Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  That was not merely the response of a few edgy law-enforcement officers intimidated by their quarry. It was a criminally excessive use of force, evidence of an agency out of control and arrogantly confident that it wasn’t accountable for any atrocities it committed.

  A short while ago, he had encountered equivalent arrogance in the reckless behavior of the men who harried him out of Las Vegas.

  He thought about Louis Lee in that elegant office under China Dream. The restaurateur had said that governments, when big enough, often ceased to play by the codes of justice under which they were established.

  All governments, even democracies, maintained control by the threat of violence and imprisonment. When that threat was divorced from the rule of law, however, even if with the best of intentions, there was a fearfully thin line between a federal agent and a thug.

  If Spencer located Valerie and learned why she was on the run, helping her would not be simply a matter of dipping into his cash reserves and finding the best attorney to represent her. Naively, that had been his nebulous plan, on those few occasions when he had bothered to think about what he might do if he tracked her down.

  But the ruthlessness of these enemies ruled out a solution in any court of law.

  Faced with the choice of violence or flight, he would always choose to flee and risk a bullet in the back—at least when no life but his own was at stake. When he eventually took responsibility for this woman’s life, however, he could not expect her to turn her own back on a gun; sooner or later he would have to meet the violence of those men with violence of his own.

  Brooding about that, Spencer drove south between the too-solid desert and the amorphous sky. The distant highway was only barely visible to the east, and no clear path lay before him.

  Out of the west came rain in blinding cataracts of rare ferocity for the Mojave, a towering gray tide behind which the desert began to disappear.

  Spencer could smell the rain even though it hadn’t reached them yet. It was a cold, wet, ozone-tainted scent, refreshing at first but then strange and profoundly chilling.

  “It’s not that I’m worried about being able to kill someone if it comes to that,” he told the huddled dog.

  The gray wall rushed toward them, faster by the second, and it seemed to be more than mere rain that loomed. It was the future too, and it was all that he feared knowing about the past.

  “I’ve done it before. I can do it again if I have to.”

  Over the rumble of the Explorer’s engine, he could hear the rain now, like a million pounding hearts.

  “And if some sonofabitch deserves killing, I can do him and feel no guilt, no remorse. Sometimes it’s right. It’s justice. I don’t have a problem with that.”

  The rain swept over them, billowing like a magician’s scarves, bringing sorcerous change. The pale land darkened dramatically with the first splash. In the peculiar storm light, the desiccated vegetation, more brown than green, suddenly became glossy, verdant; in seconds, withered leaves and grass appeared to swell into plump tropical forms, though it was all illusion.

  Switching on the windshield wipers, shifting the Explorer into four-wheel drive, Spencer said, “What worries me…what scares me is…maybe I waste some sonofabitch who deserves it…some piece of walking garbage…and this time I like it.”

  The downpour could have been no less cataclysmic than that which had launched Noah upon the Flood, and the fierce drumming of rain on the truck was deafening. The storm-cowed dog probably could not hear his master above the roar, yet Spencer used Rocky’s presence as an excuse to acknowledge a truth that he preferred not to hear, speaking aloud because he might lie if he spoke only to himself.

  “I never liked it before. Never felt like a hero for doing it. But it didn’t sicken me, either. I didn’t puke or lose any sleep over it. So…what if the next time…or the time after that…?”

  Beneath the glowering thunderheads, in the velvet-heavy shrouds of rain, the early afternoon had grown as dark as twilight. Driving out of murk into mystery, he switched on the headlights, surprised to find that both had survived the impact with the amusement-park gate.

  Rain fell straight to the earth in such tremendous tonnage that it dissolved and washed away the wind that had previously stirred the desert into sand spouts.

  They came to a ten-foot-deep wash with gently sloping walls. In the headlight beams, a stream of silvery water, a foot wide and a few inches deep, glimmered along the center of that depression. Spencer crossed the twenty-foot-wide arroyo to higher ground on the far side.

  As the Explorer crested the second bank, a series of massive lightning bolts blazed across the desert, accompanied by crashes of thunder that vibrated through the truck. The rain came down even harder than before, harder than he had ever seen it fall.

  Driving with one hand, Spencer stroked Rocky’s head. The dog was too frightened to look up or to lean into the consoling hand.

  They went no more than fifty yards from the first arroyo when Spencer saw the earth moving ahead of them. It rolled sinuously, as though swarms of giant serpents were traveling just below the surface of the desert. By the time he braked to a full stop, the headlights revealed a less fanciful but no less frightening explanation: The earth wasn’t moving, but a swift muddy river was churning from west to east along the gently sloping plain, blocking travel to the south.

  The depths of this new arroyo were mostly hidden. The racing water was already within a few inches of its banks.

  Such torrents couldn’t have risen just since the storm had swept across the plains minutes ago. The runoff was from the mountains, where rain had been falling for a while and where the stony, treeless slopes absorbed little of it. The desert seldom received downpours of that magnitude; but on rare occasions, with breathtaking suddenness, flash floods could inundate even portions of the elevated interstate highway or pour into low-lying areas of the now distant Las Vegas Strip and sweep cars out of casino parking lots.

  Spencer couldn’t judge the depth of the water. It might have been two feet or twenty.

  Even if only two feet deep, the water was moving so fast, with such power, that he didn’t dare attempt to ford it. The second wash was wider than the first, forty feet across. Before he’d traveled half that distance, the truck would be lifted and carried downriver, rolling and bobbing, as if it were driftwood.

  He backed the Explorer away from the churning flow, turned, and retraced his route, arriving at the first arroyo, to the south, more quickly than he expected. In the brief time since he had crossed it, the silvery freshet had become a turbulent river that nearly filled the wash.

  Bracketed by impassable cataracts, Spencer was no longer able to parallel the distant north-south interstate.

  He considered parking right there, to wait for the storm to pass. When the rain ended, the arroyos would empty as swiftly as they had filled. But he sensed that the situation was more dangerous than it appeared.

  He opened the door, stepped into the downpour, and was soaked by the time he walked to the front of the Explorer. The pummeling rain hammered a chill deep into his flesh.

  The cold and the wet contributed to his misery less than did the incredible noise. The oppressive roar of the storm blocked all other sounds. The rattle of the rain against the desert, the swash and rumble of the river, and the booming thunder combined to make the vast Mojave as confining and claustrophobia-inducing as the interior of a stuntman’s barrel on the brink of Niagara.

  He wanted a better view of the surging flux than he’d gotten from inside the truck, but a closer look alarmed him. Moment by moment, water lapped higher on the banks of the wash; soon it would flood across the plain. Sections of the soft arroyo walls collapsed, dissolved into the muddy currents, and were carried away. Even as the violent gush eroded a wider channel, it swelled tremendously in volume, simultaneously rising and growing broader. Spencer turned from the first arroyo and hurried toward the second, to the south of the truck. He reached that other
impromptu river sooner than he expected. It was brimming and widening like the first channel. Fifty yards had separated the two arroyos when he’d first driven between them, but that gap had shrunk to thirty.

  Thirty yards was still a considerable distance. He found it difficult to believe that those two spates were powerful enough to eat through so much remaining land and ultimately converge.

  Then, immediately in front of his shoes, a crack opened in the ground. A long, jagged leer. The earth grinned, and a six-foot-wide slab of riverbank collapsed into the onrushing water.

  Spencer stumbled backward, out of immediate danger. The sodden land around him was turning mushy underfoot.

  The unthinkable suddenly seemed inevitable. Large portions of the desert were all shale and volcanic rock and quartzite, but he had the misfortune to be caught in a cloudburst while traveling over a fathomless sea of sand. Unless a hidden spine of rock was buried between the two arroyos, the intervening land might indeed be washed away and the entire plain recontoured, depending on how long the storm raged at its current intensity.

  The impossibly heavy downfall abruptly grew heavier still.

  He sprinted for the Explorer, clambered inside, and pulled his door shut. Shivering, streaming water, he backed the truck farther from the northern arroyo, afraid that the wheels would be undermined.

  With head still downcast, from under his lowered brow, Rocky looked up worriedly at his master.

  “Have to drive between arroyos, east or west,” Spencer thought aloud, “while there’s still something to drive on.”

  The windshield wipers weren’t coping well with the cascades that poured across the glass, and the rain-blurred landscape settled into deeper degrees of false twilight. He tried turning the wiper control to a higher setting. It was already as high as it would go.

  “Shouldn’t head toward lower land. Water’s gaining velocity as it goes. More likely to wash out down there.”

  He switched the headlamps to high beams. The extra light didn’t clarify anything: It bounced off the skeins of rain, so the way ahead seemed to be obscured by curtain after curtain of mirrored beads. He selected the low beams again.

  “Safer ground uphill. Ought to be more rock.”

  The dog only trembled.

  “The space between arroyos will probably widen out.”

  Spencer shifted gears again. The plain sloped gradually up to the west, into obscure terrain.

  As giant needles of lightning stitched the heavens to the earth, he drove into the resultant narrow pocket of gloom.

  At Roy Miro’s direction, agents in San Francisco were seeking Ethel and George Porth, the maternal grandparents who had raised Spencer Grant following the death of his mother. Meanwhile, Roy drove to the offices of Dr. Nero Mondello in Beverly Hills.

  Mondello was the most prominent plastic surgeon in a community where God’s work was revised more frequently than anywhere except Palm Springs and Palm Beach. On a misshapen nose, he could perform miracles equivalent to those that Michelangelo had performed on giant cubes of Carrara marble—though Mondello’s fees were substantially higher than those of the Italian master.

  He had agreed to make changes in a busy schedule to meet with Roy, because he believed that he was assisting the FBI in a desperate search for a particularly savage serial killer.

  They met in the doctor’s spacious inner office: white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, white shell sconces. Two abstract paintings hung in white frames: The only color was white, and the artist achieved his effects solely with the textures of the heavily layered pigment. Two whitewashed lacewood chairs with white leather cushions flanked a glass-and-steel table and stood before a whitewashed burled-wood desk, against a backdrop of white silk draperies.

  Roy sat in one of the lacewood chairs, like a blot of soil in all that whiteness, and wondered what view would be revealed if the draperies were opened. He had the crazy notion that beyond the window, in downtown Beverly Hills, lay a landscape swaddled in snow.

  Other than the photographs of Spencer Grant that Roy had brought with him, the only object on the polished surface of the desk was a single blood-red rose in a Waterford cut-crystal vase. The flower was a testament to the possibility of perfection—and drew the visitor’s attention to the man who sat beyond it, behind the desk.

  Tall, slender, handsome, fortyish, Dr. Nero Mondello was the focal point of his bleached domain. With his thick jet-black hair combed back from his forehead, warm-toned olive complexion, and eyes the precise purple-black of ripe plums, the surgeon had an impact almost as powerful as that of a spirit manifestation. He wore a white lab coat over a white shirt and red silk necktie. Around the face of his gold Rolex, matched diamonds sparkled as though charged with supernatural energy.

  The room and the man were no less impressive for being blatantly theatrical. Mondello was in the business of replacing nature’s truth with convincing illusions, and all good magicians were theatrical.

  Studying the DMV photograph of Grant and the computer-generated portrait, Mondello said, “Yes, this would have been a dreadful wound, quite terrible.”

  “What might’ve caused it?” Roy asked.

  Mondello opened a desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass with a silver handle. He studied the photographs more closely.

  At last he said, “It was more a cut than a tear, so it must have been a relatively sharp instrument.”

  “A knife?”

  “Or glass. But it wasn’t an entirely even cutting edge. Very sharp but slightly irregular like glass—or a serrated blade. An even blade would produce a cleaner wound and a narrower scar.”

  Watching Mondello pore over the photographs, Roy realized that the surgeon’s facial features were so refined and so uncannily well proportioned that a talented colleague had been at work on them.

  “It’s a cicatricial scar.”

  “Excuse me?” Roy said.

  “Connective tissue that’s contracted—pinched or wrinkled,” Mondello said, without looking up from the photographs. “Though this one is relatively smooth, considering its width.” He returned the magnifying glass to the drawer. “I can’t tell you much more—except that it’s not a recent scar.”

  “Could surgery eliminate it, skin grafts?”

  “Not entirely, but it could be made far less visible, just a thin line, a thread of discoloration.”

  “Painful?” Roy asked.

  “Yes, but this”—he tapped the photo—“wouldn’t require a long series of surgeries over a number of years, as burns might.”

  Mondello’s face was exceptional because the proportions were so studied, as though the guiding aesthetic behind his surgery had been not merely the intuition of an artist but the logical rigor of a mathematician. The doctor had remade himself with the same iron control that great politicians applied to society to transform its imperfect citizens into better people. Roy had long understood that human beings were so deeply flawed that no society could have perfect justice without imposing mathematically rigorous planning and stern guidance from the top. Yet he’d never perceived, until now, that his passion for ideal beauty and his desire for justice were both aspects of the same longing for Utopia.

  Sometimes Roy was amazed by his intellectual complexity.

  “Why,” he asked Mondello, “would a man live with that scar if it could be made all but invisible? Aside, that is, from being unable to pay for the surgery.”

  “Oh, cost wouldn’t be a deterrent. If the patient had no money and the government wouldn’t pay, he’d still receive treatment. Most surgeons have always dedicated a portion of their professional time to charity work like this.”

  “Then why?”

  Mondello shrugged and pushed the photographs across the desk. “Perhaps he’s afraid of pain.”

  “I don’t think so. Not this man.”

  “Or afraid of doctors, hospitals, sharp instruments, anesthesia. There are countless phobias that prevent people from having surgery.”

&n
bsp; “This man’s not a phobic personality,” Roy said, returning the photos to the manila envelope.

  “Could be guilt. If he lived through an accident in which others were killed, he could have survivor’s guilt. Especially if loved ones died. He feels he’s no better than they were, and he wonders why he was spared when they were taken. He feels guilty just for living. Suffering with the scar is a way of atoning.”

  Frowning, Roy got to his feet. “Maybe.”

  “I’ve had patients with that problem. They didn’t want surgery because survivor’s guilt led them to feel they deserved their scars.”

  “That doesn’t sound right, either. Not for this guy.”

  “If he’s not either phobic or suffering from survivor’s guilt,” said Mondello, coming around the desk and walking Roy to the door, “then you can bet it’s guilt over something. He’s punishing himself with the scar. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. I’ve seen that before as well.”

  As the surgeon talked, Roy studied his face, fascinated by the finely honed bone structure. He wondered how much of the effect had been achieved with real bone and how much with plastic implants, but he knew that it would be gauche to ask.

  At the door, he said, “Doctor, do you believe in perfection?”

  Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, Mondello appeared mildly puzzled. “Perfection?”

  “Personal and societal perfection. A better world.”

  “Well…I believe in always striving for it.”

  “Good.” Roy smiled. “I knew you did.”

  “But I don’t believe it can be achieved.”

  Roy’s smile froze. “Oh, but I’ve seen perfection now and then. Not perfection in the whole of anything, perhaps, but in part.”

  Mondello smiled indulgently and shook his head. “One man’s idea of perfect order is another man’s chaos. One man’s vision of perfect beauty is another man’s notion of deformity.”