — NOT A THROUGH STREET — but they were already around the corner and headed down the narrow dead end, with nothing but a row of ten modest stucco houses on each side.
“Damn!”
“Better back out,” she said.
“And run right into them.”
“You’ve got the gun.”
“There’s probably more than one of them, and they’ll be armed.”
At the fifth house on the left, the garage door was open, and there wasn’t a car inside.
“We’ve got to get off the street and out of sight,” Elliot said.
He drove into the open garage as boldly as if it were his own. He switched off the engine, scrambled out of the car, and ran to the big door. It wouldn’t come down. He struggled with it for a moment, and then he realized that it was equipped with an automatic system.
Behind him, Tina said, “Stand back.”
She had gotten out of the car and had located the control button on the garage wall.
He glanced outside, up the street. He couldn’t see the van.
The door rumbled down, concealing them from anyone who might drive past.
Elliot went to her. “That was close.”
She took his hand in hers, squeezed it. Her hand was cold, but her grip was firm.
“So who the hell are they?” she asked,
“I saw Harold Kennebeck, the judge I mentioned. He—”
The door that connected the garage to the house opened without warning, but with a sharp, dry squeak of unoiled hinges.
An imposing, barrel-chested man in rumpled chinos and a white T-shirt snapped on the garage light and peered curiously at them. He had meaty arms; the circumference of one of them almost equaled the circumference of Elliot’s thigh. And there wasn’t a shirt made that could be buttoned easily around his thick, muscular neck. He appeared formidable, even with his beer belly, which bulged over the waistband of his trousers.
First Vince and now this specimen. It was the Da
y of the Giants.
“Who’re you?” the pituitary-challenged behemoth asked in a soft, gentle voice that didn’t equate with his appearance.
Elliot had the awful feeling that this guy would reach for the button Tina had pushed less than a minute ago, and that the garage door would lift just as the black van was rolling slowly by in the street.
Stalling for time, he said, “Oh, hi. My name’s Elliot, and this is Tina.”
“Tom,” the big man said. “Tom Polumby.”
Tom Polumby didn’t appear to be worried by their presence in his garage; he seemed merely perplexed. A man of his size probably wasn’t frightened any more easily than Godzilla confronted by the pathetic bazooka-wielding soldiers surrounding doomed Tokyo.
“Nice car,” Tom said with an unmistakable trace of reverence in his voice. He gazed covetously at the S600.
Elliot almost laughed. Nice car! They pulled into this guy’s garage, parked, closed the door bold as you please, and all he had to say was Nice car!
“Very nice little number,” Tom said, nodding, licking his lips as he studied the Mercedes.
Apparently Tom couldn’t conceive that burglars, psychopathic killers, and other lowlifes were permitted to purchase a Mercedes-Benz if they had the money for it. To him, evidently, anyone who drove a Mercedes had to be the right kind of people.
Elliot wondered how Tom would have reacted if they had shrieked into his garage in an old battered Chevy.
Pulling his covetous gaze from the car, Tom said, “What’re you doing here?” There was still neither suspicion nor belligerence in his voice.
“We’re expected,” Elliot said.
“Huh? I wasn’t expecting nobody.”
“We’re here… about the boat,” Elliot said, not even knowing where he was going to go with that line, ready to say anything to keep Tom from putting up the garage door and throwing them out.
Tom blinked. “What boat?”
“The twenty-footer.”
“I don’t own a twenty-footer.”
“The one with the Evinrude motor.”
“Nothing like that here.”
“You must be mistaken,” Elliot said.
“I figure you’ve got the wrong place,” Tom said, stepping out of the doorway, into the garage, reaching for the button that would raise the big door.
Tina said, “Mr. Polumby, wait. There must be some mistake, really. This is definitely the right place.”
The Eyes of Darkness Page 14