Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder
Page 40
Oslett was beginning to hope they might recover Alfie, salvage the
Network, and keep their reputations intact after all.
Turning to Clocker, Waxhill said, "What about you, Karl? Do you have a
problem with any of this?"
Though he was sitting at the table, Clocker appeared distant in spirit.
He pulled his attention back to them as if his thoughts had been with
the Enterprise crew on a hostile planet in the Crab nebula.
"There are five billion people on earth," he said, "so we think it's
crowded, but for every one of us, the universe contains countless
thousands of stars, an infinity of stars for each of us."
Waxhill stared at Clocker, waiting for elucidation. When he realized
that Clocker had nothing more to say, he turned to Oslett.
"I believe what Karl means," Oslett said, "is that . . . Well, in the
vast scheme of things, what does it matter if a few people die a little
sooner than they would have in the natural course of events?"
The sun is high over the distant mountains, where the loftiest peaks are
capped with snow. It seems odd to have a view of winter from this
springlike December morning full of palm trees and flowers.
He drives south and east into Mission Viejo. He is vengeance on wheels.
Justice on wheels. Rolling, rolling.
He considers locating a gun shop and buying a shotgun or hunting rifle,
some weapon for which there is no waiting period prior to the right of
purchase. His adversary is armed, but he is not.
However, he doesn't want to delay his pursuit of the kidnapper who has
stolen his family. If the enemy is kept off balance and on the move, he
is more likely to make mistakes. Unrelenting pressure is a better
weapon than any gun.
Besides, he is vengeance, justice, and virtue. He is the hero of this
movie, and heroes do not die. They can be shot, clubbed, run off the
road in high-speed car chases, slashed with a knife, pushed from a
cliff, locked in a dungeon filled with poisonous snakes, and endure an
endlessly imaginative series of abuses without perishing. With Harrison
Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes,
and so many other heroes, he shares the invincibility of virtue and high
noble purpose.
He realizes why his initial assault on the false father, in his house
yesterday, was doomed to fail in spite of his being a hero. He'd been
drawn westward by the powerful attraction between him and his double, to
the same degree that he had been aware of something pulling him, the
double had been aware of something approaching all day Sunday and
Monday. By the time they encountered each other - in the upstairs
study, the false father had been alerted and had prepared for battle.
Now he understands that he can initiate and terminate the connection
between them at will. Like the electrical current in any house hold
circuit, it can be controlled by an ON-OFF switch. Instead of leaving
the switch in the ON position all the time, he can open the pathway for
brief moments, just long enough to feel the pull of the false father and
take a fix on him.
Logic suggests he also can modify the power flowing along the psychic
wire. By imagining the psychic control is a dimmer switch--a
rheostat--he should be able to adjust downward the amperage of the
current in the circuit, making the contact more subtle than it has been
to date. After all, by using a rheostatic switch, the light of a
chandelier can be reduced smoothly by degrees until there is barely a
visible glow. Likewise, imagining the psychic switch as another
rheostat, he might be able to open the connection at such a low amperage
that he can track the false father without that adversary being alerted
to the fact he's being sought.
Stopping at a red traffic light in the heart of Mission Viejo, he
imagines a dial-type dimmer switch with a three-hundred-sixty-degree
brightness range. He turns it only ninety degrees, and at once feels
the pull of the false father, slightly farther east and now some what to
the north.
Outside of the bank, halfway to the BMW, Marty suddenly felt another
wave of pressure and behind it, the crushing Juggernaut of his dreams.
The sensation was not as strong as the experiences in the bank, but it
caught him in mid-step and threw him off balance. He staggered,
stumbled, and fell. The two manila envelopes full of cash flew out of
his hands and slid across the blacktop.
Charlotte and Emily scampered after the envelopes, and Paige helped
Marty to his feet.
As the wave passed and Marty stood shakily, he said, "Here, take my
keys, you better drive. He's hunting me. He's coming."
She looked around the bank lot in panic.
Marty said, "No, he's not here yet. It's like before. This sense of
being in the path of something very powerful and fast.
shaken again by contact with The Other. Although the impact of the
probe was less disturbing than ever before, he took no solace from the
diminishment of its power.
"Get us the hell out of here," he urged Paige, as he retrieved the
loaded Beretta from under the seat.
Paige started the engine, and Marty turned to the kids. They were
buckling their seatbelts.
As Paige slammed the BMW into reverse and backed out of the parking
space, the girls met Marty's eyes. They were scared.
He had too much respect for their perceptiveness to lie to them.
Rather than pretend everything was going to be all right, he said, "Hang
on. Your Mom's gonna try to drive like I do."
Popping the car out of reverse, Paige asked, "Where's he coming from?"
"I don't know. Just don't go out the same way we came in. I feel
uneasy about that. Use the other street."
Two blocks. Maybe not that far.
Driving slowly. Scanning the street ahead, left and right.
Looking for them.
A car horn toots behind him. The driver is impatient.
Slow, slow, squinting left and right, checking people on the sidewalks
as well as in passing cars.
The horn behind him. He gestures obscenely, which seems to spook the
guy into silence.
Slow, slow.
No sight of them.
Try the mental rheostat again. A sixty-degree turn this time.
Still a strong contact, an urgent and irresistible pull.
Ahead. On the left. Shopping center.
As Marty got into the front passenger seat and shut the door, holding
the envelopes of cash that the kids had retrieved for him, he was He is
drawn to the bank rather than the shopping center itself, and he parks
near the east entrance.
As he switches the engine off, he hears a brief shriek of tires.
From the corner of his eye, he is aware of a car driving away fast from
the south end of the building. Turning, he sees a white BMW eighty to a
hundred feet away. It streaks toward the shopping center, past him in a
flash.
He catches sight of only a portion of the driver's face--one cheekbone,
jaw line, curve of chin. And a shimmer of golden hair.
Sometimes it's possible to identify
a favorite song by only three notes,
because the melody has left an indelible impression on the mind.
Likewise, from that partial profile, glimpsed in a flicker of shadow and
light, in a blur of motion, he recognizes his precious wife.
Unknown people have eradicated his memories of her, but the photograph
he discovered yesterday is imprinted on his heart.
He whispers, "Paige."
He starts the Camry, backs out of the parking space, and turns toward
the shopping center.
Acres of blacktop are empty at that early hour, for only the
supermarket, a doughnut shop, and an office-supply store are open for
business. The BMW races across the parking lot, swinging wide of the
few clusters of cars, to the service road that fronts the stores. It
turns left and heads toward the north end of the center.
He follows but not aggressively. If he loses them, locating them again
is an easy matter because of the mysterious but reliable link between
him and the hateful man who has usurped his life.
The BMW reaches the north exit and turns right into the street.
By the time he arrives at that same intersection, the BMW is already two
blocks away, stopped at a red traffic signal and barely in sight.
For more than an hour, he follows them discreetly along surface streets,
north on the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, then east on the
Riverside Freeway, staying well back from them. Tucked in among the
heavy morning commuter traffic, his small Camry is as good as invisible.
On the Riverside Freeway, west of Corona, he imagines switching on the
psychic current between himself and the false father. He pictures the
rheostat and turns it five degrees out of a possible three hundred and
sixty. That is sufficient for him to sense the presence of the false
father ahead in traffic, although it gives him no precise fix.
Six degrees, seven, eight. Eight is too much. Seven. Seven is ideal.
With the switch open only seven degrees, the attraction is powerful
enough to serve as a beacon to him without alerting the enemy that the
link has been re-established. In the BMW, the imposter rides east
toward Riverside, tense and watchful but unaware of being monitored.
Yet, in the hunter's mind, the signal of the prey registers like a
blinking red light on an electronic map.
Having mastered control of this strange adducent power, he may be able
to strike at the false father with some degree of surprise.
Though the man in the BMW is expecting an attack and is on the run to
avoid it, he's also accustomed to being forewarned of assault. When
enough time passes without a disturbance in the ether, when he feels no
unnerving probes, he'll regain confidence.
With a return of confidence, his caution will diminish, and he'll become
vulnerable.
The hunter needs only to stay on the trail, follow the spoor, bide his
time, and wait for the ideal moment to strike.
As they pass through Riverside, morning traffic thins out around them.
He drops back farther, until the BMW is a distant, colorless dot that
sometimes vanishes temporarily, miragelike, in a shimmer of sunlight or
swirl of dust.
Onward and north. Through San Bernardino. Onto Interstate 15.
Into the northern end of the San Bernardino Mountains. Through the El
Cajon Pass at forty-three hundred feet.
Soon thereafter, south of the town of Hesperia, the BMW departs the
interstate and heads directly north on U.S. Highway 395, into the
westernmost reaches of the forbidding Mojave Desert. He follows,
continuing to remain at such a distance that they can't possibly realize
the dark speck in their rearview mirror is the same car that has trailed
them now through three counties.
Within a couple of miles, he passes a road sign indicating the mileage
to Ridgecrest, Lone Pine, Bishop, and Mammoth Lakes. Mammoth is the
farthest--two hundred and eighty-two miles.
The name of the town has an instant association for him. He has an
eidetic memory. He can see the words on the dedication page of one of
the mystery novels he has written and which he keeps on the shelves in
his home office in Mission Viejo, This opus is for my mother and father,
Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man--and who
can't be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.
He recalls, as well, the Rolodex card with their names and address.
They live in Mammoth Lakes.
Again, he is poignantly aware of what he has lost. Even if he can
reclaim his life from the imposter who wears his name, perhaps he will
never regain the memories that have been stolen from him. His
childhood. His adolescence. His first date. His high school
experiences. He has no recollection of his mother's or his father's
love, and it seems outrageous, monstrous, that he could be robbed of
those most essential and enduringly supportive memories.
For more than sixty miles, he alternates between despair at the
estrangement which is the primary quality of his existence and joy at
the prospect of reclaiming his destiny.
He desperately longs to be with his father, his mother, to see their
dear faces (which have been erased from the tablets of his memory), to
embrace them and re-establish the profound bond between him self and the
two people to whom he owes his existence. From the movies he has seen,
he knows parents can be a curse the maniacal mother who was dead before
the opening scene of Psycho, the selfish mother and father who warped
poor Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides--but he believes his parents to
be of a finer variety, compassionate and true, like Jimmy Stewart and
Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life.
The highway is flanked by dry lakes as white as salt, sudden battlements
of red rock, wind-sculpted oceans of sand, scrub, boron flats, distant
escarpments of dark stone. Everywhere lies evidence of geological
upheavals and lava flows from distant millennia.
At the town of Red Mountain, the BMW leaves the highway. It stops at a
service station to refuel.
He follows until he is certain of their intention, but passes the
service station without stopping. They have guns. He does not. A
better moment will be found to kill the impersonator.
Re-entering Highway 395, he drives north a short distance to
Johannesburg, which sits west of the Lava Mountains. He exits again and
tanks up the Camry at another service station. He buys crackers, candy
bars, and peanuts from the vending machines to sustain him during the
long drive ahead.
Perhaps because Charlotte and Emily had to use the restrooms back at the
Red Mountain stop, he is on the highway ahead of the BMW, but that
doesn't matter because he no longer needs to follow them. He knows
where they are going.
Mammoth Lakes, California.
Jim and Alice Stillwater. Who taught him to be an honest man.
Who can't be blamed if he is able to think like a criminal. To whom he
dedicated a novel. Beloved. Cherished. Stolen from him but soon to be
reclaimed.
He is eager to enlist
them in his crusade to regain his family and his
destiny. Perhaps the false father can deceive his children, and perhaps
even Paige can be fooled into accepting the imposter as the real Martin
Stillwater. But his parents will recognize their true son, blood of
their blood, and will not be misled by the cunning mimicry of that
family-stealing fraud.
Since turning onto Highway 395, where traffic is light, the BMW had
maintained a steady sixty to sixty-five miles an hour, though the road
made greater speed possible in many areas. Now, he pushes the Camry
north at seventy-five and eighty. He should be able to reach Mammoth
Lakes between two o'clock and two-fifteen, half an hour to forty-five
minutes ahead of the imposter, which will give him time to alert his
mother and father to the evil intentions of the creature that
masquerades as their son.
The highway angles northwest across Indian Wells Valley, with the El
Paso Mountains to the south. Mile by mile, his heart swells with
emotion at the prospect of being reunited with his mom and dad, from
whom he has been cruelly separated. He aches with the need to embrace
them and bask in their love, their unquestioning love, their undying and