by Dean Koontz
Marty had no intention of searching there. If his quarry had dragged himself out of the house to cower in a chilly, sodden nest of jasmine and agapanthus, weak from loss of blood—which was most likely the case—finding him was not urgent. It was more important to be sure he was not at that moment escaping unpursued.
Long adapted to dry conditions and accustomed to only the water provided by the sprinkler system, choruses of toads sang from their hidden niches, scores of shrill voices that were usually charming but seemed eerie and threatening now. Above their aria rose the wail of distant but approaching sirens.
If the intruder was trying to get away before the police came, the possible routes of escape were few. He could have climbed one of the property walls, but that seemed unlikely because, regardless of how miraculous his recovery, he simply hadn’t had sufficient time to cross the lawn, push through the shrubs, and clamber into one of the neighbors’ yards.
Marty turned right and ran out from under the dripping patio cover. Soaked to the skin in half a dozen steps, he followed the rear walkway along the house, then hurried past the back of the attached garage.
The downpour had lured snails from moist and shadowy retreats where they usually remained until well after nightfall. Their pale, jellied bodies were stretched most of the way out of their shells, thick feelers questing ahead. Unavoidably, he stepped on a few, smashed them to pulp, and through his mind flashed the superstitious notion that a cosmic entity would at any second crush him underfoot with equal callousness.
When he turned the corner onto the service walkway flanked by a garage wall and eugenia hedge, he expected to see the look-alike limping toward the front of the property. The walkway was deserted. The gate at the end stood half open.
The sirens were much louder by the time Marty sprinted into the driveway in front of the house. He sloshed through a gutter filled with four or five inches of fast-flowing water as cold as the Styx, stepped into the street, looked left and right, but as yet no police cars were in sight.
The Other was nowhere to be seen, either. Marty was alone on the street.
In the next block south, too far off for him to recognize the make and model, a car was speeding away. In spite of the fact that it was moving too fast for weather conditions, he doubted it was driven by the look-alike. He was still hard-pressed to believe the injured man had been able to walk, let alone reach his car and drive away so quickly. Surely they would find the son of a bitch nearby, lying in shrubbery, unconscious or dead. The car turned the corner much too fast; the thin squeal of its protesting tires was audible above the plink, plop, and susurration of the rain. Then it was gone.
From the north, the banshee shriek of sirens abruptly swelled much louder, and Marty turned to see a black-and -white police sedan negotiate that corner almost as fast as the other car had rounded the corner to the south. Revolving red and blue emergency beacons threw bright Frisbees of light through the gray rain and across the blacktop. The siren cut off as the sedan fishtailed to a stop twenty feet from Marty in the center of the street, with stunt-driver dramatics that seemed excessive even under the circumstances.
The siren of a backup cruiser warbled in the distance as the front doors of the first black-and-white flew open. Two uniformed officers came out of the cruiser, staying low, sheltering behind the doors, shouting, “Drop it! Now! Do it! Drop it right now or die, asshole! Now!”
Marty realized he was still holding the 9mm pistol. The cops knew nothing more than what Paige had told them when she’d called 911, that a man had been shot, so of course they figured he was the perp. If he didn’t do exactly what they demanded, and do it fast, they would shoot him and be justified in doing so.
He let the gun fall out of his hand.
It clattered on the pavement.
They ordered him to kick it away from himself. He complied.
As they rose from behind the open car doors, one of the cops shouted, “On the ground, facedown, hands behind your back!”
He knew better than to try to make them understand that he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. They wanted obedience first, explanations later, and if their positions had been reversed he would have expected the same thing of them.
He dropped to his hands and knees, then stretched full length on the street. Even through his shirt, the wet blacktop was so cold that it took his breath away.
Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house was directly across the street from where he was lying, and Marty hoped Charlotte and Emily had been kept away from the front windows. They shouldn’t have to see their father flat on the ground, under the guns of policemen. They were already scared. He remembered their wide-eyed stares when he’d burst into the kitchen with the gun in his hand, and he didn’t want them frightened further.
The cold leached into his bones.
The second siren suddenly grew much louder from one second to the next. He guessed the backup black-and-white had turned a corner to the south and was approaching from that end of the block. The piercing wail was as cold as a sharp icicle in the ear.
With one side of his face to the pavement, blinking rain out of his eyes, he watched the cops approach. They kept their guns drawn. When they tramped through a shallow puddle, the splashes seemed huge from Marty’s perspective.
As they reached him, he said, “It’s okay. I live here. This is my house.” His speech, already raspy, was further distorted by the shivers that wracked him. He worried that he sounded drunk or demented. “This is my house.”
“Just stay down,” one of them said sharply. “Keep your hands behind your back and stay down.”
The other one asked, “You have any ID?”
Shuddering so badly that his teeth chattered, he said, “Yeah, sure, in my wallet.”
Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of the patrol car.
He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels. It was decidedly not a good feeling.
The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling static and tinny voices of police-band radios.
“You have any photo ID in here?” asked the cop who had taken his wallet.
Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above knee-level. “Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a driver’s license.”
In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they hadn’t committed, they were often worried and afraid. But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience. Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers, he was mortified as never before in his life, even though he’d done nothing wrong. The situation itself—being in a position of utter submission while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority—seemed to trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability in some monstrous transgression that couldn’t quite be identified, feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.
“How old is this picture on your license?” asked the cop with his wallet.
“Uh, I don’t know, two years, three.”
“Doesn’t look much like you.”
“You know what DMV photos are like,” Marty said, dismayed to hear more plea than anger in his voice.
“Let him up, it’s all right, he’s my husband, he’s Marty Stillwater,” Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios’ house.
Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.
He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her
as she approached.
He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught; she wasn’t merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.
No.
No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.
Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements. Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.
The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
Another siren swelled in the distance.
He was so cold.
Three
1
The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle. Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New York, but he had never visited Central Park; those fields and vales were encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and introspection.
Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.
Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.
The device was as big as an attaché case, though square instead of rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette-lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television set: mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background, interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in yellow, and county roads in blue; unpaved dirt and gravel byways were represented by broken black lines. Population centers—precious few in this part of the world—were pink.
Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen. The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate 40.
“About four miles ahead now,” Oslett said.
Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times, Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more talkative.
The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale, displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off, replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill the screen.
The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the right side.
Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of Interstate 40. X marked the prize.
Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful, like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps, tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music, and oscillating electronic tones.
Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked sound effects altogether.
Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the device—which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It wasn’t sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly. Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar organizations in countries allied with the United States.
“Three miles,” he told Clocker.
The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply. Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved windshield. A locus of microminiature electronics in the base of the cup was the transmitter and receiver of a satellite up-link package. Through coded bursts of microwaves, the SATU could quickly interface with scores of geosynchronous communication and survey satellites owned by private industry and various military services, override their security systems, insert its program in their logic units, and enlist them in its operations without either disturbing their primary functions or alerting their ground monitors to the invasion.
By using two satellites to search for—and get a lock on—the unique signal of a particular transponder, the SATU could triangulate a precise position for the carrier of that transponder. Usually the target transmitter was an inconspicuous package that had been planted in the undercarriage of the surveillance subject’s car—sometimes in his plane or boat—so he could be followed at a distance without ever being aware that someone was tailing him.
In this case, it was a transponder hidden in the rubber heel and sole of a shoe.
Oslett used the SATU controls to halve the area represented on the screen, thereby dramatically enlarging the details on the map. Studying the new but equally colorful display, he said, “He’s still not moving. Looks like maybe he’s pulled off the side of the road in a rest stop.”
The SATU microchips contained detailed maps of every square mile of the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. If Oslett had been operating in Europe, the Mideast or elsewhere, he could have installed the suitable cartographical library for that territory.
“Two and a half miles,” Oslett said.
Driving with one hand, Clocker reached under his sportcoat and withdrew the revolver he carried in a shoulder holster. It was a Colt .357 Magnum, an ecce
ntric choice of weaponry—and somewhat dated—for a man in Karl Clocker’s line of work. He also favored tweed jackets with leather-covered buttons, leather patches on the elbows, and on occasion—as now—leather lapels. He had an eccentric collection of sweater vests with bold harlequin patterns, one of which he was currently wearing. His brightly colored socks were usually chosen to clash with everything else, and without fail he wore brown suede Hush Puppies. Considering his size and demeanor, no one was likely to comment negatively on his taste in clothes, let alone make unasked-for observations about his choice of handguns.
“Won’t need heavy firepower,” Oslett said.
Without saying a word to Oslett, Clocker put the .357 Magnum on the seat beside him, next to his hat, where he could get to it easily.
“I’ve got the trank gun,” Oslett said. “That should do it.”
Clocker didn’t even look at him.
2
Before Marty would agree to get out of the rainswept street and tell the authorities what had happened, he insisted that a uniformed officer watch over Charlotte and Emily at the Delorios’ house. He trusted Vic and Kathy to do anything necessary to protect the girls. But they would not be a match for the vicious relentlessness of The Other.
He wasn’t sanguine that even a well-armed guard was enough protection.
On the Delorios’ front porch, rain streamed from the overhang. It looked like holiday tinsel in the glow of the brass hurricane lamp. Sheltering there, Marty tried to make Vic understand the girls were still in danger. “Don’t let anyone in except the cops or Paige.”
“Sure, Marty.” Vic was a physical-education teacher, coach of the local high-school swimming team, Boy Scout troop leader, primary motivator behind their street’s Neighborhood Watch program, and organizer of various annual charity fund drives, an earnest and energetic guy who enjoyed helping people and who wore athletic shoes even on occasions when he also wore a coat and tie, as if more formal footwear would not allow him to move as fast and accomplish as much as he wished. “Nobody but the cops or Paige. Leave it to me, the kids will be okay with me and Kathy. Jesus, Marty, what happened over there?”
