by Dean Koontz
He put a hand to the hot laceration.
Although the anger in his eyes had with unsettling swiftness distilled to bitter hatred, he had gained a new respect for me and might not be so quick to make a move.
“Call them,” I repeated.
“No.”
He meant it. He would not be persuaded. The prospect of life in prison might have been worse than death to him.
Glancing at the door and then quickly at me, Joey hoped to imply that someone had entered behind me, but I knew that he was scamming, hoping I would glance back.
“Anyway,” he said, when I didn’t take the bait, “their nearest cutter is fifty nautical miles from here. We’re home free.”
The idling engines of the nearby yacht sent vibrations through the hull of the tugboat, and all the other noises of the pending transfer left me with no concern that a shot would be heard above the racket. I put one round in his left foot.
He cried out, I told him to be quiet, and I whipped him with the gun again to silence him.
Inside myself, I had opened a door to ruthlessness that I wanted to close again as soon as possible. But the fate of a nation and the lives of millions were at stake, and whatever must be done, I must do it without hesitation.
Pain had changed him. He was crying.
“I believe you about the cutter, fifty miles. So here are your options, Joey. You tell me some things about this operation, then I kill you quick and painless.”
He said a twelve-letter word that I won’t repeat, although I challenged him to repeat it.
When he didn’t take up the challenge, I said, “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll wound you in ways so painful you can’t conceive of your suffering. Wounds that leave you dying slow, unable to move or speak. You’ll be hours here on the deck, in agony, more tears than all the babies you would have killed in those cities, so many tears you’ll die of dehydration before you bleed to death.”
He wanted to sit on the deck and hold his wounded foot to damp the pain, but I would not allow it.
“Where do the bombs come from?”
I didn’t think he was ready to answer, but then in a voice shaken by pain and fear, he named a Middle Eastern country.
“How did they get on the yacht?”
“From a freighter.”
“Transshipped? Where?”
“Three hundred miles out.”
“At sea?”
“Yeah. Where the Coast Guard can’t monitor.” He inhaled with a hiss between clenched teeth. “This foot is killin’ me.”
“It won’t be the foot. How many nukes?”
“Four.”
“How many?”
“Four. I said. Four.”
“You better not be lying. What cities?”
“I don’t know.”
“What cities?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. I don’t. I didn’t need to know.”
“Who owns the yacht?”
“Some billionaire. I don’t know his name.”
“American?”
“Shit, yeah.”
“Why would an American want to do this?”
“If he can, why not?”
I hit him with the gun. An eyebrow ripped.
“Why?”
Pressing shut the torn skin with his fingers, his voice thin and higher pitched, as if time were running backward to his childhood, he said, “Hey, all right, hey, it’s like this—okay? truth? okay?—just before the bombs go off—okay?—there’ll be assassinations.”
“What assassinations?”
“President, vice president, lots of them.”
“And then the bombs. And after that?”
“They got a plan.”
“They who? What plan?”
“I don’t know. Really. See? Even this much, it’s more than I should know—okay?—stuff I found out they don’t know I know. Okay? There’s no more. I swear to God. There’s no more.”
I believed him, but even if I had not taken his protestations as the truth, I would have had no opportunity to question him further.
The knife must have been up the right sleeve of his shirt, in a sheath on his arm. How he released it, I don’t know, but it came under his cuff and into his hand. The blade flicked from the handle.
I saw the wink of light along the razor-sharp edge, but he thrust before I shot him in the throat.
The crack of the gun was not loud in the small cabin. The tug’s engines, the boom and clatter from the work on the afterdeck, and the squeal of one boat’s bumpers rubbing those of the other would have masked it easily.
Joey slid out of the chair and folded onto the floor, as if he had been a scarecrow with flesh of straw that couldn’t fully support the clothes that now draped baggily around him.
The switchblade was so sharp that it had sliced open the thick fabric of my sweatshirt as though it had been silk.
I reached through the tear to feel my right side where it stung, above the lowest rib. He had cut me.
CHAPTER 37
I sat on the radio operator’s desk, where no blood had showered.
In an arc across a bulkhead, ending in spatters on the round of glass, was his blood from the lethal shot, as if it were the spoor of a fleeing soul that had used a porthole as a portal out of this world.
My cut was shallow, the bleeding light, the pain less than that of loss but troubling. Left hand pressed over the wound, I closed my eyes and tried to dream into existence the blue lake of abiding hope.
Stormy Llewellyn and I, at eighteen, had gone to the lake to bake on beach blankets and to swim.
A sign warned that no lifeguard was on duty that day. Swimmers were advised to stay in the shallows close to shore.
The hard desert sun sprinkled diamonds in the sand and displayed a vast wealth of jewelry across the water.
The heat seemed to melt the mechanism of time, with the promise that she and I would never age or know a change of heart, or be apart from each other.
We took a boat out on the lake. I rowed into the blue, sky above and sky spread across the water.
I shipped the oars. On every side, the gently lapping blueness appeared to curve down and away, as though we had been given a small world of our own, where the horizon was nearer than on the former Earth.
We slipped from the boat and floated on our backs in the buoyant salt lake, kept afloat by the lazy winglike motion of our arms. Eyes closed against the sun, we talked.
All the talk was in essence about one thing. We were dreaming our future into existence.
From time to time, we noticed that the rowboat had drifted from us. We swam nearer to it and floated once more, dreaming aloud as before.
Later, as I rowed us back to the beach, she heard the cry and saw the drowning boy before I did.
He had been nine or ten and, showing off, had swum too far. His arms went weak, his legs cramped, and suddenly he could not keep himself afloat even in the brine.
Stormy went over the side, so lithe and swift, the arc of her stroke pulling the water away from her with determination.
On the sand, the mother and a sister, neither swimmers, became aware of the crisis only as Stormy side-stroked to shore with the boy in tow.
She swam faster than I could row. I beached the boat and ran to her, to assist, but resuscitation was not necessary. She had snared him before he had breathed the lake into his lungs.
This is a moment that will remain forever fresh in my memory: the coughing boy, the crying mother, the frightened sister—and Stormy tending to them in the way that each required.
She always was a savior of others. I know that she saved me.
Although I had thought that I had beached the boat securely when I had been eager to get to Stormy’s side, I must have left it adrift, for when I looked, it bobbed beyond the shallows.
The lake is big, and the dynamics of deep water apply. While it appears placid on the surface, currents are always working.
I waded into the
water and then swam, but at first the boat, in the influence of a current, moved farther away from me.
Perhaps the irrational fear that gripped me was inspired by the near-drowning of the boy, the reminder of ever-present death, also by the fact that Stormy and I had been dreaming our future together and, therefore, had been tempting fate.
For whatever reason, as the rowboat initially eluded me, my frustration rapidly escalated into dread. I became crazily convinced that if I could not catch the boat and board it, the future we had dreamed together would never come to pass, and that in fact the death from which the boy had narrowly escaped would be visited instead on one of us.
Because the boat was adrift and I was not, I reached it in due course. Aboard, I sat shaking, first with residual dread and then with relief.
I suppose now that in swimming to retrieve the boat, I might have experienced a dim presentiment of the shooter who, a couple of years later, would take Stormy from me.
Sometimes, I like to call into memory that day on the lake. The sky and the water. Safe in that sphere of blue.
I tell myself that I can still dream our future into existence: the two of us on a new Earth all our own.
Now and then, as we floated on our backs, the winglike motion of our arms brought our hands in contact beneath the water, and we gripped each other for a moment as if to say I’m here, I’m always here.
The tugboat yawed, and the rubber bumpers squealed between the vessels, and from above and aft came a solid thud that trembled the deck.
I slid off the radio operator’s desk and got to my feet.
Having tumbled from his chair, the dead man lay on his side, his head twisted so that he faced the ceiling. His mouth hung open, and his eyes were like those of a fish on ice in a market.
That I had never seen Stormy’s body in death, that in mercy she had been brought to me only as ashes in a simple urn, filled me with a gratitude beyond measure.
Leaving the radio room, I knew the time had not yet come for me to venture above. Once the transfer of the nukes had been completed and the crates lashed down, once Junie’s Moonbeam sailed away into the fog, Utgard and Buddy would at once kill Jackie and Hassan. My best chance to succeed at this was to time my afterdeck appearance to that bloody moment.
Opening off the passageway was one room I had not explored, the aft compartment on the starboard side, across from the radio room. I tried the door, found a light switch, and stepped into a lavatory.
A red cross marked a white corner cabinet full of first-aid supplies.
After pulling off my sweatshirt and T-shirt, I spread the wound with my fingers. I poured rubbing alcohol into the shallow gash.
No stitches were needed. Bleeding, renewed by this attention, would eventually stop again.
Leaving the laceration open to the air and the rub of clothing, however, ensured a continuous stinging that distracted me. I had to work at an awkward angle, and I might not have a lot of time; so I used no gauze, only wide waterproof adhesive tape to seal the cut.
Stripping it off later, I would inevitably tear open the laceration. I didn’t worry about that, because if the time came for me to peel away the tape, that would mean I had survived Utgard and his crew.
As I put on my sweatshirt, another heavy thud from the afterdeck shivered through the tugboat.
Although I did not think anyone would come below until the work was done, I turned off the light and stood in blackness. Should the door open, I could shoot as he reached for the switch.
The small lavatory had no porthole. The room would admit no thread of light around the door frame.
I thought of the mirror in Sam Whittle’s bathroom, which had reached out to claim his lingering spirit.
The lavatory featured a spotted mirror above the sink. I could not see what might be forming in its dark reflective surface.
My usually fevered imagination could do nothing with this rich material.
Real violence had come. More was pending.
The door to ruthlessness that I had opened in my mind had not been closed. More than darkness and mirrors, I feared what could come out of that inner door.
Heavier vibrations translating through the sea into the tugboat hull were proof that the transfer had been completed and that Junie’s Moonbeam was getting under way once more. We began to roll in the wake of the departing yacht.
I left the lavatory and went to the aft companionway, moving counter to the deck to keep my balance.
At the top of the stairs stood the door through which I had originally come below. A porthole provided a view of the long fog-swept afterdeck, which was still brightened by the halogen work lamp.
Two crates, neither of which had been there when we had motored out of the harbor, lay toward the starboard quarter of the deck. The size of coffins, wrapped in fog as they were, these twin containers suggested that we had not taken aboard anything as fantastic and grotesque as weapons that could destroy whole cities, but instead merely the less unnatural cargo of Count Dracula and his bride, who were sleeping now on beds of Transylvanian soil inside sunproof caskets where soon they would wake.
Utgard Rolf—dressed in black nylon pants with elastic cuffs tight at the ankles and a matching jacket—and a man I had not seen before were conferring near the small crane.
Two other men were at work on the port side, stowing tools in a secured deck box.
Pulling pistols as they moved, Utgard and the man to whom he had been talking, no doubt Buddy, crossed the deck behind the other two men and shot them in the back. Both sprawled facedown, and their executioners bent to administer a final shot to each at the base of the skull.
CHAPTER 38
Hesitating behind the companionway door, I thought that they would weight the dead men with chains before tossing them overboard.
Evidently, they were confident that from this distance the sea would not bring the bodies to shore for days—if ever—and that by then they would have vanished into their new lives in far corners of the world. They put away their guns, grabbed the cadavers by collars and belts, and began to drag them toward the portside deck wall.
Their backs were to me, but they would remain vulnerable only briefly. Bull strong, Utgard did not long drag his victim, but soon lifted him clear of the deck and carried him.
I dared not think about what was required of me here, but had to focus my mind on why I must not fail to act: the possibility of children seared to the bone by blast heat, of women crushed and torn by the detonation wave, of men atomized, buildings hammered to dust, museums in rubble, churches obliterated, blacktop streets boiling like rivers of lava, and square miles of ashes soaked with the blood of millions.
With no awareness of having pushed through the stairhead door, I found myself on the open deck, in motion.
The immediate fog was silver with halogen reflections, white overhead, and gray beyond the limits of the boat, the yacht lights already having been swallowed as completely as Jonah and his lantern.
The chill wet air on my face was not as cold as the pit of my stomach, and the plume of my breath across my lips seemed cold as well.
With his burden, Utgard reached the port wall. He heaved the body overboard, but the dead man’s feet hooked on the gunwale. For a macabre moment, he hung that way, until Utgard gave him a final push into the sea.
Fearing a fall, I nonetheless negotiated the wet and gently rolling deck as though born on a ship. In a two-hand grip, I brought the gun to bear.
The other man wrestled the second corpse halfway over the gunwale. Utgard grabbed one of the cadaver’s arms to assist.
Seeing the difficulty of this disposal, I waited for them to finish the job.
A hero does not shoot his adversaries in the back. But hero is a title others have wrongly given to me, which I have never claimed for myself.
As the second corpse vanished into the night and fog, I shot Utgard twice in the back from a distance of less than eight feet. He fell forward against the gunwale, b
ut did not tumble overboard.
The other man recoiled in shock but in the same instant went for the weapon in the paddle holster at his hip.
I squeezed off two rounds, trying for abdomen and chest, but I allowed the pistol to pull too high. The first round took him in the face, and the second only parted his hair.
The head shot was enough, and he went down dead.
In bad shape, supporting himself against the gunwale, Utgard turned toward me. Filled with halogen reflections, his demented coyote eyes were lanterns burning unholy oil.
His face was bruised, one eye swollen half shut, one ear crusted with blood—the consequence of events in the interrogation room.
As I stepped closer, he reached, and I shot him twice again.
He slid down the gunwale and toppled onto his side. His head knocked the deck hard enough to bounce.
For a while I took great deep breaths and blew them out, trying to exhale the tension that had suddenly begun to make my hands shake like those of a palsied old man.
Having watched them wrestle the corpses overboard, I changed my mind about eliminating these two in the same way. Disposing of them would make no sense if I left Joey dead in the radio room, and I did not believe that I could also manage to drag him topside for burial at sea.
A way might present itself in which I could get the tugboat and the nukes into the hands of responsible authorities without making the delivery personally. If I remained anonymous, never coming face to face with them, I would not have to explain the killing that I had done.
I turned my back on the dead and crossed the deck toward the coffinlike crates that were stored on the starboard quarter.
Movies condition us to expect that a villain shot repeatedly, appearing to be dead, will reliably rise once more at the penultimate moment, with shrieking violins as background. But reality has no symphonic soundtrack, and the dead stay dead. Only the spirit rises.
I was alone aboard the tugboat, and I doubted that the collector holding the contract on Utgard’s spirit would allow him to linger as a poltergeist.
With killing on my mind, I had crossed the deck in surefooted haste, but with the killing done, my balance seemed more precarious. As I moved and as my feet tripped on obstacles that did not exist, I reached out to grab supports that were not at hand.
