Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  The varieties of alien infestation are limitless and strange, but one weapon has saved the world more often than any other: fire. Kurt Russell, when he was a member of an Antarctic scientific-research outpost, had been confronted by an extraterrestrial shape-changer of infinite forms and great cunning, perhaps the most frightening and powerful alien ever to attempt colonization of the earth, and fire had been by far the most effective weapon against that formidable enemy.

  He wonders if four incendiary devices are enough. He probably won’t have time to use more of them, anyway.

  If something bursts out of the false father, Paige, or the girls, and if it’s as hostile as the things that had burst out of people in Kurt Russell’s research station, he would no doubt be overwhelmed before he could use more than four gasoline bombs, considering that he must take the time to light each one separately. He wishes he had a flame-thrower.

  2

  Standing by one of the front windows, watching heavy snow filter through the trees and onto the lane that led out to the county route, Marty plucked handfuls of 9mm ammunition out of the boxes of ammo they’d brought from Mission Viejo. He distributed cartridges in the numerous zippered pockets of his red-and-black ski jacket and in the pockets of his jeans as well.

  Paige loaded the magazine of the Mossberg. She’d had less time than Marty to practice with the pistol on the firing range, and she felt more comfortable with the 12-gauge.

  They had eighty shells for the shotgun and approximately two hundred 9mm rounds for the Beretta.

  Marty felt defenseless.

  No amount of weaponry would have made him feel better.

  After hanging up on The Other, he had considered getting out of the cabin, going on the run. But if they had been followed this far so easily, they would be followed anywhere they went. It was better to make a stand in a defendable location than to be accosted on a lonely highway or be taken by surprise in a place more vulnerable than the cabin.

  He almost called the local police to send them to his parents’ house. But The Other would surely be gone before they got there, and the evidence they collected—fingerprints and God knew what else—would only make it appear that he had murdered his own mother and father. The media had already painted him as an unstable character. The scene at the house in Mammoth Lakes would play into the fantasy they were selling. If he were arrested today or tomorrow or next week—or even just detained for a few hours without being booked—Paige and the girls would be left on their own, a situation that he found intolerable.

  They had no choice but to dig in and fight. Which wasn’t a choice so much as a death sentence.

  Side by side on the sofa, Charlotte and Emily were still wearing their jackets and gloves. They held hands, taking strength from each other. Although they were scared, they weren’t crying or demanding reassurance as many kids might have been doing in the same situation. They had always been real troupers, each in her own way.

  Marty was not sure how to counsel his daughters. Usually, like Paige, he was not at a loss for the guidance they needed to get them through the problems of life. Paige joked that they were the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, a phrase that contained as much self-mockery as genuine pride. But he was at a loss for words this time because he tried never to lie to them, did not intend to start lying now, yet dared not share with them his own bleak assessment of their chances.

  “Kids, come here, do something for me,” he said.

  Eager for distraction, they scrambled off the sofa and joined him at the window.

  “Stand here,” he said, “watch the paved road out there. If a car turns into the driveway or even goes by too slow, does anything suspicious, you holler. Got that?”

  They nodded solemnly.

  To Paige, Marty said, “Let’s check all the other windows, make sure they’re locked, and close the drapes over them.”

  If The Other managed to creep up on the cabin without alerting them, Marty didn’t want the bastard to be able to watch them—or shoot at them—through a window.

  Every window he checked was locked.

  In the kitchen, as he covered a window that looked out onto the deep woods behind the cabin, he remembered that his mother had made the drapes on her sewing machine in the spare bedroom of the house in Mammoth Lakes. He had a mental image of her, sitting at the Singer, her foot on the treadle, intently watching the needle as it chattered up and down.

  His chest clogged with pain. He took a deep breath, let it shudder out of him, then again, trying not only to expel the pain but also the memory that engendered it.

  There would be time for grief later, if they survived.

  Right now he had to think only about Paige and the kids. His mother was dead. They were alive. The cold truth: mourning was a luxury.

  He caught up with Paige in the second of the two small bedrooms just as she finished adjusting the draperies. She had switched on a nightstand lamp, so she wouldn’t be in darkness when she closed off the windows, and now she moved to extinguish it.

  “Leave it on,” Marty said. “With the storm, it’ll be a long and early twilight. From outside, he’ll probably be able to tell which rooms are lit, which aren’t. No sense making it easier for him to figure exactly where we are.”

  She was quiet. Staring at the amber cloth of the lampshade. As if their future could be prophesied from the vague patterns in that illuminated fabric.

  At last she looked at him. “How long have we got?”

  “Maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. It’s up to him.”

  “What’s going to happen, Marty?”

  It was his turn to be silent a moment. He didn’t want to lie to her, either.

  When he finally spoke, Marty was surprised to hear what he told her, because it sprang from subconscious depths, was genuine, and indicated greater optimism than he was aware of on a conscious level. “We’re going to kill the fucker.” Optimism or fatal self-delusion.

  She came to him around the foot of the bed, and they held each other. She felt so right in his arms. For a moment, the world didn’t seem crazy any more.

  “We still don’t even know who he is, what he is, where he comes from,” she said.

  “And maybe we’ll never find out. Maybe, even after we kill the son of a bitch, we’ll never know what this was all about.”

  “If we never find out, then we can’t pick up the pieces.”

  “No.”

  She put her head on his shoulder and gently kissed the exposed penumbra of the bruises on his throat. “We can never feel safe.”

  “Not in our old life. But as long as we’re together, the four of us,” he said, “I can leave everything behind.”

  “The house, everything in it, my career, yours—”

  “None of that’s what really matters.”

  “A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?”

  “The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees. There never are in this life.”

  She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Can I really handle it when he shows up here?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I’m just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of children, parent-child relations. I’m not the heroine of an adventure story.”

  “And I’m just a mystery novelist. But we can do it.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “So am I.”

  “But if I’m so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . . something like this?”

  “Imagine you are the heroine of an adventure story. ”

  “If only it were that easy.”

  “In some ways . . . maybe it is,” he said. “You know I’m not much for Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be what we are. You’re a living example, after what you went through as a kid.”

  She closed her eyes. “Somehow, it’s easier to imagine myself as a
family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.”

  “When we first met,” he said, “you couldn’t imagine yourself as a wife and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again.”

  She opened her eyes. “You taught me how.”

  “I didn’t teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught yourself.”

  She said, “So life’s a form of fiction, huh?”

  “Every life’s a story. We make it up as we go along.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to be Kathleen Turner.”

  “Even better.”

  “What?”

  “Sigourney Weaver.”

  She smiled. “Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like she got to use when she played Ripley.”

  “Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post.”

  In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods, including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters still hadn’t taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a normal task that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.

  He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows, but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle or on foot.

  Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous and time-consuming.

  Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored headlong action and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a furious—rather than sneak—attack.

  That trait might be the enemy’s fatal weakness. It was a hope worth nurturing, anyway.

  Snow fell. The shadows deepened.

  3

  From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still the call went unanswered.

  “Something’s happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left the van.”

  “Maybe something’s wrong with their phone,” Oslett suggested.

  “It’s ringing.”

  “Maybe not on their end.”

  Spicer tried again with no different result. “Come on,” he said, grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.

  “You’re not going over there?” Oslett said. “Aren’t you still worried about blowing their cover?”

  “It’s already been blown. Something’s wrong.”

  Clocker had pulled on his tweed coat over his clashing orange cashmere sweater. He didn’t bother to put on his hat because he had never bothered to take it off. Tucking the Star Trek paperback in a pocket, he also headed for the door.

  Following them with the black briefcase, Oslett said, “But what could’ve gone wrong? Everything was moving along so smoothly again.”

  Already, the storm had put down half an inch of snow. The flakes were fine and comparatively dry now, and the streets white. Evergreen boughs had begun to acquire Christmasy trimmings.

  Spicer drove the Explorer, and in a few minutes they reached the street where Stillwater’s parents lived. He pointed out the house when they were still half a block from it.

  Across the street from the Stillwater place, two vehicles were parked at the curb. Oslett pegged the red recreational van as the surveillance post because of the mirrored side windows in its rear section.

  “What’s that florist’s van doing here?” Spicer wondered.

  “Delivering flowers,” Oslett guessed.

  “Fat chance.”

  Spicer pulled past the van and parked the Explorer in front of it.

  “Is this really smart?” Oslett wondered.

  Using the cellular phone, Spicer called the surveillance team one more time. They didn’t answer.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Spicer said as he opened his door and got out into the snow.

  The three of them walked to the back of the red van.

  On the blacktop between that vehicle and the delivery van, a large floral arrangement lay in ruins. The ceramic container was shattered. The stems of the flowers and ferns were still embedded in the spongy green material that florists used to fix arrangements, so the mild wind had not blown any of them away, though they looked as if they had been stepped on more than once. The colors of some flowers were masked by snow, which meant they hadn’t been disturbed in the past thirty to forty-five minutes.

  The ruined blossoms and frost-paled ferns had a curious beauty. Snap a photo, hang it in an art gallery, title it something like “Romance” or “Loss,” and people would probably stand before it for long minutes, musing.

  As Spicer rapped on the back door of the surveillance vehicle, Clocker said, “I’ll check the delivery van.”

  No one answered the knock, so Spicer boldly opened the door and climbed inside.

  As he followed, Oslett heard Spicer say softly, “Oh, shit.”

  The interior of the van was dark. Little light penetrated the two-way mirrors that served as windows. Only the scopes and screens of the electronic equipment illuminated the space.

  Oslett took off his sunglasses, saw the dead men, and pulled the rear door shut.

  Spicer had taken off his sunglasses too. His eyes were an odd, baleful yellow. Or maybe that was just a color they reflected from the scopes and gauges.

  “Alfie must’ve been coming to the Stillwater place, spotted the van, recognized it for what it was,” Spicer said. “Before he went over there, he stopped here, took care of business, so he wouldn’t be interrupted across the street.”

  The electronic gear operated off banks of solar batteries wired to flat solar cells on the roof. When surveillance was conducted at night, the batteries could be charged in the conventional fashion, if necessary, by starting the van’s engine for short periods. Even on overcast days, however, the cells collected enough sunlight to keep the system operative.

  Without the engine running, the interior temperature of the van was nonetheless comfortable, if slightly cool. The vehicle was unusually well insulated, and the solar cells also operated a small heater.

  Stepping over the corpse on the floor, looking through one of the view windows, Oslett said, “If Alfie was drawn to that house, it had to be because Martin Stillwater was already there.”

  “I guess.”

  “Yet this team never saw him go in or out.”

  “Evidently not,” Spicer agreed.

  “Wouldn’t they have let us know if they’d seen Stillwater, his wife, or kids?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So . . . is he over there now? Maybe they’re all over there, the whole family and Alfie.”

  Peering through the other window, Spicer added, “And maybe not. Somebody left there not long ago. See the tracks in the driveway?”

  A vehicle with wide tires had backed out of the garage that was attached to the white clapboard house. It had reversed to the left as it entered the street, then had shifted into forward and had driven away to the right. The snow had barely begun to fill in the multiple arcs of the tracks.

  Clocker opened the rear door, startling them. He climbed inside and pulled the door shut after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe on the floor or the two murdered operatives. “Looks like Alfie must’ve stolen the florist’s van for c
over. The deliveryman’s in the back with the flowers, dead as the moon.”

  In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably. Oslett felt claustrophobic.

  Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he’d died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.

  Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, “Is it possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?”

  Spicer said, “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  As Spicer’s fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.

  Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker’s gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows. He watched the house across the street.

  Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through foot-thick glass at an alien world.

  A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along the sidewalk; with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.

  “Got it,” Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when Oslett had been staring out the window.

  What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced, and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty minutes after Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.