by Dean Koontz
apart from humanity and superior to it, he might also have come into this world by a route different from the one everybody else had taken.
He did not know what his special route might have been, if not a mother. He had not spent any time thinking about it, for he was not, after all, either a biologist or a theologian.
As for children: He found them incoherent, incomprehensible, boring, and fundamentally inexplicable. A lot of adults’ time went to the care of children, and a horrendous amount in social services was spent on them, in spite of the fact that they were small and weak and ignorant and had nothing to give back to society.
Krait had no memories of his childhood. His sincere hope was that he’d never had one, because he was revolted by the thought of a little Krait with head lice and whooping cough, playing in a sandbox with plastic trucks, three teeth missing and snot hanging out of his nose.
After disengaging both the regular lockset and the deadbolt, he stepped into the house, listened to the emptiness for a moment, and then called out, “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”
He waited for a response, received none, closed the door behind him, and turned on a couple of lamps in the living room.
The decor was too ornate for his taste, and too feminine. His preference for simplicity was so strong that he might have been happy as a monk, in a particularly spartan monastery, except that monks were not permitted to murder people.
Before fully committing himself to this residence, Krait toured the living room, wiping his fingers along the tops of door frames and over the higher surfaces of tall furniture, pleased to discover that these surfaces were as clean as those that could easily be seen.
When he examined the sofa cushions and the armchair upholstery for evidence of discolorations from hair oil and sweat, he found none. He didn’t discover a single food or beverage stain.
With his penlight, he looked under a sofa and under a sideboard. No dust bunnies.
Satisfied that the homeowner met his standards of cleanliness, Krait relaxed on the sofa. He propped his feet on the coffee table.
After sending a coded text message that succinctly explained his situation, he requested new transportation, significant new weaponry, and a modest number of high-tech devices that might be useful now that this assignment had become more complex.
He provided the address at which he was currently taking refuge and asked to be given an estimated delivery time when one could be calculated.
Then he stripped down to his underwear and carried his clothes into the kitchen.
Sixteen
Into a night with a lowering sky and a slowly rising wind, Tim drove with no ultimate destination in mind, though as he wove from street to street, avoiding freeways, he gradually proceeded south and toward the coast.
With no trace of anxiety, Linda told him about Dennis Jolly and his big ear lobes, the self-destructing Chevy, and her need to use a bathroom.
They stopped at a service station, filled the tank with gasoline, and visited the lavatories. In the adjacent convenience store, he bought a package of vanilla-flavored Rolaids Softchews.
Tim needed the antacids, but Linda declined an offer of one. Her unflappable calm continued to intrigue him.
On the move once more, he told her about the Chevy, the fire hydrant, the picket fence, and the untimely appearance of the bearded man with the beer belly.
She said, “You shot out the tires?”
“One of the tires, maybe two.”
“Right there on a public street?”
“The way it went down, I didn’t have time to put up sawhorses and close the block.”
“Incredible.”
“Not really. Lots of places on the planet, there’s more shooting in the streets than driving.”
“Where does an ordinary bricklayer suddenly get the grit to walk into the path of a car driven by a hit man, and shoot out the tires?”
“I’m not an ordinary bricklayer. I’m an excellent bricklayer.”
“You’re something, I don’t know what,” she said, and ejected the magazine from the pistol that he had borrowed.
“So we’re in the same club,” he said. “Gimme the title of one of the novels you wrote.”
“Despair.”
“That’s one of your titles?”
“Yeah.”
“Gimme another one.”
“Relentless Cancer.”
“Another one.”
“The Hopeless and the Dead.”
“I’m going to guess—they weren’t on the best-seller list.”
“No, but they’ve sold okay. I’ve got an audience.”
“What’s their suicide rate? I don’t get it. You said you write painful, stupid, gut-wrenching books. But when I look at you, I don’t see a chronic depressive.”
Replenishing the depleted magazine with spare 9-mm rounds from her purse, she said, “I’m not depressed. I just used to think I ought to be.”
“Why did you think you ought to be?”
“Because I was hanging out with university types, they love doom. And because of all the stuff that happened.”
“What stuff?”
Instead of answering, she said, “For a long time I was so angry, so bitter, I didn’t have room for depression.”
“Then it seems like you’d be writing angry books.”
“There was some anger in them, but mostly anguish, torment, wretchedness, and a festering kind of sorrow.”
“I’m glad we weren’t dating in those days. Sorrow about what?”
“Just drive,” she said.
He drove, but he said, “Now that you won’t be writing anguished, wretched, festering books anymore, what will you be writing?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe a story about a bricklayer who goes insane at a Peter, Paul and Mary concert.”
Tim’s cell phone rang. He hesitated, thinking the caller might be Kravet.
Instead, it was Pete Santo. “Hey, Doorman, you’ve got yourself into something mondo weird.”
“Don’t call me Doorman. What weird?”
“You know how guys who use a lot of fake ID often keep the same initials for first and last name?”
Pulling to the curb and stopping in a residential neighborhood, Tim said, “All right.”
“So I put together a search profile for anyone in DMV records with an R first name, K surname. Other parameters were from Kravet’s license—male, brown hair, brown eyes, six feet, birth date.”
“You got some hits?”
“I got twenty-some hits. Nine are what we’re looking for. The photo is the same guy, your guy with that creepy little smile. Robert Krane, Reginald Konrad, Russell Kerrington—”
“You think one of them might be his real name?”
“I’m gonna run them all through local, state, and national law-enforcement databases, see if one turns up with some kind of badge. This guy has to be connected somewhere.”
“Why?”
“This is where the weird starts. According to the DMV, these licenses were applied for in nine different offices up and down the state. But every one has the same photo, not nine different ones.”
As Tim processed that news, Linda turned in her seat to stare out the rear window, as though the moment they had come to a stop, they had become easier to find.
Tim said, “So the guy’s working with someone inside the DMV.”
“Your garden-variety dirtbag,” Pete said, “when he wants fake ID, he doesn’t go to the DMV. He buys it from a fake-doc shop. It’s good for a lot of things, but not all. Say he’s stopped for speeding. If the officer ticketing him runs his license for priors, the DMV won’t have a record of it. It’s just a doc-shop job with no roots.”
“But these nine licenses have roots. They’ll stand up.”
“Man, they’ll stand up and sing ‘God Bless America.’ So he’s got someone in the DMV or he can funnify their files himself.”
“Funnify?”
“Funny
them up, insert bogus records.”
“I should take one of those vocabulary-enhancement courses.”
Pete said, “Save your money and get a personality transplant first. Here’s another thing. California has some new DMV-access agreements with a couple of neighboring states. This Kravet Krane Konrad Whoever—he has three licenses in Nevada and two in Arizona, no repeats on the names, but all with the same photo.”
“Well, it is a handsome photo,” Tim said.
“It is,” Pete agreed.
“That smile.”
“Those eyes. What is this about, compadre?”
“We’ve been through that. Parrot mug, egg-custard pie.”
“These licenses, funnifying DMV records, these are felonies. Now that I know about this, I can’t sit on it forever, not even for you.”
The name Richard Lee Kravet was almost certainly not the killer’s real name, so the burnt-out Chevy in the alleyway might not be easily tied to him under his true identity. Anyway, the wrecked car was not evidence of anything other than of reckless driving.
“Maybe if you can shake out the real ID from all the fake ones, maybe if we get the guy’s born name, who he really works for, where he lives, maybe then I can tell you the story.”
“Three maybes. I’m just warning you. I’ve got a hard ass, and I’ll sit on this for you, but not all the way till Judgment Day.”
Tim said, “Thanks, Pete. Call when you have something.”
“I suspect I’ll be working on this into the wee hours. I’ve already phoned in sick for tomorrow.”
“No matter what time it is, if you get something, call.”
“She still with you?”
“Yeah. She eats bacon cheeseburgers and hates arugula.”
“American Idol—does she like it?”
“Doesn’t watch it.”
“I told you she was something. Didn’t I tell you? Ask her what is her favorite chick flick of all time.”
To Linda, he said, “Pete wants to know what is your favorite chick flick of all time.”
“It’s a tossup between Die Hard and Man on Fire, the Denzel Washington version.”
Tim repeated her answer, and Pete said, “You lucky sonofabitch.”
Seventeen
In the laundry room, Krait located spare hangers for his pants, shirt, and sports coat. He hung these clothes from handles on the kitchen cabinetry.
Attired only in underwear, socks, and shoes, he closed the blinds at the kitchen windows. He did not approve of people who made spectacles of themselves.
He found a clothes brush with stiff bristles and another with soft bristles. The discovery of a clothes sponge delighted him.
The homeowners seemed to be as fastidious about the condition of their garments as they were about their house-cleaning.
Before departing, he would be tempted to leave them a note of approval, but also some advice. Currently on the market were nontoxic, biodegradable dry-cleaning fluids for home use, of which they had none. He felt certain they would be pleased with the products he recommended.
Using the lightly dampened sponge only where necessary, and then each brush as the nature and the condition of the different fabrics required, he had soon completed refreshing the garments.
Because the laundry room was small, he set up the ironing board in the kitchen. The homeowners possessed a high-quality, versatile steam iron.
He had once employed this same brand of steam iron to torture a young man before killing him. Unfortunately, the superb appliance had been ruined by the end of the session.
When he had finished pressing his clothes, he went in search of black shoe polish, a suitable brush, and a buffing cloth. He found a shoeshine kit under the kitchen sink.
After returning everything he had used to its proper place, he dressed and went upstairs in search of a full-length mirror. He found one in the master bathroom.
His appearance pleased him. He might have been a schoolteacher or a salesman, or anyone at all.
Mirrors intrigued him. Everything was reversed in a mirror, which suggested to him some mysterious truth about life that he had not yet been able to grasp.
He had once read an interview with a woman writer who said the fictional character with whom she most intensely identified was Lewis Carroll’s young Alice. She claimed that in spirit she was Alice.
Because she had many lamentable opinions, Krait visited the writer one evening. She proved to be quite petite. He easily picked her up and threw her at a full-length mirror to see if she would magically pass through and vanish into Wonderland.
In fact, she was not Alice. The mirror shattered. When she failed to pass through the mirror, he spent some time passing the fragments of the mirror through her.
Only when his phone vibrated did Krait become aware that he had been standing in front of this particular looking glass for more than a minute or two.
A text message informed him that the order he had placed would be delivered by 2:00 A.M.
According to his wristwatch, he had one hour and fifty-five minutes to wait.
Impatience did not trouble him. He viewed this as an opportunity to visit with the family who, unknowingly, had provided his refuge.
He began by looking through the cabinets in the master bathroom. There he learned, to his satisfaction, that he shared a number of brand preferences with these people: toothpaste, antacids, a headache remedy….
Each time he encountered a brand choice that he believed to be misguided, he dropped the item in a nearby wastebasket.
In two dresser drawers in the master bedroom, Krait found a collection of sexy lingerie. With interest, he unfolded each item, examined it, and then refolded it.
He did not disapprove of this discovery. If the average person was entitled to anything, it was the unrestrained expression of his or her sexuality.
Krait briefly considered expressing his sexuality directly into one of the most provocative pieces of lingerie and returning it to the drawer, but he decided to save himself for the Paquette woman.
At the farther end of the second-floor hall from the parents’ room lay the bedroom of their daughter. The immediate evidence suggested that she was a teenager.
The girl’s clothes, the manner in which she decorated her room, and her taste in music as embodied in her small collection of CDs suggested that she was not in rebellion against her parents.
Krait did not approve of her apparent complete submission to her mother and father.
As inscrutable and annoying as children were, he could nevertheless see one purpose for them. Contempt and animosity between generations provided tools with which a society could be shaped and controlled.
A nightstand drawer contained, among other things, a locked, leather-bound diary. Krait broke the lock.
The girl’s name was Emily Pelletrino. She had clear, graceful handwriting.
Krait read a few pages, then a paragraph here and there, but he encountered no revelations that needed to be kept under lock and key. Emily thought her parents were unintentionally amusing, but she loved and respected them. She wasn’t taking drugs. At fourteen, she still seemed to be a virgin. She sounded intent about earning high grades in school.
Until this prissy Emily person, Krait had found nothing in this house to dislike with intensity. Something about her struck him as smug.
Once the current assignment had been fulfilled, if his schedule permitted, he might return for Emily. He would like to take her away somewhere private for a week or two.
After he introduced the girl to a regimen of new experiences, mind-altering substances, and ideas, he would be able to return her home with confidence that she would no longer have such a high opinion of herself. She would also have a new attitude toward her mother and father, and the current unnatural dynamics of this family would have been repaired.
Later, in the living room, as Krait continued visiting the Pelletrino clan, he heard a car in the driveway. When he consulted his watch, he saw that the d
elivery had arrived right on time—2:00.
He did not go outside to greet the couriers. That would have been a breach of protocol.
Neither did he go to a window to peer between draperies. He had no interest in the couriers. They were mere footmen, walk-ons in the drama.
In the kitchen once more, Krait explored the contents of the freezer and found an ideal portion of homemade lasagna. He heated it in the microwave and accompanied it with a bottle of beer.
The lasagna was delectable. Whenever possible, he preferred to eat homemade food.
After cleaning up after himself, switching off the lights, and locking the front door, he went out to the driveway.
The Chevrolet that waited for him was dark blue, not white, but otherwise it appeared all but identical to the car that he had been forced to abandon in the alleyway.
No conditions of light or environment could have made the plain sedan look sporty. Under the low fast-moving clouds, however, and in the dream-strange lamplight of the sleeping street, and in the wind that chased thrashing jacaranda shadows across the night, the dark-blue Chevrolet appeared more powerful than the white version, a difference that appealed to Krait.
The keys were in the ignition. An attaché case lay on the passenger’s seat.
He didn’t have to look in the trunk to know that it contained a small suitcase.
At 2:32 A.M., he felt not in the least weary. In anticipation of a long night with the Paquette woman, he had slept until four o’clock the previous afternoon.
In a few minutes, he would know where to find her and her self-knighted champion. Long before dawn, Timothy Carrier would be as intimate with the earth as every man who had sat at King Arthur’s Round Table.
Carrier’s boldness and expertise with firearms intrigued but did not intimidate Krait. His confidence had not been cracked by recent events, not even dented, and he would not at this time seek to find out more about the man.
The more he knew about his targets, the more likely he might learn the reasons they were wanted dead. If he knew too much about why they were wanted dead, the day would come when people would want him dead, too.
Carrier was a target by association, but Krait still thought it wise to operate by the usual don’t-ask rule.
If the woman was not dead long before dawn, as well, she would be in Krait’s custody. He would not be as lenient with her as he might have been if she had