by Dean Koontz
I thought at once of the snaky man, fished from the flood tunnel, his eyes rolled far back in his head.
Three more flares repeatedly revealed a reflection with white eyes, and I stood immobilized by a marrow-freezing chill, even as Robert turned toward me.
CHAPTER 45
Deliberately, not with the quick reflexes of violent intent, Robert turned toward me.
The inscrutable semaphore of the storm no longer brightened his face, but silhouetted him. The sky, one great galleon with a thousand black sails, signaled, signaled, as if to regain his attention, and thunder boomed.
Averted from the lightning, his eyes no longer shone a moonish white. Nevertheless … though his features were deeply shadowed, his gaze still seemed vaguely phosphorescent, as milky as that of a man blinded by cataracts.
Although I could not see him well enough to be certain, I felt that his eyes were turned back in his head, no color revealed. This might have been a shiver of imagination born of the chill that had seized me.
Having assumed the stance that I recalled Chief Porter taking, I brought the shotgun to bear on him, aiming low because the kick might pull the muzzle higher.
Regardless of the condition of Robert’s eyes, whether they were as white as hard-boiled eggs or the sullen bloodshot beryl-blue they had been earlier, I felt sure that he was not merely aware of my presence but that he could see me.
Yet his demeanor and his slump-shouldered posture suggested that the sight of me failed to shift him into psycho-killer gear. If not confused, he appeared to be at least distracted, and weary.
I began to think that he had not come in search of me, but had wandered in here either for another purpose or without any purpose. Having found me inadvertently, he stood as if in resentment of the need to resolve the confrontation.
Curiouser and curiouser: He let out a long sigh of exhaustion, with a thin plaintive edge that seemed to express a sense of being harassed.
As far as I could recall, these were the first sounds that I had heard issue from his lips: a sigh, a plaint.
His inexplicable malaise and my disinclination to use the shotgun in the absence of a clear threat to my life had brought us to a bizarre impasse that, just two minutes ago, I could never have imagined.
A sudden sweat greased my brow. The situation was not tenable. Something had to give.
His arms hung at his sides. Lambent storm light licked the shape of a pistol or a revolver in his right hand.
When he first turned from the window, Robert could have whipped toward me, squeezing off shots, dropping and rolling as he fired to avoid the 12-gauge. I had no doubt that he was a practiced killer who knew the right moves. His chances of killing me would have been much better than my odds of wounding him.
The gun hung like an anchor at the end of his arm as he took two steps toward me, not in a threatening manner, but almost as though he wished to beseech me for something. These were heavy draft-horse steps that comported with the title, cheval, that Datura had given him.
I worried that Andre would come through the door next, with all the irresistible power of the locomotive of which he had initially reminded me.
Robert might then shake off his indecision—or whatever mood caused his inaction. The two could cut me down in a cross fire.
But I was not capable of blasting away at a man who didn’t at this moment seem inclined to shoot me.
Although he’d drawn closer, I could see his dissolute face no more clearly than before. Still I had the unnerving impression that his eyes were frosted panes.
From him came another sound, which at first I thought must be a mumbled question. But when it came again, it seemed more like a stifled cough.
At last the hand with the gun came up from his side.
My impression was that he raised the weapon not with lethal purpose, but unconsciously, almost as though he had forgotten that he held it. Given what I knew of him—his devotion to Datura, his taste for blood, his evident participation in the brutal murder of Dr. Jessup—I couldn’t wait for a clearer indication of his intent.
The recoil rocked me. He took the buckshot like the truck he was, and did not drop his handgun, and I pumped a round into the chamber and fired again, and the glass doors behind him dissolved because I must have pulled high or wide, so I pumped and fired a third time, and he staggered backward through the gap where the sliding doors had been.
Although he had still not dropped his weapon, he had not used it, either, and I doubted that a fourth shot was necessary. At least two of the first three rounds had hit him square and hard.
But I rushed toward him, hot to be done with this, almost as if the gun controlled me and wanted to be fully spent. The fourth round blew him off the balcony.
Only as I stepped to the shattered doors did I see what rain and perspective had previously concealed from me. The outermost third of the balcony must have broken away in the earthquake five years ago, taking with it the railing.
If any life had remained in him after three hits out of four rounds, a twelve-story fall would have taken it.
CHAPTER 46
Killing Robert left me weak in the knees and light in the head, but it did not nauseate me as I had half expected that it would. He was, after all, Cheval Robert, not a good husband or a kind father, or a pillar of his community.
Furthermore, I had the feeling that he had wanted me to do what I had done. He seemed to have embraced death as if it was a mercy.
As I backed away from the balcony doors and a sudden squall of rain that burst through them, I heard Datura screaming from some distant point of the twelfth floor. Her voice swelled like a siren as she approached at a run.
If I sprinted for the stairs, I would surely be caught in the hall before I reached them. She and Andre would be armed; and it defied reason to suppose that they would be afflicted with Robert’s indecision.
I traded the living room of the suite for the bedroom to the right of the entry door. This place was darker than the previous room because the windows were smaller and because the rotting draperies had not fallen off their rods.
I didn’t expect to find a hiding place. I just needed to buy time to reload.
Mindful of the shotgun fire that had drawn their attention, they would enter the living room cautiously. Most likely they would first lay down a volley of suppressing fire.
By the time one of them dared to explore this adjoining room, I would be ready for them. Or as ready as I would ever be. I had only four more shells, not an arsenal.
If luck was on my side, they didn’t know where Robert’s part of the search had led him—if he had been searching. They couldn’t pinpoint, by the sound alone, precisely from where the shots had come.
Should they decide to search all the rooms along the secondary hallway, an opportunity might yet arise for me to get off the twelfth floor.
Much closer now, but not from within the suite, perhaps from the intersection of corridors, Datura shouted my name. She wasn’t calling me out for a milkshake at the local soda fountain, but she sounded more excited than pissed.
The shotgun barrel, breech, and receiver were warm from the recent firing.
Leaning against a wall, shuddering as I remembered Robert plunging backward off the balcony, I plucked the first of the spare rounds from a pocket of my jeans. I fumbled in the shadows, clumsy at the unfamiliar task, trying to insert the shell into the breech.
“Can you hear me, Odd Thomas?” Datura shouted. “Can you hear me, boyfriend?”
The breech continued to defeat me, would not take the shell, and my hands began to shake, making the task more difficult.
“Was that shit what it seemed to be?” she shouted. “Was that a poltergeist, boyfriend?”
The standoff with Robert had prickled my face with sweat. The sound of Datura’s voice turned the sweat to ice.
“That was so wild, that really totally kicked!” she declared, still out in the hallway somewhere.
Deciding to load th
e breech last, I tried to insert the shell through what I believed to be the loading gate of the three-round magazine.
My fingers were sweaty, trembling. The shell slipped out of my grasp. I felt it bounce off my right shoe.
“Did you trick me, Odd Thomas?” she asked. “Did you get me to crank up old Maryann until she blew?”
She didn’t know about Buzz-cut. There was some justice in letting her think that the spirit of a merely pretty-but-not-pretty-enough cocktail waitress had gotten the best of her.
Squatting in the dark, feeling the floor around me, I feared that the shell had rolled beyond discovery and that I would have to use the flashlight to locate it. I needed all four rounds. When I found it in mere seconds, I almost let out a groan of relief.
“I want a repeat performance!” she shouted.
Remaining in a squat, the shotgun propped across my thighs, I tried again to load the magazine, turning the shell first one way, then the other, but the loading gate, if it was the loading gate, wouldn’t receive the round.
The task seemed simple, a lot easier than flipping eggs over-easy without breaking the yolks, but evidently it wasn’t so simple that someone unfamiliar with the weapon could load it in the dark. I needed light.
“Let’s crank up the dumb dead bitch again!”
At the window, I eased aside the rotting drapery.
“But this time, I’m keeping you on a leash, boyfriend.”
An hour or two of light remained in the afternoon, but the filter of the storm cast false twilight across the drenched desert. I could still see well enough to examine the gun.
I fished another shell from another pocket. Tried it. No good.
I put it on the window sill, tried a third. In the grip of absolute denial, I tried a fourth.
“You and Danny the Geek aren’t getting out of here. You hear me? There is no way out.”
The ammunition I had found on the bathroom counter, beside the sink, had evidently been for another weapon.
For all intents and purposes, this couldn’t be considered a shotgun anymore. It had become just a fancy club.
I was up the famous creek not only without a paddle but also without a boat.
CHAPTER 47
I used to think that I might one day like to work in the retail tire business. I spent some time hanging around Tire World, out near the Green Moon Mall, on Green Moon Road, and everyone there seemed to be relaxed and happy.
In the tire life, at the end of the work day, you don’t have to wonder if you’ve accomplished anything meaningful. You’ve taken in people with bad rubber, and you’ve sent them rolling away on fine new wheels.
Americans thrive on mobility and feel shrunken in spirit when they do not have it. Providing tires is not only good commerce but also soothes troubled souls.
Although selling tires does not involve a lot of hard bargaining, as do real-estate transactions and deals brokered with international arms merchants, I am concerned that I might find the sales end of the business too emotionally draining. If the supernatural aspect of my life involved nothing more stressful than daily interaction with Elvis, tire sales would make sense, but as you’ve seen, the favorite son of Memphis isn’t the half of it.
Before I went to the Panamint, I figured that eventually I would return to work for Terri Stambaugh. If the griddle proved too taxing on my nerves, on top of everything else that was perpetually cooking with me, I might succumb to the lure of the tire life, working not sales but installation.
That stormy day in the desert, however, much changed for me. We must have our goals, our dreams, and we must strive for them. We are not gods, however; we do not have the power to shape every aspect of the future. And the road the world makes for us is one that teaches humility if we are willing to learn.
Standing in a moldering room in a ruined hotel, contemplating a useless shotgun, listening to a murderous madwoman assure me that my fate was hers to decide, having given away both my coconut-raisin power bars, I felt humbled, all right. Maybe not as humbled as Wile E. Coyote when he finds himself flattened under the same boulder with which he intended to crush the Road Runner, but pretty humble.
She shouted, “You know why there’s no way out, boyfriend?”
I didn’t inquire, confident that she would tell me.
“Because I know about you. I know all about you. I know that it works both ways.”
This statement made no immediate sense to me, but it was no more mystifying than a hundred other things she’d said, so I didn’t devote much effort to translation.
I wondered when she would stop squawking and come looking. Maybe Andre already had crept into the suite, searching, and her shouting in the corridor was intended to mislead me into thinking the ax was not already on the downswing.
As if she had read my mind, she said, “I don’t have to come searching for you, do I, Odd Thomas?”
After putting the shotgun on the floor, I wiped my face with my hands, blotted my hands on my jeans. I felt six-days dirty, with no hope of a Sunday bath.
I had always expected to die clean. In my dream, when I open that paneled white door and get the pike through the throat, I’m wearing a clean T-shirt, pressed jeans, and fresh underwear.
“No way I have to risk getting my head shot off looking for you,” she shouted.
Considering all the messes I get into, I don’t know why I had always expected to die clean. Now that I thought about it, this seemed self-delusional.
Freud would have had a grand time analyzing my have-to-die-clean complex. But then Freud was an ass.
“Psychic magnetism!” she shouted, getting more of my attention than I had recently been giving her. “Psychic magnetism works both ways, boyfriend.”
My spirits had not been high by virtually any measure, but at her words, they fell a little.
When I have a specific target in mind, I can cruise at random, and my psychic magnetism will often lead me to him, but sometimes, when I am thinking a lot about another person yet am not actively seeking him, the same mechanism operates, and he is casually drawn to me, all unaware.
When psychic magnetism works in reverse, without my conscious intent, I am without control … and vulnerable to nasty surprises. Of all the things about me that Danny could have told Datura, this might have been the most dangerous for her to know.
Previously, whenever a bad guy has found himself wandering into my presence by virtue of reverse psychic magnetism, he has been as surprised by this development as I have been. Which at least puts us on equal footing.
Instead of searching urgently room to room, floor to floor, Datura intended to remain alert but calm, to make herself receptive to the pull of my aura, or whatever the hell it is that exerts this paranormal attraction. She and Andre could cover the two staircases, periodically check the elevator shafts for noise, and wait until she found herself at my side—or at my back—drawn to me by virtue of the fact that, as in the Willie Nelson song, she was always on my mind.
No matter how clever I was about finding a way out of the hotel, before I got to freedom, I was likely to encounter her. It was a little like destiny.
If you’ve had a beer too many and are in an argumentative mood, you might say Don’t be an idiot, Odd. All you have to do is not think about her.
Imagine yourself running barefoot on a summer day, as carefree as a child, and your foot comes down on an old board, and a six-inch spike spears your metatarsal arch, penetrating all the way through your instep. No need to cancel your plans and seek out a doctor. You’ll be fine if you just don’t think about that big sharp rusty spike sticking through your foot.
You’re playing eighteen holes of golf, and your ball goes into the woods. Retrieving it, you’re bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. Don’t bother calling 911 on your cell phone. You can finish the round with aplomb if you simply concentrate on the game and forget all about the annoying snake.
No matter how many beers you have consumed, I trust that you get my point. D
atura was a spike through my foot, a snake with fangs sunk into my hand. Trying not to think about that woman, under these circumstances, was like being in a room with an angry naked sumo wrestler and trying not to think about him.
At least she had revealed her intentions. Now I knew that she knew about reverse psychic magnetism. She might fall upon me when I least expected it, but I would no longer be entirely surprised when she decapitated me and drank my blood.
She had stopped shouting.
I waited tensely, unnerved by the silence.
Not thinking about her had been easier when she was yammering than when she shut up.
A rattle and blur of rain on the window. Thunder. A threnody of wind.
Ozzie Boone, mentor and man of letters, would like that word. Threnody: a dirge, a lamentation, a song for the dead.
While I played hide-and-seek with a madwoman in a burned-out hotel, Ozzie was probably sitting in his cozy study, sipping thick hot cocoa, nibbling pecan cookies, already writing the first novel in his new series about a detective who is also a pet communicator. Maybe he would title it Threnody for a Hamster.
This threnody, of course, would be for Robert: full of lead shot and broken, twelve stories below.
After a while, I checked the luminous face of my wristwatch. I consulted it every few minutes until a quarter of an hour had passed.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to the corridor. On the other hand, I didn’t have any enthusiasm about staying where I was, either.
In addition to Kleenex, a bottle of water, and a few other items of no value for a man in my fix, my backpack held the fishing knife. The sharpest blade wasn’t a match for a shotgun, assuming she had one, but it was better than attacking her with a packet of Kleenex.
