"A little dizzy. That's all."
"What now?" He looked at her.
"What else? We go on to Santa Barbara.
El Encanto Heights, bring this thing to an end... somehow." CANDY
ARRIVED in the archway between a living room and dining room. No one
was in either place.
He heard a buzzing sound farther back in the house, and after a moment
he identified it was an electric razor. It stopped. Then he heard
water running in a sink, and the drone of a bath room exhaust fan.
He intended to head straight for the hall and the bath, take the man by
surprise. But he heard a rustle of paper from the opposite direction.
He crossed the dining room and stepped into the kitchen doorway. It was
smaller than the kitchen in his mother's house, but it was as spotlessly
clean and orderly as his mother's kitchen had not been since her death.
A woman in a blue dress was sitting at the table, her back to him. She
was leaning over a magazine, turning the pages one after the other, as
if looking for something of interest to read.
Candy possessed a far greater control of his telekinetic talents than
Frank enjoyed, and in particular could teleport more efficiently and
swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from
molecular resistance. Nevertheless he was surprised that she had not
gotten up to investigate, the sounds he had made during arrival had been
only one room away from her and, surely, odd enough to prick her!"
curiosity.
She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to where He could not
see much of her from behind. Her hair thick, lustrous, and so black it
seemed to have been spun from the same loom as the night. Her shoulders
and back were muscular. Her legs, which were both to one side of the
chair crossed at the ankles, were shapely. If he had been a man with
any interest in sex, he Supposed he would have been excited by the curve
of her calves.
Wondering what she looked like-and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to
know how her blood would taste stepped out of the open doorway and took
three steps to her. He made no effort to be silent, but she did not
look up.
The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her
hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of the chair.
He turned her around and was instantly excited by her.
He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, trimness
of her waist, the fullness of her breasts. Though beautiful, it was not
even her face that electrified him. Something else. A quality in her
gray eyes. Call it vitality. She was more alive than most people,
vibrant.
She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or an then struck him
furiously with both fists. She pounded his chest, battered his face.
Vitality! Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, her
vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of sexual charms.
He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-h of the
bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her
without drawing the attention of the man long as he could prevent her
from screaming. He struck her on the side of the head with his fist,
hammered her before she could scream. She slumped against him, not
unconscious dazed.
Shaking with the anticipation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back,
on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge He spread her legs
and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting
as that. As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him
in confusion, still rattlebrained from the blows she had taken. Then
her eyes began to clear. He saw horrified comprehension return to her,
and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which
was clean and sweet, intoxicating.
She thrashed beneath him.
She was so alive. So wonderfully alive. For a while.
WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and
Julie's office and offered some to Hal.
Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee
table, Hal said,
"You know what that stuff does to your arteries?" :'Why's everyone so
concerned about my arteries today?"
'You're such a nice young man. We'd hate to see you dead before you're
thirty. Besides, we'd always wonder what clothes you might've worn
next, if you'd lived."
"Not anything like what you're wearing, I assure you." Hal leaned over
and looked in the box that Lee held down to him.
"Looks pretty good. Rule of thumb-any pizza they'll bring to you,
they're selling service instead of good food. But this doesn't look bad
at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard
begins." Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and
put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate.
"There."
"You're not going to give me half',."
"What about the cholesterol?"
"Hell, cholesterol's just a little animal fat, it isn't arsenic." WHEN
THE woman's strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her.
Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch
another drop of it. The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him.
He remembered his sisters' cats, eating their own each time one of the
pack died, and he grimaced.
Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard the door open
farther back in the house. Footsteps approached. Candy quickly circled
the table, putting it and the woman between himself and the doorway to
the dining room From the vision induced by the dummy's scrapbook of
pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to kill as most
people were. He preferred to put a little distance between them, give
himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by
surprise.
Clint appeared in the doorway. Except for his outfit slacks, navy-blue
blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt looked the same as the psychic
impression he had left on the book. He had pumped a lot of iron in his
time. His hair thick, black, and combed straight back from his
forehead.
He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes Excited
by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy
watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next. There
were all sorts of ways it could and not one of them would be dull.
Clint did not react as Candy expected. He did not show surprise when he
saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table he did not seem horrified,
shattered by the loss of her, or raged. Something major changed in his
stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting
under the earth's crust.
Finally he met Candy's gaze, and said,
"You." The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling For a
moment. Candy could think of no way this man could know him-then he
remembered Thomas.
The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about<
br />
Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother's death. His
service in God's army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret
should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.
mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing God's
work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine
favor to others.
"Satan," she told him, "constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in
Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with
worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains
fire on them too. If you can't keep the secret, you'll die and go to
Hell for your big mouth."
"Candy," Clint said.
The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had
been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble,
though he had not broken the code of silence himself.
He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had
tilted his head and said,
"Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?" As
furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table,
wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined
to break the man, make him talk before killing him.
In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman's
murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired
two shots.
He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy
heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest,
pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head
or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the
mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his
mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate
the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport,
leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been
stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could
dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he'd stood. Those
were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he
was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of
that kitchen and back to his mother's house alive.
THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had
earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw's "Night mare." Bobby brooded,
staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop
thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a
bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms
with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad
dreams. Though exceptionally vivid, almost more real than real life,
there had been nothing uncanny about it-or so he had convinced himself.
But this was different. He could believe that these urgent, lava-hot
words had erupted from some subconscious. A dream, with complex
Freudian message couched in elaborate scenes and symbols-yes, that was
understandable; after all, the subconscious dealt in euphemisms a
metaphors. But this wordburst had been blunt, direct, like telegraph
delivered on a wire plugged directly into his cerebral cortex.
When he wasn't brooding, Bobby was fidgeting. Because Thomas. For some
reason, the longer he dwelt on the blaze of words the more Thomas
slipped into his thoughts. He could see connection between the two, so
he tried to put Thomas out of his mind and concentrate on turning up an
explanation for thee experience. But Thomas gently, insistently
returned, again and again. After a while Bobby got the uneasy feeling
there was a link between the wordburst and Thomas, though he had no
ghost of an idea what it might be.
Worse, as the miles rolled up on the odometer and they reached the
western end of the valley, Bobby began to understand that Thomas was in
danger. And because of me and Julie Bobby thought.
Danger from whom, from what?
The biggest danger that Bobby and Julie faced, right now was Candy
Pollard. But even that jeopardy lay in the future for Candy didn't know
about them yet; he was not aware that they were working on Frank's
behalf, and he might never become aware of it, depending on how things
went in Santa Barbara and El Encanto Heights. Yes, he had seen Bobby on
the beach at Punaluu, with Frank, but he had no way of knowing who Bobby
was. Ultimately, even if Candy became aware Dakota & Dakota's
association with Frank, there was no way that Thomas could be drawn into
the affair; Thomas was other, separate part of their lives. Right?
"Something wrong?" Julie said as she pulled the Toyota to the left, to
pass a big rig hauling Coors.
He could see nothing to be gained by telling her that Thomas might be in
danger. She would be upset, worried. And for what? He was just
letting his vivid imagination run away with him. Thomas was perfectly
safe down there in Cielo Vista.
"Bobby, what's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Why're you fidgeting?"
"Prostate trouble."
CHANNEL No. 5, a softly glowing lamp, cozy rose-patterned fabrics and
wallpaper...
He laughed with relief when he materialized in the bedroom, the bullets
left behind in that kitchen in Placentia, over a hundred miles away. His
wounds had knitted up as if they had never existed. He had lost perhaps
an ounce of blood and a few flecks of tissue, because one of the bullets
had passed through him and out his back, carrying that material with it
before he'd transported himself beyond the revolver's range. Everything
else was as it should be, however, and his flesh did not harbor even the
memory of pain.
He stood in front of the dresser for half a minute, breathing deeply of
the perfume that wafted up from the saturated handkerchief. The scent
gave him courage and reminded him of the abiding need to make them pay
for his mother's murder, all of them, not just Frank but the whole
world, which had conspired against her.
He looked at his face in the mirror. The gray-eyed woman's blood was no
longer on his chin and lips; he had left it behind him, as he might
leave water behind when teleporting out of a rainstorm. But the taste
of it was still in his mouth. And his reflection was without a doubt
that of vengeance personified.
Depending on the element of surprise and his ability to target his point
of arrival precisely now that he was familiar with the kitchen, he
returned to Clint's house. He intended to enter at the dining-room
doorway, immediately behind the man, directly opposite the point from
which he had dematerialized.
Either the experience of being shot had shaken him more than he
realized, or the rage jittering through him had passed the critical
point at which it interfered with his concentration. Whatever the
reason, he did not arrive where he intended, but by the door to the
garage, one-quarter instead of halfway around the room from his last
/>
position, to the right of Clint and not near enough to rush him and
seize the gun before it could be fired.
Except Clint was not present. And the woman's body had been removed
from the table. Only the blood remained as proof that she perished
there.
Candy could not have been gone more than a minute-time he had spent in
his mother's room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way. He
expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving
or checking desperately for a pulse. But as soon as he realized Candy
was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and... And who
He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint
thread of life remained unbroken in the worn getting her out of the way
in case Candy returned.
Cursing softly-then immediately begging his mother's and God's
forgiveness for his foul language-Candy tried the door into the garage.
It was locked. If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn't have paused
to lock up behind himself.
He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room,ward the foyer of
the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street. But he
heard a noise from deeper in the house and halted before he reached the
front door. He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back
to the bedroom A light was on in one of those rooms. He eased to the
door and risked a glance inside.
Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed. Candy watched, the
man pulled her skirt down over her legs. He still had the revolver in
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 44
