by Dean Koontz
Gottfrey intends to wait for darkness. Ancel and Clare think they are clever. They fail to understand, however, that their roles are not central to this drama, while he is the iconic loner around whom every scene is structured. Their fate shall be enslavement.
12
AS RADLEY DUBOSE PROWLS THE scene beside the ruined garage, the white, wet substance clings to his shoes, and pea gravel sticks to the pasty stuff.
This is reason enough for Carter Jergen to remain a few steps back from the site of the investigation. He is wearing gray suede seven-eye lace-up ankle-fit trainers by Axel Arigato. In both the Corrigan and Atlee houses, he barely avoided getting blood on the exquisitely finished suede. He is damn well not going to soil the shoes irrevocably by competing with Dubose in a pointless game of Name the Mysterious Crap.
The big man tramps across the layer of gravel—which seems to average four or five inches in depth—scowling as he considers the subtleties of texture and distribution. With one shoe, he scrapes away the little stones to reveal bare earth.
“It’s mud underneath. Someone recently used a lot of water with an urgent purpose,” he observes solemnly, as though he will shortly retire to his rooms on Baker Street, there to fill his favorite pipe with black tobacco and play his violin while pondering this clue.
Dubose walks in widening circles, scanning the ground. He halts when, in addition to the crunching noise, there arises a metallic sound like an empty soft-drink can crumpling under his weight. He scrapes aside several inches of little stones to reveal a buried California license plate. A pair of plates. Not rusted and long out of date. The current design.
Frowning, he holds the plates between thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if they are the first two cards in a poker hand played with a giant deck.
From his safe-for-the-shoes position, Carter Jergen feels his oppressive sense of impending doom relieved somewhat by the mixed emotions that Dubose stirs in him: contempt for the man’s boobish pretension, grudging admiration for the way he often resolves a mystery in spite of being born with a hillbilly brain that has been further stupefied by the faculty of Princeton, and an embarrassing but undeniable adolescent veneration of the big man’s total coolness and—admit it—his genuine charisma.
Suddenly Dubose casts aside the license plates and withdraws his smartphone from a pocket. “No time to relay this through the Desert Flora Study Group. Got to call him direct.”
“Call who?” Jergen asks.
“Whom. The helo pilot. Live and learn, Cubby.” When the pilot answers, Dubose says, “Hawk somehow brought a white Suburban through roadblocks. Washed off the special-formula paint with a solvent. Put on federal tags. It’s that black FBI Suburban you scoped out where the truck took down a house. Find it, and we’ll have the bitch.”
Jergen stands awestruck, his hope renewed.
13
THEY WERE TWO MINUTES FROM Bernie. Jane wasn’t superstitious, but her many experiences of desperate situations had taught her that sometimes the closer your destination, the more you might slip-slide away. Which only made sense. When your adversaries were formidable—whether they were two sociopathic serial killers on an isolated farm or multiple law-enforcement agencies of the United States government—the longer you took to wrap up a piece of business, the greater the chances that you would lose momentum and the other side would gain it. In such circumstances, time was seldom a friend.
She called out to Travis where he curled in the duffel bag on the floor behind the driver’s seat. “How’re you doing, Travis?” When he didn’t answer, she raised her voice. “Travis, are you okay?”
This time he said something, but too softly for her to hear.
Cornell relayed the boy’s reply. “Umm. Umm. He says bandages don’t talk.”
Luther laughed, and after a hesitation, Jane laughed as well, though at the moment laughter made her nervous. Even though she didn’t believe in fate, she wanted to avoid taunting it.
Luther turned off the highway onto the approach road to the RV campground. Bernie had moved the motor home to the overflow parking lot outside the main gate. He stood beside it in the sun. In white sneakers and white chinos and a pink-and-blue Hawaiian shirt, slight and white-haired, with a face that would have gotten him role after role as a kindly grandfather if the movies still told stories in which kindly grandfathers were relevant, just the sight of him would have given her hope. Except the uncharacteristic angularity and tension of his posture signaled that something was wrong.
14
JERGEN HEARS A CAR STOP in front of the house, and a door slams. Already additional investigators are swarming to the property.
Looking around wonderingly at the garden hose and the license plates and the pea gravel and the chalky, pasty white stuff, he is able to put some of the pieces together, but the puzzle is far from complete.
“How can you be sure it was Hawk?”
“Helo pilot reported one agent was a woman.”
“We have several in the valley right now.”
“The other was a black guy.”
“We got black guys.”
“That Minnesota sheriff she teamed up with before was black.”
“You think the boy was hiding in the house?” Jergen asks.
“Maybe in the house.” Dubose’s attention shifts to the distant ramshackle barn. “The house or somewhere on the property.”
“But why did Hosteen drive his truck into this place?”
“I don’t know everything, Cubby.” He picks up the license plates he previously discarded. “Gotta call Desert Flora, have them run a search of plates scanned on incoming traffic, see where the Suburban came from when it was white.”
Just then an outlandish yet somehow familiar figure appears from around the ruins of the house and says, “Hey now, boys, that there’s some ass-kickin’ truck you got. I’d get myself one if I had more than a pot to pee in, which is about all I got after four lazy squanderin’ husbands and what with the pathetic check I get from the thievin’ embezzlers at Social Security.”
She looks as old as the desert, centuries of hot sun baked into her wrinkled face, long tangles of brittle white hair frizzling from under her wide-brimmed straw hat. Dressed in a red neckerchief, a tan-linen shirt almost as wrinkled as she is, cargo-pocket khakis, and red athletic shoes, she carries a big shoulder-slung purse from which peers a small dog, a Pomeranian that regards Jergen and Dubose with keen interest.
“I figured a fancy-ass truck like yours couldn’t stay hid for long in the Anza-Borrego. A dandy like that’n, must take years of profitable sinnin’ to pay for it. What’s the sticker price on that there sucker?”
Dubose smiles, though not warmly, and says, “We’re FBI and this is a crime scene, ma’am. You need to leave the property.”
She cocks her head and squints at them, and the Pomeranian does the same, as if it mimics her gestures as a parrot might mimic her colorful language.
“You boys ’member me broke down by the side of the road in killer heat, you went blowin’ by like a wind out of Hell?”
“Ah,” Jergen says, “yes, that rust-bucket Dodge pickup.”
The old woman says, “I come here to tell you a thing or damn two about manners and courtesy, seein’ as how your worthless parents never done their job.”
“Granny,” Dubose says, “you could get yourself in a world of trouble if you don’t vamoose.”
Ignoring the implication that she risks arrest for interfering with an investigation, the old woman says, “Maybe some didn’t stop ’cause they were on their way to comfort a dyin’ child. But you’re not that kind. What blisters my butt is you not only go flyin’ past, but you just got to mock me with a toot-toot. Wasn’t me alone might wither and blow away in that killer heat, was Larry, too.” At the mention of his name, Larry the Pomeranian looks adoringly at his guardian. “This her
e precious pup is the light of my life, the only one who’s loved me in ninety years. You toot-toot me, you toot-toot him.”
Dubose has had enough. When the big man has had enough, he is a wonder to watch. “Listen, you stupid dried-up old twat, you get your skinny ass out of here, or I’ll break more bones than you can count, make you watch me crush Larry’s head, and then bury you alive in the rubble of this house.”
She sighs. “Idiot.” She draws a Sig Sauer P245 from her monster purse and shoots Dubose twice point-blank. She shoots Jergen as he goes for his pistol, shoots him again as the weapon falls from his hand.
He collapses to the pea gravel.
Suffering pain far greater than anything he’s ever known or imagined, Jergen looks up at the old woman as she stares down with disdain. “Rattlesnakes,” she declares. “Shit, I musta killed a thousand of ’em.”
From Jergen’s perspective, when the shooter turns and walks away, she is not a diminutive old woman any longer, but a towering figure with a mystical aura. His entire life now seems to have been a wandering without purpose, incoherent until she walked in to say, Hey now, boys, that’s some ass-kickin’ truck you got, whereafter she has defined his life as he’s never been able to do, has drawn a red circle around his thirty-seven years and penciled in the margin one word: meaningless.
15
IN CASE THE AUTHORITIES WERE stopping all incoming and outgoing traffic at the roadblocks, as they had done little more than two and a half hours earlier, Cornell Jasperson would leave Borrego Valley in the motor home, tucked under the platform bed, where Luther Tillman had hidden earlier. Travis would occupy the smaller space under the built-in sofa, where Jane had been concealed.
She helped the boy extricate himself from the duffel bag, and she knelt beside the Suburban to hold him close, to feel the beating of his heart and look into his eyes. They were his father’s eyes in every striation, in their crystalline clarity, in the directness with which they met her eyes.
“Good so far,” she said. “Not much farther to go. Mr. Riggowitz will show you where to hide. He’s a lovely man. Do exactly what he tells you to do.”
“I will.”
“Listen, in there where you’re going to hide, there might be this cockroach. Don’t let it scare you at the wrong moment.”
“Cock-a-roaches don’t scare me, Mom.”
“I should have said don’t let it startle you. Be very quiet and still, and everything will be all right.”
“Why can’t you hide in the motor home with us?”
“There aren’t enough spaces to hide, sweetie. Besides, Luther and I are going to be Bernie’s escort. Like a police escort.”
She hugged him very tight again and kissed his cheek, his brow.
“Hurry now. Mr. Riggowitz is waiting.”
As Luther led the boy to meet Bernie at the starboard door of the Tiffin Allegro, into which Cornell had already climbed, as Jane got to her feet, she heard the helicopter.
16
CARTER JERGEN LYING HELPLESS ON a catafalque of pea gravel, under a searing sun as fierce as the eye of some merciless monocular judge, a chorus of crickets singing a monotonous dirge…
The agony first squeezes from him screams more terrible than those to which any of the people he’s executed have ever given voice. But either his nervous system short-circuits from an overload of pain or his brain is pumping out a flood of endorphins, for the torment soon subsides to mere misery. He doesn’t know exactly where he’s been shot and lacks the courage to assess his wounds. He is too weak to move and growing weaker by the moment. Bleeding out. He can smell the blood.
He is lying on his side, facing Radley Dubose, whom he believes is dead. The big man is sprawled flat on his back, arms out to his sides.
Then Dubose speaks. “An historic moment, my friend.”
“Call nine-one-one,” says Jergen as a flicker of hope fires through his unadjusted brain.
“No can do, Cubby. I’m paralyzed from the neck down. No feeling at all. Wish I’d called Desert Flora about the bitch Hawk before I called the pilot. Now only the pilot knows.”
Jergen begins to weep.
“No tears are warranted,” Dubose counsels. “This is a great and noble death.”
“Noble?” Carter Jergen is still capable of astonishment and a small flame of anger. “Noble? Tell me what the hell is noble about it?”
“We’re dying for the revolution.”
Jergen’s words come in a rhythm of exhaustion. “We’re dying ’cause you tooted at a creepy old, crazy old skank demented from a lifetime of vicious heat, tarantulas, snakes, flying bats eating flying beetles in the night, and four useless desert-rat husbands, who she probably deserved, the hateful bitch.”
“Whom, not who,” Dubose corrects. “Love the revolution, my friend. It is our monument.”
Jergen’s vision is fading. He can draw only shallow breaths. “It’s bullshit. The revolution. Just bullshit.”
“All revolutions are bullshit, Cubby. That is…until you win one. Then you rule like gods and take what you want, who you want. Meanwhile…man, what a ride.”
Jergen’s hearing is fading, too. Dubose sounds distant. He can hardly hear the big man. He whispers an expression of love, such as he knows it: “You were always so cool. How could this happen to you when you were always so cool?”
If Dubose answers, Jergen does not hear him.
17
THE POSSIBLE EVIL INTENTIONS OF those who fly the Airbus H120 imparted to the aircraft a monstrous quality, so that as it streaked across the desert scrub toward the RV campground, it appeared less like a machine than like a huge wasp with lethal venom to deliver. The helo’s approach was so direct and fast, Jane could only assume that in the half hour since the pilot left them unmolested at the ruined house, he had found a reason to reconsider their legitimacy and to seek them out.
Now he and his crewmate had seen Travis being led to the motor home, a boy approximately the size of the one they were hunting.
Jane pulled open the front passenger door and grabbed the Auto Assault-12 as the chopper racketed over the car, over the Tiffin Allegro, and executed an arc of return.
She hated this. She was trained for the street, not for the battlefield. In the Bureau, and even since, when she’d been forced to kill, the enemy had been a person, dimensional and detailed; she had seen his face, had known beyond all doubt that he was malicious and an immediate threat to her life or the life of an innocent. But this confrontation was of the nature of war, not law enforcement. She couldn’t see the faces of the men in the chopper, didn’t know their names, didn’t with certainty understand their intentions. In war you needed to kill at a distance, at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise you could be overwhelmed and lose your advantage—and then the fight. But the need to do this made her feel…not wicked, not even unclean, but in part responsible because it might not have come to this if she had been a little smarter, quicker.
There was no time for self-examination. She existed only for her boy, to give him a chance at life and perhaps yet a world worth living in. What laws Jane broke and what sins she committed in his defense were a cancer on no one else’s soul but her own, and she alone would bear the consequences all the way to the grave and perhaps beyond.
The pilot used the Airbus H120 as a weapon of intimidation, clearing the roof of the motor home by no more than twenty feet. Maybe the copilot was also a shooter. Jane couldn’t know if they were strictly on a surveillance run or might be combat ready. When the chopper crossed the Suburban and turned its flank to her, the starboard door might be open to facilitate automatic fire.
Loaded with slugs, the Auto Assault-12 had an effective range of one hundred meters. As the helo passed over the Suburban far lower than that, Jane moved boldly under it and emptied the drum magazine. With a muzzle velocity of eleven hundred feet per second, the sho
tgun pumped out thirty-two slugs in six seconds. The auto-fire reports stuttered loud across the parking lot, but the recoil-reduction system was as effective as claimed, the butt plate of the stock bumping against her shoulder not with jarring violence, but as if giving her a rapid series of attaboys to encourage her attack.
At such close range, the slugs ripped holes in the aircraft’s undercarriage. Wrecked one of the skids. Rattled hard through the whirling rotor blades to no good effect. Tore up the tail pylon. Blew out the tail rotor. Disintegrated the horizontal stabilizer.
Seventy or eighty feet past Jane, the Airbus wobbled into an uncontrolled death spin. It came back toward her, and a thrill of terror fired her heart as if it were a drum magazine in her breast. Then the chopper spun away from her, drawing a gray spiral of smoke on the bright air. The engine quit, and the helo tipped, and a blade of the rotary wing gouged the blacktop. The Airbus flipped, tumbled, exploded, vanishing in a beautiful bright flower of infinite petals that for a moment seemed to grant pilot and copilot absolution in death, but then the broken craft reappeared as a scorched carcass, and the petals of flame became mere tongues of fire that licked through the wreckage with fiendish hunger.
Jane turned toward the Suburban.
The two dogs were at the side window of the cargo area, neither of them barking. They seemed not to have been frightened by either the gunfire or the crashing Airbus. Their dark liquid eyes regarded Jane with grave interest, as though in their veins flowed the blood of seers, as if they intended, by the intensity of their stares, to convey to her the nature of some oncoming calamity.
Luther stood on the farther side of the vehicle. “Shit.”
“An avalanche of it,” she agreed.
“You think they had time to report finding us?”
