Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  “Good or bad,” Clocker said, “everything resonates with the same movement of subatomic particles.”

  “Now don’t go ruining a beautiful moment,” Oslett warned him.

  4

  In the deepest swale of the night, he rises from vivid dreams of slashed throats, bullet-shattered heads, pale wrists carved by razor blades, and strangled prostitutes, but he does not sit up or gasp or cry out like a man waking from a nightmare, for he is always soothed by his dreams. He lies in the fetal position upon the back seat of the car, half in and half out of convalescent sleep.

  One side of his face is wet with a thick, sticky substance. He raises one hand to his cheek and cautiously, sleepily works the viscous material between his fingers, trying to understand what it is. Discovering prickly bits of glass in the congealing slime, he realizes that his healing eye has rejected the splinters of the car window along with the damaged ocular matter, which has been replaced by healthy tissue.

  He blinks, opens his eyes, and can again see as well through the left as through the right. Even in the shadow-filled Buick, he clearly perceives shapes, variations of texture, and the lesser darkness of the night that presses at the windows.

  Hours hence, by the time the palm trees are casting the long west-falling shadows of dawn and tree rats have squirmed into their secret refuges among the lush fronds to wait out the day, he will be completely healed. He will be ready once more to claim his destiny.

  He whispers, “Charlotte . . .”

  Outside, a haunting light gradually arises. The clouds trailing the storm are thin and torn. Between some of the ragged streamers, the cold face of the moon peers down.

  “. . . Emily . . .”

  Beyond the car windows, the night glimmers softly like slightly tarnished silver in the glow of a single candle flame.

  “. . . Daddy is going to be all right . . . all right . . . don’t worry . . . Daddy is going to be all right. . . .”

  He now understands that he was drawn to his double by a magnetism which arose because of their essential oneness and which he perceived through a sixth sense. He’d had no awareness that another self existed, but he’d been pulled toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious volition.

  Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father any time he wishes.

  Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He imagines his positive is aligned with the false father’s negative. Opposites attract.

  He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.

  West. West and south.

  As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery promise of its atmosphere.

  West and south. Not far. A few miles.

  The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken his life.

  Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives the lines of power connecting them.

  He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats into himself, shuts down. He isn’t quite ready to re-engage the enemy in combat and doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that another encounter is only hours away.

  He closes his eyes.

  Smiling, he drifts into sleep.

  Healing sleep.

  At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves—his sweet wife, his beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo.

  Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.

  Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a spasm that shook him from head to foot.

  He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn’t wake.

  He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window, cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but that was the only movement in the night.

  In the wall opposite the front window, draperies covered a pair of sliding glass doors beyond which lay a balcony overlooking the sea. Through the doors and past the deck railing, down at the foot of the bluff, lay a width of pale beach onto which waves broke in garlands of silver foam. No one could easily climb to the balcony, and the sward was deserted.

  Maybe it had been only a nightmare.

  He turned away from the glass, letting the draperies fall back into place, and he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Three o’clock in the morning.

  He had been asleep about five hours. Not long enough, but it would have to do.

  His neck ached intolerably, and his throat was mildly sore.

  He went into the bathroom, eased the door shut, and snapped on the light. From his travel kit he took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin. The label advised a dosage of no more than two tablets at a time and no more than eight in twenty-four hours. The moment seemed made for living dangerously, however, so he washed down four of them with a glass of water drawn from the sink tap, then popped a sore-throat lozenge in his mouth and sucked on it.

  After returning to the bedroom and picking up the short-barreled shotgun from beside the bed, he went through the open connecting door to the girls’ room. They were asleep, burrowed in their covers like turtles in shells to avoid the annoying light of the nightstand lamp.

  He looked out their windows. Nothing.

  Earlier, he had returned the reading chair to the corner, but now he moved it farther out into the room, where light would reach it. He didn’t want to alarm Charlotte and Emily if they woke before dawn and saw an unidentifiable man in the shadows.

  He sat with his knees apart, the shotgun across his thighs.

  Although he owned five weapons—three of them now in the hands of the police—although he was a good shot with all of them, although he had written many stories in which policemen and other characters handled weapons with the ease of familiarity, Marty was surprised by how unhesitatingly he had resorted to guns when trouble arose. After all, he was neither a man of action nor experienced in killing.

  His own life and then his family had been in jeopardy, but he would have thought, before learning differently, that he’d have reservations when his finger first curled around the trigger. He would have expected to experience at least a flicker of regret after shooting a man in the chest e
ven if the bastard deserved shooting.

  He clearly remembered the dark glee with which he had emptied the Beretta at the fleeing Buick. The savage lurking in the human genetic heritage was as accessible to him as to any man, regardless of how educated, well-read, and civilized he was.

  What he had discovered about himself did not displease him as much as perhaps it should. Hell, it didn’t displease him at all.

  He knew that he was capable of killing any number of men to save his own life, Paige’s life, or the lives of his children. And although he swam in a society where it was intellectually correct to embrace pacifism as the only hope of civilization’s survival, he didn’t see himself as a hopeless reactionary or an evolutionary throwback or a degenerate but merely as a man acting precisely as nature intended.

  Civilization began with the family, with children protected by mothers and fathers willing to sacrifice and even die for them.

  If the family wasn’t safe anymore, if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t protect the family from the depredations of rapists and child molesters and killers, if homicidal sociopaths were released from prison after serving less time than fraudulent evangelists who embezzled from their churches and greedy hotel-rich millionairesses who underpaid their taxes, then civilization had ceased to exist. If children were fair game—as any issue of a daily paper would confirm they were—then the world had devolved into savagery. Civilization existed only in tiny units, within the walls of those houses where the members of a family shared a love strong enough to make them willing to put their lives on the line in the defense of one another.

  What a day they’d been through. A terrible day. The only good thing about it was—he had discovered that his fugue, nightmares, and other symptoms didn’t result from either physical or mental illness. The trouble was not within him, after all. The boogeyman was real.

  But he could take minimal satisfaction from that diagnosis. Although he had regained his self-confidence, he had lost so much else.

  Everything had changed.

  Forever.

  He knew that he didn’t even yet grasp just how dreadfully their lives had been altered. In the hours remaining before dawn, as he tried to think what steps they must take to protect themselves, and as he dared to consider the few possible origins of The Other that logic dictated, their situation inevitably would seem increasingly difficult and their options narrower than he could yet envision or admit.

  For one thing, he suspected that they would never be able to go home again.

  He wakes half an hour before dawn, healed and rested.

  He returns to the front seat, switches on the interior light, and examines his forehead and left eye in the rearview mirror. The bullet furrow in his brow has knit without leaving any scar that he can detect. His eye is no longer damaged—or even bloodshot.

  However, half his face is crusted with dried blood and the grisly biological waste products of the accelerated healing process. A portion of his countenance looks like something out of The Abominable Dr. Phibes or Darkman.

  Rummaging in the glove compartment, he finds a small packet of Kleenex. Under the tissues is a travel-size box of Handi Wipes, moistened towelettes sealed in foil packets. They have a lemony scent. Very nice. He uses the Kleenex and towelettes to scrub the muck off his face, and he smooths out his sleep-matted hair with his hands.

  He won’t frighten anyone now, but he is still not presentable enough to be inconspicuous, which is what he desires to be. Though the bulky raincoat, buttoned to the neck, covers his bullet-torn shirt, the shirt reeks of blood and the variety of foods that he spilled on it during his feeding frenzy in McDonald’s rainswept parking lot last evening, in the now-abandoned Honda, before he’d ever met the unlucky owner of the Buick. His pants aren’t pristine, either.

  On the off chance he’ll find something useful, he takes the keys from the ignition, gets out of the car, goes around to the back, and opens the trunk. From the dark interior, lit only partially by an errant beam from the nearby tree-shrouded security lamp, the dead man stares at him with wide-eyed astonishment, as if surprised to see him again.

  The two plastic shopping bags lie atop the body. He empties the contents of both on the corpse. The owner of the Buick had been shopping for a variety of items. The thing that looks most useful at the moment is a bulky crew-neck sweater.

  Clutching the sweater in his left hand, he gently closes the trunk lid with his right to make as little noise as possible. People will be getting up soon, but sleep still grips most if not all of the apartment residents. He locks the trunk and pockets the keys.

  The sky is dark, but the stars have faded. Dawn is no more than fifteen minutes away.

  Such a large garden-apartment complex must have at least two or three community laundry rooms, and he sets out in search of one. In a minute he finds a signpost that directs him to the recreation building, pool, rental office, and nearest laundry room.

  The walkways connecting the buildings wind through large and attractively landscaped courtyards under spreading laurels and quaint iron carriage lamps with verdigris patina. The development is well-planned and attractive. He would not mind living here himself. Of course his own house, in Mission Viejo, is even more appealing, and he is sure the girls and Paige are so attached to it that they will never want to leave.

  The laundry-room door is locked, but it doesn’t pose a great obstacle. Management has installed a cheap lockset, a latch-bolt not a dead-bolt. Having anticipated the need, he has a credit card from the cadaver’s wallet, which he slips between the faceplate and the striker plate. He slides it upward, encounters the latch-bolt, applies pressure, and pops the lock.

  Inside, he finds six coin-operated washing machines, four gas dryers, a vending machine filled with small boxes of detergents and fabric softeners, a large table on which clean clothes can be folded, and a pair of deep sinks. Everything is clean and pleasant under the fluorescent lights.

  He takes off the raincoat and the grossly soiled flannel shirt. He wads up both the shirt and the coat and stuffs them into a large trash can that stands in one corner.

  His chest is unmarked by bullet wounds. He doesn’t need to look at his back to know that the single exit wound is also healed.

  He washes his armpits at one of the laundry sinks and dries with paper towels taken from a wall dispenser.

  He looks forward to taking a long hot shower before the day is done, in his own bathroom, in his own home. Once he has located the false father and killed him, once he has recovered his family, he will have time for simple pleasures. Paige will shower with him. She will enjoy that.

  If necessary, he could take off his jeans and wash them in one of the laundry-room machines, using coins taken from the owner of the Buick. But when he scrapes the crusted food off the denim with his fingernails and works at the few stains with damp paper towels, the result is satisfactory.

  The sweater is a pleasant surprise. He expects it to be too large for him, as the raincoat was, but the dead man evidently did not buy it for himself. It fits perfectly. The color—cranberry red—goes well with the blue jeans and is also a good color for him. If the room had a mirror, he is sure it would show that he is not only inconspicuous but quite respectable and even attractive.

  Outside, dawn is just a ghost light in the east.

  Morning birds are chirruping in the trees.

  The air is sweet.

  Tossing the Buick keys into some shrubbery, abandoning the car and the dead man in it, he proceeds briskly to the nearest multiple-stall carport and systematically tries the doors of the vehicles parked under the bougainvillea-covered roof. Just when he thinks all of them are going to be locked, a Toyota Camry proves to be open.

  He slips in behind the wheel. Checks behind the sun visor for keys. Under the seat. No such luck.

  It doesn’t matter. He’s nothing if not resourceful. Before the sky has brightened appreciably, he hot-wires the car and is on the road again.

  Most like
ly, the owner of the Camry will discover it’s missing in a couple of hours, when he’s ready to go to work, and will quickly report it stolen. No problem. By then the license plates will be on another car, and the Camry will be sporting a different set of tags that will make it all but invisible to the police.

  He feels invigorated, driving through the hills of Laguna Niguel in the rose light of dawn. The early sky is as yet only a faded blue, but the high formations of striated clouds are runneled with bright pink.

  It is the first day of December. Day one. He is making a fresh start. From now on, everything will go his way because he will no longer underestimate his enemy.

  Before he kills the false father, he will put out the bastard’s eyes in retribution for the wound that he himself suffered. He will require his daughters to watch, for this will be an important lesson to them, proof that false fathers cannot triumph in the long run and that their real father is a man to be disobeyed only at the risk of severe punishment.

  Five

  1

  Shortly after dawn, Marty woke Charlotte and Emily. “Got to get showered and hit the road, ladies. Lots to do this morning.”

  Emily was fully awake in an instant. She scrambled out from under the covers and stood on the bed in her daffodil-yellow pajamas, which brought her almost to eye-level with him. She demanded a hug and a good-morning kiss. “I had a super dream last night.”

  “Let me guess. You dreamed you were old enough to date Tom Cruise, drive a sports car, smoke cigars, get drunk, and puke your guts out.”

  “Silly,” she said. “I dreamed, for breakfast, you went out to the vending machines and got us Mountain Dew and candy bars.”

  “Sorry, but it wasn’t prophetic.”

  “Daddy, don’t be a writer using big words.”

  “I meant, your dream isn’t going to come true.”

  “Well, I know that,” she said. “You and Mommy would blow a basket if we had candy for breakfast.”

  “Gasket. Not basket.”