Authors: Dean Koontz
CHAPTER 53
L
IKE AN ARAB SHEIK IN YELLOW KAFFIYEH AND yellow cloak, brought here by the rubbing of a lamp and the magic of a genie, Corky Laputa was a bright whirl in the otherwise dismal house of the three-eyed freak.
Singing “Reunited” and then “Shake Your Groove Thing,” both Peaches and Herb hits, he searched these cluttered chambers, rating them on a crud scale—cruddy, cruddier, cruddiest—as he sought what might remain of the first twenty thousand dollars that he had given Hokenberry a few weeks ago.
The beefy one might have written Corky’s name in an address book, on an index card—even on a wall, considering how much these shabby walls resembled those of the grungiest public restroom. Corky didn’t care about that. He hadn’t given Hokenberry his real name, anyway.
Surely, with a memory about as reliable as that of a chuck steak, Hokenberry had scribbled Corky’s phone number on a piece of paper somewhere in the bungalow. Corky wasn’t worried about that, either. If eventually the police found it, the number would never lead them to him.
Every month or six weeks, Corky bought a new cell phone. It came with a new number and a virgin account in a false name with a phony address. He used this for all his sensitive calls related to his work in the service of chaos.
These phones were provided by a computer hacker nonpareil and anarchist-multimillionaire named Mick Sachatone. Mick sold them for six hundred bucks a pop. He guaranteed their viability for thirty days.
Usually, the phone company didn’t realize that their system had been manipulated and didn’t identify the bad account for two months. Then they shut off service and sought the perpetrator. By that time, Corky had thrown the phone in a Dumpster and had obtained a new one.
His purpose wasn’t to save money but to guarantee his anonymity when engaged in activities that were against the law. Making a minor contribution to the eventual financial ruination of the phone company was a pleasant bonus.
Now Corky located Ned Hokenberry’s trove of cash in a bedroom one degree more civilized than the hibernation cave of a bear. The floor was littered with dirty socks, magazines, empty bags of fried bacon rinds, empty paper buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, and sucked-clean chicken bones. The money had been stuffed in an empty box of jerky under the bed.
Of the twenty thousand, only fourteen remained. The other six thousand evidently had been spent on fast food and pork-fat snacks.
Corky took the money and left the jerky box.
In the dinette alcove off the living room, Hokenberry was still dead and no less ugly than before.
During their three previous encounters, Corky had deduced that Hokenberry was estranged from his family. Unmarried, less than ideal dating material, and not the type to have a network of friends who dropped in unannounced, the former rock-tour beef would probably not be found until the FBI came knocking, subsequent to young master Manheim’s kidnapping.
Nevertheless, to guard against the accidental discovery of the body by a nosy neighbor or some such, Corky took Hokenberry’s keys from a pegboard in the kitchen and locked the front door on his way out of the house. He dropped the keys into the overgrown shrubbery.
Like a growling hellhound loose in the halls of Heaven, thunder barked and grumbled through the low gray sky.
Corky’s heart leaped with delight.
He looked up into the falling rain, in search of lightning, and then remembered that it would have come before the thunder. If there had been lightning, the bolt had not penetrated the clouds or had struck far away in the sprawling city.
The thunder must be an omen.
Corky didn’t believe in any god or any devil. He did not believe in supernatural things of any shape or meaning. He believed only in the power of chaos.
Nonetheless, he chose to believe that the thunder should be taken as an omen, signifying that his trip this coming evening to Palazzo Rospo would unfold as planned and that he would return to his home with the sedated boy.
The universe might be a dumb machine, clattering nowhere but moving fast, with no purpose other than its own eventual cataclysmic destruction. Yet even so, it might from time to time cast off a bolt or a broken gear from which a thoughtful person could foretell its next turn of direction. The thunder was such a broken gear, and based upon the timbre and duration of it, Corky confidently predicted the success of his scheme.
If the biggest movie star in the world, living behind fortified walls and an electronic moat, with full-time security and bodyguards, could not keep his family safe, if the only son of the Face could be plucked from his Bel Air estate and spirited away, even though the actor had been explicitly warned by the delivery of six packages wrapped in black, then no family was safe
anywhere
. Neither the poor nor the rich. Neither the unknown nor the famous. Neither the godless nor the God-fearing.
That message would penetrate the public hour by hour, day by grueling day, as Channing Manheim’s long and excruciating ordeal unfolded.
Corky intended first to destroy the captive boy emotionally, then mentally, and last of all physically. He would videotape this process, which he expected to take weeks. He would edit the tape, make copies on equipment that he had acquired for this project, and periodically pepper selected publications and television-news operations with evidence of Aelfric’s brutalization.
Certain media would be loath to show any of the video or even still frames from it, but others would recognize the competitive advantage of acting without conscience or taste, and with noble words would justify a plunge into the grossly sensational. Thereafter, some of the squeamish would do likewise.
The boy’s terror-stricken face would haunt the nation, and yet another blow in a long series would be struck at the foundations of America’s order and stability. Millions of citizens would be robbed of their already shaky sense of security.
Two streets from Hokenberry’s bungalow, as Corky approached his BMW, a lance of lightning pierced the clouds, thunder cracked, and a boil in the heavens burst. Rain that had drizzled suddenly fell by the ton, weight enough to press half the huff out of the wind.
If thunder alone had been an omen of his triumph, more thunder preceded by lightning was confirmation that he’d properly interpreted that first rolling peal.
The sky blazed again, and growled. Fat leaf-snapping droplets of cold rain roared through the trees and pounded,
pounded
the pavement.
For a sweet half-minute, Corky capered like Gene Kelly, singing “Shake Your Groove Thing,” not caring who might see him.
Then he got in the car and drove away from there, for he had much work to do on this most important day of his life to date.
CHAPTER 54
A
S ETHAN WAITED FOR MUSIC THAT WOULD wither the soul and for the hospital elevator that would bring it, his cell phone rang.
“Where are you?” Hazard Yancy asked.
“Our Lady of Angels. About to leave.”
“You in the garage?”
“On my way down now.”
“Upper or lower level?”
“Upper.”
“What’re you driving?”
“A white Expedition, like yesterday.”
“Wait there. We have to talk.” Hazard hung up.
Ethan rode the elevator alone and without music. Apparently the sound system was malfunctioning. Nothing but hiss-pop-crackle came from the ceiling speaker.
He had descended one floor when he thought that he detected a faint voice behind the static. Quickly it became less faint, though still too weak to convey meaning.
By the time he traveled three floors, he convinced himself that this was the eerie voice to which he had listened for half an hour on the phone the previous night. He had been so intent on understanding what it was saying that he’d fallen into something like a trance.
Drifting down from the ceiling speaker, in a fall of static as soft as snow, came his name. He heard it as if from a great distance but distinctly.
“Ethan…Ethan…”
On a foggy winter day at the beach or harbor, sea gulls in flight, high in muffling mist, sometimes called to one another with two-syllable cries that seemed part alarm and part searching signal issued in mournful hope of a reply, the most forlorn sound in the world. This call of “
Ethan, Ethan,
” as though echoing down to a ravine from a lofty peak, had that same quality of melancholy and urgency.
Listening to gulls, however, he had never imagined that he heard his name in their desolate voices. Nor had he ever thought that their plaints in the fog sounded like Hannah, as the far voice behind the speaker static sounded like her now.
She no longer called his name, but she cried out something not quite decipherable. Her tone was the same that you might use to shout a warning at a man standing on a sidewalk in complete ignorance of a terrible weight of broken cornice falling toward him from atop the building at his back.
Between the lobby and the upper level of the garage, half a floor from his destination, Ethan pressed
STOP
on the control panel. The cab braked, sagging slightly and rebounding on its cables.
Even if this was indeed a voice speaking to him—and to him alone—through the overhead speaker, rather than proof of mental imbalance, he couldn’t allow himself to be hypnotized by it as he had been on the phone.
He thought of fogbound nights and the unwary sailors who heard the singing of the Lorelei. They turned their ships toward her voice, seeking to understand the alluring promise of her words, steered onto her rock, wrecked their vessels, and drowned.
This voice was more likely to be that of the Lorelei than that of his lost Hannah. To desire what is forever beyond reach, to seek it in disregard of reason, is the fateful rock in an endless fog.
Anyway, he hadn’t brought the elevator to a halt in order to puzzle out the words of the might-be warning. Heart knocking, he pressed
STOP
because he’d suddenly been overcome with the conviction that when the doors slid open, the garage would not lie beyond them.
Crazily, he expected thick fog and black water. Or a precipice and a yawning abyss. The voice would be out there, beyond the water, beyond the chasm, and he would have nowhere to go but toward it.
In another elevator, Monday afternoon, ascending toward Dunny’s apartment, he had been stricken by claustrophobia.
Here again, the four walls crowded closer than they had been when he’d first boarded the cab. The ceiling squeezed lower, lower. He was going to be compressed meat in a can.
He put his hands over his ears to block the ghostly voice.
As the air seemed to grow hotter, thicker, Ethan heard himself straining to breathe, gasping on each inhalation, wheezing with each exhalation, and he was reminded of Fric in an asthma attack. At the thought of the boy, his heart hammered harder than ever, and with one hand he reached toward the
START
button on the control panel.
As the walls continued to close upon him, they seemed to press into his mind more crazy ideas. Instead of black water and fog where the hospital garage should be, perhaps he’d step out of the elevator to find himself in that black-and-white apartment with the walls of watchful birds, with Rolf Reynerd alive and drawing a pistol from a bag of potato chips. Shot in the gut again, Ethan would receive no reprieve this time.
He hesitated, didn’t push the button.
Maybe because his labored breathing had recalled Fric in an asthmatic phase, Ethan began to think that among the faint and not quite comprehensible words coming from the overhead speaker was the boy’s name.
“Fric…”
When he held his breath and concentrated, he couldn’t hear it. When he breathed, the name came again. Or did it?
In that other elevator, Monday afternoon, the passing bout of claustrophobia had been a sublimation of another dread that he had not wanted to face: the irrational and yet persistent fear that in Dunny’s apartment he would find his old friend dead but animated, as cold as a corpse but lively.
He suspected that this current claustrophobia and the fear of Reynerd resurrected also masked another anxiety that he was reluctant to face, that he could not quite fish from his subconscious.
Fric? Fric was emotionally vulnerable, and no wonder, but in no physical danger. The skeleton staff at the estate still numbered ten, counting Chef Hachette and the groundskeeper, Mr. Yorn. Estate security was formidable. The real danger to Fric remained that some lunatic might get at Channing Manheim, leaving the boy fatherless.
Ethan pressed
START.
The elevator moved again. In but a moment it stopped at the upper level of the parking garage.
Perhaps he would step out and find himself on a rainy street, in the path of an out-of-control PT Cruiser.
The door slid aside, revealing nothing more impossible than the concrete walls of an underground garage and ranks of vehicles huddled under fluorescent lights.
As he walked to the Expedition, his ragged breathing quickly grew normal. His racing heart not only slowed but also settled out of his throat, into his chest where it belonged.
Behind the wheel of the SUV, he pushed the master switch to engage the power locks on all the doors.
Through the windshield he could see nothing but a concrete wall mottled by water stains and car-exhaust deposits. Here and there, over time, florescences of lime had risen to the surface.
His imagination wanted to search for images in this mottling, as it sometimes hunted big game and collected menageries among the shifting shapes of clouds. Here, he saw only decomposing faces and the tumbled, tangled bodies of the cruelly murdered. He might have been sitting before a ghastly mural of the many victims in the names of whom he, as a homicide detective, had sought justice.
He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and let the tension shiver out of him.
After a while, he considered turning on the radio to pass the time until Hazard arrived. Sheryl Crow, Barenaked Ladies, Chris Isaak, without orchestral strings and timpanis and French horns, might mellow his mood.
He was reluctant to click the switch. He suspected that instead of the usual music, news, and talk shows, he would discover, from one end of the dial to the other, only the voice that might be Hannah’s, futilely trying to speak to him on every frequency.
Knuckles on glass—
rap-rap-rap
—startled him. Wearing a rolled seaman’s cap and a scowl to curdle vinegar, Hazard Yancy peered through the passenger’s window.
Ethan unlocked the doors.
Filling the SUV as fully as he might have filled a bumper car at a carnival, Hazard climbed into the front passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut. Although he had more knees than knee space, he didn’t adjust the power controls to move the seat back. He seemed nervous. “They find Dunny?”
“Who?”
“The hospital.”
“No.”
“Then why’re you here?”
“I talked to the doctor who signed the death certificate, trying to figure it out.”
“You get anywhere?”
“Right back where I started—lookin’ up my own ass.”
“Not a view that’ll draw tourists,” Hazard said. “Sam Kesselman has the flu.”
Ethan needed Kesselman—the detective assigned to the ormolu-lamp murder of Rolf Reynerd’s mother—to read Reynerd’s unfinished screenplay and then to track down the real-life inspiration for the murderous professor depicted in its pages.
“When’s he back on the job?” Ethan asked.
“His wife says he can’t even keep chicken soup on his stomach. Looks like we won’t see him till after Christmas.”
“Anybody partners with him?”
“Right at the start, Glo Williams had a piece of it, but the case went cold fast, and he stepped out.”
“Get him back in?”
“He’s on the rape-and-chop of that eleven-year-old girl that’s all over the news, no time for anything else.”
“Man, the world gets sicker by the week.”
“By the hour. Otherwise, we’d be unemployed. They call Mina Reynerd’s case Vamp and the Lamp ’cause in pictures of her when she was younger, she looked like one of those vamps in the old movies, like Theda Bara or Jean Harlow. The file is strictly on Kesselman’s desk, along with other active cases.”
“So even after Christmas, he might not get to it first thing.”
Hazard stared at the concrete wall beyond the windshield, as if stocking a menagerie of his own. Maybe he saw gazelles and kangaroos. More likely, he could not avoid seeing battered children, strangled women, the bodies of men torn by gunfire.
Memories of innocent victims. His ghost family. Always with him. They were as real to him as the badge he carried, more real than the pension that he might never live to collect.
“After Christmas isn’t soon enough,” Hazard said. “I had this dream.”
Ethan looked at him, waited. Then: “What dream?”
Rolling his Paul Bunyan shoulders, shifting on the seat to gain legroom, looking as uncomfortable as Babe the Blue Ox in a canary cage, Hazard stared at the concrete wall while he said matter-of-factly, “You were with me in Reynerd’s apartment. He shot you in the gut. Next, we’re in an ambulance. You’re not gonna make it. They have these Christmas decorations in the ambulance. Tinsel, little bells. You ask me for a set of the bells. I take one set down, try to give them to you, but you’re gone, you’re dead.”
Ethan turned his attention to the parking-garage wall once more. Among the decomposing corpses that his imagination identified in the stains and subtleties of texture, he expected to see his own face.
“I wake up,” Hazard continued, still focused on the mottled concrete, “there’s someone in the room with me. Standing over the bed. A darker shape in the dark. Some guy. I’m up, I’m at him, but he’s not there. Now he’s across the room. I go after him. He moves. He’s quick. He doesn’t walk, he like
glides
. My piece is in my holster, hanging on a chair. I get it. He keeps moving, quick, too quick, gliding, like he’s playing with me. We circle the room. I get to a light switch, click on a lamp. He’s at my closet doors, his back to me. Mirrored closet doors. He walks into the mirror. Disappears into the mirror.”
“This is still the dream,” Ethan suggested.
“I told you,
I wake up,
there’s someone in the room with me,” Hazard reminded him. “I didn’t get a good look at him, his back to me, just a glimpse in the mirror, but I think it was Dunny Whistler. I open the closet door. He’s not in there. Where is he—in the damn
mirror?
”
“Sometimes in a dream,” Ethan said, “you wake up, but the waking up is just part of the nightmare, and you’re really still dreaming.”
“I search the apartment. Don’t find anybody. Back in the bedroom what I
do
find are these.”
Ethan heard the sweet silvery ringing of small bells.
He looked away from the concrete wall.
Hazard held up an array of three concentrically strung bells like those that had hung in the ambulance.
Their eyes met.
Ethan knew that Hazard had instantly read not the nature of his secrets but certainly the fact that he
had
secrets.
The astonishing things that had happened to Ethan in less than thirty hours, and now also to Hazard, plus the inexplicable case of dead Dunny walking and possibly orchestrating the murder of Reynerd: All this had to be connected somehow to the contents of the six black boxes and the threat against Manheim.
“What aren’t you telling me,” Hazard demanded.
After a long pause, Ethan said, “I have a set of bells, too.”
“You get yours in a dream like I did?”
“I got mine just before I died in an ambulance late yesterday afternoon.”