by Dean Koontz
“You do think I’m full of shit.”
“No, baby, no,” she said. “I think you’re wonderful.”
“I’m not, though. You’re wonderful. I’m just a neurotic writer. By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time too full of themselves ever to be wonderful.”
“You’re not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited. ”
“That just proves you haven’t been listening to me all these years.”
“Okay, I’ll give you the neurotic part.”
“Thank you, dear,” he said. “It’s nice to know you’ve been listening at least some of the time.”
“But you’re also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine.”
“Bite your tongue.”
She said, “I mean it.”
“Maybe you can live with a writer, but I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.”
She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they just held each other, listening to the surf.
Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further their worries or what might need to be done in the morning. Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and therapy that a counselor could provide.
In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly, reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force; but from a divine view, transitory.
On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird’s wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware—therefore vulnerable—in a strange place. But her weariness was greater than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her mother’s breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heartbeats.
3
Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire, explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be God’s background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning, leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.
Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to him, had rewound and rerun it.
They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset, got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.
Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown porkpie hat with the small brown and black duck feather in the band. He wasn’t snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool escaped the corner of his mouth; half his chin glistened disgustingly.
Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.
His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such games—largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges between family members.
In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew almost felt as if he’d been born with that knowledge, and a profound understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his genes. Nothing—except a vast fortune—was as precious as a good name, maintained through generations; from a good name sprang as much power as from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of state, leaders of industry, noted champions of the environment, and much-lauded patrons of the arts.
His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would take Alfie aside and instruct him to terminate Clocker.
The paperback Star Trek novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker’s chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up the book.
He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker’s stopping place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as to why so many people were fascinated by the starship Enterprise and its crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited to the stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found himself in Spock’s prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and discovered he was in the mind of “Bones” McCoy.
Annoyed, he closed Journey to the Rectum of the Universe, or whatever the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker’s chest with it to wake him.
The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, “Wha? Wha?”
“We’ll be landing soon.”
“Of course we will,” Clocker said.
“There’s a contact meeting us.”
“Life is contact.”
Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin Stillwater, reading several pages of a Star Trek novel, and now being peppered with more of Clocker’s cryptograms was too much for any man to bear and still be expected to keep his good humor. He said, “Either you’ve been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails just crawled over your chin and into your mouth.”
Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with his shirt sleeve.
“This contact,” Oslett said, “might have a lead on Alfie by now. We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?”
Clocker’s eyes were rheumy. “None of us is ever fully awake.”
“Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don’t have any patience for that right now.”
Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, “You’ve got a turbulent heart, Drew.”
“Wrong. It’s my stomach that’s turbulent from having to listen to this crap.”
“An inner tempest of blind hostility.”
“Fuck you,” Oslett said.
The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their seatbelts.
According to Oslett’s Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until it showed eight minutes to midnight.
By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb clock counting down toward detonation.
The advance man—who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much younger than Drew Oslett—was waiting in the lounge at the private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomax, which it most likely was not.
Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwo
od Bumstead.
The contact didn’t seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a green Oldsmobile.
Lomax was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine. However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomax had a neck like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone, and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.
Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the air was still damp and chilly, Lomax was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.
Oslett suspected Lomax was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain, even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body was the ego that inhabited it.
Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomax was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was enough. Actually, Lomax was probably only slightly—if at all—larger than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison, Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes intimidated by Clocker’s size, Oslett delighted at the thought of Clocker intimidated by Lomax—though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn’t show it.
Lomax drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.
Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard. They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees, all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.
“Under your seat,” Lomax told Oslett, “you’ll find a Xerox of the Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house. Wasn’t easy to get hold of. Read it now, ’cause I have to take it with me and destroy it.”
Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay. They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.
“This cop, this Lowbock,” Oslett said, looking up from the report, “he thinks it’s all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn’t even an intruder.”
“That’s a break for us,” Lomax said. He grinned, which was a mistake, because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to help the willfully stupid.
Oslett said, “Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked down a drain here, I think we need more than a break. We need a miracle.”
“Let me see,” Clocker said.
Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said to Lomax, “How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how did he find him?”
Lomax shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. “No-body knows.”
Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.
To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of eternity.
Lomax said, “We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later our man will turn up, and we’ll recover him.”
“Where’s Stillwater now?”
“We don’t know.”
“Terrific.”
“Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that they seemed to . . . go into hiding, I guess you’d say.”
“What other thing?”
Lomax frowned. “Nobody’s sure. It happened right around the corner from their house. Different neighbors saw different pieces, but a guy fitting Stillwater’s description fired a lot of shots at another guy in a Buick. The Buick slams into a parked Explorer, see, gets hung up on it for a second. Two kids fitting the description of the Stillwater girls tumble out the back seat of the Buick and run, the Buick takes off, Stillwater empties his gun at it, and then this BMW—which fits the description of one of the cars registered to the Stillwaters—it comes around the corner like a bat out of hell, driven by Stillwater’s wife, and all of them get in it and take off.”
“After the Buick?”
“No. It’s long gone. It’s like they’re trying to get out of there before the cops arrive.”
“Any neighbors see the guy in the Buick?”
“No. Too dark.”
“It was our bad boy.”
Lomax said, “You really think so?”
“Well, if it wasn’t him, it must’ve been the Pope.”
Lomax gave him an odd look, then stared thoughtfully at the highway ahead.
Before the dimwit could ask how the Pope was involved in all of this, Oslett said, “Why don’t we have the police report on the second incident?”
“Wasn’t one. No complaint. No crime victim. Just a report of the hit-and-run damage to the Explorer.”
“According to what Stillwater told the cops, our Alfie thinks he is Stillwater, or ought to be. Thinks his life was stolen from him. The poor boy’s totally over the edge, whacko, so to him it makes sense to go right back and steal the Stillwater kids because somehow he thinks they’re his kids. Jesus, what a mess.”
A highway sign indicated they would soon reach the city limits of Laguna Beach.
Oslett said, “Where are we going?”
“Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point,” Lomax replied. “You’ve got a suite there. I took the long way so you’d both have a chance to read the police report.”
“We napped on the plane. I sort of thought, once we landed, we’d get right into action.”
Lomax looked surprised. “Doing what?”
“Go to the Stillwater house for starters, have a look around, see what we can see.”
“Nothing to see. Anyway, I’m supposed to take you to the Ritz. You’re to get some sleep, be ready to go by eight in the morning.”
“Go where?”
“They expect to have a lead on Stillwater or your boy or both by morning. Someone will come to the hotel to give you a briefing at eight o’clock, and you’ve gotta be rested, ready to move. Which you should be, since it’s the Ritz. I mean, it’s a terrific hotel. Great food too. Even from room service. You can get a good, healthy breakfast, not typical greasy hotel crap. Egg-white omelets, seven-grain bread, all kinds of fresh fruit, non-fat yogurt—”
Oslett said, “I sure hope I can get a breakfast like I have in Manhattan every morning. Alligator embryos and chicken-fried eel heads on a bed of seaweed sautéed in a garlic butter, with a double side order of calves’ brains. Ahhh, man, you never in your life feel half as pumped as you do after that breakfast.”
So astonished that he let the speed of the Oldsmobile fall to half of what it had been, Lomax stared at Oslett. “Well, they have gr
eat food at the Ritz but maybe not as exotic as what you can get in New York.” He looked at the street again, and the car picked up speed. “Anyway, you sure that’s healthy food? Sounds packed with cholesterol to me.”
Not a hint of irony, not a trace of humor informed Lomax’s voice. It was clear that he actually believed Oslett ate eel heads, alligator embryos, and calves’ brains for breakfast.
Reluctantly, Oslett had to face the fact that there were worse potential partners than the one he already had. Karl Clocker only looked stupid.
In Laguna Beach, December was the off season, and the streets were nearly deserted at a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning. At the three-way intersection in the heart of town, with the public beach on the right, they stopped for the red traffic signal, even though no other moving car was in sight.
Oslett thought the town was as unnervingly dead as any place in Oklahoma, and he longed for the bustle of Manhattan: the all-night rush of police vehicles and ambulances, the noir music of sirens, the endless honking of horns. Laughter, drunken voices, arguments, and the mad gibbering of the drug-blasted schizophrenic street dwellers that echoed up to his apartment even in the deepest hours of the night were sorely lacking in this somnolent burg on the edge of the winter sea.
As they continued out of Laguna, Clocker passed the Mission Viejo Police report forward from the back seat.
Oslett waited for a comment from the Trekker. When none was forthcoming, and when he could no longer tolerate the silence that filled the car and seemed to blanket the world outside, he half-turned to Clocker and said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
“Not good,” Clocker pronounced from his nest of shadows in the back seat.
“Not good? That’s all you can say? Looks like one colossal mess to me.”
“Well,” Clocker said philosophically, “into every crypto-fascist organization, a little rain must fall.”
Oslett laughed. He turned forward, glanced at the solemn Lomax, and laughed harder. “Karl, sometimes I actually think maybe you’re not a bad guy.”