by Dean Koontz
He wanted to shoot himself, put an end to this humiliation.
She said, “I’m not seeing anyone special, not anyone I’d share secrets with.”
Reese cleared his throat. “Well, uh, that’s good. All right.”
He started to turn toward the door, where Julio was giving him a strange look, and Teddy said, “You are a big one, aren’t you?”
Reese faced her again. “Excuse me?”
“You’re quite a big guy. Too bad there aren’t more your size. A girl like me would almost seem petite to you.”
What does she mean by that? he wondered. Anything? Just polite conversation? Is she giving me an opening? If it’s an opening, how should I respond to it?
“It would be nice to be thought of as petite,” she said.
He tried to speak. Could not.
He felt stupid, awkward, and shy as he’d been at sixteen.
Suddenly he could speak, but he blurted out the question as he might have done as a boy of sixteen: “Miss-Bertlesman-would-you-go-out-with-me-sometime?”
She smiled and said, “Yes.”
“You would?”
“Yes.”
“Saturday night? Dinner? Seven o’clock?”
“Sounds nice.”
He stared at her, amazed. “Really?”
She laughed. “Really.”
A minute later, in the car, Reese said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“I never realized you were such a smooth operator,” Julio said kiddingly, affectionately.
Blushing, Reese said, “By God, life’s funny, isn’t it? You never know when it might take a whole new turn.”
“Slow down,” Julio said, starting the engine and driving away from the curb. “It’s just a date.”
“Yeah. Probably. But … I got a feeling it might turn out to be more than just that.”
“A smooth operator and a romantic fool,” Julio said as he steered the car down out of the Heights, toward Newport Avenue.
After some thought, Reese said, “You know what Eric Leben forgot? He was so obsessed with living forever, he forgot to enjoy the life he had. Life may be short, but there’s a lot to be said for it. Leben was so busy planning for eternity, he forgot to enjoy the moment.”
“Listen,” Julio said, “if romance is going to make a philosopher out of you, I may have to get a new partner.”
For a few minutes Reese was silent, submerged in memories of well-tanned legs and flamingo-pink silk. When he surfaced again, he realized that Julio was not driving aimlessly. “Where we going?”
“John Wayne Airport.”
“Vegas?”
“Is that okay with you?” Julio asked.
“Seems like the only thing we can do.”
“Have to pay for tickets out of our own pockets.”
“I know.”
“You want to stay here, that’s all right.”
“I’m in,” Reese said.
“I can handle it alone.”
“I’m in.”
“Might get dangerous from here on, and you have Esther to think about,” Julio said.
My little Esther and now maybe Theodora “Teddy” Bertlesman, Reese thought. And when you find someone to care about—when you dare to care—that’s when life gets cruel; that’s when they’re taken from you; that’s when you lose it all. A premonition of death made him shiver.
Nevertheless, he said, “I’m in. Didn’t you hear me say I’m in? For God’s sake, Julio, I’m in.”
33
VIVA LAS VEGAS
Following the storm across the desert, Ben Shadway reached Baker, California, gateway to Death Valley, at 6:20.
The wind was blowing much harder than it had been back toward Barstow. The driven rain snapped against the windshield with a sound like thousands of impacting bullets. Service-station, restaurant, and motel signs were swinging on their mountings, trying to tear loose and fly away. A stop sign twitched violently back and forth, caught in turbulent currents of air, and seemed about to screw itself out of the ground. At a Shell station, two attendants in yellow rain slickers moved with their heads bowed and shoulders hunched; the tails of their glistening vinyl coats flapped against their legs and whipped out behind them. A score of bristly tumbleweeds, some four or five feet in diameter, bounced-rolled-sailed across tiny Baker’s only east-west street, swept in from the desolate landscape to the south.
Ben tried to call Whitney Gavis from a pay phone inside a small convenience store. He couldn’t get through to Vegas. Three times, he listened to a recorded message to the effect that service had been temporarily interrupted. Wind moaned and shrieked against the store’s plate-glass windows, and rain drummed furiously on the roof—which was all the explanation he required for AT&T’s troubles.
He was scared. He had been badly worried ever since finding the ax propped against the refrigerator in the kitchen of Eric’s mountain cabin. But now his fear was escalating by the moment because he began to feel that everything was going wrong for him, that luck had turned entirely against him. The encounter with Sharp, the disastrous change in the weather, his inability to reach Whit Gavis when the phones had been working, now the trouble with the lines to Vegas, made it seem as if the universe was, indeed, not accidental but was a machine with dark and frightful purpose, and that the gods in charge of it were conspiring to make certain he would never again see Rachael alive.
In spite of his fear, frustration, and eagerness to hit the road again, he paused long enough to grab a few things to eat in the car. He’d had nothing since breakfast in Palm Springs, and he was famished.
The clerk behind the counter—a blue-jeaned, middle-aged woman with sun-bleached hair, her brown skin toughened by too many years on the desert—sold him three candy bars, a few bags of peanuts, and a six-pack of Pepsi. When Ben asked her about the phones, she said, “I hear tell there’s been flash flooding east of here, out near Cal Neva, and worse around Stateline. Undermined a few telephone poles, brought down the lines. Word is, it’ll be repaired in a couple of hours.”
“I never knew it rained this hard in the desert,” he said as she gave him change.
“Don’t rain—really rain, I mean—but maybe three times a year. Though when we do get a storm, it sometimes comes down like God is breaking his promise about the fire next time and figures to wipe us out with a great flood like before.”
The stolen Merkur was parked half a dozen steps beyond the exit from the store, but Ben was soaked again during the few seconds needed to get to the car. Inside, he popped open a can of Pepsi, took a long swallow, braced the can between his thighs, peeled the wrapper off a candy bar, started the engine, and drove back toward the interstate.
Regardless of how terrible the weather got, he would have to push toward Vegas at the highest possible speed, seventy or eighty miles an hour, faster if he could manage it, even though the chances were very high that, sooner or later, he would lose control of the car on the rain-greased highway. His inability to reach Whit Gavis had left him with no alternative.
Ascending the entrance ramp to I-15, the car coughed once and shuddered, but then it surged ahead without further hesitation. For a minute, heading east-northeast toward Nevada, Ben listened intently to the engine and glanced repeatedly at the dashboard, expecting to see a warning light blink on. But the engine purred, and the warning lights remained off, and none of the dials or gauges indicated trouble, so he relaxed slightly. He munched on his candy bar and gradually put the Merkur up to seventy, carefully testing its responsiveness on the treacherously wet pavement.
Anson Sharp was awake and refreshed by 7:10 Tuesday evening. From his motel room in Palm Springs, with the background sound of hard rain on the roof and water gurgling through a downspout near his window, he called subordinates at several places throughout southern California.
From Dirk Cringer, an agent at the case-operation headquarters in Orange County, Sharp learned that Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom had not dropped out of the Leben investi
gation as they were supposed to have done. Given their well-earned reputation as bulldog cops who were reluctant to quit even hopeless cases, Sharp had ordered both of their personal cars fitted with hidden transmitters last night and had assigned men to follow them electronically, at a distance from which Verdad and Hagerstrom would not spot a tail. That precaution had paid off, for this afternoon they had visited UCI to meet with Dr. Easton Solberg, a former associate of Leben’s, and later they had spent a couple of hours on stakeout in front of Shadway Realty’s main office in Tustin.
“They spotted our team and set up their own surveillance half a block back,” Cringer said, “where they could watch both us and the realty office.”
“Must’ve thought they were real cute,” Sharp said, “when all the time we were watching them while they watched us.”
“Then they followed one of the real-estate agents home, a woman named Theodora Bertlesman.”
“We already interviewed her about Shadway, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, everyone who works with him in that office. And this Bertlesman woman wasn’t any more cooperative than the rest of them, maybe less.”
“How long were Verdad and Hagerstrom at her place?”
“More than twenty minutes.”
“Sounds like she might’ve been more open with them. Have any idea what she told them?”
“No,” Cringer said. “She lives on a hillside, so it was hard to get a clear angle on any of the windows with a directional microphone. By the time we could’ve set it up, Verdad and Hagerstrom were leaving anyway. They went straight from her place to the airport.”
“What?” Sharp said, surprised. “LAX?”
“No. John Wayne Airport here in Orange County. That’s where they are now, waiting for a flight out.”
“What flight? To where?”
“Vegas. They bought tickets on the first available flight to Vegas. It leaves at eight o’clock.”
“Why Vegas?” Sharp said, more to himself than to Cringer.
“Maybe they finally decided to give up on the case like they were told. Maybe they’re going off for a little holiday.”
“You don’t go off on a holiday without packing suitcases. You said they went straight to the airport, which I suppose means they didn’t make a quick stop home to grab a change of clothes.”
“Straight to the airport,” Cringer confirmed.
“All right, good,” Sharp said, suddenly excited. “Then they’re probably trying to get to Shadway and Mrs. Leben before we do, and they’ve reason to believe the place to look is somewhere in Las Vegas.” There was a chance he would get his hands on Shadway, after all. And this time, the bastard would not slip away. “If there’re any seats left on that eight o’clock flight, I want you to put two of your men aboard.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have men here in Palm Springs, and we’ll head to Vegas, too, just as soon as we can. I want to be in place at the airport there and ready to track Verdad and Hagerstrom the moment they arrive.”
Sharp hung up and immediately called Jerry Peake’s room.
Outside, thunder roared in the north and faded to a soft rumble as it moved south through the Coachella Valley.
Peake sounded groggy when he answered.
“It’s almost seven-thirty,” Sharp told him. “Be ready to roll in fifteen minutes.”
“What’s happening?”
“We’re going to Vegas after Shadway, and this time luck’s on our side.”
One of the many problems of driving a stolen car is that you can’t be sure of its mechanical condition. You can’t very well ask for a guarantee of reliability and a service history from the owner before you make off with his wheels.
The stolen Merkur failed Ben forty miles east of Baker. It began coughing, wheezing, and shuddering as it had done on the entrance ramp to the interstate a while ago, but this time it did not cease coughing until the engine died. He steered onto the berm and tried to restart the car, but it would not respond. All he was doing was draining the battery, so he sat for a moment, despairing, as the rain fell by the pound and by the hundred-weight upon the car.
But surrender to despair was not his style. After only a few seconds, he formulated a plan and put it into action, inadequate though it might be.
He tucked the .357 Combat Magnum under his belt, against the small of his back, and pulled his shirt out of his jeans to cover the gun. He would not be able to take the shotgun, and he deeply regretted the loss of it.
He switched on the Merkur’s emergency flashers and got out into the pouring rain. Fortunately, the lightning had passed away to the east. Standing in the storm-gray twilight gloom beside the disabled car, he shielded his eyes with one hand and looked into the rain, toward the west, where distant headlights were approaching.
I-15 was still lightly traveled. A few determined gamblers were trekking toward their mecca and would probably have been undeterred by Armageddon, though there were more big trucks than anything else. He waved his arms, signaling for help, but two cars and three trucks passed him without slowing. As their tires cut through puddles on the pavement, they sent sheets of water pluming in their wake, some of which cascaded over Ben, adding to his misery.
About two minutes later, another eighteen-wheeler came into view. It was bearing so many lights that it appeared to be decorated for Christmas. To Ben’s relief, it began to brake far back and came to a full stop on the berm behind the Merkur.
He ran back to the big rig and peered up at the open window where a craggy-faced man with a handlebar mustache squinted down at him from the warm, dry cab. “Broke down!” Ben shouted above the cacophony of wind and rain.
“Closest mechanic you’re going to find is back in Baker,” the driver called down to him. “Best cross over to the westbound lanes and try to catch a ride going that way.”
“Don’t have time to find a mechanic and get her fixed!” Ben shouted. “Got to make Vegas fast as I can.” He had prepared the lie while waiting for someone to stop. “My wife’s in the hospital there, hurt bad, maybe dying.”
“Good Lord,” the driver said, “you better come aboard, then.”
Ben hurried around to the passenger’s door, praying that his benefactor was a highballer who would keep the pedal to the metal in spite of the weather and rocket into Vegas in record time.
Driving across the rain-lashed Mojave on the last leg of the trip to Las Vegas, with the darkness of the storm slowly giving way to the deeper darkness of night, Rachael felt lonelier than she’d ever felt before—and she was no stranger to loneliness. The rain had not let up for the past couple of hours, largely because she was more than keeping pace with the storm as it moved eastward, driving deeper into the heart of it. The hollow beating of the windshield wipers and the droning of the tires on the wet road were like the shuttles of a loom that wove not cloth but isolation.
Much of her life had been lived in loneliness and in emotional—if not always physical—isolation. By the time Rachael was born, her mother and father had discovered that they could not abide each other, but for religious reasons they had been unwilling to consider divorce. Therefore, Rachael’s earliest years passed in a loveless house, where her parents’ resentment toward each other was inadequately concealed. Worse, each of them seemed to view her as the other’s child—a reason to resent her, too. Neither was more than dutifully affectionate.
As soon as she was old enough, she was sent to Catholic boarding schools where, except for holidays, she remained for the next eleven years. In those institutions, all run by nuns, she made few friends, none close, partly because she had a very low opinion of herself and could not believe that anyone would want to be friends with her.
A few days after she graduated from prep school, the summer before she was to enter college, her parents were killed in a plane crash on their way home from a business trip. Rachael had been under the impression that her father had made a small fortune in the garment industry by investing money that her mo
ther had inherited the year of their wedding. But when the will was probated and the estate was settled, Rachael discovered that the family business had been skirting bankruptcy for years and that their upper-class life-style had eaten up every dollar earned. Virtually penniless, she had to cancel her plans to attend Brown University and, instead, went to work as a waitress, living in a boarding-house and saving what she could toward a more modest education in California’s tax-supported university system.
A year later, when she finally started school, she made no real friends because she had to keep waitressing and had no time for the extracurricular activities through which college relationships are formed. By the time she received her degree and launched herself upon a program of graduate study, she had known at least eight thousand nights of loneliness.
She was easy prey for Eric when, needing to feed on her youth as a vampire feeds on blood, he had determined to make her his wife. He was twelve years her senior, so he knew far more about charming and winning a young woman than men her own age knew; he made her feel wanted and special for the first time in her life. Considering the difference in their ages, perhaps she also saw in him a father figure capable of giving her not only the love of a husband but the parental love she had never known.
Of course, it had turned out less well than she expected. She learned that Eric didn’t love her but loved, instead, the thing that she symbolized to him—vigorous, healthful, energetic youth. Their marriage soon proved to be as loveless as that of her parents.
Then she had found Benny. And for the first time in her life she had not been lonely.
But now Benny was gone, and she didn’t know if she would ever see him again.
The Mercedes’s windshield wipers beat out a monotonous rhythm, and the tires sang a one-note tune—a song of the void, of despair and loneliness.
She attempted to comfort herself with the thought that at least Eric posed no further threat to her or Ben. Surely he was dead from a score of rattlesnake bites. Even if his genetically altered body could safely metabolize those massive doses of virulent poison, even if Eric could return from the dead a second time, he was obviously degenerating, not merely physically but also mentally. (She had a vivid mental image of him kneeling on the rain-soaked earth, eating a living serpent, as frightening and elemental as the lightning that flashed above him.) If he survived the rattlesnakes, he would very likely remain on the desert, no longer a human being but a thing, loping hunchbacked or squirming on its belly through the hillocks of sand, slithering down into the arroyos, feeding greedily on other desert dwellers, a threat to any beast he encountered but no longer a threat to her. And even if some glimmer of human awareness and intelligence remained in him, and if he still felt the need to avenge himself on Rachael, he would find it difficult if not impossible to come out of the desert into civilization and move freely about. If he tried that, he would create a sensation—panic, terror—wherever he went, and would probably be chased down and captured or shot.