by Dean Koontz
Time and the ungodly heat had done their nasty work. The face—upside down to me—was bloated, darker than it had been when last I had seen it, and marbled with green. The mouth had sagged open. Thin cataracts of milky fluid had formed over both eyes, although I could still discern the delineation between the whites and irises.
As I reached across the dead man’s face to cut the shroud away from his chest, he licked my wrist.
I cried out in shock and disgust, reared back, and dropped the scissors.
From the cadaver’s sagging mouth exploded a squirming black mass, a creature so strange in this context that I didn’t realize what it must be until it fully extracted itself. On Robertson’s dead face, the thing reared up on its four back legs and raked the air with its forelegs. Tarantula.
Moving too quickly to give it a chance to bite, I backhanded the spider. It tumbled across the floor, sprang to its feet, and scurried into a far corner.
When I picked up the fallen scissors, my hand shook so badly that I gave the air a vigorous trimming before I was able to steady myself.
Concerned that more critters might have crawled into the bottom of the shroud to explore the fragrant contents, I resumed my work on the sheet with nervous care. I exposed the body to the waist without encountering another eight-legged forager.
In my startled reaction to the tarantula, I had blown the plug out of my right nostril. When the residue of lemony fluid evaporated, I could smell the body again, though not at full strength because I continued to breathe through my mouth.
Glancing toward the corner into which the spider had retreated, I discovered that it wasn’t there anymore.
I searched anxiously for a moment. Then, in spite of the poor light, I saw the hairy beast just to the left of the corner, three feet off the floor, slowly ascending the pink wall.
Too shaky and too pressed for time to unbutton the dead man’s shirt as I’d done in my apartment, I tore it open, popping buttons. One of them snapped off my face, and the others bounced across the floor.
When I pressed from my mind the inhibiting image of my mother with a pistol to her breast, I was able to focus the flashlight on the wound. Steeling myself to examine it closely, I saw why it had seemed strange to me.
I propped the flashlight against the body again and tore open three foil-wrapped towelettes. I sandwiched them into one thick pad and gently swabbed away the obscuring custardy ooze that had seeped from the wound.
The bullet had pierced a tattoo on Robertson’s chest, directly over his heart. This black rectangle was the same size and shape as the meditation card that I had found in his wallet. In the center of the rectangle were three red hieroglyphs.
Bleary-eyed, nervous, strung out on caffeine, I couldn’t quickly make sense of the design when it was upside down.
As I shifted from behind Robertson’s head to his side, those dead eyes seemed to move, tracking me under the semiopaque, milky cataracts.
When I checked on the tarantula, it had vanished from the farther wall. With the flashlight, I located it on the ceiling, working its way toward me. It froze in the direct light.
I turned the beam on the tattoo and discovered that the three red hieroglyphs were actually three letters of the alphabet in a script with flourishes. F … O … The third had been partially torn away by the bullet, but I was certain that it had been an L.
FOL. Not a word. An acronym. Thanks to Shamus Cocobolo, I knew what it meant: Father of Lies.
Robertson had worn the name of his dark lord over his heart.
Three letters: FOL. Three others, encountered elsewhere, and recently …
Suddenly I could see Officer Simon Varner vividly in memory: behind the wheel of the department cruiser in the parking lot at the bowling alley, leaning toward the open window, his face sweet enough to qualify him as the host of a children’s TV program, his heavy-lidded eyes like those of a sleepy bear, his burly forearm resting on the driver’s door, the “gang tattoo” that he claimed embarrassed him. Nothing as elaborate as Robertson’s tattoo, no similarity of style whatsoever. No black rectangle inlaid with fancy red script. Just another acronym in black block letters: D … something. Maybe DOP.
Did Officer Simon Varner, of the Pico Mundo Police Department, wear the name of this same master on his left arm?
If Robertson’s tattoo marked him with one of the devil’s many names, then Simon Varner’s put him in the same club.
Names for the devil raced through my mind: Satan, Lucifer, Old Scratch, Beelzebub, Father of Evil, His Satanic Majesty, Apollyon, Belial.…
I couldn’t think of the words that would explain the acronym on Varner’s arm, but I had no doubt that I had identified Robertson’s kill buddy.
At the bowling alley, there had been no bodachs around Varner as there had been, at times, around Robertson. If I’d seen him with bodachs in attendance, I might have realized what a monster he was.
Because they might take fingerprints, I hurriedly gathered the scraps of foil that had wrapped the towelettes and shoved them in a pocket of my jeans. I grabbed the scissors, stood, swept the ceiling with the flashlight, and found the tarantula directly overhead.
Tarantulas are timid. They do not stalk human beings.
I sprinted from the room, heard the spider drop to the floor with a soft but solid fleshy sound, slammed the door between us, and wiped prints off the knob with the tail of my T-shirt, then off the front door, too, as I left.
Because tarantulas are timid and because I believe there are no coincidences, I raced to the Chevy, threw the scissors and flashlight in the shopping bag, started the engine, and stomped the accelerator. I exited the grounds of the Church of the Whispering Comet with a shriek of tortured rubber, kicking up a spray of sand and crumbled blacktop, eager to reach the state highway before being surrounded by legions of tarantulas, an army of coyotes, and a slithering swarm of rattlesnakes all functioning in concert.
CHAPTER 56
Not DOP. POD. Prince of darkness. the source of Simon Varner’s tattooed acronym, POD, occurred to me as I crossed the town line, returning to Pico Mundo.
Costumed satanists performing weird rituals with an obscenely decorated chalice would be regarded by most people as being less well intentioned but also markedly sillier than the elaborately fur-hatted members of a men’s lodge called the Fraternal Order of Hedgehogs. Men who dress up to look bad are as suspect of being nerds as are those men with weed-whacker haircuts, tortoiseshell eyeglasses, pants worn five inches above the navel and three inches above the shoes, and bumper stickers that say JAR JAR BINKS RULES.
If I would have been inclined to dismiss them as nerds playing at evil, that inclination had not held past the moment when I found the Rubbermaid-boxed souvenirs in the freezer.
Now that I suspected the identity of Robertson’s collaborator, I trusted my supernatural gift to lead me to him. Considering that in the grip of psychic magnetism—Stormy sometimes shortens it to PM syndrome or PMS—I occasionally make abrupt turns, I drove with as much speed as seemed prudent.
Under the influence of PMS, I zone out to some extent, and try to think only about the object of my interest—in this case, Varner—rather than about where I am at any moment or about where I might be going. I’ll know where I’m going when I get there.
In this state, my conscious mind relaxes, and random thoughts pop into it almost as often as I make seemingly random turns in search of my quarry. This time, one of those thoughts involved my mother’s older sister, Cymry, whom I have never met.
According to my mother, Cymry is married to a Czechoslovakian whose first name is Dobb. My father says Cymry has never married.
Neither of my parents has a history of reliability. In this case, however, I suspect that my father is telling the truth and that I have no uncle of either Czechoslovakian or any other heritage.
My father says that Cymry is a freak, but he will say no more. His assertion infuriates my mother, who denies Cymry’s freakhood and calls her a g
ift from God.
This is an odd statement on my mother’s part, considering that she lives her life as if with the firm conviction that God does not exist.
The first time that I asked Granny Sugars about her mysterious firstborn, she dissolved in tears. I had never seen her cry before. The next day, still red-eyed, she had hit the road again in pursuit of faraway poker games.
The second time I asked her about Cymry, she became angry with me for pursuing the issue. I had never before seen her angry. Then she became cold and distant. She had never previously been that way with me, and her behavior reminded me too much of my mother.
Thereafter, I never asked about Cymry.
I suspect that in an institution somewhere, managed with drugs and humane restraints, I have an aunt who is at least a little like me. I suspect that as a child she didn’t conceal her special gift as I did.
This is probably why Granny Sugars, with all her poker winnings, left no estate of which I’m aware. I think she funded a trust to pay for Cymry’s care.
Over the years, my father has let slip certain clues leading me to speculate that Cymry’s sixth sense, whatever strange talents it may encompass, is accompanied by physical mutation. I think she scared people not just because of things that she said but also because of how she looked.
More often than not, a baby born with one mutation will, in fact, have two or more. Ozzie says—and apparently not in his role as a writer of fiction—that one in every eighty-eight thousand babies is born with a sixth finger on one hand, as he was. Hundreds if not thousands of them should be walking the streets of America, yet how many six-fingered hands have you seen on adults? You don’t encounter them because most of those babies are born with other and more terrible deformities that cause them to die in early infancy.
Those six-fingered children fortunate enough to be robustly healthy will usually receive surgery if the superfluous digit can be removed without affecting the function of the hand. They walk among us, Little Ozzie says, passing for five-fingered “mundanes.”
I think all this is true, because Ozzie is proud of his sixth finger and enjoys collecting lore on what he calls “the natural-born pickpockets who are members of my superior breed.” He says that his second mutation is his ability to write well and swiftly, turning out enthusiastically received books at a prodigious pace.
I dream of Aunt Cymry from time to time. These are not prophetic dreams. They are full of yearning. And sadness.
Now, at 12:21, daydreaming about Cymry yet acutely and nervously aware of precious minutes passing, fully in the PMS zone, I expected to find Officer Simon Varner in the vicinity of either the bowling alley or the multiplex theater where the dog movie would unreel shortly after one o’clock. Instead, I was led unexpectedly to the Green Moon Mall.
What I saw was unusual for a Wednesday in summer: a packed parking lot. The giant banner reminded me that the mall merchants’ annual summer sale had begun at ten o’clock this morning and would continue through the weekend.
What a crowd.
CHAPTER 57
A galaxy of suns blazed on the windshields of the serried cars and SUVs, a lightquake that shocked my bloodshot eyes and forced me to squint.
Three-story department stores anchored the north and south ends of the mall. Numerous specialty shops occupied the two levels between those leviathans.
PMS drew me to the department store at the north end. I drove around to the back and parked near a wide descending ramp that led to the subterranean loading docks where trucks delivered merchandise.
Three spaces away stood a black-and-white police cruiser. No cop in sight.
If this was Varner’s car, he was already in the mall.
My hands shook. The buttons on my cell phone were small. To get it right, I had to key in the number of Burke Bailey’s twice.
I intended to tell Stormy to leave work immediately, to get out of the mall by the nearest door, to go quickly to her car and drive away fast, drive anywhere, just drive.
As the number was ringing, I hung up. She might not at this moment be destined to cross Varner’s path, but if I persuaded her to get the hell out of there, she might cross his sights at the instant that he pulled his gun and opened fire.
Her destiny is to be with me forever. We have the card from the fortune-telling machine as proof. It hangs above her bed. Gypsy Mummy had given us, for a single quarter, what that other couple couldn’t buy at any price.
Logic argued that if I did nothing, she would be safe. If she changed her plans at my urging, I might be thwarting her destiny and mine. Trust in fate.
My responsibility was not to warn off Stormy but to stop Simon Varner before he was ready to put his plan in action, before he killed anyone.
There you have your classic easier-said-than-done. He was a cop, and I wasn’t. He carried at least one firearm, and I didn’t. Taller than me, stronger than me, trained in every possible method to subdue an aggressive citizen, he enjoyed all the advantages—except a sixth sense.
The gun that had killed Robertson was stashed under the driver’s seat. I had put it there the previous night, meaning to dispose of it later.
Leaning forward, I fumbled under my seat, found the weapon, and withdrew it. I felt as if I were holding hands with Death.
After more fumbling, I figured out how to eject the magazine. I counted nine rounds. Bright brass. Loaded nearly to capacity. The only round missing was the one that had put a hole in Robertson’s heart.
I shoved the magazine back into the pistol. It clicked in place.
My mother’s gun has a safety. A red dot is revealed when the safety is switched off.
This piece appeared to have no comparable feature. Perhaps the safety was built into the trigger, requiring a double pull.
No safety on my heart. It was booming.
I felt as though I were holding hands with death, all right—my death.
With the pistol in my lap, I picked up the phone and punched in Chief Porter’s private cell number, not his police-department line. The keys seemed to be growing smaller, as if this were a phone Alice had gotten from a hookah-smoking caterpillar, but I entered the seven digits correctly on the first try, and pressed SEND.
Karla Porter answered on the third ring. She said that she was still in the ICU waiting room. She’d been allowed to see the chief on three occasions, for five-minute visits.
“He was awake the last time, but very weak. He knew who I was. He smiled for me. But he’s not able to talk much, and not coherently. They’re keeping him semi-sedated to facilitate healing. I don’t think he’ll be really talking much before tomorrow.”
“But he’s going to be all right?” I asked.
“That’s what they say. And I’m beginning to believe it.”
“I love him,” I said, and heard my voice break.
“He knows that, Oddie. He loves you, too. You’re a son to him.”
“Tell him.”
“I will.”
“I’ll call,” I promised.
I pressed END and dropped the phone on the passenger’s seat.
The chief could not help me. No one could help me. No sad, dead prostitute to quell the killing frenzy of this coyote. Just me.
Intuition told me not to take the pistol. I slid it under the seat again.
When I switched off the engine and got out of the car, the fiery sun was both a hammer and an anvil, forging the world between itself and its reflection.
Psychic magnetism works whether I’m rolling on wheels or afoot. I was drawn to the delivery ramp. I went down into the coolness of the subterranean loading docks.
CHAPTER 58
With a low ceiling and endless gray concrete, the mall-employee underground parking garage and loading dock had the bleak and ominous atmosphere of an ancient tomb deep under Egyptian sands, the tomb of a hated pharaoh whose subjects had buried him on the cheap, without glittering gold vessels or ornamentation of any kind.
The elevated dock ran the l
ength of the immense structure, and big trucks were backed up to it at various points. At the department store, two semis at a time could bypass the dock and pull directly into an enormous receiving room.
This place clattered and hummed with activity as the truck crews off-loaded late-arriving sales merchandise and the harried stockroom employees prepped it for delivery to the sales floors after the close of business.
I passed among racks, carts, carousels, bins, boxes, and drums of merchandise, everything from women’s party dresses to culinary gadgets to sporting goods. Perfume, swimwear, gourmet chocolates.
Nobody challenged my right to be there, and when I plucked a hardwood baseball bat out of a drum full of them, no one ordered me to put it back.
Another drum contained hollow aluminum bats. They weren’t what I wanted. I preferred a bat with heft. I required a certain balance to the instrument. You can better break an arm with a wooden club, more easily shatter a knee.
Maybe I would need the baseball bat, maybe I wouldn’t. The fact that it was there—and that PMS brought me to it—seemed to suggest that if I didn’t avail myself of it, then I would later regret my decision.
The only extracurricular activity I went out for in high school was baseball. As I wrote earlier, I had the best stats on the team, even though I could only play home games.
I’m not out of practice, either. The Pico Mundo Grille has a team. We play other businesses and civic organizations; we whup ass, year after year.
Repeatedly, loaded forklifts and electric carts announced their approach with soft beeps and musical toots. I stepped out of their way but kept moving, though I had no idea where I was going.
In my mind’s eye: Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm. Find the bastard.
A pair of extra-wide double doors swung into a corridor with a bare concrete floor and painted concrete walls. I hesitated, looked right, turned left.
My stomach churned. I needed antacids.
