Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  All four trucks were idling noisily now.

  Carrying his flashlight, Tommy ran to the farthest of the four big roll-down doors of the interior loading zone and touched the control that started it moving laboriously upward on its track. Jack watched him tensely from the high seat of the big rig. Tommy hurried back along that outer wall, his progress marked by the hobbling beam of his flash, slapping his right hand against the door controls as he came to each of them. Then, snapping off his flashlight, he bolted toward the Mack as the four doors slowly lumbered open with much grating and clattering.

  Outside, the Morlocks would know the doors were going up, would hear the trucks’ engines. But they’d be looking into a dark building, and until they could throw some light in here, they couldn’t know which rig was the intended escape vehicle. They might spray all of the trucks with submachine-gun fire, but Jack was counting on gaining a few precious seconds before they opted for that violent course of action.

  Tommy clambered up into the cab of the Mack, pulling the door shut behind him, sandwiching Mort between himself and Jack.

  “Damn rollers move too slow,” Mort said as the bay doors clattered toward the ceiling, gradually revealing the sleet-lashed night beyond.

  “Drive through the sucker,” Tommy urged.

  Fastening his seatbelt, Jack said, “Can’t risk getting hung up.”

  The door was one-third open.

  Gripping the wheel with both hands again, Jack saw movement in the murky, wintry world beyond, where the few dim exterior security lights did little to push back the darkness. Two men hurried across the wet and icy blacktop, from the left, slipping and skidding, both of them armed, one of them with what appeared to be an Uzi. They were trying to stay low to make poor targets of themselves and trying to stay on their feet at the same time, squinting into the black warehouse under the rising bay doors, and as yet they had not thought of meeting the crisis with an indiscriminate spray of bullets.

  The first door, the one in front of Jack, was halfway up.

  Abruptly, angling in from the left, the same direction from which the two hoods had come, the gray Ford van appeared, its tires churning up silvery plumes of slush. It fishtailed to a stop between the second and third ramps, blocking those exits. Its front wheels were up on the lower edge of the third ramp, so its headlights speared into the fourth bay, revealing that the cab of that truck was untenanted.

  In front of Jack, the door was two-thirds up.

  “Keep your heads down,” he said.

  Mort and Tommy squeezed down as low as they could, and Jack hunched over the wheel. The heavy rolling panel was not all the way up, but he thought he could slip under it—with a little luck. In quick succession he released the brakes, popped the clutch, and hit the accelerator.

  The instant he put the truck in gear, those outside knew that the break was being made from the first bay, and the night was shaken with the rattle of gunfire. Jack heard slugs slam into the truck as he reached the exit, drove through, and headed down the concrete ramp, but none penetrated the cab or shattered the windshield.

  Below, another van, this one a Dodge, swept in at the foot of the incline, trying to block his path. Reinforcements had, indeed, arrived.

  Instead of braking, Jack tramped down harder on the accelerator and grinned at the horrified expressions of the men in the Dodge as the massive grille of the Mack slammed into them. The rig rammed the van backward so hard that the smaller vehicle tipped over on its side and slid fifteen or twenty feet across the macadam.

  The impact jolted Jack, but his safety belt held him in check. Mort and Tommy were thrown forward, against the lower part of the dash and into the cramped space below. They protested with cries of pain.

  To execute that maneuver, Jack had been forced to descend the ramp faster than he should have done, and now as he tried to wheel the truck to the left, toward the lane leading away from the warehouse, the rig lurched, swayed, threatened to either tear itself out of his control or tip over as the Dodge had done. Cursing, he held on to it, brought it around with an effort that made his arms feel as if they were pulling out of his shoulders, and then he was headed straight into the lane.

  Ahead of him, three men stood around a midnight-blue Buick, and at least two of them were armed. They opened fire as he bore down on them. One man aimed too low, and bullets snapped off the top of the Mack’s grille, sparking brightly where they struck. The other guy aimed too high; Jack heard slugs ricocheting off the brow of the cab, above the windshield. One of the two overhead-mounted air-horns was hit and torn loose; it fell down along the side of the cab, thumped against Tommy’s window, hanging from its wires.

  Jack was almost on top of the Buick, and the gunmen realized he meant to hit it, so they stopped shooting and scattered. Handling the huge rig as if it were a tank, he broad-sided the car, shoving it out of the way. He kept going, past the end of the warehouse, toward another warehouse, past that one, still accelerating.

  Mort and Tommy pushed themselves back onto the seat, groaning. Both were battered. Mort had a bloody nose, and Tommy was bleeding from a small cut over his right eye, but neither of them was seriously hurt.

  “Why does every job go sour?” Mort asked morosely, his voice more nasal than usual because of his injured nose.

  “It hasn’t gone sour,” Jack said, switching on the windshield wipers to clear away the glimmering beads of sleet. “It’s just turned out to be a little more exciting than we expected.”

  “I hate excitement,” Mort said, putting a handkerchief to his nose.

  Jack glanced in the side mirror, back toward the fratellanza ’s warehouse, and he saw the Ford van turning around to follow him. He had put the Dodge and the Buick out of commission, and he only had the Ford to worry about. He had no hope of outrunning it. The roads were treacherously icy, and he had too little experience behind the wheel of a rig like this to risk pushing it to its limits in bad weather.

  He was also worried about an unnerving chorus of small noises that had sprung up from the engine compartment following the ramming of the van and the Buick. Something rattled tinnily. Something else hissed. If the Mack broke down and left them stranded, they would very likely be killed in the ensuing shoot-out with the Morlocks.

  They were in a vast industrial area of warehouses, packing plants, and factories, and the nearest major city street was more than a mile ahead of them. Though some of the factories had night shifts and were currently operating, the industrial park’s main service road, along which they were speeding, was deserted.

  Glancing at the mirror, Jack saw the Ford on their tail and gaining fast. He abruptly wheeled the rig to the right, into a branch road past a factory where a sign proclaimed HARKWRIGHT CUSTOM FOAM PACKAGING.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Tommy asked.

  “We can’t outrun them,” Jack said.

  “We can’t face them down, either,” Mort said through his bloody handkerchief. “Not handguns against Uzis.”

  “Trust me,” Jack said.

  Harkwright Custom Foam Packaging did not operate a late shift. The building itself was dark, but the road around it and the big truck lot behind were lit by sodium-vapor lamps that colored the night yellow.

  At the rear of the building, Jack turned left, into the truck lot, through drilling sleet that looked like molten gold under the big lamps. Two score of trailers, without cabs attached, stood in orderly ranks, like beheaded prehistoric beasts, all painted mustard by the fall of sodium light. He swung the rig in a wide circle, brought it in close to the back wall of the factory, doused the headlights, and drove parallel to the building, heading back toward the road that entered the lot and along which he had just come. He braked to a stop at the corner, close up against the factory wall, at a right angle to the branch road.

  “Brace yourselves,” he said.

  Mort and Tommy already knew what was coming. Their feet were pressed flat up against the dashboard and their backs were jammed against the bac
k of the seat, as protection against the impact.

  No sooner had Jack braked at the corner of the building—the Mack poised like a crouching cat anticipating a mouse—than a glow appeared on the passing road. The light approached from the right, from the front of the factory: the most out-reaching headlamp beams of the unseen but oncoming Ford van. The glow grew brighter, brighter still, and Jack tensed, trying to wait until the last best moment before pulling into the lane. Now the glow became two distinct parallel beams, lancing past the snout of the Mack, and the beams grew very bright. Finally Jack tramped hard on the accelerator, and the Mack lurched forward, but it was a big truck, not quick off the dime. The Ford, going faster than Jack had expected, shot past the corner, directly across the Mack’s bow, and Jack surged forward in time to catch only the rear of it. But that was enough to send the small van into a spin. It whipped around 360 degrees, then again, on the icy surface of the parking lot, before crashing nose-first into one of the mustard-colored cargo trailers.

  Jack was sure that none of the men in the Ford was in any condition to come out of the wreck shooting, but he did not dawdle. He swung the Mack around and headed back past the side of Harkwright Custom Foam Packaging. When he reached the main service road, he turned right, away from the distant fratellanza warehouse, toward the entrance to the industrial park and the network of city streets beyond.

  They were not followed.

  He drove three miles by a direct route to an abandoned Texaco service station that they had scouted days ago. He pulled past the useless pumps and parked alongside the dilapidated little building.

  The moment Jack halted the rig, Tommy Sung threw open the door on his side, jumped out, and walked away into the darkness. He was heading for a lower-middle-class residential neighborhood three blocks away, where, on Monday, they had parked a dirty, rusted, battered Volkswagen Rabbit. The car was newer under the hood than it was outside—and fast. It would get them back to Manhattan, where they would dump it.

  They had also stashed an untraceable Pontiac in the industrial park on Monday, within a two-minute walk of the mob warehouse. They intended to hump the bags of money to the Pontiac, then drive the Pontiac here for the switch to the Rabbit. But alternate transportation had become essential, and the Pontiac had been left to rot where they stashed it.

  Jack and Mort heaved the sacks of money out of the Mack and stood them against the side wall of the shuttered service station, where the slanting sleet began to crust on the canvas. Mort climbed back in the cab and wiped down all the surfaces they might have touched.

  Jack stood by the bags, looking at the street beyond the end of the rig, where an occasional car crept past on the glistening pavement. None of the motorists would be interested in a truck parked at a long-abandoned service station. But if a police car cruised by on patrol ...

  At last Tommy pulled in from the side street and parked between the rows of pumps. Mort grabbed two sacks, hustled them toward the car, slipped, fell, got right up, made for the Rabbit again. Dragging the other pair of bags, Jack followed with greater care. By the time Jack reached the Rabbit, Mort was already in the back seat. Jack threw the last bags in with Mort, slammed the door, and got in front with Tommy.

  He said, “For God’s sake, drive slow and careful.”

  “You can count on it,” Tommy said.

  The tires spun on the sleet-skinned blacktop as they pulled out from between the pumps, and when they left the lot and moved into the street, they slid sideways before the tread gripped.

  “Why does every job turn sour?” Mort asked mournfully.

  “It hasn’t turned sour,” Jack said.

  The Rabbit hit a pothole and began to slide toward a parked car, but Tommy turned the wheel into the slide and got control. They continued at an even slower pace, found the expressway, and climbed a ramp under a sign that said NEW YORK CITY.

  At the upper end of the ramp, as the tires slithered one last time before gripping and carrying them onto the express-way, Mort said, “Why’d it have to sleet?”

  “They’ve got a lot of salt and cinders on these lanes,” Tommy said. “It’s going to be all right now, all the way into the city.”

  “We’ll see,” Mort said glumly. “What a bad night. Jesus.”

  “Bad?” Jack said. “Bad? Mort, they would never in a thousand years let you in the Optimist’s Club. For God’s sake, we’re all of us millionaires. You’re sitting on a fortune back there!”

  Under his porkpie hat, which still dripped melting sleet, Mort blinked in surprise. “Well, uh, I guess that does take some of the sting out of it.”

  Tommy Sung laughed.

  Jack laughed, and Mort, too, and Jack said, “The biggest score any of us ever made. And no taxes payable on it, either.”

  Suddenly, everything seemed uproariously funny. They settled in a hundred yards behind a highway maintenance truck with flashing yellow beacons, cruising at a safe and leisurely speed, while they gleefully recalled the highlights of their escape from the warehouse.

  Later, when the tension was somewhat relieved, when their giddy laughter had subsided to pleased smiles, Tommy said, “Jack, I gotta tell you that was a first-rate piece of work. The way you used the computer to create paperwork for the crate ... and that little electronic gizmo you used to open the safe so we didn’t need to blow it ... well, you are one hell of an organizer.”

  “Better than that,” Mort said, “in a crisis you’re just about the best knockover artist I’ve ever seen. You think fast. I tell you, Jack, if you ever decided to put your talents to work in the straight world, for a good cause, there’s no telling what you could do.”

  “Good cause?” Jack said. “Isn’t getting rich a good cause?”

  “You know what I mean,” Mort said.

  “I’m no hero,” Jack said. “I don’t want any part of the straight world. They’re all hypocrites out there. They talk about honesty, truth, justice, social conscience ... but most of them are just looking out for number one. They won’t admit it, and that’s why I can’t stand them. I admit it. I’m looking out for number one, and to hell with them.” He heard the tone of his own voice changing from amusement to sullen resentment, but he could not help that. He scowled through the wet windshield, past the thumping wipers. “Good cause, huh? If you spend your life fighting for good causes, the so-called good people will sure as hell break your heart in the end. Fuck ’em.”

  “Didn’t mean to touch a nerve,” Mort said, clearly surprised.

  Jack said nothing. He was lost in bitter memories. Two or three miles later, he said quietly, “I’m no damn hero.”

  In days to come, when he recalled those words, he would have occasion to wonder how he could have been so wrong about himself.

  It was one-twelve a.m., Wednesday, December 4.

  3. Chicago, Illinois

  By eight-twenty, Thursday morning, December 5, Father Stefan Wycazik had celebrated the early Mass, had eaten breakfast, and had retreated to his rectory office for a final cup of coffee. Turning away from his desk, he faced the big French window that presented a view of the bare, snow-crusted trees in the courtyard, and he tried not to think about any parish problems. This was his time, and he valued it highly.

  But his thoughts drifted inexorably to Father Brendan Cronin. The rogue curate. The chalice-hurler. Brendan Cronin, the talk of the parish. The Berserk Priest of St. Bernadette’s. Brendan Cronin of all people. It just did not make sense. No sense at all.

  Father Stefan Wycazik had been a priest for thirty-two years, the rector of the Church of St. Bernadette for nearly eighteen years, and throughout his life of service, he had never been tortured by doubt. The very concept baffled him.

  Following ordination, he was assigned as a curate to St. Thomas‘s, a small parish in the Illinois farm country, where seventy-year-old Father Dan Tuleen was shepherd. Father Tuleen was the sweetest-tempered, kindest, most sentimental, and most lovable man Stefan Wycazik had ever known. Dan had also been troubled by
arthritis and failing vision, too old for the job of running a parish. Any other priest would have been removed, gently forced into retirement. But Dan Tuleen had been permitted to remain at his post because he had been at St. Thomas’s for forty years and was an integral part of the life of his flock. The Cardinal, a great admirer of Father Tuleen, had looked around for a curate who could handle a good deal more responsibility than would usually be expected of a rookie, and he had finally settled on Stefan Wycazik. After only a day at St. Thomas’s, Stefan had realized what was expected of him and had not been intimidated. He’d shouldered virtually all the work of the parish. Few young priests would have been equal to such a task. Father Wycazik never doubted he could handle it.

  Three years later, when Father Tuleen died quietly in his sleep, a new priest was assigned to St. Thomas’s, and the Cardinal sent Father Wycazik to another parish in suburban Chicago, where the rector, Father Orgill, was having troubles with alcohol. Father Orgill had not been a totally disgraced whiskey priest. He had been a man with the power to salvage himself, and he had been well worth salvaging. Father Wycazik’s job had been to give Francis Orgill a shoulder to lean on and to guide him, subtly but firmly, toward an exit from his dilemma. Unhampered by doubt, he had provided what Francis Orgill had needed.

  During the next three years, Stefan served at two more problem-plagued churches, and those who moved in the hierarchy of the archdiocese began to refer to him as “His Eminence’s troubleshooter.”

  His most exotic assignment was to Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage and School in Saigon, Vietnam, where he was second in charge under Father Bill Nader for six nightmarish years. Our Lady of Mercy was funded by the Chicago Archdiocese and was one of the Cardinal’s pet projects. Bill Nader had carried the scars of two bullet wounds, one in his left shoulder and one in his right calf, and had lost two Vietnamese priests and one previous American to Vietcong terrorists.

  From the moment of Stefan’s arrival, during his entire tour of duty in the war zone, he never doubted that he would survive or that his work in that hell-on-earth was worthwhile. When Saigon fell, Bill Nader, Stefan Wycazik, and thirteen nuns escaped the country with 126 children. Hundreds of thousands died in the subsequent bloodbath, but even in the face of mass slaughter, Stefan Wycazik never doubted that 126 lives were a very significant number, never allowed despair to grip him.

  Back in the States, as a reward for his willingness to be the Cardinal’s troubleshooter for a decade and a half, Stefan was offered a promotion to monsignor, which he modestly declined. Instead, he humbly requested—and was rewarded with—his own parish. At long last.

  That was St. Bernadette’s. It had not been a prosperous parish when it was put into Stefan Wycazik’s able hands. St. Bernadette’s was $125,000 in debt. The church was in desperate need of major repairs, including a new slate roof. The rectory was worse than decrepit; it threatened to come tumbling down in the next high wind. There was no parish school. Attendance at Sunday Masses had been on a steady decline for almost ten years. St. Bette’s, as some of the altar boys referred to it, was precisely the kind of challenge that excited Father Wycazik.

  He never doubted that he could rescue St. Bette’s. In four years he raised the attendance at Mass by forty percent, retired the debt, and repaired the church. In five years he rebuilt the parish house. In seven years he doubled attendance and broke ground for a school. In recognition of Father Wycazik’s unflagging service to Mother Church, the Cardinal, in his last week of life, had conferred the coveted honor of P.R.—permanent rector—on Stefan, guaranteeing him life tenure at the parish that he had single-handedly brought back from the edge of both spiritual and financial ruin.

  The granite solidity of Father Wycazik’s faith made it difficult for him to understand why, at the early Mass on the Sunday just past, Father Brendan Cronin’s belief had dissolved so completely as to cause him to fling the sacred chalice across the chancel in despair and rage. In front of almost a hundred worshipers. Dear God. At least it had not happened at one of the three later Masses, which were better attended.

  Initially, when Brendan Cronin had come to St. Bette’s more than a year and a half ago, Father Wycazik had not wanted to like him.

  For one thing, Cronin had been schooled at the North American College in Rome, reputedly the most splendid educational institution within the jurisdiction of the Church. But though it was an honor to be invited to attend that establishment, and though its graduates were considered the cream of the priesthood, they were often effete dainties, loath to get their hands dirty, with much too high an opinion of themselves. They felt that teaching catechism to children was beneath them, a waste of their complex minds. And visiting shut-ins was a task they found unspeakably distasteful after the glories that had been Rome.

  In addition to the stigma of being trained in Rome, Father Cronin was fat. Well, not fat, really, but certainly plump, with a round soft face and liquid-green eyes that seemed, at first encounter, to betoken a lazy and perhaps easily corrupted soul. Father Wycazik, on the other hand, was a big-boned Pole whose family had not contained a single fat man. The Wycaziks were descended from Polish miners who had emigrated to the United States at the turn of the century, taking physically demanding jobs in steel mills, quarries, and the construction trades. They had produced big families that could be supported only through long hours of honest labor, so there wasn’t time to get fat. Stefan had grown up with an instinctual sense that a real man was solid but lean, with a thick neck, big shoulders, and joints gnarled from hard work.

  To Father Wycazik’s surprise, Brendan Cronin had proved to be a hard worker. He had acquired no pretensions and no elitist opinions while in Rome. He was bright, good-natured, amusing, and he thrived on visiting shut-ins, teaching the children, and soliciting funds. He was the best curate Father Wycazik had been given in eighteen years.

  That was why Brendan’s outburst on Sunday—and the loss of faith that had inspired it—was so distressing to Stefan Wycazik. Of course, on another level, he looked forward to the challenge of bringing Brendan Cronin back into the fold. He had begun his career in the Church as a strong right arm for priests in trouble, and now he was being called upon to fill that role once more, which reminded him of his youth and engendered in him a buoyant feeling of vital purpose.

  Now, as he took another sip of coffee, a knock came at the office door. He turned his gaze to the mantel clock. It was of ormolu and inlaid mahogany with a fine Swiss movement, a gift from a parishioner. That timepiece was the only elegant object in a room boasting strictly utilitarian—and mismatched—furniture and a threadbare imitation-Persian carpet. According to the clock, the time was eight-thirty, precisely, and Stefan turned to the door, saying, “Come in, Brendan.”

  As he came through the door, Father Brendan Conin looked no less distressed than he had on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when they had met in this office to discuss his crisis of faith and to search for ways to reestablish his belief. He was so pale that his freckles burned like sparks on his skin, and by contrast his auburn hair looked more red than usual. The bounce had left his step.

  “Sit down, Brendan. Coffee?”

  “Thank you, no.” Brendan bypassed the tattered Chesterfield and the Morris chair, slumping in the sag-bottomed wingback instead.

  Did you eat a good breakfast? Stefan wanted to ask. Or did you just nibble at some toast and swill it down with coffee?

  But he did not want to seem to be mothering his curate, who was thirty years old. So he said, “You’ve done the reading I suggested?”