Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

  actual commission of the crime. But as he left the knoll and headed

  toward the houses to the southwest, where he had parked his car on a

  quiet street, he felt no elation, no thrill. He was losing the ability

  to take delight in even the contemplation of a crime.

  He was changing. And he did not know why.

  As he drew near the first houses to the southwest of the knoll, he

  became aware that the night had grown brighter. He looked up. The moon

  swelled fat on the horizon, so huge it seemed to be crashing to earth,

  an illusion of enormousness created by the odd perspective of the early

  stages of the satellite's ascension. He stopped abruptly and stood with

  his head tilted back, staring up at the luminous lunar surface. A chill

  seized him, an inner iciness unrelated to the winter cold.

  "The moon," he said softly.

  Hearing himself speak those words aloud, Jack shuddered violently.

  Inexplicable fear welled in him. He was gripped by an irrational urge

  to run and hide from the moon, as if its luminescence were corrosive and

  would, like an acid, dissolve him as he stood bathed in it.

  The compulsion to flee passed in a minute. He could not understand why

  the moon had so suddenly terrified him. It was only the ancient and

  familiar moon of love songs and romantic poetry. Strange.

  He headed toward the car again. The looming lunar face still made him

  uneasy, and several times he glanced up at it, perplexed.

  However, by the time he got in the car, drove into New Haven, and picked

  up Interstate 95, that curious incident had faded from his mind. He was

  once more preoccupied with thoughts of Jenny, his comatose wife, whose

  condition haunted him more than usual at Christmastime.

  Later, in his apartment, as he stood by a big window, staring out at the

  great city, a bottle of Becks in one hand, he was sure that from 261st

  Street to Park Row, from Bensonhurst to Little Neck, there could be no

  one in the Metropolis whose Christmas Eve was lonelier than his.

  7.

  Christmas Day

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Sandy Sarver woke soon after dawn came to the high plains. The early sun

  glimmered vaguely at the bedroom windows of the house trailer. The

  world was so still that it seemed time must have stopped.

  She could turn over and go back to sleep if she so desired, for she had

  eight more days of vacation ahead of her. Ernie and Faye Block had

  closed the Tranquility Motel and had gone to visit their grandchildren

  in Milwaukee. The adjacent Tranquility Grille, which Sandy operated

  with her husband, Ned, was also closed over the holidays.

  But Sandy knew she could not get back to sleep, for she was wide

  awake-and horny. She stretched like a cat beneath the blankets. She

  wanted to wake Ned, smother him with kisses, and pull him atop her.

  Ned was merely a shadowy form in the dark bedroom, breathing deeply,

  sound asleep. Although she wanted him badly, she did not wake him.

  There would be plenty of time for lovemaking later in the day.

  She slipped quietly out of bed, into the bathroom, and showered. She

  made the end of it a cold shower.

  For years she had been uninterested in sex, frigid. Not long ago, the

  sight of her own nude body had embarrassed her and filled her with

  shame. Although she did not know the reason for the new feelings that

  had risen in her lately, she definitely had changed. It had started the

  summer before last, when sex had suddenly seemed . . . well,

  appealing. That sounded silly now. Of course sex was appealing. But

  prior to that summer, lovemaking had always been a chore to be endured.

  Her late erotic blossoming was a delightful surprise and an inexplicable

  mystery.

  Nude, she returned to the shadowy bedroom. She took a sweater and a

  pair of jeans from the closet, and dressed.

  In the small kitchen, she started to pour orange juice but stopped when

  stricken by the urge to go for a drive. She left a note for Ned, put on

  a sheepskin-lined jacket, and went outside to the Ford pickup.

  Sex and driving were the two new passions in her life, and the latter

  was almost as important to her as the former. That was another funny

  thing: until the summer before last, she hated going anywhere in the

  pickup except to work and back, and she seldom drove. She'd not only

  disliked highway travel but had dreaded it the way some people were

  afraid of airplanes. But now, other than sex, there was nothing she

  liked better than to get behind the wheel of the truck and take off

  journeying on a whim, without a destination, speeding.

  She had always understood why sex repelled her-that had been no mystery.

  She could blame her father, Horton Purney, for her frigidity. Though

  she had never known her mother, who had died giving birth, Sandy had

  known her father far too well. They had lived in a ramshackle house on

  the outskirts of Barstow, on the edge of the lonely California desert,

  just the two of them, and Sandy's earliest memories were of sexual

  abuse. Horton Purney had been a moody, brooding, mean, and dangerous

  man. Until Sandy escaped from home at fourteen, her father had used her

  as if she had been an erotic toy.

  Only recently had she realized that her strong dislike for highway

  travel was also related to something else that her father had done to

  her. Horton Purney had run a motorcycle repair shop out of a sagging,

  sun-scorched, unpainted barn on the same property as his house, but he

  had never made much money from it. Therefore, twice a year, he put

  Sandy in the car and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the

  desert to Las Vegas, where he knew an enterprising pimp, Samson Cherrik.

  Cherrik had a list of perverts with a special interest in children, and

  he was always happy to see Sandy. After a few weeks in Vegas, Sandy's

  father packed, put Sandy in the car, and drove back to Barstow, his

  pockets bulging with cash. For Sandy, the long drive to Vegas was a

  nightmare journey, for she knew what awaited her at their destination.

  The trip back to Barstow was worse, for it was not an escape from Vegas

  but a return to the grim life in that ramshackle house and the dark,

  urgent, insatiable lust of Horton Purney. In either direction, the road

  had led to hell, and she had learned to loathe the rumble of the car's

  engine, the hum of tires on the pavement, and the unspooling highway

  ahead.

  Therefore, the pleasure she now took from driving and sex seemed

  miraculous. She could not understand where she'd found the strength and

  will to overcome her horrible past. Since the summer before last, she

  simply . . . changed, was still changing. And, oh, it was glorious

  to feel the chains of self-loathing and the bonds of fear breaking

  apart, to feel self-respect for the first time in her life, to feel

  free.

  , Now, she got into the Ford pickup and started the engine. Their house

  trailer was set on an unlandscaped half-acre lot at the southern edge of

  the tiny-almost nonexistent-town of Beowawe, along Route 21, a two-lane

  blacktop. As Sandy drove away from the trailer, ther
e seemed to be

  nothing but empty plains, rolling hills, scattered buttes, rocky

  outcroppings, grass, brush, and waterless arroyos for a thousand miles

  in every direction. The intensely blue morning sky was immense, and as

  she got the Ford up to speed, Sandy felt as if she might take flight.

  If she headed north on 21, she would pass through Beowawe and soon come

  to Interstate 80, which led east toward Elko or west toward Battle

  Mountain. Instead, she went south, into a beautifully barren landscape.

  With skill and ease, she guided the four-wheel-drive pickup over the

  badly weathered county road at seventy miles an hour.

  In fifteen minutes, Route 21 petered out into a gravel roadbed that led

  south through another eighty-three miles of uninhabited and desolate

  territory. She did not follow it, choosing instead to turn east on a

  one-lane dirt track flanked by wild grass and scrub.

  Some snow lay on the ground this Christmas morning, though not much. In

  the distance, the mountains were white, but down here, the annual

  precipitation was less than fifteen inches a year, little of it in the

  form of snow. Here was an inch-deep skin of snow, there a small hillock

  against which a shallow drift had formed, and here a sparkling bush on

  which winddriven snow had hardened into a lacy garment of ice, but by

  far the largest portion of the land was bare and dry and brown.

  Sandy drove fast on the dirt, too, and behind her a cloud of dust plumed

  up. In time she left the track, headed overland-north, then west,

  coming at last to a familiar place, though she had not set out with this

  destination in mind. For reasons she did not understand, her

  subconscious often guided her to this spot during her solitary drives,

  seldom in a direct line but by wandering routes, so her arrival was

  usually a surprise to her. She stopped, set the brake. With the engine

  idling, she stared for a while through the dusty windshield.

  She came here because it made her feel better, though she did not know

  why. The slopes, the spines and teeth of rock, the grass and brush,

  formed a pleasing picture, though the scene was no prettier and no

  different from thousands of other places nearby. Yet here she felt a

  sublime peacefulness that could not be attained anywhere else.

  She switched off the engine and got out of the pickup, and for a while

  she strolled back and forth, hands jammed into the pockets of her

  sheepskin-lined jacket, oblivious of the stingingly cold air. Her drive

  through the wildiands had brought her back toward civilization, and

  Interstate 80 lay only a couple of hundred yards to the north. The

  occasional roar of a passing truck-echoed like a distant dragon's growl,

  but the holiday traffic was light. Beyond the highway, on the uplands

  to the northwest, lay the Tranquility Motel and Grille, but Sandy

  glanced just once in that direction. She was more interested in the

  immediate terrain, which exerted a mysterious and powerful attraction

  for her, and which seemed to radiate peace the way a rock, in evening,

  radiated the heat of the sun that it had absorbed during the day.

  She wasn't trying to analyze her affinity for this patch of ground.

  Evidently, there was some subtle harmony in the contours of the land, an

  interplay of line, form, and shadow that defied definition. Any attempt

  to decode its attraction would be as foolish as trying to analyze the

  beauty of a sunset or the appeal of a favorite flower.

  That Christmas morning, Sandy did not yet know that Ernie Block had been

  drawn, as if possessed, to the same patch of ground on December 10, when

  he had been on his way home from the freight office in Elko. She did

  not know that it aroused in Ernie an electrifying sense of pending

  epiphany and more than a little fear-emotions quite unlike those that it

  stirred in her. Weeks would pass before she learned that her special

  retreat had a strong attraction for others besides herself-both friends

  and strangers.

  Chicago, Illinois.

  For Father Stefan Wycazik-that stocky Polish dynamo, rector of St.

  Bernadette's, rescuer of troubled priests-it was the busiest Christmas

  morning he had ever known. And as the day wore on, it swiftly became

  the most meaningful Christmas of his life.

  He celebrated the second Mass at St. Bernadette's, spent an hour

  greeting parishioners who stopped by the rectory with fruit baskets and

  boxes of homemade cookies and other gifts, then drove to University

  Hospital to pay a visit to Winton Tolk, the policeman who had been shot

  in an uptown sandwich shop yesterday afternoon. Following emergency

  surgery, Tolk had been in the intensive care unit yesterday afternoon

  and all through the night. Christmas morning he had been moved to a

  semiprivate room adjacent to the ICU, for although he was no longer in

  critical condition, he still needed to be monitored constantly.

  When Father Wycazik arrived, Raynella Tolk, Winton's wife, was at her

  husband's bedside. She was quite attractive, with chocolate-brown skin

  and stylish close-cropped hair. "Mrs. Tolk? I'm Stefan Wycazik."

  "But-"

  He smiled. "Relax. I'm not here to give anyone the last rites."

  "Good," Winton said, , cause i'm sure not planning on dying."

  of looming over me ... calling my name ... but I was still in a haze,

  you see."

  "It's a miracle Win survived," Raynella said in a tremulous voice.

  "Now, now, honey," Winton said softly. "I did make it, and that's all

  that counts." When he was sure his wife would be all right, he looked at

  Stefan and said, "Everyone's amazed that I could lose so much blood and

  pull through. From what I hear, I must've lost buckets."

  "Did Brendan apply a tourniquet?"

  Tolk frowned. "Don't know. Like I said, I was in a haze, a daze."

  Father Wycazik hesitated, wondering how to find out what he needed to

  know without revealing the extraordinary possibility that motivated this

  visit. "I know you're not very clear about what happened but . . .

  did you notice anything peculiar about ... Brendan's hands?"

  :'Peculiar? What do you mean?"

  "He touched you, didn't he?"

  "Sure. I guess he felt for a pulse ... then checked around to see

  where the bleeding was coming from."

  "Well, did you feel anything ... anything unusual when he touched you

  ... anything odd?" Stefan asked carefully, frustrated by the need to be

  vague.

  "I don't seem to be following your line of thought, Father."

  Stefan Wycazik shook his head. "Never mind. The important thing is

  that you're well." He glanced at his watch and, feigning surprise, said,

  "Good heavens, I'm late for an appointment." Before they could respond,

  he snatched his hat from the chair, wished them godspeed, and hurried

  out, no doubt leaving them astonished by his behavior.

  When people saw Father Wycazik walking toward them, they were usually

  reminded of drill sergeants or football coaches. His solid body and the

  self-confident, aggressive way he used it were not what one expected of

  a priest. And when he was in a hurry, he was not so much like a drill
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  sergeant or a football coach as he was like a tank.

  From Tolk's room, Father Wycazik blitzed down the hall, shoved through a

  pair of heavy swinging doors, then through another pair, into the

  intensive care unit, where the wounded policeman had been until just an

  hour ago. He asked to speak to the physician on duty, Dr. Royce

  Albright. With the hope that God would forgive a few little white lies

  told in a good cause, Stefan identified himself as the Tolk family's

  priest and implied that Mrs. Tolk had sent him to get the full story of

  her husband's condition, about which she was not yet entirely clear.

  Dr. Albright looked like Jerry Lewis and had a deep rumbling voice like

  Henry Kissinger, which was disconcerting, but he was willing to answer

  whatever questions Father Wycazik wished to pose. He was not Winton

  Tolk's personal physician, but he was interested in the case. "You can

  assure Mrs. Tolk that there's almost no danger of a setback. He's

  coming along marvelously. Shot twice in the chest, pointblank, with a

  .38. Until yesterday, no one here would've believed that anyone could

  take two shots in the chest from a large-caliber handgun and be out of

  intensive care in twentyfour hours! Mr. Tolk is incredibly lucky."

  "The bullets missed the heart, then . . . and all vital organs?"

  "Not only that," Albright said, "but neither round did major damage to

  any veins or arteries. A .38-caliber slug has lots of punch, Father.

  Ordinarily, it chews up the victim. In Tolk's case, one major artery

  and vein were nicked, but neither was severed. Very fortunate, indeed."