The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  “Let’s say they are carrying big-time.”

  “We don’t have to say it. They are carrying.”

  “If this turns into a firefight, how do we avoid killing the boy, collateral damage?”

  “To keep the kid safe, they don’t want a firefight,” Dubose says. “So they’ll try to get the drop on us and take our weapons or pull some other cute shit. All I’m saying is, they’ll hesitate, and we won’t. Blow the shit out of them on sight.”

  “What if they’re using the boy as a shield?”

  “Man, to get a degree from Harvard, do they make you minor in cynicism? These aren’t the kind of people who use little kids as shields.”

  “People are never the kind of people you think they are.”

  “Then there’s every reason to blow the shit out of ’em on sight.”

  They get out of the VelociRaptor and close the doors.

  The chopper is hovering high enough above the trees to avoid being an easy target, but it remains stationed over the heat source to guide the ground team and to unnerve the Washingtons with noise.

  Jergen and Dubose are armed with belt-carried 9 mm Sig Sauer pistols, but not with rifles, because this is going to be a close-up fight if it is any fight at all.

  Thigh-high waterside grass and a variety of trees, which Jergen can’t identify in the current light, offer them what cover they will have. The helicopter is an adapted civilian-model medium-twin craft with high-set main and tail rotors, and it produces enough noise to cover any sounds they might make.

  The stream is about twelve feet wide. There must be a high concentration of calcium carbonate in the runoff from these hills, because over decades the seasonal rains have laid down a flowstone bed, accounting for the smooth, swift movement of the water, which proves to be about two feet deep when Dubose wades to the farther bank.

  Because the night lacks stars and is brightened only by cloud-filtered moonlight, Jergen doesn’t expect the darkness to be much deeper under the trees, but it is. Without the NVGs, they would be nearly blind.

  Given Gavin Washington’s background, there is a possibility that he is equipped with goggles of his own, though they won’t be MIL-SPEC Generation 4 gear with eighty-thousand amplification, but rather Generation 1-plus. Hunter and hobbyist models ranging from a few hundred bucks to a couple thousand dollars will not serve Washington nearly as well as their headsets will serve them.

  Jergen and Dubose proceed at a matched pace, moving from tree to tree, pistols in a two-hand grip. They are wary of the tall grass and the trees ahead, which offer cover to the Washingtons if they have chosen to get out of their vehicle and establish a forward position in an attempt to set a trap.

  This is unlikely. For one thing, they will assume that their body heat will betray them. And chances are they will stay with the boy. They have been counting on the cool water of the stream and the canopy of trees to mask the Rover’s heat signature. Now that they realize this ruse didn’t work, they won’t have had time to plan another.

  In retrospect, Dubose’s preference for killing the Washingtons on sight in favor of capturing just the boy does not seem to be as ill-considered as Jergen first thought. He certainly doesn’t want to die here tonight—or anywhere on any night. Better to act first and decisively. All they really need is the boy. With him, they will have Jane Hawk by the short hairs.

  Ahead, the Land Rover comes into view, parked in the middle of the stream, the cooling water flowing over its bumper and around its flanks, glowing with otherworldly light above the water line, as if it is a phantom coach that conveys the spirits of the dead to their reward.

  They are now within the perimeter of the helo’s downdraft. The trees thrash overhead, spinning off leaves that shudder through the green dark like huge moths, and the tall grasses shiver, and the turbulent air beats shapes into the surface of the stream that was heretofore as smooth as glass.

  They’re thirty yards from the Land Rover…now twenty…fifteen. The windshield is a darker rectangle in the bright green of the vehicle. Beyond the glass there are no warm shapes of people, as though the Rover has been abandoned.

  If the Washingtons have foolishly set out on foot with the boy in this forbidding territory, they can’t have gotten far. The trees might mask their smaller heat signatures from aerial surveillance, but there will be breaks in the canopy through which they will sooner or later be sighted, and eventually there won’t be any trees at all.

  Ten yards, and now Jergen and Dubose are in the very eye of the downdraft, where the air is calmer, although the engine roar and the whump-whump-whump of the rotary wing are louder than ever.

  Perhaps it is only the tidal crash of rhythmic sound resonating in the hollows of Jergen’s bones, but suddenly he shudders with the suspicion that they have walked into a trap after all.

  6

  Gavin was slumped down in the driver’s seat. The single lens of the ATN PVS7-3 goggles, which fed a gathered image to both eyes, was aimed through the thick spokes of the steering wheel and just over the top of the dashboard, so that he presented little or no heat profile separate from that of the Rover. From this uncomfortable position, he saw the men appear out of the gloom, one on each side of the stream, pistols at the ready, and he watched them approach through the wind-tossed vegetation.

  Travis had put the briefcase full of money and Jessie’s blade-runner prosthetics on the backseat, and he had taken refuge on the floor, where the dogs cuddled with him. Jessie was in the cargo area, which the shepherds had occupied previously; she was sitting, propped against the back of the backseat, below window level.

  Gavin had switched off the engine when they had first driven into the stream, hoping that the cooling flow and the sheltering trees might blind the chopper to them. When that hadn’t worked, he had started the engine again and prepared to make a break for it when the moment was right.

  In the roar of the helicopter, the men approaching along the banks of the stream would not be able to hear the Land Rover. They might assume the engine wasn’t running, or that the vehicle was abandoned.

  When the gunmen drew as close as Gavin dared to let them get before taking action, he shifted the idling vehicle into drive. The pressure of the rushing water prevented the Rover from drifting forward, so that the thugs were not alerted until he popped up in his seat and tramped the accelerator. For an instant, the big tires spun on the flowstone bed of the stream, but then the Land Rover surged forward.

  The assassins startled and hesitated for but a moment, which brought the Rover almost even with them before they opened fire. Three muzzle flares, two on the right. A bullet barked off the roof panel above the windshield. Another knocked a side mirror cockeyed. Maybe the third went wide. Even as they were firing, Gavin gave them a blast of the horn, which might have further startled them, but which was primarily meant to be a signal to Jessie.

  7

  Seated in the cargo area, back pressed to the backseat, Jessie faced the open tailgate, shotgun ready. When the horn blared all but simultaneously with the gunfire and they kept moving, she could only suppose that Gavin hadn’t been hit, thank God, and that they were already passing the gunmen.

  In the immediate echo of the horn, as plumes of water flared up from the back tires and chopper downdraft cast a cold spray into the cargo area, Jessie squeezed off the first of four rounds, unable to see any target, intending only to make the gunmen drop flat and hold their fire in the Land Rover’s wake, muzzle flare for an instant glittering in thousands of airborne droplets, recoil bucking her against the bracing seatback. Few things equaled the thundercrack of a 12-gauge to make sober men duck and cover, and by the time she squeezed off the second, third, and fourth rounds, the Rover was so far upstream she didn’t feel in danger from their pistol fire.

  Ears ringing, half-deaf for the moment, Jessie resorted to the open box of shells between her thighs
to slip a round in the breech and three more in the tube magazine.

  8

  The German shepherds were good dogs, but they were howling now in the backseat, protesting the painful volume of shotgun blasts in such a contained space, and Gavin sympathized, his ears ringing as though he’d been slapped hard up both sides of his head. He shouted to Travis, his voice sounding as if it came from the far end of a culvert. The boy shouted back just loud enough to be heard—he was okay—and Jessie gave a shout-out, too.

  The blackish trees beyond the reach of the helo’s downdraft stood as still as if petrified to stone in another millennium, and on his left he came to a break in their palisade and swung out of the stream, over the low grassy bank, onto the canyon floor. Fifty yards ahead stood some model of truck he’d never seen before, even though, as he closed on it, he could make out the word FORD in large letters across the grille.

  If there had been three men with the truck, one remaining behind, it might be a mistake to stop, but he didn’t think there was a third. He didn’t see anyone. He braked beside the Ford, threw open his door, and drew his Springfield .45. He emptied the magazine into the two rear tires on the driver’s side, blowing out both, a couple rounds ricocheting off the alloy wheels, distorted reflections of the bright green muzzle flashes quivering through the glossy black paint like some aurora borealis in an evil netherworld. He ejected the empty magazine, slapped in a new one, closed his door, holstered the warm pistol, and drove east at high speed.

  The gunmen were on foot now and no longer an immediate threat, but the helicopter was giving chase.

  Gavin came to a place where the trees relented on both sides of the stream. Beyond the sinuous slide of water, the south wall of the canyon looked lower and less steep than the north wall, offering what appeared to be a clear route to the top. He forded the stream and motored up an incline of grass. The ground was still soft from recent rains and moist below the first couple inches, and he gouged out muddy tracks all the way to the crest.

  On the higher ground, the helicopter came at them from the west. It was a civilian helo, large enough to carry six or eight passengers in addition to the crew, if it had not been retrofitted for another purpose. It bore no agency ID that he could see in the drowned light of the NVGs.

  Maybe the pilot had been military in an earlier career, but maybe he was just a chopper jockey who had no service training, no war experience. The latter seemed to be the case when he swooped in no more than fifty feet above the Rover, as though to intimidate the driver, which was a hopeless cause.

  But even if they weren’t ex-military, the pilot and his copilot might be more than just aerial-search specialists assisting a hard-boiled ground crew. If the copilot was a trained sniper—or if a sniper was aboard—that might justify a lower approach in order to take out the vehicle without accidentally killing anyone aboard. No doubt the people trying to find Jane would prefer to interrogate Gavin and Jessie rather than kill them, and at all costs take Travis alive. Or maybe their intent was to spook him with one dangerous feint after another, using the helicopter much as a matador used a red cape to thwart a bull, distracting and delaying him long enough for the ground crew to scale the canyon wall and reengage.

  The helo racketed east through the night, looped around to the south, and approached them again.

  When he realized the aircraft was coming in as low as before, maybe even lower, as though to skid-kiss the roof of the Land Rover, Gavin braked to a stop. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Jessie scrambling out of the open tailgate. She closed it behind her and crouched at the back of the vehicle.

  Ghostly celebrants seemed to spring from graves as the helo passed over the land, billows of dust and chaff shapen into dancers that whirled away into the haunted dark. The blades of the rotary wing carved slabs of air and threw them down to rock the Rover on its tires.

  As the chopper passed at reckless altitude, Jessie fired the shotgun three times in quick succession, and then pulled off a fourth round aimed at its tail rotor.

  This wasn’t a movie, so the aircraft did not burst into flames, as there was no reason that it should. But a knocking noise and the sharp keening of metal parts grinding against each other at high speed suggested that she’d done some damage.

  The pilot arced west and south, away from the canyon, and the helo yawed as it gained a little altitude.

  Jessie opened the front passenger door and boarded the Rover, and Gavin set out after the helicopter as she slammed her door. He had no intention of giving pursuit for any purpose other than to keep it in sight until he knew whether it was seriously disabled.

  Whatever mechanical problem a few loads of point-blank buckshot might have caused, it quickly metastasized into a crisis. The pilot ceased lateral flight and hovered and started to put down, the rotary wing stuttering. When the helo was about forty feet off the ground, its blades locked. Without lift, it dropped hard, snapped a skid, tipped, and came to rest canted to starboard, propped at an angle by wing blades.

  Gavin stripped off his night-vision goggles and gave them to Jessie. He switched on the headlights. The pale land and dark scrub seemed to leap at them out of a void, the green world gone, this more familiar world stabilizing under them.

  Travis scrambled off the floor, onto the backseat, when Jessie told him to belt up. He tried his best to do so with the dogs half atop him and excitedly licking his hands and face.

  Keeping in mind the possibility of gunfire, Gavin drove wide of the downed aircraft. However, the sidewash of the Rover’s high beams revealed one man on his knees beside the craft and another in the open cockpit door above, getting ready to jump.

  The hills unveiled their contours more readily to headlights than to the amplified moonlight and infrared of the NVGs. Gavin oriented himself as best he could as Jessie read aloud the compass heading, and then he drove south-southwest through the wildlands faster than he had dared in a green world.

  The tremors took him then. Not for long, not violently enough to make his teeth chatter. If there had been a cold sweat on his brow and down his back before this, he didn’t realize it until now.

  In spite of how practiced Jessie had been in both showdowns, Gavin knew that she was shaken, too, when she said, “Afghanistan used to be half a world away. I liked it better there.”

  9

  Jane Hawk allowed herself far fewer superstitions than did most people, one of which was that long good-byes were more likely to be final good-byes than were short ones. Better to say “until next time” or “see you soon” than to say “good-bye” at any length.

  Behind the mortuary, beside her Explorer Sport, in the chilly darkness of 3:30 Sunday morning, Jane said to Gilberto Mendez, “See you soon,” and she thanked him, and she told him that she loved him.

  It was her conviction, not superstition, that this civilization was built on love—on the love of people for one another and on the love that surpasseth all understanding. In this age of cynicism and snark, genuine emotion was mocked, love derided as sentimentalism. In this world of rapid change, there were few things to which you could hold fast. Wisdom acquired through centuries of experience, traditions, and beloved neighborhoods eroded and washed away, and with them went the people who found solace and meaning in those things, who once would have been part of your life for most of your life. Now a rootless population, believing in nothing but the style and fashion of the moment, produced a culture of surface conformity under which the reality was a loveless realm in which soon everyone would live as a stranger in a strange land. When you loved enough important qualities of a person, then you loved him or her, and you had better say it while time remained.

  She loved Gilberto’s faithfulness to Carmella, his devotion to his children, his respect for the dignity of the dead and for the eternal nature of their souls, his love of freedom, and his lifelong commitment to the Marine way, to semper fi. Therefore, her good-by
e consisted of just those eight heartfelt words, “See you soon. Thank you. I love you.” She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek.

  At 3:31, she was on the road in her SUV that had been rebuilt in Mexico, wearing the chopped-everywhichway Vogue-punk black wig and the eye shadow and the blue lipstick and the nose ring that went with the photo on the Elizabeth Bennet driver’s license.

  In the passenger seat was Booth Hendrickson, still under her control because she had accessed him by saying “Play Manchurian with me,” and had not released him with the words Auf Wiedersehen. She believed in the efficacy of the control mechanism, even in his case. Nevertheless, for this first leg of the journey, his wrists were bound together with a zip-tie that also looped through his belt, so that he could not lift his hands from his lap.

  He wore his suit; but a too-roomy shirt belonging to Gilberto had replaced his custom-tailored shirt from which Jane had earlier cut one arm when preparing him for injection. He wore no tie. Before having his hands encumbered by his belt, he had nervously fingered his buttoned collar and had appeared distressed that his outfit remained incomplete.

  Heading east toward San Bernardino, she didn’t speak to him, nor he to her. For the first half hour, she welcomed the silence, the time to think about what lay ahead and how best to cope with it. But soon the man’s servile obedience to her preference for quiet, his placid expression unchanging mile by mile, and his dead-eyed stare that never wavered from the dark road ahead…all that became too eerie for her to countenance.

  Since she still had nothing to say to him, she opted for music. She wanted no trackable GPS in any car she acquired, but she always needed a vast store of music, which not unpleasantly reminded her of the life she might have lived if her father had not murdered her mother so many years ago.