Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  "This is a serious threat, Jerry," Jonathan said. "It's not anything to joke about."

  And they were at it again, screaming at each other - quite like Mother and Father used to do when they couldn't make the household budget work. Some things never change.

  8

  THE BABY WOKE US REPEATEDLY EVERY NIGHT, AS THOUGH IT ENJOYED disturbing our rest. In Jessica's seventh month of pregnancy, toward dawn, we all were jolted awake by a thunder of thought energy that poured from the womb-wrapped being-to-be.

  "I think I was wrong," Jonathan said.

  "About what?" I asked. I could barely see him in the dark bedroom.

  "It's a girl, not a boy," he said.

  I probed out with my mind and tried to get a picture of the creature inside Jessica's belly. It resisted me successfully, for the most part, just as it resisted Jonathan's and Jessica's psychic proddings. But I was sure it was male, not female. I said so.

  Jessica sat up in bed, her back against the headboard, both hands on her moving stomach. "You're wrong, both of you. I think it's a boy and girl. Or maybe neither one."

  Jonathan turned on the bedside lamp in the house by the sea and looked at her. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  She winced as the child within her struck out hard against her. "I'm in closer contact with it than either of you. I sense into it. It isn't like us."

  "Then I was right," Jonathan said.

  Jessica said nothing.

  "If it's both sexes, or neither, it doesn't need any of us," he said.

  He turned off the light again. There was nothing else to do.

  "Maybe we could kill it," I said.

  "We couldn't," Jessica said. "It's too powerful."

  "Jesus!" Jonathan said. "We can't even read its mind! If it can hold off all three of us like that, it can protect itself for sure. Jesus!"

  In the darkness, as the blasphemy echoed in the room, Jessica said, "Don't use that word, Jonathan. It's beneath us. We're above those old superstitions. We're the new breed. We have new emotions, new beliefs, new rules."

  "For another month or so," I said.

  HARDSHELL

  1

  ARTERIES OF LIGHT PULSED THROUGH THE BLACK SKY. IN THAT STROBOscopic blaze, millions of cold raindrops appeared to have halted in midfall. The glistening street reflected the celestial fire and seemed to be paved with broken mirrors. Then the lightning-scored sky went black again, and the rain resumed. The pavement was dark. Once more the flesh of the night pressed close on all sides.

  Clenching his teeth, striving to ignore the pain in his right side, squinting in the gloom, Detective Frank Shaw gripped the Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special in both hands. He assumed a shooter's stance and squeezed off two rounds.

  Ahead of Frank, Karl Skagg sprinted around the corner of the nearest warehouse just in time to save himself. The first slug bored a hole in the empty air behind him, and the second clipped the corner of the building.

  The relentless roar of the rain on metal warehouse roofs and on the pavement, combined with rumbling thunder, effectively muffled the shots. Even if private security guards were at work in the immediate area, they probably had not heard anything, so Frank could not expect assistance.

  He would have welcomed assistance. Skagg was big, powerful, a serial killer who had committed at least twenty-two murders. The guy was incredibly dangerous even in his best moments, and right now he was about as approachable as a whirling buzzsaw. This was definitely not a job for one cop.

  Frank considered returning to his car and putting in a call for backup, but he knew that Skagg would slip away before the area could be cordoned off. No cop would call off a chase merely out of concern for his own welfare - especially not Frank Shaw.

  Splashing across the puddled serviceway between two of the huge warehouses, Frank took the corner wide, in case Skagg was waiting for him just around the bend. But Skagg was gone.

  Unlike the front of the warehouse, where concrete loading ramps sloped to the enormous roll-up garage doors, this side was mostly blank.

  Two hundred feet away, below a dimly glowing bulb in a wire security cage, was a man-size metal door. It was half open but falling shut.

  Wincing at the pain in his side, Frank hurried to the entrance. He was surprised to see that the handle was torn off and that the lock was shattered, as if Skagg had used a crowbar or sledgehammer. Had he found a tool leaning against the warehouse wall, and had he used it to batter his way inside? He had been out of sight for mere seconds, no more than half a minute, which surely wasn't enough time to break through a steel door.

  Why hadn't the burglar alarm sounded? Surely the warehouse was protected by a security system. And clearly Skagg had not entered with sufficient finesse to circumvent an alarm.

  Thoroughly soaked, Frank shivered involuntarily when he put his back to the cold wall beside the door. He gritted his teeth, willed himself to stop shaking, and listened intently.

  He heard only the hollow drumming of rain on metal roofs and walls. The sizzle of rain dancing on the wet pavement. The gurgle and slurp and chuckle of rain in gutters and downspouts.

  Wind bleating. Wind hissing.

  Frank broke the cylinder out of his revolver, tipped the two unused cartridges into his hand, dropped them in a pocket, and used a speedloader to put him back in business, fully stocked.

  His right side throbbed. Minutes ago Skagg had taken him by surprise, stepping out of shadows with a length of rebar picked up at a construction site, swinging it as Mickey Mantle might have swung a baseball bat. Frank felt as if chunks of broken glass were working against one another in his deep muscles and bones; the pain sharpened slightly each time he drew a breath. Maybe he had a broken rib or two. Probably not ... but maybe. He was wet, cold, and weary.

  He was also having fun.

  2

  TO OTHER HOMICIDE DETECTIVES, FRANK WAS KNOWN AS HARDSHELL Shaw. That was also what his buddies had called him during Marine Corps basic training more than twenty-five years ago, for he was stoical, tough, and could not be cracked. The name had followed him when he left the service and joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He never encouraged anyone to use the sobriquet, but they used it anyway because it was apt.

  Frank was tall, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and hips, with a rock-solid body. His enormous hands, when curled into fists, were so formidable that he usually needed only to brandish them to assure an adversary's cooperation. His broad face appeared to have been carved out of granite - and with some difficulty, with much breaking of chisels and snapping of hammers.

  His colleagues in the homicide division of the LAPD sometimes claimed that Frank had only two basic expressions: mean and meaner.

  His pale-blue eyes, clear as rainwater, regarded the world with icy suspicion. When thinking, he frequently sat or stood perfectly still for long periods during which the quickness and alertness of his blue eyes, contrasted with his immobility, gave the impression that he was peering out from within a shell.

  He had a damn hard shell, so his friends claimed. But that was only half of what they said about him.

  Now, finished reloading his revolver, he stepped in front of the damaged door to the warehouse. He kicked it open. Crouched, head down, holding the .38 in front of him, he went in fast, looking left and right, expecting Skagg to rush at him with a crowbar, hammer, or whatever tool the scumbag had used to get into the building.

  To Frank's left was a twenty-foot-high wall of metal shelving filled with thousands of small boxes. To his right were large wooden crates stacked in rows, towering thirty feet overhead, extending half the length of the building, alternating with avenues wide enough to admit forklifts.

  The banks of overhead fluorescents suspended from the fifty-foot-high warehouse ceiling were switched off. Only a few security lamps in conical tin shades shed a wan glow over the stored goods below, leaving most of the place sheathed in shadows.

  Frank moved cautiously and silently. His soggy shoes sq
uished, but that sound was barely audible over the pounding rain on the roof. With water dripping off his brow, his jawline, and the barrel of his gun, he eased from one row of crates to another, peering into each passageway.

  Skagg was at the far end of the third aisle, about a hundred and fifty feet away, half in shadow, half in milk-pale light, waiting to see if Frank had followed him. He could have kept out of the light, could have crouched entirely in the gloom against the crates, where he might not have been visible; by waiting in plain sight, he seemed to be taunting Frank. Skagg hesitated as if to be sure that he had been spotted, and then he disappeared around the corner.

  For five minutes they played hide-and-seek, moving stealthily through the maze of cartons and crates. Three times, Skagg allowed himself to be seen, although he never let Frank get close.

  He's having fun too, Frank thought.

  That made him angry.

  High on the walls, under the cobweb-festooned eaves, were slit windows that helped illuminate the cavernous building during the day. Now, only the flicker of lightning revealed the existence of those narrow panes. Although that inconstant pulse did not brighten the warehouse, it occasionally caused shadows to leap disconcertingly, and twice Frank nearly shot one of those harmless phantoms.

  Easing along another avenue, scanning the gloom on both sides, Frank heard a noise, a hard scraping. He knew at once what it was: a crate sliding on a crate.

  He looked up. In the grayness high above, a sofa-size box-visible only as a black silhouette - teetered on the edge of the crate beneath it. Then it tipped over and plummeted straight toward him.

  Wile E. Coyote time.

  Frank threw himself forward, hit the floor, and rolled just as the crate exploded against the concrete where he had been standing. He averted his face as wood disintegrated into hundreds of splintery shards of shrapnel. The box had contained plumbing fixtures; bright, chrome-plated faucets and shower heads bounced along the floor, and a couple thumped off Frank's back and thighs.

  Hot tears of agony burned in his eyes, for the pain in his right side flared brighter. Further abused by all of this activity, his battered ribs now seemed not merely broken but pulverized.

  Overhead, Skagg let out a sound that was one part a cry of rage, one part an animalistic ululation celebrating the thrill of the hunt, and one part insane laughter.

  With some sixth sense, Frank was suddenly aware of a murderous, descending weight. He rolled to his right, flat up against the same wall of crates atop which Skagg stood. Behind him, a second huge box crashed to the warehouse floor.

  "You alive?" Skagg called.

  Frank did not respond.

  "Yeah, you must be down there, because I didn't hear you scream. You're a quick bastard, aren't you?"

  That laugh again. It was like atonal music played on an out-of-tune flute: a cold, metallic sound. Inhuman. Frank Shaw shivered.

  Surprise was Frank's favorite strategy. During a pursuit, he tried to do what his prey would least expect. Now, taking advantage of the masking roar of the rain on the corrugated steel roof, he stood up in the darkness beside the wall of crates, holstered his revolver, blinked tears of pain out of his eyes, and began to climb.

  "Don't cower in the shadows like a rat," Skagg shouted. "Come out and try to take a shot at me. You've got a gun. I don't. It'll be your bullets against whatever I can throw at you. What better odds do you want, you chickenshit cop?"

  Twenty feet up the thirty-foot-high wall of wooden boxes, with his chilled fingers hooked into meager niches, with the toes of his shoes pressed hard against narrow ledges, Frank paused. The pain in his right side tightened as if it were a lasso, and it threatened to pull him backward into the aisle almost two stories below. He clung to his precarious position and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, willing the pain to go away.

  "Hey, asshole," Skagg shouted.

  Yeah?

  "You know who I am?"

  Big man on the psycho circuit, aren't you?

  "I'm the one the newspapers call the Night Slasher."

  Yeah, I know, I know, you drooling degenerate.

  "This whole damn city lays awake at night, worrying about me, wondering where I am," Skagg shouted.

  Not the whole city, man. Personally, I haven't lost any sleep over you.

  Gradually the hot, grinding pain in his ribs subsided. It did not disappear altogether, but now it was a dull throb.

  Among friends in the marines and on the police force, Frank had a reputation for persevering and triumphing in spite of wounds that would have incapacitated anyone else. In Nam he had taken two bullets from a Vietcong machine gun, one in the left shoulder and one through his left side directly above the kidney, but he had kept on going and had wasted the gunner with a grenade. Bleeding profusely, he had nevertheless used his good arm to drag his badly wounded buddy three hundred yards to a place of concealment, where they were safe from enemy snipers while the medevac chopper had sought and found them. As the medics loaded him into the helicopter, he had said, "War is hell, all right, but it's also sure exhilarating!"

  His friends said he was iron hard, nail tough. But that was only part of what they said about him.

  Overhead, Karl Skagg hurried along the tops of the boxes. Frank was close enough to hear the heavy footsteps above the ceaseless rumble of the rain.

  Even if he had heard nothing, he would have known that Skagg was on the move. The two-crate-thick wall trembled with the killer's passage - though not violently enough to shake Frank off his perch.

  He started to climb again, feeling cautiously for handholds in the darkness, inching along the pile of plumbing supplies. He got a few splinters in his fingers, but it was easy to screen out those small, stabbing pains.

  From his new position atop the wall, Skagg shouted into another shadowy section of the warehouse to which he apparently thought Frank had moved, "Hey, chickenshit!"

  You called?

  "I have something for you, chickenshit."

  I didn't know we were exchanging gifts.

  "I got something sharp for you."

  I'd prefer a TV set.

  "I got the same thing for you that I used on all the others."

  Forget the TV. I'll settle for a nice bottle of cologne.

  "Come and get your guts ripped out, you chickenshit!"

  I'm coming, I'm coming.

  Frank reached the top, raised his head above the edge of the wall, looked left, then right, and saw Skagg about thirty feet away. The killer had his back to Frank and was peering intently down into another aisle.

  "Hey, cop, look at me, standing right up here in the light. You can hit me with no trouble. All you have to do is step out and line up a shot. What's the matter? Don't you even have the nerve for that, you yellow bastard?"

  Frank waited for a peal of thunder. When it came, he levered himself over the edge, on top of the stack of crates, where he rose to a crouch. The pounding rain was even louder up here, and combined with the thunder it was enough to cover any noise he made.

  "Hey, down there! You know who I am, cop?"

  You're repeating yourself. Boring, boring.

  "I'm a real prize, the kind of trophy a cop dreams of!"

  Yeah, your head would look good on my den wall.

  "Big career boost if you brought me down, promotions and medals, you chickenshit."

  The ceiling lights were only ten feet above their heads, and at such short range even the dim bulbs in the security lamps cast enough of a glow to illuminate half the crates on which they stood. Skagg was in the brightest spot, posturing for the one-man audience that he believed was below him.

  Drawing his .38, Frank stepped forward, out of a shadowy area into a fall of amber light.

  Skagg shouted, "If you won't come for me, you chickenshit, I'll come for you."

  "Who're you calling chickenshit?" Frank asked.

  Startled, Skagg spun toward him and, for an instant, teetered on the edge of the boxes. He windmilled his arms to keep fr
om falling backward into the aisle below.

  Holding his revolver in both hands, Frank said, "Spread your arms, drop to your knees, then lay flat on your belly."

  Karl Skagg had none of that heavy-browed, slab-jawed, cement-faced look that most people associated with homicidal maniacs. He was handsome. Movie-star handsome. His was a broad, well-sculpted face with masculine yet sensitive features. His eyes were not like the eyes of a snake or a lizard or some other wild thing; they were brown, clear, and appealing.

  "Flat on your belly," Frank repeated.

  Skagg did not move. But he grinned. The grin ruined his moviestar looks because it had no charm. It was the humorless leer of a crocodile.

  The guy was big, even bigger than Frank. He was six five, maybe even six and a half feet. Judging by the solid look of him, he was a dedicated, lifelong weight lifter. In spite of the chilly November night, he wore only running shoes, jeans, and a blue cotton shirt. Damp with rain and sweat, the shirt molded to his muscular chest and arms.

  He said, "So how're you going to get me down from here, cop? Do you think I'll let you cuff me and then just lay up here while you go for backup? No way, pig face."

  "Listen and believe me: I'll blow you away without the slightest hesitation."

  "Yeah? Well, I'll take that gun off you quicker than you think. Then I'll rip your head off and shove it up your ass."

  With unconcealed distaste, Frank said, "Is it really necessary to be so vulgar?"

  Grinning more broadly, Skagg moved toward him.

  Frank shot him pointblank in the chest.

  The hard report echoed off the metal walls, and Skagg was thrown backward. Screaming, he pitched off the crates and plummeted into the aisle below. He landed with a thunk that cut off his scream.

  Skagg's violent departure caused the crates to rock, and for a moment the unmortared wall of boxes swayed dangerously, creaking and grinding. Frank fell to his hands and knees.

  Waiting for the stacks to steady under him, he thought about all the paperwork involved in a shooting, the many forms required to appease the bleeding hearts who were always certain that every victim of police gunfire was as innocent as Mother Teresa. He wished that Skagg had not forced the issue so soon. He wished that the killer had been more clever, had managed a more involved game of cat and mouse before the climactic scene. Thus far the chase had not provided half enough fun to compensate for the mountain of paperwork ahead.