The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  If there was one image she could take with her on leaving this world, it must be the face of her child, her sweet Travis, the face of innocence in answer to this evil countenance. He drove the jagged femur at her eyes, and perhaps it was the thought of Travis that electrified her, that gave her strength even when she didn’t have breath. She heaved against his pinning weight and turned her head, and the bone stabbed stone, spalling off splinters that prickled across her face.

  Hatred boiling for decades had resulted in blackest malignity, which was the source of his inhuman strength, but when the bone cracked into the floor with such force, the reverberations coursing up his right arm for a moment weakened him, and the femur slipped from his numbed fingers. He wanted her blind and disfigured and dead. When he saw her alive and unmarked, his rage became so great that he lost even his animal cunning. He let go of her throat with his left hand and pulled his arm back and made a fist, and in so doing ceased to pincer her thighs with his knees. She drew her right leg out from under him, knee to her chest, and as his fist hammered down, she thrust her foot hard at his balls, missed the target, but landed the blow solidly in his groin. The kick unbalanced him, and his punch found only air. She thrust up and shoved him, he fell away from her, and she scrambled to her feet.

  Gasping for breath, she backed off, scanning the floor for her pistol. It was lost in shadows, or maybe it had spun across the stone and into the fissure.

  Hendrickson clambered to his feet with his back to her, spewing a sewage of obscenities unlike anything she’d heard before, as if he had no language anymore except for words that were scurrilous and filthy, lacking the presence of mind even to make of them coherent invective. He turned and saw her and came after her, and there was nothing for her to do but snatch up the femur. Some of the wicked points had snapped off the broken end, but at the same time the bone had further shattered, exposing other points as sharp as stilettos. He rushed her, and Jane didn’t retreat or stand her ground, but instead thrust forward to meet him. Reckless in his wrath, he was surprised by her assault and failed to knock her arm aside as she drove the jagged end of the leg bone into his throat.

  She stepped quickly backward, leaving the bone embedded, and though blood ran from the wound, there was no arterial spurting, as she had hoped there would be. He stood stunned and swaying, one hand on the femur, working his mouth but producing no obscenities. She thought that he must go to his knees, but instead, gagging noisily, he pulled the bone from his throat and held it by the shank. He took a step toward her with the weapon, towering like the indestructible avatar of some cruel god. His foot came down on the flashlight, and he kicked it out of his way, his grin a crescent of darkness and red teeth.

  Like a roulette wheel, the spinning light gave her one last hope of a win, coming to a stop so that the beam revealed the Heckler. She picked up the pistol, turned with it in a two-hand grip, and shot Booth Hendrickson three times as, hand fisted around the ancient femur, he came at her with the glee of a man who’d been shorn of his soul and all restraints therewith. When he was down and dead on the floor, she shot him twice again.

  20

  Pastor Milo assures them he has great respect for the FBI, in spite of some doubts he expresses about recent directors. As he escorts Jergen and Dubose among his parishioners, he explains to his people that no one should take photos with their phones to post on the Internet, as this might compromise these fine agents in any future vital undercover work to which they might be assigned.

  Of all those present, only four think they might have seen the Honda from time to time. But just one, a grizzled specimen named Norbert Gossage, says anything that intrigues Jergen and Dubose.

  “It’s a peculiar shade of green for a Honda,” says Gossage, scratching his bearded neck, “which is why I remember it at all.”

  Dubose gives Jergen a look that expresses his doubt about the value of a Harvard education. “Yes, sir, you’re right about that.”

  “Honda isn’t a car people spend bucks to customize,” says Gossage, working a finger in his left ear. “So you notice a thing like that special paint job. I used to see this one here”—he takes the finger out of his ear and taps the photo on the smartphone, as though it would never occur to him that Jergen will now have to sterilize the screen—“down in the south valley, around where Route 3 divides. I used to work in those parts.”

  “Saw it where, exactly?” Dubose asks.

  “Nowhere exactly. It was always on the move when I saw it.”

  “You have any idea who might have been driving it?”

  “Some fella. I never got a clear look at him. Truth is, I stayed out of his way when I saw him comin’. I don’t think he was ever properly taught how to drive. Other thing is, it’s been years since last I saw it.”

  His expectations deflating, Jergen says, “ ‘Years’?”

  “At least three years. Maybe longer.”

  Although they try to wring additional details out of Norbert Gossage, there is no more to be wrung.

  By now, three small children are clutching Dubose’s pant legs, and the big man is looking like he might start swatting them.

  Time to go.

  21

  Jane recovered the tote and the flashlight and crossed the plank, resisting the urge to look back, as if Hendrickson would stay dead only as long as she remained convinced that she had killed him.

  She made her way to the stairhead and out of that building into the snowy day. Thirty-eight minutes had elapsed since she’d fled Anabel’s lair at the foot of the crooked staircase.

  No doubt the woman, from her winter home in La Jolla, had reported Jane’s whereabouts to those with a burning desire to see her dead. She needed to keep moving, faster than fast, but the storm that had hampered her on the journey north was now her ally. They might be able to marshal a hit team out of Las Vegas, even out of Reno, possibly out of Sacramento. However, the snow was falling harder than ever, and the light breeze had become a stiff wind. The only way they could reach her in a timely manner was by chopper, but the wind and the poor visibility and the certainty of ice forming on the rotary wings, bringing the helo down, would force them to delay.

  By the time she reached her Explorer Sport, she was shaking uncontrollably, not entirely because of the weather, for which she wasn’t adequately dressed. The engine started on the first try. She turned the heat up.

  From the shorter forest-service road to the longer one, to the county road, to Highway 50 South, the word for the world was white. By the time she crossed the state line from Nevada into California, she was able to dial down the heat.

  She stopped for fuel in South Lake Tahoe and considered staying there for the night, because they would not expect her to be in the area come morning. But though road conditions were far from ideal, the plows were working and 50 West was open, and she decided to try for Placerville.

  Since the struggle with Hendrickson, she’d felt pain in her left side, above the hip and below the rib cage. A week earlier in San Francisco, she’d been wounded. Nothing serious, although she’d needed stitches and was sewn up by a friend who was a doctor. She might have pulled a stitch or two, but now wasn’t the time to check.

  She drove.

  What beauty snow usually held for her was absent this storm. There was something of ashes about it this time, as if beyond the limited view that the blizzard allowed, the world was burning and, when the ashfall ended, would be revealed as blackened ruins to every horizon.

  Survival might be a matter of training and intuition, but it was also always a gift for which gratitude was required. Mile after grudging mile, the desolation that shrouded her heart would not relent, would not allow grace to find her.

  At last she resorted to music and turned it loud, so that the monotony of the tire chains could not be heard. Rubinstein at the keyboard, Jascha Heifetz on violin, Gregor Piatigorsky on the cello. Tcha
ikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Minor, op. 50.

  She didn’t know at what point she began to weep as she drove, and she didn’t realize at what point she stopped weeping, but by then the ash had become snow again, and gratitude rose in her and grace settled upon her, and hope.

  22

  Half an hour of daylight remained, but Travis knew he couldn’t wait any longer. Something terrible had happened.

  He wasn’t supposed to go outside, but the rules weren’t the rules anymore. He had to think for himself.

  He fed the dogs and leashed them and took them out to potty. They were good dogs, and they didn’t run off when he dropped the leashes to pick up their poop in blue bags. He twisted the necks of the bags and knotted them and set them on the porch.

  He took the leashes in hand again and walked with the dogs to the falling-down barn that wasn’t really falling down, though it sure looked a mess.

  He stood in front of the door Uncle Gavin had stood in front of earlier in the day, when everything seemed like it was going to be all right.

  He didn’t try the door or knock. Uncle Gavin had said there were cameras and Cousin Cornell would know when anyone was waiting there.

  Maybe Cousin Cornell was sleeping or maybe he took a while to make up his mind what to do, but after a long time, there came a buzz and a clunk, and the door swung open.

  Travis stepped into a little room, bringing the dogs with him. The door behind him closed all by itself.

  The door in front of him didn’t open right away. The dogs fidgeted, but Travis didn’t.

  He looked up at the camera, and after a while, he thought he ought to explain, so he said, “Something very bad has happened.”

  Another minute or two passed, and then the inner door opened.

  He went into a big room full of books and comfortable chairs and lamps, with many pools of light and pools of shadow.

  Duke and Queenie were so excited by this new place that they pulled their leashes out of Travis’s hands and scampered off this way and that, sniffing everything.

  A man stood by an armchair, in lamplight. He was very tall and not as black as Uncle Gavin. Tall and thin like a scarecrow on stilts or something.

  The man said, “Those are big dogs. Don’t let those big dogs kill me, please and thank you.”

  23

  With daylight fast fading, Jergen and Dubose are still touring Borrego Valley in search of they know not what. Or at least Carter Jergen knows not. His partner, apparently now gripped by the delusion that he is clairvoyant, cruises slowly, waving impatient drivers past him, squint-eyed behind his sunglasses, surveying the inhospitable landscape as if Travis Hawk might be traversing it in full camouflage, regarding every structure as though he suspects that a five-year-old fugitive is holed up there with a cache of weapons and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.

  “We can’t be looking for the peculiar-green Honda, because that’s back in town, at the market.”

  Dubose says nothing.

  “And whoever drove it years ago must be driving something else now, but we don’t know what.”

  Dubose cruises in silence.

  “What we should be doing,” Jergen says, “is digging deep into the Washingtons’ background, see if we can find any link between them and anyone in this godforsaken desert.”

  Dubose deigns to speak. “We’ll start doing that after dark, when there isn’t any more light to search by.”

  “All right, but what exactly are we searching for?”

  Dubose keeps his strategy to himself.

  He slows as they approach a small, faded-blue stucco house with a white metal roof shaded by unkempt palms.

  24

  While Travis reported how Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie changed the way they looked and went into town and didn’t come back, the big strange man never stopped moving as he listened. He went to a chair and started to sit down, but then didn’t, and he chose another chair that he almost also sat in, but again he stood up before his butt met the cushion.

  Moving, moving, moving this way and that, here and there, he also kept rubbing his ginormous hands together like he was washing them under running water. When he wasn’t doing that, he covered his face with his hands as if there must be something he didn’t want to see and had forgotten he could just close his eyes. He kept moving with his hands over his face, not able to see where he was going, and almost fell over a chair. He walked into a table, rattling the lamp on it.

  There wasn’t much to Travis’s story, but the big strange man, who was Mr. Cornell Jasperson, asked him to repeat some details again and again, as if they might change a little each time until, after a while, the whole story would be different and Gavin and Jessie would have come back hours ago and there would be nothing to worry about after all.

  When Mr. Jasperson finally stopped asking to hear this and that bit yet again, he stood in silence, his hands over his face, but now looking at Travis between the spread fingers. After a silence, he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Travis said. “Except I better tell my mother.”

  That was when he realized he hadn’t brought the disposable phone with him, to which the number of his mother’s disposable cell was taped. “I have to go back to the house.”

  25

  The driveway to the little blue house is unpaved and bristling with weeds. The yard immediately around the house is pea gravel. Behind the house stands an unpainted barn with each wall askew the other, a shaky assemblage of dry rot and rust and tar paper, likely to collapse if a cow farts.

  “Reminds me of home in West Virginia,” Dubose says.

  Carter can’t help tweaking him. “You lived in a barn?”

  “We had a house maybe a little nicer than this one. But our barn was worse.”

  “How could it be worse?” Jergen marveled.

  “It took some effort, but it looked like such a ratty place you’d dare go in only if you wanted your family to collect on your life insurance. Nobody official ever did go in when my granddad and my daddy distilled whiskey and packaged it there, and not later when my brother Carney put in all the lamps and planted a crop of weed.”

  “Your grandfather and father were bootleggers?”

  “That isn’t a word they would have used.”

  “And your brother is a pot dealer?”

  “He farms it a little, but he’s too much of a user to be a seller. Anyway, Carney is a world-class asshole. He’s dead to me.”

  Jergen considered that last sentence. “When you say ‘dead to me,’ do you mean…?”

  “No, I didn’t kill him. Though there’s times when I wish I had. Anyway, even with Carney, life was good back then.”

  “Well,” Jergen commiserates, “we all feel that way about one relative or another.”

  His nostalgic reverie drawing to an end, Dubose takes his foot off the brake and the VelociRaptor drifts forward. “They left the boy somewhere in the valley when they went to the market. He’s still here. His mother will know where, and she’ll sooner or later come for him.”

  26

  “Don’t leave me alone with these big, scary dogs,” Mr. Jasperson said, “please and thank you.”

  “They won’t hurt you,” Travis promised. “I’ll just run over to the house and get the phone and be right back.”

  “Oh, my. Oh, goodness.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  Duke and Queenie were lying against each other, a puddle of dog fur, about as threatening as a rug.

  “I’ll be fast,” Travis promised.

  He went into the vestibule, and the door closed behind him, and he opened the outer door.

  Out on the road, a monster pickup truck was moving slowly past, rolling on six big tires, glossy black and as cool as anything from a Star Wars movie.

  2
7

  “…Still here. His mother will know where, and she’ll sooner or later come for him,” Dubose says, and he accelerates.

  “We’ll set a hundred traps for her,” Jergen says.

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet serious money that she can’t walk right through the hundred. While we’re waiting for her, we have to be finding the boy.”

  “You think she’ll surrender if she knows we have him? I mean, she’s got to figure we’ll inject her and him if we don’t just kill them both.”

  “After a lot of serious contemplation regarding the mother-child bond,” Dubose says, as though he is a heavy-thinking backwoods philosopher, “the way I see it, if she doesn’t surrender within six hours after she knows we have the kid, then we just kill the little bastard. Because that’ll as good as kill the bitch herself. She’ll be done after that. She won’t have any game in her anymore. She might even kill herself and save us the trouble.”

  As night descends, they cruise a few miles in mutual silence, during which Jergen contemplates the unmitigated ruthlessness of his partner, which he cannot help but admire. “I think you’re right about the kid. But I wouldn’t give her six hours. Maybe two.”

  28

  In the days of the gold rush, Placerville, which lay on the eastern flank of the Mother Lode, went by the name Old Dry Diggins. It was a place of such lawlessness that to keep order, authorities started hanging lawbreakers two at a time, after which the settlement became known as Hangtown. Placerville was less colorful these days, and quiet.