by Dean Koontz
Something thumped into the back end of the Explorer, jolting Spencer. The rearview mirror. The Chevy. On his ass. The fedwagon receded a few feet into the swirling sand, then leaped forward again, tapping the truck, maybe trying to make him spin out, maybe just letting him know they were there.
He was aware of Rocky looking at him, so he looked at Rocky.
The dog seemed to be saying, Okay, now what?
They passed the last of the undeveloped land and exploded into a silent clarity of sandless air. In the cold steely light of the pending storm, they had to abandon all hope of slipping away like Lawrence of Arabia into the swirling silicate cloaks of the desert.
An intersection lay half a block ahead. The signal light was red. The flow of traffic was against him.
He kept his foot on the accelerator, praying for a gap in the passing traffic, but at the last moment he rammed the brake pedal to the floor, to avoid colliding with a bus. The Explorer seemed to lift onto its front wheels, then rocked to a halt in a shallow drainage swale that marked the brink of the intersection.
Rocky yelped, lost his grip on the upholstery, and slid into the leg space in front of his seat, under the dashboard.
Belching pale-blue fumes, the bus trundled past in the nearest of the four traffic lanes.
Rocky eeled around in the cramped leg space and grinned up at Spencer.
“Stay there, pal. It’s safer.”
Ignoring the advice, the dog scrambled onto the seat again as Spencer accelerated into traffic in the reeking wake of the bus.
As Spencer turned right and swung around the bus, the rearview mirror captured the mold-green sedan bouncing across the same shallow swale in the pavement and arcing right into the street, as smoothly as if it were airborne.
“That sonofabitch knows how to drive.”
Behind him, the Chevy appeared around the side of the city bus. It was coming fast.
Spencer was less concerned about losing them than about being shot at again before he could get away.
They would have to be crazy to open fire from a moving car, in traffic, where stray bullets could kill uninvolved motorists or pedestrians. This wasn’t Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, wasn’t Beirut or Belfast, wasn’t even Los Angeles, for God’s sake.
On the other hand, they hadn’t hesitated to blast away at him on the street in front of Theda Davidowitz’s apartment building. Shot at him. No questions first. No polite reading of his constitutional rights. Hell, they hadn’t even made a serious effort to confirm that he was, in fact, the person they believed him to be. They wanted him badly enough to risk killing the wrong man.
They seemed convinced that he’d learned something of staggering importance about Valerie and that he must be terminated. In truth, he knew less about the woman’s past than he knew about Rocky’s.
If they ran him down in traffic and shot him, they would flash real or fake ID from one federal agency or another, and no one would hold them responsible for murder. They would claim that Spencer had been a fugitive, armed and dangerous, a cop killer. No doubt they’d be able to produce a warrant for his arrest, issued after the fact and postdated, and they would clamp his dead hand around a drop gun that could be linked to a series of unsolved homicides.
He accelerated through a yellow traffic light as it turned red. The Chevy stayed close behind him.
If they didn’t kill him on the spot, but wounded him and took him alive, they would probably haul him away to a soundproofed room and use creative methods of interrogation. His protestations of ignorance would not be believed, and they would kill him slowly, by degrees, in a vain attempt to extract secrets that he didn’t possess.
He had no gun of his own. He had only his hands. His training. And a dog. “We’re in big trouble,” he told Rocky.
In the cozy kitchen of the cabin in the Malibu canyon, Roy Miro sat alone at the dining table, sorting through forty photographs. His men had found them in a shoe box on the top shelf in the bedroom closet. Thirty-nine of the pictures were loose, and the fortieth was in an envelope.
Six of the loose snapshots were of a dog—mixed breed, tan and black, with one floppy ear. It was most likely the pet for which Grant had bought the musical rubber bone from the mail-order firm that still kept his name and address on file two years later.
Thirty-three of the remaining photographs were of the same woman. In some she appeared to be as young as twenty, in others as old as her early thirties. Here: wearing blue jeans and a reindeer sweater, decorating a Christmas tree. And here: in a simple summer dress and white shoes, holding a white purse, smiling at the camera, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers. In more than a few, she was grooming horses, riding horses, or feeding apples to them.
Something about her haunted Roy, but he couldn’t understand why she so affected him.
She was an undeniably attractive woman, but she was far from drop-dead gorgeous. Though shapely, blond, blue-eyed, she nonetheless lacked any single transcendent feature that would have put her in the pantheon of true beauty.
Her smile was the only truly striking thing about her. It was the most consistent element of her appearance from one snapshot to the next: warm, open, easy, a charming smile that never seemed to be false, that revealed a gentle heart.
A smile, however, was not a feature. That was especially true in this woman’s case, for her lips weren’t particularly luscious, as were Melissa Wicklun’s lips. Nothing about the set or width of her mouth, the contours of her philtrum, or the shape of her teeth was even intriguing, let alone electrifying. Her smile was greater than the sum of its parts, like the dazzling reflection of sunlight on the otherwise unremarkable surface of a pond.
He could find nothing about her that he yearned to possess.
Yet she haunted him. Though he doubted that he had ever met her, he felt that he ought to know who she was. Somewhere, he had seen her before.
Staring at her face, at her radiant smile, he sensed a terrible presence hovering over her, just beyond the frame of the photograph. A cold darkness was descending, of which she was unaware.
The newest of the photographs were at least twenty years old, and many were surely three decades out of the darkroom tray. The colors of even the more recent shots were faded. The older ones held only the faintest suggestions of color, were mostly gray and white, and were slightly yellowed in places.
Roy turned each photo over, hoping to find a few identifying words on the reverse, but the backs were all blank. Not even a single name or date.
Two of the pictures showed her with a young boy. Roy was so mystified by his strong response to the woman’s face and so fixated on figuring out why she seemed familiar that he did not at first realize that the boy was Spencer Grant. When he made the connection, he put the two snapshots side by side on the table.
It was Grant in the days before he had sustained his scar.
In his case, more than with most people, the face of the man reflected the child he had been.
He was about six or seven years old in the first photo, a skinny kid in swimming trunks, dripping wet, standing by the edge of a pool. The woman was in a one-piece bathing suit beside him, playing a silly practical joke for the camera: one hand behind Grant’s head, two of her fingers secretly raised and spread to make it appear as though he had a small pair of horns or antennae.
In the second photograph, the woman and the boy were sitting at a picnic table. The kid was a year or two older than in the first picture, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. She had one arm around him, pulling him against her side, knocking his cap askew.
In both snapshots, the woman’s smile was as radiant as in all those without the boy, but her face was also brightened by affection and love. Roy felt confident that he’d found Spencer Grant’s mother.
He remained baffled, however, as to why the woman was familiar to him. Eerily familiar. The longer he stared at the pictures of her, with or without the boy at
her side, the more certain he became that he knew her—and that the context in which he had previously seen her was deeply disturbing, dark, and strange.
He turned his attention again to the snapshot in which mother and son stood beside the swimming pool. In the background, at some distance, was a large barn; even in the faded photograph, traces of red paint were visible on its high, blank walls.
The woman, the boy, the barn.
On a deep subconscious level, a memory must have stirred, for suddenly the skin prickled across Roy’s scalp.
The woman. The boy. The barn.
A chill quivered through him.
He looked up from the photographs on the kitchen table, at the window above the sink, at the crowded grove of trees beyond the window, at the meager coins of noontime sunlight tumbling through the wealth of shadows, and he willed memory to glimmer forth, as well, from the eucalyptic dark.
The woman. The boy. The barn.
For all his straining, enlightenment eluded him, although another chill walked through his bones.
The barn.
Through residential streets of stucco homes, where cacti and yucca plants and hardy olive trees were featured in low-maintenance desert landscaping, through a shopping center parking lot, through an industrial area, through the maze of a self-storage yard filled with corrugated-steel sheds, off the pavement and through a sprawling park, where the fronds of the palms tossed and lashed in a frenzied welcome to the oncoming storm, Spencer sought without success to shake off the pursuing Chevrolet.
Sooner or later, they were going to cross the path of a police patrol. As soon as one unit of local cops became involved, Spencer would find it even more difficult to get away.
Disoriented by the twisting route taken to elude his pursuers, Spencer was surprised to be flashing past one of the newest resort hotels, on the right. Las Vegas Boulevard South was only a few hundred yards ahead. The traffic light was red, but he decided to bet everything that it would change by the time he got there.
The Chevy remained close behind him. If he stopped, the bastards would be out of their car and all over the Explorer, bristling with more guns than a porcupine had quills.
Three hundred yards to the intersection. Two hundred fifty.
The signal was still red. Cross traffic wasn’t as heavy as it could get farther north along the Strip, but it was not light, either.
Running out of time, Spencer slowed slightly, enough to allow himself more maneuverability at the moment of decision but not enough to encourage the driver of the Chevy to try to pull alongside him.
A hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty.
Lady Luck wasn’t with him. He was still playing the green, but the red kept turning up.
A gasoline tanker truck was approaching the intersection from the left, taking advantage of the rare chance to make a little speed on the Strip, going faster than the legal limit.
Rocky began bobbing his head up and down again.
Finally the driver of the tanker saw the Explorer coming and tried to brake quickly without jackknifing.
“All right, okay, okay, gonna make it,” Spencer heard himself saying, almost chanting, as if he were crazily determined to shape reality with positive thought.
Never lie to the dog.
“We’re in deep shit, pal,” he amended as he curved into the intersection in a wide arc, around the front of the oncoming truck.
As panic shifted his perceptions into slo-mo, Spencer saw the tanker sweep toward them, the giant tires rolling and bouncing and rolling and bouncing while the terrified driver adroitly pumped the brakes as much as he dared. And now it was not merely approaching but looming over them, huge, an inexorable and inescapable behemoth, far bigger than it had seemed only a split second ago, and now bigger still, towering, immense. Good God, it seemed bigger than a jumbo jet, and he was nothing but a bug on the runway. The Explorer began to cant to starboard, as if it would tip over, and Spencer corrected with a slight pull to the right and a tap of the brakes. The energy of the aborted rollover was channeled into a slide, however, and the back end traveled sideways with a shriek of tormented tires. The steering wheel spun back and forth through his sweat-dampened hands. The Explorer was out of control, and the gasoline tanker was on top of them, as large as God, but at least they were sliding in the right direction, away from the big rig, although probably not fast enough to escape it. Then the sixteen-wheel monster shrieked by with only inches to spare, a curved wall of polished steel passing in a mirrored blur, in a gale of wind that Spencer was certain he could feel even through the tightly closed windows.
The Explorer spun three hundred sixty degrees, then kept going for another ninety. It shuddered to a halt, facing the opposite direction—and on the far side of the divided boulevard—from the gasoline tanker, even as that behemoth was still passing it.
The southbound traffic, into the lanes of which Spencer had careened, stopped before running him down, although not without a chorus of screaming brakes and blaring horns.
Rocky was on the floor again.
Spencer didn’t know if the dog had been thrown off the seat again or, in a sudden attack of prudence, had scrambled down there.
He said, “Stay!” even as Rocky clambered up onto the seat.
The roar of an engine. From the left. Coming across the broad intersection. The Chevy. Hurtling past the back of the halted tanker, toward the side of the Explorer.
He jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The tires spun, then rubber got a bite of pavement. The Explorer bulleted south on the boulevard—just as the Chevy shot past the rear bumper. With a cold squeal, metal kissed metal.
Gunshots erupted. Three or four rounds. None seemed to strike the Explorer.
Rocky remained on the seat, panting, claws dug in, determined to hold fast this time.
Spencer was headed out of Vegas, which was both good and bad. It was good because as he proceeded farther south, toward the open desert and the last entrance to Interstate 15, the risk of being brought to a stop by a traffic jam would quickly diminish. It was bad, however, because beyond the forest of hotels, the barren land would provide few easy routes of escape and even fewer places to hide. Out on the vast panoramas of the Mojave, the thugs in the Chevy could slip a mile or two behind and still keep a watch on him.
Nevertheless, leaving town was the only sane choice. The turmoil at the intersection behind him was sure to bring the cops.
As he was speeding past the newest hotel-casino in town—which included a two-hundred-acre amusement park, Spaceport Vegas—his only sane choice became no real choice at all. From across the boulevard, a hundred yards ahead, a northbound car swung out of the oncoming traffic, jumped the far side of the low median strip, smashed through a row of shrubs, and bounced into the southbound lanes. It slid to a stop at an angle, blocking the way, ready to ram Spencer if he tried to squeeze around either end of it.
He stopped thirty yards from the blockade.
The new car was a Chrysler but, otherwise, so like the Chevy that the two might have been born of the same factory.
The driver stayed behind the wheel of the Chrysler, but the other doors opened. Big, troublesome-looking men got out.
The rearview mirror revealed what he’d expected: The Chevy also had halted at an angle across the boulevard, fifteen yards behind him. Men were getting out of that vehicle too—and they had guns.
In front of him, the men at the Chrysler had guns too. Somehow that didn’t come as a surprise.
The final picture had been kept in a white envelope, which had been fastened shut with a length of Scotch tape.
Because of the shape and thinness of the object, Roy knew that it was another photograph before he opened the envelope, though it was larger than a snapshot. As he peeled off the tape, he expected to find a five-by-seven studio portrait of the mother, a memento of special importance to Grant.
It was a black-and-white studio photograph, sure enough, but it was of a man in his middle th
irties.
For a strange moment, for Roy, there was neither a eucalyptus grove beyond the windows nor a window through which to see it. The kitchen itself faded from his awareness, until nothing existed except him and that single picture, to which he related even more powerfully than to the photos of the woman.
He could breathe but shallowly.
If anyone had entered the room to ask a question, he could not have spoken.
He felt detached from reality, as if in a fever, but he was not feverish. Indeed, he was cold, though not uncomfortably so: It was the cold of a watchful chameleon, pretending to be stone on a stone, on an autumn morning; it was a cold that invigorated, that focused his entire consciousness, that contracted the gears of his mind and allowed his thoughts to spin without friction. His heart didn’t race, as it would have in a fever. Indeed, his pulse rate declined, until it was as ponderously slow as that of a sleeper, and throughout his body, each beat reverberated like a recording of a cathedral bell played at quarter speed: protracted, solemn, heavy tolling.
Obviously, the shot had been taken by a talented professional, under studio conditions, with much attention to the lighting and to the selection of the ideal lens. The subject, wearing a white shirt open at the throat and a leather jacket, was presented from the waist up, posed against a white wall, arms folded across his chest. He was strikingly handsome, with thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead. The publicity photograph, of a type usually associated with young actors, was a blatant glamour shot but a good one, because the subject possessed natural glamour, an aura of mystery and drama that the photographer didn’t have to create with bravura technique.
The portrait was a study in light and shadow, with more of the latter than the former. Peculiar shadows, cast by objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn to the man as night itself was drawn across the evening sky by the terrible weight of the sinking sun.