by Dean Koontz
bitten off.”
The meanness of her rejection would have caused a lesser man than Krait to strike her. He merely stared at her and, after a while, found his smile.
“I’ve got a little something to do, Mary. But I’ll be nearby in another room. If you shout for help, no one will hear you but me, and I’ll have to shove a rag in your mouth and seal your lips with duct tape. You don’t want that, do you?”
The murderous intent in her eyes had seared away all tears.
“You are a piece of work, dear.”
He thought she might spit at him, but she did not.
“Raise a son to die for you.” He shook his head. “I wonder what kind of man your husband must be.”
She looked as though she had a withering response to make, and he waited for it, but she chose silence.
“I’ll be back soon, to put you to beddy-bye in the Expedition. You just sit here, Mary, and remember what a good thing it is that you’ve decided not to get yourself and Zachary and his whole family killed.”
He left the kitchen and stood in the hallway, listening.
Mary made no sound. Krait expected subtle rattling noises as she tested and examined the handcuffs, but she remained quiet.
In the living room, Krait took down the oil painting of happy children running on a sunny beach. He put it on the floor and knelt beside it.
From a pants pocket, he withdrew a switchblade and flicked open the knife. He cut the canvas from the frame, then sliced the painting into strips.
He considered taking from the frames on the bookshelves all the photos that included Tim, and cutting those to pieces, as well. But because he would soon be killing the real Tim, his remaining minutes in the Carrier house would be more enjoyably spent elsewhere.
Fifty-Nine
Pete Santo did not slow down as he drove by the Carrier house.
Nothing about the place appeared different except that the draperies were drawn shut at the first-floor windows. Tim’s mother always kept them open.
At the end of the block, Tim said, “Park here.”
Pete pulled to the curb, screened from the house by trees. He put down the backseat windows and switched off the engine.
During the drive, Zoey had clambered forward from the cargo space to be with Linda. The dog lay now with her head in her new mistress’s lap.
Linda said, “When do I know something might’ve gone wrong?”
“If you hear a lot of gunfire,” Tim said.
“But how long?”
He turned in his seat to face her. “If we don’t have him in ten minutes, it’s gone bad.”
“Wait fifteen,” Pete said, “then drive away from here.”
“Leave you?” she asked. “I can’t do that.”
“You do it,” Tim insisted. “Wait fifteen, then do it.”
“But…drive where?”
He realized that she literally had nowhere to go.
Reaching between the front seats, holding the disposable phone, he said, “Take this. Get out of the neighborhood. Park somewhere. If one of us doesn’t call you in an hour, two hours, we’re both dead.”
She held fiercely to his hand for a moment before taking the phone.
Pete got out and closed the driver’s door.
“You have all that cash,” Tim said. “You can decide whether to go back to your place, get those gold coins. Don’t think I would, but that’s up to you. What you’ve got is what you start a new life with, a new name.”
“I’m so damn sorry, Tim.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. If I’d known what was coming, I’d have done it all the same anyway.”
He got out of the Mountaineer, closed the door, and checked to be sure the pistol tucked under his belt was adequately concealed by his Hawaiian shirt.
Her face was at the open window. In all his life, he had never seen a better face.
He and Pete were not going in by the front door. Houses on these streets backed up to one another, without benefit of an alleyway. They would have to go around to the parallel street and approach his folks’ place through a neighbor’s backyard.
Walking away from the SUV, toward the nearby corner, Tim wanted to glance back, to take one last look at her, wanted it almost more than he could bear, but this was business now, this was the thing.
Following Pete around the corner, to the cross street, he nearly collided with an old man whose pants were hitched so high above his waist that if he kept a watch in his watch pocket, the ticking would tickle his right breast.
“Tim! Morning glory and evening grace, if it isn’t our Tim!”
“Hi, Mickey. What a sight you are.”
Mickey McCready, closing on eighty with thickets of bristling white ear hairs to prove it, lived across the street from Tim’s folks. He was wearing bright-yellow pants and a dazzling red shirt.
“These are my walking clothes. Damn if I’m gonna be hit in a crosswalk. How you been, Tim? How’s work? Got a special girl yet?”
“I do, Mickey. A really special one.”
“Bless her, the lucky girl, what’s her name?”
“Mickey, I gotta go. Have an appointment. You gonna be home?”
“Where do I ever go?”
“I’ll come visit. A little later, okay?”
“I want to hear about this girl.”
“I’ll come visit,” Tim promised.
Mickey clutched his arm. “Hey, I been transferring my videos to DVD. Made a disc about you, our Tim, from when you were a toddler.”
“That’s great, Mickey. I gotta go. I’ll come visit.” He pulled away and hurried to catch up with Pete.
“Where does he get shirts that’re only eight inches long?” Pete asked.
“He’s a nice old guy. Everybody’s favorite unrelated uncle.”
At the next corner, they turned right. They were on the street that ran parallel to his parents’ street.
The sixth house featured a sign at the front walkway that said THE SAPERSTEINS’ and showed two teddy bears, male and female, with names on their coveralls, NORMAN and JUDY.
“They’ll both be at work,” Tim said. “Kids are grown. Nobody home.”
He led Pete through a side gate into the Sapersteins’ backyard.
Filigrees of sunlight rippled across the water in a swimming pool, and a cat sunning on the brick patio was surprised into flight, vanishing into the shrubbery.
The property ended at a six-foot-high privacy wall all but concealed by purple trumpet vines.
Pete said, “Doorman, did I ever tell you, you’re the ugliest man I’ve ever met?”
“I ever tell you, you’re the dumbest?”
“We ready?”
“We wait till we’re ready, we’ll be as old as Mickey.”
The trumpet vines were mature and thick, so firmly secured to the stucco-coated concrete blocks that they made a good ladder. Tim climbed about a foot and peered over the top of the wall into his parents’ backyard.
Blinds covered the kitchen windows and the kitchen door. The draperies were drawn shut at the family-room doors.
At all the second-floor windows, the draperies were open. He didn’t see anyone up there, keeping watch.
Controlled terror, channeled wrath, that roaring in the blood that he could hear but that didn’t mask other sounds, all told him that the moment was his to seize.
He climbed the wall, knocking off a cascade of purple blooms behind him, dropped onto the grass beyond, and Pete followed fast to his right.
Pulling the pistol from his waistband, Tim hurried to the house, to the back wall next to the kitchen door.
Carrying his service pistol, Pete flanked the door, and they looked at each other, listening. The house lay quiet, but that didn’t mean anything. Duck hunters in a blind were quiet. Morgues were quiet.
From a pants pocket, Tim fished a small ring on which he kept his apartment key and the key to the toolbox on his work truck. He also had a key to his folks’ place because he alwa
ys looked after things when they were away.
Brass sliding in the keyway made a crisp sound. His dad kept the locks well lubricated, and the Schlage deadbolt retracted with little noise.
This was when you could take a bullet or a bunch of them, going through a door, doors were never easy, but he had an okay instinct for them, could usually tell the safe ones from the doubtful, usually knew the doors behind which one kind of hell or another waited.
He was having trouble reading this one, maybe because this was not an ordinary search-and-clear, his mother was in there, his mother and the guy with the hungry eyes, so he had even less room for error than usual.
Heart rapping a little now, still breathing low and slow, hands dry, nice and dry, he was at that cusp where you did or you didn’t, further delay was bad tactics, so he pushed the door open.
He went in low and fast, pistol in a two-hand grip, wishing the gun were bigger, better sized for his hands, and nobody waited for him in the kitchen.
Sweeping with the muzzle left to right, kitchen to family room, he glimpsed syringes on the island and what looked like a hypodermic-dart pistol, and then he saw his mother over the gun sight, sitting at the table, just sitting there at the table, in the coppery light of the chandelier with the circling birds, and she raised her head, only now aware that someone had entered, and what a look she gave him.
Sixty
Considering that he most likely had come out of a mirror into this world, Krait wondered if he might one day return to his native realm by way of another such portal.
In the master bedroom, he stood before a full-length mirror that was mounted on the inside of the open closet door. He put his right hand upon his reflection, half expecting the silvered surface to quiver and then to relent, offering no more resistance than the surface tension of pooled water.
The glass was cool but firm beneath his hand.
He raised his left hand, as well, and pressed it to the reaching hand of the other Krait who gazed out at him.
Perhaps in the reversed mirror world, time ran backward. Instead of aging, he might grow younger, until he became eighteen, the age at which his memories began. Thereafter, descending into his youth, he might learn where he had come from and of what he had been born.
Eye to eye, he peered down into the darkness of himself, and he liked what he saw.
He thought that he was exerting only a light pressure, but the mirror cracked before him, split top to bottom, though it remained secure within its frame.
The halves of his reflection were now slightly offset from each other, one eye a fraction higher than the other, the nose deformed. One side of the mouth hung askew, as though he had suffered a stroke.
This other Krait, this fractured Krait, disturbed him. This broken, imperfect Krait. This unfamiliar Krait whose smile was not a smile anymore.
He took his hands off the mirror and quickly closed the other Krait in the closet.
Unnerved and not sure why, he calmed himself by opening dresser drawers and examining the contents, learning what he could about the lives of his hosts, seeking secrets that would illuminate.
Sixty-One
The door between the kitchen and the downstairs hall stood open, and Pete covered it.
Putting a finger to his lips to signal silence, Tim knelt by his mother and whispered, “Where is he?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know.
When she put her right hand to his face, he kissed it.
A leg of the chair was shackled to a leg of the table. On the chair, a stretcher bar prevented him from slipping off the handcuff. On the table, a large ball-and-claw foot would not allow him to lift the leg out of the other half of the cuffs.
Her left arm was cuffed to the arm of the chair.
These were double-lock cuffs. He might be able to bend a paper clip or something into a pick with which to spring the locks, but he couldn’t do it quickly.
Between the arm and the seat of the pine chair were supporting spindles. The spindle nearest the end of the arm was thicker than the others, but it alone prevented the cuff from being slipped free of the chair.
Although he did not want to leave the hallway unguarded, Tim hissed for Pete’s attention, and gestured for assistance.
Both of them had to put down their guns.
Tim wanted to avoid dragging the chair, the loud stutter of its legs barking against the wood floor.
Pete put one hand on the right arm of the chair, one on the rounded back rail, and bore down with all his weight.
Holding the left arm of the chair with one hand, Tim gripped the forward support spindle. He pushed on the arm and pulled hard on the support, then harder, with all the strength that he could muster.
The spindle was in fact a dowel rod, glued into bores in the seat and in the underside of the arm. In theory, the joints were points of weakness, and the vertical dowel might crack loose from the holes in which it had been fitted.
Tim’s right arm seemed to swell with the effort, and he felt the cords rising and pulling taut in his neck, his pulse throbbing in his temples.
His folks had bought this pine suite at least thirty years ago, in what might as well have been another world from this one, when furniture was made in places like North Carolina and made to last a lifetime.
The threat of the unguarded hallway at his back insisted on his attention, but he had to block it from his mind and focus on the chair, the chair, the too-well-made damn chair.
Sweat popped at his hairline, and the support spindle cracked away from the chair arm with an unavoidable splintering sound that might have carried to the next room but not much farther.
Snatching his pistol off the table, Pete returned to the hallway door.
Tim retrieved the 9-mm, put an arm around his mother, glanced at Pete for an all-clear, and Pete nodded, and Tim guided her across the kitchen to the back door.
Outside, he hurried with her through the bright sun to the walkway that led along the north side of the house.
He whispered, “To the street, turn right—”
“But you—”
“—Pete’s SUV, near the corner—”
“—you’re not—”
“—a woman, a dog, wait with them.”
“But the police—”
“Just us.”
“Tim—”
“Go,” he insisted.
Another mother might have argued or clutched, but she was his mother. She shot him a fierce look of love and hurried toward the front of the house.
Tim returned to the kitchen, where Pete watched the hallway. He shook his head. The splintering spindle had not betrayed them.
Tim left the back door standing open behind him. If things went wrong more ways than you could ever figure, you wanted to have an easy exit.
Forward from the kitchen, on the left side of the hall, were the dining room, a closet, and then the stairs. On the right were a half bath, a small study, and the living room.
Pete had been here many times since they had grown up fast together in their eighteenth year, since they had come home in their twenty-third. He knew the layout almost as well as Tim knew it.
They stood listening, and the house was full of silence and threat and blind fate, and then together they did what they had done often before, although not recently, went forward quietly into the silence, door by door and room by room, with blood racing and hackles up and their minds as clear as distilled spirits.
Sixty-Two
Having found nothing enlightening in the dresser drawers, Krait moved toward a promising highboy. Passing a window, he saw Mary on the front lawn.
She ran to the sidewalk, turned right, and fled out of sight, shielded by the street trees. From her left wrist dangled the set of handcuffs.
However she might have gotten free of the chair, she had not engineered her own escape. The fact that no one ran at her side confirmed for Krait the identity of her rescuer. Tim had come home.
Why and how could wait
for later. This was not a time for questions but for a final answer to the problem of the mason.
Drawing the Glock from his shoulder rig, Krait quickly crossed the bedroom, hesitated at the open door, and sidled into the upstairs hall.
If Tim had come to the second floor, he would already have found Krait, perhaps would have shot him as he turned away from the window after glimpsing Mary.
Krait could see down the upper flight of stairs to the landing. The lower flight turned out of sight.
Aiming at the landing, he waited for a head to appear, a face to look up and receive a splash of bullets.
Thunders of silence rose from below, the kind of silence that quakes through you and breaks your sweat and promises lightning.
Krait decided that Tim would not come up the stairs without a strategy and proven tactics. He would know the danger of stairwells.
Standing here at the head of the stairs, from what seemed to be an unassailably superior position, Krait sensed that he was also vulnerable. He eased back until he could neither see down the stairs nor be seen from the landing.
He looked along the hall toward the back of the house. Besides the master-bedroom door, five doors waited. One would be a bathroom. Perhaps one was a closet. At most, there were three other bedrooms.
Although Krait had always been a decisive man, he stood for a moment in uncharacteristic indecision.
The silence rose like a drowning flood, though this was only silence, not stillness, for through it moved a predator unique in Krait’s experience.
Tim and Pete, on opposite sides of the downstairs hall, staying out of each other’s forward line of fire, toed open doors that were ajar, cleared the spaces beyond, scanned the dining room from the archway, the living room, and came to the stairs.
If the killer believed he had the house to himself, it seemed that he would not be this quiet. Even if he were playing both sides of a game of chess, a pawn would once in a while clatter as it was set off the board; in a game of