Tim felt awkward, bigger than usual, as if he were a sponge that had swollen up in the storm.

Linda returned barefoot, wearing a robe. She carried a blanket and a stack of towels, which she put on the counter near him.

Pulling aside a pair of folding shutter doors, she exposed a washer and dryer in a laundry nook. “Get out of your clothes, throw them in the dryer. Use the blanket for a robe.”

She grabbed one of the towels, went to the sink, and began to dry off her carryall and purse.

“Do I get some privacy?” he asked.

“You think I’m all thrilled to check out your bare butt?”

“Maybe. What do I really know about you?”

“I’m going upstairs to get a quick shower.”

“I have my dignity.”

“That’s the first thing I noticed about you, after your huge head. How long are we safe here?”

“I wouldn’t push it past two hours. Ninety minutes is better.”

“There’s a full bath down here, too, if you want a shower. We can press your jeans and shirt when they come out of the dryer.”

“I feel funny about this,” he said.

“I promise not to sneak back for a package peek.”

“No, I mean using a stranger’s house like this.”

“She’s not a stranger. She’s my friend.”

“She’s a stranger to me. When this is over, I’ll have to do something really nice for her.”

“You could pay off her mortgage.”

“That’s an expensive shower.”

“I hope you’re not cheap. I could never live with a cheap man.”

She left the room with her carryall and purse.

For a moment he stood there thinking about two words that she had tossed off so casually: live with. If he thought about it hard enough, his clothes would dry on him, without need of the Maytag.

He stripped, loaded the dryer, mopped the floor with a towel, and took the other towels to the downstairs bathroom.

The hot water felt good. He might have stood in the shower longer except that the drain in the floor made him think of Kravet’s dilated eyes, greedy for light, and those eyes made him think of Psycho.

Scrubbed, dried, wrapped in a blanket, in the kitchen once more, he wanted something to eat, but he didn’t feel right about looking through the cupboards and refrigerator.

He sat in a breakfast-set chair to wait, the blanket pulled around him as if it were a monk’s habit.

The previous evening, at Linda’s house, before they had gone on the run, there had been a moment when the sight of her had filled him with a complexity of needs but also with dread. He had told himself to remember the tightening knot of terror and the loosening knot of wild exaltation that seemed to bind and to free him at the same time.

He’d had no name for that feeling. But he had realized that when eventually he could name it, he would understand why he was abruptly walking out of the quiet life that he had made for himself and into a new life that had no safety railings.

Now he knew the word. Purpose.

He had lived with purpose once. He had thrived on commitment.

For good reasons he had retreated to a life of repetitive work, innocent pleasures, and as little reflection as he could manage.

Back in the day, a kind of weariness of the heart had settled upon him and a kind of disillusionment and something like a sense of futility, none of them the pure thing, all of them alloyed with other feelings that he could not easily define. He might have overcome mere weariness and true disillusionment and a pure sense of futility, but the kind-of-something-like quality of these emotions made them fuzzy at the edges and more difficult to address.

When he retreated to tradesman’s labor and simple pleasures, when his greatest purpose was mortaring stone to stone and brick to brick, when his deepest satisfaction came from finishing a book of crossword puzzles or having dinner with friends, weariness lifted from his heart. In this smaller life, no longer committed to any grand enterprise, he had nothing about which to become disillusioned, no challenge great enough to raise doubts and to foster feelings of futility.

The previous evening, in the tavern, his years of retreat had suddenly come to an end. He didn’t fully understand why he had chosen to break down the walls behind which he had become so comfortable, but her photograph had something to do with it.

He had not fallen in love at first sight. He had not spent his life looking for someone like Linda. Her face had just been another face, attractive but not enchanting. The feelings he had for her now were nothing he could have imagined then.

Maybe it was this: The name of a person marked for murder is just a name, but the face makes real the cost of violence, for if we have the nerve to look, we can see in any face our own vulnerability.

Looking not in the least vulnerable, Linda returned, dressed in the blue jeans and the black T-shirt that she had brought in the carryall.

She snatched up his wet work boots and said, “There’s a gas-log fireplace in the living room. Our shoes should dry on the hearth. While we wait, we can have something quick to eat.”

Beyond the windows, the spring dawn had arrived gray and meek, and the angry torrents of rain had receded to a drizzle.

When Linda came back, she said, “You look happier than makes any sense at all.”

Thirty-Eight

With a high forehead, bushy white eyebrows, a solid jaw, and weathered skin, the man seeking Cynthia looked like a sea captain from a harder century, one who had chased down a white whale, killed it, rendered it, and brought to port a ship full of barreled blubber oil and ambergris.

He stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, frowned at Krait sitting at the table, and said, “Who’re you?”

“Rudyard Kipling. You must be Malcolm.”

“Rudyard Kipling—he’s some dead writer.”

“Yes, I was named after him, and I don’t like his work, just a poem or two.”

Suspicion knitted the two bushy eyebrows into one. “What’re you doing here?”

“Beth and James invited me. We’re all terrific friends of Judi and Frankie.”

“Judi and Frankie are in Paris.”

“I was supposed to go with them, but I had to cancel. Have you had breakfast, Malcolm?”

“Where’s Cynthia?”

“She and I have thrown all carbohydrate caution to the wind. We’re having hot chocolate and buttered cinnamon toast. She’s such marvelous good company, your wife.”

Krait needed to entice the old man into the kitchen. The Glock lay on the chair where Cynthia had not seen it. Malcolm couldn’t see it, either, from where he stood. If Krait reached for it, however, Malcolm, already suspicious, might back off, and for sure he would bolt when he saw the gun coming up.

Frowning at Cynthia’s plate and mug on the table, Malcolm said, “But where is she?”

Pointing to the closed door of the half bath, Krait said, “The call of nature. We were just talking about Cynthia’s efforts to save the eagles and the whales. I so admire that.”

“What?”

“Eagles and whales. And hunger in Africa. You must be proud of her giving nature.”

“Bethany and Jim never mentioned any Rudyard Kipling.”

“Well, honestly, I’m not a very interesting person, Malcolm. For every thousand Judi and Frankie stories, they’d have at most one about me.”

The old man had steel-gray eyes and a sword-sharp stare. He said, “Something’s wrong with you.”

“Well,” said Krait, “I’ve never liked my nose.”

Malcolm called out, “Cynthia!”

Neither of them looked at the door to the half bath. They kept their eyes on each other.

Krait reached for the Glock.

The old man bolted.

Getting to his feet so fast that he knocked over his chair, thumbing the slide selector to full-auto, Krait brought the pistol to bear on the doorway. Malcolm had fled from sight.

Krait went after him.

Having cleared the dining room as quick as a boy, the old man knocked against an end table in the living room, stumbled, grabbed at an armchair to right himself.

Krait put a short burst in his back, from rump to neck. The sound suppressor absorbed the concussion so completely that a blowgun would have made more noise.

The old man fell facedown and lay there, head turned to one side. His eye was peeled wide; but his stare could not accurately be called sharp anymore.

Standing over Malcolm, Krait emptied the extended magazine into him. The body twitched, not with life but with the impacts.

Wasting twenty or more rounds on a dead man wasn’t practical, but it was necessary.

A lesser man than Krait, with less self-control, might have replaced the depleted magazine with a fresh one and emptied that, too. Composure and forbearance were among his most defining character traits, but even his singular patience might be tried to the breaking point.

He opened the front door and found Cynthia’s raincoat draped over the arm of the glider on the porch. Her umbrella and Malcolm’s lay on the floor. He brought everything inside and locked the door.

He hung her coat in the foyer closet. He put the umbrellas there, as well.

In the kitchen, he sat at the table with his cell phone and checked his E-mail. While chatting with Cynthia, he had received word that the Explorer had been abandoned in a restaurant parking lot.

No stolen-vehicle reports had been made from the blocks around the restaurant yet; but somebody might not find his car missing for hours.

Krait thought maybe a bus, and he sent that message. Not many buses would have been running that route at that hour. They wouldn’t have to find and question more than a couple of drivers.

After plugging his phone into its charger, he hand-washed the breakfast dishes, put them away, and wiped off the table.

He had no intention of cleaning up the mess in the half bath or the one in the living room. Cynthia and Malcolm had come nosing around because their daughter and son-in-law had failed to establish privacy rules and boundaries. This was not his business now; it was a family matter.

Having tidied the kitchen, he went upstairs to the master bedroom to learn if Bethany and Jim kept any pornographic videos or interesting sex toys.

He discovered neither erotica nor anything else that gave him any insights into the kind of people they were. Jim folded rather than rolled his socks. A few of Bethany’s panties had a cute little pink bunny embroidered at the hip. Not much here for the tabloids.

The most interesting thing in their bathroom drawers were the number of brands—and the quantity—of laxatives. These people either ate no fiber whatsoever or they had colons as inefficient as Third World plumbing.

Bethany and Jim were such a bland pair that Krait wondered why the fabled Judi and Frankie wanted anything to do with them.

The toothbrushes were pink and blue. He used the pink one, assuming it was Bethany’s. But he applied the men’s rather than the women’s deodorant.

Thereafter, he was reduced to passing time in the kitchen with the issue of O that had been in the mail.

At 7:15, he opened the front door and smiled at the sight of the hanging travel bag placed neatly on the porch glider and the small carryall standing beside it. His clothes had been delivered.

The rain had stopped altogether. Trees dripped. Sun had broken through the clouds, and the wet street had begun to steam.

Fifteen minutes later, dressed for the day, he inspected himself in a full-length beveled mirror on the back of the master-bathroom door.

When Bethany was na*ed in this bathroom, perhaps admirers in the mirror world watched her without her knowledge. Krait could not see those who might live in the reversed reality, only himself looking back at him, but that didn’t mean the inhabitants of the other realm were likewise limited in their vision.

Downstairs once more, as he approached the front door, he heard a key in the lock. The deadbolt turned, and the door opened.

A woman stepped into the house, made a small sound of surprise at the sight of him, and said, “You startled me.”

“And you me. Bethany and Jim didn’t tell me to expect anyone.”

“I’m Nora, from next door.”

She was a petite but buxom woman with a pixie haircut and blue nail polish of which he disapproved.

“This is like a house in one of those sitcoms,” Krait said, “where everyone just bursts right in without knocking or ringing the bell.”

“Beth pays me to make five dinners every week, put them in her freezer,” said Nora. “I stock her refrigerator Monday, cook Tuesday.”

“Then it must be thanks to you that we had such a brilliantly scrumptious dinner last evening.”

“Oh, you’re staying over?”

“I’m a rude, drop-in, ten-minute-warning houseguest, but dear Beth always pretends to be glad to see me. Name’s Richard Kotzwinkel, everyone calls me Ricky.”

He stepped back to encourage her to enter, but also to block her view of Malcolm in the living room.

“Gee, Ricky, I don’t want to intrude—”

“No, come in, come in. Cynthia and I just had a long fabulously chatty breakfast together after the early birds raced off to get the worm or whatever they get at an investment-banking firm.”

“Cynthia’s here?”

“In the kitchen. And Malcolm stopped in a little while ago.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Though he’s something of a sourpuss compared to dear Cindy.”

She stepped farther inside and closed the door behind her. “Was it really scrumptious?”

“Was what? Oh, you mean your dinner. Divine. It was divine.”

“Which selection did she heat up?” Nora asked.

Her eyes were a lively blue. She had full lips and smooth skin.

“Chicken,” he said. “We had the chicken.”

He considered raping her, but he just killed her. For variety, he used his hands.

Collateral damage was frowned upon by those who solicited him to go on these missions, so he rarely popped bystanders in the process of nailing his target. His generous petitioners would understand. As the bumper sticker says, SHIT HAPPENS.

On the porch, he pulled the door shut and used Nora’s key to lock it, although that didn’t seem likely to keep out anyone.

Thirty-Nine

As they finished breakfast, Pete Santo called. Tim set his cell on speakerphone and stood it beside the waffle plate.

“I’m not calling from my place,” Pete said. “This is strictly cell-to-cell.”

“Something happened,” Tim said. “What happened?”

“I stayed away from restricted law-enforcement databases, just Googled Kravet’s different names. I hit pay dirt, dug in it for a while—and then my cable service failed.”

Tags: Dean Koontz Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net