by Dean Koontz
She stepped around him, trying to walk away, but he grabbed her arm, halting her.
“Please let me go,” she said evenly.
Glaring at her, he said, “How could I have been so wrong about you? I thought you were sweet, a bit shy, an unworldly little fluff of a girl. But you’re a nasty little ball-buster, aren’t you?”
“Really, this is an absolutely crazy attitude. And this crude behavior isn’t worthy of you. Now let me go.”
He gripped her even tighter. “Or is this all just a negotiating ploy? Huh? When the papers are drawn up, when we come back to sign everything on Friday, will you suddenly have a change of heart? Will you want more?”
“No, I’m not playing any games.”
His grin was tight and mean. “I’ll bet that’s it. If we agree to such a ridiculously low settlement and draw up the papers, you’ll refuse to sign them, but you’ll use them in court to try to prove we were going to give you the shaft. You’ll pretend the offer was ours and that we tried to strong-arm you into signing it. Make me look bad. Make me look as if I’m a real hard-hearted bastard. Huh? Is that the strategy? Is that the game?”
“I told you, there’s no game. I’m sincere.”
He dug his fingers into her upper arm. “The truth, Rachael.”
“Stop it.”
“Is that the strategy?”
“You’re hurting me.”
“And while you’re at it, why don’t you tell me all about Ben Shadway, too?”
She blinked in surprise, for she had never imagined that Eric knew about Benny.
His face seemed to harden in the hot sun, cracking with more deep lines of anger. “How long was he fucking you before you finally walked out on me?”
“You’re disgusting,” she said, immediately regretting the harsh words because she saw that he was pleased to have broken through her cool facade at last.
“How long?” he demanded, tightening his grip.
“I didn’t meet Benny till six months after you and I separated,” she said, striving to keep a neutral tone that would deny him the noisy confrontation he apparently desired.
“How long was he poaching on me, Rachael?”
“If you know about Benny, you’ve had me watched, something you’ve no right to do.”
“Yeah, you want to keep your dirty little secrets.”
“If you have hired someone to watch me, you know I’ve been seeing Benny for just five months. Now let go. You’re still hurting me.”
A young bearded guy, passing by, hesitated, stepped toward them, and said, “You need help, lady?”
Eric turned on the stranger in such a rage that he seemed to spit the words out rather than speak them: “Butt out, mister. This is my wife, and it’s none of your goddamn business.”
Rachael tried to wrench free of Eric’s iron grip without success.
The bearded stranger said, “So she’s your wife—that doesn’t give you the right to hurt her.”
Letting go of Rachael, Eric fisted his hands and turned more directly toward the intruder.
Rachael spoke quickly to her would-be Galahad, eager to defuse the situation. “Thank you, but it’s all right. Really. I’m fine. Just a minor disagreement.”
The young man shrugged and walked away, glancing back as he went.
The incident had at last made Eric aware that he was in danger of making a spectacle of himself, which a man of his high position and self-importance was loath to do. However, his temper had not cooled. His face was flushed, and his lips were bloodless. His eyes were the eyes of a dangerous man.
She said, “Be happy, Eric. You’ve saved millions of dollars and God knows how much more in attorneys’ fees. You won. You didn’t get to crush me or muddy my reputation in court the way you had hoped to, but you still won. Be happy with that.”
With a seething hatred that shocked her, he said, “You stupid, rotten bitch. The day you walked out on me, I wanted to knock you down and kick your stupid face in. I should’ve done it. Wish I had. But I thought you’d come crawling back, so I didn’t. I should’ve. Should’ve kicked your stupid face in.” He raised his hand as if to slap her. But he checked himself even as she flinched from the expected blow. Furious, he turned and hurried away.
As she watched him go, Rachael suddenly understood that his sick desire to dominate everyone was a far more fundamental need than she’d realized. By stripping him of his power over her, by turning her back on both him and his money, she had not merely reduced him to an equal but had, in his eyes, unmanned him. That had to be the case, for nothing else explained the degree of his rage or his urge to commit violence, an urge he had barely controlled.
She had grown to dislike him intensely, if not hate him, and she had feared him a little, too. But until now, she had not been fully aware of the immensity and intensity of the rage within him. She had not realized how thoroughly dangerous he was.
Although the golden sunshine still dazzled her eyes and forced her to squint, although it still baked her skin, she felt a cold shiver pass through her, spawned by the realization that she’d been wise to leave Eric when she had—and perhaps fortunate to escape with no more physical damage than the bruises his fingers were certain to have left on her arm.
Watching him step off the sidewalk into the street, she was relieved to see him go. A moment later, relief turned to horror.
He was heading toward his black Mercedes, which was parked along the other side of the avenue. Perhaps he actually was blinded by his anger. Or maybe it was the brilliant June sunlight flashing on every shiny surface that interfered with his vision. Whatever the reason, he dashed across the southbound lanes of Main Street, which were at the moment without traffic, and kept on going into the northbound lanes, directly into the path of a city garbage truck that was doing forty miles an hour.
Too late, Rachael screamed a warning.
The driver tramped his brake pedal to the floorboards. But the shriek of the truck’s locked wheels came almost simultaneously with the sickening sound of impact.
Eric was hurled into the air and thrown back into the southbound lanes as if by the concussion wave of a bomb blast. He crashed into the pavement and tumbled twenty feet, stiffly at first, then with a horrible looseness, as if he were constructed of string and old rags. He came to rest facedown, unmoving.
A southbound yellow Subaru braked with a banshee screech and a hard flat wail of its horn, halting only two feet from him. A Chevy, following too close, rammed into the back of the Subaru and pushed it within a few inches of the body.
Rachael was the first to reach Eric. Heart hammering, shouting his name, she dropped to her knees and, by instinct, put one hand to his neck to feel for a pulse. His skin was wet with blood, and her fingers slipped on the slick flesh as she searched desperately for the throbbing artery.
Then she saw the hideous depression that had reshaped his skull. His head had been staved in along the right side, above the torn ear, and all the way forward past the temple to the edge of his pale brow. His head was turned so she could see one eye, which was open wide, staring in shock, though sightless now. Many wickedly sharp fragments of bone must have been driven deep into his brain. Death had been instantaneous.
She stood up abruptly, tottering, nauseated. Dizzy, she might have fallen if the driver of the garbage truck had not grabbed hold of her, provided support, and escorted her around the side of the Subaru, where she could lean against the car.
“There was nothin’ I could do,” he said miserably.
“I know,” she said.
“Nothin’ at all. He run in front of me. Didn’t look. Nothin’ I could do.”
At first Rachael had difficulty breathing. Then she realized she was absentmindedly scrubbing her blood-covered hand on her sundress, and the sight of those damp rusty-scarlet stains on the pastel-blue cotton made her breath come quicker, too quick. Hyperventilating, she slumped against the Subaru, closed her eyes, hugged herself, and clenched her teeth. She was determined not to faint. She
strove to hold in each shallow breath as long as possible, and the very process of changing the rhythm of her breathing was a calming influence.
Around her she heard the voices of motorists who had left their cars in the snarl of stalled traffic. Some of them asked her if she was all right, and she nodded; others asked if she needed medical attention, and she shook her head—no.
If she had ever loved Eric, that love had been ground to dust beneath his heel. It had been a long time since she’d even liked him. Moments before the accident, he’d revealed a pure and terrifying hatred of her, so she supposed she should have been utterly unmoved by his death. Yet she was badly shaken. As she hugged herself and shivered, she was aware of a cold emptiness within, a hollow sense of loss that she could not quite understand. Not grief. Just … loss.
She heard sirens in the distance.
Gradually she regained control of her breathing.
Her shivering grew less violent, though it did not stop entirely.
The sirens grew nearer, louder.
She opened her eyes. The bright June sunshine no longer seemed clean and fresh. The darkness of death had passed through the day, and in its wake, the morning light had acquired a sour yellow cast that reminded her more of sulfur than of honey.
Red lights flashing, sirens dying, a paramedic van and a police sedan approached along the northbound lanes.
“Rachael?”
She turned and saw Herbert Tuleman, Eric’s personal attorney, with whom she had met only minutes ago. She had always liked Herb, and he had liked her as well. He was a grandfatherly man with bushy gray eyebrows that were now drawn together in a single bar.
“One of my associates … returning to the office … saw it happen,” Herbert said, “hurried up to tell me. My God.”
“Yes,” she said numbly.
“My God, Rachael.”
“Yes.”
“It’s too … crazy.”
“Yes.”
“But …”
“Yes,” she said.
And she knew what Herbert was thinking. Within the past hour, she had told them she would not fight for a large share of Eric’s fortune but would settle for, proportionately, a pittance. Now, by virtue of the fact that Eric had no family and no children from his first marriage, the entire thirty million plus his currently unvalued stock in the company would almost certainly, by default, come into her sole possession.
2
SPOOKED
The hot, dry air was filled with the crackle of police radios, a metallic chorus of dispatchers’ voices, and the smell of sun-softened asphalt.
The paramedics could do nothing for Eric Leben except convey his corpse to the city morgue, where it would lie in a refrigerated room until the medical examiner had time to attend to it. Because Eric had been killed in an accident, the law required an autopsy.
“The body should be available for release in twenty-four hours,” one of the policemen had told Rachael.
While they had filled out a brief report, she had sat in the back of one of the patrol cars. Now she was standing in the sun again.
She no longer felt sick. Just numb.
They loaded the draped cadaver into the van. In spots, the shroud was dark with blood.
Herbert Tuleman felt obliged to comfort Rachael and repeatedly suggested that she return with him to his law office. “You need to sit down, get a grip on yourself,” he said, one hand on her shoulder, his kindly face wrinkled with concern.
“I’m all right, Herb. Really, I am. Just a little shaken.”
“Some cognac. That’s what you need. I’ve got a bottle of Rémy Martin in the office bar.”
“No, thank you. I guess it’ll be up to me to handle the funeral, so I’ve got things to attend to.”
The two paramedics closed the rear doors on the van and walked unhurriedly to the front of the vehicle. No need for sirens and flashing red emergency beacons. Speed would not help Eric now.
Herb said, “If you don’t want brandy, then perhaps coffee. Or just come and sit with me for a while. I don’t think you should get behind a wheel right away.”
Rachael touched his leathery cheek affectionately. He was a weekend sailor, and his skin had been toughened and creased less by age than by his time upon the sea. “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’m fine. I’m almost ashamed of how well I’m taking it. I mean … I feel no grief at all.”
He held her hand. “Don’t be ashamed. He was my client, Rachael, so I’m aware that he was … a difficult man.”
“Yes.”
“He gave you no reason to grieve.”
“It still seems wrong to feel … so little. Nothing.”
“He wasn’t just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was necessary to make you want to stay with him.”
“You’re a dear.”
“It’s true. If it weren’t very true, I wouldn’t speak of a client like this, not even when he was … deceased.”
The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene. Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers, making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved from ice.
Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his office building, to her red 560 SL. He said, “I could have someone drive Eric’s car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys at your place.”
“That would be helpful,” she said.
When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to the window and said, “We’ll have to talk soon about the estate.”
“In a few days,” she said.
“And the company.”
“Things will run themselves for a few days, won’t they?”
“Certainly. It’s Monday, so shall we say you’ll come see me Friday morning? That gives you four days to … adjust.”
“All right.”
“Ten o’clock?”
“Fine.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” she said, and she drove home without incident, though she felt as though she were dreaming.
She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had loads of charm: French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a used-brick fireplace, and more. She’d made the down payment and moved a year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and which boasted every luxury; however, she liked her cozy bungalow better than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.
She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands and face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she wore. Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming effect. Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness remained at the core of her, she stopped shivering.
After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she owned—a charcoal-gray suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a hot summer day—she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious morticians. Having ascertained that they could see her immediately, she drove directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in Yorba Linda.
She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience. But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the situation. The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-consciously reverent that it was stagy. His proffered sympathy was oily yet ponderous, relentless and calculated, but surprisingly she found herself playing along wi
th him, responding to his condolences and platitudes with clichés of her own. She felt as if she were an actor trapped in a bad play by an incompetent playwright, forced to deliver her wooden lines of dialogue because it was less embarrassing to persevere to the end of the third act than to stalk off the stage in the middle of the performance. In addition to identifying himself as a grief counselor, Attison referred to a casket as an “eternal bower.” A suit of burial clothes, in which the corpse would be dressed, was called “the final raiments.” Attison said “preparations for preservation” instead of “embalming,” and “resting place” instead of “grave.”
Although the experience was riddled with macabre humor, Rachael was not able to laugh even when she left the funeral home after two and a half hours and was alone in her car again. Ordinarily she had a special fondness for black humor, for laughter that mocked the grim, dark aspects of life. Not today. It was neither grief nor any kind of sadness that kept her in a gray and humorless mood. Nor worry about widowhood. Nor shock. Nor the morbid recognition of Death’s lurking presence in even the sunniest day. For a while, as she tended to other details of the funeral, and later, at home once more, as she called Eric’s friends and business associates to convey the news, she could not quite understand the cause of her unremitting solemnity.
Then, late in the afternoon, she could no longer fool herself. She knew that her mental state resulted from fear. She tried to deny what was coming, tried not to think about it, and she had some success at not thinking, but in her heart she knew. She knew.
She went through the house, making sure that all the doors and windows were locked. She closed the blinds and drapes.
At five-thirty, Rachael put the telephone on the answering machine. Reporters had begun to call, wanting a few words with the widow of the Great Man, and she had no patience whatsoever for media types.
The house was a bit too cool, so she reset the air conditioner. But for the susurrant sound of cold air coming through the wall vents and the occasional single ring the telephone made before the machine answered it, the house was as silent as Paul Attison’s gloom-shrouded office.