The Darkest Evening of the Year

by Dean Koontz

  “Of course.”

  She takes the lid off the container of potato salad and smells it. “You pity her, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Why should I?”

  She spits in the potato salad. “You shouldn’t.”

  He says nothing.

  Again she spits in the potato salad.

  She stares at him, reading his reaction.

  Unlike her, he is in control not just of his body and intellect but also of his emotions. He meets her stare unwaveringly.

  “Save your sympathy for me,” she says.

  “I feel nothing for her.”

  “Not even disgust?”

  “She’s just a thing,” he says.

  Moongirl can maintain a stare halfway to forever. Finally she holds out the container of potato salad and says, “You too.”

  Without hesitation, he spits in it.

  She smiles at him.

  He dares not return the smile. She will take it as mockery.

  A third time, she spits in the potato salad, then returns the lid to the container and places the container on the tray.

  She says, “Maybe I’ll let you strike the match.”

  He is not sure of the safe reply, so he says nothing.

  “Tomorrow night,” she says.

  “You’ll want to do it.”

  “You won’t?”

  “I will if it’s what you want.”

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “What else is there.”

  “Boredom,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  She picks up the tray.

  “I’ll carry that for you,” he says.

  “No. You go ahead, unlock the door.”

  He precedes her through the house.

  Behind him, she says, “We’ll have a little fun now.”

  Chapter

  28

  From the back of Amy’s Expedition, Fred and Ethel and Nickie watched solemnly as Mandy and the nameless dog were loaded into Dani Chiboku’s SUV.

  A few clouds had materialized. Although at ground level the air hung as still as old clothes in the back of a closet, at the higher altitude white cloaks were flung across the sky, billowing eastward, tattering to the west.

  With the dogs safely aboard, Dani closed the tailgate and said, “Seriously, Amy, five years.”

  “Something will happen. We’ll have more and better fund-raisers. I’m applying everywhere for grants.”

  “But the number of dogs that need to be rescued keeps rising in direct proportion to the amount of money you generate.”

  “So far, yeah, but it’s not an economic law. Eventually the need and the resources are gonna come into balance. People just can’t keep throwing so many dogs away.”

  “Look around, girl. The world’s never been meaner. It’s going to get worse.”

  “No. I’ve known it worse than this.”

  Amy seldom spoke of her past and always with circumspection. She sometimes wondered if friends accepted her as merely a private person or if instead they suspected her of having secrets.

  The sharp interest in Dani’s eyes and the curiosity that pinched and dimpled every feature of her face answered that question.

  When Amy offered nothing more, Dani said, “You should start to think about getting a job.”

  “This is my job. The dogs.”

  “It may be a passion. It may even be a calling. But, girl, it isn’t a job. A job pays you.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do, Dani. I’ve been doing just this for like ten years. I’m unemployable.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re smart, you’ve got drive—”

  “I’m a spoiled little rich girl living off an inheritance.”

  “You’re not rich anymore, if you ever were, and you don’t know what spoiled is.” Dani shook her head. “Love you like a sister, Amy.”

  Amy nodded. “Me too.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll open up to me like a sister would.”

  “I’m afraid what you see is what you get. Nothing to open up.” She kissed Dani on the cheek. “I’m not a book, I’m a pamphlet.”

  Buttering her words with sarcasm, Dani said, “Yeah, right.”

  “Tell Mookie I’m grateful for him taking Janet Brockman’s case.”

  Opening the driver’s door of her SUV, Dani said, “What’s the story with the little girl?”

  “Theresa? I don’t know. She may be some kind of autistic or just traumatized from…the way it was in that house.”

  “Mookie says a strange thing happened at the office.”

  Amy raised one hand to the locket at her throat. The pendant featured a cameo carved from soapstone, but instead of the classic profile of a woman, the subject was a golden retriever. She never wore other jewelry, nor owned any.

  “The girl goes straight to Baiko,” Dani said, “sits on the floor with him, pets him.”

  The previous night, as Amy had carried the sleepy child into Lottie Augustine’s house, Theresa had reached up and touched the locket.

  “Later, when they’re leaving the office, she says to Mookie, ‘No more cancer.’”

  The wind, Theresa had said so softly, fingering the locket. The wind…the chimes.

  “Mookie hadn’t mentioned that Baiko had just gone through chemo. Didn’t say a word about the cancer.”

  “Maybe Lottie told them,” Amy suggested.

  “Not very likely, is it?”

  Twenty years ago, Lottie had lost her only child to cancer. Five years later, her husband died of the same malignancy. As if cancer were the secret and the truest name of the devil, which would conjure him in a sulfurous cloud even if whispered, Lottie never spoke of the disease.

  “The girl says to Mookie, ‘No more cancer,’ and then she says, ‘It won’t come back.’”

  The wind…the chimes.

  “Amy?”

  “She’s a strange child,” Amy said.

  “Mookie says she’s got troubling eyes.”

  “I thought beautiful.”

  “I haven’t seen her myself.”

  “Beautiful but bruised,” Amy said.

  “Let’s hope she’s right.”

  “What?”

  “About Baiko’s cancer.”

  “I suspect she is,” Amy said. “I’m sure she is.”

  She stood by the driver’s door of her Expedition and watched Dani Chiboku drive away with the two latest rescues.

  The day remained sunny, but she could no longer feel its warmth.

  A moving shadow wiped the sun glare off the Expedition.

  When Amy looked up, the covey of eastward-racing clouds seemed to be too high to cast such a shadow.

  A change was coming. She didn’t know what it would be, but she knew it would not be a change for the better.

  She did not like change. She wanted continuity and the peace that came with it: day folding into night, night into day, dogs saved and passed to loving homes, and more dogs saved.

  A change was coming, and she was afraid.

  Chapter

  29

  The client was waiting for them east of Lake Elsinor, out where the merciless desert had met its match in the relentless tract-house builders.

  Bobby Onions drove them to the rendezvous in his cool Land Rover because no way in hell would he ride in Vernon Lesley’s Chevy, which Bobby called “wimp wheels, a losermobile.”

  Vern refrained from mentioning that every time he needed an extra hand, Bobby was available for hire, which suggested that clients were not standing in line outside Onions Investigations.

  Inexplicably, the freeway traffic was light. Whatever the reason, Vern knew the explanation wasn’t that the Rapture had occurred, that the saved had been taken straight to Heaven.

  Mrs. Bonnaventura, who lived in the crappy apartment next to Vern’s crappy apartment, believed in the imminence of the Rapture.
Housebound by emphysema, she kept two things close to her: a wheeled tank of oxygen, which she received through nasal cannula, and a small bag that she had packed for the miraculous ascent.

  In the bag were a Bible, a change of underwear, photos of dead loved ones—family and friends—whom Mrs. Bonnaventura intended to track down without delay upon reaching Paradise, and breath mints.

  She knew she wouldn’t need the oxygen tank in Heaven, where she would be restored to her youth, and she couldn’t explain to Vern why she packed the underwear or the breath mints. She’d said, “I just don’t want to take any chances, it would be so embarrassing.”

  When she talked about meeting God, Mrs. Bonnaventura glowed. The prospect of a divine howdy-do delighted her.

  Vern didn’t believe in the Rapture, and he was neutral on the existence of God. But one thing he knew for sure: If God existed, meeting Him after death would be so terrifying that you’d probably die a second time from sheer fright.

  Even someone like Mrs. Bonnaventura, who had lived a mostly blameless life, when ushered into the awesome presence of the Creator of the infinite universe and also of the butterfly, would discover ten thousand fearsome new layers of meaning in the word humility.

  Mrs. Bonnaventura said God was pure love, as if this quality of the Lord made meeting him a less weighty event, as if it would be like—but even nicer than—meeting Oprah Winfrey.

  Vern figured that if God existed, a God of pure love, then for sure there had to be a Purgatory, because you would need a place of purification before you dared go upstairs for the Ultimate Hug. Even a sweet woman like Mrs. Bonnaventura, rapturing directly from this life to God’s presence, would detonate as violently as antimatter meeting matter, like in that old episode of Star Trek.

  Interrupting Vern’s theological musings, piloting the Rover with one hand, rubbing the back of his neck with the other, Bobby Onions said, “So what’s the story with the bounce?”

  “Bounce?”

  “The woman.”

  “What woman?” Vern wondered.

  “What woman could it be?” Bobby said impatiently. “Redwing.”

  “You said someone you’re investigating, you call a monkey.”

  “That’s a man or a woman. Besides, I’m not investigating her anymore.”

  “So why do you call her the bounce?”

  “When a woman has the right stuff in the right places to bounce in the right way, she’s hot. A bounce is a sexy lady.”

  “What do you call a sexy guy?” Vern asked.

  “I don’t find guys sexy.” Bobby frowned. He put both hands on the wheel and sat up straighter. “You don’t find guys sexy, do you?”

  “No. Hell, no. Don’t talk crazy.”

  “So what is this Von Longwood business?” Bobby asked.

  “What do you mean? He’s my avatar. In Second Life.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I told you. Don’t you listen?”

  “You’re always talking about him.”

  “And you’re never listening. He’s an avatar, like a cartoon version of me, just another identity. He’s me, I’m him.”

  Scowling into the desert glare as they turned onto an exit ramp, Bobby said, “It sounds kinky to me.”

  “It’s not kinky. Mostly it’s a role-playing game.”

  “I heard about these two gay guys—one dressed up like a nurse, the other like a Nazi, then they’d go at each other.”

  “Not that kind of role-playing. It’s cool. Go on-line, look up Second Life, educate yourself.”

  “I don’t need the Internet. I’ve already got me a life, and it’s packed full. I don’t need a play life.”

  Simmering, Vern said, “The next road, go left.”

  Cottonwoods and clusters of wild oleander thrived along a dry streambed, but on the hills of rock and sand, nothing grew other than withered mesquite and sage and bunch-grass.

  “How much you pay for your fabulous flying car?” Bobby asked, punctuating the question with a smirk.

  Although he knew he was being mocked, Vern could not resist saying with some pride, “A hundred fifty thousand Linden dollars.”

  “What’s a Linden dollar?”

  “That’s the money you buy to spend in Second Life. Linden Labs, they started Second Life.”

  “How much is that in real money?”

  “Six hundred bucks.”

  “You paid six hundred bucks for a cartoon car? No wonder you drive a losermobile in your real life.”

  Vern almost said My second life is my real life, but he knew a Philistine like Bobby would never understand.

  Instead, he said, “So which is the real you—Bobby Onions or Barney Smallburg?”

  The starboard wheels stuttered on the graveled shoulder of the road, but then found the pavement again.

  “You sonofabitch,” said Barney-Bobby. “You investigated me.”

  “Anybody I’m gonna hire to back me up on a job—I find out who he is first. You changed your name two years before you got your PI license. I’ve known it since the first case you worked with me.”

  “In a paramilitary profession,” said Barney-Bobby, “image is important.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Barney Smallburg doesn’t sound like a guy with gonads.”

  “Compared to Vernon Lesley, it sounds totally kick-ass.”

  “You’ll be making a right turn in about half a mile.”

  Runty cactuses clawed out a life on a sand-and-shale hillside, their spiky shadows creeping eastward as the westering sun sought the distant sea.

  “Tell you what,” said Barney-Bobby. “You never tell anyone I changed my name, I’ll stop riding you about Von Longwood.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You’re of the old school, I’m of the new,” Bobby said, “but I’ve got a lot of respect for you, Vern.”

  That was bullshit, but Vern didn’t care. What people thought of him in his first life was of no concern to him anymore. He had his refuge now, and his wings.

  “So what’s the story with the bounce?” Bobby asked.

  “She had her own other life before the current one. She’s hiding under the name Redwing.”

  “Hiding from who?”

  “I don’t know. But they found her. And they hired me to search for every proof she kept of that life and take it from her.”

  “What proof?”

  “Documents, snapshots.”

  “Why take it from her?”

  “You ask too many questions,” Vern said.

  “You, me, every good procto has to have curiosity.”

  Procto. Vern decided not to ask for a definition. He said, “All I care is, it’s a good payday.”

  As Vern had instructed, Bobby turned right on a badly fissured blacktop road so long neglected that weeds sprouted from the cracks in the pavement.

  “Are you ironed?” Bobby Onions asked. “You don’t look ironed.”

  Squinting down at his shirt and pants, Vern said, “I always buy this wrinkleproof polyester-blend crap. I just let the wrinkles hang out. What the hell do you care anyway?”

  Bobby sighed. “‘Are you ironed’ means are you carrying iron, are you packing a gun?”

  “You aren’t living in a movie, Bobby. When did you ever hear of a PI getting shot by a client in real life?”

  “It could always happen.”

  “To the best of your knowledge, has it ever happened?”

  “All it takes is once to get yourself dead.” Bobby patted the left side of his sport coat. “I’m packing a real door-buster.”

  “I didn’t want to ask,” Vern said, “’cause I thought maybe you had a huge tumor or something.”

  “Bullshit. It doesn’t show. It’s in a custom holster, and I had the tailor do some work on the jacket.”

  The road topped a rise. A great flat plain opened before them.