Dragonfly

by Dean R. Koontz

  “You know.”

  “Look, mister, so far as I know you're a cop. And I ain't going to proposition no cop, no way.”

  “Sex,” he said.

  “Not interested,” she said, turning away from the window.

  “Hey! What about your friend?” He nodded at the girl behind her.

  “I'll ask her.”

  The other girl came to the window. She was a petite brunette, in her late teens or early twenties. She was wearing tight jeans and a long-sleeved white sweater and a short buckskin jacket. “Yeah?”

  “How much?”

  “You just did that routine with Velma.”

  “Okay, okay.” Embarrassed, he told her what he wanted.

  She appraised the car and said, “Seventy bucks.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have a motel room, or what?”

  “I thought maybe we could use your place,” he said.

  “That's ten extra.”

  “Okay.”

  “Eighty — in advance.”

  “Sure.”

  She went over to the blonde, and they talked for almost a minute. Then she came back, got in the car, and gave him her address.

  She had three rooms and a bath on the fourth floor of a thirty-year-old apartment house. There was a new wall-to-wall carpet in every room, including the kitchen; but she didn't have much furniture. What pieces she did have were expensive and in good taste.

  In the bedroom, when they had both undressed, he said, “I'll stand up. You get on your knees.”

  “Whatever makes you happy.” She got down before him and took his penis in one hand.

  Before she could bring it to her lips, he chopped a knee into her chin and knocked her backward. As she fell he tried to imagine that she was not a hooker, that she was McAlister, that he was beating McAlister. He kicked her alongside the head and laughed when her eyes rolled back. He imagined that he was kicking McAlister and David Canning and the President and everyone else who had ever gotten the best of him or held authority over him. He even imagined that he was kicking A. W. West — and that made him feel best of all. He stopped kicking her and stood over her, gasping for breath. Then he dropped to his knees beside her and touched the bloody froth at her nostrils. Sighing contentedly, he began to use his fists.

  TWO

  TOKYO: FRIDAY, 3:15 P.M.

  Someone knocked gently on the door, three times.

  Canning stood up. He put one hand under his coat and touched the butt of the pistol in his shoulder holster.

  The knocking came again, somewhat louder and more insistent than it had been the first tune.

  Keeping one hand inside his jacket, he turned away from the door which opened on the hotel corridor. The knocking came from the other door, the one that connected to the adjoining room. He walked over to it and stood against the wall. When the knocking sounded a third time, quite loud now, he said, “Who is it?”

  “Tanaka.” The voice was rather soft and high-pitched, just as McAlister had described it.

  That didn't mean it was Tanaka.

  It could be anyone.

  It could even be the man who had followed him from the airport, the man who had watched him board the elevator.

  “Are you there?”

  “I'm here.”

  “Open up.”

  Whether or not it was Tanaka, he couldn't just stand here and wait for something to happen; he had to make it happen.

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  He drew his pistol and stepped to one side of the door. He pushed the chair out from under the knob and out of the way. Then he twisted the brass key, pulled the door open, stepped past it, and shoved the silenced barrel of the Colt against the trim belly of a strikingly lovely young Japanese woman.

  “I'm so happy to meet you, too,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A gun in the stomach is so much more interesting than a plain old handshake.”

  “Huh?”

  “A saying of Confucius.”

  He stared at her.

  “Ah, and you're so articulate!”

  He blinked. “Who are you?”

  “Lee Ann Tanaka. Or would you like me to be someone else?”

  “But…”

  “Yes?”

  He looked at her face carefully and saw that she fit the description that McAlister had given him. A tiny scar marked the left corner of her upper lip — although it was only as wide as a hair and half an inch long, certainly not a souvenir of a fight to the death with broken bottles. High on her left cheek there was a tiny black beauty mark: the “mole” for which McAlister had advised him to look. Finally, her hair was full, rich, and as black as raven wings. McAlister's only sin was one of omission.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Oh, then you were worried about my heart.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My heart.”

  He shook his head.

  She said, “Fear is good for the heart. Speeds it up. Gives the heart muscles much-needed exercise. Cleans out the system. How nice of you to be worried about my heart, Mr. Canning.”

  He put the pistol back in his holster. '"I'm sorry.”

  “But my heart needed the exercise!” she said.

  “I'm sorry for almost shooting you.”

  “Was it that close?”

  “Close enough.”

  She put one hand to her breast. “Now you're giving my heart too damned much exercise.” She stepped back a pace and said, “Do you have any luggage?”

  “Two pieces.”

  “Bring it.”

  He fetched the suitcases and followed her into the adjoining room. It was a large, airy bedchamber decorated with imitations of old Japanese rice-paper water-colors and with genuine eighteenth-century Japanese furniture.

  “This won't be good enough,” he said.

  In the middle of the room she stopped and turned to look back at him. “What won't be good enough?”

  “Someone will be watching the door to my room.”

  “Right you are, Mr. Canning. You're under surveillance.”

  “If I don't come out and make a target of myself, sooner than later there are some goons who'll break in there and try to get me.”

  “Break right into your room?”

  “One way or the other.”

  “What is Japan coming to? It's as bad here as in the States.”

  “And if I'm not in my room,” Canning said, “they'll know that I didn't go out the front door. And they'll know I couldn't have climbed out onto the window ledge with two heavy suitcases. So the first place they'll look is in here.”

  She clapped her hands. “Marvelous!”

  “What's marvelous?”

  “Your magnificent exhibition of deductive reasoning,” she said brightly. She gave him a big, very pretty smile.

  He felt as if he had stepped into a whirlwind. He didn't quite know how to deal with her, and he couldn't understand why McAlister had put him in the hands of a woman, any woman, and especially this woman. “Look, Miss Tanaka, when these men don't find me next door, they'll simply come over here. They'll find me here. And they'll shoot me.”

  “Ah, I have confidence in you,” she said. “You're much too fast on the draw for them.” She rubbed her stomach where he'd held the gun on her.

  “Miss Tanaka—”

  “They won't shoot you,” she said. “Because you won't be here.” She turned and walked toward what he thought was the bathroom door. Over her shoulder she said, “Come along.”

  “Where to?”

  “You'll see.”

  He followed her out of the bedroom onto a narrow railed deck that overlooked the first-floor living room of a two-floor suite. A bathroom and another bedroom opened onto the deck, and a carpeted spiral staircase wound down to one corner of the living room. A huge crystal chandelier hung from the roof of the gallery.

  Downstairs, she t
urned to him and said, “They will not be expecting you to enter a room on one floor and immediately come out of a room on the floor below.”

  “I believe you've got something,” he said.

  “Charm,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Come along.”

  At the front door of the suite, she reached for the brass knob, then let go of it, turned, and put her back to the door. She held one finger beside her lips. “Sssshh!”

  He put down his suitcases and listened to the voices in the hotel corridor.

  “Don't go for your gun,” she said, grinning at him. “It's just the bellhop moving new guests into the room across the hall. Killing them might be exciting, but it would accomplish nothing.” She closed her eyes and listened to the voices beyond the door.

  He was standing no more than two feet away from her, and he did not close his eyes. For the first time since he'd seen her upstairs, he had an opportunity to study her face, to look beyond the hair-line scar on her upper lip and the beauty mark on her left cheek. Her forehead was broad and seamless. Her eyebrows were two natural black crescents, and her eyes were deeply set for an oriental face. She had a pert nose, very straight along the bridge, delicate nostrils; and her breathing was as quiet as the flight of a moth. With her high perfect cheekbones, aristocratic haughtiness, and shockingly ripe mouth, she might have been one of those high-priced fashion models who periodically took Manhattan, Paris, and London by storm. Her flawless complexion was the shade of aged book paper, and the sight of it somehow made him feel all warm and loose inside.

  And what of the body that went with a face like that? he thought.

  He looked down at the rest of her. But she was wearing a long belted trenchcoat that concealed everything except the crudely defined thrust of her breasts and the tininess of her waist. When he looked up again, he found that she was watching him.

  Her eyes were large and clear. The irises were as black as her hair. They fixed on his eyes and seemed to bore straight through him, pinning him like an insect to a velvet specimen tray.

  He blinked.

  She didn't blink.

  Suddenly his heart was beating so hard that he could hear it. His mouth was dry. He wanted to sit down somewhere with a drink and knit his nerves together again.

  “Now,” she said.

  “Now what?”

  “Time to go.”

  “Oh,” he said quickly.

  She turned away from him and opened the door. She leaned out, looked left and right, then went into the hall.

  Picking up his suitcases, he followed her. He waited while she locked the suite, and then he trailed her down the corridor and through a brightly marked door into a concrete stairwell.

  “We don't want to go out through the lobby,” she said. “They think you're in your room, and they won't be expecting you down there — but one of them might be lurking about just the same. I have a rented car parked near the hotel's side entrance.”

  Their footsteps echoed flatly off the concrete walls.

  At every landing Canning expected to see a man with a gun. But there was no one on the stairs.

  Once he had to call to stop to catch his breath. His shoulders ached from the weight of the bags; he rubbed the back of his neck and wished he were sitting in a hot bath.

  “Would you like me to take one of those?” she asked, pointing at the suitcases.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I'm stronger than I look.”

  “That's what McAlister told me.”

  She grinned again. She had fine, brilliantly white teeth. “What else did he say about me?”

  “Well, he said that the scar on your upper lip came from a fight you were in.”

  “Oh? A fight?”

  “Some mean bastard carved you with a broken bottle.”

  Laughing lightly, she turned and went down the stairs, two at a time. She was almost skipping.

  He plodded.

  Outside, she helped him put his suitcases in a sparkling white Subaru, then went around and got in behind the wheel. When she drove away from the curb, the tires smoked and squealed, and Canning was pressed back into his seat.

  He turned around and looked out the rear window. But it was soon evident that they had not been spotted and followed by any of The Committee's agents.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, facing front again.

  “Hotel New Otani.”

  “Where's that?”

  “Not far.”

  To Canning's way of thinking, even one block was too far. The frenzied Tokyo traffic was not like anything he had seen before — or like anything he wanted to see again. There did not appear to be any formal lanes along which traffic could flow in an orderly manner; instead, strings of automobiles and trucks and buses crisscrossed one another, weaved and tangled with insane complexity. And the motorbikes, of course, zipped in and out between the larger vehicles, as if their operators had never been told about pain and death.

  Initially, Canning felt that Lee Ann Tanaka drove like a certifiable maniac. She swung from one informal “lane” of cars into another without looking to see what was coming up behind her; and other cars' brakes barked sharply in her wake. Repeatedly, she stopped so suddenly and forcefully that Canning felt as if he were being cut in half by his seatbelt. She accelerated when there was absolutely nowhere to go, somehow squeezed in between trucks and buses that appeared to be riding bumper-to-bumper, gave a score of pedestrians intimations of mortality, and used the car's horn as if she thought this was New Year's Eve.

  Gradually, however, Canning realized that she knew precisely what she was doing. She smiled continually. She did not appear to be frightened by the dozens of near-collisions — as if she knew from experience the difference between destruction and a millimeter. Evidently she was as at home in the streets of Tokyo as he was in his own living room.

  He said, “How long does it take to become a carefree driver in this traffic?”

  She shrugged. “I don't know.”

  “Well, how long have you been driving here?”

  “Since the day before yesterday.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  She glanced sideways at him. “I'm an American,” she said somewhat sharply. “I was born and raised an American. I'm as American as you are. I was never in Japan in my life — until the day before yesterday.”

  “Oh, God,” he said miserably.

  “I flew in from San Francisco. Took a written test and an eye exam at the licensing bureau's airport office. Rented this car and been winging it ever since.” As she spoke she swerved out of her lane, cut off a city bus and beat it through the intersection under a changing light.

  “I thought you'd driven here all your life.”

  She cornered hard, nearly running down several pedestrians who had edged out from the sidewalk. “Thanks for the compliment! It's really not as awful as it looks from the passenger's seat.”

  “I'll bet.”

  “The only time it gets hairy is around nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. Just like in any American city. And you know what the Japanese call the peak traffic hours?”

  “I couldn't guess.”

  “Rushawa.”

  “Rush hour?”

  She spelled it for him, switching lanes twice between the first and the final letters.

  He smiled appreciatively. “But since you haven't driven here all your life — do you think you could slow down?”

  She whipped the car to the right, stood on the brakes, stopped the car on a hundred-yen coin, and switched off the engine.

  Lifting his head from his knees, Canning said, “Jesus! I only asked you to slow down—”

  “We're here,” she said brightly.

  “What?”

  “The Hotel New Otani.”

  Dazed, he glanced up just as the uniformed doorman opened the door of the Subaru. The man leaned in, smiled at Canning, offered a hand to help him out of the low-slung little car, and said, “Kon
nichiwa, sir!”

  Afternoon, yes, Canning thought. But was it good? And could it be the same afternoon that he had got off a plane from Honolulu? So much seemed to have happened in the frenetic company of Miss Tanaka. Days seemed to have passed. “Konnichiwa yourself,” he said.

  As they followed the doorman and Canning's luggage into the hotel, Lee Ann took his arm and said, “We don't have to register. I've done that already. We're traveling as Mr. and Mrs. J. Okrow. I figure that once The Committee's agents know they've lost you at the Imperial, they'll start checking other hotels — but not for married couples. And if they manage to get their hands on the hotel register — well, the name Okrow sounds Western to the Japanese desk clerk at the Otani, but it probably will sound Japanese to most Westerners.”

  “It does to me.”

  “You see!”

  “You think of everything,” he said, genuine admiration in his voice.

  “I try to,” she said, beaming up at him and squeezing his arm in a fine imitation of wifely pleasure and devotion.”

  The room she had booked for them was attractive and spacious. Two double beds dressed in white chenille and boasting dark caned headboards were set against one wall. A matching caned nightstand stood between the beds and held a twin-necked lamp, a telephone, and menus from the hotel's restaurants. On the other side of the room, there was a combination desk-dresser with a wall mirror above it. There was also a color television set on its own wheeled cart. Two Danish-style armchairs stood on opposite sides of a small round coffee table. The wallpaper was pebble-textured and cream-colored, except for the wall opposite the windows: that was decorated with an abstract brown and green and white mural of mountains and bamboo fields. In the bathroom — with separate tub and shower stall, sun lamps, and bidet — there was a full bottle of whiskey and another of vodka standing on the makeup counter. A small refrigerator hummed to itself in the niche under the sink, and it was stocked with a variety of soft drinks.

  Taking off his jacket, Canning said, “You must think I'm a real boozer.”

  “I like to drink, myself.”

  “The agency never bought me whiskey before.”

  “You haven't been playing it right.” She sat down in one of the armchairs and folded her hands in her lap. “You like the room?”