by Dean Koontz
Instead, he lived inland, behind the hills and beyond the sight of the sea, in one of the rustic canyons that appealed not only to those who kept horses and loved the simple life but also to troubled cranks and crackpots, weedheads with names like Boomer and Moose who farmed marijuana under lamps in barns and bunkers, ecoterrorists scheming to blow up auto dealerships in the name of endangered tree rats, and religious cultists worshiping UFOs.
A ranch fence badly in need of paint surrounded Trotter’s four acres. He usually kept the gate shut to discourage visitors.
Today the gate hung wide open because he feared that Corky—known to him as Robin Goodfellow, kick-ass federal agent—would drive through that barrier, battering it off its hinges, as he’d done once before.
At the end of the graveled driveway stood the hacienda-style house of pale yellow stucco and exposed timbers. Not dilapidated enough to be called ramshackle, not nearly dirty enough to be called squalid, the place suffered instead from a sort of genteel neglect.
Trotter didn’t spend much money maintaining his home because he expected to have to flee at any moment. A man with his head in the lunette of a guillotine lived with no more tension than what Jack Trotter daily endured.
A conspiracy theorist, he believed that a secret cabal ran the nation, that it intended soon to dispense with democracy and impose brutal dictatorial control. He was ever alert for early signs of the coming crackdown.
Currently Trotter believed that post-office employees would be the vanguard of the repression. They were, in his estimation, not the mere bureaucrats they appeared to be, but highly trained shock troops masquerading as innocent letter carriers.
He had prepared a series of bolt-holes, each more remote than the one before it. He hoped to escape civilization by degrees when the bloodbath began.
No doubt he would have fled after Corky’s first visit had he not believed that Corky, as Robin Goodfellow, knew the location of every one of his bolt-holes and would descend on him in his hideaway with a company of cutthroat mailmen who would show no mercy.
Toward the east end of the property, away from the house, stood an ancient unpainted barn and a prefab steel building of more recent construction. Corky knew only some of what Trotter was up to in those structures, but he pretended to have full knowledge.
In the fierce heat of summer, the real threat to Trotter would be fire, not a wicked government cabal. The steep slopes behind his property, as well as half the narrow valley both up-canyon and down-canyon, bristled with wild brush that, by late August, would be as ready for burning as Brittina Dowd’s house had proved to be with the application of a little gasoline.
Now, of course, the steep slopes were so supersaturated with rain that the risk was a mud slide. In this terrain, a canyon wall could descend in a tidal wave of muck with such suddenness that even a wild-eyed paranoid with every nerve fully cocked might not be able to outrun it. If he broke into a sprint at first rumble, Trotter could still wind up buried alive, but alive only briefly, sharing his grave with an ark’s worth of crushed and smothered wildlife.
Corky loved southern California.
Not yet crushed and smothered, Trotter waited for his visitor on the veranda. If at all possible, he hoped to keep Corky out of the house.
On one of his previous visits, deeply into his role as a rogue government agent who used the United States Constitution as toilet paper, Corky had misbehaved. He had shown no respect for Trotter’s property rights. He had been a brute.
On this twenty-second day of December, Corky didn’t find himself to be mellowed out by holiday good will. He was a punk-mean elf.
Although he parked ten steps from the veranda, he didn’t hurry through the downpour because Robin Goodfellow, too cool for jackboots but wearing them in spirit, was not a man who noticed the weather when he was in a foul mood.
He climbed the three steps to the veranda, drew the Glock from his shoulder holster, and pressed the muzzle to Trotter’s forehead.
“Repeat what you told me on the phone.”
“Damn,” Trotter said nervously. “You know it’s true.”
“It’s bullshit,” Corky said.
Trotter’s hair was as orange as that of the Cheshire Cat who had toyed with Alice in Wonderland. He had the pinned-wide, protuberant eyes of the Mad Hatter. His nose twitched nervously, reminiscent of the White Rabbit. His bloated face and his huge mustache recalled the famous Walrus, and he was in general as brillig, slithy, and mimsy as numerous of Lewis Carroll’s characters rolled into one.
“For God’s sake, Goodfellow,” Trotter all but blubbered, “the storm, the storm! We can’t do the job in this. It’s impossible in weather like this.”
Still pressing the Glock to Trotter’s forehead, Corky said, “The storm will break by six o’clock. The wind will die completely. We’ll have ideal conditions.”
“Yeah, they’re saying it might break, but what do they know? Do any of their predictions ever turn out right?”
“I’m not relying on the TV weathermen, you cretin. I’m relying on supersecret Defense Department satellites that not only study the planet’s weather patterns but control them with microwave energy pulses. We will make the storm end when we need it to end.”
This crackpot assertion played well with the paranoid Trotter, whose pinned-wide eyes stretched even wider. “Weather control,” he whispered shakily. “Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts—an untraceable weapon as terrible as nuclear bombs.”
In reality, Corky was counting on nothing more than chaos to be his ally, to bring the storm to an end when he needed calm skies.
Chaos never failed him.
“Rain or no rain, wind or no wind,” he told Trotter, “you will be in Bel Air, at the rendezvous point, at seven o’clock sharp, as originally planned.”
“Weather control,” Trotter muttered darkly.
“Don’t even think about not coming. Do you know how many eyes are on us right now—up in those hills, out in those fields?”
“Lots of eyes,” Trotter guessed.
“My people are everywhere in this canyon, ready to keep you honest or blow your brains out, whichever you want.”
In fact, the only eyes on them were those of the crows, hawks, sparrows, and other members of the feathered community gathered in the ancient California live oaks that sheltered the house.
Jack Trotter had fallen for these lies not because of the phony NSA credentials, not because of Corky’s bravura performance as Agent Robin Goodfellow, but because Corky had known so much about Trotter’s many aliases and at least a few things about his thus far successful career as a bank robber and a distributor of Ecstasy. He believed that Corky had learned about him by means of the ruling cabal’s all but omniscient intelligence-gathering apparatus.
What Corky had learned about Trotter, however, he had heard from Mick Sachatone, the hacker and multimillionaire anarchist who traded in forged documents, untraceable cell phones, and other illegal paperwork, objects, substances, and information. Mick had provided Trotter with the identities that subsequently he revealed to Corky.
Ordinarily, Mick would never disclose to one client the affairs of another. Considering the kind of people he did business with, such a lack of discretion would result, if he were lucky, in his death or, if he were unlucky, in the excision of his eyes, the extraction of his tongue, the severing of his thumbs, and castration with pliers.
Because Mick had reason to hate Trotter with an intensity nearly homicidal, he had risked sharing information with Corky. Jealous rage of operatic proportions had caused him to violate his usual standards of client confidentiality.
For his part, Trotter had earned Mick’s enmity, though he seemed unaware of it. He had stolen Mick’s girlfriend.
Mick’s girlfriend had been a porn-movie star renowned in certain jerky circles for the inhuman flexibility of her body.
Perhaps Trotter didn’t think that anyone could become profoundly emotionally attached, on evenings and week
ends, to a woman who did two, six, and even ten men at a time in front of a camera, during her regular business hours.
Since the age of thirteen, however, Mick’s most cherished dream had been to have a porn star for a girlfriend. He felt that Trotter had robbed him of his heart’s one true desire and had thwarted his destiny.
After four months with Trotter, the woman had disappeared. Mick was of the opinion that, having tired of her, Trotter had killed her either because she had learned too much about his illegal activities or merely for sport, and had buried her deep in the canyon.
Now she was of no use to anyone, and this pointless waste of her exceptional flexibility further infuriated Mick.
Lowering the Glock from Trotter’s forehead, Corky said, “Let’s go inside.”
“Please, let’s not,” Trotter pleaded.
“Need I remind you,” Corky said, lying with delightful panache, “that your cooperation with me could earn you erasure from all public records, from all tax records, making you the freest man who ever lived, a man utterly unknown to the government?”
“I’ll be there tonight. Seven o’clock sharp. Wind or no wind. I swear I will.”
“I still want to go inside,” Corky said. “I still feel the need to make my point with you.”
A sadness came into Trotter’s Mad Hatter eyes. His walruslike face drooped.
Resigned, he led Corky into the house.
The bullet holes in the walls, from the previous occasion when Corky had needed to teach Trotter a lesson, had not been repaired; however, the living-room display shelves had been filled with a new collection of Lladro porcelains—statuettes of ballerinas, princesses dancing with princes, children capering with a dog, a lovely farm maiden feeding a flock of geese gathered at her feet….
That a paranoid, conspiracy-drunk, bank-robbing, drug-peddling survivalist with bolt-holes leading from here to the Canadian border should have a weak spot for fragile porcelains didn’t surprise Corky. Regardless of how rough we may appear on the exterior, each of us has a human heart.
Corky himself had a weakness for old Shirley Temple movies, in which he indulged once or twice a year. Without embarrassment.
As Trotter watched, Corky emptied the 9-mm magazine, shattering one porcelain with every shot.
In the months since he had unintentionally wounded Mina Reynerd in the foot, he had become remarkably proficient with handguns. Until recently, he’d never much wanted to use a firearm in the service of chaos, for it had seemed too cold, too impersonal. But he was warming to the instrument.
He replaced the first magazine with a second and finished off the Lladro collection. The humid air was full of a chalky dust and the smell of gunfire.
“Seven o’clock,” he said.
“I’ll be there,” said the chastened Trotter.
“Gonna take a magic carpet ride.”
After replacing the second magazine with a third, Corky slipped the Glock into his shoulder holster and walked out to the veranda.
He proceeded slowly through the rain to the Land Rover, boldly turning his back to the house.
He drove down out of the Malibu canyons toward the coast.
The sky was an open beaker, pouring forth not rain but the universal solvent for which medieval alchemists had sought in vain. All around him, the hills were melting. The lowlands were dissolving. The edge of the continent deliquesced into the tumultuous sea.
CHAPTER 64
FRIC IN THE ROSE ROOM, IN A CHAIR BY THE WINDOWS, looked out at his mother’s love-affirming gift of high-piled bronze road apples.
The picnic hamper stood on the floor beside his chair, the lid closed.
Although he would spend time here to support the story that he had stupidly spewed out to Mr. Devonshire, he would not actually pretend to eat nonexistent ham sandwiches, partly because if someone saw him, they would for sure think Like mother, like son, but largely because he didn’t have any nonexistent dill pickles to go with them.
Ha, ha, ha.
At the time of the incident, almost two years ago, his mother’s publicist explained to the weasels in the scandal-hungry press that Freddie Nielander had been admitted to a private hospital somewhere in Florida. She was said to be suffering from exhaustion.
With surprising frequency, supermodels were hospitalized for that reason. Apparently, being wildly glamorous twenty-four hours a day could be as physically demanding as the work of a plowhorse and as emotionally draining as tending to the terminally ill.
Nominal Mom had done one Vanity Fair cover too many, one Vogue spread more than had been wise, leading to the temporary but complete loss of muscle control throughout her body. That seemed to be the official story, as far as Fric could understand it.
No one believed the official story. Newspapers, magazines, and the gossipy reporters on the TV entertainment-news shows spoke darkly of a “breakdown,” an “emotional collapse.” Some actually called it a “psychotic episode,” which sounded like an installment of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and Ethel mowed down a bunch of people with submachine guns. They referred to her hospital as a “sanitarium for the richest of the rich” and as an “exclusive psychiatric clinic,” and Howard Stern, the shock jock on radio, reportedly called it a “booby hatch for a broad who’s got more boobies than brains.”
Fric had pretended not to know what the media were saying about his mother, but secretly he had read and listened to every scrap of coverage that he could find. He’d been frightened. He’d felt useless. Reporters disagreed over which of two institutions she might be in, and Fric didn’t have an address for either of them. He couldn’t even send her a card.
Eventually, his father had taken him aside in the rose garden, which had already been moved away from the house, to ask if Fric had heard any strange news stories about his mother. Fric had pretended to be clueless.
His father had said, “Well, sooner or later, you’ll hear things, and I want you to know none of it’s true. It’s the usual celebrity-bashing crapola. They’ll say your mom had some nervous breakdown or something, but she didn’t. The truth isn’t pretty, but it’s not half as ugly as you’ll hear, so Ming and Dr. Rudy are going to share with you some techniques for keeping your mind at peace through all this.”
Dr. Rudy was Rudolph Kroog, a psychiatrist famous in Hollywood circles for his unconventional past-life therapy. He talked to Fric for a little while, trying to determine if in a previous incarnation he might have been a boy king in Egypt during the centuries it was ruled by pharaohs, and provided a bottle of capsules with directions to take one at lunch and one at bedtime.
Remembering that boy kings had sometimes been poisoned by their advisers, which he’d learned on Saturday-morning cartoon shows, Fric had carried the capsules directly to his third-floor suite, where he flushed them down the drain. If a green, scaly monster had lived in his toilet, he killed it with an overdose that day.
As easy as Dr. Rudy had been to endure, Ming was hard. After two days of “sharing,” Fric preferred to be consigned to the mercy of Mr. Hachette, the brain-diseased chef, even if he would be roasted with apples and fed to unsuspecting Bowery bums on Thanksgiving.
Eventually, everyone had left him alone.
He still didn’t know whether it had been a hospital, sanitarium, or booby hatch.
His mother had been to Palazzo Rospo only once since then, but she hadn’t mentioned the incident. That was the visit in which she told Fric that he was an almost perfect invisible little mouse.
Then they had gone riding on a pair of great black stallions, and Fric had been exuberant, self-assured, athletic like his father, and a superb rider.
Ha, ha, ha.
Sitting here in the rose room, gazing through the windows, he had gotten so lost in the past that he hadn’t noticed when Mr. Yorn, the groundskeeper, had entered the picture. Wearing green rain togs and black wading boots, Mr. Yorn must have been checking the lawn drains or investigating a clogged downspout. Now he stared through the rose-room wi
ndows at Fric, from a distance of six feet, looking puzzled, perhaps worried.
Maybe Mr. Yorn had waved and Fric, lost in the past, had not waved back, and so Mr. Yorn had waved again, and still Fric had not waved back; and now maybe Mr. Yorn thought Fric was in a trance.
To prove that he was neither a rude little snot nor hypnotized, Fric waved, which seemed to be the right thing to do, whether Mr. Yorn had been standing there unacknowledged for ten seconds or five minutes.
Fric waved a little too vigorously, which might have been what caused the groundskeeper to step closer to the windows and say, “Are you all right, Fric?”
“Yes, sir. I’m fine. I’m just having some ham sandwiches.”
Apparently the leaded glass panes and the roar of the rain filtered some of the sense out of Fric’s voice, for Mr. Yorn edged closer still and spoke again: “What did you say?”
“Ham sandwiches!” Fric explained, raising his voice almost to a shout.
For a moment Mr. Yorn continued to peer in at him, as though studying a curious bug trapped in a specimen jar. Then he shook his head, causing the brim of his rain hat to flap comically, and he turned away.
Fric watched the groundskeeper walk past the bronze bowel movement. Mr. Yorn receded into the storm, dwindling across the immense lawn until he appeared to be no bigger than a garden gnome, until he was finally gone like a ghost.
Fric figured he knew exactly what Mr. Yorn was thinking: Like mother, like son.
Rising from the chair, stretching, shaking stiffness out of his legs, Fric accidentally kicked the picnic hamper, knocking it over.
The lid fell open, revealing something inside: a whiteness.
The hamper had been empty. No quake lights, no ham sandwiches, no anything.
Fric scoped the parlor. He saw no place in which an unsuspected companion might be hiding. The door to the hall remained closed, as he had left it.
Hesitantly, he stooped. Cautiously, he reached into the hamper.
He withdrew a folded newspaper and shakily opened it. The Los Angeles Times.
