by Dean Koontz
He released the false bottom of the drawer, plucked it out, threw it aside. Next he removed a four-inch-deep, rectangular metal lockbox of the kind in which small businesses secured their folding cash at the end of the day.
“I’m shot.”
Fumbling with the lockbox latches, Jimmy said, “Minute, minute, minute.” From the metal box he took plastic bags of pot and hashish. “Gotta flush, then I’ll call.”
“Call then flush.”
“Too much shit going down here, too much shit. Can’t get caught with this stuff, too.”
“Dad. Please. Call.”
As Jimmy scuttled away through the baleful light, muttering to himself—“Gotta flush, gotta flush, gotta flush”—he was reminiscent of no one so much as Rumpelstiltskin, except more demented.
Ryan tried to get up from the chair. He passed out.
Approaching sirens woke him.
Jimmy was bent over the La-Z-Boy, pressing a rag to Ryan’s head.
“What’re you doing?”
“Gotta stop the bleeding.”
The damp rag smelled like dishwater, but Ryan didn’t have the strength to push it away. He spoke through it as it fluttered against his face: “Dad, listen.”
“They’re almost here.”
“Wore masks.”
“Who did?”
“Broke in wearing masks.”
“Like shit they did.”
“We never saw faces.”
“I saw their faces.”
The tail of the rag flicked into his mouth, and he spat it out. “They had…wrong address.”
“Be quiet. Keep your strength.”
“They wanted Curtis someone.”
“Shit they did. No Curtis here.”
“Shot me before they realized.”
As the sirens died, Jimmy said, “Pullin’ up in front.”
Rallying himself, Ryan grabbed the rag and tore it away from his face. “Listen. That’s the story.”
Confused, his father said, “We need a story?”
Ryan would not finger Violet and her two associates. He didn’t want the old man to do it, either.
“Deep shit, Dad. We need a story.”
“Masks, wrong address, Curtis someone,” Jimmy said.
“Can you do it?”
“Bullshit cops? Been doing it all my life.”
A moment later, paramedics were in the room.
So recently willing to die, Ryan was surprised, as the medics bent to him, how much he wanted to live.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Three years and five months after the release of her first novel, Samantha published her third. Lexington, Kentucky, at the end of her twenty-one-city publicity tour, was not a standard stop on authors’ promotional schedules. She had asked her publisher to include it after Atlanta, to bring her close to St. Christopher’s Ranch, which would give her an excuse to phone him.
She thought he might feel less comfortable agreeing to see her if she came across the country just for that purpose, and might be more relaxed if he thought she happened to be in the neighborhood. Two weeks earlier, when she called him, he seemed pleased to hear from her, and she secured an invitation without pressing for it.
That morning, she rented a car and drove deep into the Bluegrass region, taking back roads where she could, in no hurry, enchanted by the rolling rural landscape, the miles on miles of black plank fences, white plank fences, and limestone walls, beyond which magnificent Thoroughbreds grazed in pristine meadows.
St. Christopher’s Ranch sat on seventy acres. Its meadows were as lush as any in the area, and the horses at pasture were beautiful though not Thoroughbreds. The main house stood far back from the county route, at the end of a driveway overhung by ancient oaks.
Encircled by a deep veranda, this enormous but elegant Kentucky manor house, white with black trim, was shaded from the worst of the June sunshine by the largest willow trees that Sam had ever seen.
Both ramps and steps rose from walkways to the veranda. She took the wide steps.
This spacious porch was furnished with gliders and large padded wicker chairs, in one of which sat a tow-headed and freckled boy of about thirteen, tanned and barefoot, in blue-jean shorts and a DOGS ROCK T-shirt. He was reading a book and, because he had no arms, he turned the pages with his toes.
“Hey,” he said, looking up from his book, “you ever been told you sure are pretty?”
“Heard it a couple times,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“With a name like that, a girl better be pretty. If I was ten years older, you’d be toast.”
“You ever been told you’re a terrible flirt?”
“Heard it a couple times,” he said, and grinned.
As instructed by phone, she went through a screen door into a front hall with a lovely old walnut floor. Here the ranch offices were situated in an atmosphere so relaxed, all the doors stood open.
Father Timothy was in his office, at his desk, where she had been told he would be when she arrived. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a face weathered by sun and wind, he could have passed for any ranch hand or experienced horseman if he had not been in a monk’s habit.
“Because this is a dog-wash day, Binny had a lot to do this morning, and since he wasn’t sure exactly when you’d get here, he asked me to take you to him.”
“Binny,” she said.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know, we call him that around here. His name being well known, and him wanting a low profile. It’s just what we call him instead, for privacy’s sake.”
In her first novel, there had been a character nicknamed Binny.
Father Tim led her through the main house to what he called the park, which was rather like a quadrangle on a college campus. Three other houses, similar to the original manor house but newer, embraced this large paved area, which was shaded by a grove of oaks.
The park bustled with festive activities. Children in wheelchairs sat at low tables, working on all manner of craft projects. A group of ambulatory kids in karate pajamas took instruction in martial arts. A storybook hour was under way, with children seated on pillows, in a semicircle around an animated nun evoking a rabbit’s surprise and fright with flamboyant gestures. And everywhere dogs lazed or frolicked, golden retrievers and Labradors, all vigorous and well-groomed and happy.
“The brothers live in the expanded main house,” Father Timothy explained as Sam accompanied him through the oak-shaded park, “and the sisters have a convent farther back on the property. These three other houses are dormitories, but we need to build a fourth. We don’t segregate the children by types of disability, Down syndrome rooms with paraplegic, so they can learn to appreciate one another’s special strengths.”
St. Christopher’s accepted orphans and abandoned children with special needs of all kinds. The younger ones eventually might be adopted, but those over six, who were harder to place, most likely could expect to live at the ranch until they were adults.
The brothers’ several enterprises included the breeding and raising of show-quality dogs. Although this work produced a profit, the unsold dogs ranked as important as those who went on to show-prize glory or to happy homes, because these remained on the ranch and were not merely companions to the children but were also trained to socialize them and to help them learn confidence.
Beyond the park, wide paved pathways led to stables and riding rings, to more fenced pastures, to the convent, and to service buildings, one of which contained the on-site veterinary office and the dog-grooming facility.
Father Tim escorted Sam to the dog-wash, opened the door, and said, “I’ll not intrude upon your reunion. You’ll recognize Binny—as the kids say, if he had one more floppy ear, he would be just like the dogs.”
The big room included bath sinks, grooming tables, and dog dryers. One golden retriever sat in a dryer, gazing out mournfully, as if imprisoned. Ryan, assisted by a Down syndrome boy of about fifteen, administered ast
ringent gel to the ears of a black Lab who had already been dried.
Not having noticed Samantha yet, Ryan said to the boy, “Find his collar there, Rudy, and take him back to Sister Josephine.”
Rudy said he would, then saw Sam and smiled. Ryan knew the meaning of the smile, and turned.
He wore rubber boots and a rubber apron over khakis and a green knit shirt. Sam had never seen him dressed with such disregard for style—nor had he ever looked more elegant.
Because she had not been sure how this would unfold, she was moved and happy to see that at the sight of her, his face brightened with unmistakable delight.
“There you are,” he said. “My God, there you are.”
The way he looked at her brought tears to her eyes, and seeing this, Ryan busied her with an introduction to Rudy and then to Ham, the Labrador who needed to be returned to Sister Josephine.
“Rudy here,” Ryan said, “is going to be a great dog groomer.” The boy ducked his head shyly. “He’s already pretty good except he doesn’t like the part where you have to express their anal glands.”
“Yuch,” the boy said.
As Rudy left with Ham, Ryan said, “Let me get out of this gear, wash up. We’ll have lunch. I made it. The lunch, I mean.” He shook his head. “You’re actually here. Don’t go anywhere. Let Tinker out of the dryer, she’s done. She’s mine. She’ll be going to lunch with us.”
The retriever was grateful to be paroled and doubly grateful for an ear massage and a chin scratch.
Ryan took off the apron, hung it up, took off the boots, laced on a pair of running shoes, and then scrubbed his hands and forearms at one of the long, deep dog-wash sinks.
“Tinker is wonderful,” Sam said.
“She’s the best. She wonders why she’s stuck with me instead of with a kid who’ll throw the ball all day for her.”
“I’m sure she adores you.”
“Well, yes, ’cause I’m the one with the cookies.”
Ryan took her hand so naturally that it seemed they had never been apart, and Tinker led them outside, around the building, and up a set of exterior stairs to a second-floor porch.
His apartment was smaller than the one that she’d had on Balboa Peninsula: kitchen and living room in a cramped space, the bedroom positively tiny.
Lunch consisted of cold chicken, cheese, potato salad—“I make a killer potato salad”—fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. Together Ryan and Sam prepared the table on the porch.
Unlike the porch she’d had on Balboa, this one enjoyed no all-embracing pepper tree, but it had a roof. The view was of a baseball diamond and fenced pastures beyond.
“How’s the book doing?” he asked.
“Fastest-selling yet.”
“Fantastic. I told you. Didn’t I tell you? You’re no one-hit wonder.”
They talked about the book business, about what she was writing now, and about St. Christopher’s, of which it seemed he might be able to talk for days and never exhaust his supply of charming stories.
She had come to see if he was well and happy, for it mattered very much to her that he should be both. When a man went to the extraordinary length of giving away his entire fortune, you had to worry that he had done so under the misguided romantic notion that he would find his problems lifted from him with the weight of the wealth, only to discover that the world was a harder place without a bottomless bank account. But he seemed happier than she had dared to hope, and she knew he was not putting on a show for her, because he was still as easy to read as any book by Dr. Seuss.
“The days, the weeks, the years are so full here, Sam. There are always dogs to wash, stables to paint, lawns to mow, and always kids who think only I can solve their problems because I’ve got one dog-ear. I love the kids, Sam. God, they’re great, they struggle with such limitations, but they never complain.”
He could have had the ear repaired with cosmetic surgery, but for reasons she could only guess at, he had chosen to live with it. Likewise the scars on his head: Tufts of hair bristled at odds with all the hair around them or didn’t grow at all. Poor nerve response in his left foot caused it to drag a little, but he didn’t limp; he moved with his usual grace, adapting to the foot as if he had been born with the problem. He remained the handsomest man she had ever known, and now he possessed a sweet beauty that had not been his before, that had nothing to do with looks.
They talked through the afternoon, and although Samantha had no intention of asking him what had happened back in the day, when his life had changed so radically, he eventually came to talk of it, and for the first time she heard about all that he had withheld from her—Ismay Clemm, the dreams, the paranoid pursuit of conspiracies that for a while he believed extended to her mother, even to her. He spoke of his blindness and of his mistakes with an ease and humility—even with a slightly melancholy humor—that made this the most riveting narrative to which she had ever listened, no less because of the way these events had so profoundly changed him than because of the events themselves.
She questioned none of the supernatural elements of his story, for though she had never seen a spirit herself, the world had always been to her a place of infinite layers, and all its flawed people a community of saints potential. And most of the time, as Ryan now knew, grace is offered not in the form of a visitation like that of Ismay, but in the form of people just like us. People like Cathy Sienna, who had known Ryan needed to be told the roots of violence, even if he would not consider them until too late, and who later, on that flight back from Denver, had told him that he should offer his suffering and his achievements for the intentions of others, which was now in fact how he lived, with no expectation of ultimate mercy but with the hope that others might receive it.
She had been in love with him once, and still she loved him. This was a different love, emotional and intellectual and spiritual, as before, but not sensual. Through his suffering, he learned to love truth, and on this afternoon she saw that his love of truth led him to an understanding of her that he had never possessed before, an understanding of her so complete that perhaps he alone in the world really knew her. During this astonishing afternoon, her love for him had grown deeper, and she wondered if in her life she would know anything again quite like it.
In late afternoon, when the time came to part, they both knew it and rose together from the table. He and Tinker escorted Sam back across the ranch, past the stables and the riding rings, through the quadrangle, to her car in front of the original manor house.
As they walked, he said, “One more thing I need to say to you, Sam, and I know you’ll want to argue, but I ask you up front to cut me some slack. No argument. No comment. Just listen. I’m a fan of your books, after all, so that ought to earn me a big measure of courtesy. A writer needs to keep her fans happy.”
She perceived in his calculated light tone that what he needed next to say to her was more important to him than anything else they had talked about throughout the afternoon. By her silence, she assented.
He took her hand again, and they walked a few steps before he said, “Looking back on it all, for the longest time, I couldn’t see why a guy like me was so important to the universe that I would be sent Ismay Clemm or be given all the signs that could have prevented me from being a user who now lives with a dead girl’s heart and with her life on my conscience. Why would I be given so many chances when I was so clearly not a guy who would take them or even recognize them? And then one day not long ago, I knew. Reading this third book of yours, I knew. It was you, Sam. I was given all those chances because of you.”
“Ryan—”
“You promised no comment. See, here’s how it is. You’re a fine person, more than fine, you’re grace personified. And what you’re doing with your life is important. It’s necessary that you’re happy, because in your happiness, you’re going to show so many other people the way, through your books. Be happy, Sam. Find someone. Marry. Have kids. What an incredible mother you will be. Have kids, Sam, embrac
e life, and write your brilliant books. Because if there’s any hope for me, when my time comes, it’s not because I gave everything away, and it’s not because I live here among monks, not one myself and never can be. No, if there’s any ultimate redemption, it will be because I passed through your life without scarring you, and did not diminish who you are. No comment, now, not a one.”
They had reached her car, and she did not know that she could drive or that she could talk. But she knew what he wanted of her, what he needed. So she found within herself the depth of courage to make no comment on what he had said, and instead to smile at him and find something to say that might end this on a lighter note.
“You never did tell me…what was the William Holden film that you kept waking to and thinking had a message for you?”
By his smile and then his soft laugh, she knew that she had found a right question.
“God must have a sense of humor, Sam. And for sure He became so exasperated with me that He tried to hammer me over the head with a sign only less obvious than a burning bush. It’s not what the movie is about that matters. It’s the title that might have made me think—if I’d taken the clue and bothered to research it.” He paused for effect. “Satan Never Sleeps.”
She found a laugh in that, though of the kind that bruises.
He held her for a moment, and she held him, and she kissed his cheek, and he kissed her brow.
Driving away, she looked once in the mirror and saw him standing in the lane, watching her leave, and she could not look back again.
Along the county road, when she found a widening of the shoulder where she could park, she stopped the car.
An unfenced meadow sloped up toward a trio of oaks. She climbed the meadow to the trees and sat with her back against the largest of them, hidden from traffic on the road below.
For a long time, she wept, not so much for him and not at all for herself, but for the condition of all things and for the way the world could be but is not.
In time, she found herself thinking about nothing more than the birds and their songs, the sound of the breeze in the high branches of the oaks, and the shafts of sunlight, clear and pure, that fell through the trees and found the grass and caressed it.
She rose then and returned to the car. She needed to go home. She had a new book to write. And a life to find.
This book is dedicated to Tim and Serena Powers
for reasons obvious to anyone who knows them
BY DEAN KOONTZ
77 Shadow Street • What the Night Knows • Breathless
Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me
The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy
The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy
The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon
One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye
False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing
Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire
The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers
Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms
Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear
Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night
The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder
