The Face of Fear

by Dean Koontz

  “The next setback is five stories down. Looks about half as wide as this one. I’ll lower you the same way I got you here. I’ll be anchored to the window post.” He tugged on his own five-foot tether. “But we don’t have time to rig a seventy-five-foot safety line for you. You’ll have to go on just a single rope.”

  She chewed her lower lip, nodded.

  “As soon as you reach that ledge,” Graham said, “look for a narrow, horizontal masonry seam between blocks of granite. The narrower the better. But don’t waste too much time comparing cracks. Use the hammer to pound in a piton.”

  “This short rope you just hooked onto me: is that to be my safety line when I get down there?”

  “Yes. Unclip one end of it from your harness and snap the carabiner to the piton. Make sure the sleeve is screwed over the gate.”

  “Sleeve?”

  He showed her what he meant. “As soon as you’ve got the sleeve in place, untie yourself from the main line so that I can reel it up and use it.”

  She gave him his gloves.

  He put them on. “One more thing. I’ll be letting the rope out much faster than I did the first time. Don’t panic. Just hold on, relax, and keep your eyes open for the ledge coming up under you.”

  “All right.”

  “Any questions?”

  “No.”

  She sat on the edge of the setback, dangled her legs over the gulf.

  He picked up the rope, flexed his cold hands several times to be certain he had a firm grip. A meager trace of warmth had begun to seep into his fingers. He spread his feet, took a deep breath, and said, “Go!”

  She slid off the ledge, into empty space.

  Pain pulsated through his arms and shoulders as her full weight suddenly dragged on him. Gritting his teeth, he payed out the rope as fast as he dared.

  In the thirty-eighth-floor corridor, Frank Bollinger had some difficulty deciding which business lay directly under Harris’s office. Finally, he settled on two possibilities: Boswell Patent Brokerage and Dentonwick Mail Order Sales.

  Both doors were locked.

  He pumped three bullets into the lock on the Dentonwick office. Pushed open the door. Fired twice into the darkness. Leaped inside, crouched, fumbled for the wall switch, turned on the overhead lights.

  The first of the three rooms was deserted. He proceeded cautiously to search the other two.

  Connie had reached the ledge five stories below.

  Nevertheless, he kept his hands on the rope and was prepared to belay her again if she slipped and fell before she had anchored her safety tether.

  He heard two muffled shots.

  The fact that he could hear them at all above the howling wind meant that they were frighteningly close.

  But what was Bollinger shooting at?

  The office behind Graham remained dark; but suddenly, lights came on beyond the windows of the office next door.

  Bollinger was too damned close.

  Is this where it happens? he wondered. Is this where I get the bullet in the back?

  Sooner than he had expected, the signal came on the line: two sharp tugs.

  He reeled in the rope, wondering if he had as much as a minute left before Bollinger found the correct office, the broken window—and him.

  If he was going to reach that ledge five stories below before Bollinger had a chance to kill him, he would have to rappel much faster than he had done the first time.

  Once more, the rope passed over regularly spaced windows. He would have to be careful not to put his feet through one of them. Because he’d have to take big steps rather than little ones, and because he’d have to descend farther on each arc and take less time to calculate his movements, avoiding the glass would be far more difficult than it had been from the fortieth to the thirty-eighth floor.

  His prospects rekindled his terror. Perhaps it was fortunate that he needed to hurry. If he’d had time to delay, the fear might have grown strong enough to immobilize him again.

  Bollinger returned to the corridor. He fired two shots into the door of the Boswell Patent Brokerage suite.

  36

  Boswell Patent Brokerage occupied three small rooms, all of them shabbily furnished—and all of them deserted.

  At the broken window, Bollinger leaned out, looked both ways along the snow-swept six-foot-wide setback. They weren’t there either.

  Reluctantly, he brushed the shards of glass out of his way and crawled through the window.

  The storm wind raced over him, pummeled him, stood his hair on end, dashed snowflakes in his face and shoved them down his shirt, under his collar, where they melted on his back. Shivering, he regretted having taken off his overcoat.

  Wishing he had handholds of some sort, he stretched out on his belly. The stone was so cold that he felt as if he had lain down bare-chested on a block of ice.

  He peered over the edge. Graham Harris was only ten feet below, swinging away from the building on a thin rope, slipping down the line as he followed his arc, swinging back to the building: rappelling.

  He reached down, gripped the piton. It was so cold that his fingers almost froze to it. He tried to twist it loose but discovered it was well planted.

  Even in the pale, almost nonexistent light, he could see that there was a gate in the snap link that was fixed to the piton. He fingered it, tried to open it, but couldn’t figure out how it worked.

  Although he was right on top of Harris, Bollinger knew he could not get off an accurate shot. The cold and the wind had brought tears to his eyes, blurring his vision. The light was poor. And the man was moving too fast to make a good target.

  Instead, he put down the Walther PPK, rolled onto his side, and quickly extracted a knife from his trousers pocket. He flicked it open. It was the same razor-sharp knife with which he had murdered so many women. And now, if he could cut the rappelling line before Harris got down to the ledge, he would have claimed his first male victim with it. Reaching to the piton, he began to saw through the loop of the knot that was suspended from the jiggling carabiner.

  The wind struck the side of the building, rose along the stone, buffeted his face.

  He was breathing through his mouth. The air was so cold that it made his throat ache.

  Completely unaware of Bollinger, Harris pushed away from the building once more. Swung out, swung back, descended six or eight feet in the process. Pushed out again.

  The carabiner was moving on the piton, making it difficult for Bollinger to keep the blade at precisely the same cutting point on the rope.

  Harris was rappelling fast, rapidly approaching the ledge where Connie waited for him. In a few seconds he would be safely off the rope.

  Finally, after Harris had taken several more steps along the face of the highrise, Bollinger’s knife severed the nylon rope; and the line snapped free of the carabiner.

  He knew what had happened.

  His thoughts accelerated. Long before the rope had fallen around his shoulders, before his forward momentum was depleted, even as his feet touched the stone, he had considered his situation and decided on a course of action.

  The ledge was two inches deep. Just the tips of his boots fit on it. It wasn’t large enough to support him.

  Taking advantage of his momentum, he flung himself toward the window and pushed in that direction with his toes—up and in, with all of his strength—the instant he made contact with the window ledge. His shoulder hit one of the tall panes. Glass shattered.

  He had hoped to thrust an arm through the glass, then throw it around the center post. If he could do that, he might hold on long enough to open the window and drag himself inside.

  However, even as the glass broke, he lost his toehold on the icy two-inch-wide sill. His boots skidded backward, sank through empty air.

  He slid down the stonework. He pawed desperately at the window as he went.

  His knees struck the sill. The granite tore his trousers, gouging his skin. His knees slipped off the impossibly shall
ow indention just as his feet had done.

  He grabbed the sill with both hands as gravity drew him over it. He held on as best he could. By his fingers. Dangling over the street. Kicking at the wall with his feet. Trying to find a toehold where there was none. Gasping.

  The setback where Connie waited was only fifteen feet from the sill to which he clung, just seven or eight feet from the bottoms of his boots. Eight feet. It looked like a mile to him.

  As he contemplated the long fall to Lexington Avenue, he hoped to God that his vision of a bullet in the back had been correct.

  His gloves were too thick to serve him well in a precarious position like this. He lost his grip on the ice-sheathed stone.

  He dropped onto the yard-wide setback. Landed on his feet. Cried out in pain. Tottered backward.

  Connie shouted.

  With one foot he stepped into space. Felt death pulling at him. Screamed. Windmilled his arms.

  Connie was tethered to the wall and willing to test the piton that she had hammered between the granite blocks. She jumped at Graham, clutched the front of his parka, jerked at him, tried to stagger to safety with him.

  For what must have been only a second or two but seemed like an hour, they swayed on the brink.

  The wind shoved them toward the street.

  But at last she proved sufficiently strong to arrest his backward fall. He brought his foot in from the gulf. They stabilized on the last few inches of stone. Then he threw his arms around her, and they moved back to the face of the building, to safety, away from the concrete canyon.

  37

  “He may have cut the rope,” Connie said, “but he isn’t up there now.”

  “He’s coming for us.”

  “Then he’ll cut the rope again.”

  “I guess he will. So we’ll just have to be too damned fast for him.”

  Graham stretched out on the yard-wide ledge, parallel to the side of the building.

  His bad leg was filled with a steady, almost crippling pain from ankle to hip. Considering all the rappelling he would have to do to reach the street, he was certain the leg would give out at some crucial point in the climb, probably just when his life most depended on surefootedness.

  He took a piton from one of the accessory straps at his waist. He held out one hand to Connie. “Hammer.”

  She gave it to him.

  He twisted around a bit, lay at an angle to the building, his head and one arm over the edge of the setback.

  Far below, an ambulance moved cautiously on Lexington Avenue, its lights flashing. Even from the thirty-third floor, the street was not entirely visible. He could barely make out the lines of the ambulance in the wash of its own emergency beacons. It drew even with the Bowerton Building, then drove on into the snowy night.

  He found a mortar seam even without removing his bulky gloves, and he started to pound in a piton.

  Suddenly, to one side, two floors below, movement caught his eye. A window opened inward. One of two tall panes. No one appeared at it. However, he sensed the man in the darkness of the office beyond.

  A chill passed along his spine; it had nothing to do with the cold or the wind.

  Pretending that he had seen nothing, he finished hammering the piton in place. Then he slid away from the edge, stood up. “We can’t go down here,” he told Connie.

  She looked puzzled. “Why not?”

  “Bollinger is below us.”

  “What?”

  “At a window. Waiting to shoot us—or at least you—as we go past him.”

  Her gray eyes were wide. “But why didn’t he come here to get us?”

  “Maybe he thought we’d already started down. Or maybe he thought we’d run out of his reach along this setback the moment he came into an office on this floor.”

  “What now?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  Her eyebrows were crusted with snow, as was the fringe of fur lining that escaped her hood. He held her. The wind moaned incessantly.

  He said, “This is a corner building.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It faces on another street besides Lexington.”

  “So?”

  “So we follow the setback,” he said excitedly. “Turn the corner on the setback.”

  “And climb down the other face, the one that overlooks the side street?”

  “You’ve got it. That’s no harder to climb than this wall.”

  “And Bollinger can only see Lexington Avenue from his window,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Sooner or later, he’ll figure out what we’ve done.”

  “Later.”

  “It had better be.”

  “Sure. He’ll wait right where he is for a few minutes, expecting to pick us off. Then he’ll waste time checking this entire floor.”

  “And the stairwells.”

  “And the elevator shafts. We might get most of the way down before he finds us.”

  “Okay,” she said. She unhooked her safety tether from the window post.

  38

  At the open window on the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger waited. Apparently they were preparing the rope which they would hook to the piton that Harris had just pounded into place.

  He looked forward to shooting the woman as she came past him on the line. The image excited him. He would enjoy blowing her away into the night.

  When that happened, Harris would be stunned, emotionally destroyed, unable to think fast, unable to protect himself. Then Bollinger could go after him at will. If he could kill Harris where he chose, kill him cleanly, he could salvage the plan that he and Billy had devised this afternoon.

  As he waited for his prey, he thought again of that second night of his relationship with Billy....

  After the whore left Billy’s apartment, they ate dinner in the kitchen. Between them they consumed two salads, four steaks, four rashers of bacon, six eggs, eight pieces of toast, and a large quantity of Scotch. They approached the food as they had the woman: with intensity, with singlemindedness, with appetites that were not those of men but those of supermen.

  At midnight, over brandy, Bollinger had talked about the years when he had lived with his grandmother.

  Even now he could remember any part of that conversation he wished. He was blessed with virtually total recall, a talent honed by years of memorizing complex poetry.

  “So she called you Dwight. I like that name. ”

  “Why are you talking that way?”

  “The Southern accent? I was born in the South. I had an accent until I was twenty. I made a concerted effort to lose it. Took voice lessons. But I can recall it when I want. Sometimes the drawl amuses me. ”

  “Why did you take voice lessons in the first place? The accent is nice. ”

  “Nobody up North takes you seriously when you’ve got a heavy drawl. They think you’re a redneck. Say, what if I call you Dwight?”

  “If you want. ”

  “I’m closer to you than anyone’s been since your grandmother. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yeah. ”

  “I should call you Dwight. In fact, I’m closer to you than your grandmother was. ”

  “I guess so. ”

  “And you know me better than anyone else does. ”

  “Do I? I suppose I do. ”

  “Then we need special names for each other. ”

  “So call me Dwight. I like it.”

  “And you call me—Billy. ”

  “Billy?”

  “Billy James Plover. ”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I was born with it. ”

  “You changed your name?”

  “Just like I did the accent. ”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. ”

  “Why?”

/>   “I went to college up North. Didn’t do as well as I should have done. Didn’t get the grades I deserved. Finally dropped out. But by then I knew why I didn’t make it. In those days, Ivy League professors didn’t give you a chance if you spoke with a drawl and had a redneck name like Billy James Plover. ”

  “You’re exaggerating. ” “How would you know? How in the hell would you know? You’ve always had a nice white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Northern name. Franklin Dwight Bollinger. What would you know about it?”

  “I guess you’re right. ”

  “At that time, all the Ivy League intellectuals were involved in a conspiracy of sorts against the South, against Southerners. They still are, except that the conspiracy isn’t so broad or so vicious as it once was. Back then, the only way you could succeed in a Northern university or community was to have an Anglo-Saxon name like yours—or else one that was out-and-out Jewish. Frank Bollinger or Sol Cohen. You could be accepted with either name. But not with Billy James Plover. ”

  “So you stopped being Billy. ”

  “As soon as I could. ”

  “And did your luck improve?”

  “The same day I changed my name. ”

  “But you want me to call you Billy. ”

  “It wasn’t the name that was wrong. It was the people who reacted negatively to the name. ”

  “Billy ...”

  “Shouldn’t we have special names for each other?”

  “Doesn’t matter. If you want. ”

  “Aren’t we special ourselves, Frank?”

  “I think so. ”

  “Aren’t we different from other people?”

  “Quite different. ”

  “So we shouldn’t use between us the names they call us by. ”

  “If you say so. ”

  “We’re supermen, Frank. ”

  “What?”

  “Not like Clark Kent. ”

  “I sure don’t have X-ray vision. ”

  “Supermen as Nietzsche meant. ”

  “Nietzsche?”

  “You aren’t familiar with his work?”

  “Not particularly. ”

  “I’ll lend you a book by him.”

  “Okay. ”

  “In fact, since Nietzsche should be read over and over again, I’ll give you a book by him. ”