by Dean Koontz
“It wasn’t your fault,” Henry Rankin said.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Charlie told her.
“What sort of woman—”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Charlie said. “I want you to think about the call and answer a few questions.”
“There wasn’t much said.”
“She claimed to be his grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“She said she was Mrs. Scavello?”
“Well . . . no. She didn’t give her name. But she knew he was here with his mother, and I never suspected . . . I mean, well, she sounded like a grandmother.”
“Exactly what did she sound like?” Henry asked.
“God, I don’t know . . . a very pleasant voice,” Sherry said.
“She speak with an accent?” Charlie asked.
“No.”
“Doesn’t have to’ve been a real obvious accent to be of help to us,” Henry said. “Almost everyone speaks with at least a mild accent of some kind.”
“Well, if it was there, I didn’t notice it,” Sherry said.
“Did you hear anything in the background?” Charlie asked.
“Like what?”
“Any noise of any kind?”
“No.”
“If she was calling from an outdoor pay phone, for instance, there would’ve been traffic noises, street noises of some kind.”
“There wasn’t anything like that.”
“Any noises that might help us figure the kind of place she was calling from?”
“No. Just her voice,” Sherry said. “She sounded so nice.”
12
After her vision, Mother Grace dismissed all her disciples except Kyle Barlowe and Edna Vanoff. Then, using the phone in the church basement, she placed a call to the detective agency where Joey Scavello and his mother had gone, and she spoke briefly with the boy. Kyle wasn’t sure he saw the sense of it, but Mother Grace was pleased.
“Killing him isn’t sufficient,” she said. “We must terrify and demoralize him, too. Through the boy, we’ll bring fear and despair to Satan himself. We’ll make the devil understand, at last, that the Good Lord will never permit him to rule the earth, and then he’ll finally abandon his schemes and hopes of glory.”
Kyle loved to hear her talk like that. When he listened to Mother Grace, he knew that he was a vital part of the most important events in the history of the world. Awe and humility made his knees weak.
Grace led Kyle and Edna to the far end of the basement, where a wood-paneled wall contained a cleverly concealed door. Beyond the door lay a room measuring twenty by twenty-six feet. It was full of guns.
Early in her mission, Mother Grace had received a vision in which she had been warned that, when Twilight came, she must be prepared to defend herself with more than just prayer. She had taken the vision very seriously indeed. This was not the church’s only armory.
Kyle had been here many times before. He enjoyed the coolness of the room, the vague scent of gun oil. Most of all he took pleasure from the realization that terrible destruction waited quietly on these shelves, like a malevolent genie in a bottle, needing only a hand to pull the cork.
Kyle liked guns. He liked to turn a gun over and over in his enormous hands, sensing the power in it the way a blind man sensed the meaning in lines of Braille.
Sometimes, when his sleep was particularly deep and dark, he dreamed about holding a large gun in both hands and pointing it at people. It was a .357 Magnum, with a bore that seemed as big as a cannon’s, and when it roared it was like the voice of a dragon. Each time it bucked in his hands, it gave him a jolt of intense pleasure.
For a while he had worried about these night-fantasies because he had thought it meant the devil hadn’t been driven out of him, after all. But he came to see that the people in the dreams were God’s enemies and that it was good for him to fantasize their destruction. Kyle was destined to be an instrument of divine justice. Grace had told him so.
Now, in the armory, Mother Grace went to the shelves along the wall to the left of the door. She took down a box, opened it, removed the plastic-wrapped revolver that lay within, and put the weapon on a work table. The gun she had chosen was a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special, a snub-barreled piece that packed a lot of wallop. She took another one from the shelf, removed it from its box, and placed it beside the first.
Edna Vanoff removed the weapons from their plastic wrappings.
Before the day was done, the boy would be dead, and it might be one of these two weapons that destroyed him.
Mother Grace removed a Remington 20-gauge shotgun from one of the shelves and brought it to the work table.
Kyle’s excitement grew.
13
Joey sat in Charlie’s chair, behind the big desk, sipping Coca-Cola that Charlie had poured for him.
Christine was in the client’s chair once more. She was shaken. A couple of times, Charlie saw her put her fingernail between her teeth and almost bite it before she realized she’d be biting acrylic.
He was upset that they had been reached and disturbed here, in his offices. They had come to him for help, for protection, and now both of them were frightened again.
Sitting on the edge of his desk, looking at Joey, he said, “If you don’t want to talk about the phone call, I’ll understand. But I’d really like to ask you some questions.”
To his mother, Joey said, “I thought we were going to hire Magnum.”
Christine said, “Honey, you’ve forgotten that Magnum’s in Hawaii.”
“Oh, yeah. Jeez, that’s right,” the boy said. He looked troubled. “Magnum would’ve been the best one to help us.”
For a moment Charlie didn’t know what the boy was talking about, and then he remembered the television show, and he smiled.
Joey took a long drink of his Coke, studying Charlie over the rim of the glass. Finally he said, “I guess you’ll be okay.”
Charlie almost laughed. “You won’t be sorry you came to us, Joey. Now . . . what did the woman on the phone say to you?”
“She said . . . ‘You can’t hide from me.’ ”
Charlie heard fear ooze into the boy’s voice, and he quickly said, “Well, she’s wrong about that. If we have to hide you from her, we can. Don’t you worry about that. What else did she say?”
“She said she knew what I was.”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
The boy looked baffled. “I don’t know.”
“What else did she say?”
“She said . . . she’d cut my heart out.”
A strangled sound came from Christine. She stood, nervously clutching her purse. “I think I ought to take Joey . . . away somewhere.”
“Maybe eventually,” Charlie said soothingly. “But not just yet.”
“I think now’s the time. Before . . . anything happens. We could go to San Francisco. Or farther. I’ve never been to the Caribbean. This is a good time of the year for the Caribbean, isn’t it?”
“Give me at least twenty-four hours,” Charlie said.
“Yeah? Twenty-four hours? And what if that hag catches up with us? No. We should leave today.”
“And how long do you intend to stay away?” Charlie asked. “A week? A month? A year?”
“Two weeks should be long enough. You’ll find her in two weeks.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Then how long?”
Understanding and sympathizing with Christine’s concern, wanting to be gentle with her, knowing that he had to be blunt instead, Charlie said, “Clearly, she’s got some sort of fixation on Joey, some sort of obsession about him. It’s Joey that keeps her motor running, so to speak. Without him around, she might pull in her horns. She might evaporate on us. We might never find her if Joey isn’t here to bring her out. Do you intend to go on vacation forever?”
“Are you saying you intend to use my son as bait?”
“No. Not exactly. We’d never put him
right in the jaws of a trap. We’ll use him more as a lure.”
“That’s outrageous!”
“But it’s the only way we’ll get her. If he’s not around, there’ll be no reason for her to show herself.” He went to Christine and put a hand on her shoulder. “He’ll be guarded at all times. He’ll be safe.”
“Like hell he will.”
“I swear to you—”
“You’ve already got the van’s license number,” she said.
“That might not be enough. It might not lead anywhere.”
“You’ve got the name of the company that owns it. The True Word.”
“That might not be enough, either. And if it’s not enough, if it doesn’t lead us anywhere, then Joey has to be around so the old woman has a reason to risk exposing herself.”
“Seems like we’re the ones taking the risks.”
“Trust me,” he said softly.
She met his eyes.
He said, “Sit down. Come on. Give me a chance. Later, if I see any indication—the slightest indication—that we might not be able to handle the situation, I’ll send you and Joey out of town for a while. But please . . . not just yet.”
She looked past him at her son, who had put down his glass of Coke and was sitting on the edge of Charlie’s big chair. She seemed to realize that her fear was directly transmitted to the boy, and she sat down and composed herself as Charlie requested.
He sat on the edge of his desk again. “Joey, don’t worry about the witch. I know just how to deal with witches. Leave the worrying to me. Now . . . you were on the phone, and she said she wanted to cut . . . cut you. What did she say after that?”
The boy screwed up his face, trying to remember. “Not much . . . just something about some judges.”
“Judges?”
“Yeah. She said something like . . . God wants her to bring some judge men to me.”
“Judgment?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “She said she was bringing these judge men to see me. She said God wasn’t gonna let me escape from her.” He looked at his mother. “Why does God want that old witch to get me?”
“He doesn’t want her to get you, honey. She was lying. She’s crazy. God has nothing to do with this.”
Frowning, Charlie said, “Maybe, in a roundabout way, He does. When Henry said the van was owned by a printing company called The True Word, I wondered if maybe it was a religious printing company. ‘The True Word’—meaning the holy word, scripture, the Bible. Maybe what we’ve got on our hands here is a religious fanatic.”
“Or two,” she said, glancing at the window, obviously remembering the man with the white van.
Or more than two, Charlie thought uneasily.
During the past couple of decades, when it had become fashionable to distrust and disparage all of society’s institutions (as if there had been no wisdom at all in the creation of them), a lot of religious cults had sprung up, eager to fill the power vacuum. Some of them were honest, earnest offshoots of long-established religions, and some were crackpot organizations established for the benefit of their founders, to enrich them, or to spread their gospels of madness and violence and bigotry. California was more tolerant of unusual and controversial views than any other state in the union; therefore, California was home to more cults, both good and bad, than anywhere else. It wouldn’t be surprising if, for some bizarre reason, one of these cults had gone looking for scapegoats or sacrifices and had settled on an innocent six-year-old boy. Crazy, yes, but not particularly surprising.
Charlie hoped that wasn’t the explanation for what had happened to the Scavellos. No one was harder to deal with than a religious fanatic on a holy mission.
Then, as Charlie turned away from Christine, as he looked back at the boy, something odd happened. Something frightening.
For a moment the boy’s smooth young skin seemed to become translucent, then almost entirely transparent. Incredibly, the skull was visible beneath the skin. Charlie could see hollow dark eye sockets glaring at him. Worms writhing deep in those calcimine pits. A bony smile. Gaping black holes where the nose should have been. Joey’s face was still there, though it was like a vague photograph superimposed over the skeletal countenance. A presentiment of death.
Shocked, Charlie stood and coughed.
The brief vision left him almost as soon as it came, shimmering before him for no more than a split second.
And he told himself it was his imagination, though nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
An icy snake of fear uncoiled in his stomach.
Just imagination. Not a vision. There weren’t such things as visions. Charlie didn’t believe in the supernatural, in psychic phenomena or any of that claptrap. He was a sensible man and prided himself on his solid, dependable nature.
To cover his surprise and fear, but also to put the grisly sight out of mind, he said, “Uh, okay then, I think now you should just go on to work, Christine. As much as you can, try to carry on as if this were an ordinary day. I know it won’t be easy. But you’ve got to get on with your business and your life while we’re sorting this out for you. Henry Rankin will go with you. I’ve already talked to him about it.”
“You mean . . . he’ll come along as my bodyguard?”
“I know he’s not a big man,” Charlie said, “but he’s a martial arts expert, and he carries a gun, and if I had to choose any man from among my staff to entrust with my own life, I think it would be Henry.”
“I’m sure he’s competent. But I don’t really need a bodyguard. I mean, it’s Joey the woman wants.”
“And getting at you is an indirect way of getting at him,” Charlie said. “Henry goes with you.”
“What about me?” Joey said. “Am I going to preschool?” He looked at his Mickey Mouse watch. “I’m already late.”
“No preschool today,” Charlie said. “You’ll stay with me.”
“Yeah? Am I gonna help you do some investigating?”
Charlie smiled. “Sure. I could use a bright young assistant.”
“Wow! You hear him, Mom? I’m gonna be like Magnum.”
Christine forced a smile, and even though it was false it made her face lovelier than ever. Charlie longed to see a real, warm, genuine smile take possession of her.
She kissed her son goodbye, and Charlie could see that it was difficult, even painful, for her to leave the boy under these circumstances.
He walked her to the door while, behind them, Joey picked up his Coke again.
She said, “Should I come back here after I leave work?” “No. We’ll bring him to the store at . . . what . . . five o’clock?”
“That’ll be fine.”
“Then you and Joey’ll go home with bodyguards. They’ll stay the night. Two of them in the house with you. And I’ll probably have a man stationed out on the street, watching for people who don’t belong in the neighborhood.”
Charlie opened the door between his office and the reception lounge, but suddenly Joey called out to his mother, and she turned back.
“What about the dog?” the boy said, getting up, coming out from around Charlie’s desk.
“We’ll look for one tomorrow, honey.”
During the past few minutes, the boy had not been visibly frightened. Now, he became tense and uneasy again. “Today,” he said. “You promised. You said we’d get another dog today.”
“Honey—”
“I got to have a dog today, before it gets dark,” the boy said plaintively. “I just got to, Mom. I got to.”
“I can take him to buy a dog,” Charlie said.
“You have work to do,” she said.
“This is not a hole-in-the-wall operation, dear lady. I’ve got a staff to do the leg work. My job, for the time being, is to look after Joey, and if getting him a dog is part of looking after him, then I’ll take him to get a dog. No problem. Is there any pet store you’d prefer?”
“We got Brandy at the pound,” Joey said. “
Rescued him from certain death.”
“Did you?” Charlie said, amused.
“Yeah. They was gonna put Brandy to sleep. Only it wasn’t just sleep, see. What it was . . . well, it was sleep, yeah, but it was a whole lot worse than just sleep.”
“I can take him to the pound,” Charlie told Christine.
“We’ll rescue another one!” Joey said.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Christine said.
“Sounds like fun,” Charlie said.
She looked at him with evident gratitude, and he winked at her, and she smiled a halfway real smile this time, and Charlie wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t.
“Not a German shepherd,” Christine said. “They sort of scare me. Not a boxer either.”
“What about a Great Dane?” Charlie asked, teasing her. “Or maybe a St. Bernard or a Doberman?”
“Yeah!” Joey said excitedly. “A Doberman!”
“How about a big, fierce Alsatian with three-inch-long teeth?” Charlie said.
“You’re incorrigible,” Christine said, but she smiled again, and it was that smile he was trying so hard to elicit.
“We’ll get a good dog,” Charlie said. “Don’t worry. Trust me.”
“Maybe I’ll call him Pluto,” Joey said.
Charlie looked askance. “Why would you want to call me Pluto?”
Joey giggled. “Not you. The new dog.”
“Pluto,” Charlie said, mulling it over. “Not bad.”
For that one shining moment, it seemed as if all was right with the world. It seemed there was no such thing as death. And for the first time, Charlie had the feeling that the three of them somehow belonged together, that their destinies were linked, that they had more of a future together than just their investigator-client relationship. It was a nice, warm feeling. Too bad it couldn’t last.
14
Two revolvers and two shotguns lay on the work table in the armory. All four weapons had been loaded. Boxes of spare ammunition stood beside the firearms.
Mother Grace had sent Edna Vanoff on another errand. She and Kyle were alone.
Kyle picked up the shotgun. “I’ll lead the attack.”