by Koontz, Dean
Although I couldn’t be certain, I thought I heard someone coming up the stairs behind us.
When Milo and I entered the third room, Penny closed that door as silently as she had closed the others, and she engaged a deadbolt.
If Waxx was prepared to shoot his way inside, a mere deadbolt would not long delay him.
We were in the master bedroom.
Paneled corner to corner in black marble, the wall opposite the bed featured a stunning contemporary fireplace.
On the hearth stood a handsome set of stainless-steel fireplace tools. The poker would have been an acceptable weapon—if Waxx had been armed with a Wiffle bat instead of a gun.
From her purse, Penny fished the ring of keys that Marty and Celine had given her. She selected an electronic key: a plastic wedge about as big as a corn chip.
Elsewhere on the second floor, Waxx kicked open a door.
The face of the fireplace mantel featured a ring motif carved in the marble. The center ring was the largest, and all the others were the same, smaller size.
Penny held the electronic key to the large ring. A code reader beeped, and to the left of the fireplace, a concealed door—one of the panels of marble—swung open on a pivot hinge. A light brightened automatically in the space beyond.
Years ago, during construction, Marty mentioned that the house would have a panic room, but he never said where it would be located. Evidently, he recently walked Penny through it in case she needed to show it to a qualified buyer.
Another crash, elsewhere on the second floor, sounded nearer than the first.
Lassie padded through the secret door as if she knew all about such things and was not in the least surprised or impressed, and Milo followed his dog.
As disrespectful of other people’s property as ever we had known him, Waxx kicked the master-bedroom door, but it held.
“Hurry,” Penny whispered as I stepped through the marble wall.
Beyond lay a windowless shaft and a spiral staircase. The steel landing and treads were covered with textured rubber to facilitate a quiet descent.
In the bedroom, Waxx kicked the door again.
Milo followed the dog down the winding stairs.
As I stepped after Milo and as Penny came onto the landing behind me, I didn’t hear gunfire, although I heard what must have been the consequences of it: the hard crack of splintering wood, the metallic bark of bullet-scored metal. Waxx was shooting out the lock.
In spite of the rubberized treads, a silent descent was not possible. Our passage sent vibrations through the spiral structure, an insectile hum that echoed off the walls.
Glancing back, I saw Penny descending. The secret door was closed tight at the top. I hoped sufficient insulation would prevent the noise we made from being heard in the master bedroom.
But it might not matter if Waxx heard us. He wouldn’t have an electronic key, wouldn’t know where the door was hidden, and could not shoot his way through marble.
Perhaps I should have felt safe. Instead, I felt trapped.
Because he needed both hands to carry the electronic device, Milo could not use the handrail. Watching him descend unsteadily in front of me, I worried that he would fall. Although the treads were sheathed in rubber, the spiral stairs were steep and tightly turned, and bones could easily be broken in a tumble.
“Come on,” I said softly, “let me carry that, Milo.”
“No.”
“I promise not to use it. I won’t turn it on.”
“No.”
“I don’t even know what it is.”
“I remember the vacuum cleaner.”
“That could happen to anyone.”
“Not to just anyone,” he disagreed.
“It wasn’t operator error. The vacuum malfunctioned.”
“Who said?”
“I’m speculating.”
“Lassie had nightmares for months.”
“She’s too sensitive. She needs to laugh at life more.”
“Anyway,” Milo said, “no more stairs.”
At the bottom of the shaft stood a steel door. It could be opened only with the electronic key held close to a key-code reader.
Beyond the door lay the panic room: a fireproof fourteen-foot-square space with a dedicated phone line, a toilet closet, a sink, a bed, and two cases of bottled water.
I snatched up the phone. No dial tone.
“We aren’t staying here,” Penny said. “While he’s searching upstairs, we’re getting all the way out.”
Another steel door offered a second exit from the panic room. When Penny opened it, we were confronted with what appeared to be a blank wall.
This was in fact a tightly fitted pocket door that rolled aside. Beyond lay a utility closet that contained the house’s water softener and filtration system.
Penny led us around the equipment, cracked the door at the front of the closet, reconnoitered the way ahead, and revealed to us the garage that contained the three restored classic pickup trucks and our Explorer.
Milo said, “Cool,” and I echoed his sentiment.
As boy and dog scrambled into the backseat, as I got in the front passenger seat, Penny settled behind the wheel. She handed me the house keys, from which dangled the fob that operated the garage doors.
“Top button, but don’t press it until I tell you. The moment he hears the garage door going up, he’ll come running.”
Milo had buckled himself into his safety harness. I warned him to hold Lassie tight.
Penny released the emergency brake before starting the engine.
She switched on the windshield wipers. As she shifted into reverse, she gave me the go-ahead.
When I thought of Waxx hearing the distant rumble of the roll-up and setting out at a run, that barrier seemed to take forever to get out of our way.
My attention was fixed on the door between the garage and the house, which stood half open, as Waxx had left it. He would come that way, firing at us as he crossed the threshold.
The moment the door cleared the roof of our SUV, Penny peeled rubber backing out of the garage, down the short driveway.
The end of the peninsula had little traffic in the off-season. Penny counted on blind luck as she reversed without hesitation into the street and hung a hard left.
Had I been driving, executing the same maneuver at precisely the same time, we would have struck a car, a skateboarding teenager, someone in a wheelchair, and a nun.
As Penny made that left turn, the luggage in the cargo area rearranged itself with much thumping and rattling, then thumped and rattled some more when she braked to a stop and shifted into drive, but no vehicles collided with us.
Beyond the open roll-up, Shearman Waxx had not appeared in the garage.
The tires spun on the slick pavement, Penny eased up on the accelerator, the Explorer found traction, and we headed up-peninsula.
Just beyond the house, a grape-purple Maserati Quattroporte stood at the curb, engine idling and parking lights on.
As one of the most stylish cars in the world, it would have attracted my attention in any circumstances. I focused on the sleek Maserati now with special intensity because it seemed to me to be as sinister as it was beautiful.
Of course, after the events in the house, everything in view raised my suspicions. Every tree loomed ominously, as if it would collapse upon us. Behind every dark window at every house, a watcher seemed to lurk with malevolent intent. The sky menaced, the gray needles of rain stitched a portentous mood into the day, and the blacktop glistened like a serpent’s scales.
As we passed the Maserati, I looked down at the driver’s-side window from my higher position in the Explorer, and the man behind the wheel gazed up at me.
Heavy protruding jaws, wide crocodilian mouth and thin cruel lips, brutish nose in which the nostrils were as big as nickels, overhanging Frankenstein-monster brow, sunken eyes as pale as those of an albino, eyes that in the somber light of the storm appeared luminous, and overall an
impression of tragic malformation: Here was a face met when opening a door or turning a corner in a fever dream, a face materializing from the shadows in the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic.
We felt safer mobile than stationary. As we traveled a random route through the drenched afternoon, considering our options, my mind returned again and again to the deformed face.
Penny believed that rain streaming down my window and down the window of the Maserati had distorted the countenance. He was a man like any other, perhaps ugly, but not the grotesque individual that I—and my vivid imagination—had conspired with the rain to invent.
Her reasoning made sense, and for a while I elaborated on her theory. With all that we had so recently endured, the world had become an asylum; and when the mind dwelt in constant expectation of one new madness or another, it could conjure menace from the mundane, invoke a phantom assassin from an innocent shadow.
Besides, we had not been followed by the Maserati or by another vehicle. If such a pale-eyed ogre existed, it had no interest in us.
All boys are fascinated by the bizarre and the singular, that which is alone of its kind. Initially, Milo expressed keen interest in what he called the Maserati monster, but soon he retreated to his strangely high-functioning Game Boy and to whatever equations and three-dimensional blueprints currently obsessed him.
Concerned about his emotional condition, Penny and I assured him that we would keep him safe. Remarkably, however, he seemed to have incurred no trauma from being the target of a skilled rifleman.
I loved him without reservation but knew that I might never fully understand him, which was as poignant as any truth could be.
We had more urgent issues to consider than the Maserati driver. Not least was how Shearman Waxx had found us so quickly, mere hours after we had taken shelter in Marty and Celine’s spec house.
I now accepted as fact Milo’s suggestion that Waxx might have known our friends before he wrote his review of One O’Clock Jump. The critic researched us and prepared his assault perhaps even before I finished the novel.
Because of my past writing, I offended him so much, he deemed me to be deserving of not only a savage review but also death.
We were fortunate enough, however, to have many more friends than Marty and Celine. If Waxx planned our murders for months, he’d had sufficient time to learn who we saw socially; but the list was long enough that, once we fled our burning home, he would have needed a few days to discover with which of our friends we had taken refuge.
Instead, he had shown up less than eight hours later, armed and with a plan of attack. This suggested that we revealed our location by some action, requiring little or no detective work on his part.
“Clitherow warned you not to use credit cards,” Penny said.
“And I didn’t.”
“But even if you did—how would Waxx know?”
“Maybe he’s a genius hacker, he can break into the credit-card company’s computer, monitor your activity, track your whereabouts.”
“So he can breach security systems with impunity, he knows how to handle explosives, he’s a good rifleman, and he’s a world-class hacker. What the hell kind of book critic is this guy?”
“One who still needs to improve his syntax.”
Preferring to avoid lonely roads and open spaces, we cruised business and residential streets. Much of Orange County is a megaplex of cities and suburbs, from which the orange groves and strawberry fields long ago disappeared.
“When you cashed a check earlier, what bank branch did you use?”
I said, “It was at the upper end of the peninsula.”
“Could he somehow track that?”
“Wouldn’t hacking a bank’s records be harder than penetrating a credit-card company?”
“Both hard, the bank harder,” Milo confirmed from the backseat.
His opinion sounded suspiciously authoritative, but we didn’t worry that he was hacking bank computers. He had been born not only a prodigy but also with a tao, a sense of right and wrong, so strong that he never told us a lie. He could be evasive but not dishonest.
This is why he dreamed of being director of the FBI instead of attorney general. Considering some of the unsavory characters who had held the latter post, Milo didn’t have the credentials for it.
“John Clitherow told me to abandon our car,” I said. “We were in such a hurry to find a place to lie low, I thought as long as we kept the Explorer out of sight in Marty’s garage …”
“Could there be a tracking device on it?”
“John just said Waxx’s resources seem supernatural and we shouldn’t underestimate his capabilities.”
“You mean we gotta buy a new car?”
“There’ll be a public record of the sale. I don’t know how long it takes for that to show up on DMV records where some supernatural hacker might be able to find it.”
Penny said, “What’re we supposed to do—steal a car?”
“That would be wrong,” Milo advised.
“I was being sarcastic, honey.”
“I hope so,” Milo said.
We rode in silence, and then Penny said, “Milo, I want you to understand something.”
“What?” the boy asked.
“Your dad and I sound a little lost right now. We’re not lost. We’re thinking. We’re not the kind of people who just take crap like this. My family blows up things. If your dad had a family, they’d blow up things, too. Your dad is smart, he’s quick, and he’s brave, which he proved today, proved forever. We’re going to figure this out, and we’re going to strike back, and we’re going to make this Waxx sonofabitch regret he ever stepped into our lives.”
“Vengeance,” Milo said, as he had said to me in his room two days previously, when the review was published.
The word sounded less offensive now than it sounded then.
“Justice,” Penny said. “Call it justice. One way or another, we’re going to crush Shearman Waxx with a big damn load of justice.”
I began to wish I’d spent the past ten years writing thrillers, because then perhaps I would know something useful about tracking devices, electronic surveillance, phone tapping, and techniques of evasion when pursued by psychopathic book critics.
In the storm-dimmed light, most drivers were using headlights, which inspired happier thoughts of the impending Christmas holiday by transforming the falling rain into tinsel streamers, the foaming gutter water into angel hair, and every puddle into collections of silver ornaments waiting to be hung on a tree.
“Hud called me on my cell phone,” I said, “but I immediately called him back on the disposable. That couldn’t have been how Waxx found us because he was already watching us then. He opened fire a couple minutes later.”
“I thought you only had the disposable.”
“No. I’m keeping my phone in case John Clitherow decides to contact me again.”
“What did the Hud call about?”
“Heard our house blew up. Thought you might want to dump Alma, get a new agent.”
“What’s he trying to imply—that Alma blew it up?”
“No. But he seems to feel you should be worried that Alma’s clients are dying on her.”
“Gwyneth Oppenheim?”
“He wants you to think maybe Alma’s good karma is past its expiration date.”
“And now her clients are going to die like flies?”
“Should I invite him to your funeral?” I asked.
“No way, not the Honker,” Milo said from the backseat, and Lassie issued a low growl.
After I pinched my nose and honked, I said, “He thinks a blown-up house could get me on Oprah.”
“Well, that’s a big step up from Dancing with the Stars.”
“It was like three years ago he wanted me to do that, and I still haven’t taken samba lessons. I am such an ungrateful client.”
“Remember that dinner, I’d finished the first bunny book. He spent an hour arguing, Pistachio s
houldn’t be a purple rabbit?”
“He said purple on book jackets doesn’t sell.”
“He urged me to go green for the environmental crowd.”
“And make the rabbit a kitten,” I recalled.
“Pistachio, the green kitten. Except he said Pistachio wasn’t a good name for marketing.”
“Hey, I forgot that part. What name did he suggest?”
“Toot. Toot the green kitten.”
“Toot. I guess that works if you’re marketing narrowly to little kids who’re cocaine addicts.”
With a faint note of disapproval, Milo said, “Are you guys thinking how to get another car?”
“Yes we are, dear,” Penny said. “We’re multitrack thinkers.”
“We already have a slew of ideas,” I said. “We’re carefully evaluating them before we decide what to do.”
Milo said, “I have a pretty good idea.”
Penny and I glanced at each other, and I said, “Yeah? What’s that?”
“Well, but you’re the parents, I’m just a kid. I should defer to you, hear your ideas first.”
I said, “Nobody likes a wiseass, Milo. What’s your idea?”
He had a good one. We decided to pursue his scheme before taking time to evaluate our slew of more complicated ideas.
Penny dropped me off at a discount store and drove continuously through the surrounding neighborhood while I bought three raincoats with hoods and long-handled flashlights. If the Explorer contained a tracking device, we would not appear to have stopped anywhere.
As I waited outside the store with my purchases, the SUV did not quickly appear. Nausea overcame me, and fear. Then Penny returned.
From there we drove to the serviceway behind St. Gaetano’s, the church we attended. Penny stopped, and I hastily pulled our remaining luggage from the back of the SUV and dumped it on the pavement.
She departed, and after trying a back door to the church and finding it locked, I walked around to the front of the building. In my long black raincoat with hood, I suppose I appeared monkish. I climbed the steps and entered by the main door.
As the true twilight replaced the false and as nine-to-fivers began to leave work, no services were under way at St. Gaetano’s. Vespers would begin in half an hour, but at the moment the narthex and the nave were deserted.