by Dean Koontz
“Easy, lady, easy,” Vecchio said. “Be still, damn it!”
Alfonse Johnson was one step inside the back door, which must have been unlocked because they hadn’t needed to break it down. Johnson was covering the only other person in the room: a little girl, perhaps five, who stood with her back pressed into a corner, wide-eyed and pale, too frightened yet to cry.
The air smelled of hot tomato sauce and onions. On the cutting board were sliced green peppers. The woman had been making dinner.
“Come on,” Roy said to Johnson.
Together, they searched the rest of the house, moving fast. The element of surprise was gone, but momentum was still on their side. Hall closet. Bathroom. Girl’s bedroom: teddy bears and dolls, the closet door standing open, nobody there. Another small room: a sewing machine, a half-finished green dress on a dressmaker’s dummy, closet packed full, no place for anyone to hide. Then the master bedroom, closet, closet, bathroom: nobody.
Johnson said, “Unless that’s him in a blond wig on the kitchen floor…”
Roy returned to the living room, where the guy in the lounge chair was tilted as far back as he could go, staring into the bore of the .44 while Cal Dormon screamed in his face, spraying him with spittle: “One more time. You hear me, asshole? I’m asking just one more time—where is he?”
“I told you,” the guy said, “Jesus, nobody’s here but us.”
“Where’s Grant?” Dormon insisted.
The man was shaking as if the Barcalounger was equipped with a vibrating massage unit. “I don’t know him, I swear, never heard of him. So will you just, will you just please, will you point that cannon somewhere else?”
Roy was saddened that it was so often necessary to deny people their dignity in order to get them to cooperate. He left Johnson in the living room with Dormon and returned to the kitchen.
The woman was still flat on the floor, with Vecchio’s knee in her back, but she was no longer trying to reach the butcher knife. She wasn’t calling him a bastard anymore, either. Fury having given way to fear, she was begging him not to hurt her little girl.
The child was in the corner, sucking on her thumb. Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she made no sound.
Roy picked up the butcher knife and put it on the counter, out of the woman’s reach.
She rolled one eye to look up at him. “Don’t hurt my baby.”
“We aren’t going to hurt anyone,” Roy said.
He went to the little girl, crouched beside her, and said in his softest voice, “Are you scared, honey?”
She turned her eyes from her mother to Roy.
“Of course, you’re scared, aren’t you?” he said.
With her thumb stuck in her mouth, sucking fiercely, she nodded.
“Well, there’s no reason to be scared of me. I’d never hurt a fly. Not even if it buzzed and buzzed around my face and danced in my ears and went skiing down my nose.”
The child stared solemnly at him through tears.
Roy said, “When a mosquito lands on me and tries to take a bite, do I swat him? Noooooo. I lay out a tiny napkin for him, a teeny tiny little knife and fork, and I say, ‘No one in this world should go hungry. Dinner’s on me, Mr. Mosquito.’”
The tears seemed to be clearing from her eyes.
“I remember one time,” Roy told her, “when this elephant was on his way to a supermarket to buy peanuts. He was in ever so great a hurry, and he just ran my car off the road. Most people, they would have followed that elephant to the market and punched him right on the tender tip of his trunk. But did I do that? Noooooo. ‘When an elephant is out of peanuts,’ I told myself, ‘he just can’t be held responsible for his actions.’ However, I must admit I drove to that market after him and let the air out of the tires on his bicycle, but that was not done in anger. I only wanted to keep him off the road until he’d had time to eat some peanuts and calm down.”
She was an adorable child. He wished he could see her smile.
“Now,” he said, “do you really think I’d hurt anyone?”
The girl shook her head: no.
“Then give me your hand, honey,” Roy said.
She let him take her left hand, the one without a wet thumb, and he led her across the kitchen.
Vecchio released the mother. The woman scrambled to her knees and, weeping, embraced the child.
Letting go of the girl’s hand and crouching again, touched by the mother’s tears, Roy said, “I’m sorry. I abhor violence, I really do. But we thought a dangerous man was here, and we couldn’t very well just knock and ask him to come out and play. You understand?”
The woman’s lower lip quivered. “I…I don’t know. Who are you, what do you want?”
“What’s your name?”
“Mary. Mary Z-Zelinsky.”
“Your husband’s name?”
“Peter.”
Mary Zelinsky had a lovely nose. The bridge was a perfect wedge, all the lines straight and true. Such delicate nostrils. A septum that seemed crafted of finest porcelain. He didn’t think he had ever seen a nose quite as wonderful before.
Smiling, he said, “Well, Mary, we need to know where he is.”
“Who?” the woman asked.
“I’m sure you know who. Spencer Grant, of course.”
“I don’t know him.”
Just as she answered him, he looked up from her nose into her eyes, and he saw no deception there.
“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.
To Vecchio, Roy said, “Turn the gas off under that tomato sauce. I’m afraid it’s going to burn.”
“I swear I’ve never heard of him,” the woman insisted.
Roy was inclined to believe her. Helen of Troy could not have had a nose any finer than Mary Zelinsky’s. Of course, indirectly, Helen of Troy had been responsible for the deaths of thousands, and many others had suffered because of her, so beauty was no guarantee of innocence. And in the tens of centuries since the time of Helen, human beings had become masters at the concealment of evil, so even the most guileless-looking creatures sometimes proved to be depraved.
Roy had to be sure, so he said, “If I feel you’re lying to me—”
“I’m not lying,” Mary said tremulously.
He held up one hand to silence her, and he continued where he had been interrupted:
“—I might take this precious girl to her room, undress her—”
The woman closed her eyes tightly, in horror, as if she could block out the scene that he was so delicately describing for her.
“—and there, among the teddy bears and dolls, I could teach her some grown-up games.”
The woman’s nostrils flared with terror. Hers really was an exquisite nose.
“Now, Mary, look me in the eyes,” he said, “and tell me again if you know a man named Spencer Grant.”
She opened her eyes and met his gaze.
They were face-to-face.
He put one hand on the child’s head, stroked her hair, smiled.
Mary Zelinsky clutched her daughter with pitiful desperation. “I swear to God I never heard of him. I don’t know him. I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“I believe you,” he said. “Rest easy, Mary. I believe you, dear lady. I’m sorry it was necessary to resort to such crudity.”
Though the tone of his voice was tender and apologetic, a tide of rage washed through Roy. His fury was directed at Grant, who had somehow hoodwinked them, not at this woman or her daughter or her hapless husband in the Barcalounger.
Although Roy strove to repress his anger, the woman must have glimpsed it in his eyes, which were ordinarily of such a kindly aspect, for she flinched from him.
At the stove, where he had turned off the gas under the sauce and under a pot of boiling water as well, Vecchio said, “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“I don’t think he ever did,” Roy said tightly.
Spencer took two suitcases from the closet, considered them, put the sm
aller of the two aside, and opened the larger bag on his bed. He selected enough clothes for a week. He didn’t own a suit, a white shirt, or even one necktie. In his closet hung half a dozen pairs of blue jeans, half a dozen pairs of tan chinos, khaki shirts, and denim shirts. In the top drawer of the highboy, he kept four warm sweaters—two blue, two green—and he packed one of each.
While Spencer filled the suitcase, Rocky paced from room to room, standing worried sentry duty at every window he could reach. The poor mutt was having a hard time shaking off the nightmare.
Leaving his men to watch over the Zelinsky family, Roy stepped out of the house and crossed the street toward his car.
The twilight had darkened from red to deep purple. The streetlamps had come on. The air was still, and for a moment the silence was almost as deep as if he had been in a country field.
They were lucky that the Zelinskys’ neighbors had not heard anything to arouse suspicion.
On the other hand, no lights showed in the houses flanking the Zelinsky place. Many families in that pleasant middle-class neighborhood were probably able to maintain their standard of living only if both husband and wife held full-time jobs. In fact, in this precarious economy, with take-home pay declining, many were holding on by their fingernails even with two breadwinners. Now, at the height of the rush hour, two-thirds of the homes on both sides of the street were dark, untenanted; their owners were battling freeway traffic, picking up their kids at sitters and day schools that they could not easily afford, and struggling to get home to enjoy a few hours of peace before climbing back on the treadmill in the morning.
Sometimes Roy was so sensitive to the plight of the average person that he was brought to tears.
Right now, however, he could not allow himself to surrender to the empathy that came so easily to him. He had to find Spencer Grant.
In the car, after starting the engine and slipping into the passenger seat, he plugged in the attaché case computer. He married the cellular telephone to it.
He called Mama and asked her to find a phone number for Spencer Grant, in the greater L.A. area, and from the center of her web in Virginia, she began the search. He hoped to get an address for Grant from the phone company, as he had gotten one for the Bettonfields.
David Davis and Nella Shire would have left the downtown office for the day, so he couldn’t call there to rail at them. In any case, the problem wasn’t their fault, though he would have liked to place the blame on Davis—and on Wertz, whose first name was probably Igor.
In a few minutes, Mama reported that no one named Spencer Grant possessed a telephone, listed or unlisted, in the Los Angeles area.
Roy didn’t believe it. He fully trusted Mama. The problem wasn’t with her. She was as faultless as his own dear, departed mother had been. But Grant was clever. Too damned clever.
Roy asked Mama to search telephone-company billing records for the same name. Grant might have been listed under a pseudonym, but before providing service, the phone company had surely required the signature of a real person with a good credit history.
As Mama worked, Roy watched a car cruise past and pull into a driveway a few houses farther along the street.
Night ruled the city. To the far edge of the western horizon, twilight had abdicated; no trace of its royal-purple light remained.
The display screen flashed dimly, and Roy looked down at the computer on his lap. According to Mama, Spencer Grant’s name did not appear in telephone billing records, either.
First, the guy had gone back into his employment files in the LAPD computer and inserted the Zelinsky address, evidently chosen at random, in place of his own. And now, although he still lived in the L.A. area and almost certainly had a telephone, he had expunged his name from the records of whichever company—Pacific Bell or GTE—provided his local service.
Grant seemed to be trying to make himself invisible.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Roy wondered aloud.
Because of what Nella Shire had found, Roy had been convinced that he knew the man he was seeking. Now he suddenly felt that he didn’t know Spencer Grant at all, not in any fundamental sense. He knew only generalities, superficialities—but it was in the details where his damnation might lie.
What had Grant been doing at the bungalow in Santa Monica? How was he involved with the woman? What did he know?
Getting answers to those questions was of increasing urgency.
Two more cars disappeared into garages at different houses.
Roy sensed that his chances of finding Grant were diminishing with the passage of time.
Feverishly, he considered his options, and then went through Mama to penetrate the computer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. In moments, a picture of Grant was on his display screen, one taken by the DMV specifically for a new driver’s license. All vital statistics were provided. And a street address.
“All right,” Roy said softly, as if to speak loudly would be to undo this bit of good luck.
He ordered and received three printouts of the data on the screen, exited the DMV, said good-bye to Mama, switched off the computer, and went back across the street to the Zelinsky house.
Mary, Peter, and the daughter sat on the living room sofa. They were pale, silent, holding hands. They looked like three ghosts in a celestial waiting room, anticipating the imminent arrival of their judgment documents, more than half expecting to be served with one-way tickets to Hell.
Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio stood guard, heavily armed and expressionless. Without comment, Roy gave them printouts of the new address for Grant that he had gotten from the DMV.
With a few questions, he established that both Mary and Peter Zelinsky were out of work and on unemployment compensation. That was why they were at home, about to have dinner, when most neighbors were still in schools of steel fish on the concrete seas of the freeway system. They had been searching the want ads in the Los Angeles Times every day, applying for new jobs at numerous companies, and worrying so unrelentingly about the future that the explosive arrival of Dormon, Johnson, Vecchio, and Roy had seemed, on some level, not surprising but a natural progression of their ongoing catastrophe.
Roy was prepared to flash his Drug Enforcement Administration ID and to use every technique of intimidation in his repertoire to reduce the Zelinsky family to total submission and to ensure that they never filed a complaint, either with the local police or with the federal government. However, they were obviously already so cowed by the economic turmoil that had taken their jobs—and by city life in general—that Roy did not need to provide even phony identification.
They would be grateful to escape from this encounter with their lives. They would meekly repair their front door, clean up the mess, and probably conclude that they had been terrorized by drug dealers who had burst into the wrong house in search of a hated competitor.
No one filed complaints against drug dealers. Drug dealers in modern America were akin to a force of nature. It made as much sense—and was far safer—to file an angry complaint about a hurricane, a tornado, a lightning storm.
Adopting the imperious manner of a cocaine king, Roy warned them: “Unless you want to see what it’s like having your brains blown out, better sit still for ten minutes after we leave. Zelinsky, you have a watch. You think you can count off ten minutes?”
“Yes, sir,” Peter Zelinsky said.
Mary would not look at Roy. She kept her head down. He could not see much of her splendid nose.
“You know I’m serious?” Roy asked the husband, and was answered with a nod. “Are you going to be a good boy?”
“We don’t want any trouble.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
The reflexive meekness of these people was a sorry comment on the brutalization of American society. It depressed Roy.
On the other hand, their pliability made his job a hell of a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.
He followed Dormon,
Johnson, and Vecchio outside, and he was the last to drive away. He glanced repeatedly at the house, but no faces appeared at the door or at any of the windows.
A disaster had been narrowly averted.
Roy, who prided himself on his generally even temper, could not remember being as angry with anyone in a long time as he was with Spencer Grant. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the guy.
Spencer packed a canvas satchel with several cans of dog food, a box of biscuit treats, a new rawhide bone, Rocky’s water and food bowls, and a rubber toy that looked convincingly like a cheeseburger in a sesame-seed bun. He stood the satchel beside his own suitcase, near the front door.
The dog was still checking the windows from time to time, but not as obsessively as before. For the most part, he had overcome the nameless terror that propelled him out of his dream. Now his fear was of a more mundane and quieter variety: the anxiety that always possessed him when he sensed that they were about to do something out of their daily routine, a wariness of change. He padded after Spencer to see if any alarming actions were being taken, returned repeatedly to the suitcase to sniff it, and visited his favorite corners of the house to sigh over them as though he suspected that he might never have the chance to enjoy their comforts again.
Spencer removed a laptop computer from a storage shelf above his desk and put it beside the satchel and suitcase. He’d purchased it in September, so he could develop his own programs while sitting on the porch, enjoying the fresh air and the soothing susurration of autumn breezes stirring the eucalyptus grove. Now it would keep him wired into the great American info network during his travels.
He returned to his desk and switched on the larger computer. He made floppy-disk copies of some of the programs he had designed, including the one that could detect the faint electronic signature of an eavesdropper on a phone line being used for a computer-to-computer dialogue. Another would warn him if, while he was hacking, someone began hunting him down with sophisticated trace-back technology.