by Dean Koontz
Or …
Or Eric had not been in the cabin then, had only entered later, after he saw them drive away in the Mercedes. He had discarded the ax, thinking they were gone for good, then had fled without it when he heard Benny returning in the Ford.
One or the other.
Which? The need to answer that question seemed urgent and all-important. Which?
If Eric had been here earlier, when Rachael and Ben were in the garage, why hadn’t he attacked? What had changed his mind?
The cabin was almost as empty of sound as a vacuum. Listening, Ben tried to determine if the silence was one of expectation, shared by him and one other lurking presence, or a silence of solitude.
Solitude, he soon decided. The dead, hollow, empty stillness that you experienced only when you were utterly and unquestionably alone. Eric was not in the house.
Ben looked through the screen door at the woods that lay beyond the brown lawn. The forest appeared still, as well, and he had the unsettling feeling that Eric was not out there, either, that he would have the woods to himself if he searched for his prey among the trees.
“Eric?” he said softly but aloud, expecting and receiving no answer. “Where the hell have you gone, Eric?”
He lowered the shotgun, no longer bothering to hold it at the ready because he knew in his bones that he would not encounter Eric on this mountain.
More silence.
Heavy, oppressive, profound silence.
He sensed that he was teetering precariously on the edge of a horrible revelation. He had made a mistake. A deadly mistake. One that he could not correct. But what was it? What mistake? Where had he gone wrong? He looked hard at the discarded ax, desperately seeking understanding.
Then his breath caught in his throat.
“My God,” he whispered. “Rachael.”
LAKE ARROWHEAD—3 MILES.
Peake got behind a slow-moving camper in a no-passing zone, but Sharp did not seem bothered by the delay because he was busy seeking Peake’s agreement to the double murder of Shadway and Mrs. Leben.
“Of course, Jerry, if you have the slightest qualms at all about participating, then you leave it to me. Naturally, I expect you to back me up in a pinch—that’s part of your job, after all—but if we can disarm Shadway and the woman without trouble, then I’ll handle the terminations myself.”
I’ll still be an accessory to murder, Peake thought.
But he said, “Well, sir, I don’t want to let you down.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Jerry. I would be disappointed if you didn’t have the right stuff. I mean, I was so sure of your commitment and courage when I decided to bring you along on this assignment. And I can’t stress strongly enough how grateful your country and the agency will be for your wholehearted cooperation.”
You psycho creep, you lying sack of shit, Peake thought.
But he said, “Sir, I don’t want to do anything that would be opposed to the best interests of my country— or that would leave a black mark of any kind on my agency record.”
Sharp smiled, reading total capitulation in that statement.
Ben moved slowly around the kitchen, peering closely at the floor, where traces of broth from the discarded soup and stew cans glistened on the tile. He and Rachael had taken care to step over and around the spills when they had gone through the kitchen, and Ben had not previously noticed any of Eric’s footprints in the mess, which was something he was certain he would have seen.
Now he found what had not been there earlier: almost a full footprint in a patch of thick gravy from the Dinty Moore can, and a heelprint in a gob of peanut butter. A man’s boots, large ones, by the look of the tread.
Two more prints shone dully on the tile near the refrigerator, where Eric had tracked the gravy and peanut butter when he had gone over there to put down the ax and, of course, to hide. To hide. Jesus. When Ben and Rachael had entered the kitchen from the garage and had stepped into the living room to gather up the scattered pages of the Wildcard file, Eric had been crouched at the far side of the refrigerator, hiding.
Heart racing, Ben turned away from the prints and hurried to the door that connected with the garage.
LAKE ARROWHEAD.
They had arrived.
The slow-moving camper pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store, getting out of their way, and Peake accelerated.
Having consulted the directions that The Stone had written on a slip of paper, Sharp said, “You’re headed the right way. Just follow the state route north around the lake. In four miles or so, look for a branch road on the right, with a cluster of ten mailboxes, one of them with a big red-and-white iron rooster on top of it.”
As Peake drove, he saw Sharp lift a black attaché case onto his lap and open it. Inside were two thirty-eight pistols. He put one on the seat between them.
Peake said, “What’s that?”
“Your gun for this operation.”
“I’ve got my service revolver.”
“It’s not hunting season. Can’t have a lot of noisy gunfire, Jerry. That might bring neighbors poking around or even alert some sheriff ’s deputy who just happens to be in the area.” Sharp withdrew a silencer from the attaché case and began to screw it onto his own pistol. “You can’t use a silencer on a revolver, and we sure don’t want anybody interrupting us until it’s over and we’ve had plenty of time to adjust the bodies to fit our scenario.”
What the hell am I going to do? Peake wondered as he piloted the sedan north along the lake, looking for a red-and-white iron rooster.
On another road, State Route 138, Rachael had left Lake Arrowhead behind. She was approaching Silverwood Lake, where the scenery of the high San Bernardinos was even more breathtaking—though she had no eye for scenery in her current state of mind.
From Silverwood, 138 led out of the mountains and almost due west until it connected with Interstate 15. There, she intended to stop for gasoline, then follow 15 north and east, all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. That was a drive of more than two hundred miles over some of the most starkly beautiful and utterly desolate land on the continent, and even under the best of circumstances, it could be a lonely journey.
Benny, she thought, I wish you were here.
She passed a lightning-blasted tree that reached toward the sky with dead black limbs.
The white clouds that had recently appeared were getting thicker. A few of them were not white.
In the empty garage, Ben saw a two-inch-by-four-inch patch of boot-tread pattern imprinted on the concrete floor in some oily fluid that glistened in the beams of intruding sunlight. He knelt and put his nose to the spot. He was certain that the vague smell of beef gravy was not an imaginary scent.
The tread mark must have been here when he and Rachael returned to the car with the Wildcard pages, but he had not noticed it.
He got up and moved farther into the garage, studying the floor closely, and in only a few seconds he saw a small moist brown glob about half the size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought the finger to his nose. Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or heel of one of Eric Leben’s boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the Wildcard file into the garbage bag.
Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he’d seen no reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a man with devastating brain injuries—a walking dead man who, if he followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore, Ben could not blame himself; no, he had done the right thing when he had sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away
all by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How could he have realized? It was the only thing he could have done. It was not at all his fault, this unforeseeable development was not his fault, not his fault—but he cursed himself vehemently.
Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their next moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that he had a chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect appealed to him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben. He’d hidden beside the refrigerator until they were in the living room, then crept into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid shut behind himself.
If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk …
Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to kick the back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through from the trunk …
His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.
Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron rooster mounted atop one mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow branch road that led up a steep slope past widely separated driveways and past houses mostly hidden in the forest that encroached from both sides.
Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirty-eights. Now he took two fully loaded spare magazines from the attaché case, kept one for himself, and put the other beside the pistol that he had provided for Peake. “I’m glad you’re with me on this one, Jerry.”
Peake had not actually said that he was with Sharp on this one, and in fact he could not see any way he could participate in cold-blooded murder and still live with himself. For sure, his dream of being a legend would be shattered.
On the other hand, if he crossed Sharp, he would destroy his career in the DSA.
“The macadam should turn to gravel,” Sharp said, consulting the directions The Stone had given him.
In spite of all his recent insights, in spite of the advantages those insights should have given him, Jerry Peake did not know what to do. He did not see a way out that would leave him with both his self-respect and his career. As he drove up the slope, deeper into the dark of the woods, a panic began to build in him, and for the first time in many hours he felt inadequate.
“Gravel,” Anson Sharp noted as they left the pavement.
Suddenly Peake saw that his predicament was even worse than he had realized because Sharp was likely to kill him, too. If Peake tried to stop Sharp from killing Shadway and the Leben woman, then Sharp would simply shoot Peake first and set it up to look as if the two fugitives had done it. That would even give Sharp an excuse to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben: “They wasted poor damn Peake, so there was nothing else I could do.” Sharp might even come out of it a hero. On the other hand, Peake couldn’t just step out of the way and let the deputy director cut them down, for that would not satisfy Sharp; if Peake did not participate in the killing with enthusiasm, Sharp would never really trust him and would most likely shoot him after Shadway and Mrs. Leben were dead, then claim one of them had done it. Jesus. To Peake (whose mind was working faster than it had ever worked in his life), it looked as if he had only two choices: join in the killing and thereby gain Sharp’s total trust—or kill Sharp before Sharp could kill anyone else. But no, wait, that was no solution, either—
“Not much farther,” Sharp said, leaning forward in his seat, peering intently through the windshield. “Slow it to a crawl.”
—no solution at all, because if he shot Sharp, no one would ever believe that Sharp had intended to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben—after all, what was the bastard’s motive?—and Peake would wind up on trial for blowing away his superior. The courts were never ever easy on cop killers, even if the cop killer was another cop, so sure as hell he’d go to prison, where all those seven-foot-tall, no-neck criminal types would just delight in raping a former government agent. Which left—what?—one horrible choice and only one, which was to join in the killing, descend to Sharp’s level, forget about being a legend and settle for being a goddamn Gestapo thug. This was crazy, being trapped in a situation with no right answers, only wrong answers, crazy and unfair, damn it, and Peake felt as if the top of his head were going to blow off from the strain of seeking a better answer.
“That’s the gate she described,” Sharp said. “And it’s open! Park this side of it.”
Jerry Peake stopped the car, switched off the engine.
Instead of the expected quietude of the forest, another sound came through the open windows the moment the sedan fell silent: a racing engine, another car, echoing through the trees.
“Someone’s coming,” Sharp said, grabbing his silencer-equipped pistol and throwing open his door just as a blue Ford roared into view on the road above them, bearing down at high speed.
While the service-station attendant filled the Mercedes with Arco unleaded, Rachael got candy and a can of Coke from the vending machines. She leaned against the trunk, alternately sipping Coke and munching on a Mr. Goodbar, hoping that a big dose of refined sugar would lift her spirits and make the long drive ahead seem less lonely.
“Going to Vegas?” the attendant asked.
“That’s right.”
“I ’spected so. I’m good at guessing where folks is headed. You got that Vegas look. Now listen, first thing you play when you get there is roulette. Number twenty-four, ’cause I have this hunch about it, just looking at you. Okay?”
“Okay. Twenty-four.”
He held her Coke while she got the cash from her wallet to pay him. “You win a fortune, I’ll expect half, of course. But if you lose, it’ll be the devil’s work, not mine.”
He bent down and looked in her window just as she was about to drive away. “You be careful out there on the desert. It can be mean.”
“I know,” she said.
She drove onto I-15 and headed north-northeast toward distant Barstow, feeling very much alone.
26
A MAN GONE BAD
Ben swung the Ford around the bend and started to accelerate but saw the dark green sedan just beyond the open gate. He braked, and the Ford fishtailed on the dirt lane. The steering wheel jerked in his hands. But he did not lose control of the car, kept it out of the ditches on both sides, and slid to a halt in a roiling cloud of dust about fifty yards above the gate.
Below, two men in dark suits had already gotten out of the sedan. One of them was hanging back, although the other—and bigger—man was rushing straight up the hill, closing fast, like a too-eager marathon runner who had forgotten to change into his running shorts and shoes. The yellowish dust gave the illusion of marbled solidity as it whirled through veined patterns of shade and sunshine. But in spite of the dust and in spite of the thirty yards that separated Ben from the oncoming man, he could see the gun in the guy’s hand. He could also see the silencer, which startled him.
No police or federal agents used silencers. And Eric’s business partners had opened up with a submachine gun in the heart of Palm Springs, so it was unlikely they would suddenly turn discreet.
Then, only a fraction of a second after Ben saw the silencer, he got a good look at the grinning face of the oncoming man, and he was simultaneously astonished, confused, and afraid. Anson Sharp. It had been sixteen years since he had seen Anson Sharp in Nam, back in ’72. Yet he had no doubt about the man’s identity. Time had changed Sharp, but not much. During the spring and summer of ’72, Ben had expected the big bastard to shoot him in the back or hire some Saigon hoodlum to do it—Sharp had been capable of anything—but Ben had been very careful, had not given Sharp the slightest opportunity. Now here was Sharp again, as if he’d stepped through a time warp.
What the hell had brought him here now, more than a decade and a half later? Ben had the crazy notion that Sharp had been looking for him all this time, anxious to settle the score, and just happened to track him down now, in the midst of all
these other troubles. But of course that was unlikely—impossible—so somehow Sharp must be involved with the Wildcard mess.
Less than twenty yards away, Sharp took a shooter’s spreadlegged stance on the road below and opened fire with the pistol. With a whap and a wet crackle of gummy safety glass, a slug punched through the windshield one foot to the right of Ben’s face.
Throwing the car into reverse, he twisted around in his seat to see the road behind. Steering with one hand, he drove backward up the dirt lane as fast as he dared. He heard another bullet ricochet off the car, and it sounded very close. Then he was around the turn and out of Sharp’s sight.
He reversed all the way to the cabin before he stopped. There he shifted the Ford into neutral, left the engine running, and engaged the handbrake, which was the only thing holding the car on the slope. He got out and quickly put the shotgun and the Combat Magnum on the dirt to one side. Leaning back in through the open door, he gripped the release lever for the handbrake and looked down the hill.
Two hundred yards below, the Chevy sedan came around the bend, moving fast, and started up toward him. They slowed when they saw him, but they did not stop, and he dared to wait a couple of seconds longer before he popped the handbrake and stepped back.
Succumbing to gravity, the Ford rolled down the lane, which was so narrow that the Chevy could not pull entirely out of the way. The Ford encountered a small bump, jolted over it, and veered toward one drainage ditch. For a moment Ben thought the car was going to run harmlessly off to the side, but it stuttered over other ruts that turned it back on course.
The driver of the Chevy stopped, began to reverse, but the Ford was picking up a lot of speed and was bearing down too fast to be avoided. The Ford hit another bump and angled somewhat toward the left again, so at the last second the Chevy swung hard to the right in an evasive maneuver, almost dropping into the ditch. Nevertheless, the two vehicles collided with a clang and crunch of metal, though the impact wasn’t as direct or as devastating as Ben had hoped. The right front fender of the Ford hit the right front fender of the Chevy, then the Ford slid sideways to the left, as if it might come around a hundred and eighty degrees until it was sitting alongside the Chevy, both of them facing uphill. But when it had made only a quarter turn, the Ford’s rear wheels slammed into the ditch, and it halted with a shudder, perpendicular to the road, effectively blocking it.