by Dean Koontz
“Might be bad weather ahead,” Paige said.
The sky was largely blue to the east, but masses of dark clouds were surging across the peaks and through the passes of the Sierra Nevadas to the west.
“Better stop at a service station in Bishop,” Marty said, “find out if the Highway Patrol’s requiring chains to go up into Mammoth.”
Maybe he should have welcomed a heavy snowfall. It would further isolate the cabin and make them less accessible to whatever enemies were hunting them. But he felt only uneasiness at the prospect of a storm. If luck was not with them, the moment might come when they needed to get out of Mammoth Lakes in a hurry. Roads drifted shut by a blizzard could cause a delay long enough to be the death of them.
Charlotte and Emily wanted to play Look Who’s the Monkey Now, a word game Marty had invented a couple of years ago to entertain them on long car trips. They had already played twice since leaving Mission Viejo. Paige declined to join them, pleading the need to focus her attention on driving, and Marty ended up being the monkey more frequently than usual because he was distracted by worry.
The higher reaches of the Sierras disappeared in mist. The clouds blackened steadily, as if the fires of the hidden sun were burning to extinction and leaving only charry ruin in the heavens.
10
The motel owners referred to their establishment as a lodge. The buildings were embraced by the boughs of hundred-foot Douglas firs, smaller pines, and tamaracks. The design was studiedly rustic.
The rooms couldn’t compare with those at the Ritz-Carlton, of course, and the interior designer’s attempt to call to mind Bavaria with knotty-pine paneling and chunky wood-frame furniture was jejune, but Drew Oslett found the accommodations pleasant nonetheless. A sizable stone fireplace, in which logs and starter material already had been arranged, was especially appealing; within minutes of their arrival, a fire was blazing.
Alec Spicer telephoned the surveillance team stationed in a van across the street from the Stillwater house. In language every bit as cryptic as some of Clocker’s statements, he informed them that Alfie’s handlers were now in town and could be reached at the motel.
“Nothing new,” Spicer said when he hung up the phone. “Jim and Alice Stillwater aren’t home yet. The son and his family haven’t shown up, either, and there’s no sign of our boy, of course.”
Spicer turned on every light in the room and opened the drapes because he was still wearing his sunglasses, though he had taken off his leather flight jacket. Oslett suspected that Alec Spicer didn’t remove his shades to have sex—and perhaps not even when he went to bed at night.
The three of them settled into swiveling barrel chairs around a herringbone-pine dinette table off the compact kitchenette. The nearby mullioned window offered a view of the wooded slope behind the motel.
From a black leather briefcase, Spicer produced several items Oslett and Clocker would need to stage the murders of the Stillwater family in the fashion that the home office desired.
“Two coils of braided wire,” he said, putting a pair of plastic-wrapped spools on the table. “Bind the daughters’ wrists and ankles with it. Not loosely. Tight enough to hurt. That’s how it was in the Maryland case.”
“All right,” Oslett said.
“Don’t cut the wire,” Spicer instructed. “After binding the wrists, run the same strand to the ankles. One spool for each girl. That’s also like Maryland.”
The next article produced from the briefcase was a pistol.
“It’s a SIG nine-millimeter,” Spicer said. “Designed by the Swiss maker but actually manufactured by Sauer in Germany. A very good piece.”
Accepting the SIG, Oslett said, “This is what we do the wife and kids with?”
Spicer nodded. “Then Stillwater himself.”
Oslett familiarized himself with the gun while Spicer withdrew a box of 9mm ammunition from the briefcase. “Is this the same weapon the father used in Maryland?”
“Exactly,” Spicer said. “Records will show it was bought by Martin Stillwater three weeks ago at the same gun shop where he’s purchased other weapons. There’s a clerk who’s been paid to remember selling it to him.”
“Very nice.”
“The box this gun came in and the sales receipt have already been planted in the back of one of the desk drawers in Stillwater’s home office, down in the house in Mission Viejo.”
Smiling, filled with genuine admiration, beginning to believe they were going to salvage the Network, Oslett said, “Superb attention to detail.”
“Always,” Spicer said.
The Machiavellian complexity of the plan delighted Oslett the way Wile E. Coyote’s elaborate schemes in Road Runner cartoons had thrilled him as a child—except that, in this case, the coyotes were the inevitable winners. He glanced at Karl Clocker, expecting him to be likewise enthralled.
The Trekker was cleaning under his fingernails with the blade of a penknife. His expression was somber. From every indication, his mind was at least four parsecs and two dimensions from Mammoth Lakes, California.
From the briefcase, Spicer produced a Ziploc plastic bag that contained a folded sheet of paper. “This is a suicide note. Forged. But so well done, any graphologist would be convinced it was written by Stillwater’s own hand.”
“What’s it say?” Oslett asked.
Quoting from memory, Spicer said, “ ‘There’s a worm. Burrowing inside. All of us contaminated. Enslaved. Parasites within. Can’t live this way. Can’t live.’ ”
“That’s from the Maryland case?” Oslett asked.
“Word for word.”
“The guy was creepy.”
“Won’t argue with you on that.”
“We leave it by the body?”
“Yeah. Handle it only with gloves. And press Stillwater’s fingers all over it after you’ve killed him. The paper’s got a hard, smooth finish. Should take prints well.”
Spicer reached into the briefcase once more and withdrew another Ziploc bag containing a black pen.
“Pentel Rolling Writer,” Spicer said. “Taken from a box of them in a drawer of Stillwater’s desk.”
“This is what the suicide note was written with?”
“Yeah. Leave it somewhere in the vicinity of his body, with the cap off.”
Smiling, Oslett reviewed the array of items on the table. “This is really going to be fun.”
While they waited for an alert from the surveillance team that was staking out the elder Stillwaters’ house, Oslett risked a walk to a ski shop in a cluster of stores and restaurants across the street from the motel. The air seemed to have grown more bitter in the short time they had been in the room, and the sky looked bruised.
The merchandise in the shop was first-rate. He was quickly able to outfit himself in well-made thermal underwear imported from Sweden and a black Hard Corps Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit. The suit had a reflective silver lining, foldaway hood, anatomically shaped knees, ballistic nylon scuff guards, insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers, and enough pockets to satisfy a magician. Over this he wore a purple U.S. Freestyle Team vest with Thermoloft insulation, reflective lining, elasticized gussets, and reinforced shoulders. He bought gloves too—Italian leather and nylon, almost as flexible as a second skin. He considered buying high-quality goggles but decided to settle for a good pair of sunglasses, since he wasn’t actually intending to hit the slopes. His awesome ski boots looked like something a robot Terminator would wear to kick his way through concrete-block walls.
He felt incredibly tough.
As it was necessary to try on every item of clothing, he used the opportunity to change out of the clothes in which he’d entered the shop. The clerk obligingly folded the garments into a shopping bag, which Oslett carried with him when he set out on the return walk to the motel in his new gear.
By the minute, he was more optimistic about their prospects. Nothing lifted the spirits like a shopping spree.
When he returned to the r
oom, though he had been gone half an hour, there had been no news.
Spicer was sitting in an armchair, still wearing sunglasses, watching a talk show. A heavyset black woman with big hair was interviewing four male cross-dressers who had attempted to enlist, as women, in the United States Marine Corps, and had been rejected, though they seemed to believe the President intended to intervene on their behalf.
Clocker, of course, was sitting at the table by the window, in the fall of silvery pre-storm light, reading Huckleberry Kirk and the Oozing Whores of Alpha Centauri, or
whatever the damn book was called. His only concession to the Sierra weather had been to change from a harlequin-pattern sweater-vest into a fully sleeved cashmere sweater in a stomach-curdling shade of orange.
Oslett carried the black briefcase into one of the two bedrooms that flanked the living room. He emptied the contents on one of the queen-size beds, sat cross-legged on the mattress, took off his new sunglasses, and examined the clever props that would ensure Martin Stillwater’s postmortem conviction of multiple murder and suicide.
He had a number of problems to work out, including how to kill all these people with the least amount of noise. He wasn’t concerned about the gunfire, which could be muffled one way or another. It was the screaming that worried him. Depending on where the hit went down, there might be neighbors. If alerted, neighbors would call the police.
After a couple of minutes, he put on his sunglasses and went out to the living room. He interrupted Spicer’s television viewing: “We waste them, then what police agency’s going to be dealing with it?”
“If it happens here,” Spicer said, “probably the Mammoth County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Do we have a friend there?”
“Not now, but I’m sure we could have.”
“Coroner?”
“Out here in the boondocks—probably just a local mortician. ”
“No special forensic skills?”
Spicer said, “He’ll know a bullet hole from an asshole, but that’s about it.”
“So if we terminated the wife and Stillwater first, nobody’s going to be sophisticated enough to detect the order of homicides?”
“Big-city forensic lab would have a hard time doing that if the difference was, say, less than an hour.”
Oslett said, “What I’m thinking is . . . if we try to deal with the kids first, we’ll have a problem with Stillwater and his wife.”
“How so?”
“Either Clocker or I can cover the parents while the other one takes the kids into a different room. But stripping the girls, wiring their hands and ankles—it’ll take ten, fifteen minutes to do right, like in Maryland. Even with one of us covering Stillwater and his wife with a gun, they aren’t going to sit still for that. They’ll both rush me or Clocker, whoever’s guarding them, and together they might get the upper hand.”
“I doubt it,” Spicer said.
“How can you be sure?”
“People are gutless these days.”
“Stillwater fought off Alfie.”
“True,” Spicer admitted.
“When she was sixteen, the wife found her father and mother dead. The old man killed the mother, then himself—”
Spicer smiled. “Nice tie-in with our scenario.”
Oslett hadn’t thought about that. “Good point. Might also explain why Stillwater couldn’t write the novel based on the case in Maryland. Anyway, three months later she petitioned the court to free her from her guardian and declare her a legal adult.”
“Tough bitch.”
“The court agreed. It granted her petition.”
“So blow away the parents first,” Spicer advised, shifting in the armchair as if his butt had begun to go numb.
“That’s what we’ll do,” Oslett agreed.
Spicer said, “This is fucking crazy.”
For a moment Oslett thought Spicer was commenting on their plans for the Stillwaters. But he was referring to the television program, to which his attention drifted again.
On the talk show, the host with big hair had ushered off the cross-dressers and introduced a new group of guests. There were four angry-looking women seated on the stage. All of them were wearing strange hats.
As Oslett left the room, he saw Clocker out of the corner of his eye. The Trekker was still at the table by the window, riveted by the book, but Oslett refused to let the big man spoil his mood.
In the bedroom he sat on the bed again, amidst his toys, took off his sunglasses, and happily enacted and re-enacted the homicides in his mind, planning for every contingency.
Outside, the wind picked up. It sounded like wolves.
11
He stops at a service station to ask directions to the address he remembers from the Rolodex card. The young attendant is able to help him.
By 2:10 he enters the neighborhood in which he was evidently raised. The lots are large with numerous winter-bare birches and a wide variety of evergreens.
His mom and dad’s house is in the middle of the block. It’s a modest, two-story, white clapboard structure with forest-green shutters. The deep front porch has heavy white balusters, a green handrail, and decoratively scalloped fasciae along the eaves.
The place looks warm and welcoming. It is like a house in an old movie. Jimmy Stewart might live here. You know at a glance that a loving family resides within, decent people with much to share, much to give.
He cannot remember anything in the block, least of all the house in which he apparently spent his childhood and adolescence. It might as well be the residence of utter strangers in a town which he has never seen until this very day.
He is infuriated by the extent to which he has been brainwashed and relieved of precious memories. The lost years haunt him. The total separation from those he loves is so cruel and devastating that he finds himself on the verge of tears.
However, he suppresses his anger and grief. He cannot afford to be emotional while his situation remains precarious.
The only thing he does recognize in the neighborhood is a van parked across the street from his parents’ house. He has never seen this particular van, but he knows the type. The sight of it alarms him.
It is a recreational vehicle. Candy-apple red. An extended wheel-base provides a roomier interior. Oval camper dome on the roof. Large mud flaps with chrome letters: FUN TRUCK. The rear bumper is papered with overlapping rectangular, round, and triangular stickers memorializing visits to Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone, the annual Calgary Rodeo, Las Vegas, Boulder Dam, and other tourist attractions. Decorative, parallel green and black stripes undulate along the side, interrupted by a pair of mirrored view windows.
Perhaps the van is only what it appears to be, but at first sight he’s convinced it’s a surveillance post. For one thing, it seems too aggressively recreational, flamboyant. With his training in surveillance techniques, he knows that sometimes such vans seek to declare their harmlessness by calling attention to themselves, because potential subjects of surveillance expect a stakeout vehicle to be discreet and would never imagine they were being watched from, say, a circus wagon. Then there’s the matter of the mirrored windows on the side, which allow the people within to see without being seen, providing privacy that any vacationer might prefer but that is also ideal for undercover operatives.
He does not slow as he approaches his parents’ house, and he strives to show no interest in either the residence or the candy-apple red van. Scratching his forehead with his right hand, he also manages to cover his face as he passes those reflective view windows.
The occupants of the van, if any, must be employed by the unknown people who manipulated him so ruthlessly until Kansas City. They are a link to his mysterious superiors. He is as interested in them as in re-establishing contact with his beloved mother and father.
Two blocks later, he turns right at the corner and heads back toward a shopping area near the center of town, where earlier he passed a sporting-goods store. Lackin
g a firearm and, in any event, unable to buy one with a silencer, he needs to obtain a couple of simple weapons.
At 2:20, the motel-room telephone rang.
Oslett put on his sunglasses, hopped off the bed, and went to the living-room doorway.
Spicer answered the phone, listened, mumbled a word that might have been “good,” and hung up. Turning to Oslett, he said, “Jim and Alice Stillwater just came home from lunch.”
“Let’s hope Marty gives them a ring now.”
“He will,” Spicer said confidently.
Looking up from his book at last, Clocker said, “Speaking of lunch, we’re overdue.”
“The refrigerator in the kitchenette is loaded with stuff from the deli,” Spicer said. “Cold cuts, potato salad, macaroni salad, cheesecake. We won’t starve.”
“Nothing for me,” Oslett said. He was too excited to eat.
By the time he returns to the neighborhood where his parents live, it is 2:45, half an hour after he left. He is acutely aware of the minutes ticking away. The false father, Paige, and the kids could arrive at any time. Even if they made another bathroom stop after Red Mountain or haven’t maintained quite as high a speed as when he’d been following them, they are virtually certain to arrive in no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
He desperately wants to see his parents before the treacherous imposter gets to them. He needs to prepare them for what has happened and enlist their aid in his battle to reclaim his wife and daughters. He is uneasy about the pretender getting to them first. If that creature could insinuate itself so thoroughly with Paige, Charlotte, and Emily, perhaps there is a risk, however small, that it will win over Mom and Dad as well.
When he turns the corner onto the block where he spent his unremembered childhood, he is no longer driving the Camry that he stole in Laguna Hills at dawn. He is in a florist’s delivery van, a lucky acquisition he made by force after leaving the sporting-goods store.
He has accomplished a great deal in half an hour. Nevertheless, time is running out.