by Dean Koontz
He wanted to understand what it must be like for her, to be the instrument of God’s will, but he couldn’t comprehend her state of mind or the mighty forces working within her. He did not know what to say to her, and he was depressed that he couldn’t comfort her.
She said, “Go home, sleep. Tomorrow, perhaps, we’ll kill the boy.”
28
In the car, speeding through the storm-sodden streets, Charlie insisted on having a look at Christine’s wound, although she said it wasn’t serious. He was relieved to discover that she was right; she had only been grazed; the bullet had left a shallow furrow, two inches long, just above her hip. It was more of an abrasion than a wound, mostly cauterized by the heat of the bullet; the slug wasn’t in her, and there was only minor bleeding. Nevertheless, they stopped at an all-night market, where they picked up alcohol and iodine and bandages, and Charlie dressed the wound while Vince, behind the wheel, got them on the road again. They switched from street to street, doubled back, circled through the rain-lashed darkness, like a flying insect reluctant to light anywhere for fear of being swatted, crushed.
They took every possible precaution to insure that they weren’t followed, and they didn’t arrive at the safe house in Laguna Beach until almost one o’clock in the morning. It was halfway up a long street, with (in daylight) a view of the ocean; a small place, almost a bungalow, two bedrooms and one bath; quaint, about forty years old but beautifully maintained, with a trellised front porch, gingerbread shutters; shrouded in bougainvillaea that grew up one wall and most of the way across the roof. The house belonged to Henry Rankin’s aunt, who was vacationing in Mexico, and there was no way Grace Spivey or anyone from the Church of the Twilight could know about it.
Charlie wished they had come here earlier, that he had never allowed Christine and Joey to return to their own house. Of course, he’d had no way of knowing that Grace Spivey would take such drastic and violent action so soon. Killing a dog was one thing, but dispatching assassins armed with shotguns, sending them boldly into a quiet residential neighborhood . . . well, he hadn’t imagined she was that crazy. Now he had lost two of his men, two of his friends. An emotional acid, part grief and part self-reproach, ate at him. He had known Pete Lockburn for nine years, Frank Reuther for six, and liked both of them a great deal. Although he knew he wasn’t at fault for what had happened, he couldn’t help blaming himself; he felt as bleak as a man could feel without contemplating suicide.
He tried to conceal the depth of his grief and rage because he didn’t want to upset Christine further. She was distraught about the murders and seemed determined to hold herself, in part, accountable. He tried to reason with her: Frank and Pete knew the risk when they took the job; if she hadn’t hired Klemet-Harrison, the bodies now on the way to the morgue would be hers and Joey’s, so she’d done the right thing by seeking help. Regardless of the arguments he presented, she couldn’t shake off her dark sense of responsibility.
Joey had fallen asleep in the car, so Charlie carried him through the slanting rain, through the drizzling night quiet of the Laguna hills, into the house. He put him down on the bed in the master bedroom, and the boy didn’t even stir, only murmured softly and sighed. Together, Charlie and Christine undressed him and put him under the covers.
“I guess it won’t hurt if he misses brushing his teeth just one night,” she said worriedly.
Charlie couldn’t suppress a smile, and she saw him smiling, and she seemed to realize how ironic it was to be fretting about cavities only hours after the boy had escaped three killers.
She blushed and said, “I guess, if God spared him from the bullets, He’ll spare him from tooth decay, huh?”
“It’s a good bet.”
Chewbacca curled up at the side of the bed and yawned heartily. He’d had a rough day, too.
Vince Fields came to the doorway and said, “Where do you want me, boss?”
Charlie hesitated, remembering Pete and Frank. He had put them in the line of fire. He didn’t want to put Vince in the line of fire, too. But, of course, it was ridiculous of him to think that way. He couldn’t tell Vince to hide in the back of the closet where it was safe. It was Vince’s job to be in the line of fire if necessary; Vince knew that, and Charlie knew that, and they both knew it was Charlie’s job to give the orders, regardless of the consequences. So what was he waiting for? Either you had the guts to accept the risks in this job, or you didn’t.
He cleared his throat and said, “Uh . . . I want you right here, Vince. Sitting on a chair. Beside the bed.”
Vince sat down.
Charlie took Christine to the small tidy kitchen, where George Swarthout had made a large pot of coffee and had poured cups for himself and Vince. Charlie sent George to the living room windows, to keep watch on the street, poured some of the coffee for himself and Christine.
“Miriam—Henry’s aunt—is a brandy drinker. Would you like a slug in that coffee?”
“Might be a good idea,” Christine said.
He found the brandy in the cabinet by the refrigerator and laced both cups of coffee.
They sat across from each other at a small table by a window that looked out on a rain-hammered garden where, at the moment, only shadows bloomed.
He said, “How’s your hip?”
“Just a twinge.”
“Sure?”
“Positive. Listen, what happens now? Will the police make arrests?”
“They can’t. The assailants are all dead.”
“But the woman who sent them isn’t dead. She’s a party to attempted murder. A conspirator. She’s as guilty as they were.”
“We’ve no proof Grace Spivey sent them.”
“If all three of them are members of her church—”
“That would be an important lead. The problem is, how do we prove they were church members?”
“The police could question their friends, their families.”
“Which they would definitely do . . . if they could find their friends and families.”
“What do you mean?”
“None of those three gunmen was carrying identification. No wallets, no credit cards, no driver’s licenses, no nothing.”
“Fingerprints. Couldn’t they be identified by their fingerprints?”
“Of course, the police will be following up on that. But unless those men were in the army or have criminal records or once held a security job that required them to be fingerprinted, their prints won’t be on file anywhere.”
“So we might never know who they were?”
“Maybe not. And until we can identify them, there’s no way to trace them back to Grace Spivey.”
She scowled as she drank some of her coffee and brandy, mulling over the situation, trying to see what they might have missed, trying to come up with a way to link the killers with the Church of the Twilight. Charlie could tell her that she was wasting her time, that Grace Spivey had been too careful, but she had to reach that conclusion on her own.
Finally she said, “The man who attacked us in front of the house . . . was he the one who was driving the van?”
“No. He’s not the man I watched through binoculars.”
“But if he was in that van, even as a passenger, maybe it’s still parked down the street from my house.”
“Nope. The police looked for it. No white van anywhere in the neighborhood. Nothing at all that would point to The True Word or to the Church of the Twilight.”
“What about their weapons?”
“Those are being checked out, too. But I expect they weren’t purchased legitimately. There’ll be no way to find out who bought them.”
Her face soured by frustration, she said, “But we know Grace Spivey threatened Joey, and we know one of her people has been following us in a van. After what happened tonight, isn’t that reason enough for the cops to at least go talk to her?”
“Yes. And they will.”
“When?”
“Now. If they haven’t already
. But she’ll deny everything.”
“They’ll keep a watch on her?”
“Nope. No point in it, anyway. They might be able to watch her, but they can’t keep tabs on everyone who’s a member of her church. That would require a lot more manpower than they have. Besides, it’d be unconstitutional.”
“Then we’re right back where we started,” she said miserably.
“No. Eventually, maybe not right away but in time, one of those nameless dead men or one of their guns or the pictures I took of the man in the van will give us a concrete connection with Grace Spivey. These people aren’t perfect. Somewhere, they’ve overlooked a detail, made a mistake, and we’ll capitalize on it. They’ll make other mistakes, too, and sooner or later we’ll have enough evidence to nail them.”
“Meanwhile?”
“You and Joey will lay low.”
“Here?”
“For the time being.”
“They’ll find us.”
“No.”
“They will,” she said grimly.
“Not even the police know where you are.”
“But your people know.”
“We’re on your side.”
She nodded, but he could see that she still had something to say, something she really didn’t want to say but something she couldn’t contain, either.
“What is it? What’re you thinking?” he prodded.
“Isn’t it possible that one of your people belongs to the Church of the Twilight?”
The question startled him. He hand-picked his people, knew them, liked them, trusted them. “Impossible.”
“After all, your agency had a run-in with Spivey. You rescued those two little children from her cult, snatched them away from their mother. I’d think maybe Grace Spivey would be wary of you, wary enough to plant someone in your organization. She could’ve converted one of your men.”
“No. Impossible. The first time she tried to contact one of them, he’d report it to me immediately.”
“Maybe it’s one of your new employees, someone who was a Spivey disciple before he ever came to work for you. Have you hired anyone new since you snatched those kids?”
“A few people. But our employees have to undergo a rigorous background investigation before we hire them—”
“Membership in the church could be hidden, kept secret.”
“It’d be difficult.”
“I notice you’ve stopped saying ‘impossible.’ ”
She’d made him uneasy. He liked to believe that he always thought of everything, prepared for every contingency. But he hadn’t thought of this, primarily because he knew his people too well to entertain the notion that any of them was weak-minded enough to sign up with a crackpot cult. Then again, people were strange, especially these days, and the only thing about them that could surprise you was if they never surprised you.
He sipped his coffee and said, “I’ll have Henry Rankin run entirely new checks on everyone who’s joined us since the Spivey case. If something was missed the first time, Henry’ll find it. He’s the best there is.”
“And you’re sure you can trust Henry?”
“Jesus, Christine, he’s like my brother!”
“Remember Cain and Abel.”
“Listen, Christine, a little suspicion, a touch of paranoia—that’s good. I encourage it. Makes you more cautious. But you can go too far. You’ve got to trust someone. You can’t handle this alone.”
She nodded, looked down at her half-finished coffee and brandy. “You’re right. And I guess it’s not very charitable of me to worry about how trustworthy your people are when two of them have already died for me.”
“They didn’t die for you,” he said.
“Yes, they did.”
“They only—”
“Died for me.”
He sighed and said nothing more. She was too sensitive a woman not to feel some guilt about Pete Lockburn and Frank Reuther. She would just have to work it out by herself—the same way he would.
“All right,” she said. “So while Joey and I are lying low, what’ll you be doing?”
“Before we left your house, I called the rectory at the church.”
“Her church?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t in. But I asked her secretary to arrange a meeting for tomorrow. I made her promise to call Henry Rankin tonight, no matter how late, and let him know when I’m to be there.”
“Walking into the lion’s den.”
“It’s not quite that dramatic or dangerous.”
“What do you expect to gain by talking to her?”
“I don’t know. But it seems the next logical step.” She shifted in her chair, picked up her coffee, put it down without taking a drink, and chewed nervously on her lower lip. “I’m afraid that . . .”
“What?”
“I’m afraid, if you go to her . . . somehow she’ll make you tell her where we are.”
“I’m not that easy,” he said.
“But she might use drugs or torture or—”
“Believe me, Christine, I can handle myself and I can handle this old woman and her pack of crazies.”
She stared at him for a long time.
Her eyes were mesmerizingly beautiful.
At last she said, “You can. I know it. You can handle them. I have a lot of faith in you, Charlie Harrison. It’s an . . . instinct. I feel good about you. I know you’re capable. I don’t doubt you. Really I don’t. But I’m still scared.”
At 1:30, someone from Klemet-Harrison brought Charlie’s gray Mercedes to the house in Laguna Beach, so he could drive himself home when he was ready. At 2:05, grainyeyed and bone-weary, he looked at his watch, said, “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” and went to the sink to rinse out his coffee cup.
When he put his cup in the rack to dry and turned, she was standing at the kitchen window, beside the door, staring out at the dark lawn. She was hugging herself.
He went to her. “Christine?”
She turned, faced him.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded, being brave. “Just a chill.”
Her teeth chattered when she spoke.
On impulse, he put his arms around her. Without a hint of reservation, she came against him, allowed herself to be held, her head on his shoulder. Then her arms slipped around him, too, and they were linked, and nothing had ever been better than hugging her. Her hair was against his cheek, her hands on his back, her body molded to him, her warmth piercing him, the scent of her filling him. The embrace had the electrifying quality of a new and longed-for experience and, at the same time, it was a comfortable, familiar sharing. It was difficult to believe he had known her less than one day. He seemed to have wanted her much longer than that—and, of course, he had, though until he’d seen her he hadn’t known it was her that he had wanted for so many years.
He could have kissed her then. He had the desire and the nerve to put a hand under her chin and lift her face and press his lips to hers, and he knew she wouldn’t resist, might even welcome it. But he did no more than hug her because he sensed the time wasn’t exactly right for the commitment that a passionate kiss implied. Now, it would be a kiss that she sought partly out of fear, partly out of a desperate need to be reassured. When at last he did kiss her, he wanted it to be for other reasons entirely: desire, affection, love. He wanted the start to be perfect for them.
When she finally let go of him, she seemed self-conscious. She smiled shyly and said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get shaky on you. I’ve got to be strong. I know it. There’s no room for weakness in this situation.”
“Nonsense,” he said gently. “I needed a hug, too.”
“You did?”
“Everyone could use a teddy bear now and then.”
She smiled at him.
He hated to leave her. All the way out to the car, with the wind tearing at his coat and the rain battering his bare head, he wanted to turn around and go back in there and tell her that something special was h
appening between them, something that shouldn’t happen this fast, something like you saw in the movies but never in real life. He wanted to tell her now, even if it was the wrong time, because in spite of all his reassuring talk, he didn’t know for sure that he would be able to handle Spivey and her crazies; there was a possibility, however slim, that he would never get another chance, never see Christine Scavello again.
He lived in the hills of North Tustin, and he was almost half-way home, cruising a lonely stretch of Irvine Boulevard, thinking about Frank Reuther and Pete Lockburn, when the events of the past few hours became too much to handle, and he was suddenly short of breath. He had to pull to the berm and stop. There were orange groves on one side of the roadway, strawberry fields on the other side, and darkness all around. At this hour, there was no traffic. Slumped back in his seat, he stared at the rain-spattered windshield where the water made ghostly, speckled patterns in the backsplash of his own headlight beams, brief-lived patterns erased by the metronomically thumping windshield wipers. It was unnerving and dispiriting to realize that human lives could be erased as suddenly and easily as those rain patterns on the glass. He wept.
In all its years of operation, Klemet-Harrison had lost only one other man in the line of duty. He had been killed in an automobile accident while he was working, although it was unconnected to his assignment and could have taken place as easily on his own time. A few men had been shot at over the years, mostly by estranged husbands who were determined to harass their wives in spite of court orders restraining them from doing so; and a couple of guys had even been hit. But until now no one had been murdered, for God’s sake. The private investigation business was far less violent, far less dangerous than it was portrayed on television and in the movies. Sometimes you got roughed up a bit or had to rough up someone else, and there was always the potential for violence, but the potential was rarely realized.
Charlie wasn’t afraid for himself, but he was afraid for his men, the people who worked for him and relied upon him. When he had taken this case, maybe he had gotten them into something he shouldn’t have. Maybe, by signing on to protect Christine and Joey, he had also signed death warrants for himself and his associates. Who knew what to expect when you were dealing with religious fanatics? Who knew how far they would go?