Relentless

by Koontz, Dean

  Through the windows, I saw them standing outside, on the back-porch steps, with a third man.

  From the east, out of the fog, the Hummer appeared. It stopped on the lawn near the three men. They boarded the vehicle, and it roared away with them.

  When I switched on the cellar lights, Penny and Milo were at the foot of the stairs, having followed me as I pursued Waxx and Brock.

  “Did you hear?” I asked.

  “Everything until they went into the kitchen and closed the door,” Penny said.

  As they climbed toward me, I said, “When they catch us, they’re going to take us to Eureka, where there’s a plane waiting to fly us south.”

  “Where south?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  In the kitchen, she asked, “You hear anything more about Zazu?”

  “No. I’m not sure I want to hear more. Anyway, they aren’t going to catch us.” I scooped Milo off the floor. “Spooky, I’m going to take you through the dining room, into the living room, to the foyer and up the stairs. Until we’re on the stairs, I want you to keep your eyes closed, all right?”

  “I can handle it, Dad.”

  “Keep your eyes closed.”

  “They’re just dead people.”

  “If you don’t keep your eyes tight shut, I’ll throw away the whatchamacallit thermonuclear saltshaker.”

  “No, don’t. We’re really, really gonna need them, the way things are going.”

  “Then keep your eyes closed.”

  “All right.”

  Penny asked, “What’s upstairs?”

  “I have a thing to do. And so do you, down here. Go through the jacket and pants pockets of Rink and Shucker.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “You’ll like it better than what I’ll be doing upstairs. We need their ID, anything about who they are. And car keys.”

  “I guess I did vow for better or worse.”

  “The fun has only begun.” I gave her a quick kiss. “Meet us in the foyer in three minutes. We’ve got to move fast.”

  She yanked an entire roll of paper towels off a dispenser near the sink, and said to herself, “Plastic trash bags,” as she started pulling open drawers.

  “Eyes closed,” I reminded Milo.

  In my arms, Milo tucked his face against my throat. I put one hand against the back of his head to keep him where he was. If he opened his eyes, I’d feel his lashes moving against my skin.

  Through the dining room, across the living room, around the three bodies, to the stairs, ascending. “All right, scout.”

  He opened his eyes and lifted his head. “What’re we gonna do upstairs?”

  “A Bruce Willis thing.”

  “Die Hard!”

  “A later Bruce Willis thing.”

  I put Milo down in the upstairs hall, and together we located the bedroom in which Truman Walbert had chosen to bunk.

  In the attached bathroom, I rummaged through the vanity drawers in search of his shaving gear. Because of Walbert’s heavy jowls and the deep lines in his hound-dog face, I doubted that he had used a straight razor, and I was relieved to find an electric, which would make this job go quicker.

  Using the sideburn trimmer, I cut a swath from my forehead, across the top of my skull, and down the back.

  Watching snakes of my strange hair spiral to the floor, Milo said, “Extreme.”

  “What if I said you’re next?”

  “Then I’d have to knock you flat.”

  “Totally flat, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t enjoy doing it.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  Milo said, “But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

  When nothing was left but short bristles, I switched from the trimmer to the standard shaver head and buzzed away the stubble.

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  “Slick.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Let’s go.”

  Indicating the hair mounded like dead rats on the floor, Milo said, “Don’t we have to clean up?”

  “We’re desperate fugitives. We live by our own rules.”

  “Cool.”

  At the top of the stairs, I lifted him into my arms and told him to close his eyes until further notice. I carried him down to the foyer.

  In the hallway, around the three cadavers, Penny had laid a carpet of green-plastic trash bags to avoid getting more blood on the soles of her shoes. The scene wasn’t from a conventional TV commercial, but it effectively sold the point that the product was versatile, its many uses limited only by the consumer’s imagination.

  Penny came into the foyer with a smaller white-plastic trash bag containing what she had harvested from the dead.

  I thought of my uncle Tray’s methamphetamine-amped buddies gathering wallets and purses from the many victims in Uncle Ewen’s farmhouse twenty-eight years earlier, and I wondered at the complex and often eerie patterns evident in every life.

  Seeing the new me, Penny said with dismay, “Oh, no. Where’s your wonderful weird thatch?”

  “Crawling around on the bathroom floor. Turns out, it has a life of its own, tried to attack us. Car keys?”

  She fished them out of the white trash bag.

  I said, “You drive us back to pick up Lassie while I make a phone call.”

  Outside, when I got a closer look at the dull-green sedan in which Rink and Shucker had arrived, I said, “Looks like standard government-issued wheels.”

  A three-inch-square sticker had been applied to the inside of the lower left-hand corner of the windshield, facing out to be read by security scanners. At the bottom were a number and data in the form of a bar code.

  The primary element of the overall-gray sticker was a white circle that enclosed a symbol: three muscular red arms radiating from the center, joined at the shoulder and forming a kind of wheel, each arm bent at the elbow, each hand fisted.

  “It’s a triskelion,” Penny said. “I’d guess the fists symbolize power, red endorses violence, and the wheel form promises unstoppable momentum.”

  “So you think they don’t work for the Bureau of Compassionate Day Care.”

  “They might.”

  I put Milo in the backseat and got in the front with Penny as she started the engine. “We have to abandon the Mountaineer. Besides Lassie, is there anything in it we’ve absolutely got to have?”

  “One suitcase,” she said. “I can grab it in ten seconds.”

  “Milo?” I asked.

  “That sack of special stuff Grimpa got me. I haven’t used most of it yet.”

  “What about the bread-box thing you wouldn’t let me carry out of the house on the peninsula?”

  “Oh, yeah. That for sure. That is monumentally crucial.”

  “Did I say you can open your eyes now?”

  “I figured it out back on the porch.”

  “My little Einstein.”

  “‘Weird little Einstein,’ he called me,” Milo remembered. “He wants to know weird, he should look in a mirror.”

  As Penny followed the driveway toward the state road, I keyed in Vivian Norby’s disposable-cell number on my disposable cell and prayed she would pick up.

  Since only I possessed her new number, Vivian answered with, “Cubby?”

  “Viv, I’m so sorry about this, but the bad guys are going to have your Mountaineer soon.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked worriedly.

  “I’m bald, but otherwise we’re all fine.”

  “You remember I told you I smelled something funny about all this and that it was a stink I smelled before somewhere, sometime?”

  “Yes, I do. I remember the stink conversation.”

  “Well, like twenty-five years ago, Wilfred worked for this police chief who took this homicide case away from him with a lame excuse.”

  Wilfred Norby was Vivian’s deceased husband, the ex-marine and detective. The name Wilfred comes from two Old English words, willa and frith, which together
mean “desire for peace.”

  “Turned out,” Vivian continued, “the chief and a half dozen of his top staff were corrupt. They were doing business with a drug gang that committed the homicide Wilfred got pulled from. The stink is corruption in high places, Cubby. This isn’t just some wingnut on your case. This is something bigger.”

  “We’re on the same page, Viv. Listen, as soon as the bad guys have the Mountaineer, they’ll be coming to you, and when they find out you’re Milo’s sitter, they’ll know you gave it to us.”

  “Just let them try to get anything out of me.”

  “I don’t want them to try. Viv, they were on us so fast in Smokeville, all that research you’ve been doing into Henry Casas and other artists must have triggered some alarm built into one website or another.”

  “I don’t like these sonsofbitches,” she said.

  “They’re not on my Christmas list, either. My point is, they might already figure you’re helping us, they might show up there at any time.”

  “This is so invigorating,” Vivian said.

  “Viv, I am very sorry, but I think you better get out of there right away. Take whatever things you’re most sentimental about, you’d hate to lose. Go to your bank, withdraw as much cash as you can, and be ready to make a big change.”

  “I wish Wilfred could be here for this.”

  “Go to the Boom Demolition office in Anaheim. The secretary’s name is Golda Chenetta, she looks like Judi Dench. Tell her you need to talk to Grimbald, tell Grim I said to take you to the stronghold.”

  “What stronghold?”

  “He’ll know. Viv, hear me clear now. Time is of the essence.”

  “It always is. I’m already in motion. Kiss Prince Milo for me,” she said, and terminated the call.

  Penny drove off the paved route, into the lay-by where we had left the Mountaineer, which was still shrouded in mist.

  “What if they’re waiting here for us?” she suddenly worried.

  “Then we’re finished.”

  As if it were a time machine returning from an earlier century, fading from the rational past into the insane present, the Mercury Mountaineer materialized out of the fog. No one from the Bureau of Compassionate Day Care lurked around the vehicle.

  Penny killed the sedan headlights but left the engine running. “What exactly are you intending to do?”

  “Let’s get what we need from the Mountaineer, and then I’ll fill you in.”

  Lassie was ecstatic to see us. She even favored me with a nuzzle equal to that she gave Milo and Penny. I suspected she wanted to lick my bald head.

  Penny intended to put the suitcase in the trunk, but I stopped her. “Everything on the floor in front of the backseat.”

  When we transferred what little we were keeping from the SUV, we stood at the sedan while I sorted onto the hood those items that Penny had taken from Rink and Shucker.

  In their wallets, I found each man had a California driver’s license in his name. But each possessed a second driver’s license, also with his photo, Rink’s in the name Aldous Lipman, Shucker’s in the name Fraser Parson.

  “Nothing suspicious about that,” I said.

  “No, no, nothing. The poor men suffer from multiple-personality syndrome,” said Penny.

  Standing between us, Milo said, “Let me see,” and I passed the four licenses down to him. “When I’m director of the FBI, these are the kind of guys who’re gonna learn what justice means.”

  The two men carried laminated cards that featured only their photos, their names, and a triskelion that matched the one on the windshield sticker. I put Rink’s in my shirt pocket.

  Each of them also had a thin leather wallet, a simple one-fold that held a badge and a laminated credential, with photo, identifying him as an agent of the National Security Agency.

  “You think that’s real?” Penny asked.

  “I’m not sure anything’s what it appears to be anymore except you, me, and Milo.”

  “And Lassie,” Milo said.

  “She appears to be a dog, and she is,” I acknowledged. “But sometimes I’m not sure a dog is all she is.”

  The becalmed sea of fog suddenly began to move, not because a breeze had sprung up, but because the thermal balance between land and sea had tipped in the opposite direction than it had tipped the previous twilight, when I had been walking from Smokeville Pizzeria to our cottage at the motor court.

  The fog flowed from the evergreen forest, across the lay-by, pulled westward by a new tide. As it gained speed, it began again to look more like smoke than like mist. The entire world seemed to be smoldering, evidence of an unseen fire raging just below the surface of things.

  “I think the fog helps us,” I said. “So we better move before the day clears. Remember—Waxx told Brock that any car not obviously one of theirs is going to be stopped, not just at the roadblocks but wherever they encounter it.”

  She said, “But we’ve got one of their sedans, and the triskelion is on the windshield.”

  “They’re looking for Cullen Greenwich, the writer, but he’s got strange hair, and I don’t have any hair at all. They’re looking for a man, woman, and child traveling together, but I’m a man alone.”

  “Alone?” Penny said. “Where are the woman and child?”

  “And the dog?” Milo added.

  “You’ll be riding in the trunk,” I said. “Won’t that be fun?”

  From the lay-by where we abandoned the Mountaineer, I turned south, away from the Landulf house and Smokeville.

  Within moments, a sign announced TITUS SPRINGS—4 MILES. Waxx had told Brock that the southern roadblock was established this side of Titus Springs.

  I traveled less than a quarter of a mile before I began to miss Penny, Milo, and Lassie. I wished that somebody else would have been available to drive, so I could be in the trunk with my family.

  The road rose and fell through geography that might have struck me as grand and harmonious at another time but that seemed portentous now, and as full of pending violence as missiles in their launchers. Every unusual shadow was an augury to be interpreted, the westward-racing fog an omen of fast-approaching chaos, the suffocated morning light a presentiment of mortality. Cedars and hemlocks and pines stood on both sides of the pavement, like ranked armies waiting only for a trumpet blast to signal the start of an epic engagement.

  A low growl behind me instantly—and irrationally—brought to mind the deformed face of the man in Henry Casas’s painting, but when I glanced over my shoulder with alarm, I saw only our Lassie on the backseat.

  I smiled, said “Good girl,” and returned my attention to the roadway before realizing that Lassie in the backseat was no less astonishing than if the Maserati monster had been there.

  Only a couple of minutes earlier, I had lifted the dog into the trunk of the sedan. I had closed the lid on her.

  Certain that I must have imagined her impossible liberation, I glanced back once more. She grinned at me.

  My confidence in the reliability of my senses was so shaken that when, five seconds later, I decided to check on her presence one more time, I tilted down the rearview mirror with the expectation that a figment of my imagination would cast no reflection. But she regarded me with cocked-head insouciance.

  She had not jumped out of the trunk before the lid slammed. I would stake a fortune on that wager.

  Behind me, Lassie again issued a long, low growl.

  Having been saved by something like a miracle when I was six years old, I decided two things: first, that a refusal to accept this phenomenon was not merely healthy self-doubt but was instead cynical skepticism that was unworthy of me; second, that young Milo had some explaining to do.

  The land was repaying its debt of fog to the sea with such dispatch that already I could see much farther than when I had left the lay-by.

  Downhill, on the left, headlights stabbed across the roadway and then arced toward me as an SUV appeared between trees and turned onto the pavement
from a narrow dirt road, heading north. As the vehicle approached, I saw that it was an Explorer.

  Clearly, the driver was interested in me. As he came uphill, he rode closer and closer to the center line until he had edged a few inches into my lane.

  Suspecting that Waxx’s protocols for his current operation required agents to acknowledge one another when they crossed paths, I remained close to the center line, reduced speed, and rolled down the window in the driver’s door.

  In the lower corner of the windshield, on the driver’s side of the Explorer, was a square decal of a size suspiciously like that on the windshield of my sedan, but I could not at first discern what it might be. As we closed on each other, however, I recognized the red triskelion, three fisted arms forming a wheel.

  His window was open, too, and as we coasted past each other, the driver gave me a thumbs-up sign with his left hand.

  He had a blocky head suitable for breaking boards in a martial-arts exhibition, the bulging jaws of someone who might pull nails out of lumber with his teeth, the nose of a pugilist who had let down his guard too often, and the eyes of a pit viper. The guy riding shotgun was not nearly so good-looking.

  After the briefest hesitation, I returned the driver’s thumbs-up sign with my left hand, and as we glided past each other, I sighed with relief, eased down on the accelerator, and rolled up my window.

  In my side mirror, I thought I saw the Explorer come to a halt in the middle of the road.

  After readjusting my rearview mirror to capture the back window, I confirmed that Blockhead had brought his vehicle to a full stop. He hung a left turn and fell in behind me.

  Something about me had made them suspicious. Perhaps I was not supposed to respond to his thumbs-up with a thumbs-up of my own, but was instead supposed to make the okay sign or wiggle my pinkie, or thrust my middle finger at him.

  I could try my best not to be paralyzed by the viciousness of these evil people-of-the-red-arms, and I could strive to accommodate myself to their singular lunacy, but it just wasn’t right that they also expected me to play their game by some book of boy’s-club rules that included code signs, countersigns, and secret handshakes.