The Good Guy

by Dean Koontz

  solitaire, some cards were laid down with a snap.

  They had several sets of tactics for taking a stairwell, though they might have been better armed for this job. No matter how often they had ascended guarded stairs in the past, Tim was not keen to make an assault on these. Here were stairs that felt like a series of dangerous doors.

  With gestures, he indicated to Pete a simple plan of action, and a nod confirmed that the message had been understood. Leaving Pete at the stairs, Tim moved toward the back of the house, from which they had just come.

  In the master bedroom, Krait unlocked the double-hung window through which he had seen Mary on the run. He raised the lower sash, which squeaked faintly on waxed tracks.

  Over the sill, onto the front-porch roof, he expected a hail of bullets in the back. He stepped immediately sideways, out of the window.

  Two cars passed in the street, but the drivers didn’t notice a man with a gun on the Carriers’ porch roof.

  Krait went to the edge, looked down, and jumped to clear a row of shrubs, and landed in the grass.

  In the living room, Pete snared a decorative pillow from the sofa and a larger seat cushion from an armchair. He returned with them to the foot of the stairs.

  Glancing back down the hall, he saw that Tim had already gone out the open back door.

  The staircase featured an inlaid carpet runner. He wondered how much the treads creaked.

  Still no sound came from the second floor. Maybe the guy felt so sure of himself that he was taking a nap. Maybe he had died of the most conveniently timed heart attack in history.

  With the pistol in his right hand, the seat cushion under his left arm, and the throw pillow in his left hand, Pete tried the first step. It didn’t squeak, and neither did the second.

  The south end of the back porch was enclosed with a trellis that Tim had long ago built with horizontal two-by-fours and vertical two-by-twos. His mother would not have tolerated quaint lattice.

  Joseph’s Coat climbing roses were far from their peak growth this early in the season, but they offered enough thorns to make him glad that his hands were well callused.

  The horizontals easily took his weight, and the vertical two-by-twos held even though they protested more than he would have liked.

  On the roof, he drew the pistol from under his belt and went to the nearest window. Beyond lay his former bedroom, which he still used when he stayed overnight on holidays or when house-sitting.

  The room appeared to be deserted.

  As a kid, he had spent countless evenings on this porch roof, lying on his back to study the stars. A fiend for fresh air, he had never locked his bedroom window, and maybe fifteen years ago, the latch had corroded in the open position.

  On his most recent overnight visit, his father had still not replaced the latch, so of course he expected now, in the crunch, to find that it had been repaired. But Dad respected tradition, and the unlocked sash slid up with ease.

  Like a cat burglar, he entered his bedroom. A couple of creaks lived in the floor, but he knew where they lurked, and he avoided them as he circled the room to the hall door, which was ajar.

  He listened for movement, and when he heard none, he pulled the door inward and cautiously looked out. He expected to see the killer toward the front of the house, near the stairs, but the hallway was deserted, too.

  Pete stopped halfway up the first flight of stairs and waited. When he felt sure that he’d given Tim enough time to reach the second floor, he tossed the decorative pillow onto the landing.

  A nervous gunman might fire at any movement, but no one blew the crap out of the pillow.

  He counted to five and threw the much larger cushion, because a nervous gunman, not on edge enough to have fired at the small pillow, might expect a subsequent and larger target to be the charge behind the fake-out. Silence. Maybe this guy wasn’t nervous.

  Bedroom to bedroom to closet to bedroom to bath, Tim traveled the upstairs hall, clearing rooms, finding no one.

  As he approached the master bedroom, he heard the heavy chair cushion flump on the landing. He snatched a decorative pillow from a hallway chair and threw it into the nearby stairwell.

  Having worked with Tim enough to be able to interpret the return pillow as an all-clear, Pete came up fast, but quiet and alert, with his pistol at arm’s length, backlit by golden afternoon sunlight streaming through the high round window in the stairwell.

  Tim indicated the master bedroom, and they flanked the half-open door, Tim on the side away from the hinges. This was it now, the guy had to be here, so they were in the dead zone.

  Push the door wide, through fast, sweep the room with the gun. Move right, Pete to the left, no one on the far side of the bed.

  The window open, the draperies limp in the motionless air, not good, the window open, not good, if the guy had been at the window at the wrong moment, when she had crossed the front lawn.

  Or it was a ruse. If they went to the window, their backs would be to the master-bathroom door, now ajar, and to the closet door, now closed.

  He wanted the window, knew it was the window, but you go by the book for a reason, and the reason is it keeps you alive more often than it gets you killed.

  If the guy was gone from the house, hunting her, every second counted, but there were two doors, so the doors first.

  Pete took the closet, standing aside, reaching for the knob, throwing it wide, but no fusillade responded. In the closet ceiling, a trap to the attic. Closed as it should be. Anyway, he wouldn’t have gone to the attic.

  Tim slammed back the bathroom door, went in fast, small space, just enough light from the curtained window to see there was no one.

  In the bedroom, heart hammering now, a metallic taste in the mouth, maybe the taste of disaster, he said to Pete, “He went after Mom, he’ll find her with Linda.”

  Window, porch roof, lawn was faster than down the stairs and out, so he headed toward the raised sash, Pete with him, but from the corner of his eye, he caught movement, turned.

  Beyond the open door, a large distended oval of golden light bright on the hallway wall, thrown by the high round window in the stairwell, and into it a shadow creeping, twisted shadow of a demon in a dream.

  Not after Mom and Linda, after all, but out the front window, around the house, in the kitchen door, and up the stairs, behind them now and closing.

  Open door, machine pistol, he’d come in spraying. Nothing to shelter behind, they’d be cut down dead, whether they nailed him or not.

  Tim dropped the pistol, grabbed the highboy, and he didn’t know where the strength came from. He was big but so was the highboy, full of folded sweaters and spare blankets and whatever the hell else it was full of, yet he lifted it off the floor, lifted it away from the wall, swung it toward the door, and high-velocity slugs chopped into it even as he set it down, rapped it, drilled it, and a round came all the way through the drawer fronts, through the stuff inside, punching out the board back, two inches from his face, a splinter biting his cheek.

  Pete flat on the floor, maybe hit, no, firing back from under the highboy, which stood on six-inch legs. Hell of an angle, all skill useless, just squeezing off rounds, but luck happens just like shit happens, and the guy in the hall screamed.

  The pistol with the sound suppressor had made little noise, but the incoming rounds had chopped wood, pocked walls, smashed lamps. It all stopped, and there was just the scream, which diminished into a high thin keening.

  Maybe the scream was a trick, maybe the guy was jamming a new magazine into the pistol, but when you can’t go by the book because the situation isn’t covered in it, then you go by the gut. Tim snared his gun from the floor. He broke from the cover of the highboy and saw no one in the open doorway and went for the hall.

  The air ripe with gun stink. A litter of shell casings. Blood on the carpet.

  Hit in the left leg, the shark from the tavern had backed off toward the stairs, still standing but leaning against the newe
l post. The clack of a fresh magazine locking in place. The black-hole eyes came up, found Tim, and in spite of the thin keening, here was the smile.

  Tim squeezed off two rounds, and the shark took one in the left shoulder, but his right arm was still on the clock, and the machine pistol rose, the muzzle wavering but as deep as the dilated pupils of the hungry eyes. Wanting the guy alive, Tim went at him fast, because you have to walk straight into what you don’t dare run away from. The muzzle jumped, a burst of fire sliced past his head, and hot pain bloomed.

  The second burst went wide because the shark needed two hands to hold the target, and Tim reached him and took the machine pistol away from him, the barrel hot in his callused hand, and the killer fell backward down the stairs, collapsed on his back on the landing, knocking the pillows aside, not dead but not ready to run a marathon.

  Tim touched the right side of his head, where pain throbbed, and it was wet with blood. Something wrong with his ear. He could hear, but blood trickled down the ear canal.

  Wanting the name of the guy with the parachuting dog named Larry, the guy who had paid for Linda’s murder, Tim went down the stairs. He squatted beside the fallen man, reaching out with the intention of lifting the killer’s head off the floor by a twisted handful of hair.

  A switchblade flashed open, slashed, Tim felt a faint pressure across the palm of his reaching hand, the shark was rising, levering up on his good leg, he wasn’t a quitter, so Tim shot him twice point-blank in the throat, and that was the end of it.

  Krait fell back into an infinite maze of mirrors, the light yellow and dim. Strange figures moved in countless silvered panes, aware of him, approaching and circling, from one glass to the next. He strained his eyes to get a better look at them, but the harder that he sought to see them, the faster the light faded, until at last he lay in a palpable dark, in a wilderness of mirrors.

  The switchblade had merely grazed his left palm, scoring the skin but leaving the meat of the hand intact.

  His right ear had fared worse.

  “A piece of it’s missing,” Pete said.

  “Big piece?”

  “Not so big. Your head won’t hang out of balance, but you need to see a doctor.”

  “Not yet.” Tim sat on the hallway floor, his back against the wall. “You can’t lose a life-load of blood from a torn ear.”

  He fumbled his phone from his pocket and keyed in the number of the disposable cell that he had left with Linda. He put it to his damaged ear, flinched, and pressed it to his left.

  When she answered, Tim said, “He’s dead, we’re not.”

  Relieved, she let out her breath in an explosive expletive. “I never even kissed you.”

  “We can do that, if you want.”

  “Tim, they want us out of the car. Your mom and me, we put up the windows and locked the doors, but they’re trying to get us out.”

  Confused, he said, “Who, what?”

  “They came in so fast, sealed off the street, like just after we heard the gunfire. Look out a window.”

  “Hold on.” He got up and said to Pete, “We have some kind of company.”

  They went to the open window in the master bedroom. The street was full of black SUVs with bold white letters on the roofs and front doors: FBI.

  Armed men had taken up position behind the vehicles and at other points of cover.

  “Stall them two minutes,” Tim told Linda, “then tell them it’s over, and we’ll walk out to them.”

  “What the hell?” Pete wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Tim said, terminating the call.

  “Feels right to you?”

  “Feels something.”

  He stepped away from the window and keyed in the number for directory assistance. When the operator came on, he asked for a listing for Michael McCready.

  They offered to connect the call automatically for an extra charge, and it was not a day for pinching pennies.

  Mickey answered, and Tim said, “Hey, Mickey, I’m going to have to postpone that visit for a while.”

  “Angels in Hell, Tim, what’s happening over there?”

  “You got your videocam on this?”

  “It’s better than any of your kiddie birthday parties, Tim boy.”

  “Listen, Mickey, don’t let them see you with the camera. Shoot from inside the house. Use the zoom, try to get as many of their faces as close up and clear as you can.”

  Mickey was silent for a moment. Then: “Are they a bunch of bastards, Tim?”

  “They might be.”

  Sixty-Three

  He said he was Steve Wentworth, which might in fact be his name or only one of his names.

  His photo ID, complete with convincing holographic details, said FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.

  Tall, athletic, with close-cropped hair and the ascetic features of a handsome monk, he looked plausible. Perhaps too plausible.

  His generic Southern accent had been polished by an Ivy League education.

  Wentworth wanted to talk to Tim alone in the small study off the downstairs hall. Tim insisted that Linda be present.

  Resisting, Wentworth said, “This is a courtesy I can’t extend to anyone but you.”

  “She is me,” Tim said, and would not compromise.

  They brought her from the dining room, where they were holding her, ostensibly for questioning.

  The house swarmed with agents. If they were agents.

  Tim thought of them as orcs, as in The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Entering the study, she said to Wentworth, “He needs treatment for his ear.”

  “We have medics present,” Wentworth said. “He won’t let them touch him.”

  “It’s hardly bleeding anymore,” Tim assured her.

  “Because it’s all a clotted mess. My God, Tim.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, though it did. “I had two aspirin.”

  His mom and Pete were being held in the family room.

  Supposedly somebody intended to take statements from them.

  His mom probably thought they were safe now. Maybe they were.

  The killer’s corpse had been bagged and wheeled from the house on a gurney. No one had taken photographs of it before it had been moved.

  If CSI types were present, they must have forgotten to bring their gear. Evidence collection did not appear to be under way.

  As Wentworth closed the study door, Tim and Linda sat together on the sofa.

  The agent settled in an armchair and crossed his legs. He had the relaxed air of a master of the universe.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Carrier.”

  Tim felt Linda’s analytic Egyptian-green eyes regarding him, and he said to Wentworth, “I don’t want any of that.”

  “I understand. But it’s true. If you weren’t you, I wouldn’t be here, and this wouldn’t be over for you or for Ms. Paquette.”

  “That surprises me,” Tim said.

  “Why? Because you think we’re not on the same side of things?”

  “Are we?”

  Wentworth smiled. “Whether we are or not, even in this world, the way it’s changing, some things must remain above assault. In the interest of principled reconstruction, some things must be respected, including men like you.”

  “Principled reconstruction?”

  Wentworth shrugged. “We need our jargon.”

  “I’m at sea here,” Linda said.

  “He’s going to tell us some truth,” Tim said.

  “Some?”

  “As little as he has to.”

  “I’d prefer not to tell you any,” Wentworth said. “But you—you’ll never stop until you know.”

  “You’re not FBI, are you?” Linda asked.

  “We are what we need to be, Ms. Paquette.”

  His suit had the cut and finish of expensive hand-tailoring, and his wristwatch was worth a year of an agent’s salary.

  “Our country, Tim, must make certain concessions.”

  “C
oncessions?”

  “We cannot be what we once were. In the interest of prosperity, there must be less of it. Too much freedom assures less peace.”

  “Try selling that at the ballot box.”

  “We do sell it, Tim. By inciting false fears in the people. Remember Y2K? All computers would crash at the stroke of midnight! The collapse of high-tech civilization! Nuclear missiles would launch uncontrollably! Thousands of hours of TV news and uncounted miles of newsprint sold the Y2K terror.”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  “That’s the point. For a long time now, has not the news been nothing but doom? Do you think that just happens? Electric power lines cause cancer! But of course they don’t. Most everything you eat will kill you, and this pesticide, and that chemical! But of course people lead longer and healthier lives decade by decade. Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.”

  “Which is where?”

  “To a responsible future in a properly managed world.”

  Wentworth was a man completely without gesture. His hands rested unmoving on the arms of the chair. His manicured nails gleamed as if coated with clear polish.

  Tim mulled the phrase: “Responsible future.”

  “The people elect mostly fools and frauds. When the politicians make policy that leads this country toward the needed reconstruction of its systems, they can be supported, but when they make bad policy, they must be sabotaged at every turn, from within.”

  Tim stared at the thin crust of blood that the switchblade had drawn across the palm of his left hand.

  “Just wait,” Wentworth said, “till—oh, say—the threat of the asteroid impact builds in the years ahead. You would see unthinkable sacrifices quickly embraced by the people as we united the planet to establish a massive asteroid-deflection system in deep space.”