Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  12

  EVEN THOUGH THE TIRES HAD WINTER TREAD, THEY SPUN USELESSLY A couple of times on the way to Celeste's place, but Joey concluded the short trip without sliding into anything. The Baker house was white with green trim and had two dormer windows on the second floor.

  He and Celeste ran clumsily across the lawn to the front-porch steps, avoiding the walkway, which was far more treacherous than the frozen

  grass.

  Lights glowed throughout the downstairs, glittering in laces of ice that filigreed some of the windows. The porch lamp was on as well.

  They should have entered with caution, because P.J. might have gotten there ahead of them. They had no way of knowing which of the three families he intended to visit first.

  But Celeste was in a panic about her folks, so she unlocked the door and plunged heedlessly into the short front hall, calling out to them as she entered. "Mom! Daddy! Where are you? Mom!"

  No one answered.

  Aware that any attempt to restrain the girl would prove futile, brandishing the crowbar at every shadow and imagined movement, Joey followed close behind her as she burst through doorways and flung open those doors that were closed, shouting for her mother and father with increasing terror. Four rooms downstairs and four up. One and a half bathrooms. The place wasn't a mansion by any definition, but it was better than any home that Joey had ever known, and everywhere there were books.

  Celeste checked her own bedroom last, but her parents weren't there, either. "He's got them," she said frantically.

  "No. I don't think so. Look around you - there aren't any signs of violence here no indications of a struggle. And I don't think they would have gone out with him anywhere willingly, not in this weather."

  "Then where are they?"

  "If they'd had to go somewhere unexpectedly, would they leave a note for you?"

  Without answering, she spun around, dashed into the hall, and descended the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.

  Joey caught up with her in the kitchen, where she was reading a message that was pinned to a corkboard beside the refrigerator.

  Celeste,

  Bev didn't come home from Mass this morning.

  No one knows where she is. The sheriff is

  looking for her. We've gone over to Asherville

  to sit with Phil and Sylvie. They're half out

  of their minds with worry. I'm sure it's all

  going to turn out fine. Whatever happens,

  we'll be home before midnight. Hope you had

  a nice time at Linda's place. Keep the doors

  locked. Don't worry. Bev will turn up. God

  won't let anything happen to her. Love, Mom

  Turning from the corkboard, Celeste glanced at the wall clock - only 9:02 - and said, "Thank God, he can't get his hands on them."

  "Hands." Joey suddenly remembered. "Let me see your hands."

  She held them out to him.

  The previously frightful stigmata in her palms had faded to vague bruises.

  "We must be making right decisions," he said with a shiver of relief. "We're changing fate - your fate, at least. We've just got to keep on keeping on."

  When he looked up from her hands to her face, he saw her eyes widen at the sight of something over his shoulder. Heart leaping, he swung toward the danger, raising the iron crowbar.

  "No," she said, "just the telephone." She stepped to the wall phone. "We can call for help. The sheriff's office. Let them know where they can find Bev, get them looking for P.J."

  The telephone was an old-fashioned rotary model. Joey hadn't seen one of those in a long time. Curiously, more than anything else, it convinced him that he was, indeed, twenty years in the past.

  Celeste dialed the operator, then jiggled the cradle in which the handset had been hanging. "No dial tone."

  "All this wind, ice - the lines might be down."

  "No. It's him. He cut the lines."

  Joey knew that she was right.

  She slammed down the phone and headed out of the kitchen. "Come on.

  We can do better than the crowbar."

  In the den, she went to the oak desk and took the gun-cabinet key from the center drawer.

  Two walls were lined with books. Running one hand over their brightly colored spines, Joey said, "Just tonight, I finally realized ... when P.J. conned me into letting him ... letting him get away with murder, he stole my future."

  Opening the glass door of the gun cabinet, she said, "What do you mean?"

  "I wanted to be a writer. That's all I ever wanted to be. But what a novelist is always trying to do ... if he's any good, he's trying to get at the truth of things. How could I hope to get at the truth of things, be a writer, when I couldn't even face up to the truth about my brother? He left me with nowhere to go, no future. And he became the writer."

  She removed a shotgun from the rack in the cabinet and put it on the desk. "Remington. Twenty-gauge. Pump action. Nice gun. So tell me something - how could he be a writer if it's supposed to be all about dealing with truth? He's only about lies and deceit. Is he a good writer?"

  "Everyone says he is."

  She took another shotgun from the cabinet and put it on the desk beside the first weapon. "Remington too. My dad's partial to the brand. Twelve-gauge. Pretty walnut stock, isn't it? I didn't ask you what everyone else says. What do you think? Is he any good as a novelist - in this future of yours?"

  "He's successful."

  "So what. Doesn't necessarily mean he's good."

  "He's won a lot of awards, and I've always pretended to think he's good. But ... I've really never felt he was much good at all."

  Crouching, pulling open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, quickly pawing through the contents, she said, "So tonight you take your future back - and you will be good."

  In one corner stood a gray metal box the size of a briefcase. It was ticking.

  "What's that thing in the corner?" Joey asked.

  "It monitors carbon monoxide and other toxic gases seeping up from the mine fires. There's one in the basement. This room isn't over the basement, it's an add-on, so it has a monitor of its own."

  "An alarm goes off?"

  "Yeah, if there's too many fumes." In the drawer she found two boxes of ammunition. She put them on the desk. "Every house in Coal Valley was equipped with them years ago."

  "It's like living on a bomb."

  "Yeah. But with a long, slow fuse."

  "Why haven't you moved out?"

  "Bureaucrats. Paperwork. Processing delays. If you move out before the government has the papers ready to sign, then they declare the house abandoned, a public danger, and they aren't willing to pay as much for it. You have to live here, take the risk, let it happen at their pace if you want to get a halfway fair price."

  Opening one of the boxes of shells as Celeste opened the other, Joey said, "You know how to use these guns?"

  "I've been going skeet-shooting and hunting with my dad since I was thirteen."

  "You don't seem like a hunter to me," he said as he loaded the 20-gauge.

  "Never killed anything. Always aim to miss."

  "Your dad never noticed that?"

  "Funny thing is - whether it's shotguns or rifles, whether it's small game or deer, he always aims to miss too. Though he doesn't think I know it."

  "Then what's the point?"

  As she finished loading the 12-gauge, she smiled with affection at the thought of her father. "He likes just being in the woods, walking in the woods on a crisp morning, the clean smell of the pines - and having some private time with me. He's never said, but I've always sensed he would've liked a son. Mom had complications with me, couldn't carry another baby. So I've always tried to give Dad a little of the son stuff. He thinks I'm a real tomboy."

  "You're amazing," he said.

  Hastily dropping spare shells into the various pockets of her black raincoat, she said, "I'm only what I'm here to be."

  The strangeness of
that statement harked back to other enigmatic things that she had said earlier in the night. He met her eyes, and once again he saw those mysterious depths, which seemed too profound for her years, too deep to be plumbed. She was the most interesting girl that he had ever known, and he hoped that she saw something appealing in his eyes.

  As Joey finished stuffing spare shells into the pockets of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, Celeste said, "Do you think Beverly is the first?"

  "The first?"

  "That he's ever killed."

  "I hope so ... but I don't know."

  "I think there've been others," she said solemnly.

  "After that night, after Beverly, when I let him go ... I know there must've been others. That's why he was a gypsy. Poet of the highway, my ass. He liked the life of a drifter 'cause he could keep moving through one police jurisdiction after another. Hell, I never realized it before, didn't want to realize it, but it's the classic sociopathic pattern

  the loner on the road, the outsider, a stranger everywhere he goes, the next thing to invisible. Easier for a man like that to get caught if the bodies keep piling up in the same place. P.J.'s brilliance was to make a profession out of drifting, to become rich and famous for it, to have the unstructured lifestyle of a rootless serial killer but with the perfect cover - a respectable occupation that all but required rootlessness, and a reputation for writing uplifting stories about love and courage and compassion."

  "But all that's in the future, as far as I'm concerned," Celeste said. "Maybe my future, our future. Or maybe only one possible future. I don't know how that works - or that it'll even help to think about it."

  Joey had a bitter taste in his mouth - as though biting into a hard truth could produce a flavor as acrid as chewing on dry aspirin. "Whether it was one possible future or the only future, I still have to carry some of the guilt for all those he killed after Beverly, because could've put an end to it that night."

  "Which is why you're here now, tonight, with me. To undo it all, Not just to save me but everyone who came after ... and to save yourself." She picked up the 12-gauge and chambered a shell. "But what I meant was that I think he's killed before Beverly. He was just too cool with you, Joey, too smooth with that story about her running in front of his car up on Pine Ridge. If she'd been his first, he'd have been easily rattled. When you opened that trunk and found her, he'd have been more shaken. The way he handled you - he's used to carting dead women around in his car, looking for a safe place to dump them. He's had a lot of time to think about what he'd do if anyone ever caught him with a body before he was able to dispose of it."

  Joey suspected that she was right about this, just as she was right about the weather not being responsible for the dead telephone.

  No wonder he had reacted with blind panic in Henry Kadinska's office when the attorney revealed the terms of his father's last will and testament. The money in the estate had originally come from P.J. It was blood money in more ways than one, as tainted as Judas's thirty pieces of silver. Cash accepted from the devil himself could have been no less

  clean.

  He chambered a shell in his shotgun. "Let's go."

  13

  OUTSIDE, THE SLEET STORM HAD PASSED, AND RAIN WAS FALLING ONCE more. The brittle ice on the sidewalks and in the streets was swiftly melting into slush.

  Joey had been wet and cold all night. In fact, he had lived in a perpetual chill for twenty years. He was used to it.

  Halfway along the front walk, he saw that the hood was standing open on the Mustang. By the time he got to the car, Celeste was shining the flashlight into the engine compartment. The distributor cap was gone.

  "P.J.," Joey said. "Having his fun."

  "Fun."

  "To him it's all fun."

  "I think he's watching us right now."

  Joey surveyed the nearby abandoned houses, the wind-stirred trees between them: south to the end of the next block where the street terminated and the forested hills began, north one block to the main drag through town.

  "He's right here somewhere," she said uneasily.

  Joey agreed, but in the tumult of wind and rain, his brother's presence was even less easily detected than a reluctant spirit at a

  seance.

  "Okay," he said, "so we're on foot. No big deal. It's a small town anyway. Who's closer - the Dolans or the Bimmers?"

  "John and Beth Bimmer."

  "And his mother."

  She nodded. "Hannah. Sweet old lady."

  "Let's hope we're not too late," Joey said.

  "P.J. can't have had time to come here from the church ahead of us, cut the phone line, wait around to disable the car, and still go after anyone."

  Nevertheless, they hurried through the slush in the street. On that treacherous pavement, however, they didn't dare to run as fast as they would have liked.

  They had gone only half a block when the subterranean rumble began again, markedly louder than before, building swiftly until the ground quivered under them - as though no boats plied the River Styx any more, leaving the transport of all souls to deep-running, clamorous railroads. As before, the noise lasted no more than half a minute, with no catastrophic surface eruption of the seething fires below.

  The Bimmers lived on North Avenue, which wasn't half grand enough to be called an avenue. The pavement was severely cracked and buckled as though from a great and incessant pressure below. Even in the gloom, the once-white houses appeared too drab - as if they were not merely in need of a fresh coat of paint but were all heavily mottled with soot. Some of the evergreens were deformed, stunted; others were dead. At least North Avenue was on the north side of town: across Coal Valley Road from the Baker house and one block farther east.

  Six-foot-tall vent pipes, spaced about sixty feet on center and encircled by high chain-link safety barriers, lined one side of the street. From those flues, out of realms below, arose gray plumes of smoke like processions of fugitive ghosts, which were torn into rags by the wind and exorcised by the rain, leaving behind only a stink like that of hot tar.

  The two-story Bimmer residence was curiously narrow for its lot, built to the compressed horizontal dimensions of a row house in a downtown neighborhood in some industrial city like Altoona or Johnstown. It appeared taller than it actually was - and forbidding.

  Lights were on downstairs.

  As he and Celeste climbed the porch steps, Joey heard music inside, and a tinny laugh track. Television.

  He pulled open the aluminum-and-glass storm door and knocked on the wood door behind it.

  In the house, the phantom studio audience laughed uproariously and a lighthearted tinkle of piano music further cued the folks at home that they were supposed to be amused.

  After the briefest hesitation, Joey knocked again, harder and longer.

  "Hold your horses," someone called from inside.

  Relieved, Celeste exhaled explosively. "They're okay."

  The man who opened the door - evidently John Bimmer - was about fifty-five, shiny bald on top with a Friar Tuck fringe of hair. His beer belly overhung his pants. The bags under his eyes, his drooping jowls, and his rubbery features made him appear as friendly and comfortable as an old hound dog.

  Joey was holding the shotgun down at his side, safely aimed at the porch floor, and Bimmer didn't immediately see it. "You're an impatient young fella, ain't you?" he said affably. Then he spotted Celeste and broke into a wide smile. "Hey, missy, that lemon meringue pie you brought by yesterday was every bit of a first-rate job."

  Celeste said, "Mr. Bimmer, we-"

  "First rate," he repeated, interrupting her. He was wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt, a white T-shirt, and tan pants held up by suspenders, and he patted the bulge of his belly to emphasize how good the pie had been. "Why, I even let Beth and Ma take a smell of that beauty before I ate it all myself?"

  The night echoed with a hard crack, as if the wind had snapped off a big tree branch somewhere nearby, but it was not a branch and had nothi
ng to do with the wind, because simultaneously with the sound, arterial blood brightened the front of John Bimmer's T-shirt. His engaging smile turned strange as he was half lifted off his feet and thrown backward by the power of the shot.

  Joey shoved Celeste through the open doorway and to the living-room floor. He scrambled after her, dropped beside her, rolled onto his back, and kicked the front door shut hard enough to rattle a pair of pictures - John Kennedy, Pope John XXIII - and a bronze crucifix on the wall above the sofa.

  Bimmer had been thrown backward with such force that he wasn't even lying in their way, which meant that the caliber of the weapon was big, damn big, a deer rifle, maybe even bigger than that, a lot of punch. Probably hollow-point cartridges too.

  In a blue bathrobe and a crown of pink hair curlers, Bimmer's wife rose from an armchair in front of the television, even as the door was slamming shut, stunned into silence but only for an instant. When she saw her husband's vest of blood and the two shotguns, she reached the logical but incorrect conclusion. Screaming, she turned away from them.

  "Get down!" Joey shouted, and Celeste cried out, "Beth, stay down!"

  Unheeding, in a blind panic, heading toward the back of the house, Beth Bimmer crossed in front of a window. It imploded with an incongruously merry, bell-like ringing of shattering glass. She took a shot in the temple, which snapped her head to the side so hard that it might also have broken her neck, and as the phantom audience on the television laughed uproariously, she crashed to the living-room floor in front of a birdlike elderly woman in a yellow sweatsuit, who was sitting on the sofa.

  The older woman had to be Hannah, Bimmer's mother, but she had no time to grieve for her son and daughter-in-law, because two of the next three shots were generous destiny's gifts for her, pumped through the same window but delivered without the merry-bell music of breaking glass, killing her where she sat, as she reached for her hickory cane with one palsied hand, before either Joey or Celeste could even cry out to her.

  It was late October of 1975, and the Vietnam War had ended back in April, but Joey felt as if he were in one of those Asian battle zones that had filled the television news when he was growing up. The sudden, senseless death might have shocked him into immobility and fatal indecision - except that he was actually a forty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old body, and those additional twenty years of experience had been gained during a time when sudden, senseless violence had grown commonplace. As a product of the latter decades of the millennium, he could cope reasonably well in the midst of gunfire and random slaughter.