by Dean Koontz
He tried to sit up again. He could only raise his head, and not far, just far enough to see that the killer had gone down after squeezing off that last barrage, facedown on the blacktop. The round in the chest had taken him out, though not fast enough.
Jack’s head lolled to his left. Even as his tunnel vision constricted further, he saw a black-and-white swing off the street, into the station at high speed, fishtailing to a stop as the driver stood on the brakes.
Jack’s vision closed down altogether. He was totally blind.
He felt as helpless as a baby, and he began to cry.
He heard doors opening, officers shouting.
It was over.
Luther was dead. Almost one year since Tommy Fernandez had been shot down beside him. Tommy, then Luther. Two good partners, good friends, in one year. But it was over.
Voices. Sirens. A crash that might have been the portico collapsing over the service-station pumps.
Sounds were increasingly muffled, as if someone was steadily packing his ears full of cotton. His hearing was fading in much the same way that his vision had gone.
Other senses too. He repeatedly pursed his dry mouth, trying unsuccessfully to work up some saliva and get a taste of something, even the acrid fumes of gasoline and burning tar. He couldn’t smell anything, either, although a moment ago the air had been ripe with foul odors.
Couldn’t feel the pavement under him. Or the blustery wind. No pain any more. Not even a tingle. Just cold. Deep, penetrating cold.
Utter deafness overcame him.
Holding desperately to the spark of life in a body that had become an insensate receptacle for his mind, he wondered if he would ever see Heather and Toby again. When he tried to summon their faces from memory, he could not recall what they looked like, his wife and son, two people he loved more than life itself, couldn’t remember their eyes or the color of their hair, which scared him, terrified him. He knew he was shaking with grief, as if they had died, but he couldn’t feel the shakes, knew he was crying but couldn’t feel the tears, strained harder to bring their precious faces to mind, Toby and Heather, Heather and Toby, but his imagination was as blind as his eyes. His interior world wasn’t a bottomless pit of darkness but a blank wintry whiteness, like a vision of driving snow, a blizzard, frigid, glacial, arctic, unrelenting.
CHAPTER THREE
Lightning flashed, followed by a crash of thunder so powerful it rattled the kitchen windows. The storm began not with a sprinkle or drizzle but with a sudden downpour, as if clouds were hollow structures that could shatter like eggshells and spill their entire contents at once.
Heather was standing at the counter beside the refrigerator, scooping orange sherbet out of a carton into a bowl, and she turned to look at the window above the sink. Rain was falling so hard it almost appeared to be snow, a white deluge. The branches of the ficus benjamina in the backyard drooped under the weight of that vertical river, their longest trailers touching the ground.
She was relieved she wouldn’t be on the freeways later in the day, commuting home from work. Due to a lack of regular experience, Californians weren’t good at driving in rain; they either slowed to a crawl and took such extreme precautions that they halted traffic, or they proceeded in their usual gonzo fashion and careened into one another with a recklessness approaching enthusiasm. Later, a lot of people would find their usual hour-long evening commute stretching into a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal.
There was, after all, a bright side to being unemployed. She just hadn’t been looking hard enough for it. No doubt, if she put her mind to it, she’d think of a long list of other benefits. Like not having to buy any new clothes for work. Look how much she had saved right there. Didn’t have to worry about the stability of the bank in which they had their savings account, either, because at the rate they were going, they wouldn’t have a savings account in a few months, not on just Jack’s salary, since the city’s latest financial crisis had required him to take a pay cut. Taxes had gone up again too, both state and federal, so she was saving all the money that the government would have taken and squandered in her name if she’d been on someone’s payroll. Gosh, when you really thought about it, being laid off after ten years at IBM wasn’t a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual festival of life-enhancing change.
“Give it a rest, Heather,” she warned herself, closing up the carton of sherbet and returning it to the freezer.
Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by dwelling on bad news, and he was right, of course. His upbeat nature, genial personality, and resilient heart had made it possible for him to endure a nightmarish childhood and adolescence that would have broken many people.
More recently, his philosophy had served him well as he’d struggled through the worst year of his career with the Department. After almost a decade together on the streets, he and Tommy Fernandez had been as close as brothers. Tommy had been dead more than eleven months now, but at least one night a week Jack woke from vivid dreams in which his partner and friend was dying again. He always slipped from bed and went to the kitchen for a post-midnight beer or to the living room just to sit alone in the darkness awhile, unaware that Heather had been awakened by the soft cries that escaped him in his sleep. On other nights, months ago, she had learned that she could neither do nor say anything to help him; he needed to be by himself. After he left the room, she often reached out beneath the covers to put her hand on the sheets, which were still warm with his body heat and damp with the perspiration wrung out of him by anguish.
In spite of everything, Jack remained a walking advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Heather was determined to match his cheerful disposition and his capacity for hope.
At the sink, she rinsed the residue of sherbet off the scoop.
Her own mother, Sally, was a world-class whiner who viewed every piece of bad news as a personal catastrophe, even if the event that disturbed her had occurred at the farthest end of the earth and had involved only total strangers. Political unrest in the Philippines could set Sally off on a despairing monologue about the higher prices she believed she would be forced to pay for sugar and for everything containing sugar if the Philippine cane crop was destroyed in a bloody civil war. A hangnail was as troublesome to her as a broken arm to an ordinary person, a headache invariably signaled an impending stroke, and a minor ulcer in the mouth was a sure sign of terminal cancer. The woman thrived on bad news and gloom.
Eleven years ago, when Heather was twenty, she’d been delighted to cease being a Beckerman and to become a McGarvey—unlike some friends, in that era of burgeoning feminism, who had continued to use their maiden names after marriage or resorted to hyphenated surnames. She wasn’t the first child in history who became determined to be nothing whatsoever like her parents, but she liked to think she was extraordinarily diligent about ridding herself of parental traits.
As she got a spoon out of a drawer, picked up the bowl full of sherbet, and went into the living room, Heather realized another upside to being unemployed was that she didn’t have to miss work to care for Toby when he was home sick from school or hire a sitter to look after him. She could be right there where he needed her and suffer none of the guilt of a working mom.
Of course, their health insurance had covered only eighty percent of the cost of the visit to the doctor’s office on Monday morning, and the twenty-percent co-payment had caught her attention as never before. It had seemed huge. But that was Beckerman thinking, not McGarvey thinking.
Toby was in his pajamas in an armchair in the living room, in front of the television, legs stretched out on a footstool, covered in blankets. He was watching cartoons on a cable channel that programmed exclusively for kids.
Heather knew to the penny what the cable subscription cost. Back in October, when she’d still had a job, she’d have had to guess at the amount and might not have come within five dollars of it.
On the TV, a tiny mouse was chasing a cat, which had appa
rently been hypnotized into believing that the mouse was six feet tall with fangs and blood-red eyes.
“Gourmet orange sherbet,” she said, handing Toby the bowl and spoon, “finest on the planet, brewed it up myself, hours upon hours of drudgery, had to kill and skin two dozen sherbets to make it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said, grinning at her, then grinning even more broadly at the sherbet before raising his eyes to the TV screen and locking onto the cartoon again.
Sunday through Tuesday, he had stayed in bed without making a fuss, too miserable even to agitate for television time. He had slept so much that she’d begun to worry, but evidently sleep had been what he needed. Last night, for the first time since Sunday, he’d been able to keep more than clear liquids in his stomach; he’d asked for sherbet and hadn’t gotten sick on it. This morning he’d risked two slices of unbuttered white toast, and now sherbet again. His fever had broken; the flu seemed to be running its course.
Heather settled into another armchair. On the end table beside her, a coffeepot-shaped thermos and a heavy white ceramic mug with red and purple flowers stood on a plastic tray. She uncapped the thermos and refilled the mug with a premium coffee flavored with almond and chocolate, relishing the fragrant steam, trying not to calculate the cost per cup of this indulgence.
After curling her legs on the chair, pulling an afghan over her lap, and sipping the brew, she picked up a paperback edition of a Dick Francis novel. She opened to the page she had marked with a slip of paper, and she tried to return to a world of English manners, morals, and mysteries.
She felt guilty, though she was not neglecting anything to spend time with a book. No housework needed to be done. When they’d both held jobs, she and Jack had shared chores at home. They still shared them. When she’d been laid off, she’d insisted on taking over his domestic duties, but he’d refused. He probably thought that letting her fill her time with housework would lead her to the depressing conviction that she would never find another job. He’d always been as sensitive about other people’s feelings as he was optimistic about his own prospects. As a result, the house was clean, the laundry was done, and her only chore was to watch over Toby, which wasn’t a chore at all because he was such a good kid. Her guilt was the irrational if inescapable result of being, by nature and by choice, a working woman who, in this deep recession, was not permitted to work.
She had submitted applications to twenty-six companies. Now all she could do was wait. And read Dick Francis.
The melodramatic music and comic voices on the television didn’t distract her. Indeed, the fragrant coffee, the comfort of the chair, and the cold sound of winter rain drumming on the roof combined to take her mind off her worries and let her slip into the novel.
Heather had been reading fifteen minutes when Toby said, “Mom?”
“Hmmm?” she said, without looking up from her book.
“Why do cats always want to kill mice?”
Marking her place in the book with her thumb, she glanced at the television, where a different cat and mouse were involved in another slapstick chase, the former pursuing the latter this time.
“Why can’t they be friends with mice,” the boy asked, “instead of wanting to kill them all the time?”
“It’s just a cat’s nature,” she said.
“But why?”
“It’s the way God made cats.”
“Doesn’t God like mice?”
“Well, He must, because He made mice too.”
“Then why make cats to kill them?”
“If mice didn’t have natural enemies like cats and owls and coyotes, they’d overrun the world.”
“Why would they overrun the world?”
“Because they give birth to litters, not single babies.”
“So?”
“So if they didn’t have natural enemies to control their numbers, there’d be a trillion billion mice eating up all the food in the world, with nothing left for cats or us.”
“If God didn’t want mice to overrun the world, why didn’t He just make them so they have single babies at a time?”
Adults always lost the Why Game, because eventually the train of questions led to a dead-end track with no answer.
Heather said, “You got me there, kiddo.”
“I think it’s mean to make mice have a lot of babies and then make cats to kill them.”
“You’ll have to discuss that with God, I’m afraid.”
“You mean when I go to bed tonight and say my prayers?”
“Best time,” she said, freshening the coffee in her mug with the supply in the thermos.
Toby said, “I always ask Him questions, then I always fall asleep before He answers me. Why does He let me fall asleep before I can get the answer?”
“That’s the way God works. He only talks to you in your sleep. If you listen, then you wake up with the answer.”
She was proud of that one. She seemed to be holding her own.
Frowning, Toby said, “But usually I still don’t know the answer when I wake up. Why don’t I know it if He told me?”
Heather took a few sips of coffee to gain time. Then she said, “Well, see, God doesn’t want to just give you all the answers. The reason we’re here on this world is to find the answers ourselves, to learn and gain understanding by our own efforts.”
Good. Very good. She felt modestly exhilarated, as if she’d held on longer than she’d any right to expect in a tennis match with a world-class player.
Toby said, “Mice aren’t the only things get chased and killed. For every animal, there’s another animal wants to tear it to pieces.” He glanced at the TV. “See, there, like dogs want to murder cats.”
The cat that had been chasing the mouse was now, in turn, being pursued by a fierce-looking bulldog in a spiked collar.
Looking at his mother again, Toby said, “Why does every animal have another animal that wants to kill it? Would cats overrun the world without their natural enemies?”
The Why Game train had come to another dead end in the track. Oh, yes, she could have discussed the concept of original sin, told him how the world had been a serene realm of peace and plenty until Eve and Adam had fallen from grace and let death into the world. But all of that seemed to be heavy stuff for an eight-year-old. Besides, she wasn’t sure she believed any of it, though it was the explanation for evil, violence, and death with which she herself had grown up.
Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no answer. “If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father golden retriever and one puppy.”
He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they’d been delaying because their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog.
“Nothing would ever die or grow old,” Toby said, continuing to describe the world he would have made, “so the puppy would always be a puppy, and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world, and then nothing would have to kill anything else.”
That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been.
“I wouldn’t make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes,” he said, wrinkling his face in disgust. “That never made any sense. God musta been in a really weird mood that day.”
Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces.
“Well, He musta been,” Toby insisted, turning his attention to the television again.
He looked so like Jack. He had Jack’s beautiful gray-blue eyes and open guileless face. Jack’s nose. But he had her blond hair, and he was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and solidly built; Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed miraculous. He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack’s love for her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of procreation, then perh
aps the bargain made in Eden wasn’t as lopsided as it sometimes seemed.
On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering feline.
The telephone rang.
Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside, and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen.
The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on the counter and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Heather?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Lyle Crawford.”
Crawford was the captain of Jack’s division, the man to whom he answered.
Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the instincts of a cop’s wife, but she knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and expelling the same word with each exhalation: “No, no, no, no.”
Crawford was saying something, but Heather couldn’t make herself listen to him, as if whatever had happened to Jack would not really have happened as long as she refused to hear the ugly facts put into words.
Someone was knocking at the back door.
She turned, looked. Through the window in the door, she saw a man in uniform, dripping rain, Louie Silverman, another cop from Jack’s division, a good friend for eight years, nine years, maybe longer, Louie with the rubbery face and unruly red hair. Because he was a friend, he had come around to the back door instead of knocking at the front, not so formal that way, not so damn cold and horribly formal, just a friend at the back door, oh God, just a friend at the back door with some news.
Louie said her name. Muffled by the glass. So forlorn, the way he said her name.
“Wait, wait,” she told Lyle Crawford, and she took the receiver away from her ear, held it against her breast.
