Chaos Theory

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Who are you?’ Noah demanded. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘Who has the medallion?’ asked the spidery man. ‘Did you give it to your girlfriend, or do you still have it?’

  ‘What? What the hell are you talking about? What medallion?’

  ‘Come on, Mr Flynn. You know darned well what medallion.’

  ‘Who the hell are you? Are you cops or what? Where’s your ID?’

  The spidery man came up to him and took off his dark glasses. He had a bony, complicated nose and glittery eyes that were too close together, as if there had scarcely been enough space on his face to crowd in all of his features. He smelled strongly of mentholated chest rub.

  ‘The medallion doesn’t belong to you, Mr Flynn. I need you to give it to me.’

  The Hawaiian-looking man came closer, and stood with his legs apart, interlacing his fingers and flexing them backward and forward. He was such a typecast heavy that Noah couldn’t help shaking his head in derision.

  ‘Something’s funny?’ asked the spidery man.

  ‘On the contrary. Something’s very serious. You’re obviously not cops. So – if you don’t get off my girlfriend’s property right now, you and Kwongo here are going to be in very serious trouble.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand the position you’re in, Mr Flynn.’

  ‘Oh – I understand all right. I understand that I’ve had more than enough of you for one lifetime, and I’m less-than-politely requesting that you leave. You, and those two guys indoors. I’m guessing by the matching sedans and the matching suits that you all belong to the same scout troupe?’

  The front door suddenly opened and the black man appeared. ‘She says she don’t have it.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said the black man. ‘I believe her.’

  Noah immediately stalked over to him and seized him by the lapels. ‘What are you doing to her? Have you touched her?’

  He forced the man backwards and banged his head against the side of the door before losing his balance and lurching sideways. But the spidery man snapped, ‘Mr Flynn! Hold it, Mr Flynn!’

  Noah let the black man drop on to one knee, and turned around. The Hawaiian-looking man was holding open one side of his coat to reveal that he was pointing an automatic at him.

  ‘John here will shoot you if you cause us any trouble, Mr Flynn.’

  Noah didn’t say anything, but cautiously raised his hands. He had a deep respect for firearms, especially when they were pointing in his direction.

  ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ said the spidery man. ‘Kind of public, out here on the street.’ Across the road, the old woman in the blue saggy dress was standing at her window, watching them. ‘You first, Mr Flynn.’

  Noah walked through the narrow hallway that led to the back of the house, and the three men in grey suits followed him. The Shaker-style kitchen was filled with sunshine, and a vase of sunflowers stood on the window ledge.

  Jenna was sitting tied to one of the wheel-back chairs, next to the butcher-block table. Arranged on the table in order of size were six or seven knives – carving knives, vegetable knives and boning knives.

  ‘Noah?’ she said, in a high, frightened voice. ‘Noah – what’s going on? They said they wanted your medallion. They said they’d kill me if I didn’t give it to them!’

  Seven

  Noah turned to the spidery man and demanded, ‘What the hell is this? Who are you people?’

  ‘You really don’t need to know that,’ said the spidery man. ‘You already know far more than is healthy for you, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about anything! This is crazy!’

  The spidery man held out his hand. ‘The medallion, Mr Flynn.’

  Noah lifted the P R C H A L medallion out of his shirt pocket and held it out. The spidery man snatched it, gave it a quick sideways glance, and dropped it into his own pocket.

  ‘You see? That wasn’t very difficult, was it? There was no need for anybody to be unpleasant.’

  ‘So – you’ve got what you came for,’ said Noah. ‘You can go now.’

  The spidery man carefully ran his fingers through his black, slicked-back hair, as if he were searching for phrenological bumps to predict his immediate future.

  ‘Problem is, Mr Flynn, that you and your young lady here both know the significance of this medallion.’

  ‘What significance? I just told you! I don’t know what the hell it is or what’s written on it or what P R C H A L means or nothing!’

  ‘You know much more than you think you know. And that is why I have to make sure that this all finishes here. Today. Now.’

  The spidery man clicked his fingers, and the black man and the Hawaiian approached Noah from either side and seized his arms. Noah tried to struggle, but the Hawaiian pushed the muzzle of his automatic hard against his right cheekbone.

  The spidery man came close to Noah, reeking of menthol.

  ‘You want it sooner, Mr Flynn, or later? The choice is entirely yours.’

  ‘What’s this really all about?’ Noah panted. ‘If you’re going to kill us, I think we deserve to know why.’

  The spidery man gave a snort of disbelief. ‘You don’t seriously think that I’m going to stand here for ten minutes and give you a detailed explanation of why you have to die? What do you think this is, Murder, She Wrote?’

  ‘At least tell me how you found out that I had the medallion, and how you tracked me down.’

  ‘No.’

  Now the blond-haired man stepped forward. He was the only one who kept his dark glasses on. He was slim, and obviously fit, and he walked rather like a dancer, with an uncanny gliding motion. He went up to the butcher’s block table and examined the knives. Eventually he picked up a poultry knife with a thin, ten-inch blade. He ran the edge of it along the ball of his thumb. A bead of bright red blood appeared, and he sucked it.

  Noah struggled even harder to wrench himself free, but his captors were both powerful men and the Hawaiian jammed the gun muzzle even harder into his face. ‘You want it now? You want to say aloha ‘oe even before you find out what happens to your girlfriend?’

  ‘Up your okole,’ Noah grunted. He was bursting with fear and adrenaline but also a blazing sense of injustice. Why were he and Jenna going to be killed, just because he had showed her that medallion? It may have been stolen from someone who was prepared to kill to get it back, but it had been lying on the seabed for over sixty years, so it was obvious that Noah himself hadn’t stolen it. And even if it had some political or criminal significance, Noah certainly had no idea what it was.

  ‘I can tell you just one thing,’ said the spidery man. ‘Everything in life is connected to everything else, and you, you poor idiot – you found out how. Or will find out, if I allow you to live.’

  ‘Noah – please – don’t let them hurt me!’ Jenna begged. ‘Noah – I’m pregnant!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m three months’ pregnant. David – I’m having his baby!’

  Noah turned to the spidery man in fury. ‘Do you hear that? She’s pregnant! You can’t kill a pregnant woman! You’d be killing her child as well!’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe you should have thought of that before.’

  ‘I didn’t know that before! I didn’t know nothing before! I still don’t know nothing! I don’t understand what any of this means and I don’t understand why you want to kill us! I mean, what significance can that medallion possibly have, that you have to kill people before they find out what it is? What?’

  The spidery man leaned closer – so close that Noah could feel his breath against his cheek. ‘Chaos,’ he whispered. ‘Chaos and old Night.’

  Noah swallowed hard. He felt as if he had a large knot of gristle in his throat, and his eyes were filling with tears of frustration.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I simply don’t understand why. Please – don’t hurt her. Don’t kill he
r baby. I love her.’

  The spidery man stayed very close, his face only inches away. He smiled, and then he said, ‘Love is no excuse for mercy, Mr Flynn.’

  ‘You’re going to regret this, you son of a bitch!’

  ‘No, I’m not. Go on, Henry. We don’t have all day.’

  The blond-haired man walked around behind Jenna’s chair.

  ‘No!’ Noah roared, but without any hesitation the blond-haired man reached around and drew the poultry knife across Jenna’s throat. Jenna stared at Noah in horror and disbelief as the front of her blouse was suddenly drenched in bright, wet blood.

  Noah twisted and kicked, but he was professional enough to realize that struggling wasn’t going to do him any good. He had also witnessed enough serious injuries to know that Jenna’s wound was fatal, and that even if these men allowed him to try, there wasn’t a hope in hell that he could save her life.

  More than that, he knew that nothing was going to stop them from cutting his throat, too.

  Jenna’s head dropped forward on to her chest. She was wheezing and choking as she gasped for breath. A large pink bubble of blood swelled from the side of her neck and then burst.

  ‘See?’ said the spidery man, with obvious satisfaction. ‘Pretty painless way to go, as ways to go go.’

  Noah said nothing, but squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment and filled his lungs with air. He expanded his chest and braced his arm muscles, like a bodybuilder.

  The blond-haired man pulled a dishcloth off the rail and wiped the poultry knife. Then, with a grin, he came gliding around the kitchen table, holding the knife up high as if he were a matador, about to give the coup de grâce to a helpless bull.

  ‘I wish I could say I was sorry about this,’ said the spidery man, with a sniff. ‘But, you know – needs must.’

  As the blond-haired man approached him, Noah exhaled and relaxed his muscles and dropped to the floor as if his legs had given way. He fell out of his captors’ grasp as if he had vanished altogether, leaving nothing but his empty polo shirt and jeans.

  He knew what a risk he was taking. The Hawaiian could shoot him on the spot. But in a sleepy neighbourhood like North Tassajara, he was gambling that they were reluctant to attract attention with gunfire.

  He tilted himself forward and then sprang to his feet. Without any hesitation, he vaulted over the kitchen table and charged straight for the French doors that gave out on to the backyard. Shielding his face with his upraised elbows, he threw himself through the left-hand door. Glazing bars splintered, glass shattered, and then he was tumbling across the red-brick patio in a classic stuntman’s roll.

  He heard the spidery man shouting, ‘Stop him, Makaha, you moron!’ But there was no shot. He picked himself up and sprinted around the side of the house, past Jenna’s studio, across the front yard and into the street. As he was climbing into his truck, the Hawaiian and the black man came bursting out of the front door.

  Noah started up the Super Duty with a deep whistling roar from its 6.8-litre engine, and pulled away from the curb with an operatic scream from its tyres. But instead of heading back towards the coast, he deliberately drove uphill. If he could lose these bastards anywhere, he could lose them on the curves and chicanes of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

  He glanced in his rear-view mirror. The Hawaiian and the black man were already climbing into their sedan, and the spidery man and the blond man were running towards the other car.

  After a mile, the neat suburban houses disappeared, and the ground began to rise steeply. The road became narrower, with rocks and scrub on either side, and then bristlecone fir trees and ponderosa pines. Noah swerved around one curve after another, keeping his foot flat on the accelerator, and allowing the Super Duty’s natural understeer to hold it on the road. The sun flickered through the trees like an old-fashioned movie projector.

  As he climbed higher, Noah glimpsed the ocean off to his left, intensely blue. The last time he had driven up here, Jenna had been with him. He had pulled off the road and they had sat and talked about their future together – or, rather, their mutual realization that they didn’t have a future together.

  He saw a flash of silver in his rear-view mirror. The Hawaiian and the black man were gaining on him. When he took a right-hand curve, their silver sedan disappeared behind the trees, but when he took a left-hand curve, he could see that they were less than a hundred yards behind him. The Hawaiian may have looked like a B-picture heavy, but he was obviously a skilful driver.

  The mountains grew steeper, and as they did so the curves became tighter. Noah struggled with the steering wheel as the Super Duty threatened to lose its grip on the road, and now its tyres were almost constantly howling. He saw the silver sedan go into a wide, drifting skid around one curve, but the Hawaiian managed to keep it on the road with a snake-like twitch of its tail.

  They sped around a long, left-hand curve. As they did so, Noah heard a shot, and then another. Missed, both of them. But then a bullet hit the back of his cab, with a loud metallic bang. A few seconds later, just before the road curved to the right, his rear window shattered.

  Damn it, these guys were good. It was one thing to drive in a movie car chase, in which every twist and slide had been meticulously choreographed beforehand, and every bullet-strike was nothing but an electronically-detonated squib, but these guys had no idea where he was taking them, yet they were quickly catching up with him, and they were hitting him, too.

  He was only a half-mile away from the place where he had turned off the road to talk to Jenna – a very steep, down-sloping parking area on the right-hand side of the road, with a view through the trees toward Morro Bay, coming after a long right-hand curve.

  Noah managed to keep well ahead of the silver sedan as his Super Duty screamed around the curve. Now and then he caught sight of their gleaming front grille, but he didn’t give them the opportunity to take another clear shot.

  He flashed past the sign that warned ‘Dangerous Curve’, and put his foot down even harder. He could see that the silver sedan was accelerating too, but he needed to be out of sight when he reached the next bend. He didn’t want them to see his brake lights.

  He was screaming around the curve at fifty-five now – sixty – sixty-five – and the Super Duty was swaying and rolling like a boat in a heavy sea. Two or three miles an hour faster and it would lose its grip on the road altogether, and go tumbling over and over into the trees. Noah could feel its tyre treads clawing to keep their hold on the blacktop, and how close they were to breaking away: he had rolled two trucks for the movie Race With The Devil, and he could almost hear the rubber screaming to him in panic.

  The turning was suddenly up ahead of him. He saw the gap in the trees, the slope that led down to the parking area. He stood on his brakes and the Super Duty’s tyres gripped the road so hard that they smoked. Even so, he was still going too fast as he hurtled and bounced down the hill, and he had to spin the steering wheel so that the Super Duty slithered sideways. There was a low retaining wall at the bottom of the parking area, made of pine logs, and he collided with it broadside.

  But his plan had worked. As he sat there, winded and bruised, there was a bang like a cannon going off. The silver sedan came flying over the parking area, its engine screaming, and crashed into the trees below. There was another bang, but much deeper this time, and a ball of orange flame rolled up into the sky.

  Noah jumped down from his truck and balanced on top of the retaining wall. He could see that the silver sedan was wedged on its side between two tall pines, and that it was blazing fiercely. Nobody could have survived that.

  He waited a little longer, to see if the second sedan would appear. One minute went past . . . two. All he could hear was birds twittering and the odd buckling sound of overheated metal. At last he climbed back into his truck and drove cautiously back up to the highway. The road was deserted. No cars, no emergency services, nothing. If the spidery man and the blond man had been following close behind,
they had probably decided that discretion was the better part of being cold-blooded killers, and carried on going.

  Noah drove slowly back down to North Tassajara. Three police cars and an ambulance were already clustered around Jenna’s house, their red lights flashing. Presumably the old lady across the road had called them. Noah parked and walked up to the police line.

  ‘Help you?’ demanded a freckled young police officer.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Noah. ‘Not unless you know how to bring dead people back to life.’

  Eight

  It was 9.07 that evening before Detective Willis came in to say, ‘It’s OK, Mr Flynn. You can leave now. And your ride’s arrived.’

  ‘Hallelujah! Are you sure you don’t want to ask me the same questions all over again? That’s all you’ve been doing since you brought me here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. When it comes to homicide, we have to be thorough.’

  Noah stood up wearily. ‘You’ll keep me in touch with any progress, won’t you? Especially if you find out who those two dead guys are.’

  Detective Willis gave him a non-committal blink. ‘We’ll call you if we need to ask you any more questions, sir. Or if we need you to make any IDs.’

  ‘You catch those other two sons of bitches, that’s all I’m asking for. The blond one in particular. I want to be sitting there watching when they give him the needle.’

  ‘We’ll be doing our best, sir, believe me.’

  Noah looked at him. Detective Willis was a short, pot-bellied man with a stringy comb-over and two double chins. He looked like Martin Balsam’s less successful brother. He had been interviewing Noah continuously since three that afternoon, joined from time to time by two other detectives from the San Luis Obispo Police Department and two officers from the California Highway Patrol.

  Noah had told Detective Willis everything that had happened, six or seven times, in painstaking detail. How the blond-haired man had cut Jenna’s throat. The high-speed chase through the mountains. But in all of that he hadn’t mentioned the medallion. His visit to Jenna had been totally spontaneous, he had explained, simply to see how she was getting along.