by Dean Koontz
When she’d first seen it, she’d stood in childlike wonder, mouth open and eyes wide. She was no less astonished than she would have been if she’d seen a flying saucer and its unearthly crew.
She’d been certain that Grant had been swept out of the truck and carried to his death. Or that he was dead inside.
To get up to his truck, she’d had to back her Rover under it, putting the rear wheels uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliff. Then she had stood on the roof, which brought her head just to the bottom of the Explorer’s front passenger door. She had reached up to the handle and, in spite of the awkward angle, had managed to open the door.
Water poured out, but the dog was what startled her. Whimpering and miserable, huddled on the passenger seat, he had peered down at her with a mixture of alarm and yearning.
She didn’t want him jumping onto the Rover. He might slip on that smooth surface and fracture a leg, or tumble and break his neck.
Although the pooch hadn’t looked as if he would perform any canine stunts, she had warned him to stay where he was. She climbed down from the Rover, drove it forward five yards, turned it around to direct the headlights on the ground under the Explorer, got out again, and coaxed the dog to jump to the sandy riverbed.
He needed a lot of coaxing. Poised on the edge of the seat, he repeatedly built up the courage to jump. But each time, he turned his head away at the last moment and shrank back, as if he were facing a chasm instead of a ten-or twelve-foot drop.
Finally, she remembered how Theda Davidowitz had often talked to Sparkle, and she tried the same approach with this dog: “Come on, sweetums, come to mama, come on. Little sweetums, little pretty-eyed snookie-wookums.”
In the truck above, the pooch pricked one ear and regarded her with acute interest.
“Come here, come on, snookums, little sweetums.”
He began to quiver with excitement.
“Come to mama. Come on, little pretty eyes.”
The dog crouched on the seat, muscles tensed, poised to leap.
“Come give mama a kissie, little cutie, little cutie baby.”
She felt idiotic, but the dog jumped. He sprang out of the open door of the Explorer, sailed in a long graceful arc through the night air, and landed on all fours.
He was so startled by his own agility and bravery that he turned to look up at the truck and then sat down as if in shock. He flopped onto his side, breathing hard.
She had to carry him to the Rover and lay him in the cargo area directly behind the front seat. He repeatedly rolled his eyes at her, and he licked her hand once.
“You’re a strange one,” she said, and the dog sighed.
Then she had turned the Rover around again, backed it under the suspended Explorer, and climbed up to find Spencer Grant slumped behind the steering wheel, woozily conscious.
Now he was out cold again. He was murmuring to someone in a dream, and she wondered how she would get him out of the Explorer if he didn’t revive soon.
She tried talking to him and shaking him gently, but she wasn’t able to get a response from him. He was already damp and shivering, so there was no point in scooping a handful of water off the floor and splashing his face.
His injuries needed to be treated as soon as possible, but that was not the primary reason that she was anxious to get him into the Rover and away from there. Dangerous people were searching for him. With their resources, even hampered by weather and terrain, they would find him if she didn’t quickly move him to a secure place.
Grant solved her dilemma not merely by regaining consciousness but by virtually exploding out of his unnatural sleep. With a gasp and a wordless cry, he bolted upright in his seat, bathed in a sudden sweat yet shuddering so furiously that his teeth chattered.
He was face-to-face with her, inches away, and even in the poor light, she saw the horror in his eyes. Worse, there was a bleakness that transmitted his chill deep into her own heart.
He spoke urgently, though exhaustion and thirst had reduced his voice to a coarse whisper: “Nobody knows.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Nobody. Nobody knows.”
“Easy. You’ll be okay.”
“Nobody knows,” he insisted, and he seemed to be caught between fear and grief, between terror and tears.
A terrible hopelessness informed his tortured voice and every aspect of his face to such an extent that she was struck speechless. It seemed foolish to continue to repeat meaningless reassurances to a man who appeared to have been granted a vision of the cankerous souls in Hades.
Though he looked into her eyes, Spencer seemed to be gazing at someone or something far away, and he was speaking in a rush of words, more to himself than to her: “It’s a chain, iron chain, it runs through me, through my brain, my heart, through my guts, a chain, no way to get loose, no escape.”
He was scaring her. She hadn’t thought that she could be scared anymore, at least not easily, certainly not with mere words. But he was scaring her witless.
“Come on, Spencer,” she said. “Let’s go. Okay? Help me get you out of here.”
When the slightly chubby, twinkly-eyed man stepped out of the elevator with Bobby Dubois into the windowless subbasement, he halted in his tracks and gazed at Eve as a starving man might have stared at a bowl of peaches and cream.
Eve Jammer was accustomed to having a powerful effect on men. When she had been a topless showgirl on the Las Vegas stage, she had been one beauty among many—yet the eyes of all the men had followed her nearly to the exclusion of the other women, as though something about her face and body was not just more appealing to the eye but so harmonious that it was like a secret siren’s song. She drew men’s eyes to herself as inevitably as a skillful hypnotist could capture a subject’s mind by swinging a gold medallion on a chain or simply with the sinuous movements of his hands.
Even poor little Thurmon Stookey—the dentist who’d had the bad luck to be in the same hotel elevator with the two gorillas from whom Eve had taken the million in cash—had been vulnerable to her charms at a time when he should have been too terrified to entertain the slightest thought of sex. With the two goons dead on the elevator floor and the Korth .38 pointed at his face, Stookey had let his eyes drift from the bore of the revolver to the lush cleavage revealed by Eve’s low-cut sweater. Judging by the glimmer that had come into his myopic eyes just as she’d squeezed the trigger, Eve figured that the dentist’s final thought had not been God help me but What a set.
No man had ever affected Eve to even a small fraction of the extent to which she affected most men. Indeed, she could take or leave most men. Her interest was drawn only to those from whom she might extract money or from whom she might learn the tricks of obtaining and holding on to power. Her ultimate goal was to be extremely rich and feared, not loved. Being an object of fear, totally in control, having the power of life and death over others: That was infinitely more erotic than any man’s body or lovemaking skills could ever be.
Still, when she was introduced to Roy Miro, she felt something unusual. A flutter of the heart. A mild disorientation that was not in the least unpleasant.
What she was feeling couldn’t have been called desire. Eve’s desires were all exhaustively mapped and labeled, and the periodic satisfaction of each was achieved with mathematical calculation, to a schedule as precise as that kept by a fascist train conductor. She had no time or patience for spontaneity in either business or personal affairs; the intrusion of unplanned passion would have been as repulsive to her as being forced to eat worms.
Undeniably, however, she felt something from the first moment she saw Roy Miro. And minute by minute, as they discussed the Grant-Davidowitz tape and then listened to it, her peculiar interest in him increased. An unfamiliar thrill of anticipation coursed through her as she wondered where events were leading.
For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what qualities of the man inspired her fascination. He was rather pleasant loo
king, with merry blue eyes, a choirboy face, and a sweet smile—but he was not handsome in the usual sense of the word. He was fifteen pounds overweight, somewhat pale, and he didn’t appear to be rich. He dressed with less flair than any Nazarene passing out religious publications door-to-door.
Frequently Miro asked her to replay a passage of the Grant-Davidowitz recording, as though it contained a clue that required pondering, but she knew that he had become preoccupied with her and had missed something.
For both Eve and Miro, Bobby Dubois pretty much ceased to exist. In spite of his height and physical awkwardness, in spite of his colorful and ceaseless chatter, Dubois was of no more interest to either of them than were the bunker’s plain concrete walls.
When everything on the recording had been played and replayed, Miro went through some shuffle and jive to the effect that he was unable to do anything about Grant for the time being, except wait: wait for him to surface; wait for the skies to clear so a satellite search could begin; wait for search teams already in the field to turn up something; wait for agents investigating other aspects of the case, in other cities, to get back to him. Then he asked Eve if she was free for dinner.
She accepted the invitation with an uncharacteristic lack of coyness. She had a growing sense that what she responded to in the man was some secret power that he possessed, a strength that was mostly hidden and that could be glimpsed only in the self-confidence of his easy smile and in those blue-blue eyes that never revealed anything but amusement, as if this man expected always to have the last laugh.
Although Miro had been assigned a car from the agency pool while he was in Vegas, he rode in her own Honda to a favorite restaurant of hers on Flamingo Road. Reflections of a sea of neon rolled in tidal patterns across low clouds, and the night seemed filled with magic.
She expected to get to know him better over dinner and a couple of glasses of wine—and to understand, by dessert, why he fascinated her. However, his skills as a conversationalist were equivalent to his looks: pleasant enough, but far from beguiling. Nothing that Miro said, nothing that he did, no gesture, no look brought Eve any closer to understanding the curious attraction that he held for her.
By the time they left the restaurant and crossed the parking lot toward her car, she was frustrated and confused. She didn’t know whether she should invite him back to her place or not. She didn’t want sex with him. It wasn’t that kind of attraction, exactly. Of course, some men revealed their truest selves when they had sex: by what they liked to do, by how they did it, by what they said and how they acted both during and after. But she didn’t want to take him home, do it with him, get all sweaty, go the whole disgusting route, and still not understand what it was about him that so intrigued her.
She was in a dilemma.
Then, as they drew near to her car, with the cold wind soughing in a nearby row of palm trees and the air scented with the aroma of charcoal-broiled steaks from the restaurant, Roy Miro did the most unexpected and outrageous thing that Eve had ever seen in thirty-three years of outrageous experience.
An immeasurable time after getting down from the Explorer and into the Range Rover—which could have been an hour or two minutes or thirty days and thirty nights, for all he knew—Spencer woke and saw a herd of tumbleweed pacing them. The shadows of mesquite and paddle-leaf cactus leaped through the headlights.
He rolled his head to the left, against the back of the seat, and saw Valerie behind the wheel. “Hi.”
“Hi, there.”
“How’d you get here?”
“That’s too complicated for you right now.”
“I’m a complicated guy.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Where we going?”
“Away.”
“Good.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Woozy.”
“Don’t pee on the seat,” she said with obvious amusement.
He said, “I’ll try not to.”
“Good.”
“Where’s my dog?”
“Who do you think’s licking your ear?”
“Oh.”
“He’s right there behind you.”
“Hi, pal.”
“What’s his name,” she asked.
“Rocky.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“About what?”
“The name. Doesn’t fit.”
“I named him that so he’d have more confidence.”
“Isn’t working,” she said.
Strange rock formations loomed, like temples to gods forgotten before human beings had been capable of conceiving the idea of time and counting the passage of days. They awed him, and she drove among them with great expertise, whipping left and right, down a long hill, onto a vast, dark flatness.
“Never knew his real name,” Spencer said.
“Real name?”
“Puppy name. Before the pound.”
“Wasn’t Rocky.”
“Probably not.”
“What was it before Spencer?”
“He was never named Spencer.”
“So you’re clearheaded enough to be evasive.”
“Not really. Just habit. What’s your name?”
“Valerie Keene.”
“Liar.”
He went away for a while. When he came around again, there was still desert: sand and stone, scrub and tumbleweed, darkness pierced by headlights.
“Valerie,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What’s your real name?”
“Bess.”
“Bess what?”
“Bess Baer.”
“Spell it.”
“B-A-E-R.”
“Really?”
“Really. For now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means what it means.”
“It means that’s your name now, after Valerie.”
“So?”
“What was your name before Valerie?”
“Hannah Rainey.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, realizing that he was firing on only four of six cylinders. “Before that?”
“Gina Delucio.”
“Was that real?”
“It felt real.”
“Is that the name you were born with?”
“You mean my puppy name?”
“Yeah. That your puppy name?”
“Nobody’s called me by my puppy name since before I was in the pound,” she said.
“You’re very funny.”
“You like funny women?”
“I must.”
“‘And then the funny woman,’” she said, as if reading from a printed page, “‘and the cowardly dog and the mysterious man rode off into the desert in search of their real names.’”
“In search of a place to puke.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.”
She applied the brakes, and he flung open the door.
Later, when he woke, still riding through the dark desert, he said, “I have the most god-awful taste in my mouth.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bess.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, Baer. Bess Baer. What’s your name?”
“My faithful Indian sidekick calls me Kemosabe.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like shit,” he said.
“Well, that’s what ‘Kemosabe’ means.”
“Are we ever going to stop?”
“Not while we have cloud cover.”
“What’ve clouds got to do with anything?”
“Satellites,” she said.
“You are the strangest woman I’ve ever known.”
“Just wait.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
“Maybe I’m psychic.”
“Are you psychic?”
“No.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. He could almost imagine that he
was on a merry-go-round. “I was supposed to find you.”
“Surprise.”
“I wanted to help you.”
“Thanks.”
He let go of his grip on the world of the waking. For a while all was silent and serene. Then he walked out of the darkness and opened the red door. There were rats in the catacombs.
Roy did a crazy thing. Even as he was doing it, he was amazed at the risk he was taking.
He decided that he should be himself in front of Eve Jammer. His real self. His deeply committed, compassionate, caring self that was never more than half revealed in the bland, bureaucratic functionary that he appeared to be to most people.
Roy was willing to take risks with this stunning woman, because he sensed that her mind was as marvelous as her ravishing face and body. The woman within, so close to emotional and intellectual perfection, would understand him as no one else ever had.
Over dinner, they had not found the key that would open the doors in their souls and let them merge, which was their destiny. As they were leaving the restaurant, Roy was concerned that their moment of opportunity would pass and that their destiny would be thwarted, so he tapped the power of Dr. Kevorkian, which he’d recently absorbed from the television in the Learjet. He found the courage to reveal his true heart to Eve and force the fulfillment of their destiny.
Behind the restaurant, a blue Dodge van was parked three spaces to the right of Eve’s Honda, and a man and woman were getting out of it, on their way to dinner. They were in their forties, and the man was in a wheelchair. He was being lowered from a side door of the van on an electric lift, which he operated without assistance.
Otherwise, the parking lot was deserted.
To Eve, Roy said, “Come with me a minute. Come say hello.”
“Huh?”
Roy walked directly to the Dodge. “Good evening,” he said as he reached under his coat to his shoulder holster.
The couple looked up at him, and both said, “Good evening,” with a thread of puzzlement sewn through their voices, as if trying to recall where they had met him before.