by Dean Koontz
8
Lieutenant Lowbock was the last cop out of the house.
On the front stoop, as the doors of squad cars slammed in the street behind him and engines started, he turned to Paige and Marty to favor them with one more short-lived and barely perceptible smile. He was evidently loath to be remembered for the tightly controlled anger they had finally stirred in him. “I’ll be seeing you as soon as we have the lab results.”
“Can’t be too soon,” Paige said. “We’ve had such a charming visit, we simply can’t wait for the next time.”
Lowbock said, “Good evening, Mrs. Stillwater.” He turned to Marty. “Good evening, Mr. Murder.”
Marty knew it was childish to close the door in the detective’s face, but it was also satisfying.
Sliding the security chain into place as Marty engaged the dead-bolt lock, Paige said, “Mr. Murder?”
“That’s what they call me in the People article.”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“Right in the headline. Oh, wait’ll you read it. It makes me look ridiculous, spooky-old-scary-old Marty Stillwater, book hustler extraordinary. Jesus, if he happened to read that article today, I don’t half blame Lowbock for thinking this was all a publicity scam of some kind.”
She said, “He’s an idiot.”
“It is an unlikely damn story.”
“I believed it.”
“I know. And I love you for that.”
He kissed her. She clung to him but briefly.
“How’s your throat?” she asked.
“I’ll live.”
“That idiot thinks you choked yourself.”
“I didn’t. But it’s possible, I suppose.”
“Stop seeing his side of it. You’re making me mad. What now? Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“Fast as we can,” he agreed. “And not come back until we can figure out what the hell this is all about. Can you throw a couple of suitcases together, basics for all of us for a few days?”
“Sure,” she said, already heading for the stairs.
“I’ll go call Vic and Kathy, make sure everything’s all right over there, then I’ll come help you. And Paige—the Mossberg is under the bed in our room.”
Starting up the stairs, stepping over the splintery debris, she said, “Okay.”
“Get it out, put it on top of the bed while you pack.”
“I will,” she said, already a third of the way up the stairs.
He didn’t think he had sufficiently impressed her with the need for uncommon caution. “Take it with you to the girls’ room.”
“All right.”
Speaking sharply enough to halt her, pain encircling his neck when he tilted his head back to stare up at her, he said, “Damn it, I mean it, Paige.”
She looked down, surprised because he never used that tone of voice. “Okay. I’ll keep it close.”
“Good.”
He headed for the telephone in the kitchen and made it as far as the dining room when he heard Paige cry out from the second floor. Heart pounding so hard he could draw only shallow staccato breaths, Marty raced back into the foyer, expecting to see her in The Other’s grasp.
She was standing at the head of the stairs, horrified by the gruesome stains on the carpet, which she was seeing for the first time. “Hearing about it, I still didn’t think . . .” She looked down at Marty. “So much blood. How could he just . . . just walk away?”
“He couldn’t if he was . . . just a man. That’s why I’m sure he’ll be back. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for a month, but he’ll be back.”
“Marty, this is crazy.”
“I know.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she said, less in any profane sense than as a prayer, and hurried into the master bedroom.
Marty returned to the kitchen and took the Beretta out of the cabinet. Although he had loaded the pistol himself, he popped out the magazine, checked it, slammed it back into place, and jacked a round into the chamber.
He noticed scores of overlapping dirty footprints all across the Mexican-tile floor. Many were still wet. During the past two hours, the police had tramped in and out of the rain, and evidently not all of them had been thoughtful enough to wipe their feet at the door.
Though he knew the cops had been busy and that they had better things to do than worry about tracking up the house, the footprints—and the thoughtlessness they represented—seemed to be nearly as profound a violation as the assault by The Other. A surprisingly intense resentment uncoiled in Marty.
While sociopaths stalked the modern world, the judicial system operated on the premise that evil was spawned primarily by societal injustice. Thugs were considered victims of society as surely as the people they robbed or killed were their victims. Recently a man had been released from a California prison after serving six years for raping and murdering an eleven-year-old girl. Six years. The girl, of course, was still as dead as she had ever been. Such outrages were now so common that the story got only minor press coverage. If the courts would not protect eleven-year-old innocents, and if the House and Senate wouldn’t write laws to force the courts to do so, then judges and politicians couldn’t be counted on to protect anyone, anywhere, at any time.
But, damn it, at least you expected the cops to protect you because cops were on the street every day, in the thick of it, and they knew what the world was really like. The grand poobahs in Washington and smug eminences in courtrooms had isolated themselves from reality with high salaries, endless perks, and lush pensions; they lived in gate-guarded neighborhoods with private security, sent their kids to private schools—and lost touch with the damage they perpetrated. But not cops. Cops were blue-collar. Working men and women. In their work they saw evil every day; they knew it was as widespread among the privileged as among the middle-class and the poor, that society was less at fault than the flawed nature of the human species.
The police were supposed to be the last line of defense against barbarity. But if they became cynical about the system they were asked to uphold, if they believed they were the only ones who cared about justice any more, they would cease caring. When you needed them, they would conduct their forensic tests, fill out thick files of paperwork to please the bureaucracy, track dirt across your once-clean floors, and leave you without even sympathy.
Standing in his kitchen, holding the loaded Beretta, Marty knew that he and Paige now constituted their own last line of defense. No one else. No greater authority. No guardian of the public welfare.
He needed courage but also the free-wheeling imagination that he brought to the writing of his books. Suddenly he seemed to be living in a noir novel, in that amoral realm where stories by James M. Cain or Elmore Leonard took place. Survival in such a dark world depended upon quick thinking, fast action, utter ruthlessness. Most of all it hinged on the ability to imagine the worst that life could come up with next and, by imagining, be ready for it rather than surprised.
His mind was blank.
He had no idea where to go, what to do. Pack up and get out of the house, yes. But then what?
He just stared at the gun in his hand.
Although he loved the works of Cain and Leonard, his own books were not that dark. They celebrated reason, logic, virtue, and the triumph of social order. His imagination did not lead him toward vigilante solutions, situational ethics, or anarchism.
Blank.
Worried about his ability to cope when so much was riding on him, Marty picked up the kitchen phone and called the Delorios. When Kathy answered on the first ring, he said, “It’s Marty.”
“Marty, are you okay? We saw all the police leaving, and then the officer over here left, too, but nobody’s made the situation clear to us. I mean, is everything all right? What in the world is going on?”
Kathy was a good neighbor and genuinely concerned, but Marty had no intention of wasting time in a full recounting of what he’d been through with either the would-be killer or the p
olice. “Where are Charlotte and Emily?”
“Watching TV.”
“Where?”
“Well, in the family room.”
“Are your doors locked?”
“Yes, of course, I think so.”
“Be sure. Check them. Do you have a gun?”
“A gun? Marty, what is this?”
“Do you have a gun?” he insisted.
“I don’t believe in guns. But Vic has one.”
“Is he carrying it now?”
“No. He’s—”
“Tell him to load it and carry it until Paige and I can get there to pick up the girls.”
“Marty, I don’t like this. I don’t—”
“Ten minutes, Kathy. I’ll pick up the girls in ten minutes or less, fast as I can.”
He hung up before she was able to respond.
He hurried upstairs to the guest room that doubled as Paige’s home office. She did the family bookkeeping, balanced the checkbook, and looked after the rest of their financial affairs.
In the right-hand bottom drawer of the pine desk were files of receipts, invoices, and canceled checks. The drawer also contained their checkbook and savings-account passbook, which Marty retrieved fixed together with a rubberband. He stuffed them into one pocket of his chinos.
His mind wasn’t blank any more. He’d thought of some precautions he ought to take, though they were too feeble to be considered a plan of action.
In his office he went to the walk-in storage closet and hastily selected four cardboard cartons from stacks of thirty to forty boxes of the same size and shape. Each held twenty hardcover books. He could only carry two at a time to the garage. He put them in the trunk of the BMW, wincing from the pain in his neck, which the effort exacerbated.
Entering the master bedroom after his second hasty trip to the car, he was brought up short just past the threshold by the sight of Paige snatching up the shotgun and whipping around to confront him.
“Sorry,” she said, when she saw who it was.
“You did it right,” he said. “Have you gotten the girls’ things together?”
“No, I’m just finishing here.”
“I’ll get started on theirs,” he said.
Following the blood trail to Charlotte and Emily’s room, passing the broken-out section of gallery railing, Marty glanced at the foyer floor below. He still expected to see a dead man sprawled on the cracked tiles.
9
Charlotte and Emily were slumped on the Delorios’ family -room sofa, heads close together. They were pretending to be deeply involved in a stupid television comedy show about a stupid family with stupid kids and stupid parents doing stupid things to resolve a stupid problem. As long as they appeared to be caught up in the program, Mrs. Delorio stayed in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Mr. Delorio either paced through the house or stood at the front windows watching the cops outside. Ignored, the girls had a chance to whisper to each other and try to figure out what was happening at home.
“Maybe Daddy’s been shot,” Charlotte worried.
“I told you already a million times he wasn’t.”
“What do you know? You’re only seven.”
Emily sighed. “He told us he was okay, in the kitchen, when Mommy thought he was hurt.”
“He was covered with blood,” Charlotte fretted.
“He said it wasn’t his.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do,” Emily said emphatically.
“If Daddy wasn’t shot, then who was?”
“Maybe a burglar,” Emily said.
“We’re not rich, Em. What would a burglar want in our place? Hey, maybe Daddy had to shoot Mrs. Sanchez.”
“Why shoot Mrs. Sanchez? She’s just the cleaning lady.”
“Maybe she went berserk,” Charlotte said, and the possibility appealed enormously to her thirst for drama.
Emily shook her head. “Not Mrs. Sanchez. She’s nice.” “Nice people go berserk.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
Emily folded her arms on her chest. “Name one.” “Mrs. Sanchez,” Charlotte said.
“Besides Mrs. Sanchez.”
“Jack Nicholson.”
“Who’s he?”
“You know, the actor. In Batman he was the Joker, and he was totally massively berserk.”
“So maybe he’s always totally massively berserk.”
“No, sometimes he’s nice, like in that movie with Shirley MacLaine, he was an astronaut, and Shirley’s daughter got real sick and they found out she had cancer, she died, and Jack was just so sweet and nice.”
“Besides, this isn’t Mrs. Sanchez’s day,” Emily said.
“What?”
“She only comes on Thursdays.”
“Really, Em, if she went berserk, she wouldn’t know what day it was,” Charlotte countered, pleased with her response, which made such perfect sense. “Maybe she’s loose from a looney-tune asylum, goes around getting housekeeping jobs, then sometimes when she’s berserk she kills the family, roasts them, and eats them for dinner. ”
“You’re weird,” Emily said.
“No, listen,” Charlotte insisted in an urgent whisper, “like Hannibal Lecter.”
“Hannibal the Cannibal!” Emily gasped.
Neither of them had been allowed to see the movie—which Emily insisted on calling The Sirens of the Lambs—because Mom and Daddy didn’t think they were old enough, but they’d heard about it from other kids in school who’d seen it on video a billion times.
Charlotte could tell that Emily was no longer so sure about Mrs. Sanchez. After all, Hannibal the Cannibal had been a doctor who went humongously berserk and bit off people’s noses and stuff, so the idea of a berserk cannibal cleaning lady suddenly made a lot of sense.
Mr. Delorio came into the family room to part the drapes over the sliding glass doors and study the backyard, which was pretty much revealed by the patio lights. In his right hand he held a gun. He had not been carrying a gun before.
Letting the drapes fall back into place, turning away from the glass doors, he smiled at Charlotte and Emily. “You kids okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlotte said. “This is a great show.”
“You need anything?”
“No thanks, sir,” Emily said. “We just want to watch the show.”
“It’s a great show,” Charlotte repeated.
As Mr. Delorio left the room, both Charlotte and Emily turned to watch him until he was out of sight.
“Why’s he have a gun?” Emily wondered.
“Protecting us. And you know what that means? Mrs. Sanchez must still be alive and on the loose, looking for someone to eat.”
“But what if Mr. Delorio goes berserk next? He’s got a gun, we could never get away from him.”
“Be serious,” Charlotte said, but then she realized a physical-education teacher was just as likely to go berserk as any cleaning lady. “Listen, Em, you know what to do if he goes berserk?”
“Call nine-one-one.”
“You won’t have time for that, silly. So what you’ll have to do is, you’ll have to kick him in the nuts.”
Emily frowned. “Huh?”
“Don’t you remember the movie Saturday?” Charlotte asked.
Mom had been upset enough about the movie to complain to the theater manager. She’d wanted to know how the picture could have received a PG rating with the language and violence in it, and the manager had said it was PG-13, which was very different.
One of the things that bothered Mom was a scene where the good guy got away from the bad guy by kicking him hard between the legs. Later, when someone asked the good guy what the bad guy wanted, the good guy said, “I don’t know what he wanted, but what he needed was a good kick in the nuts.”
Charlotte had sensed, at once, that the line annoyed her mother. Later, she could have asked for an explanation, and her mother would have given her one. Mom and Daddy believed in answering all of a child
’s questions honestly. But sometimes, it was more exciting to try to learn the answer on her own, because then it was something she knew that they didn’t know she knew.
At home, she’d checked the dictionary to see if there was any definition of “nuts” that would explain what the good guy had done to the bad guy and also explain why her mother was so unhappy about it. When she saw that one meaning of the word was obscene slang for “testicles,” she checked that mysterious word in the same dictionary, learned what she could, then sneaked into Daddy’s office and used his medical encyclopedia to discover more. It was pretty bizarre stuff. But she understood it. Sort of. Maybe more than she wanted to understand. She had explained it as best she could to Em. But Em didn’t believe a word of it and, evidently, promptly forgot about it.
“Just like in the movie Saturday,” Charlotte reminded her. “If things get real bad and he goes berserk, kick him between the legs.”
“Oh, yeah,” Em said dubiously, “kick him in his tickles. ”
“Testicles.”
“It was tickles.”
“It was testicles,” Charlotte insisted firmly.
Emily shrugged. “Whatever.”
Mrs. Delorio walked into the family room, drying her hands on a yellow kitchen towel. She was wearing an apron over her skirt and blouse. She smelled of onions, which she had been chopping; she’d been starting to prepare dinner when they’d arrived. “Are you girls ready for more Pepsi?”
“No, ma’am,” Charlotte said, “we’re fine, thank you.
Enjoying the show.”
“It’s a great show,” Emily said.
“One of our favorites,” Charlotte said.
Emily said, “It’s about a boy with tickles and everyone keeps kicking them.”
Charlotte almost thumped the little twerp on the head.
Frowning with confusion, Mrs. Delorio glanced back and forth from the television screen to Emily. “Tickles?”
“Pickles,” Charlotte said, making a lame effort at covering.
The doorbell rang before Em could do more damage.
Mrs. Delorio said, “I’ll bet that’s your folks,” and hurried out of the family room.
“Peabrain,” Charlotte said to her sister.