by Dean Koontz
Outside, the helicopter engine went from a low idle to a loud roar. The pilot revved it. Revved it again.
What the hell?
Frowning, Roy clambered through the debris and went outside to see what was happening.
The agent posted in front of the market was looking toward the Hallmark shop, where the chopper was lifting off.
“What’s he doing?” Roy asked.
“Taking off.”
“Why?”
“Must be going somewhere.”
Another moron. Stay calm. Peach in. Green out.
“Who told him to leave his position, who told him to take off?” Roy demanded.
As soon as the question was put, he knew the answer. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he knew why the chopper was taking off and who was in it.
He jammed the Beretta into his shoulder holster, wrenched the submachine gun out of the surprised agent’s hands, and charged toward the ascending aircraft. He intended to rupture its fuel tanks and bring it to the ground.
Raising the weapon, finger on the trigger, Roy realized there was no way he was ever going to be able to explain his actions to the satisfaction of a straight-arrow Utah cop with no appreciation for the moral ambiguity of federal law enforcement. Shooting at his own helicopter. Jeopardizing his pilot and copilot. Destroying a hugely expensive piece of government machinery. Perhaps causing it to crash into occupied stores. Great, fiery gouts of aviation fuel splashing everything and anyone in their path. Respected Cedar City merchants transformed into human torches, running in circles through the February morning, blazing and shrieking. It would all be colorful and exciting, and nailing the woman would be worth the lives of any number of bystanders, but explaining the catastrophe would be as hopeless as trying to explain the fine points of nuclear physics to the idiot sitting in the back of the Dodge pickup.
And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the chief of police would be a clean-cut Mormon who had never tasted an alcoholic drink in his life, who had never smoked, and who would not be tuned in properly to the concepts of untaxable hush money and police-agency collusion. Bet on it. A Mormon.
Reluctantly, Roy lowered the submachine gun.
The chopper rose swiftly.
“Why Utah?” he shouted furiously at the fugitives that he could not see but that he knew were frustratingly close.
Peach in. Green out.
He had to calm down. Think cosmically.
The situation would be resolved in his favor. He still had the second chopper to use as a pursuit vehicle. And Earthguard 3 would find it easier to track the JetRanger than the Rover, because the chopper was larger than the truck and because it traveled above all sheltering vegetation and above the distracting movement of ground-level traffic.
Overhead, the hijacked aircraft swung east, across the roof of the card store.
In the passenger cabin, Ellie crouched beside the opening in the fuselage, leaned against the door frame, and looked down at the shopping center roof that passed under her. God, her heart was booming as loud as the rotor blades. She was terrified that the chopper would tip or lurch and that she would fall out.
During the past fourteen months, she had learned more about herself than in the entire previous twenty-eight years. For one thing, her love of life, her sheer joy in being alive, was greater than she had ever realized until the three people she had loved most had been taken from her in one brutal, bloody night. In the face of so much death, with her own existence in constant jeopardy, she now savored both the warmth of every sun-filled day and the chill wind of every raging storm, weeds as much as flowers, the bitter and the sweet. She had never been a fraction as aware of her love of freedom—her need for freedom—as when she had been forced to fight to keep it. And in those fourteen months, she had been amazed to learn that she had the guts to walk precipices, leap chasms, and grin in the devil’s face; amazed to discover that she was not capable of losing hope; amazed to find that she was but one of many fugitives from an imploding world, all of them perpetually on the rim of a black hole and resisting its God-crushing gravity; amazed by how much fear she could tolerate and still thrive.
One day, of course, she would amaze herself straight into a sudden death. Maybe today. Leaning against the frame of the open door in the fuselage. Finished by a bullet or by a long, hard fall.
They traversed the building and moved over the fifty-foot-wide service alley. The other helicopter was down there, parked behind Hallmark. No gunmen were in the immediate vicinity of the craft. Evidently, they had already bailed out and had moved in on the back of the supermarket, under the twenty-foot overhang.
With Spencer giving orders to their own pilot, they hovered in position long enough for Ellie to use the Micro Uzi on the tail assembly of the craft on the ground. The weapon had two magazines, welded at right angles to each other, with a capacity of forty rounds—minus the few that Spencer had fired into the supermarket ceiling. She emptied both magazines, slapped in spares, emptied those too. The bullets destroyed the horizontal stabilizer, damaged the tail rotor, and punched holes in the tail pylon, disabling the aircraft.
If her assault was answered by any return fire, she was unaware of it. The gunmen who had moved off to cover the back of the market were probably too surprised and confused to be sure what to do.
Besides, the entire attack on the grounded chopper had taken only twenty seconds. Then she put the Uzi on the cabin deck and slid the door shut. The pilot, at Spencer’s direction, immediately took them due north at high speed.
Rocky was crouched between two of the passenger seats, watching her intently. He was not as exuberant as he had been since they’d fled their camp in Nevada shortly after dawn. He had slipped into his more familiar suit of fretfulness and timidity.
“It’s okay, pooch.”
His disbelief was unconcealed.
“Well, it sure could be worse,” she said.
He whimpered.
“Poor baby.”
With both ears drooping, racked by shivers, Rocky was the essence of misery.
“How can I say anything that’ll make you feel better,” she asked the dog, “if I’m not allowed to lie to you.”
From the nearby cockpit door, Spencer said, “That’s a pretty grim assessment of our situation, considering we just slipped loose of a damned tight knot.”
“We’re not out of this mess yet.”
“Well, there’s something I tell Mr. Rocky Dog now and then, when he’s down in the dumps. It’s something that helps me a little, though I can’t say whether it works for him.”
“What?” Ellie asked.
“You’ve got to remember, whatever happens—it’s only life, we all get through it.”
THIRTEEN
Monday morning, after his bail had been posted, crossing the parking lot to his brother’s BMW, Harris Descoteaux stopped twice to turn his face to the sun. He basked in its warmth. He had once read that black people, even those as midnight-dark as he was, could get skin cancer from too much sun. Being black was no absolute guarantee against melanoma. Being black, of course, was no guarantee against any misfortune, quite the opposite, so melanoma would have to wait in line with all the other horrors that might befall him. After spending fifty-eight hours in jail, where direct sunlight was more difficult to get than a hit of heroin, he felt as if he wanted to stand in the sun until his skin blistered, until his bones melted, until he became one giant pulsing melanoma. Anything was better than being locked away in a sunless prison. He inhaled deeply, too, because the smog-tainted air of Los Angeles smelled so sweet. Like the juice of an exotic fruit. The scent of freedom. He wanted to stretch, run, leap, twirl, whoop, and holler—but there were some things that a man of forty-four simply did not do, regardless of how giddy with freedom he might be.
In the car, as Darius started the engine, Harris put a hand on his arm, staying him for a moment. “Darius, I’ll never forget this—what you’ve done for me, what you’re still doing.”<
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“Hey, it’s nothing.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“Well, you’d have done the same for me.”
“I think I would’ve. I hope I would’ve.”
“There you go again, working on sainthood, putting on those robes of modesty. Man, whatever I know about doing the right thing, I learned from you. So what I did here, it’s what you would do.”
Harris grinned and lightly punched Darius on the shoulder. “I love you, little brother.”
“Love you, big brother.”
Darius lived in Westwood, and from downtown, the drive could take as little as thirty minutes on a Monday morning, after the rush hour, or more than twice that long. It was always a crapshoot. They had a choice between using Wilshire Boulevard, all the way across the city, or the Santa Monica Freeway. Darius chose Wilshire, because some days the rush hour never ended and the freeway became Hell with talk radio.
For a while, Harris was all right, enjoying his freedom if not the thought of the legal nightmare that lay ahead; however, as they were approaching Fairfax Boulevard, he began to feel ill. The first symptom was a mild but disturbing dizziness, a strange conviction that the city was ever so slowly revolving around them even as they drove through it. The sensation came and went, but each time that it gripped him, he suffered a spell of tachycardia more frantic than the one before it. When his heart fluttered through more beats in a half-minute seizure than the heart of a frightened hummingbird, he was overcome by the peculiar worry that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. When he tried to breathe deeply, he found he could barely breathe at all.
At first he thought that the air in the car was stale. Stuffy, too warm. He didn’t want to reveal his distress to his brother—who was on the car phone, taking care of business—so he casually fiddled with the vent controls, until he got a draft of cool air directed at his face. Ventilation didn’t help. The air wasn’t stuffy but thick, like the heavy vapors of something odorless but toxic.
He endured the city revolving around the BMW, his heart bursting into fits of tachycardia, the air so syrup-thick that he could inhale only an inadequate drizzle, the oppressive intensity of light that forced him to squint against the sunshine that he had so recently enjoyed, the feeling that a crushing weight was hovering over him—but then he was enveloped by nausea so intense that he cried out for his brother to pull to the curb. They were crossing Robertson Boulevard. Darius engaged the emergency flashers, swung out of traffic just past the intersection, and stopped in a no-parking zone.
Harris flung open his door, leaned out, regurgitated violently. He had eaten none of the jailhouse breakfast that he’d been offered, so he was racked only by the dry heaves, although they were no less distressing or less exhausting because of that.
The siege passed. He slumped back in his seat, pulled the door shut, and closed his eyes. Shaking.
“Are you all right?” Darius asked worriedly. “Harris? Harris, what’s wrong?”
With the spell past, Harris knew he’d been stricken by nothing more—and nothing less—than an attack of prison claustrophobia. It had been infinitely worse, however, than any panic attacks that had plagued him when he had actually been behind bars.
“Harris? Talk to me.”
“I’m in prison, little brother.”
“We’re standing together on this, remember. Together, we’re stronger than anybody, always were and always will be.”
“I’m in prison,” Harris repeated.
“Listen, these charges are bullshit. You were set up. None of this will stick. You’re a Teflon defendant. You’re not going to spend another day in jail.”
Harris opened his eyes. The sunshine was no longer painfully bright. In fact, the February day seemed to have darkened with his mood.
He said, “Never stole a dime in my life. Never cheated on my taxes. Never cheated on my wife. Paid back every loan I ever took. Worked overtime most weeks since I’ve been a cop. Walked the straight and narrow—and let me tell you, little brother, it hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes I get tired, fed up, tempted to take an easier way. I’ve had bribe money in my hand, and it felt good, but I just couldn’t make my hand put it into my pocket. Close. Oh, yes, a lot closer than you ever want to know. And there’ve been some women…they would’ve been there for me, and I could’ve put Jessica way back in my mind while I was with them, and maybe I would’ve cheated on her if the opportunities had been just the littlest bit easier. I know it’s in me to do it—”
“Harris—”
“I’m telling you, I’ve got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don’t give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I’m no saint, the way you kid about. But I’ve always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It’s a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You’re always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don’t just step off and walk in the cool grass. But I’ve always wanted to be a man our mother could be proud of. I wanted to shine in your eyes too, little brother, in the eyes of my wife and kids. I love you all so damned much, I never wanted any of you to know about any of the ugliness in me.”
“The same ugliness that’s in all of us, Harris. All of us. So why are you going on like this, doing this to yourself?”
“If I’ve walked that line, hard as it is, and something like this can happen to me, then it can happen to anyone.”
Darius regarded him with stubborn perplexity. He was obviously struggling to understand Harris’s anguish but was only halfway there.
“Little brother, I’m sure you’ll clear me of the charges. No more nights in jail. But you explained the asset-forfeiture laws, and you did a damned good job, made it too clear. They have to prove I’m a drug dealer to put me back in jail, and they’ll never be able to do that because it’s all trumped up. But they don’t have to prove a damn thing to keep my house, my bank accounts. They only have to show ‘reasonable cause’ that maybe the house was the site of illegal activity, and they’ll say the planted drugs are reasonable cause even if the drugs don’t prove anything.”
“There’s that reform law in Congress—”
“Moving slowly.”
“Well, you never know. If some sort of reform passes, maybe it’ll even tie forfeiture to conviction.”
“Can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”
“With your clean record, your years of service—”
Harris gently interrupted: “Darius, under the current law, can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”
Darius stared at him in silence. A shimmer of tears blurred his eyes, and he looked away. He was an attorney, and it was his job to obtain justice for his big brother, and he was overwhelmed by the truth that he was all but powerless to assure even minimal fairness.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” Harris said. “It could happen to you next. It could happen to my kids someday. Darius…maybe I get something back from the bastards, say as much as eighty cents on the dollar once all my costs are deducted. And maybe I get my life on track, start to rebuild. But how do I know it won’t happen to me again, somewhere down the road?”
Having held back the tears, Darius looked at him again, shocked. “No, that’s not possible. This is outrageous, unusual—”
“Why can’t it happen again?” Harris persisted. “If it happened once, why not twice?”
Darius had no answer.
“If my house isn’t really my house, if my bank accounts aren’t really mine, if they can take what they want without proving a thing, what’s to keep them from coming back? Do you see? I’m in prison, little brother. Maybe I’ll never be behind bars again, but I’m in another kind of prison and never going to get free. The prison of expectations. The prison of fear. The prison of doubt, distrust.”
Darius put one hand to his forehead, pressed and pulled at his brow, as if he would like
to extract from his mind the awareness that Harris had forced upon him.
The car’s emergency-flasher indicator blinked rhythmically, in time with a soft but penetrating sound, as if warning of the crisis in Harris Descoteaux’s life.
“When the realization began to hit me,” Harris said, “back there a few blocks ago, when I began to see what a box I’m in, what a box anyone could be in under these rules, I just was…overwhelmed…felt so claustrophobic that it made me sick to my stomach.”
Darius lowered the hand from his brow. He looked lost. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say.”
For a while they just sat there, with Wilshire Boulevard traffic whizzing by them, with the city so bright and busy all around, with the true darkness of modern life not to be glimpsed in mere palm shadows and awning-shaded shop entrances.
“Let’s go home,” Harris said.
They drove the rest of the way to Westwood in silence.
Darius’s house was a handsome brick-and-clapboard Colonial with a columned portico. The spacious lot featured huge old ficus trees. The limbs were massive yet gracious in their all-encompassing spread, and the roots went back to the Los Angeles of Jean Harlow and Mae West and W. C. Fields, if not further.
It was a major achievement for Darius and Bonnie to have earned such a place in the world, considering how far down the ladder they had started their climb. Of the two Descoteaux brothers, Darius had enjoyed the greater financial success.
As the BMW pulled into the brick driveway, Harris was overcome by regret that his own troubles would inevitably taint the pride and well-earned pleasure that Darius took from that Westwood house and from everything else that he and Bonnie had acquired or achieved. What pride in their struggles and what pleasure in their attainments could survive, undiminished, after the realization that their position was maintained only at the sufferance of mad kings who might confiscate all for a royal purpose or dispatch a deputation of blackguards, under the protective heraldry of the monarch, to lay waste and burn? This beautiful house was only ashes waiting for the fire, and when Darius and Bonnie regarded their handsome residence henceforth, they would be troubled by the faintest scent of smoke, the bitter taste of burnt dreams.