by Dean Koontz
“What is it?” she asked, surveying the night.
“Don’t you feel it?”
“I feel you feeling it, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Stone,” he said.
“Stone?”
“Think of a very high cliff.”
These north-south streets were arranged like the teeth of a comb, all ending in an east-west spine. Once more he turned left, onto the spine—and found that it ended at its intersection with the last north-south street.
“Cliff?” she reminded him.
“A cliff so high you can’t see the top, it’s lost in mist up there. And not just high, but it overhangs like a wave. We live at the bottom, in its shadow.”
He turned left, onto the last street in the neighborhood. Houses on both sides. The headlights swept over a few cars parked at the curb.
“Sometimes big stones come loose from way up in the overhang of the cliff,” he said, “come loose without making a sound.”
He reduced their speed to ten miles per hour.
“You can’t hear it coming, one of these sudden silent stones, but the falling weight…maybe it compresses the air under it as it comes, and that’s what you feel.”
Each of these streets had been three blocks long, with houses on both sides. In the second and third blocks of this final street, however, houses stood only to the left.
On the right lay a public park with athletic fields, all dark at this hour, and deep.
A silent falling stone, a soundless tsunami outracing the noise that it made, the faulted earth underfoot secretly straining toward a sudden breach…
His once-acute sensitivity to threat had returned in recent hours. Now it sharpened to a needle point.
The woolen sky and steadily rising wind should have raised an expectation of a storm. But when blades of lightning sheared the clouds, they startled Tim, and he almost tramped the brake pedal.
The houses and trees and parked cars seemed to flinch from the stabbing light, and flinched again, as brightness insistently cleaved the sky, cutting down a massive weight of thunder.
Although a greater confusion of shadows shuddered across the night than what the wind alone had stirred, the lightning revealed one thing that the widely spaced streetlamps had not touched upon. A man in dark clothes stood in the shelter of an enormous Indian laurel, his back against the trunk.
As he leaned out slightly from concealment to look toward the Explorer, the lightning silvered his face, so that it seemed to be the painted mask of a mime. He was Kravet and Krane and Kerrington and Konrad and unknown others, as ubiquitous as if he were not merely a man with a hundred names but were in fact a hundred men who shared a single mind and mission.
Riveted by the ghostly face as it vanished and reappeared in sympathy with the fulminations of the sky, Linda whispered, “Impossible.”
The mystery of this apparition could be puzzled to a resolution later. Before speculation came survival.
Tim pulled the steering wheel to the right and accelerated.
From the cover of the tree, the killer stepped forward, raising a weapon as he moved, like a malevolent spirit long dormant in the earth but now resurrected by a lightning strike.
Twenty-Five
The briefest hesitation would have resulted in a different and bloodier outcome, but the Explorer jumped the curb just as Kravet stepped from cover. Before he could fully raise the gun and open fire, he was forced to leap backward to avoid being run down.
Driving past the killer or reversing away from him would have ensured a barrage through the windshield, another through the passenger’s-side windows. Going straight at him was the best hope.
When Kravet scrambled backward, he fell.
Tim swerved, hoping to run over him, break his ankles, knees, break something. The gunman eluded the wheels, and Tim accelerated into the park.
Concrete picnic tables, concrete benches. Seesaw, jungle-gym. The wind pushing ghost children in a swing set.
The tailgate window shattered, and Tim felt a bullet punch into the back of the driver’s seat.
Before he could warn Linda to get down, she slid low.
Another round rang off metal, and maybe the SUV took a third hit, too, but a cannonade of thunder drowned out the impact of the smaller caliber.
They were out of the pistol’s range, vulnerable now only to a lucky shot. The weapon had an extended barrel, probably a silencer that would further reduce its reach.
Kravet wouldn’t stand there, trying for a lucky shot. He was a guy who kept moving.
Pushing the SUV as hard as he dared on unpredictable terrain, Tim raced in search of the farther end of the park, a way out.
Throbbing storm light revealed empty bleachers, a chain-link backstop, a baseball diamond.
Although the latest explosion of thunder seemed powerful enough to crack the breast of any dam, no rain yet fell.
Linda sat up straight and raised her voice above the wind that quarreled at the broken rear window. “We’re out of the hotel ten minutes, he finds us?”
“He’s gonna keep finding us.”
“How could he be waiting there?”
“He’s got a dashboard display. And it’s not an ordinary one, either.”
“Dashboard display? What? My brain’s fried. I’m thinking one of those little dogs that its head keeps bobbing.”
“Computer display.”
“An electronic map?”
“Yeah. He saw the pattern of the streets, figured we might end up on that one, and we did.”
As they rocked across a broad grassy drainage swale, she said, “He’s tracking us?”
“I just realized. There’s a transponder on this bucket. It was an option—a stolen-car tracking service. The cops can follow the thief by satellite.”
“They’re allowed to do that if the car hasn’t been stolen?”
“No more than they’re allowed to do murders for hire to maybe get ahead on their mortgage payments.”
The swale ended at the base of a long low slope, and Tim drove toward the brow as spasms of storm light bleached the green from the wind-shivered grass.
She said, “The company, the tracking service, they wouldn’t just cooperate with some rogue cop. You yourself would have to report it stolen before they’d activate the transponder or whatever they do.”
“He probably didn’t go through the company.”
“Who’d he go through?”
“The building full of grown-up nerdy nephews again. They hacked into the company, they’re feeding the satellite tracking to Kravet’s car.”
“I hate those guys,” she said.
At the top of the slope, the land leveled off into a soccer field. Tim saw lampposts on a distant street and sped toward them, and the speedometer needle pricked past sixty.
She said, “So there’s no way to shake him off our tail.”
“No way.”
The first fat raindrops snapped against the windshield, as loud as hard-shelled insects.
“If we stop, he’ll know exactly where we are. He’ll know and he’ll come.”
“Or,” Tim said, “he’ll see something on the map, a way we’re likely to go.”
“And he’ll be waiting ahead again somewhere.”
“That worries me more.”
“Where’s the transponder? Can we stop, tear it out?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Where would they be likely to put it?” she wondered.
“I think they put it all kinds of places, lots of different places, so a thief wouldn’t have one easy place to look.”
They passed through another area of concrete picnic tables, concrete benches, concrete trash receptacles.
“All the concrete furniture,” he said, “it’s like a picnic in a gulag.”
“When I was a little girl, I remember wood benches in parks.”
“People started stealing them.”
“Nobody wants concrete.”
; “They want it,” he said. “They just can’t carry it.”
They reached the end of the park, crossed the sidewalk, jolted off the curb, into the street.
The raindrops were no longer few or fat. He switched on the windshield wipers.
“We’ve gained some time,” Tim said. “If he’s in a car like he was before, not an SUV, then he won’t risk taking a shortcut through the park. He’ll have to come around.”
“What now?”
“I want to gain more time.”
“Me, too. Like fifty years.”
“And I don’t want to go downhill to him. We turn a corner, he’s got it blocked with his car, he cuts us down. So we go up.”
“You know this area well?”
“Wish I did. You?”
“Not well,” she said.
At the intersection, he turned right. The wet, rising street glistered when the sky flared.
“I want to go to the top,” Tim said, “past the residential streets, over the crest. Maybe there’s an old county road we could take fast south.”
“It’s probably brushland past the crest.”
“Then there might be fire roads.”
“Why south?” she asked.
“It’s the fast that’s more important to me than the direction. I want to believe we’re five minutes ahead of him before we give up our wheels.”
“Abandon the Explorer?”
“Have to. If we just drive until somebody runs out of gas, we’d likely go dry first. Then he’s still coming behind us, and we don’t get to choose the place where we start on foot.”
She said, “When we checked into the hotel, I thought we’d have peace to make some kind of plan.”
“Won’t be any peace till this is over. I see that now. Should’ve seen it sooner. It’s all a razor’s edge now until it’s finished.”
“I don’t feel good about this.”
“No reason you should.”
“Everything’s falling away.”
“We’ll be all right,” he said.
“That doesn’t smell like bullshit, but it is.”
He didn’t want to lie to her. “Well, I don’t think you’d want me to say we’re dead.”
“Unless you think we are. Then say it.”
“I don’t think we are.”
“Good. That’s something.”
Twenty-Six
In the headlights, the silvery rain resembled skeins of tinsel, but this didn’t feel like Christmas.
On pavement almost slick enough for sledding, Tim ran the stop signs.
Kravet would expect them to have thought of the transponder, the satellite tracking. Because they were desperate to gain a sufficient lead before abandoning the Explorer, he would stay close on their heels to avoid losing them when they went on foot.
“You reloaded your pistol,” Tim said.
“Magazine’s full.”
“More ammo in your purse?”
“Not much. Four rounds. Maybe six.”
“I don’t want to get in a shoot-out with him. That maybe looked like a machine pistol he was using.”
“Machine pistol doesn’t sound good.”
“Could be thirty-some rounds in the magazine. He could empty it in a fraction of a minute if he wanted, pump a wide spray of lead.”
“Definitely no shoot-out.”
“Except it might come to that.”
She said, “Here’s an ugly thought.”
“Might as well hear it.”
“Are we sure he’s freelance?”
“In the bar, he seemed freelance. Guys with a license to kill get a paycheck like anybody else, not envelopes of cash.”
“But if he’s got all those hacker nerds and God knows who else giving him tech support, why is he the only guy on the street?”
“Somebody hired him to keep distance between them and your murder. They give him support, but they don’t put their own gunmen on the ground. They’re just puppeteers.”
“That’s when they thought I’d die easy, it would look like your dime-a-dozen homicidal rapist, but it won’t look that way now.”
“It’s gotten noisy,” he agreed.
“So if they think it’s out of control, maybe Kravet gets some backup. What then?”
“Then we’re screwed.”
“Maybe you should lie to me after all.”
The ascending street ended at a T intersection. The new street led north and south along the highest ridge line in town.
Tim turned south, right, and accelerated past houses bigger and more ornate than those on lower hills. Two blocks later, he came to a cul-de-sac.
“This blows,” he said, circling the coral tree in the island at the center of the turnaround. He raced back the way they had come, acutely aware of the time they were losing.
Three blocks past the intersection, the north portion of the street also ended in a cul-de-sac.
If they left the ridge and went down the street that had brought them up, they would encounter Kravet. And he would see them coming on his map display.
Tim circled another coral tree, drove out of the turnaround, pulled to the curb, doused the headlights, cut the engine, and said, “Give me the gun.”
“What’re we doing?”
“The spare bullets in your purse. I need those, too. Quick.”
She rummaged for the ammo, found five rounds.
Dropping the cartridges in his shirt pocket, he said, “We’ve got, I don’t know, two minutes. Bring the carryall, your purse, the flashlight.”
“Why not blow the horn? Wake up the neighborhood.”
“No. Come on.”
“There’d be too many witnesses. He wouldn’t shoot.”
“He would,” Tim insisted. “And we don’t want to get any of these people killed.”
He opened the door and got out into the wind-driven rain and walked back into the turnaround that they had just traveled in the Explorer. By the time he had taken half a dozen steps, his clothes were soaked.
In southern California, a major storm in May was rare. The rain wasn’t warm, but it didn’t chill him, either.
The five houses on the turnaround shared an architectural theme, from sleekly modern with a hint of Tuscany to classic Tuscan style.
Six-foot walls marked the property lines, providing privacy to each backyard. The houses were connected to those walls by gates. Some of the gates might be locked.
No dogs would have been left out in this weather, to bark and betray them. Besides, in a neighborhood of three-million-dollar homes like these, the dogs lived inside; they were part of the family; they weren’t penned or chained.
Five backyards. Kravet would go gate to gate. He would search each yard. This was prime ocean-view property, valuable, so the yards were small. He wouldn’t need five minutes to search them all.
The cul-de-sac lay at the head of a canyon. Beyond the backyards would be steep slopes difficult to negotiate, wild vines, brush.
These urban canyons were home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and bobcats. Mountain lions seldom ventured this far out of the true brushland, but the killer cats weren’t total strangers to the area, either.
At first, making their way into the canyon, Tim would not want to use the flashlight for fear Kravet would see it. He refused to contemplate let alone undertake a blind descent.
The backyards offered only the illusion of safety, and the canyon was its own kind of dead end.
Linda caught up with him. Drenched. Beautiful.
With a hard crack, the sky broke. Sharp light fell from it. Bright shards danced in the puddles.
Through the back of his wristwatch, against the skin of his wrist, he could have sworn that he felt the motion of the second hand as it swept time away.
In the front yard of a contemporary structure stood a Realtor’s FOR SALE sign. Shades were drawn shut over all the windows on both floors, suggesting that the residence might be vacant.
Atop the mailbox, a rectangular frame offered a place
to insert a street number and name. The number remained in place. The name had been removed.
No multiple-listing combination lockbox hung on the front door. That didn’t prove someone lived here. It might only mean that, even if the house was vacant, the owners preferred that it be shown only to qualified buyers, discreetly, by appointment.
Tim handed the pistol to Linda. She accepted it without comment.
He wrenched loose the Realtor’s sign. The two long legs of it were steel staves that had been driven six or eight inches into the ground.
Next door, a curving flagstone walkway—laid in an irregular-fitted pattern with a poured-concrete border—led to a traditional Tuscan home.
Tim worked the pointed staves of the FOR SALE sign into the yard, and the wet soil received them readily enough. It was a little cockeyed, but that was all right.
Two doors from the home that was actually for sale, a kid had left a bicycle on the front lawn. Tim snatched it up and carried it back to where he had removed