Dean Koontz - (1973)

by Shattered(Lit)

  The reflection remained mute.

  They by-passed the exit to Reno and stayed on Route 50 until they found a motel just east of Carson City. It was a shabby place, decaying at the edges. But neither of them had the energy to look any farther. The dashboard clock read eight-thirty-more than twenty-two hours since they had left Denver.

  in their room, Colin went straight for his bed and flopped down. "Wake me in six months, " he said.

  Alex went into the bath and closed the door. He used his electric razor to touch up the shave he had taken six hours before, brushed his teeth, took a hot shower. When he came back into the main room, Colin was asleep; the boy had not even bothered to undress. Doyle put on clean clothes, then woke him.

  "What's the matter?" the boy asked, nearly leaping off the bed when Doyle touched his shoulder.

  "You can't sleep yet."

  ,Why not?" Colin rubbed at his face. "I'm going out. I won't leave you alone, so I guess you'll have to come with me."

  "Out? Where? " Alex hesitated a moment. "To . . . To buy a gun."

  Now Colin was wide awake. He stood up and straightened his Phantom of the Opera shirt. "Do you really think we need a gun?

  Do you think that man in the Automover-"

  "He probably won't show up again."

  "Then-"

  "I only said he probably won't. But I just don't know any more . . . I've thought about it all night, all the way across Nevada, and I can't be sure of anything." He wiped at his own face, pulling off his weariness. "And then ' when I'm pretty sure that we've lost him-well, I think about some of the people we've run into. That service station attendant near Harrisburg. The woman at the Lazy Time Motel. I think about Captain Ackridge . . .

  I don't know. It's not that I think those people are dangerous. It's just that they represent something that's happening . . . Well, it seems to me we ought to have a gun, more to keep it in the house in San Francisco than to protect us for the last few hours of this trip."

  "Then why not buy it in San Francisco?"

  "I think I'll sleep better if we get it now," Alex said.

  "But I thought you were a pacifist."

  "I am." Colin shook his head. "A pacifist who carries a gun?"

  "Stranger things happen every day," Doyle said.

  A few minutes past eleven o'clock, an hour and a half after they had gone out, Doyle and the boy returned to the motel room. Alex closed the door, shutting out the insufferable desert heat. He twisted the dead lock and put the guard chain in place. He tried the knob, but it would not turn.

  Colin took the small, heavy pasteboard box to the bed and sat down with it. He lifted the lid and looked inside at the .32-caliber pistol and the box of ammunition. He had stayed in the car when Doyle went to buy it, and he had not been allowed to open the box on the short ride back. This was his first look at the weapon. He made a sour face. "You said the man in the sporting goods store called it a lady's gun."

  "That's right," Doyle said, sitting down on the edge of his bed and taking off his boots. He knew he was not going to be able to stay awake more than another minute or two.

  "Why did he say that?"

  "Compared to a .45, it has less punch, less kick, and makes a great deal less noise. It's the kind of pistol a woman usually buys."

  "Did you have any trouble buying it, since you're from out of state and all?"

  "No." Doyle stretched out on the bed.

  "In fact, it was too damned easy."

  Nineteen Friday afternoon, George Leland drove across the Nevada badlands toward Reno, his eyes brimming with pain even though the sunglasses he wore cut out half the glare from the white-white sand. He did not make good time. He was unable to keep his mind on his driving.

  Since that especially severe headache he had suffered early Thursday morning when he had gone after Alex Doyle with a garden ax, Leland had found his thoughts wandering freely, almost beyond his control. He was not able to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a stretch. His mind jumped from subject to subject like a motion picture full of quick-cuts.

  Time and again he snapped back from a daydream, surprised to find himself behind the wheel of the van. He had driven miles and miles while his mind was elsewhere . . .

  Apparently some fraction of his attention was on the road ahead and the traffic around him; but it was a very small fraction. If he had been on a heavily used freeway instead of out here in the flat, open wastelands, he would have killed himself, would have demolished the van during one of those daydreams.

  Courtney was always there with him, in and out of the dreams.

  Now, as he came back again to the sand-flanked highway and the reality of the Chevrolet grumbling crankily beneath him, she was perched only a couple of feet away, her long legs drawn up on th e seat beneath her.

  "I almost had them yesterday," Leland said contritely. "But these damn worn tires . . . "

  "That's okay, George," she said, close yet faraway.

  "No, Courtney. I should have nailed them. And . . . Last night, when I checked the motel in Salt Lake, they were not there." He was puzzled by that. "In that book of his, it said they'd stay at the Highlands Motel in Salt Lake City. What happened to them?"

  She must not have known, for she did not answer.

  Leland wiped his left hand on his trousers while he held the wheel in his right, repeated the gesture and drove with the left. "I looked in all the motels near the Highlands. They weren't staying in any of them. I've lost them. Somehow, they got away from me."

  "You'll pick them up again," she said. He had hoped that she would be sympathetic and would encourage him. Lovely Courtney.

  you could always depend on Courtney.

  "Maybe I will," he said, squinting out at the rolling hills of sand and the distant blue-and-rose mountains. "But how? And where?"

  He hoped she had the answer to that.

  She did. "In San Francisco, of course."

  "San Francisco?"

  "You have my address there," Courtney said. "And that's where they're going. Isn't it? "

  "Yes," he said. "It sure is."

  "There you are."

  "But . . . Maybe I can catch them in Reno tonight. " The lovely, soft-voiced, ethereal girl said, "They'll change motels again.

  You won't find them."

  He nodded. It was true.

  For a while, then, he went away from her. He was not in Nevada now, but in Philadelphia. Three months ago. He had gone downtown to see a film which had been entertaining and which . . . Well, the girl in it had looked so much like Courtney that he had been unable to sleep that night. He saw the film the next night too, and he learned from the lobby posters that the actress who fascinated him was Carol Lynley. But he soon forgot that. He went back to the film night after night, and she became the real Courtney.

  She was perfect. Long yellow-white hair, elfin features, those eyes that seemed to pierce him . . . Gradually, the sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth times he saw the movie, he began to experience a regeneration of sexual desire-which was odd, because the film was family fare. Finally, though, he had gone bar-hopping and had picked up a girl. He had made it with her . . . But she looked nothing like Courtney- Afterward, when he was spent, lying atop her, he looked into her face and saw that she was not Courtney, and he was angry. He felt that he had been tricked. She had cheated him. And so he started hitting her, slamming his hard fists into her face, over and over until He blinked at the blue sky, white sand, gray-black road. "Well," he said to the girl on the seat beside him, "I guess I will skip Reno.

  They won't stay in the right motel, anyway. I'll just go right on in to Frisco."

  The golden girl smiled.

  "Right on in to Frisco," Leland said. "They won't expect me there. They won't be ready for anything. I can take care of them real easy. And then we can be together. Can't we? "

  "Yes," she said, just as he wanted her to say.

  "We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?"

  "Y
es. "

  "You'd let me touch you again."

  "Yes, George."

  "Let me sleep with you again."

  "Yes. "

  "Live with me?"

  "Yes. "

  "And people would stop being nasty to me. if "Yes.

  "You don't have to worry about me hurting you, Courtney," he said.

  "When you first left me, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to kill you.

  But not any more. We're going to be together again, and I wouldn't hurt you for the world."

  Twenty Courtney answered the telephone on the first ring, and she was even more exuberant than usual. "I've been waiting for your call," she said. "I've got some good news."

  Alex was ready for a piece of good news, especially if it was delivered in that warm, throaty voice of hers. "What is it?"

  "I got the job, Alex!"

  "At the magazine?"

  "Yes!" She laughed into the phone, and he could almost see her standing there with her golden head thrown back and her taut throat exposed. "Isn't it wonderful?"

  Her happiness almost made up for everything that had gone wrong in the last few days. "You're absolutely sure it's what you wanted? "

  "It's better than what I wanted."

  "So . . . You and Colin will be old San Franciscans in short order-and I'll have to take a month off just to catch up with you."

  "You know what the pay is?"

  "Ten dollars a week?" he asked.

  "Be serious."

  "Fifteen? "

  "Eighty-five hundred a year. To start."

  He whistled. "Not bad for your first really professional job.

  But look, you aren't the only one with good news."

  "Oh?" Doyle looked at Colin, who was squeezed into the telephone booth with him, and he tried not to sound like a liar when he told the lie: "We got into Reno a few minutes ago." In fact, they had never gone to Reno at all, but to Carson City. And they had arrived early this morning, not minutes ago. They had slept all afternoon, right through the supper hour, and had awakened at half past eight, little more than an hour ago. "Neither one of us is sleepy." This was true enough, though he did not want to have to explain why neither one of them was sleepy, since they were not supposed to have been dozing in a motel all day. "It's about two hundred and fifty miles to San Francisco, so "You're coming home tonight?" she asked.

  "We thought we might as well "Look, if you're sleepy-sleep."

  "We aren't sleepy."

  "One day doesn't matter," she said. "Don't get in a big rush to finish the trip. If you fall asleep at the wheel-"

  "You'll lose a new Thunderbird but gain valuable insurance money," he finished for her.

  "That isn't funny."

  "No, I guess it isn't. I'm sorry." He was irritable, he knew, only because he did not like to lie to her. He felt cheap and somehow dirty, even though he was only lying to save her unnecessary worry.

  "You're sure you feel up to it?"

  "Yes, Courtney."

  "Then I'll keep the bed warm."

  "That I might not feel up to."

  "You will," she said. She laughed again, more softly this time.

  "You always are up to it."

  "Bad joke," he said. "Bad joke."

  "But one of those that just had to be made. So . . . What time can I expect you and the Marvelous Mite?"

  Doyle looked at his wristwatch. "It's a quarter of ten now. Give us forty-five minutes for supper . . . We should get to the house around three in the morning, if we don't get too lost."

  She gave him a noisy kiss via telephone.

  "Until three, darling."

  At eleven o'clock George Leland passed a sign which gave the mileage to San Francisco. He looked down at the speedometer SATURDAY and did some figuring. He was not as quick about it as he once would have been. The numbers were slippery. He could not seem to add with even a third-grader's skill. And he was not as sure of himself as he had once been, either, for he had to refigure the thing three times before he was satisfied with the answer.

  He looked at the shimmering golden girl beside him. "We'll reach your place by one o'clock. Maybe one-thirty," he said.

  Twenty-one Courtney gathered up the stacks of trash that had accumulated from moving and taking delivery on new furniture-empty wooden packing crates, cardboard boxes, mounds of shredded newspapers, plastic and paper wrappings, wire, cord, rope-and put it all in the guest bedroom, which had not yet been furnished. It made quite a large, unsightly hill of rubble in the center of the carpet. She stepped into the hall and closed the door on the junk. There. Now they wouldn't have to look at it or think about it until Monday, when it would become necessary to haul the whole lot away somewhere to make room for the guest-room furniture. It was a bit like sweeping dirt under a carpet, she supposed.

  mole p But as long as no one lifted up the carpet to look, what was wrong with that?

  She went back to their bedroom and stood in the doorway, surveying it. The dresser, highboy, nightstands, and bed were all of matching heavy, dark wood which looked as if it had been hand-carved and hand-polished. The carpet was a deep-blue shag. The bedspread and drapes were a rich darkgold velvet that looked almost as soft and horned as her own skin when she had a good tan. All in all, she thought, it was a damned sexy room.

  Of course, the spread didn't hang perfectly even all around. And there was a cluster of perfume and make-up bottles on the dresser. And maybe the full-length mirror needed polishing . . . But all these things were what made it a Courtney Doyle Room. She left her mark of casual, minimal, harmless disarray wherever she lived.

  "Remember," she had warned Alex on the night before their wedding, "you aren't getting a good housekeeper."

  "I don't want to marry a housekeeper," he said. "Hell, I can hire housekeepers by the dozen!

  "And I'm not a really terrific cook."

  "Why did God make restaurants?" he asked.

  "And," she had said, scowling at the thought of her own sloppiness and slothfulness, "I usually let the laundry pile up until I either have to do the wash or buy all new clothes."

  "Courtney, why do you think God invented Chinese laundries? Huh?"

  Remembering that exchange, how they had broken into fits of laughter and giggled helplessly, holding each other and rocking on the floor like silly children, she smiled and went over to their new bed and sat down on it, testing the springs.

  She actually had tested them before. She had stripped off all her clothes and jumped up and down in the center of the mattress, just as she had told Alex on the telephone. It had seemed a splendid idea at the time. But the exercise and the cool air on her ba re skin had given her ideas and an appetite for loving. She could hardly get to sleep that night for wanting him. She kept thinking of Alex, of what it was like with him, kept thinking how perfect they were together and how bedtime with him was unlike anything she had ever known with anyone else.

  They were good together in many ways, not just in bed. They liked the same books, the same movies, and usually the same people. If it was true that opposites attract, then duplicates attract even more.

  "Do you think we'll ever get bored with each other?" she had asked him toward the end of the first week of their honeymoon.

  "Bored?" he had asked, faking an enormous yawn.

  "Seriously."

  "We won't be bored for a minute," he said.

  "But we're so similar, so-"

  "Only three kinds of people bore me, " he had said. "First: someone who can only talk about himself. And you're not an egomaniac.

  //second?

  "Someone who can't talk about anything. That kind bores me to tears. But you are an intelligent, active, exciting woman who always has something going. You'll never be without something to say."

  "Third?

  "The most boring person of all is the one who doesn't listen when I talk about myself," Alex said, half serious but trying to get a laugh out of her as well.

  "I always listen," she said. "I like
to hear you talk about yourself. You are a fascinating subject."

  Now, sitting on the bed which they would share tonight, she realized that listening to each other was the main thing that made their relationship work so well. She wanted to know him, and he wanted to fully understand her. He wanted to know what she was thinking and doing, and she wanted to be a part of all that concerned him. When you got right down to it, maybe they were not duplicates at all. Maybe, because they listened so well, they came to understand and appreciate each other's tastes and, soon, to share them. They did not duplicate each other so much as they helped each other expand and grow.

  The future seemed so promising, and she was so happy that she hugged herself, an unconscious expression of satisfaction and delight which she had unknowingly passed on to Colin.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

  She looked at the bedside clock: ten minutes past two.

  Could they be here an hour early? Could he have overestimated the length of the drive by that much?

  She got off the bed and hurried into the hall, took the stairs two at a time. She was excited at the prospect of seeing them and asking lots of questions about the trip, but . . . At the same time she was a bit angry. Had he just mistaken the length of time they would need to drive in from Reno?

  Or had he broken all the speed limits getting here? If he did .

  . . How dare he risk their future only to shave an hour off a five-day trip? By the time she reached the front door, she was almost as angry as she was pleased to know they were finally home.

  She pulled off the chain and opened the door.

  "Hello, Courtney," he said, reaching out to gently touch her face.

  "George? What are you doing here?"

  Twenty-two Before she could turn and run, before she could even grasp that there was something sinister about his unexpected appearance, he took her arm in a viselike grip and walked her over to the Spanish sofa, sat down with her. He looked around the room and nodded, smiled. "It's nice. I'll like it here."

  "George? What-" Still gripping her arm in one hand, he touched her face, traced the delicate line of her jaw. "You're so lovely," he said.

  "George, why are you here?" She was somewhat afraid, though not quite terrified. His appearance did not make any sense, but it was no reason for her to go to pieces.