Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place
Page 45
one hand.
For the Second time in less than an hour, Candy heard faint away sirens
swelling in the night. The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and
called the police.
Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the question. He did
not say anything, either, and the expression on his stone face remained
unchanged. He seemed like a deaf-mute. the strangeness of the man's
demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.
He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun
at him in the kitchen, even though he had telaPorted out of there with
the impact of the second slug. Most likely, he had fired every round
reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was
feeling. He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and
reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone,
which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy
and took the weapon away from him.
But he stayed in the doorway. Either of those two shots could have been
dead-center in his heart. The power within him was great, but he could
not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.
instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from
him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched
out beside the woman.
"What the hell?" Candy said aloud.
Clint took hold of her dead hand. His other hand held the.38 revolver.
He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes
glistened with what might have been unshed tears. He put the muzzle of
the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.
Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think
what to do next. He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant
sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie,
whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the
dead man on the bed shared with them. If he ever hoped to learn who
Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew
of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might
slide out of it, he couldn't waste this opportunity.
He hurried to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew
the wallet from his pants pocket. He flipped it open and saw the
private investigator's license. Opposite it, in another plastic window,
was a business card for Dakota & Dakota.
Candy remembered a vague image of the Dakota & Dakota offices, which had
come to him in Thomas's room when he had obtained a vision of Clint from
the scrapbook. There was an address on the card. And below the name
Clint Karaghiosis, in smaller type, were the names Robert and Julia
Dakota.
Outside, the sirens had died. Someone was pounding on the front door.
Two voices shouted,
"Police!" Candy threw the wallet aside and took the gun out of the dead
man's hand. He broke open the cylinder. It was a five shot weapon, and
all of the chambers were filled with expended cartridges. Clint had
fired four rounds in the kitchen, but even in his moment of vengeful
fury, he had possessed enough control to save the last bullet for
himself.
"Just because of a woman?" Candy said uncomprehendingly, as if the dead
man might answer him.
"Because he couldn't get sex from her any more now? Why does sex matter
so much? Couldn't you get sex from another woman? Why was sex with
this one so important, you didn't want to live without it?" They were
still pounding on the door. Someone spoke through a bullhorn, but Candy
didn't pay attention to what was being said.
He dropped the gun and wiped his hand on his pants, cause he suddenly
felt unclean. The dead man had handled it, and the dead man seemed to
have been obsessed with one question, the world was a cesspool of lust
and bauchery, and Candy was glad that God and his mother had spared him
from the sick desires that seemed to infect nearly everyone else.
He left that house of sinners.
SLUMPED ON the sofa, Hal Yamataka had a slice of pizza in one hand and
the MacDonald novel in the other, when he heard the hollow flowerlike
warble. He dropped both to his feet.
the book and the food, and shot
"Frank?" The half-open door swung slowly inward, not because it was
being pushed open by anyone but because a sudden draft, sweeping in from
the reception lounge, was strong enough to move it.
"Frank?" Hal repeated.
As he crossed the room, the sound faded and the draft died. But by the
time he reached the doorway, the unmelodiclar 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 blin
ked 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
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. Thouflown from him, but it had been too short to attract
notice. The explosion of the glass and the tinny clanging of the blinds
had been loud enough, but the action had been over before anyone could
have located the source of the sound.
A four-lane street encircled the Fashion Island shopping center and also
served the office towers that, like this one, stood on the outer rim.
Apparently, however, no cars had been on it when the man had fallen.
Now two appeared to the left, one behind the other. Both passed without
slowing. A row of shrubberies, between the sidewalk and the street,
prevented motorists from seeing the corpse where it lay. The
office-tower ring of the sprawling complex was clearly not an area that
attracted pedestrians at night, so the dead man might remain
undiscovered until morning.
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He looked across the street, at the restaurants and stores that were on
this flank of the mall, five or six hundred yards away. A few people on
foot, shrunken by distance, moved between the parked cars and the
entrances to the businesses. No one appeared to have seen anything-and
in fact it would not have been that easy to spot a darkly dressed man
plunging past a mostly dark building, aloft and visible for only seconds
before gravity finished him.
Candy cleared his throat, wincing in pain, and spat toward the dead man
below.
He tasted blood. This time it was his own.
Turning away from the window, he surveyed the office, wondering where he
would find the answers he sought. If he could locate Bobby and Julie
Dakota, they might be able to explain Thomas's telepathy and more
important, they might be able to deliver Frank into his hands.
AFTER TWICE responding to an alarm from the radar did and avoiding two
speed traps in the west valley, Julie cranked the Toyota back up to
eighty-five, and they dusted L.A.
off their heels.
A few raindrops spattered the windshield, but the spring rain did not
last. She switched the wipers off moments after turning them on.
"Santa Barbara in maybe an hour," she said,
"as long cop with a sense of duty doesn't come along." The back of her
neck ached, and she was deeply weary, she didn't want to trade places
with Bobby; she didn't have the patience to be a passenger tonight. Her