Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  "Stop seeing his side of it. You're making me mad. What now?

  Shouldn't we get out of here?"

  "Fast as we can," he agreed. "And don't come back until we can figure

  out what the hell this is all about. Can you throw a couple of

  suitcases together, basics for all of us for a few days?"

  "Sure," she said, already heading for the stairs.

  "I'll go call Vic and Kathy, make sure everything's all right over

  there, then I'll come help you. And Paige the Mossberg is under the bed

  in our room."

  Starting up the stairs, stepping over the splintery debris, she said,

  "okay."

  "Get it out, put it on top of the bed while you pack."

  "I will," she said, already a third of the way up the stairs.

  He didn't think he had sufficiently impressed her with the need for

  uncommon caution. "Take it with you to the girls' room."

  "All right."

  Speaking sharply enough to halt her, pain encircling his neck when he

  tilted his head back to stare up at her, he said, "Damn it, I mean it,

  Paige."

  She looked down, surprised because he never used that tone of voice.

  "Okay. I'll keep it close."

  "Good."

  He headed for the telephone in the kitchen and made it as far as the

  dining room when he heard Paige cry out from the second floor.

  Heart pounding so hard he could draw only shallow staccato breaths,

  Marty raced back into the foyer, expecting to see her in The Other's

  grasp.

  She was standing at the head of the stairs, horrified by the gruesome

  stains on the carpet, which she was seeing for the first time.

  "Hearing about it, I still didn't think . .." She looked down at

  Marty.

  "So much blood. How could he just . . . just walk away?"

  "He couldn't if he was . . . just a man. That's why I'm sure he'll be

  back. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for a month, but

  he'll be back."

  "Marty, this is crazy."

  "I know."

  "Sweet Jesus," she said, less in any profane sense than as a prayer, and

  hurried into the master bedroom.

  Marty returned to the kitchen and took the Beretta out of the cabinet.

  Although he had loaded the pistol himself, he popped out the magazine,

  checked it, slammed it back into place, and jacked a round into the

  chamber.

  He noticed scores of overlapping dirt-y footprints all across the

  Mexican-tile floor. Many were still wet. During the past two hours,

  the police had tramped in and out of the rain, and evidently not all of

  them had been thoughtful enough to wipe their feet at the door.

  Though he knew the cops had been busy and that they had better things to

  do than worry about tracking up the house, the footprints--and the

  thoughtlessness they represented--seemed to be nearly as profound a

  violation as the assault by The Other. A surprisingly intense

  resentment uncoiled in Marty.

  While sociopaths stalked the modern world, the judicial system operated

  on the premise that evil was spawned primarily by societal injustice.

  Thugs were considered victims of society as surely as the people they

  robbed or killed were their victims. Recently a man had been released

  from a California prison after serving six years for raping and

  murdering an eleven-year-old girl. Six years. The girl, of course, was

  still as dead as she had ever been. Such outrages were now so common

  that the story got only minor press coverage. If the courts would not

  protect eleven-year-old innocents, and if the House and Senate wouldn't

  write laws to force the courts to do so, then judges and politicians

  couldn't be counted on to protect anyone, anywhere, at any time.

  But, damn it, at least you expected the cops to protect you because cops

  were on the street every day, in the thick of it, and they knew what the

  world was really like. The grand poobahs in Washington and smug

  eminences in courtrooms had isolated themselves from reality with high

  salaries, endless perks, and lush pensions, they lived in gate-guarded

  neighborhoods with private security, sent their kids to private

  schools--and lost touch with the damage they perpetrated.

  But not cops. Cops were blue-collar. Working men and women. In their

  work they saw evil every day, they knew it was as widespread among the

  privileged as among the middle-class and the poor, that society was less

  at fault than the flawed nature of the human species.

  The police were supposed to be the last line of defense against

  barbarity. But if they became cynical about the system they were asked

  to uphold, if they believed they were the only ones who cared about

  justice any more, they would cease caring. When you needed them, they

  would conduct their forensic tests, fill out thick files of paperwork to

  please the bureaucracy, track dirt across your once clean floors, and

  leave you without even sympathy.

  Standing in his kitchen, holding the loaded Beretta, Marty knew that he

  and Paige now constituted their own last line of defense.

  No one else. No greater authority. No guardian of the public welfare.

  He needed courage but also the free-wheeling imagination that he brought

  to the writing of his books. Suddenly he seemed to be living in another

  novel, in that amoral realm where stories by James M.

  Cain or Elmore Leonard took place. Survival in such a dark world

  depended upon quick thinking, fast action, utter ruthlessness. Most of

  all it hinged on the ability to imagine the worst that life could come

  up with next and, by imagining, be ready for it rather than surprised.

  His mind was blank.

  He had no idea where to go, what to do. Pack up and get out of the

  house, yes. But then what?

  He just stared at the gun in his hand.

  Although he loved the works of Cain and Leonard, his own books were not

  that dark. They celebrated reason, logic, virtue, and the triumph of

  social order. His imagination did not lead him toward vigilante

  solutions, situational ethics, or anarchism.

  Blank.

  Worried about his ability to cope when so much was riding on him, Marty

  picked up the kitchen phone and called the Delorios.

  When Kathy answered on the first ring, he said, "It's Marty."

  "Marty, are you okay? We saw all the police leaving, and then the

  officer over here left, too, but nobody's made the situation clear to

  us.

  I mean, is everything all right? What in the world is going on?"

  Kathy was a good neighbor and genuinely concerned, but Marty had no

  intention of wasting time in a full recounting of what he'd been through

  with either the would-be killer or the police. "Where are Charlotte and

  Emily?"

  "Watching TV."

  "Where?"

  "Well, in the family room."

  "Are your doors locked?"

  "Yes, of course, I think so."

  "Be sure. Check them. Do you have a gun?"

  "A gun? Marty, what is this?"

  "Do you have a gun?" he insisted.

  "I don't believe in guns. But Vic has one."

  "Is he carrying it now?"

  "No. He's--"

  "Tell him to load
it and carry it until Paige and I can get there to pick

  up the girls."

  "Marty, I don't like this. I don't--"

  "Ten minutes, Kathy. I'll pick up the girls in ten minutes or less fast

  as I can."

  He hung up before she was able to respond.

  He hurried upstairs to the guest room that doubled as Paige's home

  office. She did the family bookkeeping, balanced the check book, and

  looked after the rest of their financial affairs.

  In the right-hand bottom drawer of the pine desk were files o receipts,

  invoices, and canceled checks. The drawer also contained their

  checkbook and savings-account passbook, which Marty retrieved fixed

  together with a rubberband. He stuffed them into the pocket of his

  chinos.

  His mind wasn't blank any more. He'd thought of some precautions he

  ought to take, though they were too feeble to be considered a plan of

  action.

  In his office he went to the walk-in storage closet and hastily selected

  four cardboard cartons from stacks of thirty to forty boxes ol the same

  size and shape. Each held twenty hardcover books. He could only carry

  two at a time to the garage. He put them in the trunk of the BMW,

  wincing from the pain in his neck, which the effort exacerbated.

  Entering the master bedroom after his second hasty trip to the car, he

  was brought up short just past the threshold by the sight of Paige

  snatching up the shotgun and whipping around to confront him.

  "Sorry," she said, when she saw who it was.

  "You did it right," he said. "Have you gotten the girls' things

  together?"

  "No, I'm just finishing here."

  "I'll get started on theirs," he said.

  Following the blood trail to Charlotte and Emily's room, passin the

  broken-out section of gallery railing, Marty glanced at the foyer floor

  below. He still expected to see a dead man sprawled on the cracked

  tiles.

  Charlotte and Emily were slumped on the Delorios' family-room sofa,

  heads close together. They were pretending to be deeply involved in a

  stupid television comedy show about a stupid family with stupid kids and

  stupid parents doing stupid things to resolve a stupid problem.

  As long as they appeared to be caught up in the program, Mrs. Delorio

  stayed in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Mr. Delorio either paced

  through the house or stood at the front windows watching the cops

  outside. Ignored, the girls had a chance to whisper to each other and

  try to figure out what was happening at home.

  "Maybe Daddy's been shot," Charlotte worried.

  "I told you already a million times he wasn't."

  "What do you know? You're only seven."

  Emily sighed. "He told us he was okay, in the kitchen, when Mommy

  thought he was hurt."

  "He was covered with blood," Charlotte fretted.

  "He said it wasn't his."

  "I don't remember that."

  "I do," Emily said emphatically.

  "If Daddy wasn't shot, then who was?"

  "Maybe a burglar," Emily said.

  "We're not rich, Em. What would a burglar want in our place?

  Hey, maybe Daddy had to shoot Mrs. Sanchez."

  "Why shoot Mrs. Sanchez? She's just the cleaning lady."

  "Maybe she went berserk," Charlotte said, and the possibility appealed

  enormously to her thirst for drama.

  Emily shook her head. "Not Mrs. Sanchez. She's nice."

  "Nice people go berserk."

  "Do not."

  "Do too."

  Emily folded her arms on her chest. "Name one."

  "Mrs. Sanchez," Charlotte said.

  "Besides Mrs. Sanchez."

  "Jack Nicholson."

  "Who's he?"

  "You know, the actor. In Batman he was the Joker, and he was totally

  massively berserk."

  "So maybe he's always totally massively berserk."

  "No, sometimes he's nice, like in that movie with Shirley Mac Line, he

  was an astronaut, and Shirley's daughter got real sick and they found

  out she had cancer, she died, and Jack was just so sweet and nice."

  "Besides, this isn't Mrs. Sanchez's day," Emily said.

  "What?"

  "She only comes on Thursdays."

  "Really, Em, if she went berserk, she wouldn't know what day it was,"

  Charlotte countered, pleased with her response, which made such perfect

  sense. "Maybe she's loose from a looney-tune asylum, goes around

  getting housekeeping jobs, then sometimes when she's berserk she kills

  the family, roasts them, and eats them for dinner."

  "You're weird," Emily said.

  "No, listen," Charlotte insisted in an urgent whisper, "like Hannibal

  Lecter."

  "Hannibal the Cannibal!" Emily gasped.

  Neither of them had been allowed to see the movie which Emily insisted

  on calling The Sirens of the Lambs--because Mom and Daddy didn't think

  they were old enough, but they'd heard about it from other kids in

  school who'd seen it on video a billion times.

  Charlotte could tell that Emily was no longer so sure about Mrs.

  Sanchez. After all, Hannibal the Cannibal had been a doctor who went

  humongously berserk and bit off people's noses and stuff, so the idea of

  a berserk cannibal cleaning lady suddenly made a lot of sense.

  Mr. Delorio came into the family room to part the drapes over the

  sliding glass doors and study the backyard, which was pretty much

  revealed by the patio lights. In his right hand he held a gun. He had

  not been carrying a gun before.

  Letting the drapes fall back into place, turning away from the glass

  doors, he smiled at Charlotte and Emily. "You kids okay?"

  "Yes, sir," Charlotte said. "This is a great show."

  "You need anything?"

  "No thanks, sir," Emily said. "We just want to watch the show."

  "It's a great show," Charlotte repeated.

  As Mr. Delorio left the room, both Charlotte and Emily turned to watch

  him until he was out of sight.

  "Why's he have a gun?" Emily wondered.

  "Protecting us. And you know what that means? Mrs. Sanchez must still

  be alive and on the loose, looking for someone to eat."

  "But what if Mr. Delorio goes berserk next? He's got a gun, we could

  never get away from him."

  "Be serious," Charlotte said, but then she realized a physical education

  teacher was just as likely to go berserk as any cleaning lady.

  "Listen, Em, you know what to do if he goes berserk?"

  "Call nine-one-one."

  "You won't have time for that, silly. So what you'll have to do is,

  you'll have to kick him in the nuts."

  Emily frowned. "Huh?"

  "Don't you remember the movie Saturday?" Charlotte asked.

  Mom had been upset enough about the movie to complain to the theater

  manager. She'd wanted to know how the picture could have received a PG

  rating with the language and violence in it, and the manager had said it

  was PG-13, which was very different.

  One of the things that bothered Mom was a scene where the good guy got

  away from the bad guy by kicking him hard between the legs. Later, when

  someone asked the good guy what the bad guy wanted, the good guy said,

  "I don't know what he wanted, but what he needed was a good kick in the

 
; nuts."

  Charlotte had sensed, at once, that the line annoyed her mother.

  Later, she could have asked for an explanation, and her mother would

  have given her one. Mom and Daddy believed in answering all of a

  child's questions honestly. But sometimes, it was more exciting to try

  to learn the answer on her own, because then it was something she knew

  that they didn't know she knew.

  At home, she'd checked the dictionary to see if there was any definition

  of "nuts" that would explain what the good guy had done to the bad guy

  and also explain why her mother was so unhappy about it.

  When she saw that one meaning of the word was obscene slang for

  "testicles," she checked that mysterious word in the same dictionary,

  learned what she could, then sneaked into Daddy's office and used his