by Dean Koontz
Hit, he might have hobbled or crawled into the scrub or behind a formation of stone. He could be anywhere out there, assessing his wound, reviewing his options.
The gunman would be angry but not scared. He lived for action like this. He was a sociopath. He wouldn’t scare easily.
Definitely, unequivocally, Mitch was afraid of the man hiding in the night. He also feared the one who was lying on the road at the back of the Chrysler.
The guy near the car might be dead, but even if he was crowbait, Mitch was afraid of him anyway. He didn’t want to go near him.
He had to do what he didn’t want to do, because whether the sonofabitch was a carcass or unconscious, he possessed a weapon. Mitch needed a weapon. And quick.
He had discovered that he was capable of violence, at least in self-defense, but he hadn’t been prepared for the rapidity with which events unfolded following the first shot, for the speed with which decisions must be made, for the suddenness with which new challenges could arise.
On the farther side of the road, several blinds of scraggly vegetation offered concealment, as did low batters of weathered rock.
If the light breeze that had been active toward the coast had made its way this far inland, the desert had swallowed it to the last draught. Any movement of the brush would reveal not the hand of Nature but instead his enemy.
As far as he could tell in this murk, all was still.
Acutely aware that his own movement made a mark of him, hampered by the handcuffs, Mitch wriggled on his belly to the man behind the car.
In the gunman’s open and unblinking eyes, the mortician moon had laid coins.
Beside the body rested a familiar shape of steel made sterling in this light. Mitch seized it gratefully, almost squirmed away, but realized that he had found the useless revolver.
Wincing at the faint jingle produced by the short chain between his handcuffs, he patted down the corpse—and pressed his fingers in a wetness. Sickened, shuddering, he wiped his hand on the dead man’s clothes.
As he was about to conclude that this guy had gotten out of the Chrysler without a weapon, he discovered the checked grip of the pistol protruding from under the corpse. He pulled the gun free.
A shot cracked. The dead man twitched, having taken the round meant for Mitch.
He flung himself toward the Chrysler and heard a second shot and heard the whispery whine of passing death and heard a bullet ricochet off the car. He also heard a closer whisper, although he might have imagined two near misses with one round and might in fact have heard nothing after the insectile shriek of the ricochet.
With the car between himself and the shooter, he felt safer, but then almost at once not safe at all.
The gunman could come around the Chrysler at either the front end or the back. He had the advantage of choosing his approach and initiating the action.
Meanwhile, Mitch would be forced to keep an alert watch in both directions. An impossible task.
Already the other might be on the move.
Mitch thrust up from the ground and away from the car. He ran in a crouch, off the road, through the natural hedge of mesquite, which crackled revealingly and at the same time shushed as if warning him to be quiet.
The land sloped down from the road, which was good. If it had sloped up, he would have been visible, his broad back an easy target, the moment the gunman rounded the Chrysler.
He had lucked into firm but sandy soil, instead of shale or loose stones, so he didn’t make a clatter as he ran. The moon mapped his route, and he weaved among clumps of brush instead of thrashing through them, mindful that keeping his balance was more difficult with his hands cuffed in front of him.
At the bottom of the thirty-foot slope, he turned right. Based on the position of the moon, he believed that he was heading almost due west.
Something like a cricket sang. Something stranger clicked and shrilled.
A colony of pampas-grass clumps drew his attention with scores of tall feathery panicles. They glowed white in the moonlight, and reminded him of the plumed tails of proud horses.
From the round clumps sprayed very narrow, sharp-edged, pointed, recurved blades of grass three to five feet in length. They were waist-high on Mitch. When dry, these blades could scratch, prickle like needles, even cut.
Each clump respected the territorial integrity of the other. He was able to pass among them.
In the heart of the colony, he felt safely screened by the white feathery panicles that rose higher than his head. He remained on his feet and, through gaps between the plumes, he peered back the way that he had come.
The ghostly light did not reveal a pursuer.
Mitch shifted his position, gently pushed aside a panicle, and another, surveying the edge of the roadway at the top of the slope. He didn’t see anyone up there.
He did not intend to hide in the pampas for long. He had fled his vulnerable position at the car only to gain a couple of minutes to think.
He wasn’t concerned that the remaining gunman would drive away in the Chrysler. Julian Campbell wasn’t the kind of boss to whom you could report failure with the confidence that you would keep either your job or your head.
Besides, to the guy out there on the hunt, this was sport, and Mitch was the most dangerous game of all. The hunter was motivated by vengeance, by pride, and by the taste for violence that had led him into this kind of work in the first place.
Had he been able to hide until dawn or slip away, Mitch would not have done so. He wasn’t boiling over with macho enthusiasm for a confrontation with this second professional killer, but he understood too well the consequences of avoiding it altogether.
If the remaining gunman lived and reported back to Campbell, Anson would know sooner rather than later that his fratello piccolo, his little brother, was alive and free. Mitch would lose his ease of movement and the advantage of surprise.
Most likely, Campbell didn’t expect a report from his pair of executioners until morning. Perhaps he would not even seek them out until the following afternoon.
Indeed, Campbell might miss the Chrysler Windsor before he missed the men. That depended on which of his machines he most valued.
Mitch needed to be able to catch Anson by surprise, and he needed to be in his brother’s house at noon to take the call from the kidnappers. Holly was on a higher and narrower ledge than ever.
He could not hide, and his enemy would not. For predator and prey—whoever might be which—this had to be a fight to the death.
31
Surrounded by noble white plumes that suggested an encircling protectorate of helmeted knights, Mitch in the pampas grass recalled the hard crack of the two shots that had almost drilled him as he had been taking the pistol from the dead gunman.
If his adversary’s weapon had been equipped with a sound suppressor, as it had been in the library, the reports would not have been so loud. He might not have heard them.
In this desolate place, the gunman had not been concerned about attracting unwanted attention, but he had not removed the silencer just for the satisfaction of a louder bang. He must have had another reason.
Sound suppressors were most likely illegal. They facilitated quiet murder. They were meant for use in close quarters—as in a mansion where the household staff was not reliably corrupt.
Logic led Mitch quickly to conclude that a sound suppressor was useful only in discreet situations because it diminished the accuracy of the weapon.
When you were standing over your captive in a library or when you forced him to kneel before you on a lonely desert road, a pistol with a sound suppressor might serve you well. But at a distance of twenty feet, or thirty, perhaps it reduced the accuracy to such a degree that you were more certain to hit your target by throwing the pistol than by shooting it.
Small stones rattled like tumbling dice.
The sound seemed to have arisen west of him. He turned in that direction. With caution, he parted the pampas panicles.
> Fifty feet away, the gunman crouched like a hunch-back troll. He was waiting for any repercussions of the noise that he had made.
Even when still, the man could not be mistaken for a thrust of rock or for desert flora, because he’d drawn attention to himself in the process of crossing a long barren swath of alkaline soil. That patch of ground appeared not merely reflective but luminous.
If Mitch had not paused here, if he had continued west, he would have encountered the killer in the open, perhaps coming face-to-face as in a Western-movie showdown.
He considered lying in wait, letting his stalker draw closer before firing.
Then instinct suggested that the colony of pampas grass and similar features of the landscape were exactly the places that would most interest the gunman. He expected Mitch to hide; and he would regard the pampas with suspicion.
Mitch hesitated, for the advantage still seemed to be his. He could fire from cover, while the troll stood in the open. He had not yet squeezed off a shot with this pistol, while his adversary had expended two.
A spare magazine. Given that mayhem was the gunman’s business, he probably carried a spare magazine, maybe two.
He would approach the pampas colony cautiously. He would not make an easy target of himself.
When Mitch fired and missed because of distance, angle, distorting light, and lack of experience, the gunman would return fire. Vigorously.
The pampas offered visual cover, not protection. A barrage of eight rounds followed at least by another volley of ten would not be survivable.
Still crouching, the trollish figure took two tentative steps forward. He paused again.
Inspiration came to Mitch, a bold idea that for a moment he considered discarding as reckless but then embraced as his best chance.
He let the panicles ease into their natural positions. He slipped out of the colony opposite from the point at which the gunman approached it, hoping to keep it between them as long as possible.
To a choir of crickets and the more sinister clicking-shrilling of the unknown insect musician, Mitch hurried eastward, along the route that he had taken earlier. He passed the point at which he had descended the embankment; that unscreened ascent would leave him too exposed if he failed to reach the top before the gunman rounded the pampas colony.
About sixty feet farther, he arrived at a wide shallow swale in the otherwise uniform face of the slope. Chaparral thrived in this depression and spilled up over the edges of it.
In need of his cuffed hands to climb, Mitch jammed the pistol under his belt. Previously, moonlight had shown him the way, but now moonshadows obscured and deceived. Always conscious that quiet was as important as swift progress, he insinuated himself upward through the chaparral.
He stirred up a musky scent that might have had a plant source but that suggested he was trespassing in one kind of animal habitat or another. Brush snared, poked, scratched.
He thought of snakes, and then he refused to think of them.
When he reached the top without drawing gunfire, he eeled out of the swale, onto the shoulder of the road. He crawled to the center of the dirt lane before standing.
If he attempted to circle behind where he thought the gunman might be headed, he would find that meanwhile the gunman would have done some anticipating of his own, would have changed course in hope of surprising his quarry even as his quarry schemed to surprise him. Stalking and counterstalking, they could spend a lot of precious time wandering the wilderness, now and then finding each other’s spoor, until one of them made a mistake.
If that was the game, the fatal mistake would be Mitch’s, for he was the less experienced player. As had been true thus far, his hope lay in not fulfilling his enemy’s expectations.
Because Mitch had surprised them with the revolver, the gunman would expect him to have as savage an instinct for self-preservation as any cornered animal. He had proved, after all, not to be paralyzed by fear, self-pity, and self-loathing.
But the gunman might not expect a cornered animal, once having broken free, to return voluntarily to the corner that it had recently escaped.
The vintage Chrysler stood sixty feet west of him, the trunk lid still half raised.
Mitch hurried to the car and paused beside the corpse. Eyes filled with the starry wonder of the heavens, the acne-scarred gunman lay supine.
Those eyes were two collapsed stars, black holes, exerting such gravity that Mitch assumed they would pull him to destruction if he stared at them too long.
In fact, he felt no guilt. In spite of his father, he realized that he believed in meaning and in natural law, but killing in self-defense was no sin by any tao.
Neither was it an occasion for celebration. He felt that he had been robbed of something precious. Call it innocence, but that was only part of what he had lost; with innocence had gone a capacity for a certain kind of tenderness, a heretofore lifelong expectation of an impending, sweet, ineffable joy.
Looking back, Mitch studied the ground for footprints he might have left. In sunshine, the hard-packed dirt might betray him; but he saw no tracks now.
Under the moon’s mesmerizing stare, the desert seemed to be asleep and dreaming, rendered in the silver-and-black palette of most dreams, every shadow as hard as iron, every object as insubstantial as smoke.
When he looked into the trunk, where the moon declined to peer, the darkness suggested the open mouth of some creature without mercy. He could not see the floor of the space, as though it were a magical compartment offering storage for an infinite amount of baggage.
He withdrew the pistol from under his belt.
He lifted the lid higher, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid partway shut again.
After a little experimentation, he figured out that the sound suppressor was threaded to the barrel of the pistol. He unscrewed it and set it aside.
Sooner rather than later, when he failed to find Mitch hiding in pampas grass or in chaparral, or in a niche of weather-sculpted rock, the gunman would come back to watch the Chrysler. He would expect his prey to return to the car in the hope that the keys might be in the ignition.
This professional killer would not be capable of understanding that a good husband could never drive away from his vows, from his wife, from his best hope of love in a world that offered little of it.
If the gunman established a surveillance point behind the car, he might cross the road in the moonlight. He would be cautious and quick, but a clear target nonetheless.
The possibility existed that he would watch the front of the vehicle. But if time passed and nothing happened, he might undertake another general exploration of the area and, on returning, cross Mitch’s sights.
Only seven or eight minutes had passed since the pair had opened the trunk to receive a greeting of gunfire. The surviving man would be patient. But eventually, if his surveillance and his searches were not fruitful, he would consider packing up and getting out of here, regardless of how much he might fear his boss.
At that time, if not before, he would come to the back of the car to deal with the corpse. He would want to load it into the trunk.
Now Mitch half sat, half lay, swaddled in darkness, his head raised just enough to see across the sill of the trunk.
He had killed a man.
He intended to kill another.
The pistol felt heavy in his hand. He smoothed his trembling fingers along its contours, seeking a clickable safety, but he found none.
As he stared at the lonely moon-glazed road crowded by the spectral desert, he understood that what he had lost—innocence, and that fundamentally childlike expectation of impending, ineffable joy—was gradually being replaced by something else, and not by something bad. The hole in him was filling, with what he could not yet say.
From the car trunk he had a limited view of the world, but in that wedge he perceived far more this night than he would have been capable of perceiving previously.
The silvery road receded from him but
also approached, offering him a choice of opposite horizons.
Some stone formations contained chips of mica that sparkled in the moonlight, and where the rock rose in silhouette against the sky, the stars appeared to have salted themselves upon the earth.
Out of the north, southbound, on its feathered sails, a great horned owl, as pale as it was immense, swooped low and silent across the road, then rowed itself higher into the night, much higher and away.
Mitch sensed that what he seemed to be gaining for what he had lost, what so quickly healed the hole in him, was a capacity for awe, a deeper sense of the mystery of all things.
Then he pulled back from the brink of awe, to terror and to grim determination, when the gunman returned with an intention that had not been foreseen.
32
So stealthily had the killer returned that Mitch was unaware of his presence until he heard one of the car doors click open and swing wide with the faintest creak.
The man had approached from the front of the Chrysler. Risking exposure in the brief glow of the car’s interior lights, he got in and pulled the door shut as softly as it could be closed.
If he had gotten behind the wheel, he must intend to leave the scene.
No. He wouldn’t drive away with the trunk lid open. And surely he wouldn’t leave the corpse.
Mitch waited in silence.
The gunman was silent, too.
Slowly the silence became a kind of pressure that Mitch could feel on his skin, on his eardrums, on his unblinking eyes, as if the car were descending into a watery abyss, an ever-increasing weight of ocean bearing down on it.
The gunman must be sitting in the dark, surveying the night, waiting to learn whether the throb of light had drawn attention, whether he had been seen. If his return inspired no response, what would he do next?
The desert remained breathless.
In these circumstances, the car would seem as sensitive to motion as a boat on water. If Mitch moved, the killer would be alerted to his presence.
A minute passed. Another.
Mitch pictured the smooth-faced gunman sitting up there in the car, in the gloom, at least thirty years old, maybe thirty-five, yet with such a remarkably soft smooth face, as if life had not touched him and never would.
He tried to imagine what the man with the smooth face was doing, planning. The mind behind that mask remained inaccessible to Mitch’s imagination. He might have more profitably pondered what a desert lizard believed about God or rain or jimsonweed.
After a long stillness, the gunman shifted positions, and the movement proved to be a revelation. The unnerving intimacy of the sound indicated that the man wasn’t behind the wheel of the Chrysler. He was in the backseat.
He must have been sitting forward, watchful, ever since getting into the car. When at last he leaned back, the upholstery made a sound like leather or vinyl does when stressed, and the seat springs quietly complained.
The backseat of the car formed the back wall of the trunk. He and Mitch were within a couple feet of each other.
They were almost as close to each other as they had been on the walk from the library to the car pavilion.
Lying in the trunk, Mitch thought about that walk.
The gunman made a low sound, either a stifled cough or a groan further muffled by the intervening wall of upholstery.
Perhaps he had been wounded, after all. His condition wasn’t sufficiently serious to persuade him to pack up and leave, although it might be painful enough to discourage a lot of roaming.
Clearly, he settled in the car because he hoped that eventually, in desperation, his quarry would return to it. He figured Mitch would be circumspect in his approach, thoroughly scoping out the immediate surrounding territory, but would not expect death to be waiting for him in the shadows of the backseat.
In this makeshift learning room, Mitch thought about that walk between the library and the car pavilion: the moon like a lily pad floating in the pool, the muzzle of the pistol pressed into his side, the songs of the toads, the lacy branches of the silver sheens, the pistol pressed into his side….
A car of this vintage would not feature a fire wall or a crash panel between the trunk and the passenger compartment. The back of the rear seat might have been finished with a quarter-inch fiberboard panel or even just with cloth.
