The Good Guy (11 page)

Twenty

T
he draperies were closed over the sliding glass
doors. The lamp on the nightstand had been turned to its dimmest setting.

On the floor beside the bed stood Linda’s carryall, fully packed and ready to go in case they had to make a quick getaway.

Having pulled the spread aside, she lay on her back, head raised on a pillow. She had not taken off her shoes.

Tim had settled into an armchair. He wanted to sleep sitting up.

He had moved the chair near the entrance door, so any unusual noise in the public corridor would be more likely to wake him. From where he sat, he could see the drapery-covered balcony sliders.

Rather than fall asleep with a loaded pistol in his hand, he pressed the weapon, muzzle down, between the plush seat cushion and the side of the chair, where he could draw it as quickly as from a holster.

The digital clock over there on the nightstand read 1:32.

At this distance, from this angle, he could not discern whether Linda’s eyes were open or closed.

He said, “Are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to all your anger?”

“When was I angry?”

“Not tonight. You said for years you were bitter, so angry.”

She was silent. Then: “They were going to make one of my books into a TV miniseries.”

“Who was?”

“The usual psychopaths.”

“Which book?”

“
Heartworm
.”

“That’s a new one to me.”

“I was watching TV—”

“You don’t have a TV.”

“This was in a reception lounge at one of the networks. They run their own shows on a screen there, all day long.”

“How do they stand it?”

“I suspect the average receptionist doesn’t last long. I was there for a meeting. This daytime talk show was on.”

“And you couldn’t change channels.”

“Or throw anything at the screen. Everything in those reception lounges is soft, no hard objects. You can guess why.”

“I feel right inside the biz.”

“All the guests on the show were angry. Even the host, she was angry on their behalf.”

“Angry about what?”

“About being victims. People had been unfair to them. Their families, the system, the country,
life
had been so unfair to them.”

He said, “I tend to watch really old movies.”

“These people were furious about being victims, but they thrived on it. They wouldn’t know what to be if they couldn’t be victims.”

“‘I was born under a glass heel, and have always lived there,’” Tim quoted.

“Who said that?”

“Some poet, I can’t remember his name. This girl I dated, she said that was her motto.”

“You dated a girl who said things like that?”

“Not for long.”

“Was she good in bed?”

“I was afraid to find out. So you were watching these angry people on the talk show.”

“And suddenly I realized, under a lot of chronic anger is a sewer of self-pity.”

“Was there a sewer of self-pity under your anger?” he asked.

“I hadn’t thought so. But when I recognized it in those people on the talk show, I saw it in myself, and it sickened me.”

“Sounds like a moment.”

“It was a moment. Those people loved their anger, they were always going to be angry, and when they died, their last words would be some self-pitying drivel. I was suddenly scared shitless I might end up like them.”

“You could never end up like that.”

“Oh, yeah, I could’ve. I was on my way. But I gave up anger cold turkey.”

“You can do that?”

“Adults can do that. Perpetual adolescents can’t.”

“Did they make the miniseries?”

“No. I didn’t stay for the meeting.”

He watched her from across the room. She hadn’t moved whatsoever during their conversation. Her calm plumbed deeper than calm: It was the serenity of a woman who lived above all storm and shadow, or hoped to.

In a voice thick with weariness, she said, “Hear the wind.”

Ceaselessly the wind flew across the balcony, not loud and rancorous, but soft and lulling, like an infinite flock on an infinite journey.

In a murmur that he could barely hear, she said, “Sounds like wings that’ll carry you home.”

For a while he didn’t say anything. Then he whispered, “Are you asleep?”

She did not reply.

He wanted to cross the room and stand over her and look down on her, but he was too tired to get up from the chair.

“You’re something,” he said.

He would watch over her while she slept. He was too tense for sleep. Under one name or another, Richard Lee Kravet was out there. Kravet was coming.

Perhaps some drug explained the dilation of Kravet’s eyes. But how could he take in so much light and not be half blinded?

With the gun jammed between the seat cushion and the side of the chair, with silence unbroken in the corridor, with the wind carrying the whole world into darkness, Tim slept.

He dreamed of a flowered meadow in which he had played as a boy, and of a twilit magical forest that he had never seen in life, and of Michelle with shards of something bright in her left eye, her left arm a bleeding stump.

Twenty-One

A
t 3:16
A.M.
, Krait parked along the Pacific Coast
Highway, half a block south of the hotel.

After sending a text message requesting data on recent credit-card use by Timothy Carrier, especially flagging the name of this hotel, Krait opened the attaché case that had been delivered with the fresh car.

Nestled in the molded-foam interior were a customized Glock 18 machine pistol and four fully loaded magazines. Also included were two state-of-the-art sound suppressors and a shoulder rig.

Krait admired this weapon. He had shot a few thousand practice rounds with one like it. For a 9-mm Parabellum cycling at 1300 rpm, the Glock 18 was exceptionally controllable.

The special magazines held thirty-three rounds. They maximized the weapon’s potential in full-auto mode. He inserted one.

Because the custom barrel had been extended and threaded, he was easily able to screw on one of the sound suppressors.

He felt a kind of kinship with the machine pistol. The gun had no memory of its manufacture, just as Krait had no memory of his mother or of his childhood. They were both clean, relentless, and in the service of death.

For the prince of Earth, the modified Glock 18 made a handsome Excalibur.

On the drive south, at a traffic light, Krait had slipped out of his sports coat. Now he took off his sidearm holster and slid it and the SIG P245 under the driver’s seat.

He put on the new shoulder rig, which was suitable for the silencer-fitted Glock with the extended magazine. After adjusting it, he got out of the Chevrolet, shrugged his shoulders, and satisfied himself that the rig fit properly.

From the car, he snared his coat and put it on. He holstered the Glock, and it hung comfortably along his left side.

At this late hour, even the Pacific Coast Highway was traveled only by the wind. He breathed deeply of the night air. Without the malodorous emissions of bustling vehicles, the wind smelled clean.

This was a moment when you could believe that one day no traffic would ever again ply the roads, that no human being would walk the coastal hills or any land, anywhere. When the fallen had failed beyond hope of any rise, wind and rain would in time lick away every trace of what the dumb machine of Nature had not built, and the earth would enfold all the wicked bones to hide them forever from the sun, the moon. Under cold stars would lie a solitude from which had been purged all desire, expectation, and hope. The silence would seem never to have been broken by song or by laughter. The stillness would not be that of prayer or even of contemplation, but of a void. And then the work would be done.

Sitting in the dark car, Krait waited for the information that he had requested. He received a coded text message at 3:37.

Timothy Carrier had used his Visa card twice in the past twelve hours, the first time to buy gasoline. More recently, less than three and a half hours ago, he presented it when registering at the hotel near which Krait was now parked.

Because the hotel belonged to a chain that had a computerized nationwide reservations system, Krait’s sources had been able to discover that Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Carrier were staying the night in Room 308.

The
Mr. and Mrs.
amused him. What a whirlwind romance.

Thinking of them together in a hotel room, Krait remembered that he had been asked to rape the woman.

He wanted to rape her. He had raped women less attractive than she was. He’d never had a problem with that if it was what his contributors asked for when they petitioned him.

He also wanted very much to insert in each of her primary orifices the reproduction art that he had removed from the frame in her bedroom.

Unfortunately, the dynamics of this mission had changed. In his experience, on those rare occasions when you lost the element of surprise, you could assure success only by the ruthless application of overwhelming force.

To get to the woman, he would most likely have to kill Carrier. In the assault, a stray shot might bring her down. And if she screamed, if she resisted, Krait would have no choice but to shoot her dead without raping her.

That was all right, too. Under these circumstances, that was as much as he might hope to achieve. Two more dead was progress toward a day of empty roads, toward the silence of a void.

Krait got out of the car and locked the doors. This was not an honest age.

Instead of directly approaching the hotel, he walked to the associated parking structure.

The Explorer stood where he expected to find it: in the southwest corner of the ground level.

If a guard patrolled the garage, he was currently on another floor. More likely, the hotel relied on security cameras, of which Krait noticed several.

The cameras didn’t faze him. Electronic images could be lost; systems could crash.

In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.

Likewise, he never worried about fingerprints or DNA. They were merely patterns, the first left by skin oils, the second detailed in the structure of a macromolecule.

Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in “experts.”

Instead of exiting the parking structure on the sidewalk that paralleled the main vehicle entrance, he left by a second exit that led him to a lighted walkway along the south side of the hotel.

Wind-shaken red hibiscus bordered the path. The hibiscus was not a poisonous plant.

Occasionally, Krait had need of a poisonous plant to accomplish one of his missions. Jimsonweed, oleander, and lily of the valley had all served him well.

Hibiscus, however, was worthless.

He came to a door. The door opened on a stairwell. He climbed toward the third floor.

Twenty-Two

A
sound woke Tim from troubling dreams.

He had long ago learned that survival could depend on throwing sleep off as if it were a blanket. Clear-headed in an instant, he sat up straight in the armchair, and he drew the pistol from the seat cushion.

Although he listened intently, he did not at once hear anything more. Sometimes the sound was in the dream, and it woke you because it was the same sound to which you had seen someone die in real life.

The digital clock presented the time in lighted green numbers—3:44. He had slept perhaps two hours.

He looked toward the balcony doors.

The draperies hung undisturbed.

Now he heard the rushing wind, neither hammering nor prying, but gruff and rhythmic and reassuring.

After a silence, Linda spoke, and Tim realized that her sleep-sodden voice had awakened him. “Molly,” she said. “Oh, Molly, no, no.”

Her words carried a heavy weight of despondency and longing.

In her sleep, she had turned onto her side. She lay in the fetal position, her arms embracing a pillow, which she held tight against her breast.

“No…no…oh, no,” she murmured, and then her words dissolved into a barely audible keening, a plaint of piercing distress that was not weeping, but worse.

Getting up from his chair, Tim sensed that the woman was not in the thrall of a meaningless dream, that instead sleep had conveyed her into the past, where someone named Molly had been real and, perhaps, had been lost.

Before her sleep talk could reveal some hidden truth about her, another sound disturbed the slumberous hotel, and this one came from the corridor.

At the door, Tim listened with one ear to the crack along the jamb. He thought that he had heard the thin squeal of the door at the south stairwell.

A cool influx of air teased along the turnings in his ear.

The pricked silence resettled itself along the corridor, though now it had a quality of expectation, reluctant to let its hackles smooth down.

If Tim had correctly identified the noise, someone must be on the landing, holding open the stairwell door, surveying the third-floor hallway.

Confirmation came with the signature squeal of the door as it was carefully closed rather than being allowed to fall shut.

Few late-returning guests would be that considerate of others, and, these days, even fewer hotel employees.

Tim put one eye to the security peephole. The wide-angle lens gave him a distorted view of the hallway.

This was not the moment of no return, for Tim had passed that moment earlier in the night. When he had walked out of the street and into her house, when he had seen that she possessed a poster of a TV instead of a TV, he had committed himself to a course as irreversible as the one that Columbus had taken when he weighed anchor in August of 1492.

Where he stood now was at that point in any dangerous enterprise when the mind either sharpens to meet the escalating challenge or proves too dull for the duel, when the heart either becomes a guiding compass or shrinks from the journey, when success becomes a possibility or not.

Into the funhouse-mirror panorama provided by the fisheye lens came a man, only the back of his head visible as he studied the doors on the east side of the corridor. Then he looked this way. Distorted by the convex lens, his face was nonetheless recognizable as that of the killer who embraced a legion of identities.

His smooth pink face. His perpetual smile. His eyes like open drains.

A more powerful weapon than the 9-mm pistol would have been needed to shoot Kravet through the door.

Besides, when this killer was dead, another surely would be hired. And Tim wouldn’t have the advantage of knowing what the new man looked like.

He stepped back from the door, turned, and hurried to the bed, where Linda had fallen silent in her sleep.

His plan suddenly seemed less like a strategy than like a roll of the dice.

When he put a hand on Linda’s shoulder, she came to full mental clarity in an instant, as if she had matriculated from a survival school equal to the one that he had attended.

She sat up, stood up, as Tim said, “He’s here.”