The Good Guy (12 page)

Twenty-Three

K
rait in the quick of things felt godlike, with
neither doubt nor reservations. He knew what he needed to do, and he knew what he liked, and moments such as this were the fulfillment of both need and desire.

After stepping out of the stairwell and easing the door shut behind him, he drew the Glock 18 from his new shoulder rig. He held it down at his side as he moved into the corridor.

Odd-numbered doors lay to his right, the even-numbered to his left, along the west wall. The fifth door from the stairwell was 308.

According to hotel records, Carrier and the woman had registered three and a half hours ago. Unlike Krait, they had not slept until four o’clock Monday afternoon in anticipation of what Monday night would bring. Weary, they would want to believe that they were safe for the time being.

Krait thrived on the fact that humankind could not bear much reality. When they retreated into wishful thinking, he approached, all but invisible because he was the reality that they refused to see.

On his way upstairs, he had stopped at the second floor to ascertain the nature of the door locks. The hotel had replaced the original hardware with electronic card-key locks.

His sweet little lock-release gun would be of no use to him in this instance. He had come prepared for this contingency.

In the stairwell again, he had paused to remove from his wallet what appeared to be a department-store credit card. In fact it was an analytic scanner that could read and repeat the current release code in any electronic lock.

Unlike the LockAid, this item was not for sale even to law-enforcement agencies. No one could buy it. You were presented with it, as a grace.

Now, at the door to 308, Krait at once inserted the card into the key slot. He did not remove it when the indicator light turned from red to green; leaving it in place would freeze the lock open.

The LockAid made little noise when used. The analytic scanner made none whatsoever.

A selector switch on the slide of the pistol allowed it to perform either as a semi-automatic or a full-automatic weapon. Although Krait usually preferred simple tactics and basic weapons, he set the Glock on full-auto fire.

With a two-hand grip on the pistol, assuming that the security chain would be in place, he stepped back and kicked the door as hard as he could, as high as he could.

The retainer plate tore out of the jamb, the door flew open, and Krait went into the room fast, half crouching, arms out straight, a little pressure on the trigger, sweeping the muzzle left, sweeping right, stepping out of the way of the door as it crashed against the wall-mounted stop and rebounded.

Two beds. One lightly mussed. One with the spread turned back. A lamp on a nightstand.

No sign of the Mr. and Mrs. Maybe they had been awake, heard the squeak of the stairwell door.

Only two refuges. The balcony. The bathroom.

Bathroom door half open. Dark in there.

Leaning well into the Glock, compensating for the downward-bearing forward weight of the sound suppressor, he squeezed off a short burst through the dark gap, shattering a mirror, probably some ceramic tiles, peppering the bathroom with ricochets and shrapnel, one round clipping the door.

Recoil mild. As if the silencer acted as a recoil compensator. Not enough sound to wake a sleeper, if there had been one. Zero muzzle flash.

No screams from the bathroom. No return fire. Nobody in there. Leave it for later.

Draperies shrouding the sliders. Carrier had a gun. So clear the balcony before sweeping the fabric back from the glass.

Regretting the mess he was about to make, Krait squeezed off another short burst, draperies leaped, glass doors dissolved, and something made a
pock-twang
sound. He pulled the draperies aside, stepped outside. A fractured glaze of tempered glass crunched underfoot.

Alone on the balcony, in a wind so fresh off the sea that it smelled faintly of salt, he stepped to the outer railing, looked down. Some rocks directly below, then the beach, the breaking surf. All of it fifty feet down. Too far for them to have jumped without injury.

He did not question the reliability of the information that he had received from his sources. Never over the years had he been given the slightest reason to doubt them.

Seeking another explanation for the disappearance of his quarry, Krait glanced left and right along the back of the hotel. Balconies. Nothing but identical railed balconies. Deserted balconies.

Deserted
now
.

Less than three feet separated this balcony from the next. If you were not afraid of heights, you could cross quickly from one balcony to another.

With the crunch of glass marking each step, Krait felt as if the sliding door had been a mirror, as if he had crossed into that place where only Alice had gone before.

In Room 308 once more, he registered an important detail that had eluded him previously: the absence of any personal belongings.

When he pushed open the door to the bathroom, he found no dead or wounded. Some towels had been used; but no toiletries stood on the counter surrounding the sink.

Carrier and the woman had not left when the stairwell door had squeaked. Much earlier in the night, they had identified a vacant room and had moved into it without informing the management.

Krait returned to the third-floor corridor, snatching his analytic scanner from the key-card slot and pocketing it.

The kicking-in of the door and the shattering of the glass had awakened guests. Two men—one in his underwear, the other in pajamas—had ventured into the hallway.

Smiling, Krait pointed the Glock at them.

They retreated into their rooms, closed their doors.

By now somebody would have called the front desk to report a disturbance. And one or both of the men whom he had threatened would be dialing 911.

Krait’s heartbeat was barely elevated above his usual sixty-four-per-minute resting rate. He appeared calm, and he was calm.

Which had come first in his life, the appearance of calm or the fact, would be no easier to deduce than whether the chicken preceded the egg. The origins of his personality were lost in time, and he had no interest in them.

Like most of California, this town was inadequately policed. Unless a patrol car happened to be in the immediate area, response time would be at least five minutes.

Anyway, there would be only two officers, four at most. With a structure this large as his game board, he could cat-and-mouse his way to the car that he had parked along the highway.

If the cops showed up early, Krait would kill his way out of the hotel. He had no problem with that.

Along the west side of the corridor were eleven rooms. Of the six to the north of 308,
DO NOT DISTURB
hangers were displayed at four.

He had no reason to believe that the two rooms without signs were vacant or that his quarry had hidden in one of them. Carrier was just as likely to have put out the privacy requests or to have taken them off doors where other guests had earlier hung them, just to further confuse Krait.

To the south of 308 were four rooms, and in front of the last, Room 300, the
DO NOT DISTURB
hanger lay on the floor. Krait stared down at it. Then he considered the closed door.

He was all but certain that the sign had not been on the floor when he had first arrived here a few minutes ago. Perhaps someone had brushed against it when making a hurried exit.

Room 300 lay only three steps from the south-stairwell door.

Sensing that the clever couple had already descended two flights and had fled the building, choosing not to delay long enough to card open Room 300 and have a quick look inside, Krait departed the third floor.

They would be racing for the Explorer in the parking structure. Maybe they had already reached it.

Krait did not plunge down the steps, for panic was not in his nature, but he did descend with measured haste.

Twenty-Four

S
econds after the door to Room 308 crashed
open, Tim and Linda were out of 300, down the stairs, gone.

Wind scattered red hibiscus at their feet, their footsteps echoed off the low ceiling of the cavernous garage, the Explorer flashed its lights and chirruped when Tim used the remote key, he climbed into the driver’s seat, and she accepted the pistol from him as she boarded with her carryall.

Room 300 had indeed been vacant when, earlier in the night, he removed a sliding door and entered from the balcony. He had let Linda into their new quarters through the front door and had hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the knob.

Thereafter, he had slept for two hours, although sleep had been a dark road crowded with rough dreams.

Now he started the engine, switched on the headlights, drove out of the parking structure, and went south on the Pacific Coast Highway. At the intersection, he turned left, heading inland.

“All right,” she said. “Now I’m freaked.”

“You don’t seem that freaked.”

Turning to look through the rear window, she said, “Trust me. I’m Richard Dreyfuss on the back of the boat and the shark just jumped in my face. How did that guy find us?”

“I’m thinking it was the credit card.”

“Just because he’s a cop, he wouldn’t have people at MasterCard by the
cojones
.”

“It was a Visa card.” Tim turned right on a residential street. “He’s way more than a cop.”

“No matter who you are, don’t you have to get a court order for that kind of tracking, a warrant, something?”

He said, “Don’t thirteen-year-old hackers go into just about any system they want, and nobody gives ’em permission?”

“So this is some supercop with a nerdy nephew who can hack Visa for him twenty-four/seven?”

“Maybe somewhere there’s a building full of guys who once were nerdy nephews, used to hack into TV-network computers just to leave obscene messages for Nikki Cox. So they’re fifteen years older, and they’ve gone all the way over to the dark side.”

“A building full of them?” she asked. “Who’re you saying we’re up against?”

“I’m not saying. I don’t know.”

Hill folded into hill, and he ascended not directly but in a serpentine course, weaving through streets of houses that, in spite of their architectural variety, all seemed to be characterized by a quiet dread.

She said, “Listen, I already have you figured as a guy who knows things.”

“Not things like this. I’m out of my league.”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“So far I’ve been a little lucky.”

“Is that what you call it?”

Wind-harried pepper trees overhung the lampposts, and on the pavement, branch patterns twitched like flayed nerves.

She said, “Who is Nikki Cox?”

“She was in this TV show,
Unhappily Ever After
.”

“Good show?”

“Mean-spirited, mostly mediocre, with a talking, floppy-eared, stuffed-toy rabbit.”

“Another one of those.”

“I was a teenager, hormones squirting out my ears. I watched every episode with my tongue hanging out.”

“That must have been one sexy toy rabbit.”

In every block, in two or three houses, lights glowed softly behind curtains. Back in the days when Nikki Cox had been on the air with the smartass talking toy rabbit, at this late hour you might have seen fewer than a third as many lamplit windows as there were now. This was the decade of insomnia—or perhaps the century.

“Where are we going?” Linda asked.

“I haven’t worked it out yet.”

“Wherever we go, let’s agree to one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Not one more word about this damn Nikki Cox.”

“I just remembered the rabbit’s name. Mr. Floppy.”

“Him you can talk about.”

“I think for now we’re safer staying on the move. No more hotels.”

“I’m glad you didn’t fall to your death from a balcony.”

“Me, too. We’ll keep rolling for a while, try to think this through.”

“I thought you were going to fall. If you’d fallen, it would have been my fault.”

“How’s that figure?”

“You wouldn’t be here if somebody didn’t want me dead.”

“So just stop doing stuff that makes people want you dead.”

“I’ll work on that.”

Block after block, street after street, the conviction grew in Tim that their current safety was a brittle wire over an abyss, strung between rusting eyehooks, unraveling at one end or the other.

Repeatedly he checked the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, expecting sudden pursuit.

Linda said, “I have this friend, Teresa, she lives in Dana Point, but she’s out of town for a week. I know where she hides her spare key.”

Like agitated rats, fat wind-tumbled magnolia leaves traveled the gutter.

“Tim? Why couldn’t we hole up at Teresa’s place?”

Although the speedometer showed only thirty miles per hour, intuition told him that he was going too fast, that he would drive into trouble before he recognized it. He let their speed fall to twenty, to fifteen.

“What is it?” she asked, surveying the night.

“Don’t you feel it?”

“I feel you feeling it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Stone,” he said.

“Stone?”

“Think of a very high cliff.”

These north-south streets were arranged like the teeth of a comb, all ending in an east-west spine. Once more he turned left, onto the spine—and found that it ended at its intersection with the last north-south street.

“Cliff?” she reminded him.

“A cliff so high you can’t see the top, it’s lost in mist up there. And not just high, but it overhangs like a wave. We live at the bottom, in its shadow.”

He turned left, onto the last street in the neighborhood. Houses on both sides. The headlights swept over a few cars parked at the curb.

“Sometimes big stones come loose from way up in the overhang of the cliff,” he said, “come loose without making a sound.”

He reduced their speed to ten miles per hour.

“You can’t hear it coming, one of these sudden silent stones, but the falling weight…maybe it compresses the air under it as it comes, and that’s what you feel.”

Each of these streets had been three blocks long, with houses on both sides. In the second and third blocks of this final street, however, houses stood only to the left.

On the right lay a public park with athletic fields, all dark at this hour, and deep.

A silent falling stone, a soundless tsunami outracing the noise that it made, the faulted earth underfoot secretly straining toward a sudden breach…

His once-acute sensitivity to threat had returned in recent hours. Now it sharpened to a needle point.

The woolen sky and steadily rising wind should have raised an expectation of a storm. But when blades of lightning sheared the clouds, they startled Tim, and he almost tramped the brake pedal.

The houses and trees and parked cars seemed to flinch from the stabbing light, and flinched again, as brightness insistently cleaved the sky, cutting down a massive weight of thunder.

Although a greater confusion of shadows shuddered across the night than what the wind alone had stirred, the lightning revealed one thing that the widely spaced streetlamps had not touched upon. A man in dark clothes stood in the shelter of an enormous Indian laurel, his back against the trunk.

As he leaned out slightly from concealment to look toward the Explorer, the lightning silvered his face, so that it seemed to be the painted mask of a mime. He was Kravet and Krane and Kerrington and Konrad and unknown others, as ubiquitous as if he were not merely a man with a hundred names but were in fact a hundred men who shared a single mind and mission.

Riveted by the ghostly face as it vanished and reappeared in sympathy with the fulminations of the sky, Linda whispered, “Impossible.”

The mystery of this apparition could be puzzled to a resolution later. Before speculation came survival.

Tim pulled the steering wheel to the right and accelerated.

From the cover of the tree, the killer stepped forward, raising a weapon as he moved, like a malevolent spirit long dormant in the earth but now resurrected by a lightning strike.