by Koontz, Dean
My intention was to go alone, but Penny responded as if I had proposed to strip naked and walk into a lion’s den, while leaving her and Milo staked out as sacrificial lambs.
“I’m just going to go in there and prowl around,” I said. “I can do that best alone. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“We won’t know what we’re looking for, either,” she said. “If the three of us don’t know what we’re looking for and we look for it together, we’ll find it or we won’t find it quicker than you would or wouldn’t find it on your own.”
“That sounded like something I would say.”
“I know. We’ve been married too long.”
“Look, Penny, the police have already been through the place. If there were anything to find, they would have found it.”
“Then why did we come all the way to Smokeville?”
“To meet the locals who knew Landulf. The house is secondary.”
“Then don’t go in, and we’ll all not go in together.”
A back door opened, and we turned to look at Milo.
He said, “I’m going in, and I’m going to pretend you came with me, while you can sit here and pretend I stayed with you, so then we’ll have gone in and not gone in together.”
After telling Lassie to stay, he got out and closed the door.
I said, “He sure does have the Boom family hardheadedness.”
“You mean the Boom family determination,” Penny said.
We got out, locked the Mountaineer, and left Lassie to guard it. If she wanted to squeeze into the glove box, that was her business.
The fog seemed to penetrate my flesh and lick its cold tongues in my bone marrow.
Milo zipped up his quilted jacket. On the long-sleeved black T-shirt he wore under the jacket, white letters spelled FREEDOM.
Penny checked under her blue blazer and I reached under my corduroy sport coat to be sure that our shoulder rigs were snugged, pistols ready. Each of us had a spare magazine.
Nevertheless, I felt like a mouse. I think she did, too.
Because I didn’t want to be seen approaching the former Landulf residence, we avoided the paved road. I led the way and Milo took middle position through the trees for about fifty yards, after which we came to the long meadow that gradually sloped toward the south, where we should find the house on the higher ground.
A vehicle went by on the road: engine noise and headlights. The fog prevented me from identifying category, make, or model.
In the drowned light, under the hundred-fathom weight of the threat that hung over us, trudging up the meadow, I felt like a deep-sea diver making his way toward a sunken ship, seeking something of value in the wreckage.
The house loomed out of the murk, a handsome Victorian wrapped by a veranda. A garage stood separate from it.
I intended to break a window, but Penny said, “Better knock.”
“If there’s anybody here, it’s a ghost.”
“Just to be safe—knock.”
We climbed the front steps. Finding a doorbell, I rang it.
Just as I was about to turn away, a light came on behind the curtained glass panels that flanked the door.
“Uh-oh,” Penny said.
The door was opened by a sixtyish man who looked as if he had hound dog in his heritage. His eyes were large and sad, and the bags under them would yield enough skin to make a pair of leather gloves. His jowls, dewlaps, and heavy slumped shoulders gave an impression of age and weariness. But he was a big guy with large hands. A second look suggested that he would be a formidable adversary in a fight.
“Can I help you folks?” he asked.
Having thought the house was deserted, I had prepared no story to use if someone answered the bell.
Now I heard myself saying, “Good morning, sir. If you have the time, we’d like to sit awhile and talk to you about Jesus.”
“Well, son,” he said, “I admire you spreading the word, but I’ve got a church I’ve gone to thirty years, no need to change.”
I knew a good door-to-door evangelist would not give up easily, but I had no idea what one would say next, so I smiled and nodded and rolled my tongue around in my mouth, hoping it would find some words.
Penny said, “Excuse me, sir, but aren’t you Sheriff Walbert?”
“I used to be, ma’am. Now I’m just Walbert, first name Truman.”
“It was wrong what they did to you,” said Penny.
“Well, ma’am, much of what people do to one another is wrong, and most of it’s worse than what was done to me.”
Disoriented more than I had been in the fog, I smiled at Penny as I imagined a door-to-door evangelist might smile at his evangelist wife when he wanted to know what the hell she was talking about.
Penny said to me, “That reading I was doing. Mr. Walbert was sheriff when Tom … when all that happened here. He hardly got into the investigation before the county evoked a 62-and-out rule.”
“Sheriff before me,” said Walbert, “didn’t retire till he was 72. The rule was never enforced before. Fact is, if you’ll pardon my cynicism, I’m not sure it existed before.”
In the loop now, and reading in Penny’s demeanor that Walbert might be an ally, I gave him a chance to declare himself by saying, “Terrible thing Thomas Landulf did.”
“Well, I’d say it’s a terrible thing whoever did it.”
“But killing his own wife and daughter,” I said with dismay.
“The true commandment is ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ It doesn’t say ‘kill’ in the original language, because killing’s a whole different thing from murder. Furthermore, Moses didn’t provide us categories of murder, some worse than others. If you’re going to go door-to-door for Jesus, Mr. Greenwich, you better learn-up a bit.”
I winced at his use of my name, and said to Penny, “It’s this hair. I should have put on a hat.”
“Sheriff,” she said, “I think we all know Tom Landulf didn’t kill anyone, and didn’t commit suicide. Your being here makes me think we all might benefit by swapping information.”
“Better come in,” Walbert said.
Penny and I took Milo into the house of murder, where the murdering was not yet finished.
For Penny and me, Truman Walbert poured mugs of black coffee richer than most espressos I’ve tasted.
“I read your books, Mr. Greenwich, because Tom recommended them, and he was right.” To Milo, he said, “Mr. Big, about what I can offer you is a Coke or orange juice.”
Instead of being offended, Milo seemed to delight in his new name, and he asked for juice.
Walbert said, “Roberta Carillo, she’s the real-estate lady has the listing, said I could stay here a month or two, nobody’s lookin’ to buy anyway. It’s not I want to live here. But maybe living here, something about the case will click, or I’ll find something in the house I overlooked before. Tom, Jeanette, Melanie—they were dear to me, like family. A cop gets a thick hide, but this case cuts deep.”
Walbert had been eating breakfast before we arrived. As he talked, he stood by the sink with his plate, wiping up the last of an egg yolk with a half-slice of toast.
“From the start, I didn’t buy the tableau. It wasn’t a crime scene the way they happen, it was a staged tableau. The evidence was three murders, not two plus a suicide, but I only had the case five days before out of nowhere they retired me against my will.”
“Who’s they?”
“The county board of supervisors. Half of them are weasels, you can expect anything from them. But the others are fair folks, and I was surprised they made the action unanimous.”
“Somebody wanted you off the case,” Penny said.
“Has to be, somebody paid large to get that unanimous vote or put a big scare into some nice people. Reading the faces of the board members, I’d say it was both. They looked wide-eyed, white around the gills, like they were afraid, but also kinda smug, like they’d been scared into letting something really good be done for them
.”
“Who’s sheriff now?” Penny asked.
“They raised Ned Judd from deputy to sheriff till next election. Ned’s not a bad man, just not sharp enough to cut butter. He accepted the murder-suicide scenario. Now he avoids me out of shame, though he doesn’t know it’s shame, he thinks he’s embarrassed for me.”
As Walbert put his empty plate in the sink, I said, “You really think living here might bring some inspiration about the case?”
“Maybe. Truth told, I’m doing it largely to irritate and unnerve the county supervisors. If they think I turned up something, one or two will come squirming around to find out what, and they’ll spill something useful, whether they realize they have or not.”
The doorbell rang, and Penny asked, “Are you expecting someone?”
Frowning, Walbert said, “Nobody visits except Roberta, the real-estate lady, but she’s not a morning kind of girl.”
Penny and I exchanged a glance as Walbert replied.
I said, “Sheriff, the people who killed the Landulfs tried to kill us.”
Halfway to the hall door, he stopped and gave me a look that would have scared the crap out of me if I’d been lying to him.
“It’s true,” Penny said. “They can’t know we’re right here. But maybe they have a way of knowing we’ve been in Smokeville.”
The bell rang again.
Indicating a door between the kitchen and the dining room, he said to me, “Go that way into the living room, where you can hear me at the front door. Maybe you’ll recognize a voice. Whoever it is, I’ll let him jaw, but I won’t let him in.”
Milo stood near a window, beyond which lay the back porch. Penny drew him away from it, close to her.
As Walbert went into the hallway, I hurried through the dining room, into the living room. I stood to one side of the archway that led to the hall just aft of the foyer.
I heard Walbert open the door. “Good morning, fellas. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Walbert,” a man said, “we represent the Landulf estate, and we never gave Ms. Carillo approval to let you live here rent free.”
“You have business cards?”
“My name is Booth, this is Mr. Oswald. We took the listing away from Ms. Carillo this morning.”
“Are you attorneys? Usually you folks have cards.”
“We want you to vacate the premises immediately,” Booth said.
“If the issue is rent, I’m happy to pay.”
“Too late for that,” said Oswald. “You’ve got to go now.”
“If you gentlemen will just wait on the porch, I’ll call Roberta and confirm she’s lost the listing.”
One of the men spoke, but I couldn’t make out what he said, and then I heard movement in the foyer. The front door closed.
Truman Walbert’s silence alerted me to the danger better than anything he could have said. Silence from a man to whom talk came easily.
I drew the pistol from my shoulder holster, and in the quick of action, it felt as new and cumbersome to me as when I first held it on the beach, taking instruction from Penny. Shouldn’t think about how to hold it, thinking made the fingers stiff, just let the hand conform to the grip.
“What’s this room on the left?” Booth asked, his voice close.
“It’s like a den,” said Walbert.
They must be just beyond the living-room archway.
Oswald said, “Big old bear like you needs a den.”
Shift my weight, a floorboard might betray me. No lights on in the living room, good, the hall light would throw my shadow behind me, not toward them. But I could hear my breathing, shallow and quick, a dog panting, not good, if they listened they would hear it too, as close as they were, the breath of life suddenly become the breath of death. Inhale and hold.
“You open the door, go first, Sheriff,” Booth said, greasing the last word with a sneer.
Once committed, keep moving, no hesitation. Breathless, pistol in both hands and arms extended, I stepped into the archway.
Truman Walbert was at the den door, facing away from me. One of the men, probably Booth, held a gun to the sheriff’s head, and his back was toward me.
Oswald stood behind Booth and Walbert, also presenting his back to me. He had a pistol in his right hand, a big damn thing, pointed at the floor.
Two steps brought me to Oswald. Forgetting everything I knew about the Weaver stance and the Isosceles stance with its several variations, I said “Drop it” on an explosive exhale, as I jammed my gun to the back of his head.
Oswald twitched and froze when the muzzle of the .45 Champion pressed cold against his skull.
Booth looked over his shoulder. Shaved head, gaunt hard face, mouth as tight as a soldered seam, thin nose with more bone than flesh, eyes narrowed to coin slots: a death-vending machine.
I thought we were stalemated, everyone would have to back off slowly, stand down from this impasse, but Booth believed otherwise. He shot Truman Walbert.
Plinking vegetation at a distance doesn’t prepare you for the necessity of putting a bullet in a man’s head at point-blank range. As a theoretical target, even from only two steps away, Oswald was entirely plausible to me, but when I was standing so close to him that I could smell his cologne and see the mole on the back of his neck, he was not just an easy target but also a man, a man different from me in many respects but certain to be like me in some ways. I hesitated to do to him what Booth had done to Walbert.
An obvious professional who read my inexperience in an instant, Booth swiveled toward me, pivoting like a dancer, his weapon coming around, even as the late sheriff went to his knees and began to topple sideways.
Oswald failed to throw down his pistol, not as impressed by a gun to his head as I would have been in his position. My heart hammered, the rush of blood loud in my ears, and I knew Oswald was thinking faster about all of this than I could, plotting faster than any writer who had ever penned a page, just as Booth was moving with animal ruthlessness, with cold certainty. Oswald turned his head to the right, as if trying to see me, even though the muzzle of the .45 gouged his scalp.
Booth had already rotated sideways to me, a narrow profile, his weapon rising into position. A fraction of a second before I would have been looking down the bore of the barrel, two shots thundered in the hallway, and bullets rocked him, neck and shoulder. He started his fall just as the sheriff fully landed.
At the far end of the hall: a curl of smoke in the air and a thrusting .45 and Penny in the Isosceles stance.
Oswald was bringing his pistol up not because he hoped to turn it back on me in some trick shot, but because he intended to bring down Penny, avenging Booth.
I shot him in the head.
Either Oswald pitched away from me or I shoved him in disgust, but as he went, he fired one shot reflexively before the gun dropped from his hand.
The round missed Penny and shattered chunks of wood from the frame of the kitchen doorway.
My ears were ringing, deafened by the gun blasts in the enclosed space, and I backed up against the wall next to the archway, needing something to lean against for a moment, keeping an eye on Booth, the only one who might still be alive, the other two with broken-melon heads.
Another house full of bodies, twenty-eight years down the time stream from the first, one good man dead but also two very bad ones, nobody invisible to anyone else, no miracle here, my covenant with Death revoked: Now anything could happen.
Thou shalt not murder, but killing is a whole different thing from murder. Self-defense isn’t a transgression, defense of the innocent is required, they give medals for defense of the innocent. A brass taste filled my mouth, a hot-copper odor burned in my nose, and a gorge rose but I choked it down.
Booth remained sprawled and still on the floor, but Penny kept a two-hand grip on her pistol as she approached him. She kicked his weapon out of his reach, circled him, trying not to step in blood or on various scraps of tissue, and confirmed he was dead.
&nbs
p; I holstered my pistol. My hand ached.
“Stay there, Milo,” she shouted toward the kitchen. “We’re all right. Just stay there.”
My ears were still ringing, but I was no longer deaf when she came to me. We held each other.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t want to do it, not that, not ever.”
“Kill or be murdered,” I said. “You did well, exactly what you should’ve done.”
“You too. My God. I’m shaking head to foot, head to foot.”
“I wasn’t fast enough,” I said.
“Fast enough,” she disagreed. “Walbert was dead one way or the other, you couldn’t change that. They came here to kill him. And then to lie in wait for us.”
She must have been right, but I said, “How did they know we’d come here?”
“How do they know anything? Think about it later. We have to get out of here. Lock the front door, close any living-room draperies that might give someone a line of view through the archway into the hall. I’ll wipe off the coffee mugs, anything we might have touched in the kitchen.”
As she hurried along the hallway, I negotiated the remains of the three men, striving not to think about the nature of the wet debris, and went to the front door.
My sweat-damp fingers slipped on the deadbolt thumb-turn as I tried to twist it the wrong way. Then I engaged the lock and rubbed my sleeve over it to blur the thumbprint I might have left.
I half remembered that after Walbert admitted us, he closed the door. None of us touched the knob, but I rubbed it with my sleeve, anyway.
As the ringing in my ears subsided, I heard a sound rising outside. An approaching engine.
Sidelights flanked the front door. I lifted the edge of a lace curtain, and looked out.
A dark green sedan in the driveway, near the front porch, must have belonged to Booth and Oswald.
Looming out of the mist, a black Hummer appeared to be more of a war machine than one of the full-scale Humvees that were used by the military. It parked behind the sedan, towering over it, and the driver left the engine running, headlights and fog lights blazing.
