Read Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Page 9


  miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale.

  Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.

  As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its

  eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking

  sun.

  Marty owned five guns.

  He was not a hunter or collector. He didn't shoot skeet or take target

  practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn't

  armed himself out of fear of social collapse though sometimes he saw

  signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but

  he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.

  He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a

  mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a

  was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all

  of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched,

  minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more

  comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.

  In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of

  cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality,

  produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The

  Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.

  Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting

  range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for

  the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach

  them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than

  the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance.

  In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm

  to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal

  and tragic accidents extremely rare.

  He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the

  garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car,

  a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his

  one-o'clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.

  A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols--a

  Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904--were stored in their

  original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the

  garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required.

  He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being

  put away, and loaded it.

  He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove,

  in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not

  happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the

  reasons for his extraordinary precautions--if he could explain.

  The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front

  door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second

  drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the

  bed in the master bedroom.

  Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming

  himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the

  seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with

  weapons was the last thing he should be doing.

  He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on

  instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a

  thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action.

  But this was a good of instinctual response, and he was swept away by

  it.

  Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom,

  worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another

  consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with

  him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him

  at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad

  as in the nightmare. And getting worse.

  God help me, he thought--and was not sure if he was asking for

  protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.

  "I need . .."

  Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.

  Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.

  Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur.

  Scattered towns, all blurs.

  Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.

  Past Victorville.

  Past Apple Valley.

  Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.

  Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Free

  Riverside. Carona.

  Through the Santa Ana Mountains.

  "I need to be . .."

  South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.

  The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.

  Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.

  More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.

  Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.

  Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse

  throbbing in his temples.

  "I need to be someone."

  Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting

  into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.

  Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.

  Into the dark heart of the mystery.

  ". . . need. . . need. . . need. . . need. . . need. .."

  Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.

  Off the freeway.

  Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.

  All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his

  strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.

  Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to

  find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.

  Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on

  pale-yellow stucco walls.

  Here.

  That house.

  To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.

  Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he

  first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Some The

  attraction Inside.

  Waiting.

  A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with

  relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny.

  Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he's

  found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the

  steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.

  He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity,

  however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his

  sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal

  number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to

  breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In

  startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and selfcontained as he

  was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the

  tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique
/>
  Georgian bed.

  By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard,

  stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the

  button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending

  danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind

  panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was

  being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely crazy notion,

  for God's sake, straight out of the National Enquirer, crazy yet

  inescapable because he actually could feel a presence . .

  . a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him,

  probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull

  under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing

  consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it,

  too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing

  tonnage of water, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to

  expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant

  nearly incapacitated him, the hard clatter of the rising garage door was

  ear-splitting, intruding sunlight seared his eyes, and a musty

  odor-ordinarily too faint to be detected exploded like a poisonous cloud

  of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him

  nauseous.

  In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of

  himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the

  internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer

  teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and

  muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn't sting his eyes.

  It was like snapping out of a nightmare except he was awake on both

  sides of the snap.

  Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the

  worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of

  paranoid terror to batter him.

  He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was

  simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous

  phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sundrenched

  air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his

  destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.

  His confidence didn't return, and he couldn't stop shaking, but his

  apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was

  able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly

  disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel?

  He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and

  hazards of all kinds.

  More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.

  He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi.

  But this wasn't New York City, streets as warm with cabs, in southern

  California, the words "taxi service" were, more often than not, an

  oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge's office by taxi, he

  might have missed his appointment.

  He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he

  backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as

  stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his

  bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.

  All the way to the doctor's office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought

  about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak

  flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become

  women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife's side. Although he

  believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited

  with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a

  blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on

  this side of the veil.

  From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of

  the garage.

  As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the

  vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from

  Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the

  steering wheel--though it might not be a person at all but a talisman

  hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his

  understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet

  unclear.

  The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides

  the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.

  He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs

  into the leather jacket.

  From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that

  contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven springsteel

  picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite

  lubricant.

  He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the

  house.

  At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled

  a single name--STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess

  symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water.

  He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and

  now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be

  soothed.

  Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity

  latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the

  garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the

  way to the rear of the house.

  The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees

  and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from

  the prying eyes of neighbors.

  The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which

  thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined.

  Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe

  the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as

  though a hard-fought battle was waged here.

  A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible

  entrances from the patio. Both are locked.

  The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with

  comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a

  wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the

  lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and

  remove the pole.

  He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it

  reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he

  knocks again with the same result.

  From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of

  graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the

  lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.

  He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as

  a "rake." He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the

  necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key

  channel as deep as it will go, then brings i
t up until he feels it press

  against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake

  out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point,

  so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel

  seems to be clear.

  He turns the knob.

  The door opens.

  He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan

  of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must

  not be a silent alarm, either.

  After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps

  across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.

  He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the

  vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future

  begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and

  amnesia-riddled past.

  As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw

  the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He

  senses no danger, only opportunity.

  "I need to be someone," he tells the house, as if it is a living entity

  with the power to grant his wishes.

  The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled