The Servants of Twilight

by Dean Koontz

  37

  In downtown Laguna Beach, in an Arco Service Station they took shelter from the storm and from Grace Spivey’s disciples. After Sandy Breckenstein showed the manager his PI license and explained enough of the situation to gain cooperation, they were allowed to bring Chewbacca into the service bay, as long as they tied him securely to a tool rack. Sandy didn’t want to let the dog outside, not only because it would get wet—it was already soaked and shivering—but because there was a possibility, however insignificant, that Spivey’s people might be cruising around town, looking for them, and might spot the dog.

  While Max stayed with Christine and Joey at the rear of the service bays, away from doors and windows, Sandy used the pay phone in the small, glassed-in sales room. He called Klemet-Harrison. Charlie wasn’t in the office. Sandy spoke with Sherry Ordway, the receptionist, and explained enough of their situation to make her understand the seriousness of it, but he wouldn’t tell her where they were or at what number they could be reached. He doubted that Sherry was the informant who was reporting to the Church of the Twilight, but he could not be absolutely sure where her loyalties might lie.

  He said, “Find Charlie. I’ll only talk to him.”

  “But how’s he going to know where to reach you?” Sherry asked.

  “I’ll call back in fifteen minutes.”

  “If I can’t get hold of him in fifteen minutes—”

  “I’ll call back every fifteen minutes until you do,” he said, and hung up.

  He returned to the humid service bays, which smelled of oil and grease and gasoline. A three-year-old Toyota was up on one of the two hydraulic racks, and a fox-faced man in gray coveralls was replacing the muffler. Sandy told Max and Christine that it was going to take a while to reach Charlie Harrison.

  The pump jockey, a young blond guy, was mounting new tires on a set of custom chrome wheels, and Joey was watching, fascinated by the specialized power tools, obviously bubbling over with questions but trying not to bother the man with more than a few of them. The poor kid was soaked to the skin, muddy, bedraggled, yet he wasn’t complaining or whining as most children would have been doing in these circumstances. He was a damned good kid, and he seemed able to find a positive side to any situation; in this case, getting to watch tires being mounted appeared to be sufficient compensation for the ordeal he had just been through.

  Seven months ago, Sandy’s wife, Maryann, had given birth to a boy. Troy Franklin Breckenstein. Sandy hoped his son would turn out to be as well-behaved as Joey Scavello.

  Then he thought: If I’m going to wish for anything, maybe I’d better wish that I live long enough to see Troy grow up, whether or not he’s well-behaved.

  When fifteen minutes had passed, Sandy returned to the sales room out front, went to the phone by the candy machine, and called Sherry Ordway at HQ. She had beeped Charlie on his telepage, but he hadn’t yet called in.

  The rain bounced off the macadam in front of the station, and the street began to disappear under a deep puddle, and the pump jockey finished another tire, and Sandy was jumpier than ever when he called the office a third time.

  Sherry said, “Charlie’s at the police lab with Henry Rankin, trying to find out if forensics discovered anything about those bodies at the Scavello house that would help him tie them to Grace Spivey.”

  “That sounds like a long shot.”

  “I guess it’s the best he has,” Sherry said.

  That was more bad news.

  She gave him the number where Charlie could be reached, and he jotted it down in a small notebook he carried.

  He dialed the forensics lab, asked for Charlie, and had him on the line right away. He told him about the attack on Miriam Rankin’s house, laying it out in more detail than he’d given Sherry Ordway.

  Charlie had heard the worst of it from Sherry, but he still sounded shocked and dismayed by how quickly Spivey had located the Scavellos.

  “They’re both all right?” he asked.

  “Dirty and wet, but unhurt,” Sandy assured him.

  “So we’ve got a turncoat among us,” Charlie said.

  “Looks that way. Unless you were followed when you left their house last night.”

  “I’m sure we weren’t. But maybe the car we used had a bug on it.”

  “Could be.”

  “But probably not,” Charlie said. “I hate to admit it, but we’ve probably got a mole in our operation. Where are you calling from?”

  Instead of telling him, Sandy said, “Is Henry Rankin with you?”

  “Yeah. Right here. Why? You want to talk to him?”

  “No. I just want to know if he can hear this.”

  “Not your side of it.”

  “If I tell you where we are, it’s got to stay with you. Only you,” Sandy said. He quickly added: “It’s not that I have reason to suspect Henry of being Spivey’s plant. I don’t. I trust Henry more than most. The point is, I don’t really trust anyone but you. You, me—and Max, because if it was Max, he’d already have snuffed the kid.”

  “If we do have a bad apple,” Charlie said, “it’s most likely a secretary or bookkeeper or something like that.”

  “I know,” Sandy said. “But I’ve got a responsibility to the woman and the kid. And my own life’s on the line here, too, as long as I’m with them.”

  “Tell me where you are,” Charlie said. “I’ll keep it to myself, and I’ll come alone.”

  Sandy told him.

  “This weather . . . better give me forty-five minutes,” Charlie said.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Sandy said.

  He hung up and went out to the garage to be with the others.

  When the rains had first come, yesterday evening, there had been a brief period of lightning, but none in the past twelve hours. Most California storms were much quieter than those in other parts of the country. Lightning was not a common accompaniment of the rains here, and wildly violent electrical storms were rare. But now, with its hills grown dangerously soggy and with the threat of mudslides at hand, with its streets awash, with its coastline hammered by wind-whipped waves almost twice as high as usual, Laguna Beach was suddenly assaulted by fierce bolts of lightning as well. With a crash of accompanying thunder that shook the walls of the building, a cataclysmic bolt stabbed to earth somewhere nearby, and the gray day was briefly, flickeringly bright. With strobelike effect, the light pulsed through the open doors of the garage and through the dirty high-set windows, bringing a moment of frenzied life to the shadows, which twisted and danced for a second or two. Another bolt quickly followed with an even harder clap of thunder, and loose windows rattled in their frames, and then a third bolt smashed down, and the wet macadam in front of the station glistened and flashed with scintillant reflections of nature’s bright anger.

  Joey had drifted away from his mother, toward the open doors of the garage bays. He winced at the crashes of thunder that followed each lightning strike, but he seemed pretty much unafraid. When the skies calmed for a moment, he looked back at his mother and said, “Wow! God’s fireworks, huh, Mom? Isn’t that what you said it is?”

  “God’s fireworks,” Christine agreed. “Better get away from there.”

  Another bolt arced across the sky, and the day outside seemed to leap as the murderous current jolted through it. This one was worse than all the others, and the blast from it not only rattled windows and made the walls tremble, but seemed to shake the ground as well, and Sandy even felt it in his teeth.

  “Wow!” the boy said.

  “Honey, get away from that open door,” Christine said.

  The boy didn’t move, and in the next instant he was silhouetted by a chain of lightning strikes far brighter and more violent than anything yet, so dazzling and shocking in their power that the pump jockey was startled enough to drop a lug wrench. The dog whimpered and tried to hide under the tool rack, and Christine scurried to Joey, grabbed him, and brought him back from the open doorway.

  “Aw, M
om, it’s pretty,” he said.

  Sandy tried to imagine what it would be like to be young again, so young that you hadn’t yet realized how much there was to fear in this world, so young that the word “cancer” had no definition, so young that you hadn’t any real grip on the meaning of death or the inevitability of taxes or the horror of nuclear war or the treacherous nature of the clotprone human circulatory system. What would it be like to be that young again, so young that you could watch storm lightning with delight, unaware that it might find its way to you and fry your brains in one ten-thousandth of a second? Sandy stared at Joey Scavello and frowned. He felt old, only thirty-two but terribly old.

  What bothered him was that he couldn’t remember ever having been that young and free of fear, though surely he had been just as innocent of death when he was six. They said that animals lived their lives with no sense of mortality, and it seemed terribly unjust that men didn’t have the same luxury. Human beings couldn’t escape the knowledge of their death; consciously or subconsciously, it was with them every hour of every day. If Sandy could have had a word with this religious fanatic, this Grace Spivey, he would have wanted to know how she could have such faith in—and devotion for—a God who created human beings only to let them die by one horrible means or another.

  He sighed. He was getting morbid, and that wasn’t like him. At this rate he would need more than his usual bottle of beer before bed tonight—like a dozen bottles. Still . . . he would like to ask Grace Spivey that question.

  38

  Shortly before noon, Charlie arrived in Laguna Beach, where he found Sandy, Max, Christine, Joey and the dog waiting for him in the service station.

  Joey ran to him, met him just inside the garage doors, shouting, “Hey, Charlie, you shoulda seen the house go boom, just like in a war movie or somethin’!”

  Charlie scooped him up and held him. “I expected you to be mad at us for slipping up. I thought you’d insist on hiring Magnum again.”

  “Heck, no,” the boy said. “Your guys were great. Anyway, how could you’ve known it was gonna turn into a war movie?”

  How indeed?

  Charlie carried Joey to the rear of the garage, where the others stood in the shadows between shelves of spare parts and stacks of tires.

  Sandy had told him that the woman and the boy were all right, and of course he believed Sandy, but his stomach finally unknotted only now that he saw them with his own eyes. The wave of relief that washed through him was a physical and not just emotional force, and he was reminded—though he didn’t need reminding—of just how important these two people had become to him in such a short period of time.

  They were a miserable-looking group, pretty much dried out by now, but rumpled and mud-streaked, hair lank and matted. Max and Sandy looked rough, angry, and dangerous, the kind of men who cleared out a bar just by walking into it.

  It was a tribute to Christine’s beauty, and an indication of its depth, that she looked almost as good now as when she was scrubbed and fresh and neatly groomed. Charlie remembered how it had felt to hold her, last night in the kitchen of Miriam Rankin’s little house, just before he’d gone home, and he wanted to hold her again, felt a warm melting need to hold her, but in front of his men he could do nothing but put Joey down, take her hand in both of his, and say, “Thank God you’re all right.”

  Her lower lip quivered. For a moment she looked as if she would lean against him and cry. But she kept control of herself and said, “I keep telling myself it’s just a nightmare . . . but I can’t wake up.”

  Max said, “We ought to get them out of here now, out of Laguna.”

  “I agree,” Charlie said. “I’ll take them right now, in my car. After we’ve left, you two call the office, tell Sherry where you are, and have a car sent out. Go back up the hill to Miriam’s house—”

  “There’s not anything left of it,” Sandy said.

  “That was one hell of a blast,” Max confirmed. “The van must’ve been packed wall to wall with explosives.”

  “There might not be anything left of the house,” Charlie said, “but the cops and fire department are still up there. Sherry’s been checking into it with the Laguna Beach police, and I talked with her on the phone, coming down here. Report to the cops, help them any way you can, and find out what they’ve come up with.”

  “Did they find the guy in the alley, the one I shot?” Max asked.

  “Nope,” Charlie said. “He got away.”

  “He’d have to’ve crawled. I shot him in the leg.”

  “Then he crawled,” Charlie said. “Or there was a third man around who helped him escape.”

  “Third?” Sandy said.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “Sherry says the second man stayed with the van all the way into the house.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They are kamikazes,” Christine said shakily.

  “There mustn’t have been anything left of him but a lot of little pieces,” Max said and would have said more, but Charlie stopped him by nodding toward the boy, who was listening, mouth agape.

  They were silent, contemplating the van driver’s violent demise. The rain on the roof was like the solemn drums in a funeral cortege.

  Then the mechanic switched on a power wrench, and all of them jumped at the sudden, clangorous noise.

  When the mechanic switched the wrench off, Charlie looked at Christine and said, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

  Suspiciously studying everything that moved in the rainbattered day, Max and Sandy accompanied them to the gray Mercedes in front of the service station. Christine sat up front with Charlie, and Joey got in back with Chewbacca.

  Sitting behind the steering wheel, speaking to Sandy and Max through the open window, Charlie said, “You did a damned fine job.”

  “Almost lost them,” Sandy said, turning aside the praise.

  “Point is—you didn’t,” Charlie said. “And you’re safe, too.”

  If another of his men had died so soon after the deaths of Pete and Frank, he wasn’t sure how he could have handled it. From here on, only he would know where Christine and Joey were. His men would be working on the case, trying to link the Church of the Twilight to these murders and attempted murders, but only he would know the whereabouts of their clients until Grace Spivey was somehow stopped. That way, the old woman’s spies wouldn’t be able to find Christine and Joey, and Charlie wouldn’t have to worry about losing another man. His own life was the only one he would be risking.

  He put up his window, locked all the doors with the master switch, and drove away from the service station.

  Laguna was actually a lovely, warm, clean, vital beach town, but today it seemed drab, cloaked in rain and gray mist and mud. It made Charlie think of graveyards, and it seemed to close in around them like the descending lid of a coffin. He breathed a bit easier when they were out of town, heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Christine turned and looked at Joey, who was sitting quietly in the back of the car. Brandy . . . no, Chewbacca was lying on the seat, his big furry head in the boy’s lap. Joey was listlessly petting the dog and staring out the window at the ocean, which was choppy and wind-tossed in front of a dense wall of ash-gray fog moving shoreward from half a mile out. His face was almost expressionless, almost blank, but not quite. There was a subtle expression, something she had never seen on his face before, and she couldn’t read it. What was he thinking? Feeling? She had already asked him twice if he was all right, and he had said he was. She didn’t want to nag him, but she was worried.

  She wasn’t merely concerned about his physical safety, although that fear gnawed at her. She was also worried about his mental condition. If he did survive Grace Spivey’s demented crusade against him, what emotional scars would he carry with him for the rest of his life? It was impossible that he would come through these experiences unmarked. There would have to be psychological consequences.

  Now he continued to stroke the dog’s head but in a
hypnotic fashion, as if not fully aware that the animal was there with him, and he stared at the ocean beyond the window.

  Charlie said, “The police want me to bring you in for more questioning.”

  “The hell with them,” Christine said.

  “They’re more inclined to help now—”

  “It took all these deaths to get their attention.”

  “Don’t write them off. Sure, we’ll do a better job of protecting you than they can, and we might turn up something that’ll help them nail Grace Spivey for all this. But now that they’ve got a homicide investigation under way, they’ll do most of the work leading up to the indictments and convictions. They’ll be the ones to stop her.”

  “I don’t trust the cops,” she said flatly. “Spivey probably has people planted there.”

  “She can’t have infiltrated every police force in the country. She doesn’t have that many followers.”

  “Not every police force,” Christine said. “Just those in the towns where she carries on her fund-raising and seeks out her converts.”

  “The Laguna Beach police want to talk to you, too, of course, about what happened this morning.”

  “To hell with them, too. Even if none of them belongs to the Church of the Twilight, Spivey might be expecting me to show up at police headquarters; she might have people watching, waiting to cut us down the minute we step out of the car.” She had a sudden terrible thought and said: “You’re not taking us to any police station, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I only said they want to talk to you. I didn’t say I thought it was a good idea.”

  She sagged back against the seat. “Are there any good ideas?”

  “Got to keep your chin up.”

  “I mean, what’re we going to do now? We have no clothes, nothing but what we’ve got on our backs. My purse and credit cards. That’s not much. We’ve got nowhere to stay. We don’t dare go to our friends or anywhere else we’re known. They’ve got us on the run like a couple of wild animals.”

  “It’s not quite that bad,” he said. “Hunted animals don’t have the luxury of fleeing in a Mercedes-Benz.”