by Dean Koontz
technology in start-up companies and then acquiring them—or backing entrepreneurs who need cash to develop their ideas. Generally medically related technology but not always. Their top executives are infamous self-aggrandizers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.”
Confused, Joe said, “He Who Must Be Obeyed?”
“As do we all, as do we all,” said Shavers, smiling and nodding, raising his pipe to bite the stem.
Colway’s phone stopped ringing. The silence made Joe more nervous than the insistent trilling tone had done.
They knew where he was.
“Got to go,” he said, walking away as Shavers began to tell him about the advantages of owning Teknologik corporate bonds.
He proceeded directly to the nearest men’s room. Fortunately, no one else was in the lavatory, no old acquaintances to delay him.
In one of the stalls, Joe tore Rose’s message into small pieces. He flushed it down the toilet, as Demi had requested, waiting to confirm that every scrap vanished, flushing a second time to be sure that nothing was caught in the drain.
Medsped. Teknologik. Corporations conducting what appeared to be a police operation. Their long reach, from Los Angeles to Manassas, and their unnerving omniscience, argued that these were corporations with powerful connections beyond the business world, perhaps to the military.
Nevertheless, regardless of the stakes, it made no sense for a corporation to protect its interests with hit men brazen enough to shoot at people in public places—or anywhere else, for that matter. Regardless of how profitable Teknologik might be, big black numbers at the bottom of the balance sheet did not exempt corporate officers and executives from the law, not even here in Los Angeles, where the lack of money was known to be the root of all evil.
Considering the impunity with which they seemed to think they could use guns, the men whom he had encountered must be military personnel or federal agents. Joe had too little information to allow him even to conjecture what role Medsped and Teknologik played in the operation.
All the way along the third-floor hall to the elevators, he expected someone to call his name and order him to stop. Perhaps one of the men in Hawaiian shirts. Or Wallace Blick. Or a police officer.
If the people seeking Rose Tucker were federal agents, they would be able to obtain help from local police. For the time being, Joe would have to regard every man in uniform as a potential enemy.
As the elevator doors opened, he tensed, half expecting to be apprehended here in the alcove. The cab was empty.
On the way down to the first floor, he waited for the power to be cut off. When the doors opened on the lower alcove, he was surprised to find it deserted.
In all his life, he had never previously been in the grip of paranoia such as this. He was overreacting to the events of the early afternoon and to what he had learned since arriving at the offices of the Post.
He wondered if his exaggerated reactions—spells of extreme rage, spiraling fear—were a response to the past year of emotional deprivation. He had allowed himself to feel nothing whatsoever but grief, self-pity, and the terrible hollowness of incomprehensible loss. In fact, he’d striven hard not to feel even that much. He had tried to shed his pain, to rise from the ashes like a drab phoenix with no hope except the cold peace of indifference. Now that events forced him to open himself to the world again, he was swamped by emotion as a novice surfer was overwhelmed by each cresting wave.
In the reception lounge, as Joe entered, Dewey Beemis was on the telephone. He was listening so intently that his usually smooth dark face was furrowed. He murmured, “Yes, uh-huh, uh-huh, yes.”
Heading toward the outer door, Joe waved good-bye.
Dewey said, “Joe, wait, wait a second.”
Joe stopped and turned.
Though Dewey was listening to the caller again, his eyes were on Joe.
To indicate that he was in a hurry, Joe tapped one finger against his wristwatch.
“Hold on,” Dewey said into the phone, and then to Joe, he said, “There’s a man here calling about you.”
Joe shook his head adamantly.
“Wants to talk to you,” Dewey said.
Joe started toward the door again.
“Wait, Joe, man says he’s FBI.”
At the door, Joe hesitated and looked back at Dewey. The FBI couldn’t be associated with the men in the Hawaiian shirts, not with men who shot at innocent people without bothering to ask questions, not with men like Wallace Buck. Could they? Wasn’t he letting his fear run away with him again, succumbing to paranoia? He might get answers and protection from the FBI.
Of course, the man on the phone could be lying. He might not be with the Bureau. Possibly he was hoping to delay Joe until Blick and his friends—or others aligned with them—could get here.
With a shake of his head, Joe turned away from Dewey. He pushed through the door and into the August heat.
Behind him, Dewey said, “Joe?”
Joe walked toward his car. He resisted the urge to break into a run.
At the far end of the parking lot, by the open gate, the young attendant with the shaved head and the gold nose ring was watching. In this city where sometimes money mattered more than fidelity or honor or merit, style mattered more than money; fashions came and went even more frequently than principles and convictions, leaving only the unchanging signal colors of youth gangs as a sartorial tradition. This kid’s look, punk-grunge-neopunk-whatever, was already as dated as spats, making him look less threatening than he thought and more pathetic than he would ever be able to comprehend. Yet under these circumstances, his interest in Joe seemed ominous.
Even at low volume, the hard beat of rap music thumped through the blistering air.
The interior of the Honda was hot but not intolerable. The side window, shattered by a bullet at the cemetery, provided just enough ventilation to prevent suffocation.
The attendant had probably noticed the broken-out window when Joe had driven in. Maybe he’d been thinking about it.
What does it matter if he has been thinking? It’s only a broken window.
He was certain the engine wouldn’t start, but it did.
As Joe backed out of the parking slot, Dewey Beemis opened the reception-lounge door and stepped outside onto the small concrete stoop under the awning that bore the logo of the Post. The big man looked not alarmed but puzzled.
Dewey wouldn’t try to stop him. They were friends, after all, or had once been friends, and the man on the phone was just a voice.
Joe shifted the Honda into Drive.
Coming down the steps, Dewey shouted something. He didn’t sound alarmed. He sounded confused, concerned.
Ignoring him nonetheless, Joe drove toward the exit.
Under the dirty Cinzano umbrella, the attendant rose from the folding chair. He was only two steps from the rolling gate that would close off the lot.
Atop the chain-link fence, the coils of razor wire flared with silver reflections of late-afternoon sunlight.
Joe glanced at the rearview mirror. Back there, Dewey was standing with his hands on his hips.
As Joe went past the Cinzano umbrella, the attendant didn’t even come forth out of the shade. Watching with heavy-lidded eyes, as expressionless as an iguana, he wiped sweat off his brow with one hand, black fingernails glistening.
Through the open gate and turning right into the street, Joe was driving too fast. The tires squealed and sucked wetly at the sun-softened blacktop, but he didn’t slow down.
He went west on Strathern Street and heard sirens by the time that he turned south on Lankershim Boulevard. Sirens were part of the music of the city, day and night; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him.
Nevertheless, all the way to the Ventura Freeway, under it, and then west on Moorpark, he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror for pursuing vehicles, either marked or unmarked.
On the other hand, in spite of being on the run for her life, Rose apparently hadn’t sought protection from the cops, perhaps because there was no protection to be had. My life depends on your discretion.
He had been a crime reporter long enough to have seen more than a few cases in which the victim had been targeted not because of anything he had done, not because of money or other possessions that his assailant desired, but merely because of what he had known. A man with too much knowledge could be more dangerous than a man with a gun.
What knowledge Joe had about Flight 353 seemed, however, to be pathetically inadequate. If he was a target merely because he knew that Rose Tucker existed and that she claimed to have survived the crash, then the secrets she possessed must be so explosive that the power of them could be measured only in megatonnage.
As he drove west toward Studio City, he thought of the red letters emblazoned on the black T-shirt worn by the attendant at the Post parking lot: FEAR NADA. “Fear nothing” was a philosophy Joe could never embrace. He feared so much.
More than anything, he was tormented by the possibility that the crash had not been an accident, that Michelle and Chrissie and Nina died not at the whim of fate but by the hand of man. Although the National Transportation Safety Board hadn’t been able to settle on a probable cause, hydraulic control systems failure complicated by human error was one possible scenario—and one with which he had been able to live because it was so impersonal, as mechanical and cold as the universe itself. He would find it intolerable, however, if they had perished from a cowardly act of terrorism or because of some more personal crime, their lives sacrificed to human greed or envy or hatred.
He feared what such a discovery would do to him. He feared what he might become, his potential for savagery, the hideous ease with which he might embrace vengeance and call it justice.
7
In the current atmosphere of fierce competitiveness that marked their industry, California bankers were keeping their offices open on Saturdays, some as late as five o’clock. Joe arrived at the Studio City branch of his bank twenty minutes before the doors closed.
When he sold the house here, he had not bothered to switch his account to a branch nearer his one-room apartment in Laurel Canyon. Convenience wasn’t a consideration when time no longer mattered.
He went to a window where a woman named Heather was tending to paperwork as she waited for last-minute business. She had worked at this bank since Joe had first opened an account a decade ago.
“I need to make a cash withdrawal,” he said, after the requisite small talk, “but I don’t have my checkbook with me.”
“That’s no problem,” she assured him.
It became a small problem, however, when Joe asked for twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Heather went to the other end of the bank and huddled in conversation with the head teller, who then consulted the assistant manager. This was a young man no less handsome than the current hottest movie hero; perhaps he was one of the legion of would-be stars who labored in the real world to survive while waiting for the fantasy of fame. They glanced at Joe as if his identity was now in doubt.
Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets.
Heather returned with a guarded expression and the news that they were happy to accommodate him, though there were, of course, procedures that must be followed.
At the other end of the bank, the assistant manager was talking on his phone, and Joe suspected that he himself was the subject of the conversation. He knew he was letting his paranoia get the better of him again, but his mouth went dry, and his heartbeat increased.
The money was his. He needed it.
That Heather had known Joe for years—in fact, attended the same Lutheran church where Michelle had taken Chrissie and Nina to Sunday school and services—did not obviate her need to see his driver’s license. The days of common trust and common sense were so far in America’s past that they seemed not merely to be ancient history but to be part of the history of another country altogether.
He remained patient. Everything he owned was on deposit here, including nearly sixty thousand dollars in equity from the sale of the house, so he could not be denied the money, which he would need for living expenses. With the same people seeking him who were searching for Rose Tucker, he could not go back to the apartment and would have to live out of motels for the duration.
The assistant manager had concluded his call. He was staring at a note pad on his desk, tapping it with a pencil.
Joe had considered using his few credit cards to pay for things, supplemented by small sums withdrawn as needed from automated teller machines. But authorities could track a suspect through credit-card use and ATM activity—and be ever on his heels. They could even have his plastic seized by any merchant at the point of purchase.
A phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. He snatched it up, glanced at Joe, and turned away in his swivel chair, as if he worried that his lips might be read.
After procedures were followed and everyone was satisfied that Joe was neither his own evil twin nor a bold impersonator in a clever rubber mask, the assistant manager, his phone conversation concluded, slowly gathered the hundred-dollar bills from other tellers’ drawers and from the vault. He brought the required sum to Heather and, with a fixed and uneasy smile, watched as she counted it for Joe.
Perhaps it was imagination, but Joe felt they disapproved of his carrying so much money, not because it put him in danger but because these days people who dealt in cash were stigmatized. The government required banks to report cash transactions of five thousand dollars or more, ostensibly to hamper attempts by drug lords to launder funds through legitimate financial institutions. In reality, no drug lord was ever inconvenienced by this law, but the financial activities of average citizens were now more easily monitored.
Throughout history, cash or the equivalent—diamonds, gold coins—had been the best guarantor of freedom and mobility. Cash meant the same things to Joe and nothing more. Yet from Heather and her bosses, he continued to endure a surreptitious scrutiny that seemed to be based on the assumption that he was engaged in some criminal enterprise or, at best, was on his way for a few days of unspeakable debauchery in Las Vegas.
As Heather put the twenty thousand in a manila envelope, the phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. Murmuring into the mouthpiece, he continued to find Joe of interest.
By the time Joe left the bank, five minutes past closing time, the last customer to depart, he was weak-kneed with apprehension.
The heat remained oppressive, and the five-o’clock sky was still cloudless and blue, although not the profound blue that it had been earlier. Now it was curiously depthless, a flat blue that reminded him of something he had seen before. The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine—and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.
When he drove out of the bank lot, he saw that the assistant manager was standing beyond the glass doors, all but hidden by the reflected bronze glare of the westering sun. Maybe he was storing away a description of the Honda and memorizing the license-plate number. Or maybe he was just locking the doors.
The metropolis shimmered under the blind blue stare of the dead sky.
Passing a small neighborhood shopping center, from across three lanes of traffic, Joe saw a woman with long auburn hair stepping out of a Ford Explorer. She was parked in front of a convenience store. From the passenger side jumped a little girl with a cap of tousled blond hair. Their faces were hidden from him.
Joe angled recklessly across traffic, nearly colliding with an elderly man in a
gray Mercedes. At the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, he made an illegal U-turn.
He already regretted what he was about to do. But he could no more stop himself than he could hasten the day’s end by commanding the sun to set. He was in the grip of a bizarre compulsion.
Shaken by his lack of self-control, he parked near the woman’s Ford Explorer. He got out of the Honda. His legs were weak.
He stood staring at the convenience store. The woman and the child were in there, but he couldn’t see them for the posters and merchandise displays in the big windows.
He turned away from the store and leaned against the Honda, trying to compose himself.
After the crash in Colorado, Beth McKay had referred him to a group called The Compassionate Friends, a nationwide organization for people who had lost children. Beth was slowly finding her way to acceptance through Compassionate Friends in Virginia, so Joe went to a few meetings of a local chapter, but he soon stopped attending. In that regard, he was like most other men in his situation; bereaved mothers went to the meetings faithfully and found comfort in talking with others whose children had been taken, but nearly all the fathers turned inward and held their pain close. Joe wanted to be one of the few who could find salvation by reaching out, but male biology or psychology—or pure stubbornness or self-pity—kept him aloof, alone.
At least, from The Compassionate Friends, he had discovered that this bizarre compulsion, by which he was now seized, was not unique to him. It was so common they had a name for it: searching behavior.
Everybody who lost a loved one engaged in a degree of searching behavior, although it was more intense for those who lost children. Some grievers suffered it worse than others. Joe had it bad.
Intellectually, he could accept that the dead were gone forever. Emotionally, on a primal level, he remained convinced that he would see them again. At times he expected his wife and daughters to walk through a door or to be on the phone when it rang. Driving, he was occasionally overcome by the certainty that Chrissie and Nina were behind him in the car, and he turned, breathless with excitement, more shocked by the emptiness of the backseat than he would have been to find that the girls were indeed alive again and with him.
Sometimes he saw them on a street. On a playground. In a park. On the beach. They were always at a distance, walking away from him. Sometimes he let them go, but sometimes he was compelled to follow, to see their faces, to say, “Wait for me, wait, I’m coming with you.”
Now he turned away from the Honda. He went to the entrance of the convenience store.
Opening the door, he hesitated. He was torturing himself. The inevitable emotional implosion that would ensue when this woman and child proved not to be Michelle and Nina would be like taking a hammer to his own heart.
The events of the day—the encounter with Rose Tucker at the cemetery, her words to him, the shocking message waiting for him at the Post—had been so extraordinary that he discovered a gut-deep faith in uncanny possibilities that surprised him. If Rose could fall more than four miles, smash unchecked into Colorado rock, and walk away…Unreason overruled facts and logic. A brief, sweet madness stripped off the armor of indifference in which he’d clothed himself with so much struggle and determination, and into his heart surged something like hope.
He went into the store.
The cashier’s counter was to his left. A pretty Korean woman in her thirties was clipping packages of Slim Jim sausages to a wire display rack. She smiled and nodded.
A Korean man, perhaps her husband, was at the cash register. He greeted Joe with a comment about the heat.
Ignoring them, Joe passed the first of four aisles, then the second. He saw the auburn-haired woman and the child at the end of the third aisle.
They were standing at a cooler full of soft drinks, their backs to him. He stood for a moment at the head of the aisle, waiting for them to turn toward him.
The woman was in white ankle-tie sandals, white cotton slacks, and a lime-green blouse. Michelle had owned similar sandals, similar slacks. Not the blouse. Not the blouse, that he could recall.
The little girl, Nina’s age, Nina’s size, was in white sandals like her mother’s, pink shorts, and a white T-shirt. She stood with her head cocked to one side, swinging her slender arms, the way Nina sometimes stood.
Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her?
Joe was halfway down the aisle before he realized that he was on the move.
He heard the little girl say, “Please, root beer, please?”
Then he heard himself say, “Nina,” because Nina’s favorite drink had been root beer. “Nina? Michelle?”
The woman and the child turned to him. They were not Nina and Michelle.
He had known they would not be the woman and the girl whom he had loved. He was operating not on reason but on a demented impulse of the heart. He had known, had known. Yet when he saw they were strangers, he felt as though he had been punched in the chest.
Stupidly, he said, “You…I thought…standing there…”
“Yes?” the woman said, puzzled and wary.
“Don’t…don’t let her go,” he told the mother, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. “Don’t let her go, out of your sight, on her own, they vanish, they’re gone, unless you keep them close.”
Alarm flickered across the woman’s face.
With the innocent honesty of a four-year-old, piping up in a concerned and
