The Bad Place (51 page)

“Candy,” Clint said.

The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble, though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had tilted his head and said, “Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?”

As furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table, wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman’s murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired two shots.

He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest, pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to head or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport, leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he’d stood. Those were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of that kitchen and back to his mother’s house alive.

THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare.”

Bobby brooded, staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad dreams. Though exceptionally vivid, almost more real than real life, there had been nothing uncanny about it—or so he had convinced himself. But this was different. He could not believe that these urgent, lava-hot words had erupted from his own subconscious. A dream, with complex Freudian messages couched in elaborate scenes and symbols—yes, that was understandable; after all, the subconscious dealt in euphemisms and metaphors. But this wordburst had been blunt, direct, like a telegraph delivered on a wire plugged directly into his cerebral cortex.

When he wasn’t brooding, Bobby was fidgeting. Because of Thomas.

For some reason, the longer he dwelt on the blaze of words, the more Thomas slipped into his thoughts. He could see no connection between the two, so he tried to put Thomas out of mind and concentrate on turning up an explanation for the experience. But Thomas gently, insistently returned, again and again. After a while Bobby got the uneasy feeling there was a link between the wordburst and Thomas, though he had no ghost of an idea what it might be.

Worse, as the miles rolled up on the odometer and they reached the western end of the valley, Bobby began to sense that Thomas was in danger. And because of me and Julie, Bobby thought.

Danger from whom, from what?

The biggest danger that Bobby and Julie faced, right now, was Candy Pollard. But even that jeopardy lay in the future, for Candy didn’t know about them yet; he was not aware that they were working on Frank’s behalf, and he might never become aware of it, depending on how things went in Santa Barbara and El Encanto Heights. Yes, he had seen Bobby on the beach at Punaluu, with Frank, but he had no way of knowing who Bobby was. Ultimately, even if Candy became aware of Dakota & Dakota’s association with Frank, there was no way that Thomas could be drawn into the affair; Thomas was another, separate part of their lives. Right?

“Something wrong?” Julie said as she pulled the Toyota one lane to the left, to pass a big rig hauling Coors.

He could see nothing to be gained by telling her that Thomas might be in danger. She would be upset, worried. And for what? He was just letting his vivid imagination run away with him. Thomas was perfectly safe down there in Cielo Vista.

“Bobby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Why’re you fidgeting?”

“Prostate trouble.”

CHANEL No. 5, a softly glowing lamp, cozy rose-patterned fabrics and wallpaper ...

He laughed with relief when he materialized in the bedroom, the bullets left behind in that kitchen in Placentia, over a hundred miles away. His wounds had knit up as if they had never existed. He had lost perhaps an ounce of blood and a few flecks of tissue, because one of the bullets had passed through him and out his back, carrying that material with it before he’d transported himself beyond the revolver’s range. Everything else was as it should be, however, and his flesh did not harbor even the memory of pain.

He stood in front of the dresser for half a minute, breathing deeply of the perfume that wafted up from the saturated handkerchief. The scent gave him courage and reminded him of the abiding need to make them pay for his mother’s murder, all of them, not just Frank but the whole world, which had conspired against her.

He looked at his face in the mirror. The gray-eyed woman’s blood was no longer on his chin and lips; he had left it behind him, as he might leave water behind when teleporting out of a rainstorm. But the taste of it was still in his mouth. And his reflection was without a doubt that of vengeance personified.

Depending on the element of surprise and his ability to target his point of arrival precisely now that he was familiar with the kitchen, he returned to Clint’s house. He intended to enter at the dining-room doorway, immediately behind the man, directly opposite the point from which he had dematerialized.

Either the experience of being shot had shaken him more than he realized, or the rage jittering through him had passed the critical point at which it interfered with his concentration. Whatever the reason, he did not arrive where he intended, but by the door to the garage, one-quarter instead of halfway around the room from his last position, to the right of Clint and not near enough to rush him and seize the gun before it could be fired.

Except Clint was not present. And the woman’s body had been removed from the table. Only the blood remained as proof that she perished there.

Candy could not have been gone more than a minute—the time he had spent in his mother’s room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way. He expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving or checking desperately for a pulse. But as soon as he realized Candy was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and ... And what? He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint thread of life remained unbroken in the woman, getting her out of the way in case Candy returned.

Cursing softly—then immediately begging his mother’s and God’s forgiveness for his foul language—Candy tried the door into the garage. It was locked. If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn’t have paused to lock up behind himself.

He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, toward the foyer off the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street. But he heard a noise from deeper in the house, and halted before he reached the front door. He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back to the bedrooms.

A light was on in one of those rooms. He eased to the door and risked a glance inside.

Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed. As Candy watched, the man pulled her skirt down over her knees. He still had the revolver in one hand.

For the second time in less than an hour, Candy heard far-away sirens swelling in the night. The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and called the police.

Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the gun. He did not say anything, either, and the expression on his stoic face remained unchanged. He seemed like a deaf-mute. The strangeness of the man’s demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.

He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun at him in the kitchen, even though he had teleported out of there with the impact of the second slug. Most likely, he had fired every round reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was feeling. He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone, which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy and took the weapon away from him.

But he stayed in the doorway. Either of those two shots could have been dead-center in his heart. The power within him was great, but he could not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.

Instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched out beside the woman.

“What the hell?” Candy said aloud.

Clint took hold of her dead hand. His other hand held the .38 revolver. He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes glistened with what might have been unshed tears. He put the muzzle of the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.

Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think what to do next. He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie, whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the dead man on the bed shared with them. If he ever hoped to learn who Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might slide out of it, he couldn’t waste this opportunity.

He hurried to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew the wallet from his pants pocket. He flipped it open and saw the private investigator’s license. Opposite it, in another plastic window, was a business card for Dakota & Dakota.

Candy remembered a vague image of the Dakota & Dakota offices, which had come to him in Thomas’s room when he had obtained a vision of Clint from the scrapbook. There was an address on the card. And below the name Clint Karaghiosis, in smaller type, were the names Robert and Julia Dakota.

Outside, the sirens had died. Someone was pounding on the front door. Two voices shouted, “Police!”

Candy threw the wallet aside and took the gun out of the dead man’s hand. He broke open the cylinder. It was a five-shot weapon, and all of the chambers were filled with expended cartridges. Clint had fired four rounds in the kitchen, but even in his moment of vengeful fury, he had possessed enough control to save the last bullet for himself.

“Just because of a woman?” Candy said uncomprehendingly, as if the dead man might answer him. “Because you couldn’t get sex from her any more now? Why does sex matter so much? Couldn’t you get sex from another woman? Why was sex with this one so important, you didn’t want to live without it?”

They were still pounding on the door. Someone spoke through a bullhorn, but Candy didn’t pay attention to what was being said.

He dropped the gun and wiped his hand on his pants, because he suddenly felt unclean. The dead man had handled the gun, and the dead man seemed to have been obsessed with sex. Without question, the world was a cesspool of lust and debauchery, and Candy was glad that God and his mother had spared him from the sick desires that seemed to infect nearly everyone else.

He left that house of sinners.

SLUMPED ON the sofa, Hal Yamataka had a slice of pizza in one hand and the MacDonald novel in the other, when he heard the hollow flutelike warble. He dropped both the book and the food, and shot to his feet.

“Frank?”

The half-open door swung slowly inward, not because it was being pushed open by anyone but because a sudden draft, sweeping in from the reception lounge, was strong enough to move it.