Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade. Catatonic, yes. AWOL, no. Everyone intimately involved with the program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of the Titanic prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

  Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight and one o’clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on schedule.

  Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to assume that he’d snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M. Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would have been renegade for two full days.

  Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours? Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma City airport.

  They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

  Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours, assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn’t slept. Alfie could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single-minded as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

  Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward assassin.

  Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with which they had supplied him—and by which he could be tracked—and because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o’clock Sunday morning; the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm pistol.

  The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store: multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

  And at that point they had lost him for too long.

  From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Anywhere.

  Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.

  But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.

  Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.

  Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe. By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn’t scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.

  In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of People magazine.

  Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said I’VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA—NOW I CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth Star Trek novelization.

  Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.

  MR. MURDER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

  The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds. Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.

  The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha Christie’s old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal: Martin Stillwater’s Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products; a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in “Day-Glo” red; start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.

  Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn’t see why the article had put the New York contact’s blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be “Mr. Tedium.” If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn’t need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.

  Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them—especially novelists—had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had something to contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium. As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You didn’t have to put up with that in the movies. Movies never took you inside characters’ minds. Even if movies could show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon, anyway, for God’s sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn’t matter what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords: action and speed.

  He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of Martin Stillwater.

  “Holy shit.”

  In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous pages.

  Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever the hell it was called.

  Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said, “Look at this.”

  After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker glanced at People. “That’s Alfie.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, “Sure looks like him.”

  “Something’s very wrong here.”

  “Looks exactly like him.”

  “The kiss of the iceberg,” Oslett said
ominously.

  Frowning, Clocker said, “Huh?”

  In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or whatever the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the plane.

  As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact in New York. “Okay, I’ve seen People.”

  “Like a kick in the face, isn’t it?” New York said.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?”

  “No. Jesus, they’re like identical twins.”

  “Why am I going to California—to get a look at this writer jerk?”

  “And maybe to find Alfie.”

  “You think Alfie’s in California?”

  New York said, “Well, he had to go somewhere. Besides, the minute this People thing fell on us, we started trying to learn everything we could about Martin Stillwater, and right away we find out there was some trouble at his house in Mission Viejo late this afternoon, early this evening.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The police report’s been written up, but it isn’t logged into their computer yet, so we can’t just access it. We need to get our hands on a hard copy. We’re working on that. So far, we know there was an intruder in the house. Stillwater apparently shot somebody, but the guy got away.”

  “You think it has something to do with Alfie?”

  “Nobody here’s a big believer in coincidence.”

  The pitch of the Lear engines changed. The jet had come out of its climb, leveled off, and settled down to cruising speed.

  Oslett said, “But how would Alfie know about Stillwater?”

  “Maybe he reads People,” New York said, and laughed nervously.

  “If you’re thinking the intruder was Alfie—why would he go after this guy?”

  “We don’t have a theory yet.”

  Oslett sighed. “I feel as if I’m standing in a cosmic toilet, and God just flushed it.”

  “Maybe you should’ve taken more care with the way you were handling him.”

  “This wasn’t a handling screwup,” Oslett bristled.

  “Hey, I’m making no accusations. I’m only telling you one of the things that’s being said back here.”

  “Seems to me the big screwup was in satellite surveillance. ”

  “Can’t expect them to locate him after he took off the shoes.”

  “But how come they needed a day and a half to find the damned shoes? Bad weather over the Midwest. Sunspot activity, magnetic disturbances. Too many hundreds of square miles in the initial search zone. Excuses, excuses, excuses.”

  “At least they have some,” New York said smugly.

  Oslett fumed in silence. He hated being away from Manhattan. The moment the shadow of his plane crossed the city line, the knives came out, and the ambitious pygmies started trying to whittle his reputation down to their size.

  “You’ll be met by an advance man in California,” New York said. “He’ll give you an update.”

  “Terrific.”

  Oslett frowned at the phone and pressed END, terminating the call.

  He needed a drink.

  In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, the flight crew included a stewardess. With a button on the arm of his chair, he could summon her from the small galley at the back of the plane. In seconds she arrived, and he ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

  She was an attractive blonde in a burgundy blouse, gray skirt, and matching gray jacket. He turned in his seat to watch her walk back to the galley.

  He wondered how easy she was. If he charmed her, maybe she’d let him take her into the john and do it to her standing up.

  For all of a minute, he indulged that fantasy, but then faced reality and put her out of his mind. Even if she was easy, there would be unpleasant consequences. Afterward, she would want to sit beside him, probably all the way to California, and share with him her thoughts and feelings about everything from love and fate to death and the significance of Cheez Whiz. He didn’t care what she thought and felt, only what she could do, and he was in no mood to pretend to be a sensitive nineties kind of guy.

  When she brought the Scotch, he asked what videotapes were available. She gave him a list of forty titles. The best movie of all time was in the plane’s library: Lethal Weapon 3. He had lost track of how many times he’d seen it, and the pleasure he took from it did not diminish with repetition. It was the ideal film because it had no story line that made enough sense to bother following, did not expect the viewer to watch the characters change and grow, was composed entirely of a series of violent action sequences, and was louder than a stockcar race and a Megadeth concert combined.

  Four separately positioned monitors made it possible for four films to be shown simultaneously to different passengers. The stewardess ran Lethal Weapon 3 on the monitor nearest to Oslett and gave him a set of headphones.

  He put on the headset, turned the volume high, and settled back in his seat with a grin.

  Later, after he finished the Scotch, he dozed off while Danny Glover and Mel Gibson screamed unintelligible dialogue at each other, fires raged, machine guns chattered, explosives detonated, and music thundered.

  2

  Monday night they stayed in a pair of connecting units in a motel in Laguna Beach. The accommodations didn’t qualify as five- or even four-star lodging, but the rooms were clean and the bathrooms had plenty of towels. With the holiday weekend gone and the summer tourist season months in the future, at least half of the motel was unoccupied, and though they were right off Pacific Coast Highway, quiet ruled.

  The events of the day had taken their toll. Paige felt as if she had been awake for a week. Even the too-soft and slightly lumpy motel mattress was as enticing as a bed of clouds on which gods and goddesses might sleep.

  For dinner they ate pizza in the motel. Marty went out to fetch it—also salads and cannoli with deliciously thick ricotta custard—from a restaurant a couple of blocks away.

  When he returned with the food, he pounded insistently on the door, and he was pale and hollow-eyed when he rushed inside, arms laden with take-out boxes. At first Paige thought he had seen the look-alike cruising the area, but then she realized he expected to return and find them gone—or dead.

  The outer doors of both rooms featured sturdy dead-bolt locks and security chains. They engaged these and also wedged straight-backed desk chairs under the knobs.

  Neither Paige nor Marty could imagine any means by which The Other could possibly find them. They wedged the chairs under the knobs anyway. Tight.

  Incredibly, in spite of the terror they had been through, the kids were willing to let Marty convince them that the night away from home was a special treat. They were not accustomed to staying in motels, so everything from the coin-operated vibrating mattress to the free stationery to the miniature bars of fragrant soap was sufficiently exotic to fascinate them when Marty drew their attention to it.

  They were especially intrigued that the toilet seats in both rooms were wrapped by crisp white paper bands on which were printed assurances in three languages that the facilities had been sanitized. From this, Emily deduced that some motel guests must be “real pigs” who didn’t know enough to clean up after themselves, and Charlotte speculated about whether such a special notice indicated that more than soap or Lysol had been used to sterilize the surfaces, perhaps flamethrowers or nuclear radiation.

  Marty was clever enough to realize that the more exotic flavors of soft drinks in the motel vending machines, which the girls did not get at home, would also delight them and lift their spirits. He bought chocolate Yoo-Hoo, Mountain Dew, Sparkling Grape, Cherry Crush, Tangerine Treat, and Pineapple Fizz. The four of them sat on the two queen-size
beds in one of the rooms, containers of food spread around them on the mattresses, bottles of colorful sodas on the nightstands. Charlotte and Emily had to taste some of each beverage before the end of dinner, which made Paige queasy.

  Through her family-counseling practice, Paige had long ago learned that children were potentially more resilient than adults when it came to coping with trauma. That potential was best realized when they enjoyed a stable family structure, received large doses of affection, and believed themselves to be respected and loved. She felt a rush of pride that her own kids were proving so emotionally elastic and strong—then superstitiously and surreptitiously knocked one knuckle softly against the wooden headboard, silently asking God not to punish either her or the children for her hubris.

  Most surprisingly, once Charlotte and Emily had bathed, put on pajamas, and been tucked into the beds in the connecting room, they wanted Marty to conduct his usual story hour and continue the verses about Santa’s evil twin. Paige recognized an uncomfortable—in fact, uncanny—similarity between the fanciful poem and recent frightening events in their own lives. She was sure Marty and the girls were also aware of the connection. Yet Marty seemed as pleased by the opportunity to share more verses as the kids were eager to hear them.

  He positioned a chair at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. In their rush to get packed and out of the house, he had even remembered to bring the notebook that was labeled Stories for Charlotte and Emily, with its clip-on, battery-powered reading lamp. He sat down and held the notebook at reading distance.

  The shotgun lay on the floor beside him.

  The Beretta was on the dresser, where Paige could reach it in two seconds flat.

  Marty waited for the silence to develop the proper quality of expectation.

  The scene was remarkably like the one Paige had witnessed so often in the girls’ room at home, except for two differences. The queen-size beds dwarfed Charlotte and Emily, making them seem like children in a fairy tale, homeless waifs who had sneaked into a giant’s castle to steal some of his porridge and enjoy his guest rooms. And the miniature reading lamp clipped to the notebook was not the sole source of light; one of the nightstand lamps was aglow as well, and would remain so all night—the girls’ only apparent concession to fear.