Sole Survivor (31 page)

Tossing the photograph aside in disgust, he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing with this.”

Infuriatingly patient, she smiled compassionately and held out a hand to him.

He refused to take it.

Although he was frustrated by what he now perceived as her New Age proclivities, he also felt that somehow, by not being able to lose himself a second time in the phantasmal blue brightness, he had failed Michelle and Chrissie and Nina.

But if his experience had been only a hallucination, induced with chemicals or hypnosis, then it had no significance, and giving himself to the waking dream once again could not bring back those who were irretrievably lost.

A fusillade of confusions ricocheted through his mind.

Rose said, “It’s okay. The imbued photograph is usually enough. But not always.”

“Imbued?”

“It’s okay, Joe. It’s okay. Once in a while there’s someone…someone like you…and then the only thing that convinces is galvanic contact.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The touch.”

“What touch?”

Instead of answering him, Rose picked up the Polaroid snapshot and stared at it as though she could clearly see something that Joe could see not at all. If turmoil touched her heart and mind, she hid it well, for she seemed as tranquil as a country pond in a windless twilight.

Her serenity only inflamed Joe. “Where’s Nina, damn it? Where is my little girl?”

Calmly she returned the photograph to her jacket pocket.

She said, “Joe, suppose that I was one of a group of scientists engaged in a revolutionary series of medical experiments, and then suppose we unexpectedly discovered something that could prove there was some kind of life after death.”

“I might be a hell of a lot harder to convince than you.”

Her softness was an irritating counterpoint to his sharpness: “It’s not as outrageous an idea as you think. For the past couple of decades, discoveries in molecular biology and certain branches of physics have seemed ever more clearly to point toward a
created
universe.”

“You’re dodging my question. Where are you keeping Nina? Why have you let me go on thinking she’s dead?”

Her face remained in an almost eerie repose. Her voice was still soft with a Zen-like sense of peace. “If science gave us a way to perceive the truth of an afterlife, would you really want to see this proof? Most people would say
yes
at once, without thinking how such knowledge would change them forever, change what they have always considered important, what they intend to do with their lives. And then… what if this were a revelation with an unnerving edge? Would you want to see this truth—even if it was as frightening as it was uplifting, as fearsome as it was joyous, as deeply and thoroughly strange as it was enlightening?”

“This is just a whole lot of babble to me, Dr. Tucker, a whole lot of nothing—like healing with crystals and channeling spirits and little gray men kidnapping people in flying saucers.”

“Don’t just look. See.”

Through the red lenses of his defensive anger, Joe perceived her calmness as a tool of manipulation. He got up from his chair, hands fisted at his sides. “What were you bringing to L.A. on that plane, and why did Teknologik and its friends kill three hundred and thirty people to stop you?”

“I’m trying to tell you.”

“Then
tell
me!”

She closed her eyes and folded her small brown hands, as though waiting for this storm in him to pass—but her serenity only fed the winds of his tempest.

“Horton Nellor. Once your boss, once mine. How does he figure in this?” Joe demanded.

She said nothing.

“Why did the Delmanns and Lisa and Nora Vadance and Captain Blane commit suicide? And how can their suicides be murder, like you say? Who’re those men upstairs? What the
hell
is this all about?” He was shaking.
“Where is Nina?”

Rose opened her eyes and regarded him with sudden concern, her tranquillity at last disturbed. “What men upstairs?”

“Two thugs who work for Teknologik or some secret damn police agency, or someone.”

She turned her gaze toward the restaurant. “You’re sure?”

“I recognized them, having dinner.”

Getting quickly to her feet, Rose stared at the low ceiling as though she were in a submarine sinking out of control into an abyss, furiously calculating the enormity of the crushing pressure, waiting for the first signs of failure in the hull.

“If two of them are inside, you can bet others are outside,” Joe said.

“Dear God,” she whispered.

“Mahalia’s trying to figure a way to slip us past them after closing time.”

“She doesn’t understand. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

“She’s having boxes stacked in the receiving room to cover the entrance of the elevator—”

“I don’t care about those men or their damn guns,” Rose said, rounding the end of the table. “If they come down here after us, I can face that, handle that. I don’t care about dying that way, Joe. But they don’t really need to come after us. If they know we’re somewhere in this building right now, they can remote us.”

“What?”

“Remote us,” she said fearfully, heading toward one of the doors that served the deck and the beach.

Following her, exasperated, Joe said, “What does that mean—remote us?”

The door was secured by a pair of thumb-turn dead-bolts. She disengaged the upper one.

He clamped his hand over the lower lock, preventing her from opening it. “Where’s Nina?”

“Get out of the way,” she demanded.

“Where’s Nina?”

“Joe, for God’s sake—”

This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. “Where’s Nina?”

“Later. I promise.”

“Now.”

From upstairs came a loud clatter.

Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.

Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft—Mahalia’s and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.

When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.

Nevertheless, face-to-face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where’s Nina?”

“Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.

“Like hell she is.”

“Please, Joe—”

He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like
hell
she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.”

“If they know we’re in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can
remote
us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”

“Where is Nina?”

The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.

“Where is Nina?”

Overhead, the banquet room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.

At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.

Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.

Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettledrum with each footfall.

The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.

Rose was already at the head of the stairs.

Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.

As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.

The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.

To the east, the sky was a pustulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale-yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.

Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.

She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.

As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.

“Look out,” Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.

Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off—but he was blindsided by a second man, who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn’t, not entirely—he was wheezing but breathing—because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.

He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand—
“Freeze, bitch!”
—after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn’t want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn’t want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage—he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage—and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank’s being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this son of a bitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank’s joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the
sole perpetrator
who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane’s ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard’s head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his kneecap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead—and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.

Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath
was
knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.

Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.

“You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”

Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.

Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. “Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Going to behave?”

“Yes.”

“I’m out of patience here.”

“All right.”

“Son of a bitch,” the stranger said bitterly.

Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.

Where is Rose?

The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a lime-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.