by Dean Koontz
wedged there, and he’d choke on it. Because—and here it was, here was the truth of it, no easy euphemisms this time—after all these years, his own soul was still shackled to a ball of guilt that had been weighing him down since the death of the Lakey child, and maybe if he finally talked about it with Ross Mondale, he might find a key that would release him from that iron ball, those chains.
The radio was at full volume again, and each word exploded like one round of a cannonade.
“. . . blood . . .”
“. . . coming . . .”
“. . . run . . .”
More urgently than she had spoken before, afraid of what might be coming, wanting Melanie to be on her feet and ready to flee, Laura said, “Honey, get up, come on.”
From the radio: “. . . hide . . .”
And: “. . . it . . .”
And: “. . . coming . . .”
The volume grew louder.
“. . . it . . .”
Jarring, earsplitting: “. . . loose . . .”
Earl put his hand on the volume knob.
“. . . it . . .”
At once, Earl jerked his hand off the knob as if he had taken an electric shock. He looked at Laura, horrified. He vigorously wiped his hand on his shirt. It hadn’t been an electric shock that had sizzled through him; instead, he had felt something weird when he touched the knob, something disgusting, repulsive.
The radio said: “. . . death . . .”
Mondale’s hatred was a dark and vast swamp into which he could retreat when the uncomfortable truth about Cindy Lakey rose to haunt him. As the truth drew nearer and pressed upon him more insistently, he withdrew further into his all-encompassing black hatred and hid there amid the snakes and bugs and muck of his psyche.
He continued to glare at Dan, to loom threateningly over the desk, but there was no danger that his hatred would propel him to action. He would not throw a single punch. He didn’t need or want to relieve his hatred by striking out at Dan. Instead, he needed to nurture that hatred, for it helped him to hide from responsibility. It was a veil between him and the truth, and the heavier that veil, the better for him.
That was how Mondale’s mind worked. Dan knew him well, knew how he thought.
But, though Ross might try to hide from it, the truth was that Felix Dunbar had shot Dan—and Mondale had been too scared to return the fire. The truth was that Dunbar then went inside the Lakey house, pistol-whipped Fran Lakey, and shot eight-year-old Cindy Lakey three times while Ross Mondale was God-knew-where, doing God-knew-what. And the truth was that, wounded and bleeding badly, Dan had retrieved his own gun, crawled into the Lakey house, and killed Felix Dunbar before Dunbar could blow off Fran Lakey’s head too. All the while, Ross Mondale was maybe puking in the shrubbery or losing control of his bladder or sprawled flat on the rear lawn and striving hard to look like a natural feature of the landscape. He had come back when it was all over, sweat-damp and slug-white, shaky, reeking of the sour smell of cowardice.
Now, still behind Joseph Scaldone’s desk, Dan said, “You try forcing me off this case or you try keeping me out of the action, and I’ll tell the whole rotten story about the Lakey shootings, the truth, to anyone who’ll listen, and that’ll be the end of your dazzling career.”
With a smugness that would have been infuriating if it hadn’t been so boringly predictable, Mondale said, “If you were going to tell anyone, you’d have told them years ago.”
“That must be a comforting thought,” Dan said, “but it’s wrong. I covered for you then because you were my partner, and I figured everyone has a right to screw up once. But I’ve lived to regret the way I handled it, and if you give me a good excuse, I’d enjoy setting the record straight.”
“It all happened a long time ago,” Mondale said.
“You think no one cares about dereliction of duty just because it happened thirteen years ago?”
“No one’ll believe you. They’ll think it’s sour grapes. I’ve moved up, made friends.”
“Yeah. And they’re the kind of friends who’d sell their mothers for lunch money.”
“You’ve always been a loner. A wiseass. No matter what you think of them, I have people who’ll rally around me.”
“With a lynching rope.”
“Power makes people loyal, Haldane, even if they’d rather not be. Nobody’ll believe any crap you care to throw at me. Not a rotten wiseass like you. Not a chance.”
“Ted Gearvy will believe me,” Dan said, and if he had spoken any more quietly, he would have been inaudible.
Yet, in spite of his quiet delivery, he might as well have swung a hammer at Mondale instead of those five words. The captain looked stricken.
Gearvy, ten years their senior, was a veteran patrolman and had been Mondale’s partner during his probationary rookie year. He had seen Mondale make a few mistakes—although nothing as serious as what happened at the Lakey house later, when Dan had replaced Gearvy as Mondale’s partner. Just disquieting errors of judgment. A too-meager sense of responsibility. Gearvy had thought he detected cowardice in Ross too, but had covered up for him, just as Dan would do in times to come. Gearvy was a big, gruff, easygoing guy, three-quarters Irish, with too much sympathy for rookies. He had not given Mondale high ratings in his rookie year; the Irishman was good natured and sympathetic but not irresponsible. But he didn’t give Mondale really bad ratings, either, because he was too softhearted for that.
A few months after the Lakey incident, when Dan was back at work with a new partner, Ted Gearvy had come around, quietly feeling Dan out, dropping hints, worried that he had made a serious mistake in covering up for Ross. Eventually, they had swapped information and discovered they had both been misguidedly shielding Mondale. They realized his misconduct was not just a rare or even a sometime thing. But by then it had seemed too late to come forth with the truth. In the eyes of the department brass, Gearvy’s and Dan’s failure—even temporary failure—to report Mondale’s dereliction of duty would be nearly as bad as that dereliction itself. Gearvy and Dan would have found themselves standing in the dock beside Mondale. They weren’t prepared to damage or perhaps even destroy their own careers.
Besides, by then Mondale had wheedled as assignment to the Community Relations Division; he was no longer working on the street. Gearvy and Dan figured Ross would do well in community relations and would never return to a regular beat, in which case he would never again be in a position to hold someone else’s life in his hands. It seemed best—and safest—to leave well enough alone.
Neither of them imagined that Mondale would one day be a serious contender for the chief’s office. Maybe they would have taken action if they could have foreseen the future. Their failure to act was the thing that both of them most regretted in all their years of service.
Clearly, Mondale had not known that Gearvy and Dan had compared notes. Their consultation was a nasty shock to him.
The radio boomed:
“IT!”
“COMING!”
“HIDE!”
“COMING!”
The disconnected words exploding from the Sony were impossibly loud, delivered with considerably more volume than the speakers were capable of providing. Thunderous, volcanic. Wall-shaking. The speakers should have disintegrated or burned out as those tremendous bursts of sound smashed through them, but they continued to function. The radio vibrated against the counter.
“LOOSE!”
“COMING!”
Each word crashed through Laura and seemed to pulverize more of her self-control. Panic and fear surged through her.
The kitchen lights pulsed, dimmed. At the same time the green glow that illuminated the radio dial became brighter, unnaturally bright, as if the Sony had acquired both a consciousness and a greedy thirst for electricity, as if it were drawing off all available power for itself. But that didn’t make sense, because regardless of how much power the radio received, the dial was still equipped with a low wattage bulb that couldn�
��t produce this brilliant glow. Yet it did. As the ceiling lights grew dimmer still, dazzling emerald beams sprayed out through the Plexiglas panel on the front of the radio, painting Earl Benton’s face, glinting off the chrome on the stove and refrigerator, imparting to the air a rippling murkiness: The room seemed to be underwater.
“. . . RIPPING . . .”
“. . . APART . . .”
The air was freezing.
“. . . TEARING . . .”
“. . . APART . . .”
Laura didn’t understand that portion of the message—unless it was a threat of physical violence.
The Sony was vibrating faster than the stones in a rattlesnake’s rattle. Soon it would be bouncing across the counter.
“. . . SPLITTING . . . IN . . . TWO . . .”
Dan said, “If I go public, Ted Gearvy probably will too. And maybe there’s even someone else out there who’s seen you at your worst, Ross. Maybe they’ll come forward when we do. Maybe they’ll have a conscience too.”
Judging by the expression on Mondale’s face, there evidently was someone else who could blow his career out of the water. He was no longer smug when he said, “One cop never rats on another, damn it!”
“Nonsense. If one of us is a killer, we don’t protect him.”
“I’m no killer,” Mondale said.
“If one of us is a thief, we don’t protect him.”
“I’ve never stolen a goddamned dime.”
“And if one of us is a coward who wants to be chief, we have to stop protecting him too, before he gets into the front office and plays fast and loose with other men’s lives, the way some cowards do when they get enough power to be above the fight themselves.”
“You take the goddamned cake! You’re the snottiest, most self-satisfied son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You know the code. It’s us against them.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake, Ross. Just a minute ago, you told me it was always every man for himself.”
Irrationally trying to separate his own conduct at the Lakey house from the code of honor that he now so strenuously professed to embrace, Mondale could do no more than repeat himself: “It’s us against them, damn it!”
Dan nodded. “Yes, but when I say ‘us,’ I don’t include you. You and I can’t possibly belong to the same species.”
“You’ll destroy your own career,” Mondale said.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. The Internal Affairs Division is gonna want to know why the hell you covered up this so-called dereliction of duty.”
“Misguided allegiance to another man in uniform.”
“That won’t be good enough.”
“We’ll see.”
“They’ll have your ass for breakfast.”
Dan said, “You’re the one who actively screwed up. My moral irresponsibility was a passive act, passive sin. They might suspend me for that, reprimand me. But they’re not going to throw me off the force because of it.”
“Maybe not. But you’ll never get another promotion.”
Dan shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve gone as far as I really care to. Ambition doesn’t rule me, Ross, the way it does you.”
“But . . . no one’ll trust you after you’ve done a thing like this.”
“Sure they will.”
“No, no. Not after you’ve ratted on another cop.”
“If the cop was anyone but you, that might be true.”
Mondale bristled. “I have friends!”
“You’re well liked by the high brass,” Dan said, “because you always tell them what they want to hear. You know how to manipulate them. But the average cop on the beat thinks you’re a jerk-off.”
“Bullshit. I have friends everywhere. You’ll be frozen out, isolated, shunned.”
“Even if that’s true—and it isn’t—so what? I’m just a loner anyway. Remember? You said so yourself. You said I’m a loner. What do I care if I’m shunned?”
For the first time, more worry than hatred was evident in Ross Mondale’s face.
“You see?” Dan said. He smiled again, more broadly than before. “You don’t have any choice. You have to let me work on this case the way I want to work on it, without any interference, just as long as I want. If you mess with me, I’ll destroy you, so help me God, even if it means problems for me too.”
The overhead lights grew even dimmer. But the radio’s eerie green radiance was now so bright that it hurt Laura’s eyes.
“. . . STOP . . . HELP . . . RUN . . . HIDE . . . HELP . . .”
The Plexiglas that shielded the radio dial suddenly cracked down the middle.
The Sony vibrated so violently that it began to move across the counter.
Laura remembered the nightmarish image that had come to her a few minutes ago: crablike legs sprouting from the plastic casing....
The refrigerator door flew open again all by itself.
With a hiss and squeak of hinges, with scattered thumping sounds, every cupboard door in the room abruptly and simultaneously flung itself wide open. One of them banged against Earl’s legs, and he almost fell.
The radio had stopped emitting selected words from various stations. Now it was simply spewing out a shrill electronic noise at higher than full volume, as if attempting to shatter their flesh and bones as a perfectly sung and sustained high-C could shatter fine crystal.
Ross Mondale sat on a shipping crate and buried his face in his hands, as if weeping.
Dan Haldane was startled and disconcerted. He had been certain that Mondale was incapable of tears.
The captain didn’t sob or wheeze or make any other sounds, and when he looked up again, after half a minute or so, his eyes were perfectly dry. He hadn’t been weeping after all—merely thinking. Desperately thinking.
He had also been putting on a new expression, a conscious act not unlike exchanging one mask for another. The fear and worry and anger were completely gone. Even the hatred was fairly well hidden, although a dark rime of it was still visible in the captain’s eyes, like a film of black ice on a shallow puddle at the edge of winter. Now he was wearing his patented friendly-and-humble face, which was transparently insincere.
“Okay, Dan. Okay. We were friends once, and maybe we can be friends again.”
We were never really friends, Dan thought.
But he said nothing. He was curious to see how conciliatory Ross Mondale would pretend to be.
Mondale said, “At least we can start by trying to work together, and I can help by acknowledging that you’re a damned good detective. You’re methodical, but you’re also intuitive. I shouldn’t try to rein you in, because that’s like refusing to let a natural-born hunting dog follow its own nose. Okay. So you’re on your own in this case. Go wherever you want, see who you want, when you want. Just try to fill me in once in a while. I’d appreciate it. Maybe if we both give a little, both of us bend a little, then we’ll find that we not only can work together but can even be friends again.”
Dan decided that he liked Mondale’s anger and unconcealed hatred better than this smarmy appeasement. The captain’s hatred was the most honest thing about him. Now, the honey in his voice and manner didn’t soothe Dan; in fact, it made his skin crawl.
“But can I ask you one thing?” Mondale said, leaning forward from his perch on the packing crate, looking earnest.
“What’s that?”
“Why this case? Why’re you so passionately committed to it?”
“I just want to do my job.”
“It’s more than that.”
Dan gave nothing.
“Is it the woman?”
“No.”
“She’s very good-looking.”
“It’s not the woman,” Dan said, though Laura McCaffrey’s beauty had not escaped his attention. It did indeed play at least a small role in his determination to stay with the case, though he would never reveal as much to Mond
ale.
“Is it the kid?”
“Maybe,” Dan said.
“You’ve always worked hardest on cases where a child was abused or threatened.”
“Not always.”
“Yes, always,” Mondale said. “Is that because of what happened to your brother and sister?”
The radio vibrated harder, faster. It rattled against the counter with sufficient force to chip the tiles—and abruptly floated into the air. Levitated. It hung up there, swaying, bobbing at the end of its cord as a helium-filled balloon might bobble at the end of a string.
Laura was beyond surprise. She watched, immobilized by awe, no longer even terribly afraid, simply numb with cold and with incredulity.
The electronic whine became more shrill, thin, spiraled up, like the tape-recorded descent of a bomb played in reverse.
Laura looked down at Melanie and saw that the girl had at last begun to rise out of her stupor. She hadn’t opened her eyes yet—in fact, she was now squeezing them shut—but she had raised her small hands to her ears, and her mouth was open too.
Snakes of smoke erupted from the miraculously suspended radio. It exploded.
Laura closed her eyes and ducked her head just as the Sony blew up. Bits of broken plastic rained over her, snapped against her arms, head, hands.
A few large chunks of the radio, still attached to the cord, fell straight to the floor—the invisible hands no longer providing support—and hit the tiles with a clank and clatter. The plug pulled from the wall, and the cord slithered across the counter; it dropped onto the floor with the rest of the shattered Sony, and was still.
When the explosion had come, Melanie had finally responded to the chaos around her. She erupted from her chair, and even before the flying debris had finished falling, she scurried on hands and knees into the corner by the back door. Now she cowered there, head sheltered under her arms, sobbing.
In the silence following the cessation of the radio’s banshee wail, the child’s sobs were especially penetrating. Each, like a soft blow, landed on Laura’s heart, not with physical force but with enormous emotional impact, hammering her alternately toward despair and terror.
When Dan didn’t respond, Mondale repeated the question in a tone of innocent curiosity, but his undertone was taunting and mean. “Do you work harder on those cases involving child abuse because of what happened to your brother and sister?”
“Maybe,” Dan said, wishing he had never told Mondale about those tragedies. But when two young cops share a squad car, they usually spill their guts to each other during the long night patrols. He had spilled too much before he’d realized
