The Good Guy

by Dean Koontz

  “I’ve got money in the bank. But you can’t always get bank money as fast as you might need it. This is my falls-apart money.”

  “For when what falls apart?”

  “Anything. Everything.”

  “You think it’s the End Times or something?”

  “Things fell apart last night, didn’t they?”

  “I guess they did,” he acknowledged.

  She looked grim when she said, “I’m never going to be helpless again.”

  “We’re in a tight place, but we aren’t helpless,” he assured her.

  “I don’t mean now,” she said, returning the money to her purse.

  “You mean like you were helpless back then…with Molly and the other stuff.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to talk about the other stuff?”

  “No.”

  “You told me about Molly.”

  “Telling that much hurt enough,” she said.

  Tim followed a rising freeway entrance. Heavy but unobstructed morning traffic raced at reckless speed through what the real-estate agents would call “another day in paradise.”

  “In the end,” he said, “we’re all helpless, if you want to get to the hard truth of things.”

  “I like hard truth. But damn if I’m near the end yet.”

  Thereafter, they rode in silence all the way to the exit that would take them to the warehouse club.

  The silence was comfortable. Tim suspected that no matter how far and long they might yet go together, they were already past any kind of silence that would feel strained.

  The awkwardness would come when they were at last ready to make their separate revelations.

  Forty

  Sitting behind the wheel of his car in front of Bethany and Jim’s place, Krait sent a coded text message informing his support group of the three dead people in the house.

  He did not suggest a course of action that should be taken. Decisions of that nature were not in his province. This was only a heads-up call.

  He typed REGRET THE MESS BUT UNAVOIDABLE. Then he concluded the message by quoting T. S. Eliot: LIFE YOU MAY EVADE, BUT DEATH YOU SHALL NOT.

  Although he had never met any of the men and women in the support group, he imagined that he must be a legendary figure among them, larger than life and as large as Death. From time to time he liked to send them such quotes as the Eliot bit, so they would know that his erudition equaled his skill at execution and would be even more motivated to serve him as required.

  If he had ever gone to school, he had done so in childhood and adolescence, but he had no more memory of receiving an education than he had of being younger than eighteen. He was, however, an excellent autodidact, and had taught himself much.

  T. S. Eliot was not a writer of whom Krait approved, but even an insistently incorrect man could occasionally pen a pleasing line. If Eliot had been still alive, Krait would have killed him.

  The support group most likely would prefer to let Bethany and Jim discover Mom, Dad, and neighbor Nora. As the police investigation proceeded, the support group would destroy or compromise any forensic evidence incriminating to Krait. They also would seed DNA, hairs, and fibers that would confuse the police and ultimately bring them to a blind alley.

  Krait knew no name for the organization of which the support group was a department, but he thought of it as the Gentlemen’s Club or just the Club. He didn’t know what the Gentlemen’s Club was or what its members’ ultimate purpose might be, or why they wanted certain people dead, and he didn’t need to know.

  For more than a decade, Krait had done freelance hits for the mob and for petitioners who had been referred to him by grateful people for whom he had killed quarrelsome spouses and rich parents and other impediments to the good life. Then seven years ago, a member of the Club had approached him with the sincere hope that he would kill for them on a regular basis.

  Their conversation had taken place in the back of a moving superstretch limousine at night, in Chicago. The interior lights had never been turned on, and to Krait the representative of the Club had been only a shadow in a cashmere topcoat, sitting at the farther end of the luxuriously upholstered passenger cabin.

  The man had spoken with what Krait took to be the accent of a Boston Brahmin. He was articulate, and his manner suggested that he had been born to wealth and social position. Although the Brahmin referred to his mysterious associates only as “our people,” Krait thought of him as a gentleman and of his group as the Gentlemen’s Club.

  When the gentleman described the level of support that would be provided, Krait had been impressed. And he knew this counted as further evidence that if he was not a species different from human beings, he was at least superior to and separate from them.

  The best thing about the support group was that they served Krait not only when he was engaged in a kill for the Gentlemen’s Club, but also when he undertook a mission on behalf of the mob or any other petitioner. They did not want exclusivity, yet they were always there for him.

  They had two reasons for this generosity, the first being that they recognized Krait’s singular talent. They wished to ensure that he would never be unavailable to them by reason of imprisonment.

  Second, they did not want Krait to be able to detect a pattern in the kinds of people whom he was asked to kill, or to deduce from that pattern the possible goals and the ultimate purpose of the Gentlemen’s Club. Therefore the Club paid him in cash, delivered by guys whom he could not distinguish either from the bagmen of various mobs or from treacherous husbands and sons and businessmen.

  They paid him in cash also to keep a financial firewall between themselves and their assassin, just in case one day, in spite of all their heroic efforts on his behalf, he took a fall.

  After that limousine ride in Chicago, Krait had never again met face to face with anyone who he could be certain was a Club member.

  In fact it didn’t matter to him who was and who wasn’t a courier for the Club. He loved to kill, he was well-rewarded for it, and he felt that forgetfulness was a grace that he owed to every one of his petitioners. He wiped from his mind forever the faces of those who had passed the cash to him.

  Krait had a remarkable ability to cast off beyond recovery any memory that he wished to set adrift. The faces of men who petitioned him or who served as couriers on the behalf of petitioners were as irretrievable to him as any astronaut, severed from a tether to his spacecraft, is lost forever to the eternal depths of space.

  Life was so much simpler when you could send out beyond the stars, with no risk of recovery, not only things like couriers’ faces but also dreary episodes and even whole great swaths of time that had been occupied by unsatisfactory experience.

  He never spoke to any member of the Club by phone. Communication remained strictly by coded electronic messaging. Voice analysis could be submitted as evidence in a court of law, but no one could prove beyond doubt whose fingers had typed a message.

  In the Lamplighter Tavern, when he had mistaken Timothy Carrier for the correct petitioner, he had assumed that this mission was not on behalf of the Gentlemen’s Club. The Brahmin and his people would never tell Krait to keep half the money as a no-kill fee. They didn’t change their minds. When they wanted someone dead, they wanted him or her dead the hard way and without hope of resurrection.

  Krait still doubted that the Paquette woman might be a target of the Club. She seemed to be a nobody. Gentlemen of wealth and power did not turn their heads for a woman like her, let alone pull a trigger on her by proxy.

  After sending his message, he drove to the Pacific Coast Highway and then south to the restaurant at which Carrier had abandoned the Explorer. He went through the vehicle end to end but found nothing helpful.

  As he finished that task, his cell phone vibrated. The support group reported that a bus driver remembered dropping off in Dana Point a couple that matched the description of Carrier and Paquette.

  Krait drove to Dana Point while
the support group reviewed the woman’s phone records in the hope of identifying anyone she might know in that seaside town.

  The clouds relented, blue sky insisted, and the sun gilded the coastal hills and the beaches and the squamous sea.

  Krait felt brilliantly alive, full of a gratifying fire, as a forge is filled with fire but not consumed by it. Dealing death did that for him.

  Forty-One

  The warehouse club offered an irresistible price on one-gallon jars of mayonnaise, six to a carton, and for a modest sum, you could buy enough bricks of tofu to build a two-bedroom house.

  On their quest for a disposable cell phone, Tim and Linda did not bother with the shopping carts that were, in a pinch, large enough to transport a lame horse. Other customers had piled their carts with multiple twelve-packs of toilet paper, panty hose by the half gross, and barrels of cocktail onions.

  A young couple piloted two pushcarts with adorable identical three-year-old girls facing backward in the kiddie seats, as if they had taken advantage of a two-for-one child sale in Aisle 9.

  Sometimes Tim worried that Americans were so accustomed to abundance that they thought this level of affluence and choice had always been the norm and was even now the norm in all but the most insistently backward corners of the world. Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.

  They purchased a cell phone suitable to their needs and an electric razor for Tim. The cashier, clearly puzzled by a mere two-item sale, did no more than raise an eyebrow in disapproval of their un-American restraint.

  Tim drove the Honda to a nearby auto center as Linda used his phone to make a call to activate the disposable cell they had just bought. Because the telephone came with prepaid minutes, she was not required to give a credit card or a name to trigger service.

  This system, not yet prohibited by law, was a great convenience to terrorists whether they bought one disposable phone to facilitate untraceable conversation or acquired them in bulk to be employed as bomb timers.

  Fortunately, even honest citizens were permitted to make use of this user-friendly technology.

  The auto center was comprised of numerous dealerships, hawking almost every make of wheeled transport, situated side by side along a large figure-eight roadway. Pennants fluttered in the faint breeze, banners proclaimed bargains, and thousands of vehicles stood on blacktop sales lots like gems on jewelers’ velvet display boards.

  Every dealership needed all of its on-lot parking spaces for inventory, for vehicles awaiting repair, and for potential customers. Consequently, employees’ cars, repaired vehicles awaiting pickup, and trade-ins not yet refurbished for resale were parked along the auto center’s communal roadway.

  Tim pulled to the curb behind a two-year-old silver Cadillac. From Linda’s carryall, he withdrew his zippered vinyl kit of tools.

  She remained in the Honda to monitor whether the touted “instant activation” would be minutes or hours later than promised.

  Openly rather than furtively, quickly but not with an air of haste, Tim removed the front and back plates from Teresa’s Honda. He put them in the trunk.

  No passing motorists would think twice about a man with tools attending to a car in the middle of an auto center.

  The showrooms were set so far back behind the sales lots that the vehicles parked along the communal roadway were out of sight of the dealership employees.

  He walked forward to the silver Cadillac. The doors were locked. Peering through the windows, he saw no personal effects inside. The glove box hung open, looked empty.

  Evidence suggested this was a recent trade-in, not yet sent for service prior to resale, so it might sit here undisturbed for a few days. In California, license plates remained on a trade-in, and the buyer drove with no plates on the new vehicle until he received them in the mail.

  If the Cadillac had seemed to be an employee’s car, Tim would have moved up the line until he found a possible trade-in, because the sooner someone drove the car, the sooner the missing plates might be noticed.

  He removed the tags from the Cadillac and put them on the Honda Accord.

  When Tim got behind the wheel again, Linda said, “No service yet. If I were still a writer, I’d write about a psychopath who tracks down someone who failed to keep a guarantee of instant activation.”

  “What’s the psycho do when he finds the guy?”

  “Deactivates him.”

  “You’re still a writer,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore. And if I don’t know, how would you know?”

  Starting the Honda, he said, “Because we are what we are.”

  “That’s very deep. If I ever write another book, I’ll use that for sure.”

  “I thought I could be just a mason. I’m a mason, all right, but I’m still what I was, too.”

  As he pulled away from the curb, he could feel that green gaze all over his face.

  “And what is it that you were?” she asked.

  “My dad is a mason, too, and a damn good one. Being a mason defines him like it doesn’t seem to totally define me, though I wish it did.”

  “Your dad is a mason,” she said almost with wonder, as if he had revealed something magical.

  “Why’s that surprising? Tradesmen tend to pass the trade on to their kids, or try to.”

  “This is going to sound stupid. But since you showed up at my place, everything’s been going so fast…it never occurred to me to think did you have a father. Do you like him?”

  “Do I like him? Why wouldn’t I like him?”

  “Fathers and sons, it’s not always a sure thing.”

  “He’s a great guy. He’s the best.”

  “My God, you have a mother, too, don’t you?”

  “Well, my dad’s not an amoeba, he didn’t just divide in two and there I was.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said softly, with a kind of awe, “what’s your mother’s name?”

  “Oh, my God, her name is Mary.”

  “Mary,” she said, as though she had never heard the name before, as though it were musical and sweet upon the tongue. “Is she really wonderful?”

  “She’s about as wonderful as you could stand.”

  “What’s your dad’s name?”

  “Walter.”

  “Walter Carrier?”

  “It would be, wouldn’t it?”

  “Does he have a huge head like you?”

  “I don’t remember it any smaller.”

  “Walter and Mary,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  Perplexed, he glanced at her. “What’re you grinning about?”

  “I thought you were this foreign country.”

  “What foreign country?”

  “Your own country, an exotic land, so much to learn about it, so much to explore. But you’re not a foreign country.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re a world.”

  “Is that another crack about my big head?”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  Departing the auto center, Tim said, “No sisters. One brother. Zach. He’s five years older than me, and he’s got a normal head.”

  “Walter, Mary, Zach, and Tim,” she said, and seemed delighted. “Walter, Mary, Zach, and Tim.”

  “I’m not sure why it should matter, but suddenly everything seems to matter, so I should say Zach is married to Laura, and they have a little girl named Naomi.”

  Linda’s eyes shone as if with restrained tears, but she didn’t look like a woman on the verge of weeping. Quite the contrary.

  He sensed that he might be walking a ragged edge with this question, but he said, “What about your mom and dad?”

  The disposable cell phone rang. She took the call and said, “Yes,” in answer to a question, and then “Yes,” and then “Thank you.”

  Service had been activ
ated.

  Forty-Two

  From the contents of the desk in Teresa Mendez’s den, off her living room, Krait learned a great deal that he did not like about her. She had all the wrong values.

  The most important fact concerning this thirty-two-year-old widowed medical assistant, which Krait discovered from the simple day-planner she had left behind, was that currently she could be found vacationing in New York City with women named Gloria Nguyen and Joan Applewhite.

  She had left the previous Sunday. This was Tuesday. She would return home on the coming Sunday.

  On the back of the cabinet door under the kitchen sink hung a dishtowel. He found the towel damp.

  The shower floors in both bathrooms, upstairs and down, were beaded with water, and the tile grout was dark with moisture.

  In the living room, the gas-log fireplace had been ablaze early in the day. The bricks lining the firebox were still slightly warm to the touch.

  The two-car garage contained no vehicles. The widow Mendez might have driven to the airport to catch a flight to New York. But if she owned a second car, Carrier and the woman possessed it now.

  He sent a text message to his support group, seeking information on motor vehicles registered to Mendez.

  A short while later, as he satisfied his curiosity by inspecting the contents of the widow’s freezer, he received a coded-text reply to the effect that Mendez owned only a Honda Accord.

  They had the license number, but that was of little use to a man who worked without full legal sanction. Krait could not issue an all-points bulletin.

  For the moment, he’d lost track of his quarry. He wasn’t unduly concerned. They could find only temporary sanctuary. This was Krait’s world. He was secret royalty, and they were commoners; and he would find them sooner rather than later.

  Having gone sixteen active hours without sleep, he realized this might in fact be fate working on his behalf, giving him a chance to refresh before the final showdown.

  He brewed a pot of green tea.

  In the narrow pantry, he found a package of simple biscuits. He arranged half a dozen of them on a plate.

  In a high cupboard, he discovered a lovely little decorative thermos, blue with black-and-white harlequin bands at top and bottom. When the tea was ready, he filled the thermos.

  The well-earned respite he had hoped to enjoy at Bethany and Jim’s house waited for him here, in the humbler residence of the widow Mendez.

  He carried the thermos of tea, a mug, the plate of biscuits, and two paper napkins upstairs to the master bedroom. He put them on the nightstand.

  After undressing and carefully laying out his clothes to prevent wrinkling, he found two robes in the widow’s closet. Neither could have belonged to her deceased husband.

  The first was quilted, pink, floral, and without style. He found a disgusting wad of used tissues and half a roll of throat lozenges in one pocket.

  Fortunately, the second choice, a blue silk number, while small for him, fit well enough and felt delicious.