by Dean Koontz
The whole world was after them now. It seemed hopeless. Like a toxic chemical, despair settled into her bones, leeching her strength. She just wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep for a while.
Charlie said, “Come on. Let’s get the shopping done, take everything back to the motel, and then dump the car. I want to hole up inside before some cop spots our license plates or recognizes me.”
“Do you think the police know we headed for Santa Barbara after we left Ventura?”
“They can’t know for sure. But they’ve got to figure we were running from L.A., moving north, so Santa Barbara’s a good bet.”
As they went up and down the remaining aisles, as they checked out and paid for the groceries, Christine found it difficult to breathe. She felt as if a spotlight were trained on them. She kept waiting for sirens and alarms.
Joey became even more lethargic and solemn than before. He sensed that they were hiding something from him, and maybe it wasn’t good to withhold the truth, but she decided it would be worse to tell him that the witch had burned down their house. That would convince him they were never going back, never going home again, which might be more than he could handle.
It was almost more than she could handle.
Because maybe it was the truth. Maybe they’d never be able to go home again.
44
Charlie drove the LTD into the motel lot, parked in the slot in front of their unit—and saw movement at the small window in the kitchenette. It might have been his imagination, of course. Or it might have been the maid. He didn’t think it was either.
Instead of switching the engine off, he immediately threw the LTD into reverse and began backing out of the parking space.
Christine said, “What’s wrong?”
“Company,” he said.
“What? Where?”
In the rear seat, in a voice that was the essence of terror, Joey said, “The witch.”
In front of them, as they backed away from it, the door to their unit began to open.
How the hell did they find us so soon? Charlie wondered.
Not wanting to waste the time required to turn the car around, he kept it in reverse and backed rapidly toward the avenue in front of the motel.
Out in the street, a white van appeared and swung to the curb, blocking the exit from the Wile-Away Lodge.
Charlie saw it in the rearview mirror, jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it.
He heard gunfire. Two men with automatic weapons had come out of the motel room.
“Get down!”
Christine looked back at Joey. “Get on the floor!” she told him.
“You too,” Charlie said, tramping on the accelerator again, pulling on the steering wheel, angling away from the van behind them.
She popped her seatbelt and crouched down, keeping her head below the windows.
If a bullet came through the door, she’d be killed anyway. There wasn’t anything Charlie could do about that. Except get the hell out of there.
Chewbacca barked, an ear-rupturing sound in the closed car.
Charlie reversed across the lot, nearly sideswiping a Toyota, clipping one corner of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the swimming pool. There was no other exit to the street, but he didn’t care. He’d make an exit of his own. He drove backward, over the sidewalk and over the curb. The undercarriage scraped, and Charlie prayed the fuel tank hadn’t been torn open, and the LTD slammed to the pavement with a jolt. The engine didn’t cut out. Thank God. His heart pounding as fast as the sedan’s six cylinders, Charlie kept his foot on the accelerator, roaring backward into State Street, tires screaming and smoking, nearly hitting a VW that was coming up the hill, causing half a dozen other vehicles to brake and wheel frantically out of his path.
The white Ford van pulled away from the motel exit, which it had been blocking, drove into the street again, and tried to ram them. The truck’s grille looked like a big grinning mouth, a shark’s maw, as it bore down on them. Two men were visible beyond the windshield. The van clipped the right front fender of the LTD, and there was a tortured cry of shredding metal, a shattering of glass as the car’s right headlight was pulverized. The LTD rocked from the blow, and Joey cried out, and the dog bleated, and Charlie almost bit his tongue.
Christine started to rise to see what was happening, and Charlie shouted at her to stay down as he shifted gears and drove forward, east on State, swinging wide around the back of the white van. It tried to ram him in reverse, but he got past it in time.
He expected the crumpled fender to obstruct the tire and eventually bring them to a stop, but it didn’t. There were a few clanging-tinkling sounds as broken pieces of the car fell away, but there was no grinding noise of the sort that an impacted tire or an obstructed axle would make.
He heard more gunfire. Bullets thudded into the car, but none of them entered the passenger compartment. Then the LTD was moving fast, pulling out of range.
Charlie was grinding his teeth so hard that his jaws hurt, but he couldn’t stop.
Ahead, at the corner, on the cross-street, another white Ford van appeared on their right, swiftly moving out from the shadows beneath a huge oak.
Jesus, they’re everywhere!
The new van streaked toward the intersection, intent on blocking Charlie. To stay out of its way, he pulled recklessly into oncoming traffic. A Mustang swung wide of the LTD, and behind the Mustang a red Jaguar jumped the curb and bounced into the parking lot of a Burger King to avoid a collision.
The LTD had reached the intersection. The car was responding too sluggishly, though Charlie pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor.
From the right, the second van was still coming. It couldn’t block him now; it was too late for that, so it was going to try to ram him instead.
Charlie was still in the wrong lane. The driver of an oncoming Pontiac braked too suddenly, and his car went into a slide. It turned sideways, came straight at them, a juggernaut.
Charlie eased up on the accelerator but didn’t hit the brakes because he would lose his flexibility if he stopped completely and would only be delaying the moment of impact.
In a fraction of a second, he considered all his options. He couldn’t swing left into the cross-street because it was crowded with traffic. He couldn’t go right because the car was bearing down on him from that direction. He couldn’t throw the car into reverse because there was lots of traffic behind him, and, besides, there was no time to shift gears and back up. He could only go forward as the Pontiac slid toward him, go forward and try to dodge the hurtling mass of steel that suddenly loomed as large as a mountain.
A strip of rubber peeled off one of the Pontiac’s smoking tires, spun into the air, like a flying snake.
In another fraction of a second, the situation changed: The Pontiac was no longer coming at him broadside, but was continuing to turn, turn, turn, until it had swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees from its original position. Now its back end pointed at the LTD, and, though it was still sliding, it was a smaller target than it had been. Charlie wrenched the steering wheel to the right, then left again, arcing around the careening Pontiac, which shrieked past with no more than an inch to spare.
The van rammed them. Fortunately, it caught only the last couple inches of the LTD. The bumper was torn off with a horrendous sound, and the whole car shuddered and was pushed sideways a couple of feet. The steering wheel abruptly had a mind of its own; it tore itself out of Charlie’s grasp, spun through his clutching hands, burning his palms, and he cried out in pain but got hold of it again. Cursing, blinking back the tears of pain that briefly blurred his vision, he got the car pointed eastward again, stood on the accelerator, and kept going. When they were through the intersection, he swung back into his own lane. He hammered the horn, encouraging the cars in front of him to get out of his way.
The second white van—the one that had ripped away their bumper—had gotten out of the mess at the intersection and had followed
them. At first it was two cars back of them, then one; then it was right behind the LTD.
With the subsidence of gunfire, both Christine and Joey sat up again.
The boy looked out the rear window at the van and said, “It’s the witch! I can see her! I can see her!”
“Sit down and put your seatbelt on,” Charlie told him. “We might be making some sudden stops and turns.”
The van was thirty feet back but closing.
Twenty feet.
Chewbacca was barking again.
Belted in, Joey held the dog close and quieted it.
Traffic in front of them was closing up, slowing down.
Charlie checked the rearview mirror.
The van was only fifteen feet back of them.
Ten feet.
“They’re going to ram us while we’re moving,” Christine said.
Barely touching the brakes, Charlie whipped the car to the right, into a narrow cross-street, leaving the heavy traffic and commercial development of State Street behind. They were in an older residential neighborhood: mostly bungalows, a few two-story houses, lots of mature trees, cars parked on one side.
The van followed, but it dropped back a bit because it couldn’t make the turn as quickly as the LTD. It wasn’t as maneuverable as the car. That’s what Charlie was counting on.
At the next corner he turned left, cutting his speed as little as possible, almost standing the LTD on two wheels, almost losing control in a wild slide, but somehow holding on, nearly clipping a car parked too close to the intersection. A block later he turned right, then left, then right, then right again, weaving through the narrow streets, putting distance between them and the van.
When they were not just one but two corners ahead of the van, when their pursuers could no longer see which way they were turning, Charlie stopped making random turns and began choosing their route with some deliberation, street by street, heading back toward State, then across the main thoroughfare and into the parking lot of another shopping center.
“We’re not stopping here?” Christine said.
“Yeah.”
“But—”
“We’ve lost them.”
“For the moment, maybe. But they—”
“There’s something I have to check on,” Charlie said.
He parked out of sight of the traffic on State Street, between two larger vehicles, a camper and a pickup truck.
Apparently, when the second white van had grazed the back of the LTD, tearing off the rear bumper, it had also damaged the exhaust pipe and perhaps the muffler. Acrid fumes were rising through the floorboards, into the car. Charlie told them to crank their windows down an inch or two. He didn’t want to turn off the engine if he could help it; he wanted to be ready to move out at a moment’s notice; but the fumes were just too strong, and he had to shut the car down.
Christine unhooked her seatbelt and turned to Joey. “You okay, honey?”
The boy didn’t answer.
Charlie looked back at him.
Joey was slumped down in the corner. His small hands were fisted tight. His chin was tucked down. His face was bloodless. His lips trembled, but he was too scared to cry, scared speechless, paralyzed with fear. At Christine’s urging, he finally looked up, and his eyes were haunted, forty years too old for his young face.
Charlie felt sick and sad and weary at the sight of the boy’s eyes and the tortured soul they revealed. He was also angry. He had the irrational urge to get out of the car right now, stalk back to State Street, find Grace Spivey, and put a few bullets in her.
The bitch. The stupid, crazy, pitiful, hateful, raving, disgusting old bitch!
The dog mewled softly, as if aware of its young master’s state of mind.
The boy produced a similar sound and turned his eyes down to the dog, which put its head in his lap.
As if by magic, the witch had found them. The boy had said that you couldn’t hide from a witch, no matter what you did, and now it seemed that he was correct.
“Joey,” Christine said, “are you all right, honey? Speak to me, baby. Are you okay?”
Finally the boy nodded. But he still wouldn’t—or couldn’t—speak. And there was no conviction in his nod.
Charlie understood how the boy felt. It was difficult to believe that everything could have gone so terribly wrong in the span of just a few minutes.
There were tears in Christine’s eyes. Charlie knew what she was thinking. She was afraid that Joey had finally snapped.
And maybe he had.
45
The churning black-gray clouds at last unleashed the pent-up storm that had been building all morning. Rain scoured the shopping center parking lot and pounded on the battered LTD. Sheet lightning pulsed across large portions of the dreary sky.
Good, Charlie thought, looking out at the water-blurred world.
The storm—especially the static caused by the lightning—gave them a little more cover. They needed all the help they could get.
“It has to be in here,” he said, opening Christine’s purse, dumping the contents on the seat between them.
“But I don’t see how it could be,” she said.
“It’s the only place they could have hidden it,” he insisted, frantically stirring through the contents of the purse, searching for the most likely object in which a tiny transmitter might have been concealed. “It’s the only thing that’s come with us all the way from L.A. We left behind the suitcases, my car . . . this is the only place it could’ve been hidden.”
“But no one could’ve gotten hold of my purse—”
“It might’ve been planted a couple of days ago, when you weren’t suspicious or watchful, before all this craziness began,” he said, aware that he was grasping at straws, trying to keep his desperation out of his voice but not entirely succeeding.
If we aren’t unwittingly carrying a transmitter, he thought, then how the hell did they find us so quickly? How the hell?
He looked out at the parking lot, turned and glanced out of the back window. No white vans. Yet.
Joey was staring out the side window. His lips were moving, but he wasn’t making a sound. He looked wrungout. A few raindrops slanted in through the narrow gap at the top of the window, struck the boy’s head, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Charlie thought of his own miserable childhood, the beatings he had endured at the hands of his father, the loveless face of his drunken mother. He thought about the other helpless children, all over the world, who became victims because they were too small to fight back, and a renewed, powerful current of anger energized him again.
He picked up a green malachite compact from the pile of stuff that had been in Christine’s purse, opened it, lifted out the powder puff, took out the cake of powder, dropped them both in the litter bag that hung on the dashboard. He quickly examined the compact, but he couldn’t see anything unusual about it. He hammered it against the steering wheel a couple of times, smashed it, examined the pieces, saw nothing suspicious.
Christine said, “If we have been carrying a transmitter, something they’ve been able to home in on, it’d need a strong power source, wouldn’t it?”
“A battery,” he said, taking apart her tube of lipstick.
“But surely it couldn’t operate off a battery that small.”
“You’d be surprised what modern technology has made possible. Microminiaturization. You’d be surprised.”
Although all four of the windows were down an inch or two, letting in a bit of fresh air, the glass was steaming up. He couldn’t see the parking lot, and that made him uneasy, so he started the engine again and switched on the defroster, in spite of the exhaust fumes that seeped in from the damaged muffler and tailpipe.
The purse contained a gold fountain pen and a Cross ballpoint. He took them both apart.
“But how far would something like that broadcast?” Christine asked.
“Depends on its sophistication.”
“More specif
ically?”
“A couple of miles.”
“That’s all?”
“Maybe five miles if it was really good.”
“Not all the way to L.A.?”
“No.”
Neither of the pens was a transmitter.
Christine said, “Then how’d they find us all the way up here in Santa Barbara?” While he carefully examined her wallet, a penlight, a small bottle of Excedrin, and several other items, he said, “Maybe they have contacts in various police agencies, and maybe they learned about the stolen Caddy turning up in Ventura. Maybe they figured we were headed toward Santa Barbara, so they came up here and started cruising around, just hoping to strike it lucky, just driving from street to street in their vans, monitoring their receivers, until they got close enough to pick up the signal from the transmitter.”
“But we could have gone a hundred other places,” Christine said. “I just don’t see why they would’ve zeroed in on Santa Barbara so quickly.”
“Maybe they weren’t just looking for us here. Maybe they had search teams working in Ventura and Ojai and a dozen other towns.”
“What are the odds of their finding us just by cruising around in a city this size, waiting to pick up our transmitter’s signal?”
“Not good. But it could happen. It must have happened that way. How else would they find us?”
“The witch,” Joey said from the backseat. “She has . . . magic powers . . . witch powers . . . stuff like that.” Then he lapsed into moody silence again, staring out at the rain.
Charlie was almost ready to accept Joey’s childish explanation. The old woman was inhumanly relentless and seemed to possess an uncanny gift for tracking down her prey.
But of course it wasn’t magic. There was a logical explanation. A hidden, miniaturized transmitter made the most sense. But whether it was a transmitter or something else, they must figure it out, apply reason and common sense until they found the answer, or they were never going to lose the old bitch and her crazies.