The Bad Place (52 page)

“Frank?” Hal repeated.

As he crossed the room, the sound faded and the draft died. But by the time he reached the doorway, the unmelodic notes returned, and a burst of wind ruffled his hair.

To the left stood the receptionist’s desk, untended at this hour. Directly opposite the desk was the door to the public corridor that served the other companies on this level, and it was closed. The only other door, at the far end of the rectangular lounge, was also closed; it led to a hallway that was interior to the Dakota & Dakota suite, off which were six other offices—including the computer room where Lee was still at work—and a bathroom. The piping and the wind could not have reached him through those closed doors; therefore, the point of origin was clearly the reception lounge.

Stepping to the center of the room, he looked around expectantly.

The flute sounds and turbulence rose a third time.

Hal said, “Frank,” as he became aware, out of the corner of his eye, that a man had arrived near the door to the public hall, to Hal’s right and almost behind him.

But when he turned, he saw that it was not Frank. The traveler was a stranger, but Hal knew him at once. Candy. It could be no one else, for this was the man Bobby had described from the beach at Punaluu, and whose description Hal had received from Clint.

Hal was built low and wide, he kept in good shape, and he could remember no instance in his life when he’d been physically intimidated by another man. Candy was eight inches taller than he, but Hal had handled men taller than that. Candy was clearly a mesomorph, one of those guys destined from birth to have a strong-boned body layered with slabs of muscle, even if he exercised lightly or not at all; and he was clearly no stranger to the discipline and painful rituals of barbells, dumbbells, and slantboards. But Hal had a mesomorphic body type, as well, and was as hard as frozen beef. He was not intimidated by Candy’s height or muscles. What frightened him was the aura of insanity, rage, and violence the man radiated as powerfully as a week-old corpse would radiate the stink of death.

The instant that Frank’s brother hit the room, Hal smelled his mad ferocity as surely as a healthy dog would detect the rabid odor of a sick one, and he acted accordingly. He wasn’t wearing shoes, wasn’t carrying a gun, and wasn’t aware of anything near at hand that might be used as a weapon, so he spun around and ran back toward the bosses’ office, where he knew a loaded Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol was kept in a spring clip on the underside of Julie’s desk as insurance against the unexpected. Until now the gun had never been needed.

Hal was not the martial-arts whiz that his formidable appearance and ethnicity led everyone to believe he was, but he did know some Tai Kwan Do. The problem was, only a fool would resort to
any
form of martial arts as a first defense against a charging bull with a bumblebee up its butt.

He made the doorway before Candy grabbed him by his shirt and tried to pull him off his feet. The shirt tore along the seams, leaving the madman with a handful of cloth.

But Hal was wrenched off balance. He stumbled into the office and collided with Julie’s big chair, which was still standing in the middle of the room with four other chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of it, as Jackie Jaxx had required for Frank’s session of hypnosis. He grabbed at Julie’s chair for support. It was on wheels, which rolled grudgingly on the carpet, though well enough to send it skidding treacherously out from under him.

The psycho crashed into him, ramming him against the chair and the chair against the desk. Leaning into Hal, with massive fists that felt like the iron heads of sledgehammers, Candy delivered a flurry of punches to his midsection.

Hal’s hands were down, leaving him briefly defenseless, but he clasped them, with his thumbs aligned, and rammed them upward, between Candy’s pile-driving arms, catching him in the Adam’s apple. The blow was hard enough to make Candy gag on his own cry of pain, and Hal’s thumbnails gouged the madman’s flesh, skidding all the way up under his chin, tearing the skin as they went.

Choking, unable to draw breath through his bruised and spasming esophagus, Candy staggered backward, both hands to his throat.

Hal pushed away from the chair, against which he had been pinned, but he didn’t go after Candy. Even the blow he’d delivered was the equivalent of a tap with a flyswatter to the snout of that bull with the bee up its butt. An overconfident charge would no doubt end in a swift goring. Instead, hurting from the punches to his gut, with the sour taste of pizza sauce in the back of his throat, he hurried around the desk, hot to get his hands on that 9mm Browning.

The desk was large, and the dimensions of the kneehole were correspondingly spacious. He wasn’t sure where the pistol was clipped, and he didn’t want to bend down to look under because he would have to take his eyes off Candy. He slid his hand from left to right along the underside of the desktop, then reached deeper and slid it back the other way.

Just as he touched the butt of the pistol, he saw Candy thrust out both hands, palms forward, as if the guy knew Hal had found a gun and was saying,
Don’t shoot, I surrender, stop.
But as Hal tugged the Browning free of the metal spring clamp, he discovered that Candy didn’t have surrender in mind: blue light flashed out of the madman’s palms.

The heavy desk abruptly behaved like a wire-rigged, balsa-wood prop in a movie about poltergeists. Even as Hal was raising the gun, the desk slammed into him and carried him backward, into the huge window behind him. The desk was wider than the window, and the ends of it met the wall, which prevented it from sailing straight through the glass.

But Hal was in the center of the window, and the low sill hit him behind the knees, so nothing inhibited his plunge. For an instant the jangling Levolor blinds seemed as if they might restrain him, but that was wishful thinking; he carried them with him, through the glass, and into the night, dropping the Browning without ever having fired it.

He was surprised how long it took to fall six stories, which was not such a terribly great distance, though a deadly one. He had time to marvel at how slowly the lighted office window receded from him, time to think about people he had loved and dreams never fulfilled, time even to notice that the clouds, which had returned at twilight, were shedding light sprinkles of rain. His last thought was about the garden behind his small house in Costa Mesa, where he tended an array of flowers year-round and secretly enjoyed every moment of it: the exquisitely soft texture of a coral-red impatiens petal, and on its edge a single tiny drop of morning dew, glistening—

CANDY SHOVED the heavy desk aside and leaned out of the sixth-floor window. A cool updraft rose along the side of the building and buffeted his face.

The shoeless man lay on his back on a broad concrete walk below, illuminated by the amber backsplash of a landscape spotlight. He was surrounded by broken glass, tangled metal blinds, and a swiftly spreading blot of his own blood.

Coughing, still having a little difficulty drawing deep enough breaths, with one hand pressed to the stinging flesh of his battered throat, Candy was upset by the man’s death. Actually, not by the fact of it but by the timing of it. First, he’d wanted to interrogate him to learn who Bobby and Julie were, and what association they had with the psychic Thomas.

And when Candy had teleported into the reception lounge, the guy had thought he was Frank; he had spoken Frank’s name. The people at Dakota & Dakota were somehow associated with Frank—knew all about his ability to teleport!—and therefore would know where to find the mother-murdering wretch.

Candy supposed the office would hold answers to at least some of his questions, but he was concerned that police, responding to the dead man’s plunge, would necessitate a departure before he turned up all the information he needed. Sirens were the background music to this night’s adventures.

No sirens had arisen yet, however. Maybe he had gotten lucky; maybe no one had seen the man fall. It was unlikely that anyone was at work at any of the other companies in the office building; it was, after all, ten minutes till nine. Perhaps janitors were polishing floors somewhere, or emptying wastebaskets, but they might not have heard enough to warrant investigation.

The man had plummeted to his death with surprisingly little protest. He had not screamed. An instant before impact, the start of a shout had flown from him, but it had been too short to attract notice. The explosion of the glass and the tinny clanging of the blinds had been loud enough, but the action had been over before anyone could have located the source of the sound.

A four-lane street encircled the Fashion Island shopping center and also served the office towers that, like this one, stood on the outer rim. Apparently, however, no cars had been on it when the man had fallen.

Now two appeared to the left, one behind the other. Both passed without slowing. A row of shrubberies, between the sidewalk and the street, prevented motorists from seeing the corpse where it lay. The office-tower ring of the sprawling complex was clearly not an area that attracted pedestrians at night, so the dead man might remain undiscovered until morning.

He looked across the street, at the restaurants and stores that were on this flank of the mall, five or six hundred yards away. A few people on foot, shrunken by distance, moved between the parked cars and the entrances to the businesses. No one appeared to have seen anything—and in fact it would not have been that easy to spot a darkly dressed man plunging past a mostly dark building, aloft and visible for only seconds before gravity finished him.

Candy cleared his throat, wincing in pain, and spat toward the dead man below.

He tasted blood. This time it was his own.

Turning away from the window, he surveyed the office, wondering where he would find the answers he sought. If he could locate Bobby and Julie Dakota, they might be able to explain Thomas’s telepathy and more important, they might be able to deliver Frank into his hands.

AFTER TWICE responding to an alarm from the radar detector and avoiding two speed traps in the west valley, Julie cranked the Toyota back up to eighty-five, and they dusted L.A. off their heels.

A few raindrops spattered the windshield, but the sprinkles did not last. She switched the wipers off moments after turning them on.

“Santa Barbara in maybe an hour,” she said, “as long as a cop with a sense of duty doesn’t come along.”

The back of her neck ached, and she was deeply weary, but she didn’t want to trade places with Bobby; she didn’t have the patience to be a passenger tonight. Her eyes were sore but not heavy; she could not possibly have slept. The events of the day had murdered sleep, and alertness was assured by concern about what might lie ahead, not just on the highway before them but in El Encanto Heights.

Ever since he’d been awakened by what he called the “wordburst,” Bobby had been moody. She could tell he was worried about something, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it yet.

After a while, in an obvious attempt to take his mind off the wordburst and whatever gloomy ruminations it had inspired, he tried to strike up a conversation about something utterly different. He lowered the volume on the stereo, thereby frustrating the intended effect of Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol,” and said, “You ever stop to think, four out of our eleven employees are Asian-Americans?”

She didn’t glance away from the road. “So?”

“So why is that, do you think?”

“Because we hire only first-rate people, and it so happened that four of the first-rate people who wanted to work for us were Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese.”

“That’s part of it.”

“Just part?” she said. “So what’s the other part? You think maybe the wicked Fu Manchu turned a mind-control ray on us from his secret fortress in the Tibetan mountains and made us hire ’em?”

“That’s part of it too,” he said. “But another part of it is—I’m attracted to the Asian personality. Or to what people think of when they think of the Asian personality: intelligence, a high degree of self-discipline, neatness, a strong sense of tradition and order.”