Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City

Thirty-nine (#ulink_93bedd7c-4e77-59ca-a827-8b503c3be2a9)

GOING ON NINE O’CLOCK OF AN ORDINARY NIGHT, the city would be in its third act of the day, the streets and restaurants and places of entertainment crowded with millions of people living out their stories. This evening, the storm was a counterweight to the allure of things culinary, musical, theatrical, and otherwise enticing, and most people had flown home as if pulled off the stage by fly lines.

Gwyneth pointed out to me that even on those blocks where vehicles were usually lined up, their drivers buying drugs, the NO PARKING signs were being obeyed. Also gone were the usual front-line salesmen, young expendables hoping to avoid jail long enough to be promoted off the streets, some of whom did business in Rollerblades, the better to skate around a corner and away at the first sign of a cop, or at least to get out of sight long enough to dump incriminating merchandise down a street drain before being pursued and arrested.

Gone, too, from their customary corners, were the prostitutes, who could not look sufficiently erotic to attract johns when they were attired in Gore-Tex storm suits and parkas.

Already, in only the second hour of its reign, the blizzard had decreed at least a temporary interdiction against the more public expressions of vice.

I thought of the Fog that entered into the man in the apartment two floors below Gwyneth’s, and I wondered how many in this world were hosts to those creatures. Judging by the fact that I saw many more Clears than Fogs, I thought that the latter numbered many fewer than the former. I also didn’t think that Clears could enter into anyone. Most people indulged in their vices and clung to their virtues based on their responses to temptation and conflict, not because some Other within them drove their behavior. My guess was that when you descended to a certain depth of depravity, the Fogs could smell you as a hound, catching a murderer’s spoor, could track the criminal through forest, field, and moor.

Having seen Ryan Telford in fevered pursuit of Gwyneth in the library and having made an effort to clean up the wreckage that he left behind in her apartment, I suspected that a Fog had climbed aboard him years earlier and was delighted to be traveling in his company.

Through sheeting snow, we cruised a block of a cross street that once had been lined with five- and six-story apartment buildings, a few of which still served that residential purpose. Others had been converted to low-rent offices for a series of fledgling or declining businesses, reminding me of the buildings in which private detectives had their offices in noir novels, and the ground floors were occupied by gin joints, tattoo parlors, and specialty shops dealing in narrow lines of merchandise like vinyl records, psychedelic-era memorabilia, and taxidermy.

At a narrow brown-brick five-story, where the street level had been converted into a garage, Gwyneth said, “Here we are.”

With a remote control, she disarmed the alarm system and put up the segmented rolling door. As soon as the back end of the Land Rover cleared the threshold, she lowered the big door again, watching in the rearview and side mirrors until it clunked into place, perhaps concerned that someone might slip in behind us.

When I got out of the vehicle, powdery snow slid off the door onto the concrete. The garage was cold, dimly lighted by an automatic ceiling lamp. The only smell was the faint astringency of lingering exhaust fumes.

Gwyneth indicated stairs behind a locked steel door, though she used the elevator, which could be summoned not by a call button, but only by a key.

On the floor of the elevator car, just past the tracks in which the doors rolled, were the words in an unknown alphabet that she had printed on other thresholds. I had asked about them before, and she had avoided an answer. I didn’t ask about them again.

As the car rose from the garage on what I thought must be a hydraulic ram, I faced the floor, to avoid being revealed by the fluorescent lights behind the ceiling grid.

She said, “Not even Teague Hanlon knows about this place. Daddy set up a trust in the Cayman Islands to buy it. The trust pays the taxes and utilities. It’s my emergency bolt-hole.”

“In case of what?”

“In case of anything. Right now, in case of Ryan Telford. If he found one of my other eight apartments, he’ll find them all, because all of those are linked through the domestic trust that owns them.”

“Your father set all this up by the time you were thirteen?”

“I think he had a premonition or something, I mean that he wouldn’t live long. Though he didn’t expect to be murdered—either by honey or otherwise.”

We were going to the fifth floor at the top of the building.

I asked, “What’s on floors two, three, and four?”

“Nothing. You might not have noticed, but the windows on the first four floors have been bricked shut. This is now designated a warehouse, but nothing’s stored on those levels.”

The elevator opened, revealing a vestibule. The formidable steel door between that small space and the rest of the apartment could be unlocked only by entering a four-digit code and the star sign into a keypad.

I said, “Such heavy security.”

“I’m embarrassed to tell you, but Daddy called me a priceless treasure. This is my vault.”

In the living room, she switched on a lamp and then went to set out candles, in the light of which I would be more comfortable. The room was nearly as minimally furnished as the one in the apartment where we had eaten scrambled eggs and brioche, except that this one contained a grand piano.

At the wall of windows, I discovered three Clears on the roofs of the two buildings across the street, a woman and two men, glowing softly. The falling snow, all of it vaguely luminous as it reflected the ambient light of the city, was brighter in their vicinity, but it appeared to pass through them, and it wove no lace mantillas in their hair. One of the men gazed into the sky, and the other two peered down into the street along which we had recently arrived.

The heavens offered nothing but the sea of snow. In the street, on the farther sidewalk, a man bent into the wind, two lengths of his long scarf trailing behind him as if he were a walking weather vane. Also trailing behind him on a leash was a German shepherd, judging by its deep chest, straight back, and sloping hindquarters.

As they passed out of shadow and under a lamppost, the shepherd raised its bowed head and turned its face out of the wind-driven snow to look up as if suddenly aware of me at the window high above, its eyes radiant in the lamplight. I didn’t step back from the glass. The Fogs may take tenancy in bad people and sleep dreaming in certain objects, but I have reason to trust dogs.

In the living room behind me, Gwyneth finished strategically placing candles in ruby-glass cups and turned off the lamp.

She said, “I’ve put a glass of pinot grigio on a coaster on the piano. You do drink wine?”

Turning away from the window, I said, “Father and I would from time to time have a glass or even two.”

“I want to hear all about your father.”

Not ready to open that door yet, I said, “And I want to hear all about you.”

“There’s not that much to me.”

The most that I could clearly see of her in the lambent ruby glow of isolated votives was her right hand as it gripped a wineglass, in the bowl of which glimmered the reflection of a nearby flame.

“For every small thing I’ve learned about you,” I said, “I’m sure there are a thousand things of greater importance.”

“You are a hopeless romantic.”

“For instance, do you play the piano?”

“I play and I compose.”

“Will you play something for me?”

“After dinner. Music is a better brandy than it is an aperitif.”

Her cell phone rang, and she fished it from a jacket pocket.

The ring tone was a bar or two of lovely music, but somehow I knew that the call was bad news.

Forty (#ulink_1f9f8b07-218f-5541-8757-8482f49a4ad6)

SIX YEARS EARLIER, IN ANOTHER NIGHT OF HEAVY snow …

The windows of the performing-arts center and the museum were blind dark, and to the south the towers of St. Saturnius thrust high into a night that had become as Gothic as their finials, crockets, spires, and belfries.

Kneeling beside my father, I looked into his ruined face, that I might always remember how cruel had been his martyrdom and what he had endured to save me. One of his eyes was lost beneath a pool of blood, the socket like a cup and, in that light, the blood as dark as cabernet.

I half expected cathedral bells to ring out across the city in memoriam, a carillon of joyous bells that said Someoneisfreeatlast, and simultaneously a monody of heavy bells, iron bells, as solemn as those rung for heroes and for statesmen, bells that said Heisgonewhowasmuchloved. But the night was empty of all bells. There were no bells for such as us, no funerals, no crowd of mourners around our graves.

The distraught policemen might return at any moment. Although in part motivated by regret, they were likely to repeat with me the violence visited upon my father.