Dean Koontz - Intensity

The next two were full-body shots. The young woman was naked in both. Manacled.

Chyna closed her eyes. But opened them. She was compelled to look, perhaps because she was determined not to hide from anything any more.

In the fifth and sixth photos, the young woman was dead, and in the last her beautiful face was gone as if it had been blown off or sheared away.

The folder and the photographs fluttered from Chyna’s hands to the floor, where they clicked against the wood and spun and were still. She hid her face in her hands.

She wasn’t trying to block from her mind the gruesome image on the snapshot. Instead, she was striving to repress a nineteen-year-old memory of a farmhouse outside New Orleans, two visitors with a Styrofoam cooler, a gun taken from the refrigerator, and the cold accuracy with which a woman named Memphis had fired two rounds.

Memory, however, always has its way.

The visitors, who’d done business with Zack and Memphis before, had been there to make a drug purchase. The cooler had been filled with packets of hundred-dollar bills. Maybe Zack didn’t have the promised shipment, or maybe he and Memphis just needed more money than they could get from a sale; whatever the reason, they had decided to rip off the two men.

After the gunfire, Chyna had hidden in the barn loft, certain that Memphis would kill them all. When Memphis and Anne found her, she fought them bitterly. But she was only seven years old and no match for them. With owls hooting in alarm and taking flight from the rafters, the women dragged Chyna out of the mice-infested hay and carried her to the house.

Zack had been gone by then, having taken the bodies elsewhere, and Memphis had cleaned up the blood in the kitchen while Anne had forced Chyna to drink a shot of whiskey. Chyna didn’t want the whiskey, sealed her lips against it, but Anne said, “You’re a wreck, for Christ’s sake, you can’t stop blubbering, and one shot isn’t going to hurt you. This is what you need, kiddo, trust Mama, this is what you need. A shot of good whiskey will break a fever, you know, and what you’ve got now is a kind of fever. Come on, you little wuss, it’s not poison. Jesus, you can be a whiny little shit sometimes. Either you drink it quick, or I’ll hold you down and pinch your nose shut, and Memphis will pour it in when you open your mouth to breathe. That how you want it?” So Chyna drank the whiskey, and then took a second shot with a few ounces of milk when her mother decided that she needed it. The booze made her dizzy and strange but did not calm her.

She had appeared calmer to them because, good little fisher that she was, she’d caught her fear and reeled it inside, where they could not see it. Even by the age of seven, she had begun to understand that a show of fear was dangerous, because others interpreted it as weakness, and there was no place in this world for the weak.

Later that night, Zack had returned with whiskey on his breath too. He was exuberant, in a raucous and celebratory mood. He came straight to Chyna and hugged her, kissed her on the cheek, took her by the hands and tried to make her dance with him. “That bastard Bobby, the last time he was here, I knew by the way he couldn’t take his eyes off Chyna that he was hot for little girls, a genuine sicko, so tonight he walks in and his tongue just about uncurls to his knees when he sees her! You could’ve shot the geek half a dozen times, Memphis, before he might’ve noticed!” Bobby had been the man sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Chyna, his beautiful gray eyes fixed intently on her, speaking directly to her in a way that few adults ever spoke to kids, asking whether she liked kittens or puppies best and did she want to grow up to be a famous movie star or a nurse or a doctor or what, when Memphis shot him in the head. “The way our Chyna girl was dressed,” Zack said excitedly, “Bobby just about totally forgot anyone else was here.” The night was hot and swamp-humid, and before the visitors arrived, Chyna’s mother made her change out of her shorts and T-shirt into a brief yellow bikini swimsuit: “But only the bottoms because, child, you’re going to get heatstroke in this weather.” Although only seven, Chyna was old enough to feel peculiar about going bare-chested, even if she didn’t quite know why she felt that way. She’d gone bare-chested when she was younger, even just the previous summer, when she was six; and it was an awfully hot, sticky night. When Zack said that the way she was dressed had something to do with Bobby’s forgetting that anyone else was in the room, Chyna didn’t understand what he meant. Years later, when she did understand, she had confronted her mother with it. Anne had laughed and said, “Oh, baby, don’t get self-righteous on me. We get along by using what we’ve got, and one sure thing we girls have is our bodies. You were the perfect distraction. Anyway, poor dumb old Bobby never touched you, did he? He just got to gawk at you a little, that’s all, while Memphis went for the gun. Don’t forget, sweetie, we were cut in for a piece of that pie and lived well on it for a while.” And Chyna had wanted to say, But you used me, you put me right there in front of him where I’d see his head come apart, and I was only seven!

All these years later, in Edgler Vess’s study, she could still hear the crash of the shot and see Bobby’s face explode; the memory was as vivid as ever it had been. She didn’t know what gun Memphis used, but the ammunition must have been high-caliber hollow-point lead wadcutters that expanded on impact, because the damage they inflicted had been tremendous.

She lowered her hands from her face and looked at the open file cabinet. Vess had used three formats of folders, with staggered tab placement, so it was easy for Chyna to see all the names along the length of the drawer. Much farther back from the Almes file was one labeled TEMPLETON.

She pushed the drawer shut with her foot.

She’d found too much in this study — yet nothing helpful.

Before leaving the second floor, she turned off all the lights. If Vess came home early, before Chyna could get away with Ariel, the lights would warn him that something was amiss. He would be lulled by darkness, however, and as he crossed the threshold, she might have one last chance to kill him.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. In spite of her fantasies of pulling the trigger on Vess, Chyna didn’t want to have to confront him again, even if she found a shotgun and loaded it herself and had an opportunity to test fire it before he arrived. She was a survivor, and she was a fighter, but Vess was more than either: as unreachable as stars, something come down from a high darkness. She was no match for him, and she didn’t want another chance to prove it.

One tread at a time, balanced against the handrail, as fast as she dared, Chyna went down to the living room. None of the Dobermans was at the undraped window.

The mantel clock put the time at twenty-two minutes past eight, and suddenly the night seemed to be a sled on a slope of ice, picking up speed.

She extinguished the lamp and shuffled through darkness to the kitchen. There she turned on the fluorescent lights, only to avoid tripping in the debris, falling, and cutting herself on broken glass.

No Dobermans were on the back porch either. At the window, only the night waited.

Entering the windowless laundry room, she shut off the kitchen lights behind her and pulled the door shut.

Down to the cellar, then, to the workbench and cabinets that she had seen earlier.

In the tall metal cabinets with the vent slits in the doors, she found cans of paint and lacquer, paintbrushes, and drop cloths folded as precisely as fine linen sheets. One entire cabinet was filled with thick pads from which dangled black leather straps with chrome-plated buckles; she didn’t have any idea what they were, and she left them undisturbed. In the final cabinet, Vess stored several power tools, including an electric drill.