Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  The Padrakians had followed telephone instructions well. They were dressed as sun-worshipping tourists from New Jersey, although Bob was pushing the disguise too far by wearing black loafers and black socks with Bermuda shorts.

  A sightseeing van with large windows along the sides approached on the hotel entrance drive and stopped at the curb in front of them, under the porte cochere. The current magnetic-mat signs on each of its front doors declared CAPTAIN BLACKBEARD’S WATER ADVENTURES. Under that, above a picture of a grinning pirate, less bold letters explained GUIDED SCUBA TOURS, JET-SKI RENTALS, WATER-SKIING, DEEP-SEA FISHING.

  The driver got out and came around the front of the van to open the sliding side door for them. He wore a stylishly wrinkled white linen shirt, lightweight white ducks, and bright pink canvas shoes with green laces. Even with dreadlocks and one silver earring, he managed to look as intellectual and dignified as he had ever been in a three-piece suit or in a police captain’s uniform, in the days when Phil had served under him in the West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD. His ink-black skin seemed even darker and glossier in the tropical heat of Miami than it had been in Los Angeles.

  The Padrakians climbed into the back of the van, and Phil sat up front with the driver, who was now known to his friends as Ronald—Ron, for short—Truman. “Love the shoes,” Phil said.

  “My daughters picked them out for me.”

  “Yeah, but you like ’em.”

  “Can’t lie. They’re cool gear.”

  “You were half dancing, the way you came around the van, showing them off.”

  Flashing a grin as he drove away from the hotel, Ron said, “You white men always envy our moves.”

  Ron was speaking with a British accent so convincing that Phil could close his eyes and see Big Ben. In the course of losing his Caribbean lilt, Ron had discovered a talent for accents and dialects. He was now their man of a thousand voices.

  “I gotta tell you,” Bob Padrakian said nervously from the seat behind them, “we’re scared out of our wits about this.”

  “You’re all right now,” Phil said. He turned around in his seat to smile reassuringly at the three refugees.

  “Nobody following us, unless it’s a look-down,” Ron said, though the Padrakians probably didn’t know what he meant. “And that’s not very likely.”

  “I mean,” Padrakian said, “we don’t even know who the hell you people are.”

  “We’re your friends,” Phil assured him. “In fact, if things work out for you folks anything like the way they worked out for me and for Ron and his family, then we’re going to be the best friends you’ve ever had.”

  “More than friends, really,” Ron said. “Family.”

  Bob and Jean looked dubious and scared. Mark was young enough to be unconcerned.

  “Just sit tight for a little while and don’t worry,” Phil told them. “Everything’ll be explained real soon.”

  At a huge shopping mall, they parked and went inside. They passed dozens of stores, entered one of the less busy wings, went through a door marked with international symbols for rest rooms and telephones, and were in a long service hallway. They passed the phones and the public facilities. A stairway at the end of the corridor led down to one of the mall’s big communal shipping rooms, where some smaller shops, without exterior truck docks, received incoming merchandise.

  Two of the four roll-up, truck-bay doors were open, and delivery vehicles were backed up to them. Three uniformed employees from a store that sold cheese, cured meats, and gourmet foods were rapidly unloading the truck at bay number four. As they stacked cartons on handcarts and wheeled them to a freight elevator, they showed no interest in Phil, Ron, and the Padrakians. Many of the boxes were labeled PERISHABLE, KEEP REFRIGERATED, and time was of the essence.

  At the truck in bay number one—a small model compared with the eighteen-wheeler in bay four—the driver appeared from out of the dark, sixteen-foot-deep cargo hold. As they approached, he jumped down to the floor. The five of them climbed inside, as though going for a ride in the back of a delivery truck was unremarkable. The driver closed the door after them, and a moment later they were on the road.

  The cargo hold was empty except for piles of quilted shipping pads of the kind used by furniture movers. They sat on the pads in pitch blackness. They were unable to talk because of the engine noise and the hollow rattle of the metal walls around them.

  Twenty minutes later, the truck stopped. The engine died. After five minutes, the rear door opened. The driver appeared in dazzling sunshine. “Quickly. Nobody’s in sight right now.”

  When they disembarked from the truck, they were in a corner of a parking lot at a public beach. Sunlight flared off the windshields and chrome trim of the parked cars, and white gulls kited through the sky. Phil could smell sea salt in the air.

  “Only a short walk now,” Ron told the Padrakians.

  The campgrounds were less than a quarter of a mile from where they left the truck. The tan-and-black Road King motor home was large, but it was only one of many its size that were parked at utility hookups among the palms.

  The trees lazily stirred in the humid on-shore breeze. A hundred yards away, at the edge of the breaking surf, two pelicans stalked stiffly back and forth through the fringe of foaming water, as if engaged in an ancient Egyptian dance.

  Inside the Road King, Ellie was one of three people working at video-display terminals in the living room. She rose, smiling, to receive Phil’s embrace and kiss.

  Rubbing her belly affectionately, he said, “Ron has new shoes.”

  “I saw them earlier.”

  “Tell him he really has nice moves in those shoes. Makes him feel good.”

  “It does, huh?”

  “Makes him feel black.”

  “He is black.”

  “Well, of course, he is.”

  She and Phil joined Ron and the Padrakians in the horseshoe-shaped dining nook that seated seven.

  Sitting beside Jean Padrakian, welcoming her to this new life, Ellie took the woman’s hand and held it, as if Jean were a sister whom she hadn’t seen for a while and whose touch was a comfort to her. She had a singular warmth that quickly put new people at ease.

  Phil watched her with pride and love—and with not a little envy of her easy sociability.

  Eventually, still clinging to a dim hope that he could someday return to his old life, unable to fully accept the new one that they were offering him, Bob Padrakian said, “But we’ve lost everything. Everything. Fine, okay, I get a new name and brand-new ID, a past history that no one can shake. But where do we go from here? How do I make a living?”

  “We’d like you to work with us,” Phil said. “If you don’t want that…then we can set you up in a new place, with start-up capital to get you back on your feet. You can live entirely outside of the resistance. We can even see that you get a decent job.”

  “But you’ll never know peace again,” Ron said, “because now you’re aware that no one’s safe in this brave new world order.”

  “It was your—and Jean’s—terrific computer skills that got you into trouble with them,” Phil said. “And skills like yours are what we can never get enough of.”

  Bob frowned. “What would we be doing—exactly?”

  “Harassing them at every turn. Infiltrating their computers to learn who’s on their hit lists. Pull those targeted people out of harm’s way before the axe falls, whenever possible. Destroy illegal police files on innocent citizens who’re guilty of nothing more than having strong opinions. There’s a lot to do.”

  Bob glanced around at the motor home, at the two people working at VDTs in the living room. “You seem to be well organized and well financed. Is foreign money involved here?” He looked meaningfully at Ron Truman. “No matter what’s happening in this country right now or for the foreseeable future, I still think of myself as an American, and I always will.”

  Dropping the British accent in favor of a Louisiana bayou drawl, Ron
said, “I’m as American as crawfish pie, Bob.” He switched to a heart-of-Virginia accent, “I can quote you any passage from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. I’ve memorized them all. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t have quoted one sentence. Now his collected works are my bible.”

  “We get our financing by stealing from the thieves,” Ellie told Bob. “Manipulate their computer records, transfer funds from them to us in a lot of ways you’ll probably find ingenious. There’s so much unaccounted slush in their bookkeeping that half the time they aren’t even aware anything’s been stolen from them.”

  “Stealing from thieves,” Bob said. “What thieves?”

  “Politicians. Government agencies with ‘black funds’ that they spend on secret projects.”

  The quick patter of four small feet signaled Killer’s arrival from the back bedroom, where he had been napping. He squirmed under the table, startling Jean Padrakian, lashing everyone’s legs with his tail. He pushed between the table and the booth, planting his forepaws on young Mark’s lap.

  The boy giggled delightedly as he was subjected to a vigorous face licking. “What’s his name?”

  “Killer,” Ellie said.

  Jean was worried. “He’s not dangerous, is he?”

  Phil and Ellie exchanged glances and smiles. He said, “Killer’s our ambassador of goodwill. We’ve never had a diplomatic crisis since he graciously accepted the post.”

  For the past eighteen months, Killer had not looked himself. He wasn’t tan and brown and white and black, as in the days when he had been Rocky, but entirely black. An incognito canine. Rover on the run. A mutt in masquerade. Fugitive furball. Phil had already decided that when he shaved off his beard (soon), they would also allow Killer’s coat to change gradually back to its natural colors.

  “Bob,” Ron said, returning to the issue at hand, “we’re living in a time when the highest of high technology makes it possible for a relative handful of totalitarians to subvert a democratic society and control large sections of its government, economy, and culture—with great subtlety. If they control too much of it for too long, unopposed, they’ll get bolder. They’ll want to control it all, every aspect of people’s lives. And by the time the general public wakes up to what’s happened, their ability to resist will have been leached away. The forces marshaled against them will be unchallengeable.”

  “Then subtle control might be traded for the blatant exercise of raw power,” Ellie said. “That’s when they open the ‘reeducation’ camps to help us wayward souls learn the right path.”

  Bob stared at her in shock. “You don’t really think it could ever happen here, something that extreme.”

  Instead of replying, Ellie met his eyes, until he had time to think about what outrageous injustices had already been committed against him and his family to bring them to this place at this time in their lives.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, and he gazed down thoughtfully at his folded hands on the table.

  Jean looked at her son as the boy happily petted and scratched Killer, then glanced at Ellie’s swollen stomach. “Bob, this is where we belong. This is our future. It’s right. These people have hope, and we need hope badly.” She turned to Ellie. “When’s the baby due?”

  “Two months.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “We’re having a little girl.”

  “You picked a name for her yet?”

  “Jennifer Corrine.”

  “That’s pretty,” Jean said.

  Ellie smiled. “For Phil’s mother and mine.”

  To Bob Padrakian, Phil said, “We do have hope. More than enough hope to have children and to get on with life even in the resistance. Because modern technology has its good side too. You know that. You love high technology as much as we do. The benefits to humanity far outweigh the problems. But there are always would-be Hitlers. So it’s fallen to us to fight a new kind of war, one that more often uses knowledge than guns to fight battles.”

  “Though guns,” Ron said, “sometimes have their place.”

  Bob considered Ellie’s swollen belly, then turned to his wife. “You’re sure?”

  “They have hope,” Jean said simply.

  Her husband nodded. “Then this is the future.”

  Later, on the brink of twilight, Phil and Ellie and Killer went for a walk on the beach.

  The sun was huge, low, and red. It quickly sank out of sight beyond the western horizon.

  To the east, over the Atlantic, the sky became deep and vast and purple-black, and the stars came out to allow sailors to chart courses on the otherwise strange sea.

  Phil and Ellie talked of Jennifer Corrine and of all the hopes that they had for her, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. They took turns throwing a ball, but Killer allowed no one to take turns chasing it.

  Phil, who once had been Michael and the son of evil, who once had been Spencer and for so long imprisoned in one moment of a July night, put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Staring at the ever-shining stars, he knew that human lives were free of the chains of fate except in one regard: It was the human destiny to be free.

  To Gary and Zov Karamardian

  for their valued friendship,

  for being the kind of people who

  make life a joy for others,

  and for giving us a home

  away from home.

  We’ve decided to move in permanently

  next week!

  BY DEAN KOONTZ

  77 Shadow Street • What the Night Knows • Breathless

  Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me

  The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy

  The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy

  The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon

  One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye

  False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing

  Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire

  The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers

  Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms

  Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear

  Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night

  The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder

  The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness

  Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December

  Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways

  Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock

  The Funhouse • Demon Seed

  ODD THOMAS

  Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd • Odd Hours

  FRANKENSTEIN

  Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive

  Lost Souls • The Dead Town

  A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

  About the Author

  DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, CA 92658

  Don’t miss

  any of the adventures of

  Odd Thomas,

  America’s favorite hero.

  From #1 Bestselling Author

  ODD THOMAS IS BACK.

  His mysterious journey of suspense and discovery moves to a dangerous new level in his most riveting adventure to date… .

  by #1 New York Times bestselling author

  DEAN KOONTZ

  On sale in hardcover

  Summer 2012

  ONE

  Near sunset of my second full day as a guest in Roseland, crossing the immense lawn between the main house and the eucalyptus grove, I halted and pivoted, warned by instinct. Racing toward me, the great black stallion was as mighty a horse as I had ever seen.
Earlier, in a book of breeds, I had identified it as a Friesian. The blonde who rode him wore a white nightgown.

  As silent as any spirit, the woman urged the horse forward, faster. On hooves that made no sound, the steed ran through me with no effect.

  I have certain talents. In addition to being a pretty good short-order cook, I have an occasional prophetic dream. And in the waking world, I sometimes see the spirits of the lingering dead who, for various reasons, are reluctant to move on to the Other Side.

  This long-dead horse and rider, now only spirits in our world, knew that no one but I could see them. After appearing to me twice the previous day and once this morning, but at a distance, the woman seemed to have decided to get my attention in an aggressive fashion.

  Mount and mistress raced around me in a wide arc. I turned to follow them, and they cantered toward me once more but then halted. The stallion reared over me, silently slashing the air with the hooves of its forelegs, nostrils flared, eyes rolling, a creature of such immense power that I stumbled backward even though I knew that it was as immaterial as a dream.

  Spirits are solid and warm to my touch, as real to me in that way as is anyone alive. But I am not solid to them, and they can neither ruffle my hair nor strike a death blow at me.

  Because my sixth sense complicates my existence, I try otherwise to keep my life simple. I have fewer possessions than a monk. I have no time or peace to build a career as a fry cook or as anything else. I never plan for the future, but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.

  Bareback on the Friesian, the barefoot beauty wore white silk and white lace and wild red ribbons of blood both on her gown and in her long blond hair, though I could see no wound. Her nightgown was rucked up to her thighs, and her knees pressed against the stallion’s heaving flanks. In her left hand, she twined a fistful of the horse’s mane, as if even in death she must hold fast to her mount to keep their spirits joined.