Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  have touched it without disturbing her, for nothing disturbed her any

  more, but he did not. Because touching it would have disturbed him.

  Her brow was uncreased, her face unlined even at the corners of her

  eyes, which were closed. She was gaunt though not shockingly so.

  Motionless upon those green designer sheets, she seemed ageless, as if

  she were an enchanted princess

  awaiting the kiss that would wake her from a century of slumber.

  The only signs of life were the vague, rhythmic rise and fall of her

  breast as she breathed, and the soft movement of her throat as she

  occasionally swallowed saliva. The swallowing was an automatic,

  involuntary action and not a sign of awareness on any level whatsoever.

  The brain damage was extensive and irreparable. The movements she made

  here and now were virtually the only movements she would ever make

  until, at last, she gave a dying shudder. There was no hope. He knew

  there was no hope, and he accepted the permanence of her condition.

  She would have looked much worse if she had not received such

  conscientious care. A team of physical therapists came to her room

  every day and put her through passive exercise routines. Her muscle

  tone was not the best, but at least she had muscle tone.

  Jack held her hand and stared down at her for a long time. For seven

  years, he had been coming to see her two nights a week and for five or

  six hours every Sunday afternoon, sometimes on other afternoons as well.

  But in spite of the frequency of his visits and in spite of her

  unchanging condition, he never tired of looking at her.

  He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed, still holding her hand,

  staring at her face, and for more than an hour he talked to her. He

  told her about a movie that he had seen since his previous visit, about

  two books he had read. He spoke of the weather, described the force and

  bite of the winter wind. He painted colorful word pictures of the

  prettiest Christmas displays he had seen in shop windows.

  She did not reward him with even a sigh or a twitch. She lay as always,

  unmoving and unmoved.

  Nevertheless, he talked to her, for he worried that a fragment of

  awareness might survive, a gleam of comprehension down in the black well

  of the coma. Maybe she could hear and understand, in which case the

  worst thing for her was being trapped in an unresponsive body, desperate

  even for one-way communication, but receiving none because they thought

  she could not hear. The doctors assured him that these worries were

  groundless; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, they said,

  except what images and fantasies might sputter across short-circuiting

  synapses of her shattered brain. But if they were wrong-if there was

  only one chance in a million that they were wrong-he could not leave her

  in that perfect and terrible isolation. So he talked to her as the

  winter day beyond the window changed from one shade of gray to another.

  At five-fifteen, he went into the adjoining bathroom and washed his

  face. He dried off and blinked at his reflection in the mirror. As on

  countless other occasions, he wondered what Jenny had ever seen in him.

  Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His

  forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20-20 vision, his

  left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him

  without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other,

  wondering which was looking at them when, in fact, both were. When he

  smiled he looked clownish, and when he frowned he looked sufficiently

  threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

  But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed, and loved

  him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about

  appearances. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much. One

  of the reasons he missed her so much. One of a thousand reasons.

  He looked away from the mirror. If it was possible to be lonelier than

  he was now, he hoped to God that he never slipped down that far.

  He returned to the other room, said goodbye to his unheeding wife,

  kissed her, smelled her hair once more, and got out of there at

  five-thirty.

  In the street, behind the wheel of his Camaro, Jack looked at passing

  pedestrians and other motorists with loathing. His fellow men. The

  good, kind, gentle, righteous people of the straight world would regard

  him with disdain and possibly even disgust if they knew he was a

  professional thief, though it was what they had done to him and to Jenny

  that had driven him to crime.

  He knew anger and bitterness solved nothing, changed nothing, and hurt

  no one but himself. Bitterness was corrosive. He did not want to be

  bitter, but there were times when he could not help it.

  Later, after dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant, he returned to his

  apartment. He had a spacious one-bedroom coop in a first-class building

  on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Officially, it was owned by

  a Liechtenstein-based corporation, which had purchased it with a check

  written on a Swiss bank account, and each month the utilities and the

  association fees were paid by the Bank of America out of a trust

  account. Jack Twist lived there under the name "Philippe Delon. " To

  the doormen and other building employees, to the few neighbors with whom

  he spoke, he was known as the odd and slightly disreputable relative of

  a wealthy French family who had sent him to America ostensibly to scout

  investments but actually just to get him out of their hair. He spoke

  French fluently and could speak English with a convincing French accent

  for hours without slipping up and revealing his deception. Of course,

  there was no French family, and both the corporation in Liechtenstein

  and the Swiss bank account were his, and the only wealth he had to

  invest was that which he had stolen from others. He was not an ordinary

  thief.

  In his apartment, he went directly to the walk-in closet in the bedroom

  and removed the false partition at the rear of it. He pulled two bags

  from the secret, three-foot-deep storage space and took them into the

  dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights. He piled the bags

  beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.

  He got a bottle of Becks from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned

  to the living room. He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window,

  looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snow-covered

  ground and made strange shadows in the bare-limbed trees.

  He was stalling, and he knew it. Finally he switched on the reading

  lamp beside the chair. He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front

  of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.

  Jewels. Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond

  chokers. A diamond and emerald bracelet. Three diamond and sapphire

  bracelets. Rings, broaches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.

  These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off

  single-handedly six weeks ago. It should have been a twoman
job, but

  with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it

  himself, and it had gone smoothly.

  The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that

  heist. When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in

  a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not

  simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world,

  payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny. Until the age of

  twenty-nine, he had given much to society, to his country, but as a

  reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator's

  prison, where he had been left to rot. And Jenny . . . He could not

  bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at

  last, he had escaped and come home. Now, he no longer gave to society

  but took from it, and with intense pleasure. His greatest satisfaction

  was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with

  it-until the jewelry heist six weeks ago. At the end of that operation,

  he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement

  scared him. It was, after all, what he lived for.

  Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap,

  held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a

  feeling of accomplishment and revenge.

  He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following

  the burglary. But he was reluctant to part with it until he had

  squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.

  Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into

  the sack from which he had taken them.

  The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at

  the fratellanza warehouse five days ago. They had been able to open

  only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000-more

  than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

  By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier's checks

  and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss

  accounts. However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the

  possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.

  He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held

  them, turned them over in his hands. He brought them to his face and

  smelled them. That singular scent of money was usually exciting in

  itself-but not this time. But he did not feel triumphant, clever,

  lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried

  through society's maze exactly as they were taught. He just felt empty.

  If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have

  attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the

  straight world. But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had

  been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business. It was

  his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on

  to another job sooner than he should have. Usually he pulled off one

  job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between

  his most recent operations.

  All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent

  jobs because the money was no longer important to him. He had set aside

  enough to support himself in style for as long as he lived and to take

  care of Jenny even if she endured a normal lifespan in her coma, which

  was unlikely. Perhaps, all along, the most important thing about his

  work had not been the rebellion and defiance of it, as he had thought;

  perhaps, instead, he had done it all just for the money, and the rest of

  it had been merely cheap rationalization and self-delusion.

  But he could not believe that. He knew what he had felt, and he knew

  how much he missed those feelings now.

  Something was happening to him, an inner shifting, a seachange. He felt

  empty, adrift, without purpose. He dared not lose his love of larceny.

  It was the only reason he had for living.

  He put the money back into the bag. He turned out the light and sat in

  the darkness, sipping Beck's and staring down at Central Park.

  In addition to his recent inability to find joy in his work, he had been

  plagued by a recurring nightmare more intense than any dream he had ever

  known. It had begun six weeks ago, before the jewelry store job, and

  he'd had it eight or ten times since. In the dream, he was fleeing from

  a man in a motorcycle helmet with a darkly tinted visor. At least he

  thought it was a motorcycle helmet, although he could not see many

  details of it or anything else of the man who wore it. The faceless

  stranger pursued him on foot through unknown rooms and along amorphous

  corridors and, most vividly, along a deserted highway that cut through

  an empty moon-washed landscape. On every occasion, Jack's panic built

  like steam pressure in a boiler, until it exploded and blew him awake.

  The obvious interpretation was that the dream was a warning, that the

  man in the helmet was a cop, that Jack was going to get caught. But

  that was not the way the nightmare felt. In the dream, he never had the

  impression that the guy in the helmet was a cop. Something else.

  He hoped to God he would not have the dream tonight. The day had been

  bad enough without that midnight terror.

  He got another beer, returned to the chair by the window, and sat down

  in the darkness once more.

  It was December 8, and Jack Twist-former officer in the elite United

  States Army Rangers, former POW in an undeclared war, a man who had

  helped save the lives of over a thousand Indians in Central America, a

  man who functioned under a burden of grief that might have broken some

  people, a daring thief whose reservoir of courage had always been

  bottomless-wondered if he had run out of the simple courage to go on

  living. If he could not regain the sense of purpose he had found in

  larceny, he needed to find a new purpose. Desperately.

  7.

  Elko County, Nevada

  Ernie Block broke all the speed limits on the drive back from Elko to

  the Tranquility Motel.

  The last time he had driven so fast and recklessly had been on a gloomy

  Monday morning during his hitch with Marine Intelligence in Vietnam. He

  had been behind the wheel of a Jeep, passing through what should have

  been friendly territory, and had unexpectedly come under enemy fire. The

  incoming shells had spewed up geysers of dirt and chunks of macadam only

  feet away from his front and rear bumpers. By the time he had broken out

  of the fire zone, he had escaped more than twenty near-misses, had been

  hit by three small but painfully jagged pieces of mortar, had been

  rendered temporarily deaf from the thunderous explosions, and had found

  himself struggling to control a Jeep that was running on its wheel rims

  with four flat tires. Having survived, he figured he had known fear as

  profound as it could ever be.

  But coming back from Elko, his fear was building toward a new peak.

  Nightfall was approaching. He had driven to the Elko freight office in


  the Dodge van to take delivery of a shipment of lighting fixtures for

  the motel. He had set out shortly after noon, leaving Faye in charge of

  the front desk, giving himself plenty of time to make the round-trip

  before twilight. But he had a flat tire and lost time changing it.

  Then, once he reached Elko, he wasted almost an hour having the tire

  repaired because he had not wanted to start home without a spare. With

  one thing or another, he had left Elko almost two hours later than

  expected, and the sun had westered to the far edge of the Great Basin.

  He kept the accelerator most of the way to the floor, whipping around

  other traffic on the superhighway. He did not think he would be able to

  finish the drive home if he had to do it in full darkness. In the

  morning they would find him behind the wheel of the van, still parked

  along the roadside, stark raving mad from having spent long hours in

  horrified contemplation of the perfectly black landscape.

  In the two and a half weeks since Thanksgiving, he had continued to

  conceal his irrational fear of darkness from Faye. After she returned

  from her visit to Wisconsin, Ernie found it more difficult to sleep

  without a lamp burning, having indulged himself with a night light while

  she was gone. Every morning he used Murine to clear his bloodshot eyes.

  Fortunately, she had not suggested going into Elko at night for a movie,

  so Ernie had not been required to make excuses. A few times, after

  sunset, he'd had to go from the office to the Tranquility Grille next

  door, and even though the walk was well-lighted by the motel's outdoor

  lamps and signs, he had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fragility,

  vulnerability. But he had kept his secret.