carpeted in the same hideous orange nylon as was the upper hall. The
decorator had a clown's taste for bright colors. It made her squint.
She would have preferred to be a more successful filmmaker, if only
because she could have afforded lodgings that did not assault the
senses. Of course, this was the only motel in Moonlight Cove, so even
wealth could not have saved her from that eye-blistering orange glare.
By the time she walked to the end of the hall, pushed through another
fire door, and stepped into the bottom of the north stairwell, the sight
of gray concrete block walls and concrete steps was positively restful
and appealing.
There, the ice-maker was working. She slid open the top of the chest
and dipped the plastic bucket into the deep bin, filling it with
half-moon pieces of ice. She set the full bucket atop the machine. As
she closed the chest, she heard the door at the head of the stairs open
with a faint but protracted squeak of hinges.
She stepped to the soda vendor to get her Coke, expecting someone to
descend from the second floor. Only as she dropped a third quarter into
the slot did she realize something was sneaky about the way the overhead
door opened the long, slow squeak . . . as if someone knew the hinges
were unoiled, and was trying to minimize the noise.
With one finger poised over the Diet Coke selection button, Tessa
hesitated, listening.
Nothing.
Cool concrete silence.
She felt exactly as she had felt on the beach earlier in the evening,
when she had heard that strange and distant cry. Now, as then, her
flesh prickled.
She had the crazy notion that someone was on the landing above, holding
the fire door open now that he had come through it. He was waiting for
her to push the button, so the squeak of the upper door's hinges would
be covered by the clatter-thump of the can rolling into the dispensing
trough.
Many modern women, conscious of the need to be tough in a tough world,
would have been embarrassed by such apprehension and would have shrugged
off the intuitive chill. But Tessa knew herself well. She was not
given to hysteria or paranoia, so she did not wonder for a moment if
Janice's death had left her overly sensitive, did not doubt her mental
image of a hostile presence at the upper landing, out of sight around
the turn.
Three doors led from the bottom of that concrete shaft. The first was
in the south wall, through which she had come and through which she
could return to the ground-floor corridor. The second was in the west
wall, which opened to the back of the motel, where a narrow walk or
service passage evidently lay - 85 between the building and the edge of
the sea-facing bluff, and the third was in the east wall, through which
she probably could reach the parking lot in front of the motel. Instead
of pushing the vendor button to get her Coke, leaving her full ice
bucket as well, she stepped quickly and quietly to the south door and
pulled it open.
She glimpsed movement at the distant end of the ground-floor hall.
Someone ducked back through that other fire door into the south
stairwell. She didn't see much of him, only his shadowy form, for he
had not been on the orange carpet in the corridor itself but at the far
threshold, and therefore able to slip out of sight in a second. The
door eased shut in his wake.
At least two men-she presumed they were men, not women were stalking
her.
overhead, in her own stairwell, the unoiled hinges of that door produced
a barely audible, protracted rasp and squeal. The other man evidently
had tired of waiting for her to make a covering noise.
She could not go into the hallway. They'd trap her between them.
Though she could scream in the hope of calling forth other guests and
frightening these men away, she hesitated because she was afraid the
motel might be as deserted as it seemed. Her scream might elicit no
help, while letting the stalkers know that she was aware of them and
that they no longer had to be cautious.
Someone was stealthily descending the stairs above her.
Tessa turned away from the corridor, stepped to the east door, and ran
out into the foggy night, along the side of the building, into the
parking lot beyond which lay Cypress Lane. Gasping, she sprinted past
the front of Cove Lodge to the motel office, which was adjacent to the
now closed coffee shop.
The office was open, the doorstep was bathed in a mist-diffused glow of
pink and yellow neon, and the man behind the counter was the same one
who had registered her hours ago. He was tall and slightly plump, in
his fifties, clean-shaven and neatly barbered if a little rumpled
looking in brown corduroy slacks and a green and red flannel shirt. He
put down a magazine, lowered the volume of the country music on the
radio, got up from his spring-backed desk chair, and stood at the
counter, frowning at her while she told him, a bit too breathlessly,
what had happened.
"Well, this isn't the big city, ma'am," he said when she had finished.
"It's a peaceful place, Moonlight Cove. You don't have to worry about
that sort of thing here."
"But it happened," she insisted, nervously glancing out at the
neon-painted mist that drifted through the darkness beyond the office
door and window.
"Oh, I'm sure you saw and heard someone, but you put the wrong spin on
it. We do have a couple other guests. That's who you saw and heard,
and they were probably just getting a Coke or some ice, like you.
" He had a warm, grandfatherly demeanor when he smiled. "This place can
seem a little spooky when there aren't many guests. "Listen, mister . .
."
"Quinn. Gordon Quinn."
"Listen, Mr. Quinn, it wasn't that way at all." She felt like a
skittish and foolish female, though she knew she was no such thing.
"I didn't mistake innocent guests for muggers and rapists. I'm not an
hysterical woman. These guys were up to no damn good. Well . . . all
right. I think you're wrong, but let's have a look." Quinn came
through the gate in the counter, to her side of the office.
"Are you just going like that?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"Unarmed?"
He smiled again. As before, she felt foolish.
"Ma'am," he said, "in twenty-five years of motel management, I haven't
yet met a guest I couldn't handle."
Though Quinn's smug, patronizing tone angered Tessa, she did not argue
with him but followed him out of the office and through the eddying fog
to the far end of the building. He was big, and she was petite, so she
felt somewhat like a little kid being escorted back to her room by a
father determined to show her that no monster was hiding either under
the bed or in the closet.
He opened the metal door through which she had fled the north service
stairs, and they went inside. No one waited there.
The soda-vending machine purred, and a faint clinking arose - 87 from
the ice-maker's laboring m
echanism. Her plastic bucket still stood atop
the chest, filled with half-moon chips.
Quinn crossed the small space to the door that led to the ground-floor
hall, pulled it open.
"Nobody there," he said, nodding toward the silent corridor. He opened
the door in the west wall, as well, and looked outside, left and right.
He motioned her to the threshold and insisted that she look too.
She saw a narrow, railing-flanked serviceway that paralleled the back of
the lodge, between the building and the edge of the bluff, illuminated
by a yellowish night-light at each end. Deserted "You said you'd
already put your money in the vendor but hadn't got your soda?" Quinn
asked, as he let the door swing shut.
"That's right.
"What did you want?"
"Well . . . Diet Coke.
" At the vending machine, he pushed the correct button, and a can rolled
into the trough. He handed it to her, pointed at the plastic container
that she had brought from her room, and said, "Don't forget your ice."
Carrying the ice bucket and Coke, a hot blush on her cheeks and cold
anger in her heart, Tessa followed him up the north stairs. No one
lurked there. The unoiled hinges of the upper door squeaked as they
went into the second-floor hallway, which was also deserted.
The door to her room was ajar, which was how she left it. She was
hesitant to enter.
"Let's check it out," Quinn said.
The small room, closet, and adjoining bath were untenanted.
"Feel better?" he asked.
"I wasn't imagining things."
"I'm sure you weren't," he said, still patronizing her.
As Quinn returned to the hallway, Tessa said, "They were there, and they
were real, but I guess they've gone now. Probably ran away when they
realized I was aware of them and that I went for help - "
"Well, all's well then," he said - "You're safe. If they're gone,
that's almost as good as if they'd never existed in the first place.
" Tessa required all of her restraint to avoid saying more than, "Thank
you," then she closed the door. On the knob was a lock button, which
she depressed. Above the knob was a dead-bolt lock, which she engaged.
A brass security chain was also provided; she used it.
She went to the window and examined it to satisfy herself that it
couldn't be opened easily by a would-be assailant. Half of it slid to
the left when she applied pressure to a latch and pulled, but it could
not be opened from outside unless someone broke it and reached through
to disengage the lock. Besides, as she was on the second floor, an
intruder would need a ladder.
For a while she sat in bed, listening to distant noises in the motel.
Now every sound seemed strange and menacing. She wondered what, if any,
connection her unsettling experience had with Janice's death more than
three weeks ago.
After a couple of hours in the storm drain under the sloping meadow,
Chrissie Foster was troubled by claustrophobia. She had been locked in
the kitchen pantry a great deal longer than she had been in the drain,
and the pantry had been smaller, yet the grave-black concrete culvert
was by far the worse of the two. Maybe she began to feel caged and
smothered because of the cumulative effect of spending all day and most
of the evening in cramped places.
From the superhighway far above, where the drainage system began, the
heavy roar of trucks echoed down through the tunnels, giving rise in her
mind to images of growling dragons. She put her hands over her ears to
block out the noise. Sometimes the trucks were widely spaced, but on
occasion they came in trains of six or eight or a dozen, and the
continuous rumble became oppressive, maddening.
Or maybe her desire to get out of the culvert had something - 89 to do
with the fact that she was underground. Lying in the dark, listening to
the trucks, searching the intervening silences for the return of her
parents and Tucker, Chrissie began to feel she was in a concrete coffin,
a victim of premature burial.
Reading aloud from the imaginary book of her own adventures, she said,
"Little did young Chrissie know that the culvert was about to collapse
and fill with earth, squishing her as if she were a bug and trapping her
forever."
She knew she should stay where she was. They might still be prowling
the meadow and woods in search of her. She was safer in the culvert
than out of it.
But she was cursed with a vivid imagination. Although she was no doubt
the only occupant of the lightless passageway in which she sprawled, she
envisioned unwanted company in countless grisly forms slithering snakes;
spiders by the hundreds; cockroaches; rats; colonies of blood-drinking
bats. eventual she began to wonder if over the years a child might have
crawled into the tunnels to play and, getting lost in the branching
culverts, might have died there, undiscovered. His soul, of course,
would have remained restless and earthbound, for his death had been
unjustly premature and there had been no proper burial service to free
his spirit. Now perhaps that ghost, sensing her presence, was animating
those hideous skeletal remains, dragging the decomposed and age-dried
corpse toward her, scraping off pieces of leathery and half-petrified
flesh as it came. Chrissie was eleven years old and levelheaded for her
age, and she repeatedly told herself that there were no such things as
ghosts, but then she thought of her parents and Tucker, who seemed to be
some kind of werewolves, for God's sake, and when the big trucks passed
on the interstate, she was afraid to cover her ears with her hands for
fear that the dead child was using the cover of that noise to creep
closer, closer.
She had to get out.
When he left the dark garage where he had taken refuge from the pack of
drugged-out delinquents (which is what he had to believe they were; he
knew no other way to explain them), Sam Booker went straight to Ocean
Avenue and stopped in Knight's Bridge Tavern just long enough to buy a
six-pack of Guinness Stout to go.
Later, in his room at Cove Lodge, he sat at the small table and drank
beer while he pored over the facts of the case. On September 5, three
National Farmworkers Union organizers Julio Bustamante, his sister Maria
Bustamante, and Maria's fiance, Ramon Sanchez-were driving south from
the wine country, where they had been conducting discussions with
vineyard owners about the upcoming harvest. They were in a
four-year-old, tan Chevy van. They stopped for dinner in Moonlight
Cove. They'd eaten at the Perez Family Restaurant and had drunk too
many margaritas (according to witnesses among the waiters and customers
at Perezs that night), and on their way back to the interstate, they'd
taken a dangerous curve too fast; their van had rolled and caught fire.
None of the three had survived.
That story might have held up and the FBI might never have been drawn
into the case, but for a few inconsistencies. For one thing, according
to the Moonlight Cove police de
partment's official report, Julio
Bustamante had been driving. But Julio had never driven a car in his
life; furthermore, he was unlikely to do so after dark, for he suffered
from a form of night blindness. Furthermore, according to witnesses
quoted in the police report, Julio and Maria and Ramon were all
intoxicated, but no one who knew Julio or Ramon had ever seen them drunk
before; Maria was a lifelong teetotaler.
The Sanchez and Bustamante families, of San Francisco, also - 91 were
made suspicious by the behavior of the Moonlight Cove authorities. None
of them were told of the three deaths until September 10, five days
after the accident. Police chief Loman Watkins had explained that
Julio's, Maria's, and Ramon's paper IDs had been destroyed in the
intense fire and that their bodies had been too completely burned to
allow swift identification by fingerprints. What of the van's license
plates? Curiously, Loman had not found any on the vehicle or torn loose
and lying in the vicinity of the crash. Therefore, with three badly
mangled and burned bodies to deal with and no way to locate next of kin
on a timely basis, he had authorized the coroner, Dr. Ian Fitzgerald,
to fill out death certificates and thereafter dispose of the bodies by
cremation.
"We don't have the facilities of a big-city morgue, you understand,"
Watkins had explained.
"We just can't keep cadavers long tenn, and we had no way of knowing g
how much time we'd need to identify these people. We thought they might
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 12
