Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  by the toxicological tests.

  What’s wrong with this picture?

  Cool.

  A useless anger rose in Joe. It was not aimed at Blane, who surely was a victim too—though he didn’t initially appear to be one. This was the simmering anger of his childhood and adolescence, undirected and therefore likely to swell like the ever-hotter steam in a boiler with no pressure-release valve.

  He tucked the note pad into his jacket pocket.

  His hands curled into fists. Unclenching them was difficult. He wanted to strike something. Anything. Until he broke it. Until his knuckles split and bled.

  This blind anger always reminded Joe of his father.

  Frank Carpenter had not been an angry person. The opposite. He never raised his voice in other than amusement and surprise and happy exclamation. He was a good man—inexplicably good and oddly optimistic, considering the suffering with which fate saddled him.

  Joe, however, had been perpetually angry for him.

  He could not remember his dad with two legs. Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance. Joe was not yet three years old at the time.

  Frank and Donna, Joe’s mother, had been married with little more than two paychecks and their work clothes. To save money, they carried only liability coverage with their car. The drunk driver had no assets, and they received no compensation from any insurance company for the loss of the limb.

  The leg was amputated halfway between knee and hip. In those days there were no highly effective prostheses. Besides, a false leg with any sort of functioning knee was expensive. Frank became so agile and quick with one leg and a crutch that he joked about entering a marathon.

  Joe had never been ashamed of his father’s difference. He knew his dad not as a one-legged man with a peculiar lurching gait, but as a bedtime storyteller, an indefatigable player of Uncle Wiggly and other games, a patient softball coach.

  The first serious fight he’d gotten into was when he was six, in first grade. A kid named Les Olner had referred to Frank as a “stupid cripple.” Although Olner was a bully and bigger than Joe, his superior size was an insufficient advantage against the savage animal fury with which he was confronted. Joe beat the shit out of him. His intention was to put out Olner’s right eye, so he would know what it was like to live with one of two, but a teacher pulled him off the battered kid before he could half blind him.

  Afterward, he felt no remorse. He still felt none. He was not proud of this. It was just the way he felt.

  Donna knew that her husband’s heart would break a little if he learned his boy had gotten into trouble over him. She devised and enforced Joe’s punishment herself, and together they concealed the incident from Frank.

  That was the beginning of Joe’s secret life of quiet rage and periodic violence. He grew up looking for a fight and usually finding one, but he chose the moment and the venue to ensure that his dad was unlikely to learn of it.

  Frank was a roofer, but there was no scrambling up ladders and hustling from eaves to ridgeline with one leg. He was loath to take disability from the government, but he accepted it for a while, until he found a way to turn a talent for woodworking into an occupation.

  He made jewelry boxes, lamp bases, and other items inlaid with exotic woods in intricate patterns, and he found shops that would carry his creations. For a while he cleared a few dollars more than the disability payments, which he relinquished.

  A seamstress in a combination tailor’s shop and dry cleaner, Donna came home from work every day with hair curled from the steam-press humidity and smelling of benzine and other liquid solvents. To this day, when Joe entered a dry-cleaning establishment, his first breath brought vividly to mind his mother’s hair and her honey-brown eyes, which as a child he’d thought were faded from a darker brown by steam and chemicals.

  Three years after losing the leg, Frank began suffering pain in his knuckles and then his wrists. The diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis.

  A vicious thing, this disease. And in Frank, it progressed with uncommon speed, a fire spreading through him: the spinal joints in his neck, his shoulders, hips, his one remaining knee.

  He shut down his woodworking business. There were government programs providing assistance, though never enough and always with the measure of humiliation that bureaucrats dished out with a hateful—and often unconscious—generosity.

  The Church helped too, and charity from the local parish was more compassionately provided and less humbling to receive. Frank and Donna were Catholics. Joe went to Mass with them faithfully but without faith.

  In two years, already hampered by the loss of one leg, Frank was in a wheelchair.

  Medical knowledge has advanced dramatically in thirty years, but in those days, treatments were less effective than they are now—especially in cases as severe as Frank’s. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, injections of gold salts, and then much later penicillamine. Still the osteoporosis progressed. More cartilage and tendon tissue were lost from the chronic inflammation. Muscles continued to atrophy. Joints ached and swelled. The immunosuppressant corticosteroids available at the time somewhat slowed but did not halt the deformation of joints, the frightening loss of function.

  By the time Joe was thirteen, his daily routine included helping his dad dress and bathe when his mother was at work. From the first, he never resented any tasks that fell to him; to his surprise, he found within himself a tenderness that was a counterweight to the omnipresent anger that he directed at God but that he inadequately relieved on those unlucky boys with whom he periodically picked fights. For a long time Frank was mortified to have to rely on his son for such private matters, but eventually the shared challenge of bathing, grooming, and toilet brought them closer, deepened their feelings for each other.

  By the time Joe was sixteen, Frank was suffering with fibrousankylosis. Huge rheumatoid nodules had formed at several joints, including one the size of a golf ball on his right wrist. His left elbow was deformed by a nodule almost as large as the softball that he had thrown so many hundreds of times in backyard practices when Joe had been six years old and getting into Little League.

  His dad lived now for Joe’s achievements, so Joe was an honor student in spite of a part-time job at McDonald’s. He was a star quarterback on the high-school football team. Frank never put any pressure on him to excel. Love motivated Joe.

  In the summer of that year, he joined the YMCA Youth Athletics Program: the boxing league. He was quick to learn, and the coach liked him, said he had talent. But in his first two practice matches, he continued hammering punches into opponents after they were sagging on the ropes, beaten and defenseless. He’d had to be pulled off. To them, boxing was recreation and self-defense, but to Joe it was savage therapy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not any specific individual, but he did hurt people; consequently, he was not permitted to compete in the league.

  Frank’s chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure. Frank died two days before Joe’s eighteenth birthday.

  The week following the funeral Mass, Joe visited the church after midnight, when it was deserted. He’d had too many beers. He sprayed black paint on all the stations of the cross. He overturned a cast-stone statue of Our Lady and smashed a score of the ruby-red glasses from the votive-candle rack.

  He might have done considerably more damage if he had not quickly been overcome by a sense of futility. He could not teach remorse to God. He could not express his pain with sufficient power to penetrate the steel veil between this world and the next—if there was a next.

  Slumping in the front pew, he wept.

  He sat there less than a minute, however, because suddenly he felt that weeping in the church might seem to be an admission of his powerlessness. Ludicrously, he thought it important that his tears not be misconstrued as an acceptance of
the cruelty with which the universe was ruled.

  He left the church and was never apprehended for the vandalism. He felt no guilt about what he’d done—and, again, no pride.

  For a while he was crazy, and then he went to college, where he fit in because half of the student body was crazy too, with youth, and the faculty with tenure.

  His mother died just three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Lung cancer, spreading to the lymphatic system. She had never been a smoker. Neither had his father. Maybe it was the fumes of the benzine and other solvents in the dry cleaner’s shop. Maybe it was weariness, loneliness, and a way out.

  The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation. There was a big band with eighteen fine musicians, playing genuine dance music, not just shake-in-place rock-’n’-roll. She and Frank were self-taught in the fox-trot, swing, and the cha-cha, but they weren’t bad. They knew each other’s moves. How they laughed. There were balloons, oh, hundreds of balloons, suspended in a net from the ceiling. The centerpiece on each table was a white plastic swan holding a fat candle surrounded by red chrysanthemums. Dessert was ice cream in a sugar swan. It was a night of swans. The balloons were red and white, hundreds of them. Holding her close in a slow dance, he whispered in her ear that she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and oh, how he loved her. A revolving ballroom chandelier cast off splinters of colored light, the balloons came down, red and white, and the sugar swan tasted of almonds when it crunched between the teeth. She was twenty-nine years old the night of the dance, and she relished this memory and no other through the final hour of her life, as though it had been the last good time she could recall.

  Joe buried her from the same church that he had vandalized three years earlier. The stations of the cross had been restored. A new statue of the Holy Mother watched over a full complement of votive glasses on the tiered rack.

  Later, he expressed his grief in a bar fight. His nose was broken, but he did worse damage to the other guy.

  He stayed crazy until he met Michelle.

  On their first date, as he had returned her to her apartment, she had told him that he had a wild streak a foot wide. When he’d taken that as a compliment, she had told him that only a moron, a hormone-crazed pubescent boy, or an ape in the zoo would be witless enough to take pride in it.

  Thereafter, by her example, she taught him everything that was to shape his future. That love was worth the risk of loss. That anger harms no one more than he who harbors it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.

  Six days before their wedding, in the evening, Joe went alone to the church from which he’d buried his parents. Having calculated the cost of the damage he’d done years before, he stuffed a wad of hundred-dollar bills into the poor box.

  He made the contribution neither because of guilt nor because his faith was regained. He did it for Michelle, though she would never know of the vandalism or of this act of restitution.

  Thereafter, his life had begun.

  And then ended one year ago.

  Now Nina was in the world again, waiting to be found, waiting to be brought home.

  With the hope of finding Nina as balm, Joe was able to take the heat out of his anger. To recover Nina, he must be totally in control of himself.

  Anger harms no one more than he who harbors it.

  He was ashamed by how quickly and absolutely he had turned away from all the lessons that Michelle had taught him. With the fall of Flight 353, he too had fallen, had plummeted out of the sky into which Michelle had lifted him with her love, and had returned to the mud of bitterness. His collapse was a dishonor to her, and now he felt a sting of guilt as sharp as he might have felt if he’d betrayed her with another woman.

  Nina, mirror of her mother, offered him the reason and the chance to rebuild himself into a reflection of the person he had been before the crash. He could become again a man worthy of being her father.

  Nine-ah, Neen-ah, have you seen her?

  He leafed slowly through his treasure trove of mental images of Nina, and the effect was soothing. Gradually, his clenched hands relaxed.

  He began the last hour of the flight by reading two of the four printouts of articles about Teknologik that he had retrieved from the Post computer the previous afternoon.

  In the second, he came upon a piece of information that stunned him. Thirty-nine percent of Teknologik’s stock, the largest single block, was owned by Nellor et Fils, a Swiss holding company with extensive and diverse interests in drug research, medical research, medical publishing, general publishing, and the film and broadcasting industries.

  Nellor et Fils was the principal vehicle by which Horton Nellor and his son, Andrew, invested the family fortune, which was thought to be in excess of four billion dollars. Nellor was not Swiss, of course, but American. He had taken his base of operations offshore a long time ago. And more than twenty years ago, Horton Nellor had founded the Los Angeles Post. He still owned it.

  For a while, Joe fingered his astonishment as though he were a whittler with an intriguingly shaped piece of driftwood, trying to decide how best to carve it. As in raw wood, something waited here to be discovered by the craftsman’s hand; his knives were his mind and his journalistic instinct.

  Horton Nellor’s investments were widespread, so it might mean nothing whatsoever that he owned pieces of both Teknologik and the Post. Probably pure coincidence.

  He owned the Post outright and was not an absentee publisher concerned only about profit; through his son, he exerted control over the editorial philosophy and the reportorial policies of the newspaper. He might not be so intimately involved, however, with Teknologik, Inc. His stake in that corporation was large but not in itself a controlling interest, so perhaps he was not engaged in the day-to-day operations, treating it only as a stock investment.

  In that case, he was not necessarily personally aware of the top-secret research Rose Tucker and her associates had undertaken. And he was not necessarily carrying any degree of responsibility for the destruction of Flight 353.

  Joe recalled his encounter the previous afternoon with Dan Shavers, the business-page columnist at the Post. Shavers pungently characterized the Teknologik executives: 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.

  He Who Must Be Obeyed. Horton Nellor. Reviewing the rest of the brief conversation, Joe realized that Shavers had assumed that Joe knew of Nellor’s interest in Teknologik. And the columnist seemed to have been implying that Nellor asserted his will at Teknologik no less than he did at the Post.

  Joe also flashed back to something Lisa Peccatone had said in the kitchen at the Delmann house when the relationship between Rose Tucker and Teknologik was mentioned: You and me and Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?

  At the time, he had thought she was referring to the fact that Flight 353 had become a spring point in the arcs of all their lives. Maybe what she really meant was that all of them worked for the same man.

  Joe had never met Horton Nellor, who had become something of a recluse over the years. He’d seen photographs, of course. The billionaire, now in his late sixties, was silver-haired and round-faced, with pleasing if somewhat blurred features. He looked like a muffin on which, with icing, a baker had painted a grandfather face.

  He did not appear to be a killer. He was known as a generous philanthropist. His reputation was not that of a man who woul
d hire assassins or condone murder in the maintenance or expansion of his empire.

  Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

  The fact remained that Joe and Michelle had worked for the same man as those who now wanted to kill Rose Tucker and who—in some as yet incomprehensible manner—had evidently destroyed Nationwide 353. The money that had long supported his family was the same money that had financed their murders.

  His response to this revelation was so complexly tangled that he could not quickly unknot it, so dark that he could not easily see the entire shape of it.

  Greasy fingers of nausea seined his guts.

  Although he stared out the window for perhaps half an hour, he was not aware of the desert surrendering to the suburbs or the suburbs to the city. He was surprised when he realized that they were descending toward LAX.

  On the ground, as they taxied to the assigned gate and as the telescoping mobile corridor was linked like an umbilical between the 737 and the terminal, Joe checked his wristwatch, considered the distance to Westwood, and calculated that he would be at least half an hour early for his meeting with Demi. Perfect. He wanted enough time to scope the meeting place from across the street and a block away before committing himself to it.

  Demi should be reliable. She was Rose’s friend. He had gotten her number from the message that Rose had left for him at the Post. But he wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone.

  After all, even if Rose Tucker’s motives had been pure, even if she had kept Nina with her to prevent Teknologik from killing or kidnapping the girl, she had nevertheless withheld Joe’s daughter from him for a year. Worse, she had allowed him to go on thinking that Nina—like Michelle and Chrissie—was dead. For reasons that he could not yet know, perhaps Rose would never want to return his little girl to him.

  Trust no one.

  As he got up from his seat and started forward toward the exit, he noticed a man in white slacks, white shirt, and white Panama hat rise from a seat farther forward in the cabin and glance back at him. The guy was about fifty, stockily built, with a thick mane of white hair that made him look like an aging rock star, especially under that hat.

  This was no stranger.

  For an instant, Joe thought that perhaps the man was, in fact, a lowercase celebrity—a musician in a famous band or a character actor from television. Then he was certain that he had seen him not on screen or stage but elsewhere, recently, and in significant circumstances.

  Mr. Panama looked away from him after a fraction of a second of eye contact, stepped into the aisle, and moved forward. Like Joe, he was not burdened by any carry-on luggage, as though he had been on a day trip.

  Eight or ten passengers were between the day-tripper and Joe. He was afraid he would lose track of his quarry before he figured out where he had previously seen him. He couldn’t push along the narrow aisle past the intervening passengers without causing a commotion, however, and he preferred not to let Mr. Panama know that he had been spotted.

  When Joe tried to use the distinctive hat as a prod to memory, he came up blank, but when he pictured the man without the hat and focused on the flowing white hair, he thought of the blue-robed cult members with the shaven heads. The connection eluded him, seemed absurd.

  Then he thought of the bonfire around which the cultists had been standing last night on the beach, where he had disposed of the McDonald’s bag that contained the Kleenex damp with Charlie Delmann’s blood. And the lithe dancers in bathing suits around another bonfire. A third fire and the gathering of surfers inside the totemic ring of their upended boards. And still another fire, around which sat a dozen enthralled listeners as a stocky man with a broad charismatic face and a mane of white hair narrated a ghost story in a reverberant voice.

  This man. The storyteller.

  Joe had no doubt that they were one and the same.

  He also knew there was no chance whatsoever that he had crossed this man’s path on the beach last night and again here sheerly by chance. All is intimately interwoven in this most conspiratorial of all worlds.

  They must have been conducting surveillance on him for weeks or months, waiting for Rose to contact him, when he had finally become aware of them on Santa Monica Beach, Saturday morning. During that time they had learned all his haunts, which were not numerous: the apartment, a couple of coffee shops, the cemetery, and a few favorite beaches where he went to learn indifference from the sea.

  After he had disabled Wallace Blick, invaded their van, and then fled the cemetery, they had lost him. He had found the transponder on his car and thrown it into the passing gardener’s truck, and they had lost him. They’d almost caught up with him again at the Post, but he’d slipped away minutes ahead of them.

  So they had staked out his apartment, the coffee shops, the beaches—waiting for him to show up somewhere. The group being entertained by the ghost story had been ordinary civilians, but the storyteller who had insinuated himself into their gathering was not in the least ordinary.

  They had picked Joe up once more the past night on the beach. He knew the correct surveillance jargon: They had reacquired him on the beach. Followed him to the convenience store from which he had telephoned Mario Oliveri in Denver and Barbara in Colorado Springs. Followed him to his motel.

  They could have killed him there. Quietly. While he slept or after waking him with a gun to his head. They could have made it look like a drug overdose—or like suicide.

  In the heat of the moment, they had been eager to shoot him down at the cemetery, but they were no longer in a hurry to see him dead. Because maybe, just maybe, he would lead them again to Rose Marie Tucker.

  Evidently they weren’t aware that he had been at the Delmann house, among other places, during the hours when they had lost contact with him. If they knew he’d seen what had happened to the Delmanns and to Lisa—even though he could not understand it—they probably would terminate him. Take no chances. Terminate him “with extreme prejudice,” as their kind phrased it.

  During the night, they had placed another tracking device on his car. In the hour before dawn, they followed him to LAX, always at a distance where they were in no danger of being spotted. Then to Denver and perhaps beyond.

  Jesus.

  What had frightened the deer in the woods?

  Joe felt stupid and careless, although he knew that he was not either. He couldn’t expect to be as good at this game as they were; he’d never played it before, but they played it every day.

  He was getting better, though. He was getting better.