by Dean Koontz
“Your mom must be very pretty. I mean, well, ’cause you are.”
“I have some pictures of her. She looked way better than me.”
The wrong kind of chill passed through Joe, and he felt that he had been stupid and thoughtless. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother, too. She died of cancer when I was two.”
“Mine’s still out there somewhere, living the good life. She found a rich guy who didn’t want kids as much as she didn’t, and they went off and didn’t have any together.” Portia’s flippancy seemed calculated to deny her pain. “When I was six, she assured me I’d be better off without her, and she went down the front walk with two suitcases and got in a white Mercedes and was driven away by a man I never saw. She sure was right, ’cause when she left, and it was just Dad and me, everything was way better.”
Joe considered his words before letting loose of them. “My grandma Dulcie says we know we’re finally getting a little wisdom when we’re able to see that even loss can be beautiful if it makes us love more the things we haven’t lost.”
After a silence, she said, “What did you mean earlier when you said ‘a two-headed-calf thing’?”
“Whatever happened to me, ricocheting around like that, it won’t happen again. Strange things happen all the time, but they don’t repeat. Like, there was a rain of frogs in this town in Pennsylvania in 1948, but not since. In 1922, in Chico, California, a lot of stones fell from the sky slowly, as if gravity had little effect on them. But never again. Two-headed calves are born, but rarely.”
“I think it’ll happen again,” she said.
“Nope. It’s just a strange little story to tell the great-grandkids when I’m eighty.”
“Great-grandkids? Are you married?”
“No, of course not. I’m only in my first year of college.”
“College, huh? I’m not going to rack up humongous debt just to be twenty-two without a job instead of eighteen without a job.”
“So what’re you doing instead?”
She winked. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”
The prospect of getting to know each other better pleased Joe, and he smiled even more winsomely than usual.
She said, “Okay, Ricochet Joe, take your mental hands off my imagined body until I give you permission to dream.”
“That’s not what I was thinking about.”
“Yeah, right. Don’t try to tell me you were working on the plot of your great American novel.”
4
ANOTHER TWO-HEADED CALF
When they stepped out of the malt shop, Joe was struck by the beauty of the day. Like sheep soon to be sheared, small woolly clouds grazed the sky. The jacarandas along the street were in early bloom, graced with fairy architectures of dazzling blue blossoms. Sunshine passed through the breeze-quivered branches to gild the cobblestone sidewalk with an intricate lacework of shadow and light.
The smallest details drawn by Nature’s hand had never before compelled his notice so powerfully as they did now. Although Joe was thought by everyone to be most pleasantly ordinary, and he shared that assessment of himself, he was certainly not slow witted, and he knew that the world had abruptly become more vivid for him because Portia Montclair had come into his life.
He wondered if his coming into Portia’s life had made the world more vivid for her. He decided not.
They had left their litter sticks propped against a tree, and no one had taken them to run off and do impromptu trash collection.
Outside the malt shop stood a four-foot-high duck molded from resin and painted. He had white feathers, yellow bill and feet, and he wore a gold jacket as well as a gold yachting cap on which was emblazoned the number seven. This statue might have been mystifying if the business in front of which it stood had not been named the Lucky Duck Malt Shop.
Among longtime residents of Little City, it was a tradition to pat the duck’s head for luck. When Joe did this out of habit, almost without thinking, he said, “Trash can!” Unlike before, he didn’t cry out the words, but whispered them. He sprinted south without retrieving his litter stick or asking Portia if they might get together again so that he could watch her drink an ice-cream soda.
A block later, he found himself at a street-corner trash can with a swing-top lid. When he put his fingers to the lid, which his unknown quarry must have touched when throwing something away, he heard himself whisper, “Button,” whereupon he pivoted, turned the corner, and hurried east another block, where he pressed the button on the crosswalk control.
He failed to wait for DON’T WALK to turn to WALK but murmured, “Blue door!”—and again dashed pell-mell into busy traffic, to the consternation of a new crop of motorists, who angrily serenaded him.
By now, he had gone some distance from the quaint touristy area into a semiquaint commercial neighborhood with such businesses as barrooms and designer-knockoff clothing shops and nightclubs and palm readers and shoe stores. There were districts of Little City that were not even semiquaint, of course, because quaint was expensive to build and could be tiresome in excess, though no area of Thomas Little’s namesake burg was downright blighted or sleazy.
In search of the blue door, Joe flung himself into an alleyway and sprinted past Dumpsters and came to a peacock-blue door that in spite of its cheerful color looked like trouble. He knew where he was: at the back entrance to Patsy’s Pool Hall. He preferred not to open the door, but he was no more in control of himself than was a lemming in a fever of flight, though Joe was alone, whereas lemmings threw themselves off cliffs by the hundreds.
When he seized the handle of the door, he whispered, “Lousy stinkin’ bastards!” and pulled the door open and stepped inside and stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to quiet himself.
The dimly lighted hallway smelled as if pastrami sandwiches had recently been heated in a microwave. Bathrooms and storerooms to each side. Pool hall directly ahead through another blue door. Music coming from there, voices, the clatter of billiard balls colliding.
If to any extent Joe labored under the illusion that he had been drawn there to play billiards, he was disabused of it when he opened a fire door to his immediate right and proceeded down a set of stairs to the basement. These were not even semiquaint stairs. They were neither adequately lighted nor scrupulously clean. At the bottom lay a foyer with a concrete floor and concrete walls. The foyer offered three doors, none of them blue.
Joe opened the door directly ahead of him. He entered what he realized must be the office of Patsy O’Day, because it featured a large commander-of-the-empire desk on which a triangular wood frame held a brass plaque engraved with the name PATSY O’DAY, because on the walls were large framed paintings of dogs playing pool, and because Patsy himself was handcuffed to a drainpipe in one corner.
The owner of the pool hall didn’t look good. Even on his best days, Patsy O’Day wasn’t a picture of health. He stood about five eight and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. He looked like a small sausage casing into which an excess of sausage had been stuffed. He was walking cholesterol, a heart attack in black Bally loafers and sharkskin pants and a lemon-yellow polo shirt, one double-decker cheeseburger away from the blockage of both carotid arteries. On this occasion, he looked worse than usual because he had one black eye and was bleeding from his nose.
Just as Joe came through the door, O’Day said with some fear and not a little bitterness, “You lousy stinkin’ bastards!”
He directed this condemnation at two men who looked as bad as O’Day, but bad in a different way from him. One of them was a tall, slab-faced, Karloffian figure with a beetling forehead and dead eyes and a thick white scar from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.
The other was whippet-thin, with a long, pointed face and a mouth like a slash and crooked, yellow teeth that he
bared in a sneer when he saw Joe; he issued a thin hiss like a ferret announcing to a mouse that it would be dinner.
Only at that moment did Joe realize he lacked even a litter stick with which to defend himself.
The men who had been beating Patsy O’Day turned their attention to the intruder. The big one with the dead eyes cracked open a wide mouth in what might have been a smile. Unlike his associate, he had great teeth—perfectly straight, as shiny white as toilet porcelain.
“You want some trouble?” the thin man asked Joe. “You come in here lookin’ for some?”
“No, thank you,” Joe said.
“Look what we have here, Hocker. This young man wants trouble.”
“We got plenty left for you,” said Hocker, the one who appeared to have been stitched together from several murderers and brought to life by a lightning bolt.
When it came to crafting a witty reply or even a believable threat, Joe would have benefited from having a team of writers to call upon for inspiration. In the urgency of his situation, his own skills as a would-be novelist, such as they were, failed him. He said, “Better get out while you can—the police are coming.”
“You called them, did you?” the ferret asked.
“Yes. They’ll be here any second.”
“How come I don’t hear no sirens?”
“They’re coming, all right,” Joe said, and he wondered if there could be a more incompetent liar in all of Little City.
Bearing his sledgehammer brow and baring his piano-key teeth, Hocker took a step toward Joe.
Springing through the open office door, Portia Montclair said, “Heads up, Ricochet!”
She had both of the litter sticks, and she tossed one to Joe, which he almost fumbled but didn’t.
The man who was as thin as a paper cut made a vile sound, maybe a laugh, and began to draw something from under his coat.
Hocker reached out, grabbed the end of Portia’s litter stick, nail and all, tore it from her grasp, threw it across the room. To his companion, he said, “She’s nice meat, Jagget.”
“Tasty,” Jagget agreed.
Deducing that the thin man must be drawing a firearm from under his sport coat, Joe lunged forward, trying to stick the gun hand the way he’d stuck the knife hand of the purse snatcher. Jagget dodged. His big companion sidestepped and seized Joe’s stick and wrenched it out of his hand and threw it after the first.
In eighteen years of pleasant, uneventful life, Joe had never imagined himself to have the capacity to be a hero, never claimed to possess great courage. Now it seemed unfair that some supernatural force—or whatever it might be—had propelled him headlong into this mess without giving him a magic cudgel or a cloak of invisibility, or at least enough courage to stop his legs from trembling.
Better than cudgel or cloak, as it turned out, was the little canister of Sabre 5.0 high-concentrate pepper spray that Portia drew from a jacket pocket. As Joe would learn, it was the spray used by most police officers, and it was a defense that her father had required her to carry since she had been twelve. She squirted Hocker in the eyes and nose, hosed Jagget, temporarily blinding both men and making it hard for them to get their breath when they inhaled what the label of the canister described as “major capsaicinoids.”
The giant rubbed his eyes with his hands, wished he hadn’t, issued a wheezy series of curses as the burn doubled, staggered backward, collided with the desk, and fell to the floor.
Streaming tears, a long string of snot depending from his narrow nostrils, gasping for breath, Jagget proved to be such a bad sport that he blindly opened fire with the pistol he’d drawn from a shoulder holster.
Portia dropped to the floor. Joe would have dropped, too, if he hadn’t realized that Jagget was disoriented and shooting high. He crouched, went in fast, and drove the man hard against the desk. The impact rocked the shooter and ripped a scream of pain out of him, and he dropped the pistol.
Joe grabbed the gun and stepped back as Hocker started to get up. He wasn’t going to shoot the guy. He didn’t feel capable of that. Therefore, it was good that Portia booted the brute between the legs. She must have kicked with exquisite aim, because between his frantic inhalations, Hocker’s curses rose from bass to soprano.
“The key,” Patsy O’Day said. “On the desk. The handcuff key.”
Wary of the men on the floor, Joe got the key and unlocked the cuff that secured the pool-hall owner to the drainpipe.
“Better be careful with that,” O’Day said, taking the pistol from Joe. “Still five rounds in it.”
Hocker and Jagget performed a duet of misery. Joe realized how little would’ve had to go wrong for him and Portia to be lying dead on the floor.
To Patsy O’Day, Portia said, “This sucks.”
“They didn’t get anything from me.”
“But . . . damn.”
There appeared to be unshed tears in Portia’s eyes.
“Are you all right?” Joe asked.
“No. Yes. I’m fine.” She met his stare, and regardless of what she said, her eyes revealed her anguish. “I’m fine.”
O’Day said, “Before I call the cops, you kids better scoot.”
Portia put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ricochet. Uncle Patsy can handle it from here.”
“Uncle Patsy?”
“Her mother is my sister,” O’Day said.
“But we can’t just go,” Joe protested. “The police will need us to make a statement.”
“Not if I say I took a gun away from one of them, got the upper hand. You kids were never here.”
“But that’s not true.”
Portia tugged Joe toward the door. “The truth will get us in a world of trouble, Joe.”
“The truth frequently does,” O’Day said.
“But I always tell the truth,” Joe insisted.
Portia raised an eyebrow. “Always?”
“Nearly always.”
“You really want to try to explain your ricocheting to the police? To my father?”
Joe thought about how insane he would sound, about how her dad was likely to forbid her to associate with someone who spun such deranged stories. “I guess not. But what about Hocker and Jagget? They won’t go along with the lie.”
“Don’t you worry, kid,” said O’Day. “Who’s gonna believe scum like them?”
Reluctantly, Joe followed Portia out of the office, up the stairs, into the alley. “What was that about? Why were they beating on your uncle?”
“It’s a long story.”
As after the incident with the purse snatcher, a calm settled upon Joe. Although he found this serenity inexplicable, considering all that had just happened, he succumbed to it.
They were moving away from the building when he thought he heard a muffled gunshot. He stopped and turned. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
Another distant report.
“Your uncle might be in trouble.”
She caught him by the arm. “Not Patsy. Not now.”
“You didn’t hear that?”
“Come on, Joe.” She took his hand.
His peculiar tranquility undisturbed, he walked with her and did not even wonder where they were going.
As had happened outside the malt shop, the world revealed a greater charm and comeliness than he’d perceived before he met her, though this time it was a more solemn beauty than before. Palisades of zinc-gray storm clouds had risen in the north, and where the sky still remained clear, it was a paler shade, an off-blue like the petals of bird’s-foot violet. Although the sky had faded, the sun seemed more intense as the clouds threatened to swallow it, so that red-brick buildings became crimson a
nd yellow-brick buildings shone like stacked bars of gold, and everywhere shadows were inked with precise edges.
Portia said, “I’m taking you home with me,” which sounded promising to Joe.
5
WHERE THE WATERS OF TIME FLOW
The house was just a house, white stucco under a red clay-tile roof, cozy and well kept, but not what would be wanted for a feature in an interior-design magazine. Yet there was something about the place that enchanted Joe, that made every ordinary thing seem to be special. He supposed the magic was only that this was where she lived, where she slept and woke and cooked and ate and shared her life with her father, and where perhaps she sometimes sat at a window, gazing out at the walkway that her mother had followed to the white Mercedes.
She brewed a pot of coffee. She put on the kitchen table a small pitcher of cream, two mugs, two spoons, two napkins, and two bottles of brandy. One bottle was full, the other empty and lacking a label.
“Do you drink at all?” she asked.
“A little.”
“You’ll need a little,” she said, but did not explain herself.
“What will your father do if he shows up?”
“Pour some coffee and spike the hell out of it.”
They sat at the table, catercorner to each other. She poured a little cream and a lot of brandy in her coffee. He poured a little brandy and a lot of cream.
For a minute or two, she stared at the empty bottle. Her silence was strange, her expression troubled.
Joe thought he should ask about the empty bottle—why it was there, why she regarded it with evident anxiety, whether it might symbolize something for her. Her silence was so profound, however, that his questions seemed inadequate to break the quiet. He feared that they would make him sound ordinary to this extraordinary girl.