The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  But the gunman didn’t stop. He shifted gears at last and tried to drive past her on two ruined tires.

  The guy might have killed Bobby; now he was getting away. He would probably never be found if Julie didn’t stop him. Reluctantly she swung the Uzi higher and emptied the magazine into the side window of the van. The Ford accelerated, then suddenly slowed and swung to the right, at steadily diminishing speed, in a long arc that carried it to the far curb, where it came to a halt with a jolt.

  No one got out.

  Keeping an eye on the Ford, Julie leaned into her car, plucked a spare magazine from the seat, and reloaded the Uzi. She approached the idling van cautiously and pulled open the door, but caution was not required because the man behind the wheel was dead. Feeling a little sick, she reached in and switched off the engine.

  Briefly, as she turned from the Ford and hurried toward the bullet-riddled Dodge, the only sounds she could hear were the soughing of a faint breeze in the lush corporate landscaping that flanked the street, punctuated by the gentle hiss and rattle of palm fronds. Then she also heard the idling engine of the Dodge, simultaneously smelled gasoline, and shouted, “Bobby!”

  Before she reached the white van, the back doors creaked open, and Bobby came out, shedding twists of metal, chunks of plastic, bits of glass, wood chips, and scraps of paper. He was gasping, no doubt because the gasoline fumes had driven most of the breathable air out of the Dodge’s rear quarters.

  Sirens rose in the distance.

  Together they quickly walked away from the van. They had gone only a few steps when orange light flared and flames rose in a wooooosh from the gasoline pooled on the pavement, enveloping the vehicle in bright shrouds. They hurried beyond the corona of intense heat that surrounded the Dodge and stood for a moment, blinking at the wreckage, then at each other.

  The sirens were drawing nearer.

  He said, “You’re bleeding.”

  “Just skinned my forehead a little.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s nothing. What about you?”

  He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You weren’t hit?”

  “Unmarked. It’s a miracle.”

  “Bobby?”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t handle it if you’d turned up dead in there.”

  “I’m not dead. I’m fine.”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  Then she kicked his right shin.

  “Ow! What the hell?”

  She kicked his left shin.

  “Julie, dammit!”

  “Don’t you ever tell me to cut and run.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a full half of this partnership in every way.”

  “But—”

  “I’m as smart as you, as fast as you—”

  He glanced at the dead man on the street, the other one in the Ford van, half visible through the open door, and he said, “That’s for sure, babe.”

  “—as tough as you—”

  “I know, I know. Don’t kick me again.”

  She said, “What about Rasmussen?”

  Bobby looked up at the Decodyne building. “You think he’s still in there?”

  “The only exits from the parking lot are onto Michaelson, and he hasn’t come out this way, so unless he fled on foot, he’s in there, all right. We’ve got to nail him before he slides out of the trap with those diskettes.”

  “Nothing worthwhile on the diskettes anyway,” Bobby said.

  Decodyne had been on to Rasmussen from the time he applied for the job, because Dakota & Dakota Investigations— which was contracted to handle the company’s security checks—had penetrated the hacker’s highly sophisticated false ID. Decodyne’s management wanted to play along with Rasmussen long enough to discover to whom he would pass the Whizard files when he got them; they intended to prosecute the money man who had hired Rasmussen, for no doubt the hacker’s employer was one of Decodyne’s primary competitors. They had allowed Tom Rasmussen to think he had compromised the security cameras, when in fact he had been under constant observation. They also had allowed him to break down the file codes and access the information he wanted, but unknown to him they had inserted secret instructions in the files, which insured that any diskettes he acquired would be full of trash data of no use to anyone.

  Flames roared and crackled, consuming the van. Julie watched chimeras of reflected flames slither and caper up the glass walls and across the blank, black windows of Decodyne, as if they were striving to reach the roof and coalesce there in the form of gargoyles.

  Raising her voice slightly to compete with the fire and with the shriek of approaching sirens, she said, “Well, we thought he believed he’d circumvented the videotape records of the security cameras, but apparently he knew we were on to him.”

  “Sure did.”

  “So he also might’ve been smart enough to search for an anticopying directive in the files—and find a way around it.”

  Bobby frowned. “You’re right.”

  “So he’s probably got Whizard, unscrambled, on those diskettes.”

  “Damn, I don’t want to go in there. I’ve been shot at enough tonight.”

  A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and sped toward them, siren screaming, emergency lights casting off alternating waves of blue and red light.

  “Here come the professionals,” Julie said. “Why don’t we let them take over now?”

  “We were hired to do the job. We have an obligation. PI honor is a sacred thing, you know. What would Sam Spade think of us?”

  She said, “Sam Spade can go spit up a rope.”

  “What would Philip Marlowe think?”

  “Philip Marlowe can go spit up a rope.”

  “What will our client think?”

  “Our client can go spit up a rope.”

  “Dear, ‘spit’ isn’t the popular expression.”

  “I know, but I’m a lady.”

  “You certainly are.”

  As the black-and-white braked in front of them, another police car turned the comer behind it, siren wailing, and a third entered Michaelson Drive from the other direction.

  Julie put her Uzi on the pavement and raised her hands to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings. “I’m really glad you’re alive, Bobby.”

  “You going to kick me again?”

  “Not for a while.”

  7

  FRANK POLLARD hung on to the tailgate and rode the truck nine or ten blocks, without drawing the attention of the driver. Along the way he saw a sign welcoming him to the city of Anaheim, so he figured he was in southern California, although he still didn’t know if this was where he lived or whether he was from out of town. Judging by the chill in the air, it was winter—not truly cold but as frigid as it got in these climes. He was unnerved to realize that he did not know the date or even the month. Shivering, he dropped off the truck when it slowed and turned onto a serviceway that led through a warehouse district. Huge, corrugated-metal buildings—some newly painted and some streaked with rust, some dimly lit by security lamps and some not—loomed against the star-spattered sky.

  Carrying the flight bag, he walked away from the warehouses. The streets in that area were lined with shabby bungalows. The shrubs and trees were overgrown in many places: untrimmed palms with full skirts of dead fronds; bushy hibiscuses with half-closed pale blooms glimmering softly in the gloom; jade hedges and plum-thorn hedges so old they were more woody than leafy; bougainvillea draped over roofs and fences, bristling with thousands of untamed, questing trailers. His soft-soled shoes made no sound on the sidewalk, and his shadow alternately stretched ahead of him and then behind, as he approached and then passed one lamppost after another.

  Cars, mostly older models, some rusted and battered, were parked at curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of some of them, and he could have jump-started any
he chose. However, he noted that the cinderblock walls between the properties—as well as the walls of a decrepit and abandoned house—shimmered with the spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosphorescent graffiti of Latino gangs, and he didn’t want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one of their members. Those guys didn’t bother rushing to a phone to call the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck. Frank had enough trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured, so he kept walking.

  Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to boost. The tenth vehicle he tried was a one-year-old green Chevy, parked near a streetlamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the driver’s seat.

  Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer, Frank switched on the Chevy’s heater, drove from Anaheim to Santa Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his familiarity with the streets. He seemed to know the area well. He recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past which he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his burnt-out memory. He still could not recall who he was, where he lived, what he did for a living, what he was running from, or how he had come to wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.

  Even at that dead hour—the car clock indicated it was 2:48—he figured his chances of encountering a traffic cop were greater on a freeway, so he stayed on the surface streets through Costa Mesa and the eastern and southern fringes of Newport Beach. At Corona Del Mar he picked up the Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach, encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed southward.

  Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists’ colony, shelved down a series of steep hillsides and canyon walls to the sea, most of it cloaked now in the thick fog. Only an occasional car passed him, and the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.

  Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two-story, gabled, Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes. He wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere, he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards. For the first time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well. He searched the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.

  He switched on the overhead light, pulled the leather flight bag onto his lap and opened it. The satchel was filled with tightly banded stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

  8

  THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker stew. A couple of miles closer to the ocean, the night probably was clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.

  Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown leather jacket. He never got tired of looking at her. They had been married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked and played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys at a bar or ball game—partly because it was difficult to find other guys in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared about: big-band music, the arts and pop culture of the ‘30s and ’40s, and classic Disney comic books. Julie wasn’t a lunch-with-the-girls type, either, because not many thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever known.

  “What’s taking them so long?” she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.

  “Be patient with them, dear,” Bobby said. “They don’t have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They’re just a humble SWAT team.”

  Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicles—cars and vans—were scattered along the street. The chilly night crackled with the static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner’s office were photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.

  “What if he gets away with the diskettes?” Julie asked.

  “He won’t.”

  She nodded. “Sure, I know what you’re thinking—Whizard was developed on a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there’s another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn’t there? What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them out by phone?”

  “Can’t. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different from the one on which Whizard was developed. Incompatible.”

  “Rasmussen is clever.”

  “There’s also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut down.”

  “Rasmussen is clever,” she repeated.

  She continued to pace in front of him.

  The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel when she’d jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her right eye and along her jawline. Each time Bobby focused on those stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.

  Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious. Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair was usually thick and lustrous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally tan as toffee ice cream, and a generous mouth that always tasted sweet to him. Whenever he watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food: chestnuts, chocolate, toffee, cream, sugar, butter. He found this amusing, but he also understood the profundity of his choice of similes: She reminded him of food because she, more than food, sustained him.

  Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away, at the end of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie’s attention and then Bobby’s. Someone from the SWAT team had come to the doors to report to the guards stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie and Bobby to come forward.

  When they joined him, he said, “They found this Rasmussen. You want to see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “Definitely,” Julie said, and her throaty voice didn’t sound at all sexy now, just tough.

  9

  KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds. He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with $140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether
it belonged to him.

  The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded another surprise—a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a California driver’s license. With the wallet was a United States passport. The photographs on the passport and license were of the same man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked like, he tilted the rearview mirror and was able to see enough of his face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was ... the license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.

  He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found another Social Security card, passport, and California driver’s license. These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of Frank.

  James Roman meant nothing to him.

  George Farris was also meaningless.

  And Frank Pollard, whom he believed himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could recall.

  “What the hell am I tangled up in?” he said aloud. He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for the one to which death had entitled him.

  As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him. He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere to which he could retreat and be assured of safety. A man without a past was also a man without a future.

  10

  WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor, in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd’s office he had cold-bloodedly given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.

  The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently, standing at Ackroyd’s window to watch the fireworks, he had been surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel, where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half as bright as he thought he was.

  Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears, they were a bit ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons, squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.

  Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with the sheriff’s department, where Sampson also served before joining the City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been prescient or he had striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad and rocklike. He held a lidless box that contained four small floppy diskettes. He showed it to Julie and said, “Is this what he was after?”

  “Could be,” she said, accepting the box.

  Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, “I’ll have to go down one floor to Ackroyd’s office, switch on the computer, pop these in, and see what’s on them.”

  “Go ahead,” Sampson said.

  “You’ll have to accompany me,” Bobby said to McGrath, the officer who had brought them up on the elevator. “Keep a watch on me, make sure I don’t tamper with these things.” He indicated Tom Rasmussen. “We don’t want this piece of slime claiming they were blank disks, saying I framed him by copying the real stuff onto them myself.”

  As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the