The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  He and Jessie had believed enough in the need to defend freedom that they’d given years of their lives—and Jessie her legs—to the fight. They were grateful for each other, for their life after war. To have it upended now seemed almost too much to endure. Not that they would fail to endure it. They were good at enduring; adversity was the touchstone by which they proved their value to themselves.

  He knew what Jessie would say, because she had said it before: Nobody ever promised me that life would be a party; as long as I have you to laugh with and hope with, nothing can defeat me.

  He felt the same way.

  Nevertheless, when he got up from the tree stump, he turned in a circle, surveying the day, and he knew that everything that seemed so solid and eternal was in fact fragile. The bleached-denim blue of the desert sky, the queen palms with their feathery pendent fronds, the great flatness of desert soon to be flowering all the way to the distant mountains: All of it might seem mundane, but it was, in truth, astonishing if you took the time to think about it, precious beyond any price, every place in the world a fantastic dream that had been given substance. But you could wake from it when you woke into death—or now into a life of nanoimplant slavery.

  He pulled the Land Rover into the garage and closed the big tilt-up door. In a day or two, he would put together a simple spray booth, from a little lumber and a lot of plastic sheeting, and paint the Rover blue.

  Now, he went back into the house to shave his head.

  22

  Although Carter Jergen is keen to get Travis Hawk and use the boy to bring the mother to her knees, he almost wishes that Dubose is proved wrong, that the cameras at the turnoff to the Palomar Observatory will not reveal the Land Rover. If the Washingtons have somehow pulled off a disappearing act between Pala and Palomar, what a pleasure it will be to see the West Virginia yeti gape-mouthed and bewildered. But, no, there it is, the target vehicle, motoring past Palomar.

  “About twelve miles farther,” Dubose pontificates, “Highway 76 terminates in Highway 79. From there, maybe they went south on 79. There are two low-profile cameras at Santa Ysabel, related to the mission there, the Santa Ysabel Asistencia. Check it out.”

  “You could’ve been checking it out while I was reviewing the Palomar video,” Jergen observes in as neutral a tone of voice as he can manage.

  “I’m thinking. I’m looking at the maps and thinking. Someone has to do the thinking,” Dubose says.

  After a while, Jergen has a report to make. “They should have passed through Santa Ysabel maybe half an hour after Palomar. I’ve fast-forwarded through ninety minutes of video. No Land Rover. Have you been thinking? We need more thinking.”

  “I never stop thinking,” Dubose says. “I wish we had a few more of these stupid missions in the area, but we don’t. That’s okay. I’m on it. Stand by.”

  “Stand by?”

  “I’ve got an idea shaping up,” Dubose says.

  The big man sits before his laptop, shoulders straight, head raised, chin jutting forward, his expression almost a parody of what a man might look like when he is full of virtuous purpose. Damn if it doesn’t seem as if he’s trying to look like Dudley Do-Right.

  23

  The breeze died just before the clouds began to shed large pillowy flakes that spiraled in their descent, floating across the hood of the Explorer, streaming up the windshield without touching the glass, caught in the vehicle’s slipstream. Like a cold smoke, snow at first eddied across the pavement, but then it began to stick.

  By the time that she reached the town of Lee Vining, Jane had to reduce speed, whereupon she needed the windshield wipers. The metronomic thump of the rubber blades and the monotone song of the tire chains hashed Rubinstein, so she switched off the music.

  She pulled off the road and stopped in the parking lot of a convenience store. When she picked up the disposable phone, which was now charged, Hendrickson rose out of his self-cast spell and regarded the instrument with interest. He met her eyes as she prepared to key in the number of the burner that she’d left with Gavin and Jessie. Then he looked down at the twelve-button display.

  His eyes were not the slick white of hard-boiled eggs, as in her dream. But there seemed to be an unwholesome curiosity in them, as if on some level he knew that he should still be her enemy, even if he could not act against her.

  “Look away,” she said, to be sure that he wouldn’t see the number she meant to call.

  Instead, he met her eyes again.

  “Look away,” she repeated.

  He turned his face to the window in the passenger door.

  Maybe because of the remoteness of this place or because of the storm, she couldn’t get service. She would have to try later, though they were heading into even more remote territory and worse weather. She might have to delay calling until she crossed the border into Nevada and reached Carson City.

  She drove back onto 395, in the wake of a highway department truck fitted with an enormous plow that skimmed the pavement. The rotating yellow beacons flung waves of light through the gray, alchemizing the falling snow into gold.

  Still gazing out the side window, Hendrickson said, “They’ll find him.”

  “Find who?”

  There was no note of triumph or animosity in his flat voice, only a somber statement of what he believed to be fact. “They’ll find your son.”

  As if she were a stringed instrument that Fate was tuning for a performance, Jane felt something tighten in her chest. “What would you know about it?”

  “Not much. The boy wasn’t my primary focus. But recently…”

  “Recently what?”

  “They doubled the number of searchers looking for him.”

  “What else? You know something else. Tell me.”

  “No. Just that. Twice as many people chasing down leads.”

  “They’ll never find him,” she said.

  “It’s inevitable.”

  Irrationally, she wanted to draw her pistol and whip the barrel across his face, but she had nothing to gain—and much to lose—by indulging that desire. There was nothing worse she could do to him than what she’d already done.

  As he faced forward again, she said, “What was your primary focus?”

  “Finding you.”

  “How did that work out?”

  After a silence, he said, “I don’t know yet.”

  24

  Radley Dubose’s idea is that if the Washingtons didn’t go south on Highway 79, which the archived video from Santa Ysabel confirms that they did not, then they must have gone north.

  Jergen restrains himself from congratulating his partner on the brilliance of deducing the or in this either-or choice.

  “But they wouldn’t have gone far north on 79,” Dubose says, peering into his laptop screen as though into a crystal ball, “because all that does is take them back to Orange County by a roundabout route. They weren’t just out for a pleasure drive.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

  “But the only road that connects with the entire northern leg of 79 is County Highway 2.”

  “Therefore…?”

  “They switched onto Highway 2. But that road goes south to the Mexican border, and I already figured they won’t try crossing the border with guns.”

  “Was it you who figured that out?” Jergen asks.

  Dubose isn’t listening closely enough to hear the subtle sarcasm in his partner’s voice. “However, Highway 2 doesn’t just go south. It offers them a binary choice.”

  “Another either-or to test the clever sleuth.”

  “Just as Highway 2 takes a sharp turn south, it intersects with County Highway 22. So it’s a damn good bet they took 22 east, which goes all the way across the Anza-Borrego Desert to Salton City by the Salton Sea.”

  “Salton City by the Salton Se
a. Sounds like a song title,” says Jergen.

  “But if they wanted to go to the Salton Sea, they would have gone south on 79 to 78 to 86, ’cause those are all much better roads than 22.”

  “All these numbers,” Jergen says, “are making my pretty head spin. So what is your conclusion?”

  “Twenty-two only leads two places. Salton City is at the end of it, and before that, Borrego Springs.”

  “Maybe we go to Borrego Springs and see what there is to see.”

  Dubose looks up from his laptop. “Didn’t I just say that? It’s a hundred thirteen miles. We can be there in two hours.”

  Jergen takes his laptop, Dubose leaves his in the room, and they go downstairs to the hotel’s front entrance. The day is warm and the palm trees tower majestically, and there are white gulls kiting high in the silence of the clear blue sky.

  The valet confirms that an hour earlier a gentleman named Harry Lime had delivered a vehicle for their use. It came on a flatbed truck. He declares that it is one of the most amazing vehicles any of the valets has ever seen.

  NSA personnel have replaced the two shotgunned tires, washed the VelociRaptor, and waxed it. The truck looks fabulous. Dubose drives.

  25

  In a barren condition, Gavin’s head wasn’t nearly as smooth as that of his cousin; it had topography. He returned to the kitchen from the bathroom, frowning as he slid a hand over his naked skull. “I’ve got a bumpy head.”

  “Probably from all the times I’ve had to knock some sense into you,” Jessie said.

  Travis said, “Uncle Gavin, you look like Vin Diesel.”

  “The Fast and Furious guy? I guess you mean it as a compliment. But I’m not sure I’d have shaved off my hair if I’d known I’ve got a bumpy head.”

  “Everyone’s got a bumpy head,” Jessie assured him. “That’s why phrenologists have something to read when they read your head.”

  “Cornell’s head is as smooth as an egg.”

  “Well, that’s not the only thing different about Cornell.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to look like with a beard.”

  “Hey, Aunt Jessie, the dogs are shedding a lot right now,” Travis said. “We could save some dog hair and glue it to Uncle Gavin’s chin.”

  “Now that’s genius, Trav. We run that hand vac over Duke and Queenie, we’ll have more than enough hair. We can glue it tonight, get a preview of what my man will look like in a few weeks.”

  The dogs had taken a special interest in Gavin, sniffing around his feet and up his pant legs, as though trying to determine if, like Samson after Delilah, he’d lost something more when he’d lost his hair.

  To Jessie, he said, “We’ve got to go in town to food shop. So why don’t you start your makeover now, give me a chance to fire a little mockery back at you?”

  “Fire too much, and you’ll have nothing for dinner but what the dogs get.”

  After Jessie went into the bedroom, where they’d left their luggage, Travis said, “We wiped off the whole kitchen, Uncle Gavin. Now we have to wipe out inside the cupboards. This here is Lysol water. It stinks.”

  “But it stinks good,” Gavin said. “Why don’t you start, and I’ll come help in five minutes.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To hide where you can’t find me.”

  The boy grinned. “I’ll find you, all right. Duke and Queenie, with their noses, they’ll find you all the way to Mars.”

  When Gavin went into the living room, he discovered that Jessie had anticipated him. She handed him the burner phone that Jane had given them. “This is gonna hit her hard, baby.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  He took the disposable phone onto the front porch and closed the door behind him. He dreaded having to tell Jane, having to add to whatever hell she was currently dealing with, but he wanted to get this done.

  Apparently she was at the moment somewhere that didn’t have cell service. He couldn’t reach her.

  26

  At Oceanside, Dubose exits Interstate 5 and enters State Highway 76, heading east. They have traveled perhaps twenty-five miles when he says, “There you go.”

  “There I go what?” Jergen asks.

  Pointing through the windshield, Dubose says, “That’s County Highway 16 ahead on the left. The turnoff for Pala. The place you never heard of, where there’s a restored mission. See that pole? The cameras are on top of that pole, just like I told you they were. Low-profile cameras, so you hardly know they’re up there.” He slows the VelociRaptor. “It’s exactly like I told you, and then you went to the video, and the Rover had gone past, just like I said. That’s when Jane Hawk’s rampage began to come to an end, when the threat she posed began to unravel.”

  He sounds as though he must be rehearsing for his role in some documentary that the Techno Arcadians will make, after their triumph, to glorify their ascendancy to total power.

  Dubose accelerates. “About fourteen miles ahead, on the left, is County Highway 6, which goes to Palomar Mountain. That’s one more important milestone in the events leading up to the historic capture of Travis Hawk and the surrender of his mother.”

  Carter Jergen is feeling increasingly cranky about Dubose’s guided tour of this historic journey. “Yeah, well, nobody’s captured anybody yet.”

  “We’ll get the little shit,” Dubose assures him. “I smell him.”

  “ ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum,’ ” Jergen says, wondering if that literary allusion might go over the head of a Princeton man.

  A short while later, Radley Dubose says, “And there ahead is the turnoff to Palomar Mountain. Two more low-profile cameras high on that pole, even now recording us as I race toward the endgame of this ugly business.”

  “Damn it,” Jergen grieves, “I should be driving.”

  “Palomar Observatory,” says Dubose, “has the two-hundred-inch Hale telescope, an important national asset.”

  This is too much. Jergen reminds him of what he’d said earlier: “Where the astronomers sit around smoking weed and jerking off.”

  “Might very well be the case, my friend, but I’d advise you not to say such a thing publicly. You’ll only be mocked and derided, and the powers that be will decide you are seriously unserious.”

  27

  When Jane had left the makeover items, Jessie had doubted that anyone would fail to recognize her in such a getup. But regarding herself in the bathroom mirror, she admitted that, as usual, Mrs. Hawk had known what she was doing.

  She returned to the kitchen, her straight black hair pinned under a modified-afro wig, which worked because her multiethnic heritage left her with a café-au-lait complexion, allowing that she might have a trace of Africa somewhere in her roots. Her Irish-green eyes were hidden behind contacts that turned them brown.

  Travis said, “Aunt Jessie, you look great this way, too.”

  “You do,” Gavin agreed. “It’s suddenly like my wife’s out of town and here’s this total fox.”

  “Oh, baby, now that’s just the kind of thing a foolish man says, thinking he’ll score some points.”

  Gavin grimaced. “Heard myself saying it, couldn’t believe I was saying it. What I think happened is I was for a moment possessed by the spirit of a really stupid man.”

  They had come now to a moment that made Jessie uncomfortable, but she couldn’t figure a way to get around it. They were going to leave Travis alone for an hour and a half, maybe two hours.

  He had two canisters of Sabre 5.0 pepper spray, of a strength used by law enforcement, which they’d trained him to use when he first came to live with them. He would have the dogs, who adored him and were vigilant and protective by breed and training. Although he was not yet six, the boy was at least as responsible as the average ten-year-old. The house would be securely locked. It was broad daylight. Borrego Valley h
ad virtually zero crime, in part because more than a third of the population was over sixty-five and the median age was maybe fifty-seven, fifty-eight. In the years that the house had stood empty except for Gavin’s monthly visits, there had never been a break-in or vandalism.

  Travis was arguably safer here than he would be with them, and yet Jessie worried.

  The plan was to shop for food and other necessities that would get them through a month. Even with their appearance altered, she and Gavin didn’t want to be venturing into Borrego Springs on a regular basis. In a town that small, with a population of less than four thousand, new people would be noticed quickly, especially new black people, considering that the black population was about 1 percent. The less they showed themselves, the better. And if no one saw them with Travis, they wouldn’t match any description of two fugitives with a child. They were regular folks, probably campers, RV types, visiting Borrego Springs for a few weeks.

  There was every reason to think they couldn’t have been tracked to this relatively remote place. The traffic monitors and public-space surveillance cameras that were ubiquitous in urban and even suburban areas, as well as on interstate highways and major state freeways, had not yet been installed on back roads or in places as small and as out of the way as Borrego Springs.

  Nevertheless, if Gavin went shopping alone, there would be times when he would be distracted and when both his hands would be occupied with one task or another. He would be vulnerable, and in their current circumstances, every moment of vulnerability was an invitation to Death.

  At all times, one of them must have a hand on a gun. Jessie could do that by pushing the shopping cart that Gavin filled, keeping her pistol in her open purse.

  Although it might be unlikely that he would be spotted and pursued during his first visit to town, minimal prudence required that Jessie go with him and remain at all times aware of their surroundings. They were in a war now, and no one could fight a war alone.