Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far
back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel,
where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the
first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who
else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was
to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and
conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but
when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half
as bright as he thought he was.
Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was
huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears they were a bit
ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons,
squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.
Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with
the sheriffs department, where Sampson had served before joining the
City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been present or he had
striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad
and rocklike. He held a little box that contained four small floppy
diskettes.
He showed it to Julie and said, "Is this what he was after?"
"Could be," she said, accepting the box.
Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, "I'll have to go down one
floor to Ackroyd's office, switch on the computer POP these in, and see
what's on them."
"Go ahead," Sampson said.
"You'll have to accompany me," Bobby said to McGrath the officer who had
brought them up on the elevator.
"keep a watch on me, make sure I don't tamper with the evidence, he
indicated toward Rasmussen. "We don't want this piece of slime thinking
they were blank disks, saying I framed him copying the real stuff onto
them myself."
As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the
second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen.
"You know who I am?"
Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.
"I'm Bobby Dakota's wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It
was my Bobby you tried to kill."
He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.
She said, "Know what I'd like to do to you?" She held one of her hands
down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails.
"For starters, I'd like to grab you by the throat hold your head against
the wall, and ram two of these nice sharp fingernails straight through
your eyes, all the way deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and
twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever's messed in
there."
"Jesus, lady," Sampson's partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside
anyone but Sampson, he would have been a better man.
"Well," she said, "he's too screwed up to get any help from a prison
psychiatrist."
Sampson said, "Don't do anything foolish, Julie."
Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that
was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be
frightened by it. A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had
accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale.
To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and querulous to be as tough
as he intended, Rasmussen said, "Keep this crazy bitch away from me."
"She's not actually crazy," Sampson said. "Not clinically speaking, at
least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I'm
afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I
wouldn't say she's crazy."
Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, "Thank you so much,
Sam."
"You'll notice I didn't say anything about the other half of his
accusation," Sampson said good-naturedly.
"Yeah, I got your point."
While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.
Everyone harbored a special fear, a private bogeyman built to his own
specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew
what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights.
Not confining spaces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or
darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent
weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of
blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true
obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was
deteriorating, and he'd petitioned to be tested periodically for
syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases that, untreated, could result in
blindness. When not in prison-and he had been there twice-he had a
standing, monthly appointment with an ophthalmologist in Costa Mesa.
Still squatting in front of Rasmussen, Julie took hold of his chin. He
flinched. She twisted his head toward her. She thrust two fingers of
her other hand at him, raked them down his cheek, making red welts on
his wan skin, but not hard enough to draw blood.
He squealed and tried to strike her with his cuffed hands, but he was
inhibited by both his fear and the chain that tethered his wrists to his
ankles.
"What the hell you think you' doing?"
She spread the same two fingers with which she'd scratched him, and now
she poked them at him, stopping just two inches short of his eyes.
He winced, made a mewling sound, and tried to pull loose of her, but she
held him fast by the chin, forcing a confrontation.
"Me and Bobby have been together eight years, more than seven, and
they've been the best years of my life but you come along and think you
can just squash him the way you'd squash a bug."
She slowly brought her fingertips closer to his eyes. An inch and a
half. One inch.
Rasmussen tried to pull back. His head was against the wall He had
nowhere to go.
The sharp tips of her manicured fingernails were less than half an inch
from his eyes.
"This is police brutality," Rasmussen said.
"I'm not a cop," Julie said.
"They are," he said, rolling his eyes at Sampson and Burdock. "Better
get this bitch away from me, I'll sue your ass off."
With her fingernails she flicked his eyelashes.
His attention snapped back to her. He was breathing fast and suddenly
he was sweating too.
She flicked his lashes again, and smiled.
The dark pupils in his yellow-brown eyes were open wide.
"You bastards better hear me, I swear, I'll sue, they'll kick you off
the force-"
She flicked his lashes again.
He closed his eyes tight.
"-they'll take away your god damned uniforms and badges, they'll throw
you in prison, an you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, they get
the shit kicked out of them, broken, killed, raped!" His voice spiraled
up, cracked on the last word, like the voice of an adolescent boy.
Glancing at Sampson to be sure she had his tacit if not active approval
to carry this just a little further, glancing also at Burdock and seeing
that h
e was not as placid as Sampson but would probably stay out of it
for a while yet, Julie pressed her fingernails against Rasmussen's
eyelids.
He attempted to squeeze his eyes even more tightly shut.
She pressed harder.
"You tried to take Bobby away from me, so I'll take your eyes away from
you."
"You're nuts!"
She pressed still harder.
"Make her stop," Rasmussen demanded of the two cops.
"If you didn't want me to have my Bobby to look at, why should I let you
look at anything ever again?"
"What do you want?"
Perspiration poured down Rasmussen's face; he looked like a candle in a
bonfire, melting fast.
"Who gave you permission to kill Bobby?"
"Permission? What do you mean? Nobody. I don't need-"
"You wouldn't have tried to touch him if your employer hadn't told you
to do it."
"I knew he was on to me," Rasmussen said frantically, and because she
had not let up the pressure with her nails, thin tears flowed from under
his eyelids.
"I knew he was out there, tumbled to him five or six days ago, even
though he used different vans, trucks, even that orange van with the
county seal on it. So I had to do something, didn't I? I couldn't walk
away from the job, too much money at stake. I couldn't just let him
nail me when I finally got Wizard, so I had to do something. Listen,
Jesus, it was as simple as that."
"You're just a computer freak, a hired hacker-morally bent, sleazy, but
you're no tough guy. You're soft, squishy-soft. You wouldn't plan a
hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it."
"I don't have a boss. I'm freelance."
"Somebody still pays you." She risked more pressure, not with the
points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was
so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could
feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of
his eyelids. He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and
whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain. He was shaking;
his shackles clinked and rattled. More tears squeezed from beneath his
lids.
"Delafield." The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying
simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might.
"Kevin Delafield."
"Who's he?" Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen's chin with one hand,
her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.
"Microcrest Corporation."
"That's who hired you for this?"
He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the
slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his
eyes.
"Yeah. Delafield. A nut case. A renegade. They don't understand
about him at Microcrest. They know he gets results for them. When this
hits the fan, I won't be surprised by it, blown away. So let go of me.
What do you want?"
She let go of him.
Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision then broke
down and sobbed with relief.
As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned
with the officer who had accompanied him down stairs to Ackroyd's
office. Bobby looked at Rasmussen, his head at Julie, clucked his
tongue, and said,
"You've been naughty, haven't you, dear? Can't I take you anywhere
"I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen. That's all."
"He seems to have found it stimulating," Bobby said.
Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping
uncontrollably.
"We disagreed about something," Julie said.
"Movies, books?"
"Music."
"Ah."
Sampson Garfeuss said softly, "You're a wild woman Julie."
"He tried to have Bobby killed," was all she said.
Sampson nodded.
"I'm not saying I don't admire will sometimes... a little. But you
sure as hell owe me on this one."
"I do," she agreed.
"You owe me more than one," Burdock said.
"This guy's going to file a complaint. You can bet your ass on it."
"Complaint about what?" Julie asked. "He's not marked."
Already the faint welts on Rasmussen's cheek were faint Sweat, tears,
and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.
"Listen," Julie told Burdock, "he cracked because I just happened to
know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap,
like cutting a diamond. It worked because scum like him thinks everyone
else is scum, too, thinks we're capable of doing what he'd do in the
same situation. I'd never put out his eyes, but he might've put mine
out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I'd do him like
he would've done me. All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes
against him. Psychology. Nobody can file a complaint about the
application of a little psychology."
She turned to Bobby and said, "What was on those diskettes?"
"Wizard. Not trash data. The whole thing. These have to be the files
he duplicated. He only made one set while I was watching, and after the
shooting started he didn't have time to make backup copies."
The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board. When
the doors opened, a plain-clothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer,
stepped into the hallway.
Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.
She said, "This is evidence. The whole case might rest on it. You
think you can keep track of it?"
Dainer grinned.
"Gosh, ma'am, I'll try."
FRANK POLLARD-alias James Roman, and George Farris-looked in the trunk
of the stolen Chevy found a small bundle of tools wrapped in a felt
pouch tucked in the wheel well. He used a screwdriver to take the
plates off the car.
Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and more quiet
neighborhoods in fog bound Laguna, he parked on a dark side street and
exchanged the Chevy's plates for those on an Oldsmobile. With luck, the
owner of the Olds wouldn't notice the new plates for a couple of days,
maybe even a day or longer; until he reported the switch, the Chevy
wouldn't match anything on a police hot sheet and he would, therefore be
relatively safe to drive. In any case, Frank intended to get rid of the
car by tomorrow night and either boost a new one or use some of the cash
in the flight bag to buy legal wheels. Though he was exhausted, he
didn't think it wise to check into a motel. Four-thirty in the morning
was a damned hour for anyone to be wanting a room. Furthermore, he was
unshaven, and his thick hair was matted and oily, and his jeans and
checkered blue flannel shirt were dirty and filthy from his recent
adventures. The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to
himself, so he decided to catch a couple hours of sleep in the car.
He drove farther south, into Laguna Niguel, where he parked on a quiet
residential street, under the immense bow of a date palm. He stretched
out on the back seat, as foully as possible without benefit o
f
sufficient legroom or pillow and closed his eyes.
For the moment he was not afraid of his unknown pursuers because he felt
that the man was no longer nearby. Temporarily, at least, he had given
his enemy the shake, and had no desire to lie awake in fear of a hostile
face suddenly appearing at the window. He was also able to put out of
his mind all questions about his identity and the money in the flight
bag; he was so tired-and his thought processes were so fuzzy-that any
attempt to puzzle out solutions to those mysteries would be fruitless.
He was kept awake, however, by the memory of how strange the events in
Anaheim had been, a few hours ago. The foreboding gusts of wind. The
eerie flowerlike music. Imploding windows, exploding tires, failed
brakes, failed steering...
Who had come into that apartment behind the blue light?
Was "who" the right word... or would it be more accurate to ask what
had been searching for him?
During his urgent flight from Anaheim to Laguna, he'd not had the
leisure to reflect upon those bizarre incidents, but now he could not
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 5
