by Dean Koontz
I said, “I’m trying.”
“You were so fast, now you’re damn slow.”
“What do you think you know about me?”
In a coy voice, she said, “What is there to know, baby?”
“Not much.”
“For Danny’s sake, I hope that’s not true.”
I began to have the queasy if inexplicable feeling that somehow Dr. Jessup had been murdered … because of me.
“You don’t want to be in trouble this bad,” I said.
“Nobody can hurt me,” she declared.
“Is that right?”
“I’m invincible.”
“Good for you.”
“You know why?”
“Why?”
“I have thirty in an amulet.”
“Thirty what?” I asked.
“Ti bon ange.”
I had never heard the term before. “What does that mean?”
“You know.”
“Not really.”
“Liar.”
When she didn’t hang up but didn’t immediately say anything more, either, I sat on the ground, facing west again.
Except for an occasional clump of mesquite and a bristle of bunch-grass, the land was ash-gray and acid-yellow.
“You still there?” she asked.
“Where would I go?”
“So where are you?”
I traded another question: “Can I speak to Simon?”
“Simple or says?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Simple Simon or Simon Says?”
“Simon Makepeace,” I said patiently.
“You think he’s here?”
“Yes.”
“Loser.”
“He killed Wilbur Jessup.”
“You’re half-assed at this,” she said.
“At what?”
“Don’t disappoint me.”
“I thought you said I already had.”
“Don’t disappoint me anymore.”
“Or what?” I asked, and immediately wished that I had not.
“How about this.…”
I waited.
Finally she said, “How about, you find us by sundown or we break both his legs.”
“If you want me to find you, just tell me where you are.”
“What would be the point of that? If you don’t find us by nine o’clock, we also break both his arms.”
“Don’t do this. He never harmed you. He never harmed anyone.”
“What’s the first rule?” she asked.
Remembering our shortest and most cryptic conversation, from the previous night, I said, “I have to come alone.”
“You bring cops or anyone, we break his pretty face, and then the rest of his life, he’ll be butt ugly from top to bottom.”
When she hung up, I pressed END.
Whoever she might be, she was crazy. Okay. I’d dealt with crazy before.
She was crazy and evil. Nothing new about that, either.
CHAPTER 20
I shrugged out of my backpack and rummaged in it for an Evian bottle. The water wasn’t cold but tasted delicious.
The plastic bottle did not actually contain Evian. I had filled it at the tap in my kitchen.
If you would pay a steep price for bottled water, why wouldn’t you pay even more for a bag of fresh Rocky Mountain air if someday you saw it in the market?
Although I am not a skinflint, for years I have lived frugally. As a short-order cook with plans to marry, paid a fair but not lavish salary, I had needed to save for our future.
Now she is gone, and I am alone, and the last thing I need money for is a wedding cake. Yet from long habit, when it comes to spending on myself, I still pinch each penny hard enough to press it into the size of a quarter.
Given my peculiar and adventurous life, I don’t expect to live long enough to develop an enlarged prostate, but if I do miraculously reach ninety before I croak, I’ll probably be one of those eccentrics who, assumed to be poor, leaves a million dollars’ cash rolled up in old coffee cans with instructions to spend it on the care of homeless poodles.
After finishing the faux Evian, I returned the empty bottle to my backpack, and then watered a patch of desert with Odd’s finest.
I suspected that I had drawn close to my objective, and now I had a deadline. Sundown.
Before completing the final leg of the journey, however, I needed to know about a few things that were happening in the real world.
None of Chief Porter’s numbers were programmed for speed dial on Terri’s phone, but I had long ago memorized all of them.
He answered his mobile phone on the second ring. “Porter.”
“Sir, sorry to interrupt.”
“Interrupt what? You think I’m in a whirl of busy police work?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Right now, son, I feel like a cow.”
“A cow, sir?”
“A cow standing in a field, chewing its cud.”
“You don’t sound as relaxed as a cow,” I said.
“It’s not cow-relaxed I’m feeling. It’s cow-dumb.”
“No leads on Simon?”
“Oh, we’ve got Simon. He’s jailed in Santa Barbara.”
“That’s pretty fast work.”
“Faster than you think. He was arrested two days ago for starting a bar fight. He struck the arresting officer. They’re holding him for assault.”
“Two days ago. So the case …”
“The case,” he said, “isn’t what we thought it was. Simon didn’t kill Dr. Jessup. Though he says he’s happy someone did.”
“Was it maybe murder-for-hire?”
Chief Porter laughed sourly. “With Simon’s prison record, the job he was able to get was pumping out septic tanks. He lives in a rented room.”
“Some people would do a hit for a thousand bucks,” I said.
“They sure would, but the most they’d be likely to get from Simon is a free septic clean-out.”
The dead desert did a Lazarus, breathed and seemed about to rise. Bunch-grass shivered. Jimsonweed whispered briefly, but then fell silent as the air went still.
Gazing north, toward the distant thunderheads, I said, “What about the white van?”
“Stolen. We didn’t get any prints off it worth spit.”
“No other leads?”
“Not unless county CSI finds some strange DNA or other trace evidence at the Jessup place. What’s the situation with you, son?”
I surveyed the surrounding wasteland. “I’m out and about.”
“Feeling at all magnetic?”
Lying to him would be harder than lying to myself. “I’m being pulled, sir.”
“Pulled where?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m still on the move.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’d rather not say, sir.”
“You’re not gonna Lone Ranger this,” he worried.
“If that seems best.”
“No Tonto, no Silver—that’s not smart. Use your head, son.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to trust your heart.”
“No point in me arguing with you, is there?”
“No, sir. But something you could do is run a search of Danny’s room, look for evidence that a woman might’ve come into his life lately.”
“You know I’m not cruel, Odd, but as a cop, I have to stay real. If that poor kid went on a date, it would be all over Pico Mundo the next morning.”
“This might be a discreet relationship, sir. And I’m not saying Danny got anything from it that he hoped to. Fact is, maybe he got a world of hurt.”
After a silence, the chief said, “He would be vulnerable, you mean. To a predator.”
“Loneliness can lower your defenses.”
The chief said, “But they didn’t steal anything. They didn’t ransack the house. They didn’t even bother taking the money out of Dr. Jessup’s wallet.”
“So they wanted something
other than money from Danny.”
“Which would be—what?”
“That’s still a blind spot for me, sir. I can sort of feel a shape in it, but I can’t yet see the thing.”
Far to the north, between the charred sky and the ashen earth, the rain resembled shimmering curtains of smoke.
“I have to get moving,” I said.
“If we turn up anything about a woman, I’ll call you.”
“No, sir, I’d rather you didn’t. I need to keep the line open and save the battery. I just called because I wanted you to know there’s a woman in it, so if anything happens to me, you’ve got a starting place. A woman and three men.”
“Three? The one who Tasered you—and who else?”
“Thought one must be Simon,” I said, “but now he can’t be. All I know about the others is, one of them has big feet.”
“Big feet?”
“Say a prayer for me, sir.”
“I do each night.”
I terminated the call.
After hoisting my backpack, I continued the climb that had been interrupted by the woman’s call. The slope rose a long way but at a gentle incline. Rotten shale crunched and slid from under my feet, repeatedly testing my agility and balance.
A few small lizards skittered out of my way. I remained watchful for rattlesnakes.
Rugged leather hiking boots would have been better than the softer sneakers that I was wearing. Eventually, I would probably have to do some sneaking, and these once-white shoes would be ideal for that.
Maybe I shouldn’t have worried about footwear, snakes, and balance if I was destined to be killed by someone waiting behind a white paneled door. On the other hand, I didn’t want to rely on the theory that the repetitive dream was reliably predictive, because perhaps it had just been the consequence of too much fried food and spicy salsa.
Distant and celestial, a great door rolled open, rumbling in its tracks, and a breeze stirred the day again. When the faraway thunder faded, the air did not fall still as it had earlier, but continued to chase through the sparse vegetation, like a ghost pack of coyotes.
When I reached the top of the hill, I knew that my destination lay before me. Danny Jessup would be found here, captive.
In the distance lay the interstate. A four-lane approach road led from that highway to the plain below. At the end of the road stood the ruined casino and the blackened tower, where Death had gone to gamble and had, as always, won.
CHAPTER 21
They were the Panamint tribe, of the Shoshoni-Comanche family. These days we are told that throughout their history—like all the natives of this land prior to Columbus and the imposition of Italian cuisine on the continent—they had been peaceful, deeply spiritual, selfless, and unfailingly reverent toward nature.
The gambling industry—feeding on weakness and loss, indifferent to suffering, materialistic, insatiably greedy, smearing across nature some of the ugliest, gaudiest architecture in the history of human construction—was seen by Indian leaders as a perfect fit for them. The state of California agreed, granting to Native Americans a monopoly on casino gambling within its borders.
Concerned that the Great Spirit alone might not provide enough guidance to squeeze every possible drop of revenue out of their new enterprises, most tribes made deals with experienced gaming companies to manage their casinos. Cash rooms were established, games were set up and staffed, the doors were opened, and under the watchful eyes of the usual thugs, the river of money flowed.
The golden age of Indian wealth loomed, every Native American soon to be rich. But the flow did not reach as deeply or as quickly into the Indian population as expected.
Funny how that happens.
Addiction to gambling, impoverishment therefrom, and associated crime rose in the community.
Not so funny how that happens.
On the plain below the hilltop where I stood, about a mile away, on tribal land, waited the Panamint Resort and Spa. Once it had been as glittering, as neon-splashed, as tacky as any facility of its kind, but its glory days were gone.
The sixteen-story hotel had all the grace of a high-rise prison. Five years ago, it had withstood an earthquake with minor damage, but it had failed to weather the subsequent fire. Most of its windows had been shattered by the temblor or had exploded from the heat as the rooms blazed. Great lapping tongues of smoke had licked black patterns across the walls.
The two-story casino, wrapping three sides of the tower, had collapsed at one corner. Cast in tinted concrete, a facade of mystic Indian symbols—many of which were not actual Indian symbols but New Age interpretations of Indian spiritualism as previously conceived by Hollywood film designers—had mostly torn away from the building and collapsed into the surrounding parking lot. A few vehicles remained, crushed and corroding under the debris.
Concerned that a sentinel with binoculars might be surveying the approaches, I retreated from the hilltop, hoping that I had not been spotted.
Within days of the resort disaster, many had predicted that, considering the money to be made, the place would be rebuilt within a year. Four years later, demolition of the burned-out hulk had not begun.
Contractors were accused of having cut corners in construction that weakened the structure. County building inspectors were brought up on charges of having accepted bribes; they in turn blew the whistle on corruption in the county board of supervisors.
So much blame could be widely assessed that a farrago of both legitimate and frivolous litigation, of battling public-relations firms, resulted in several bankruptcies, two suicides, uncounted divorces, and one sex-change operation.
Most of those Panamints who had made fortunes had been stripped of them by settlements or were hemorrhaging still to attorneys. Those who had never gotten wealthy but had become compulsive gamblers were inconvenienced by the need to travel farther to lose what little they had.
Currently, half the litigations await final resolution, and no one knows if the resort will rise like a phoenix. Even the right—some would say the obligation—to bulldoze the ruins has been frozen by a judge pending the fate of an appeal of a key court decision.
Staying below the crest, I traversed south until the rocky slope rolled into a declivity.
Numerous hills fold to form a crescent collar around the west, south, and east of the plain on which the ravaged resort stands, with flatlands and bustling interstate to the north. Among these folds, I followed a series of narrow divides that eventually widened into a dry wash, progressing east by a serpentine route forced upon me by the topography.
If Danny’s kidnappers had camped on one of the higher floors of the hotel, the better to keep a lookout, I needed to approach from an unexpected direction. I wanted to get as close to the property as possible before coming out in the open.
How the nameless woman knew that I would be able to follow them, how she knew that I would be compelled to follow, why she wanted me to follow, I couldn’t explain with certainty. Reason, however, led me to the inescapable suspicion that Danny had shared with her the secret of my gift.
Her cryptic conversation on the phone, her taunting, seemed designed to tease admissions from me. She sought confirmation of facts that she already knew.
A year ago, he had lost his mother to cancer. As his closest friend, I had been a companion in his grief—until my own loss in August.
He was not a man with many friends. His physical limitations, his appearance, and his acerbic wit limited his social opportunities.
When I had turned inward, giving myself entirely to my grief, and then to writing about the events of August, I had not comforted him any longer, not as generously as I should have done.
For consolation, he had his adoptive father. But Dr. Jessup had been grieving, too, and being a man of some ambition, had probably sought solace in his work.
Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the wo
rld instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.
Someone had come through that door when Danny was at his most vulnerable. She had a smoky, silken voice.
CHAPTER 22
In a belly crawl, out of the dry wash, onto flat land, leaving the hills behind, I squirmed fast through bush sage three feet high, which gave me cover. My objective was a wall that separated the desert from the grounds of the resort.
Jackrabbits and a variety of rodents shelter from the sun and nibble leaves in just such vegetation. Where rabbits and rats went, snakes would follow, feeding.
Fortunately snakes are shy; not as shy as church mice, but shy enough. To warn them off, I made plenty of noise before slithering out of the wash and into the sage, and as I moved, I grunted and spat dirt and sneezed and, in general, produced enough noise to annoy all wildlife into relocating.
Assuming that my adversaries had camped high in the hotel, and considering that I was still a few hundred yards from that structure, what noise I made would not alert them.
If they happened to be looking in this direction, they would be scanning for movement. But the rustle of the bush sage would not draw special notice; the breeze out of the north had stiffened, shuddering all the scrub and weeds. Tumbleweed tumbled, and here and there a dust devil danced.
Having avoided the bite of snake, the sting of scorpion, the nip of spider, I reached the edge of the resort grounds. I got to my feet and leaned with my back against the wall.
I was covered in pale dust and in a powdery white substance acquired from the undersides of the sage leaves.
The unfortunate consequence of psychic magnetism is not only that it too often draws me into dangerous circumstances but also into dirty places. I’m perpetually behind in my laundry.
After brushing myself off, I followed the resort wall, which gradually curved northeast. On this side, exposed concrete block had been painted white; on the farther side, where paying customers had been able to see it, the eight-foot-high barrier had been plastered and painted pink.
Following the quake and the fire, tribal officials posted metal signs at hundred-foot intervals, sternly warning would-be trespassers of the dangers of the damaged structures beyond and of toxic residues they might contain. The Mojave sun had faded those warnings, but they remained readable.
