by Dean Koontz
dietary regimen included a high-fiber cereal every morning.
His greatest regret was that he had not been able to play out his original game plan, in which Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have tortured and killed Claudette and the two Dereks. Before committing suicide, Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have written a long statement accusing the elder Derek and his wife of horrendous physical abuse of Skeet and Dusty when they were children, and of repeated Rohypnol-facilitated rapes of Martie and of Susan Jagger, whom Ahriman might even have chosen to include as part of the killing team if she hadn’t gotten clever with a video camera. The death toll would have been seven, plus housekeepers and visiting neighbors, if any, which was by Ahriman’s calculations the minimum magnitude of slaughter necessary to attract the attention of the national media—although with Derek’s reputation as a pop-psych guru, seven deaths would receive as much coverage as a bomb blast that killed two hundred but that produced no celebrity among the casualties.
Well, although the game had been played with less grace than he would have preferred, he took satisfaction in winning. With no way to take possession of Derek Lampton’s brain, perhaps he would have the blue bag vacuum-sealed in Lucite as a symbolic trophy.
Although Skeet’s thought processes had grown clearer and more efficient during the past two drug-free days, he still didn’t have the mental acuity needed to manage a nuclear power plant or even to be trusted to sweep the floors of one. Fortunately, he was aware of this, and he intended to think carefully through each step of his attack on Dr. Ahriman during his drive from Malibu to Newport Beach.
He was also an emotional mess, frequently breaking into tears, even sobbing. Operating a motor vehicle with badly blurred vision was particularly dangerous along the Pacific Coast Highway during the rainy season, because sudden massive mudslides and dislodged boulders the size of semitrucks tumbling onto the roadway required drivers to have the reflexes of a wired cat. Worse, the early-afternoon traffic on the freeway was southbound at eighty miles per hour, in spite of a legal limit of sixty-five, and uncontrollable sobbing at that speed could have cataclysmic consequences.
His chest and belly were sore from the impact of four Kevlar-arrested bullets. Painful cramps twisted his stomach, unrelated to the bruising, born of stress and fear. He had a migraine, which he always had after seeing his mother, whether or not anyone was shot with a crossbow during the visit.
His heartache, however, was worse than any of the physical pains that he suffered. Dusty and Martie’s house was gone, and he felt as if his own house had been burned to the ground. They were the best people in the world, Martie and Dusty, the best. They didn’t deserve such trouble. Their terrific little house gone in flames, Susan dead, Eric dead, living in fear.
More heartache assailed him when he thought of himself as a baby, his mother standing over him with a pillow in her hands, his own beautiful mother. When Dusty called her on it, she didn’t even deny that she’d been going to kill him. He knew he was a total screwup as an adult, had been a screwup as a kid, but now it seemed to him that he must have been such an obvious screwup-waiting-to-happen even as an infant that his own mother had felt justified in smothering him while he slept in his crib.
He didn’t want to be such a screwup. He wanted to do the right thing, and he wanted to do well, to have his brother, Dusty, be proud of him, but he always lost his way without realizing he was losing it. He also realized he caused Dusty a lot of heartache, too, which made him feel worse.
With chest pain, belly pain, serial stomach cramps, migraine, heartache, blurred vision, and eighty-mile-per-hour traffic to keep him distracted, worried as well because his driver’s license had been revoked years ago, he arrived in Newport Beach, in the parking lot behind Ahriman’s office building, shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon, without having carefully thought out any step of his attack on Dr. Ahriman.
“I’m a total screwup,” he said.
Screwup that he was, the chances that he would make it across the parking lot, up to the fourteenth floor, into Ahriman’s office, and successfully execute the bastard were too small to be calculated. Like trying to weigh the hair on a flea’s ass.
He did have one thing going for him. If he defied all the odds and managed to shoot the psychiatrist, he would probably not go to prison for the rest of his life, as Dusty or Martie surely would if either of them pulled the trigger. Considering his colorful record of rehab, a foot-tall stack of unflattering psychiatric evaluations, and his history of pathological meekness rather than violence, Skeet would probably end up in a mental institution, with a hope of being released one day, supposing that there was anything left of him after another fifteen years of massive drug therapy.
The pistol had a long magazine, but he was still able to tuck it under his belt and cover it with his sweater. Fortunately, the sweater was meant to be baggy; it was even baggier than intended, because he had bought it years ago, and after his continued weight loss, it was now two sizes too large.
He got out of the Lexus, remembering to take the keys with him. If he left them in the ignition, someone might steal the car, perhaps making him an accessory to grand theft auto. When his name was all over the newspapers and people were looking at him being arrested on TV, he didn’t want them thinking that he was the type of person to be involved in car theft. He’d never stolen a penny in his life.
The sky was blue. The day was mild. There was no wind, and he was grateful for the calm, because he felt as if a stiff breeze might have blown him away.
He walked back and forth in front of the car, staring down at his sweater, cocking his head to one side and then the other, trying to detect the outline of the pistol from various angles. The weapon was completely concealed.
Hot tears welled again, just as he was ready to march into the building and do the deed, and so he walked back and forth, blotting his eyes on the sleeves of his sweater. A security guard was likely to be posted in the lobby. Skeet realized that a gaunt, gray-faced man in clothes two sizes too large for him, sobbing his eyes out, was likely to arouse suspicion.
One row in front of where Skeet had parked the Lexus and a few spaces to the north, a woman got out of a white Rolls-Royce and stood beside it, staring openly at him. His eyes were now dry enough to allow him to see that she was a nice-looking blond lady, very neat, in a pink knit suit, obviously a successful person and good citizen. She didn’t appear to be the rude type who would stand and stare at a perfect stranger, so he figured he must look as suspicious as if he were wearing bandoliers of ammunition and openly carrying an assault rifle.
If this lady in the pink suit found him alarming, the security guard would probably spray him with Mace, shock him with a Taser, and club him to the floor the moment he walked through the door into the lobby. He was going to screw up again.
He couldn’t bear the thought of failing Dusty and Martie, the only people who had ever loved him, really loved him, in his entire life. If he couldn’t do this for them, he might as well pull the gun out from under his sweater and shoot himself in the head right now.
He was no more capable of suicide than he was capable of theft. Well, except for jumping off the Sorensons’ roof on Tuesday. From what he understood, however, that might not have been his own idea.
Under the scrutiny of the lady in pink, pretending not to notice her, trying to appear far too happy and too pleased with life to be a crazed gunman, whistling “What a Wonderful World,” because it was the first thing that came to his mind, he crossed the parking lot to the office building and went inside, never looking back.
The doctor was not accustomed to having his schedule imposed by others, and he grew increasingly annoyed with the Keanuphobe for not calling sooner rather than later. He had no doubt she would respond to the evil-computer fantasy he had provided to her; her obsession allowed no other course of action. Apparently, however, the twit was without a shred of courtesy, without appreciation for the value of other people’s time: the typic
al nouveau-riche clod.
Unable to concentrate on writing but unable to leave his office and go play, he contented himself with making haiku out of the humble material before him.
My little blue bag. My Beretta, seven rounds. Should I shoot the shit?
That was ghastly. Seventeen syllables, yes, and technically adequate in every regard. Nonetheless, he had never seen a better example of why technical adequacy was not the explanation for William Shakespeare’s immortality.
My gun, seven shots. My little Keanuphobe. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
Equally ghastly but more satisfying.
The security guard, twice Skeet’s size and wearing clothes that fit him, sat behind the counter at the information station. He was reading a book, and he never glanced up.
Skeet checked the directory to locate Ahriman’s office, went to the elevators, pressed the call button, and stared straight ahead at the doors. He figured that the guard, a highly trained professional, would immediately sense anyone staring worriedly at him.
One of the elevators arrived swiftly. Three birdlike elderly women and three tall handsome Sikhs in turbans exited the cab; the two groups headed in different directions.
Already stressed out and fearful, Skeet was rattled by the sight of the old ladies and the Sikhs. As he had learned from Fig during the previous thirty-six hours, the numbers three and six were somehow key to understanding why extraterrestrials were secretly on Earth, and here was three twice and six once. Not a good omen.
Two people followed Skeet onto the elevator. A United Parcel Service deliveryman wheeled in a hand truck on which were stacked three boxes. Behind him came the woman in the pink suit.
Skeet had pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. The UPS man tapped the button for the ninth floor. The lady in pink didn’t press anything.
Entering the building, Dusty at once spotted Skeet getting into an elevator at the farther end of the lobby. Martie saw him, too.
He wanted to shout at his brother, but a guard sat nearby, and the last thing they needed was to attract the attention of building security.
They hurried without running. The cab doors slid shut before they were halfway across the lobby.
None of the other three elevators was at the ground floor. Two were ascending, two descending. Of the two headed down, the nearest was at the fifth floor.
“Stairs?” Martie asked.
“Fourteen floors. No.” He pointed to the indicator board, as the elevator on the fifth floor moved down to the fourth. “This’ll be faster.”
The deliveryman got off at the ninth floor, and when the doors slid shut, the lady in pink pushed the stop button.
“You’re not dead,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“You were shot four times in the chest last night on the beach, but here you are.”
Skeet was amazed. “You were there?”
“As I’m sure you know.”
“No, really, I didn’t see you there.”
“Why aren’t you dead?”
“Kevlar.”
“Not likely.”
“It’s true. We were tailing a dangerous man,” he said, figuring he sounded totally lame, like he was trying to impress her, which in fact he was. She was a pretty lady, and Skeet felt a certain stirring in his loins that he had not felt in a long time.
“Or was the whole thing fake? A setup for my benefit?”
“No setup. My chest and belly are sore as hell.”
“When you die in the matrix,” she said, “you die for real.”
“Hey, did you like that movie, too?”
“You die for real…unless you’re a machine.”
She was beginning to seem a little spooky to Skeet, and his intuition was confirmed when she drew a pistol from the white handbag that hung on straps from her left shoulder. It was fitted with what in the movies they called a silencer, but which he knew was more accurately called a sound suppressor.
“What’re you carrying under your sweater?” she demanded.
“Me? This sweater? Nothing.”
“Bullshit. Lift your sweater very slowly.”
“Oh, man,” he said with grave disappointment, because here he was screwing up again. “You’re professional security, aren’t you?”
“Are you with Keanu or against him?”
Skeet was certain that he hadn’t taken any drugs in the past three days, but this sure had the feel of episodes that had followed some of his more memorable chemical cocktails. “Well, I’m with him when he’s doing cool sci-fi stuff, you know, but I’m against him when he’s making crap like A Walk in the Clouds.”
“Why are they stopped so long on the ninth floor?” Dusty asked, frowning at the indicator board above the elevator that Skeet had boarded.
“Stairs?” Martie suggested again.
After lingering at the third floor, the elevator for which they were waiting suddenly moved to the second. “We might get past him this way.”
The machine pistol that she took from Skeet would not fit easily in her handbag. The butt of the extended magazine stuck out, but she didn’t seem to care.
Still covering him with her own pistol, she took the elevator off stop and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The cab started up at once.
“Aren’t sound suppressors illegal?” Skeet asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“But you can get one because you’re professional security?”
“Good God, no. I’m worth five hundred million dollars, and I can get anything I want.”
He couldn’t know if what she said was true or not. He didn’t suppose it mattered.
Although the woman was quite pretty, Skeet began to recognize something in her green eyes or in her attitude, or both, that scared him. They were passing the thirteenth floor, appropriately, when he realized why she put ice in his spine: She possessed an indefinable but undeniable quality that reminded him of his mother.
At that moment, as they arrived at the fourteenth floor, Skeet knew that he was a dead man walking.
When the elevator doors slid open, Martie immediately stepped inside and pressed 14.
Dusty followed, blocked two other men who tried to enter after them, and said, “Sorry, emergency. We’re expressing to fourteen.”
Martie had pressed close door immediately after pressing the floor number. She held her thumb on it.
One of the men blinked in surprise, and one of them started to object, but the doors closed before an argument could begin.
As they came out of the elevator alcove into the fourteenth-floor corridor, Skeet said, “Where are we going?”
“Don’t be so stupidly disingenuous. It’s annoying. You know perfectly well where we’re going. Now move.”
She seemed to want him to go to the left, so he did, not just because she had a gun, but because all his life he had gone where people told him to go. She followed him, jamming the muzzle of the sound suppressor into his back.
The long, carpeted corridor was quiet. The acoustic ceiling soaked up their voices. No sounds came from beyond the hallway walls. They might have been the last two people on the planet.
“What if I stop right here?” Skeet asked.
“Then I shoot you right here,” she assured him.
Skeet kept moving.
As he passed the doors to office suites on both sides of the hall, he read the names on the etched-brass wall plates beside them. Mostly, they were doctors, specialists of one kind or another—though two were attorneys. This was convenient, he decided. If he somehow survived the next few minutes, he would no doubt need a few good doctors and one attorney.
They arrived at a door where the name on the brass plate was DR. MARK AHRIMAN. Under the psychiatrist’s name, in smaller letters, Skeet read, A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION.
“Here?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
As Skeet pushed the door inward, the lady in pink shot him in the back. If the silenced pistol m
ade any noise at all, he didn’t hear it, because the pain was so instantaneous and terrible that he wouldn’t have heard a marching band going past. He was focused entirely, intensely on the pain, and he was amazed that being shot could hurt so much worse when you weren’t wearing Kevlar. Even as the woman blew a hole in him, she shoved him hard through the door and into Dr. Ahriman’s reception lounge.
Bing!
Ahriman’s computer announced an arrival, and the screen filled with a security-camera view of the reception lounge.
With more amazement than he had experienced in years, the doctor swiveled away from his contemplation of the blue bag and saw Skeet stagger into the lounge, the door to the corridor slowly falling shut behind him.
A large blot of blood stained the front of his yellow sweater, which certainly ought to have been the case after he had taken four rounds in the chest and gut at close range. Although this might have been the same sweater Skeet had been wearing yesterday, the camera angle wasn’t clear enough to allow Ahriman to see whether there were four bullet holes in the bloodstained fabric. Skeet clawed at the air as if for support, stumbled, and collapsed facedown on the floor.
The doctor had heard stories of dogs, accidentally separated from their masters when far from home, crossing hundreds and even thousands of miles of inhospitable terrain, through rain and snow and sleet and blazing sun, often with cut feet and worse injuries, and showing up weeks later on the very doorstep where they belonged, to the astonishment and tearful joy of their families. He had never heard even one story about a gut-shot man getting up from a beach, walking approximately six to eight miles over—he checked his watch—eighteen hours, through a densely populated area, ascending fourteen floors in an elevator, and staggering into the office of the man who had shot him, to point a finger of accusation, so he was convinced that there was more to this development than met the eye.
With his mouse, the doctor clicked on the security icon shaped like a gun. The metal detector indicated that Skeet was not carrying a firearm.
Lying flat on the floor, the would-be detective was not aligned with the roentgen tubes, so fluoroscopy wasn’t possible.
Jennifer came out from behind the receptionist’s window and stood over the fallen Skeet. She appeared to be screaming—although whether because the condition of this wounded man horrified her or because the sight of blood offended her vegetarian sensibilities, Ahriman couldn’t be sure.
The doctor activated the audio. Yes, she was screaming, though not loudly, hardly more than wheezing, as though she couldn’t draw a breath deep enough to let go with a real window-rattler.
As Jennifer dropped to one knee beside Skeet to check for vital signs, Ahriman clicked on the nose icon, activating the trace-scent analyzer. Any sane person’s credulity would be stretched past the breaking point by the notion that this man, with four bullet wounds, had paused in his eighteen-hour trek to acquire explosives and build a bomb, which was now strapped to his chest. Nevertheless, reminding himself that attention to detail was important, the doctor waited for the system to report. Negative: no explosives.
Jennifer rose from the body and hurried out of camera range.
She no doubt intended to call the police and paramedics.
He buzzed her through the in-phone intercom. “Jennifer?”
“Doctor, oh, God, there’s—”
“Yes, I know. A man’s been shot. Do not call the police or the paramedics, Jennifer. I will do that. Do you understand?”
“But he’s bleeding badly. He’s—”
