Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  “They’ll show,” Roy said. “Cosmic forces are with us tonight.”

  “Cosmic forces?” Duvall said, as if playing into a joke, waiting for the punch line.

  “They’ll show,” Roy repeated, and he disconnected.

  Beside Roy, Steven Ackblom sat silent and serene.

  “We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” Roy told him.

  Ackblom smiled. “There’s no place like home.”

  Spencer had been driving for nearly an hour and a half before Ellie switched off the computer and unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. A dew of perspiration beaded her forehead, although the interior of the truck was not overheated.

  “God knows if I’m mounting a good defense or planning a double suicide,” she said. “Could go either way. But now it’s there for us to use if we have to.”

  “Use what?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” she said bluntly. “It’ll take too much time. Besides, you’d try to talk me out of it. Which would be a waste of time. I know the arguments against it, and I’ve already rejected them.”

  “And this makes an argument so much easier—when you handle both sides of it.”

  She remained somber. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll have no choice but to use it, no matter how insane that seems.”

  Rocky had awakened in the backseat a short while ago, and to him, Spencer said, “Pal, you’re not confused back there, are you?”

  “Ask me anything else but not about that,” Ellie said. “If I talk about it, if I even think too much about it, then I’ll be too damn scared to do it when the time comes, if the time comes. I hope to God we don’t need it.”

  Spencer had never heard her babble before. She usually kept tight control of herself. Now she was spooking him.

  Panting, Rocky poked his head between the front seats. One ear up, one down: refreshed and interested.

  “I didn’t think you were confused,” Spencer told him. “Me, I’m twice as befuddled as a lightning bug bashing itself to bits to get out of an old mayonnaise jar. But I suppose that higher forms of intelligence, like the canine species, would have no trouble figuring out what she’s ranting about.”

  Ellie stared at the road ahead, rubbing absentmindedly at her chin with the knuckles of her right hand.

  She had said that he could ask her about anything except that, whatever that might be, so he took her up on it. “Where was ‘Bess Baer’ going to settle down before I mucked things up? Where were you going to take that Rover and make a new life?”

  “Wasn’t going to settle again,” she said, proving that she was listening. “I gave up on that. Sooner or later, they find me if I stay in one place too long. I spent a lot of the money I had…and some from friends…to buy that Rover and the gear in it. With that, I figured I could keep moving and go just about anywhere.”

  “I’ll pay for the Rover.”

  “That’s not what I was after.”

  “I know. But what’s mine is yours anyway.”

  “Oh? When did that happen?”

  “No strings attached,” he said.

  “I like to pay my own way.”

  “No point discussing it.”

  “What you say is final, huh?”

  “No. What the dog says is final.”

  “This was Rocky’s decision?”

  “He takes care of all my finances.”

  Rocky grinned. He liked hearing his name.

  “Because it’s Rocky’s idea,” she said, “I’ll keep an open mind.”

  Spencer said, “Why do you call Summerton a cockroach? Why does that annoy him particularly?”

  “Tom’s got a phobia about insects. All kinds of insects. Even a housefly can make him squirm. But he’s especially uptight about cockroaches. When he sees one—and they used to have an infestation at the ATF when he was there—he goes off the deep end. It’s almost comic. Like in a cartoon when an elephant spots a mouse. Anyway, a few weeks after…after Danny and my folks were killed, and after I gave up trying to approach reporters with what I knew, I called old Tom at his office in the Department of Justice, just rang him up from a pay phone in midtown Chicago.”

  “Good grief.”

  “The most private of his private lines, the one he picks up himself. Surprised him. He tried to play innocent, keep me talking until he could have me whacked right at that pay phone. I told him he shouldn’t be so afraid of cockroaches, since he was one himself. Told him that someday I’ll stomp him flat, kill him. And I meant what I said. Someday, somehow, I’ll send him straight to Hell.”

  Spencer glanced at her. She was staring at the night ahead, still brooding. Slender, so pleasing to the eye, in some ways as delicate as any flower, she was nevertheless as fierce and tough as any special-forces soldier that Spencer had ever known.

  He loved her beyond all reason, without reservation, without qualification, with a passion immeasurable, loved every aspect of her face, loved the sound of her voice, loved her singular vitality, loved the kindness of her heart and the agility of her mind, loved her so purely and intensely that sometimes when he looked at her, a hush seemed to fall across the world. He prayed that she was a favored child of fate, destined to have a long life, because if she died before he did, there would be no hope for him, no hope at all.

  He drove east into the night, past Rifle and Silt and New Castle and Glenwood Springs. The interstate highway frequently followed the bottoms of deep, narrow canyons with sheer walls of seamed stone. In daylight, it was some of the most breathtaking scenery on the planet. In February darkness, those soaring ramparts of rock pressed close, black monoliths that denied him the choice of going left or right and that funneled him toward higher places, toward dire confrontations so inevitable that they seemed to have been waiting to unfold since before the universe had exploded into existence. From the floor of that crevasse, only a ribbon of sky was visible, sprinkled with a meagerness of stars, as though Heaven could accommodate no more souls and would soon close its gates forever.

  Roy touched a button in the armrest. Beside him, the car window purred down. “Is it as you remember?” he asked the artist.

  As they turned off the two-lane country road, Ackblom leaned past Roy to look outside.

  Toward the front of the property, untrammeled snow mantled the paddocks that surrounded the stables. No horses had been boarded there in twenty-two years, since Jennifer’s death, because horses had been her love, not her husband’s. The fencing was well maintained and so white that it was only dimly visible against the frosted fields.

  The bare driveway was flanked by waist-high walls of snow that had been pushed there by a plow. Its course was serpentine.

  At Steven Ackblom’s request, the driver stopped at the house rather than proceeding directly to the barn.

  Roy put up the window while Fordyce removed the shackles from the artist’s ankles. Then the handcuffs. Roy did not want his guest to suffer the further indignity of those bonds.

  In their journey across the mountains, he and the artist had achieved a rapport deeper than he would have thought possible in such a short acquaintance. More than handcuffs and shackles, the mutual respect between them was certain to guarantee Ackblom’s fullest cooperation.

  He and the artist got out of the limousine, leaving Rink and Fordyce and the driver to wait for them. No wind carved the night, but the air was frigid.

  As the fenced fields had been, the lawns were white and softly luminous in the platinum light of the partial moon. The evergreen shrubs were encrusted with snow. Its limbs jacketed in ice, a winter-shorn maple cast a faint moonshadow upon the yard.

  The two-story Victorian farmhouse was white with green shutters. A deep front porch extended from corner to corner, and the embracing balustrade had white balusters under a green handrail. A gingerbread cornice marked the transition from the walls to the dormered roof, and a fringe of small icicles overhung the eaves.

  The windows were all dark. The Dresmunds had cooperated with Duva
ll. For the night, they were staying in Vail, perhaps curious about events at the ranch but selling their forgetfulness for the price of dinner in a four-star restaurant, champagne, hot-house strawberries dipped in chocolate, and a restful night in a luxury hotel suite. Later, with Grant dead and no caretaker job to be filled, they would regret making such a bad bargain.

  Duvall and the twelve men under his supervision were scattered with utmost discretion across the property. Roy couldn’t discern where a single man was concealed.

  “It’s lovely here in the spring,” said Steven Ackblom, speaking not with audible regret but as if remembering May mornings full of sun, mild evenings full of stars and cricket songs.

  “It’s lovely now too,” Roy said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” With a smile that might have been melancholy, Ackblom turned to survey the entire property. “I was happy here.”

  “It’s easy to see why,” Roy said.

  The artist sighed. “‘Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain clings cruelly to us.’”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Keats,” Ackblom explained.

  “Ah. I’m sorry if being here depresses you.”

  “No, no. Don’t trouble yourself about that. It doesn’t in the least depress me. By nature, I’m depression-proof. And seeing this place again…it’s a sweet pain, one well worth experiencing.”

  They got into the limousine and were driven to the barn behind the house.

  In the small town of Eagle, west of Vail, they stopped for gasoline. In a minimart adjacent to the service station, Ellie was able to purchase two tubes of Super Glue, the store’s entire supply.

  “Why Super Glue?” Spencer asked when she returned to the pumps, where he was counting out cash to the attendant.

  “Because it’s a lot harder to find welding tools and supplies.”

  “Well, of course it is,” he said, as though he knew what she was talking about.

  She remained solemn. Her fund of smiles had been depleted. “I hope it’s not too cold for this stuff to bond.”

  “What’re you going to do with your Super Glue, if I may ask?”

  “Glue something.”

  “Well, of course you are.”

  Ellie got into the backseat with Rocky.

  At her direction, Spencer drove the pickup past the service bays of the repair garage to the edge of the station property. He parked beside a ten-foot-high ridge of plowed snow.

  Fending off the mutt’s friendly tongue, Ellie unlatched the small sliding window between the cab and the cargo bed. She slid the movable half open only an inch.

  From the canvas duffel bag, she removed the last of the major items that she had chosen to salvage when the signal trace-back from Earthguard had made it necessary to abandon the Range Rover. A long orange utility cord. An adapter that transformed any car or truck cigarette lighter into two electrical sockets from which current could be drawn when the engine was running. Finally, there was the compact satellite up-link with automated tracking arm and collapsible Frisbee-like receiving dish.

  Outside again, Spencer put down the tailgate, and they climbed into the empty bed of the pickup. Ellie used most of the Super Glue to fix the microwave transceiver to the painted-metal cargo bed.

  “You know,” he said, “a drop or two usually does the trick.”

  “Got to be sure it doesn’t pop loose at the worst moment and start sliding around. It has to remain stationary.”

  “After that much glue, you’ll probably need a small nuclear device to get it off.”

  Head cocked in curiosity, Rocky watched them through the back window of the cab.

  The adhesive required longer than usual to bond, either because Ellie used too much or because of the cold. In ten minutes, however, the microwave transceiver was fixed securely to the truck bed.

  She opened the collapsible receiving dish to its full eighteen-inch extension. She plugged one end of the utility cord into the base of the transceiver. Then she hooked her fingers into the narrow gap that she had left in the rear window of the cab, slid the pane farther open, and fed the electrical cord into the backseat.

  Rocky pushed his snout through the window and licked Ellie’s hands as she worked.

  When the cord between the transceiver and the window was taut but not stretched tight, she pushed Rocky’s snout out of the way and slid the window as tightly shut as the cord would allow.

  “We’re going to track somebody by satellite?” Spencer asked as they jumped off the back of the truck.

  “Information is power,” she said.

  Putting up the tailgate, he said, “Well, of course it is.”

  “And I have some heavy-duty knowledge.”

  “I wouldn’t dispute that for a moment.”

  They returned to the cab of the pickup.

  She pulled the utility cord from the backseat and plugged it into one of the two sockets in the cigarette-lighter adapter. She plugged the laptop into the second socket.

  “All right,” she said grimly, “next stop—Vail.”

  He started the engine.

  Almost too excited to drive, Eve Jammer cruised the Vegas night, searching for an opportunity to become the completely fulfilled woman that Roy had shown her how to be.

  Cruising past a seedy bar where flashing neon signs advertised topless dancers, Eve saw a sorry-looking, middle-aged guy step out the front door. He was bald, maybe forty pounds overweight, with facial skin folds to rival those of any SharPei. His shoulders were slumped under a yoke of weariness. Hands in his coat pockets, head hung low, he schlepped toward the half-full parking lot beside the bar.

  She drove past him into the lot and parked in an empty stall. Through her side window, she watched him approaching. He shuffled as if too beaten down by the world to fight gravity any more than he absolutely had to.

  She could imagine how it was for him. Too old, too unattractive, too fat, too socially awkward, too poor to win the favors of a girl like those he so much desired. He was on his way home after a few beers, bound for a lonely bed, having passed a few hours watching gorgeous, big-breasted, long-legged, firm-bodied young women whom he could never possess. Frustrated, depressed. Achingly lonely.

  Eve felt so sorry for that man, to whom life had been grossly unfair.

  She got out of her car and approached him as he reached his ten-year-old, unwashed Pontiac. “Excuse me,” she said.

  He turned, and his eyes widened at the sight of her.

  “You were here the other night,” she guessed, making it sound like a statement.

  “Well…yeah, last week,” he said. He couldn’t restrain himself from looking her over. He was probably unaware of licking his lips.

  “I saw you then,” she said, pretending shyness. “I…I didn’t have the nerve to say hello.”

  He gaped at her in disbelief. And he was slightly wary, unable to believe a woman like her would be coming on to him.

  “The thing is,” she said, “you look exactly like my dad.” Which was a lie.

  “I do?”

  He was less wary now that she had mentioned her dad, but there was also less pathetic hope in his eyes.

  “Oh, exactly like him,” she said. “And…and the thing is…the thing is that…I hope you won’t think I’m weird…but the thing is…the only men I can do it with, go to bed with and be really wild with…are men who look like my father.”

  As he realized that he had stumbled into a bed of good fortune more exciting than any in his most testosterone-flooded fantasies, the jowled and dewlapped Romeo straightened his shoulders. His chest lifted. A smile of sheer delight made him look ten years younger, though no less like a SharPei.

  In that transcendent moment, when the poor man no doubt felt more alive and happier than he’d been in weeks, months, perhaps even years, Eve drew the silencer-fitted Beretta from her big handbag and shot him three times.

  She also had a Polaroid in the handbag. Although worried that a car might pull into the lot and that other pa
trons might leave the bar momentarily, she took three snapshots of the dead man as he lay on the blacktop beside his Pontiac.

  Driving home, she thought about what a fine thing she had done: helping that dear man to find a way out of his imperfect life, giving him his freedom from rejection, depression, loneliness, and despair. Tears melted from her eyes. She didn’t sob or become too emotional to be dangerous behind the wheel. She wept quietly, quietly, though the compassion in her heart was powerful and profound.

  She wept all the way home, into the garage, through the house, into her bedroom, where she arranged the Polaroids on the nightstand for Roy to see when he returned from Colorado in a day or two—and then a funny thing happened. As deeply moved as she was by what she had done, as copious and genuine as her tears had been, nevertheless, she was abruptly dry-eyed and incredibly horny.

  At the window with the artist, Roy watched the limousine as it headed back to the county road and away. It would return for them after the drama of the night had been played out.

  They were standing in the front room of the converted barn. The darkness was relieved only by the moonlight that sifted through the windows and by the green glow of the security-panel readout next to the front door. With numbers that Gary Duvall had obtained from the Dresmunds, Roy had disengaged the alarm when they’d come in, then had reset it. There were no motion detectors, only magnetic contacts at each door and window, so he and the artist could move about freely without triggering the system.

  This large first-floor room had once been a private gallery where Steven had exhibited the paintings that he favored among all those that he had produced. Now the chamber was vacant, and every faint sound echoed hollowly off the cold walls. Sixteen years had passed since the great man’s art had adorned the place.

  Roy knew this was a moment he would remember with exceptional clarity for the rest of his life, as he would remember the precise expression of wonder on Eve’s face when he had granted peace to that man and woman in the restaurant parking lot. Although the degree of humanity’s imperfection ensured that the ongoing human drama would always be a tragedy, there were moments of transcendent experience, like this, that made life worth living.