The Face of Fear

by Dean Koontz

  Surprised, Bollinger did exactly what he should not have done. He whirled and shot at the grader.

  The driver braked, almost came to a full stop.

  “Help!” Graham shouted.

  Bollinger fired at the machine again. The slug ricocheted off the steel that framed the windshield of the cab.

  The driver shifted gears and gunned the engine.

  Bollinger ran.

  Lifted by hydraulic arms, the plow rose a foot off the pavement. It cleared the curb as the machine lumbered onto the sidewalk.

  Pursued by the grader, Bollinger ran thirty or forty feet along the walk before he sprinted into the street. Kicking up small clouds of snow with each step, he crossed the avenue, with the plow close behind him.

  Connie was rapt.

  Bollinger let the grader close the distance between them. When only two yards separated him from the shining steel blade, he dashed to one side, out of its way. He ran past the machine, came back toward the Bowerton Building.

  The grader didn’t turn as easily as a sports car. By the time the driver had brought it around and was headed back, Bollinger was standing under Graham again.

  Graham saw him raise the gun. It glinted in the light from the street lamp.

  At ground level where the wind was a bit less fierce, the shot was very loud. The bullet cracked into the granite by Graham’s right foot.

  The grader bore down on Bollinger, horn blaring.

  He put his back to the building and faced the mechanical behemoth.

  Sensing what the madman would do, Graham fumbled with the compact, battery-powered rock drill that was clipped to his waist belt. He got it free of the strap.

  The grader was fifteen to twenty feet from Bollinger, who aimed the pistol at the windshield of the operator’s cab.

  From his perch on the fourth floor, Graham threw the rock drill. It arched through sixty feet of falling snow and hit BoMinger—not a solid blow on the head, as Graham had hoped, but on the hip. It glanced off him with little force.

  Nevertheless, the drill startled Bollinger. He jumped, put a foot on ice, pitched forward, stumbled off the curb, skidded with peculiar grace in the snow, and sprawled facedown in the gutter.

  The driver of the grader had expected his quarry to run away; instead, Bollinger fell toward the machine, into it. The operator braked, but he could not bring the grader to a full stop within only eight feet.

  The huge steel plow was raised twelve inches off the street; but that was not quite high enough to pass safely over Bollinger. The bottom of the blade caught him at the buttocks and gouged through his flesh, rammed his head, crushed his skull, jammed his body against the raised curb.

  Blood sprayed across the snow in the circle of light beneath the nearest street lamp.

  43

  MacDonald, Ott, the security guards and the building engineer had been tucked into heavy plastic body bags supplied by the city morgue. The bags were lined up on the marble floor.

  Near the shuttered newsstand at the front of the lobby, half a dozen folding chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle. Graham and Connie sat there with Ira Preduski and three other policemen.

  Preduski was in his usual condition: slightly bedraggled. His brown suit hung on him only marginally better than a sheet would have done. Because he had been walking in the snow, his trouser cuffs were damp. His shoes and socks were wet. He wasn’t wearing galoshes or boots; he owned a pair of the former and two pairs of the latter, but he never remembered to put them on in bad weather.

  “Now, I don’t mean to mother you,” Preduski said to Graham. “I know I’ve asked before. And you’ve told me. But I’m worried. I can’t help it. I worry unnecessarily about a lot of things. That’s another fault of mine. But what about your arm? Where you were shot. Is it all right?”

  Graham lightly patted the bandage under his shirt. A paramedic with bad breath but sure hands had attended to him an hour ago. “I’m just fine.”

  “What about your leg?”

  Graham grimaced. “I’m no more crippled now than I was before all this happened.”

  Turning to Connie, Preduski said, “What about you? The doc with the ambulance says you’ve got some bad bruises.”

  “Just bruises,” she said almost airily. She was holding Graham’s hand. “Nothing worse.”

  “Well, you’ve both had a terrible night. Just awful. And it’s my fault. I should have caught Bollinger weeks ago. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have wrapped up this case long before you two got involved.” He looked at his watch. “Almost three in the morning.” He stood up, tried unsuccessfully to straighten the rumpled collar of his overcoat. “We’ve kept you here much too long. Much too long. But I’m going to have to ask you to hang around fifteen or twenty minutes more to answer any questions that the other detectives or forensics men might have. Is that too much to ask? Would you mind? I know it’s a terrible, terrible imposition. I apologize.”

  “It’s all right,” Graham said wearily.

  Preduski spoke to another plainclothes detective sitting with the group. “Jerry, will you be sure they aren’t kept more than fifteen or twenty minutes?”

  “Whatever you say, Ira.” Jerry was a tall, chunky man in his late thirties. He had a mole on his chin.

  “Make sure they’re given a ride home in a squad car.”

  Jerry nodded.

  “And keep the reporters away from them.”

  “Okay, Ira. But it won’t be easy.”

  To Graham and Connie, Preduski said, “When you get home, unplug your telephones first thing. You’ll have to deal with the press tomorrow. But that’s soon enough. They’ll be pestering you for weeks. One more cross to bear. I’m sorry. I really am. But maybe we can keep them away from you tonight, give you a few hours of peace before the storm.”

  “Thank you,” Connie said.

  “Now, I’ve got to be going. Work to do. Things that ought to have been done long ago. I’m always behind in my work. Always. I’m not cut out for this job. That’s the truth.”

  He shook hands with Graham and performed an awkward half bow in Connie’s direction.

  As he walked across the lobby, his wet shoes squished and squeaked.

  Outside, he dodged some reporters and refused to answer the questions of others.

  His unmarked car was at the end of a double line of police sedans, black-and-whites, ambulances and press vans. He got behind the wheel, buckled his safety belt, started the engine.

  His partner, Detective Daniel Mulligan, would be busy inside for a couple of hours yet. He wouldn’t miss the car.

  Humming a tune of his own creation, Preduski drove onto Lexington, which had recently been plowed. There were chains on his tires; they crunched in the snow and sang on the few bare patches of pavement. He turned the corner, went to Fifth Avenue, and headed downtown.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, he parked on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village.

  He left the car. He walked a third of a block, keeping to the shadows beyond the pools of light around the street lamps. With a quick backward glance to be sure he wasn’t observed, he stepped into a narrow passageway between two elegant townhouses.

  The roofless walkway ended in a blank wall, but there were high gates on both sides. He stopped in front of the gate on his left.

  Snowflakes eddied gently in the still night air. The wind did not reach down here, but its fierce voice called from the rooftops above.

  He took a pair of lock picks from his pocket. He had found them a long time ago in the apartment of a burglar who had committed suicide. Over the years there had been rare but important occasions on which the picks had come in handy. He used one of them to tease up the pins in the cheap gate lock, used the other pick to hold the pins in place once they’d been teased. In two minutes he was inside.

  A small courtyard lay behind Graham Harris’s house. A patch of grass. Two trees. A brick patio. Of course, the two flower beds were barren during the winter; however, th
e presence of a wrought-iron table and four wrought-iron chairs made it seem that people had been playing cards in the sun just that afternoon.

  He crossed the courtyard and climbed three steps to the rear entrance.

  The storm door was not locked.

  As delicately, swiftly and silently as he could manage, he picked the lock on the wooden door.

  He was dismayed by the ease with which he had gained entry. Wouldn’t people ever learn to buy good locks?

  Harris’s kitchen was warm and dark. It smelled of spice cake, and of bananas that had been put out to ripen and were now overripe.

  He closed the door soundlessly.

  For a few minutes he stood perfectly still, listening to the house and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally, when he could identify every object in the kitchen, he went to the table, lifted a chair away from it, put the chair down again without making even the faintest noise.

  He sat down and took his revolver from the shoulder holster under his left arm. He held the gun in his lap.

  44

  The squad car waited at the curb until Graham opened the front door of the house. Then it drove away, leaving tracks in the five-inch snowfall that, in Greenwich Village, had not yet been pushed onto the sidewalks.

  He switched on the foyer light. As Connie closed the door, he went into the unlighted living room and located the nearest table lamp. He turned it on—and froze, unable to find the strength or the will to remove his fingers from the switch.

  A man sat in one of the easy chairs. He had a gun.

  Connie put one hand on Graham’s arm. To the man in the chair, she said, “What are you doing here?”

  Anthony Prine, the host of Manhattan at Midnight, stood up. He waved the gun at them. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” Connie asked.

  “The Southern accent? I was born with it. Got rid of it years ago. But I can recall it when I want. It was losing the accent that got me interested in mimicry. I started in show business as a comic who did imitations of famous people. Now I imitate Billy James Plover, the man I used to be.”

  “How did you get in here?” Graham demanded.

  “I went around the side of the house and broke a window.”

  “Get out. I want you out of here.”

  “You killed Dwight,” Prine said. “I drove by the Bowerton Building after the show. I saw all the cops. I know what you did.” He was very pale. His face was lined with strain.

  “Killed who?” Graham asked.

  “Dwight. Franklin Dwight Bollinger.”

  Perplexed, Graham said, “He was trying to kill us.”

  “He was one of the best people. One of the very best there ever was. I did a program about vice cops, and he was one of the guests. Within minutes we knew we were two of a kind.”

  “He was the Butcher, the one who—”

  Prine was extremely agitated. His hands were shaking. His left cheek was distorted by a nervous tic. He interrupted Connie and said, “Dwight was half the Butcher.”

  “Half the Butcher?” Connie said.

  Graham lowered his hand from the switch and gripped the pillar of the brass table lamp.

  “I was the other half,” Prine said. “We were identical personalities, Dwight and I.” He took one step toward them. Then another. “More than that. We were incomplete without each other. We were halves of the same organism.” He pointed the pistol at Graham’s head.

  “Get out of here!” Graham shouted. “Run, Connie!” And as he spoke he threw the lamp at Prine.

  The lamp knocked Prine back into the easy chair.

  Graham turned to the foyer.

  Connie was opening the front door.

  As he followed her, Prine shot him in the back.

  A terrible blow on the right shoulder blade, a burst of light, blood spattering the carpet all around him ...

  He fell and rolled onto his side in time to see Ira Preduski come out of the hallway that led to the kitchen.

  He floated on a raft of pain in a sea that grew darker by the second. What was happening?

  The detective shouted at Prine and then shot him in self-defense. Once. In the chest.

  The talk-show host collapsed against a magazine rack.

  Pain. just the first twitches of pain.

  Graham closed his eyes. Wondered if that was the wrong thing to do. If you go to sleep, you’ll die. Or was that only with a head injury? He opened his eyes to be on the safe side.

  Connie was wiping the sweat from his face.

  Kneeling beside him, Preduski said, “I called an ambulance.”

  Some time must have passed. He seemed to fade out in the middle of one conversation and in on the middle of the next.

  He closed his eyes.

  Opened them.

  “Medical examiner’s theory,” Preduski said. “Sounded crazy at first. But the more I thought about it ...”

  “I’m thirsty,” Graham said. He was hoarse.

  “Thirsty? I’ll bet you are,” Preduski said.

  “Get me ... drink.”

  “That might be the wrong thing to do for you,” Connie said. “We’ll wait for the ambulance.”

  The room spun. He smiled. He rode the room as if it were a carousel.

  “I shouldn’t have come here alone,” Preduski said miserably. “But you see why I thought I had to? Bollinger was a cop. The other half of the Butcher might be a cop too. Who could I trust? Really. Who?”

  Graham licked his lips and said, “Prine. Dead?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Preduski said.

  “Me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Dead?”

  “You’ll live.”

  “Sure?”

  “Bullet wasn’t near the spine. Didn’t puncture any vital organs, I’ll bet.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Connie said.

  Graham closed his eyes.

  epilogue

  SUNDAY

  Ira Preduski stood with his back to the hospital window. The late afternoon sun framed him in soft gold light.“Prine says they wanted to start racial wars, religious wars, economic wars ...

  Graham was lying on his side in the bed, propped up with pillows. He spoke somewhat slowly because of the pain killers he had been given. “So they could gain power in the aftermath.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  From her chair at Graham’s bedside, Connie said, “But that’s crazy. In fact, didn’t Charles Manson’s bunch of psychos kill all those people for the same reason?”

  “I mentioned Manson to Prine,” Preduski said. “But he tells me Manson was a two-bit con man, a cheap sleazy hood.”

  “While Prine is a superman.”

  Preduski shook his head sadly. “Poor Nietzsche. He was one of the most brilliant philosophers who ever lived—and also the most misunderstood.” He bent over and sniffed at an arrangement of flowers that stood on the table by the window. When he looked up again, he said, “Excuse me for asking. It’s none of my business. I know that. But I’m a curious man. One of my faults. But—when’s the wedding?”

  “Wedding?” Connie said.

  “Don’t kid me. You two are getting married.”

  Confused, Graham said, “How could you know that? We just talked about it this morning. Just the two of us.”

  “I’m a detective,” Preduski said. “I’ve picked up clues.”

  “For instance?” Connie said.

  “For instance, the way the two of you are looking at each other this afternoon.”

  Delighted at being able to share the news, Graham said, “We’ll be married a few weeks after I’m released from the hospital, as soon as I have my strength back.”

  “Which he’ll need,” Connie said, smiling wickedly.

  Preduski walked around the bed, looked at the bandages on Graham’s left arm and on the upper right quarter of his back. “Every time I think of all that happened Friday nig
ht and Saturday morning, I wonder how you two came out of it alive.”

  “It wasn’t much,” Connie said.

  “Not much?” Preduski said.

  “No. Really. It wasn’t so much, what we did, was it, Nick?”

  Graham smiled and felt very good indeed. “No, it wasn’t much, Nora.”