by Dean Koontz
But she knew that fear was the real reason she didn’t want to begin questioning the Ouija board again. She was afraid of what it might tell them.
If she surrendered to her fear so easily, she would never learn to rely on herself. And although she found the possibility disturbing, she had an ever-growing feeling that soon she would find herself in greater danger, against which Max could not or would not offer her protection.
She put her hands on the trivet, and so did Max.
Lou put his overturned chair on its feet. He sat down and picked up his pencil.
She spoke to the Ouija board. “Are you prepared to answer more questions?”
YES.
Thunder rumbled over King’s Point. The bulbs in the hanging lamp above the table flickered, nearly went out, then glowed brightly again.
“The man who killed Rochelle Drake has murdered other people, too. How many has he illed?”
35.
Lou said, “My God! He’s a regular Jack the Ripper.”
“Jack the Ripper didn’t kill that many,” Max said. “The board’s wrong. It has to be. Ask it again, Mary.”
Her voice wavered as she repeated the question. 35.
The hanging lamp flickered and went out. “Power failure,” Lou said.
Mary said, “I don’t want to sit in the dark.”
“If it lasts more than a minute,” Lou said, “I’ll go get candles from the hall closet.”
An incredible barrage of lightning pulsed outside the windows. The sharp bursts of blue-white light created a series of choppy, stroboscopic images: Lou reaching in a half dozen seemingly disconnected movements for his glass of bourbon; Max turning his head toward her as if he were a character on a motion picture screen, with the film slipping and stuttering in the projector.
Then the lightning passed; the darkness was complete; the thunder receded to a distant growl. Rain should have followed that display, but it didn’t; the sky held back the deluge.
Less than a minute after the lights went out, they fluttered dimly and came back on full strength.
She sighed with relief.
Max was eager to continue the questioning. “Ask the board when this man will strike again.”
Mary repeated the question.
TONIGHT.
“What time tonight?”
7:30.
Lou said, “Little more than an hour from now.”
“Where will he strike?” Mary asked the Ouija board.
THE HARBOR PARADE.
“You know what it means,” Lou said to Max. He was grim. “For thirty years,” he told Mary, “there’s been a Christmas night parade of lighted boats on the harbor. Never heard of it?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“All those decorated boats you saw last night will be part of it. Plus some that don’t use our harbor as home port. Maybe a hundred and fifty or more.”
“They have parades like this at Long Beach and Newport Beach in the week before Christmas,” Max told Mary. “But the King’s Point shindig is more spectacular than any of the others.”
Lou said, “There’s pretty damned good prize money for the best decorated boats, thanks to a trust fund set up by one of our richer sailors who loved the parade. It’s quite a sight. Most of the harbor restaurants open for it. They only serve a limited menu, but they’re sold out a week or two in advance.”
Mary looked at the Ouija board and asked, “Is the killer after anyone special in the boat parade?”
YES.
“Who?”
HE HAS A RIFLE.
“Who will he shoot?”
HE WANTS TO KILL THE QUEEN.
“The queen?” Mary asked.
“The queen of the parade,” Lou said. “She’ll make an easy target. She stands on the rear deck of the biggest boat in the lineup, usually midway in the procession. She’s in the center of a spotlight. Literally.”
“And,” Max said, “she makes two complete circuits of the harbor along with the other boats. So if he isn’t satisfied with the target he’s got on the first circuit, he can wait to see if she presents herself any better the second time around.”
Although it had not been asked another question, the plastic trivet moved beneath their fingers, slid through a new series of letters.
KIMBALL’S GAMES AND SNACKS.
“Will he use the tower there?”
YES. KIMBALL’S TOWER.
“One hour to stop him,” Max said.
Lou stood up. “I’ll call the police.”
“Patmore?” Mary asked dubiously.
“He’s the man with the authority.”
She said, “But will he listen to you after the false alarm last night?”
“He’s got to listen!”
Thunder again. And wind.
Mary took her hands from the trivet and hugged herself. She was still cold. “But what if Patmore does agree to put a stakeout on the tower?”
“That’s what we want, isn’t it?”
“Don’t you see?” she said. “Won’t tonight be a repeat of last night? Last night the killer knew that we were waiting for him. Why won’t he know this time, too?”
Lou hesitated, surprised by the question, worried, indecisive. Finally he picked up the tumbler and drank the last of his bourbon. “Maybe he will anticipate us. Maybe we don’t have a chance against him. If the Ouija board’s right, if he’s really killed thirty-five people and never been caught, then he’s damned clever. Probably too clever for us. But we’ve got to try, don’t we? We can’t just sit here and talk about the weather and the latest books and the newest Paris fashions while he goes on killing!”
“You’re right,” Max said.
Lou put down his empty glass and went to use the telephone in the entrance foyer.
Mary began to exercise her cramped hands. She closed them into fists, opened them, closed them.
“You look exhausted,” Max said.
“I am.”
“We’ll get to bed early.”
“If we get to bed at all.”
“We will. Nothing’s going to happen to us.”
“I’ve got awful feelings,” she said.
“You’ve had a vision?”
“No. just feelings.”
“Then forget it.”
“Tonight will be bloody.”
“Don’t worry,” he said soothingly.
She thought of Patty Spooner.
Rochelle Drake in the morgue drawer.
That feeling again: something behind her, chilly breath on the nape of her neck.
“I don’t want to die,” she said.
Max said, “You aren’t going to. Not tonight.”
“You sound so sure of that.”
“I am. I won’t let you die.”
“Are you strong enough to stop it from happening, Max? Are you stronger than destiny?”
Lightning ripped open the sky again: the reflection of light from its blade shone through the windows; and for an instant it turned Max’s eyes into icy blanks.
“King’s Point Police.”
“Missing persons, please.”
“I can help you, sir.”
“No. I want to talk to someone in the missing persons’ bureau. Didn’t you hear me?”
“We don’t have a separate department for missing persons’ reports.”
“You don’t?”
“We’re a small police force. Can I help you?”
“What’s your name?”
“Ms. Newhart.”
“I’m Ralph Larsson. Let me talk to a policeman.”
“We’ve only got two on duty tonight.”
“One of them will be enough for me.”
“They’re both in cruisers right now.”
“Dammit, my daughter’s missing!”
“How old is your daughter, sir?”
“Twenty-six. She was—”
“How long has she been missing?”
“Look, Ms. Newhart, I’m in San Francisc
o. I live in San Francisco, and my daughter lives in King’s Point. I just talked to her a week ago. She was fine then. But now that I think she may no longer be fine, I can’t just jump in my car and drive several hundred miles to look in on her. This could be an emergency. She was supposed to call me on Christmas Eve, but she never did.”
“Maybe she went to a party or something.”
“I thought for sure she’d call sometime today, but she hasn’t. I’ve tried calling her, but there’s no answer. Now, dammit, it’s not like her to do something like this! It’s not like her to forget her family on Christmas.”
“Have you tried calling her friends? They might know something.”
“I don’t know Erika’s friends.”
“Maybe her neighbors—”
“She hasn’t got neighbors. She—”
“Everyone has neighbors.”
“She lives in one of those three cottages on the South Bluff, at the end of the paved road. She’s the only one who lives there year ’round.”
“You know what? I’ll bet your daughter’s trying to call you right now. Why don’t you hang up and see? If she doesn’t call tonight, then ring us back tomorrow.”
“Are you serious?”
“Well, we can’t do anything anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is a policy of this department, and of most police departments, not to enter a missing person’s case if the report involves an adult who’s been gone less than forty-eight hours.”
“She has to be missing more than two days before you’re interested?”
“That’s our policy.”
“Well, how do I know she didn’t disappear the day after she last called me, six days ago?”
“You said she was supposed to call last night.”
“And didn’t.”
“So officially, she’s only been missing since last night.”
“Jesus!”
“I’m sorry. That’s policy.”
“If my daughter was ten years old instead of twenty-six—”
“That’s different. Children are different. But your daughter isn’t a child.”
“So your officers can’t become involved until tomorrow night?”
“That’s right. But, sir, I’m certain your daughter will call you long before then.”
“Ms. Newhart, my name is Ralph Larsson. I told you once before, but I want you to remember it. Ralph Larsson. I’m an attorney. A very successful attorney. I was also the governor’s college roommate. Now, Ms. Newhart, if your officers don’t take a drive out to my daughter’s house to check on her right away, tonight, within the next half an hour, and if later we should discover that something happened to my daughter between this moment and tomorrow night, I will come down there to King’s Point and find a reputable cooperating attorney. I will devote the next few years of my life to breaking you and your idiotic superiors. I will sue your fucking goddamned police department, and I will sue your chief for his stupid arbitrary policies. And by God, Ms. Newhart, I will also sue you for every nickel you now have or ever hope to earn. And even if I don’t win the case, Ms. Newhart, you will go broke paying for your own lawyers. Do you read me clearly?”
Lou Pasternak was angry. Furious. The chief of police had hung up on him twice! The third time, his wife answered the phone and said he wasn’t at home.
“A demitasse would fit Patmore’s head like a sombrero! ”
“I gather,” Max said, “that he wouldn’t put a stakeout on Kimball’s tower.”
Lou snatched his empty glass from the table, went into the kitchen, and picked up the bottle of Wild Turkey. “If the bastard had a little more sense, he’d be a half-wit.”
From the dining room Mary asked, “Shouldn’t we call the sheriff?”
“Remember, Percy Osterman can’t step into King’s Point police business unless Patmore asks him to.”
“But when a man’s killed people all over the country, isn’t there an exception? Something called ‘hot pursuit’?”
Lou said, “If a guy robs a bank that’s in the county’s jurisdiction, hops into a car, and flees into a city with its own cops, the sheriff’s men can chase and arrest him. That’s hot pursuit. This isn’t.”
Max said, “Maybe Osterman can persuade Patmore to cooperate again.”
“Not a chance. Not after last night.” Lou returned to the table with a fresh glass of bourbon.
“So what now?” Max asked.
Mary said, “We’ll have to stop him ourselves. We’ll have to go down to the tower.”
Lou stared at her in amazement. “Are you serious?”
“It’s absolutely out of the question,” Max said.
She said, “What would you prefer to do? We can’t just sit here and talk about the weather and the latest books and the newest Paris fashions while he goes on killing.”
Lou recognized his own words, and he had no effective argument against them.
“If we just sit here,” she said, “he’ll kill the queen of the boat parade. And most likely a lot of other people, too.”
“The rain might force the queen and her court inside, off the open deck,” Max said. “Then she wouldn’t be a target.”
“It isn’t raining,” Mary said.
“It’ll start soon.”
“Do you want to bet their lives on that?” she asked. “Lou, we have to stop this man. We haven’t any choice.”
“I don’t want him to kill again,” Max said. “But he isn’t our responsibility.”
“If not ours, whose?” she asked.
Lou saw an uncommon determination in her lovely face. Unshakable resolve in those big blue eyes. He suspected that neither he nor Max could change her mind about this. Might as well argue with a post. He could see that. But he was frightened for her. And as her friend, he felt he should at least try to make her reconsider. “Mary, we’re no match for this man.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Isn’t it just one of him against the three of us?”
“But he’s a killer,” Max said.
“And we’re not killers,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Knowing what he’s done,” she said, “and what he’d do to you if he had the chance, couldn’t you shoot him if he came at you with a gun?”
Max said, “Of course, in self-defense—”
“That’s just what this is,” she said. “Self-defense.”
“But this psychopath will have a rifle,” Lou said. “And probably a knife. What would we have? Our hands?”
“There’s a pistol in the dashboard of the Mercedes,” Mary said. “Max is licensed to carry it.”
He looked at Max and raised his eyebrows. “You’re allowed to carry a concealed weapon?”
Getting up from his chair, heading toward the kitchen, Max said, “Yeah.”
“How’d you manage to wrangle the permit? They usually reserve those for people in businesses where they’ve got to carry around diamonds or a lot of cash.”
In the kitchen Max poured himself a double shot of Wild Turkey. “We worked on a couple of cases with the L.A. County sheriff’s office. The sheriff saw what dangerous situations Mary can find herself in. He knew I collected guns. He knew I was a marksman, and he figured I wasn’t the type to get excited and accidentally blow someone apart.” Max drank his bourbon neat and quick: a nervous thirst that briefly exposed the tension that lay beneath his studied composure. “So the sheriff got me the permit.” He rinsed out his glass under the kitchen faucet, came back to the dining room, and stood over Mary. “But I’m not going to load that pistol and go out hunting someone to shoot.”
“You wouldn’t be hunting just anyone,” she said. “You’d be hunting a man who has—”
“Forget it,” Max said. “I won’t do it.”
“Let’s talk about it,” she said.
“No use. It’s decided.”
Lou saw a spark of anger in her eyes. Max’s resistance would do nothing but harden her resolve.
She said, “Okay, Max. Stay here. I’ll take the gun and go by myself.”
“Mary, for God’s sake, you don’t know how to handle a pistol!”
She stared up at him without blinking and said, “You take off the safeties and jack a bullet into the chamber, point, pull the trigger—and the son of a bitch falls down.”
Lou knew how stubborn Max could be sometimes. He saw the set of the man’s jaw, the drawing up of his shoulders, and he wanted to warn him off. Max was accustomed to playing father-lover to her, accustomed to saying what would be done and what wouldn’t. But tonight she wasn’t the easygoing Mary they both knew. Even now changes were occurring in her. Conflicting emotions played across her face, but the primary expression was always determination. She was going to make her own decision, and she wasn’t going to heed anyone’s advice. He had never seen such strength in her before, such purpose. It was exciting, attractive. He sat mute, wanting to advise Max against an authoritarian approach but unable to interfere.
“This is absurd,” Max said. “Mary, I won’t let you have the pistol.”
“Then I’ll go without it.”
He glared down at her. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
She stood up, faced him. She met his eyes and held them, as if to prove, through the directness of her gaze, the depth of her commitment. She spoke with quiet intensity and with a foreboding tone that chilled Lou to the bone. “I’m up against something so big, so evil that I can only guess at the dimensions like a blind child feeling an elephant’s leg. These past few days have been a living hell for me, Max.”
“I know. And—”
“You can’t know. No one can know.”
“If you—”
“Don’t interrupt,” she said. “I want you to understand. So you’ve just got to listen. Max, I’m afraid to go to sleep, and I’m afraid to wake up in the morning. I’m afraid to open every door I come to, afraid to turn around. I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of what might happen—and of what might not happen. Dammit, I’m even afraid to go to the bathroom alone! I cannot live like this. I refuse to live like this. There’s something about this case that makes it different from all others, something that’s working inside of me like acid, eating me alive. This case touched my life like nothing else I’ve worked on, but I don’t know why. Max, I sense, I feel, I know that if I don’t pursue this man with every ounce of energy I have and in every way I know how, then he’ll come after me.”
