by Dean Koontz
night between the slats of the plantation shutters.
Paige was struck by how vulnerable he suddenly appeared. Six feet tall,
a hundred and eighty pounds, with his easy-going manner and limitless
enthusiasm for life, Marty had always before struck her as being more
solid and permanent than anything in the world, oceans and mountains
included. Now he seemed as fragile as a pane of glass.
With his back toward her, still studying the night, he said, "Or it
might have been an indication of a small stroke."
"No."
"Though according to the references I checked, the most likely cause is
a brain tumor."
She raised her glass. It was empty. She could not remember having
finished the wine. A little fugue of her own.
She set the glass on the desk. Beside the hateful cassette recorder.
Then she went to Marty and put a hand on his shoulder.
When he turned to her, she kissed him lightly, quickly. She laid her
head against his chest and hugged him, and he put his arms around her.
Because of Marty, she had learned that hugs were as essential to a
healthy life as were food, water, sleep.
Earlier, when she had caught him systematically checking window locks,
she'd insisted, with only a scowl and a single word-"Well?"-- insisted
on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.
She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said,
"It might be nothing."
"It's something."
"But I mean, nothing physical."
He smiled ruefully. "It's so comforting to have a psychologist in the
house."
"Well, it could be psychological."
"Somehow, it doesn't help that maybe I'm just crazy."
"Not crazy. Stressed."
"Ah, yes, stress. The twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of
goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to
explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls--" She
let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn't upset with Marty,
exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought
turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.
She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she
remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.
"All right . . . except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you've
always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you're just a
secret worrier. And lately, you've had a lot of pressures."
"I have?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.
"The deadline on this book is tighter than usual."
"But I've still got three months, and I think I'll need one."
"All the new career expectations--your publisher and agent and everyone
in the business watching you in a different way now."
The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the
New York Times bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet
enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed
imminent with the release of his new novel in January.
The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty
wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his
writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh.
He knew he was in danger of unconsciously modifying his work, so lately
he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had always been
his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as
many as twenty and thirty times.
"Then there's People magazine," she said.
"That's not stressful. It's over and done with."
A writer for People had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a
photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being
Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had
desperately resisted his publisher's entreaties to do the piece.
Given his friendly relationship with the People people, he had no reason
to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity
usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what
mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as
he put it, "the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library
with a snake in my teeth to hype sales."
"It's not over and done with," Paige disagreed. The issue with the
article about Marty would not hit the newsstands until Monday. "I know
you're dreading it."
He sighed. "I don't want to be"
"Madonna with a snake in your teeth.
I know, baby. What I'm saying is, you're more stressed about the
magazine than you realize."
"Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?"
"Sure. Why not? I'll bet that's what the doctor will say."
Marty looked skeptical.
Paige moved into his arms again. "Everything's been going so well for
us lately, almost too well. There's a tendency to get a little
superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this.
Nothing's going to go wrong. You hear me?"
"I hear you," he said, holding her close.
"Nothing's going to go wrong," she repeated. "Nothing."
After midnight.
The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back
from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost
to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets,
watching over the prosperous residents, autumn stripped black limbs
bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information beyond the
brick and stone walls.
The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work
awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of
his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand
times before.
Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises
an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed
as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten
altogether.
A cold northwest breeze.
A moonless sky.
A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.
The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is
encircled by a spear-point iron fence.
The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that
position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in
Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.
As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico
at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to
unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he
extracts a key.
Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn't
know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose.
This has happened to him before.
The key fits the dead-bolt lock.
He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the
warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door
softly behind him.
After puttin
g the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system
programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the
moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the
system, otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit
disarming sequence just when it's required, punches it in.
He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside
pocket, a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type
manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private
citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently,
by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms
as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.
Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize
shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains
eighteen cartridges.
A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it,
and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will
guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will
deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without
waking others in the house and neighborhood.
Eight shots should be more than he needs.
The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped secondfloor
hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar
with this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.
Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects
seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a
science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or
an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial
respects.
He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the
king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.
Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and
woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His
face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is
on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see
enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.
He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband's throat.
The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the
counter-balanced lids of a doll's eyes.
The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man's throat, raises the
muzzle, and fires two rounds pointblank in his face. The gunfire sounds
like the soft spitting of a cobra.
He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.
Two bullets in the wife's exposed left temple complete his assignment,
and she never wakes at all.
For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness
of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most
intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world.
After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends
are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person's final breath.
Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable
existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of
sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and
significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his
targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with
other human beings, connections that briefly banish his alienation and
make him feel included, needed, loved.
Although these victims are always strangers to him--and in this case, he
does not even know their names--the experience can be so poignant that
tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control
of himself.
Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly
against the woman's left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still
pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man's
shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say, Goodbye, old riend, goodbye.
He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.
Goodbye.
Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and
radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer
from the weapon and to holster both pieces.
He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is
transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while
he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he
strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.
Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn't bother locking it.
He doesn't wipe off the brass knob, for he isn't concerned about leaving
fingerprints.
The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.
With rathke scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs
along the driveway.
The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer
senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along
the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.
Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense
tune on the return trip to the car.
By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels
once more the weight of the oppressive apartheid in which he exists.
Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.
In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the
nightstand. The pistol is still in the clasp of that nylon-lined
leather sleeve. He stares at the weapon for a while.
In the bathroom he takes a pair of scissors from his shaving kit, closes
the lid on the toilet, sits in the harsh fluorescent glare, and
meticulously destroys the two bogus credit cards that he has used thus
far on the assignment. He will fly out of Kansas City in the morning,
employing yet another name, and on the drive to the airport he will
scatter the tiny fragments of the cards along a few miles of highway.
He returns to the nightstand.
Stares at the pistol.
After leaving the dead bodies at the job site, he should have broken the
weapon down into as many pieces as possible. He should have disposed of
its parts in widely separated locations, the barrel in a storm drain
perhaps, half the frame in a creek, the other half in a Dumpster . . .
until nothing was left. That is standard procedure, and he is at a loss
to understand why he disregarded it this time.
A low-grade guilt attends this deviation from routine, but he is not
going to go out again and dispose of the weapon. In addition to the
guilt, he feels . . . rebellious.
He undresses and lies down. He turns off the bedside lamp and stares at
the layered shadows on the ceiling.
He is not sleepy. His mind is restless, and his thoughts jump from
subject to subject with such unnerving rapidity that his hyperactive
mental state soon translates into physical agitation. He fidgets,
pulling at the sheets, readjusting blankets, pillows.
; Out on the interstate highway, large trucks roll ceaselessly toward far
destinations. The singing of their tires, the grumble of their engines,
and the whoosh of the air displaced by their passage form a background
white noise that is usually soothing. He has often been lulled to sleep
by this Gypsy music of the open road.
Tonight, however, a strange thing happens. For reasons he can't
understand, this familiar mosaic of sound isn't a lullaby but a siren
song. He cannot resist it.
He gets out of bed and crosses the dark room to the only window. He has
an obscure night view of a weedy hillside and above it a slab of
sky--like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope,
separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are
flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.
He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound
vehicles.
Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him,
making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he
feels compelled to explore.