by Dean Koontz
She almost ran a red light, braked in time. The last thing she needed was to draw the attention of a cop.
Pogo closed his eyes.
She watched him.
She said, “Pogo?”
“Hmmm?”
“Don’t you go anywhere.”
“Only where you take me,” he promised.
She didn’t want to upset him by crying. She wasn’t a girl who cried often or easily. She cried quietly all the way to the house on the harbor.
* * *
She parked the Honda in the garage and helped Pogo into the kitchen.
He sat on the hardwood floor with his back against one of two Sub-Zero refrigerators, worried about getting blood on the furniture. “Not good for my reputation as a house-sitter.”
When she gave him a bottle of water from the second fridge, he drank greedily. He seemed to have a little trouble swallowing.
Makani hurriedly collected blankets, fashioned a makeshift bed on the kitchen floor. Pogo hissed in pain as he stretched out there.
She elevated his feet with pillows, in case he was in shock. Shock could kill.
Bob wanted to lie down beside his uncle Pogo, and Makani said no, but Pogo said yes. Bob cuddled up against him, nobly resisting what would have been an ordinary doggie urge to lick the blood.
“Where’s the damn doctor?” she wondered.
“He’s coming.”
“What can I get you?”
“I’m okay.”
She felt useless. Worse, she felt responsible. Her gift. Her curse. And all of it for what? Neither twin worth saving.
When she asked him if he was all right, he didn’t answer. He was unconscious. Breathing shallowly.
His skin was cool, clammy. She took his pulse. It was rapid.
Doorbell.
* * *
The doctor wore tennis shoes without socks, khaki shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt that blazed with a colorful pattern of parrots and palm leaves. He carried a black medical bag and a small ice chest.
The ice chest contained two units of blood. Apparently, on the phone, Pogo had told Simon his blood type.
The doctor wanted to add padding to the kitchen table and use it for his surgery. Makani quickly gathered up more blankets, and they carefully transferred Pogo from the floor.
She said, “He’s unconscious. Why’s he unconscious?”
“Just the body conserving its resources.”
The physician was clean shaven, well barbered, with a broad kind face. He seemed competent. She should have believed him, but she didn’t.
The first time she asked his name, he only smiled at her. The second time she asked, he said, “Just call me Harry,” though she suspected even that name was a lie.
After he had taken the patient’s vital signs, inspected the wound and addressed it, sutured both the entry wound and the exit wound, and administered two units of blood, he decided they could risk moving Pogo upstairs in the elevator, to a second-floor bedroom.
Makani hadn’t known that the house contained an elevator, but Pogo had informed Simon of its existence.
They found a wheeled office chair in a downstairs study, sat him in it, and rolled him into the elevator, still unconscious and in fact now sedated.
“This is so wrong,” Makani said. “This is crazy, he isn’t getting the right care.”
“I swear to you,” Dr. Harry said, “this is way better than a government-run hospital.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“He’s young, he’s strong, we’ll see.”
Throughout the ordeal, she tried not to touch the doctor. Twice, however, she brushed one of his hands with one of hers. She read him: the boating accident when he’d been drinking and should not have been at the helm, his young wife and child drowned, the little boy lost forever to the ocean, the subsequent descent into even heavier drinking, and the eventual sobriety.
She saw, too, that the texture of his guilt was as coarse and bristled as ever it had been; the years had not softened it. Nor had time diminished his shame. He recognized that continued suffering offered him the best chance of redemption, and he made the difficult choice to ignore the move-on-and-love-yourself advice of current pop psychology. He found a kind of happiness in taking responsibility for what he’d done. A peace settled upon him when he acknowledged that his selfishness and recklessness had destroyed two lives and that the only right consequence was that the prospects for his own life be shaped and constricted by his thoughtless actions; it was the peace of genuine contrition.
Following the second unintended touch, the physician seemed to recognize some difference in the way Makani regarded him. He met her eyes with a new intensity and cocked his head and said, “Something you want to say, something you think I’m missing? Please be frank. You can’t offend me.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier. You’re doing right by him. I know that. I see that now.”
For all the terror and grief her paranormal talent brought into her life, it also sometimes revealed to her whom she could trust.
“It’s just that…Pogo means so much to me. Every day, I’m afraid of losing him. Maybe that sounds crazy. But every day. That’s just the way I feel. Every day. And now this.”
“It’s not crazy,” he assured her. “It’s the sanest thing of all to live your life with the understanding that every hour may be the final hour.”
* * *
The harbor raced with color under a red sunset so bright that it seemed even saltwater should burst into flame from its fiery reflection. From a window in Pogo’s bedroom, Makani watched as the scene slowly darkled, until no sunshine remained in it and the only lights glimmering on the black water were from the houses around the harbor, from the docks that served the houses, and from the moored boats that wallowed gently in the receding tide.
Pogo woke shortly past eight o’clock. He knew who he was. He knew where he was. He said he loved her.
Dr. Harry was a live-in physician for twenty-four hours, and thereafter came to visit once a day.
* * *
Some Decembers, the weather sprites overpowered the weather gremlins, and Southern California received mid-year warmth at year’s end, the gold-crowned sun ruling over this earthly paradise that, in spite of its imperfections, was perfect enough. If at least a mild El Niño effect brought warm water from South America all the way to this blessed coast, surfers could forgo the insulating neoprene wetsuits common to the season and hit the beach dressed as if the approaching holiday were July Fourth instead of Christmas.
Makani and Pogo paddled out to the lineup, straddled their boards, and made like a pair of buoys, a couple of dismo ducks, forgoing their turns while trying to stay out of the way of others more eager to thrash the waves or be thrashed by them. They didn’t talk much because much had already been said.
Obeying doctor’s orders for two and a half months, he refrained from surfing, which brought him as close to despondency as he was likely to get. She hadn’t worried about him. She knew what he was made of, that he bounced back like Silly Putty. Two weeks earlier, he had returned to the sea, though not immediately to rip and slash it as he’d once done. He tested his shoulder, his balance, his skills, slowly working his way back by taking easy rides, then inside zippers, then somewhat more challenging waves.
Today, the surf had been solid normal when they paddled out, five-footers with just enough power to keep the veterans in the fight. But as they soaked in the lineup, sneaker sets began to insert from time to time, and then grew and became more frequent, until it seemed as if the sea must be aware that this was The Day for Pogo, the day when he hoped to prove that he was home and was once more totally who he had been.
As he drew his legs out of the water and knelt on his board, he said, “O’Brien, do you believe in evil?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“The important kind.”
“How could I not believe?”
“You
can’t just walk away from it.”
She thought of Ursula and Undine. “Maybe sometimes walking away is best.”
“Maybe never. You know, even firemen don’t always have someone to save.”
“They like it better when they do.”
“But if no one’s in the building, they still have to put out the fire.”
Big Mama rolled one of her best under them, and the next in the set seemed to be swelling even bigger as it darkened behind them.
“Stop jawing me about firemen,” Makani said. “You’re at the head of the lineup, dude. Go to your wipeout like a man.”
He was grinning as he rose and caught the wave and found the lip and took the drop, for the moment disappearing from view.
The sea was deep, and the sky was deeper than the sea, and the day was The Day, fully bitchin’, sweet, radical, as totally live as any day had ever been.
Author’s Note
My novel Ashley Bell will be published on December 8, 2015, and everyone in my publishing life thinks it is the best book I’ve ever written, which is not always their opinion, because they are an honest bunch and don’t lie to me just to please me, though I really, really wish they would. The two associated novellas—“Last Light” and “Final Hour”—are set in Newport Beach, as is Ashley Bell, but Makani and her dog, Bob, are not in the novel. Pogo has a key supporting role in Ashley Bell, though the story he and the main characters inhabit is far more epic than in these novellas and is filled with so many twists and turns, I needed 560 pages to get it right. I’m intrigued by Makani and Pogo’s relationship, however, and will write at least another novella about them. And about Bob, of course. Meanwhile, may you have in your life much ‘ano ‘i and ‘aka ‘aka, a hui hou aku—“much love and laughter, until we meet again.” And don’t be a goob.
BY DEAN KOONTZ
The City • Innocence • 77 Shadow Street • What the Night Knows • Breathless • Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed
ODD THOMAS
Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd • Odd Hours • Odd Interlude • Odd Apocalypse • Deeply Odd • Saint Odd
FRANKENSTEIN
Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive • Lost Souls • The Dead Town
A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie
About the Author
DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.
www.deankoontz.com
Facebook.com/DeanKoontzOfficial
@deankoontz
Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:
Dean Koontz
P.O. Box 9529
Newport Beach, California 92658
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