Still the only sound, my heartbeat accelerated.

The feather rose before my eyes, and I almost reached for it, but I intuited that to seize it would be wrong.

Looking past the feather, I saw her as she’d never presented herself before: in high heels, a businesslike skirt and blouse and jacket, eyeglasses, ink-black hair pinned up in a chignon.

Fiona Cassidy.

She moved toward one pair of bronze and beveled-glass doors. As she walked, she looked not back at me, but north.

Turning my head, following her stare, I saw him as he had never presented himself before: in black wing tips, a dark-gray business suit, white shirt and tie, a hat with a pinched crown and black band and snap brim.

Tilton.

My father.

He moved toward a different exit from the one Fiona approached. He had shaved off his beard.

He reached the door.

She opened her door and stepped outside. I looked down at the briefcase.

Over the thundering of my heart, I heard myself say, “Bomb.”

76

In Illinois, Mrs. Nozawa’s Monday had not begun well. After his breakfast and his walk, Toshiro Mifune didn’t want to go back into the house. He was agitated, panting, and as she tried to settle him, he vomited copiously in the grass.

On occasion, Mr. Nozawa complained that his wife treated the dog better than she did him, to which she replied, with affection, that he wasn’t as dependent or innocent as their sweet Labrador retriever. Now she coaxed Toshiro Mifune into the backseat of her Cadillac, not in the least concerned that he might make a mess there. A car was just a car, but the dog was her fourth child.

Never previously an imprudent person, Mrs. Nozawa disobeyed all the speed limits, as if the car were an ambulance. She arrived at the veterinarian’s office with a squeal of brakes.

Dr. Donovan examined the dog and performed an

array of tests while Mrs. Nozawa sat in the waiting area, on the edge of her seat, her hands fisted in her lap, as if she were the mother of a wrongly condemned man, waiting outside of the prison’s execution chamber, waiting either for word of the governor’s stay or for the crackle of the electric chair.

As it turned out, Toshiro Mifune had a fever and an infection, nothing mortal. He would be all right after a course of antibiotics and rest.

Mrs. Nozawa drove home at a sedate pace, continuously talking in a soothing tone to the dog in the backseat. She called the drycleaning shop to say that she would be out all day.

The Labrador’s favorite place in the house was on the padded window seat in the living room, where he could watch activity in the street. Once he was lying on those cushions, nose to the glass, she sat in a nearby armchair with a copy of Julia Child’s cookbook, reading recipes.

Now that Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had returned from his holiday, Mrs. Nozawa needed to tell him about Dr. Mace-Maskil, the murder of his wife Noreen, and the plausible assumption that Lucas Drackman had killed the woman for the professor. She had meant to call by nine o’clock his time, but already it was after ten o’clock there. As soon as Toshiro Mifune went to sleep, she would reach out to Mr. Tamazaki. No hurry.

77

As I said, “Bomb,” I turned toward the north end of the lobby and saw that I had put some distance between myself and Amalia, who stood perhaps forty feet away with Malcolm, both of them studying the ornate ceiling, the procession of stainless-steel horses in perpetual gallop. No one moved in slow motion anymore, and sound returned, and I realized that I had said, “Bomb,” so softly that no one had heard me.

I broke the paralyzing grip of dread and shouted it this time—“Bomb! Bomb!”—and started toward Amalia. “Get out! Go! There’s a bomb!”

She appeared startled, confused, and Malcolm looked at me in disbelief, as if he thought I must be pulling some stupid stunt.

By then I wasn’t just shouting, I was screaming—“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!”—and my fright must have been convincing. Suddenly electrified, the crowd cried out in many voices and rushed toward the exits.

Even in the thrall of terror, I thought there would be time for everyone to get out, that Fiona Cassidy wouldn’t have set the bombs to detonate so soon after she and my father departed, that she would not have taken such a risk with their lives.

As we would eventually learn, the bank wasn’t their primary target. It was but a distraction, a misdirection, a blood-drenched tactic, and the success of their operation depended on the bombs going off just as she and my father reached the bottom of the exterior steps.

I was twenty feet from Amalia and Malcolm when the briefcase placed by my father detonated. I don’t know what shrapnel took her, whether it might have been part of the bomb, bolts and nails included to increase its deadliness, or whether it might have been slivers and chunks of the room’s elaborate architectural details. I don’t know why some nights I lie awake thinking about that. Whichever it was, it changes nothing, doesn’t diminish the monstrousness of the deed or reduce to any degree my father’s guilt.

Tags: Dean Koontz The City Horror
Source: readsnovelonline.net