Dean Koontz - The Door To December

By the time he reached the back door and stepped out into the cool night air, the intruder was gone. He had no way of knowing which side of the redwood fence the perp had jumped.

* * *

Dan washed his face in Rink's bathroom. His forehead was bruised and abraded,

His vision had drifted back into focus and had locked there. Although his head felt as though it had been used as a blacksmith's forge, he knew he wasn't suffering from concussion.

His head was not the only thing that ached. His neck, his shoulders, his back, and his left knee throbbed.

In the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink, he found a package of gauze, made a compress out of it, and set it aside. He discovered some Bactine too, and he sprayed the scraped flesh of his forehead, blotted it gingerly, sprayed it again. He picked up the gauze compress and held it firmly against his forehead with his right hand, hoping to stop the bleeding altogether, while he prowled around the house.

He went to the room where he had been ambushed, and he switched on the light. It was a study, less elegantly but just as expensively furnished as the living room. One entire wall of bookshelves was built around a television and VCR. Half the shelves were used for books; the other half were filled with videotapes.

He looked at the tapes first and saw some familiar motion-picture titles: Silver Streak, Arthur, all the Abbott-and-Costello pictures, Tootsie, The Goodbye Girl, Groundhog Day, Foul Play, Mrs. Doubtfire, several Charlie Chaplin films, two Marx Brothers pictures. All the legit movies were comedies, and it figured a professional hit man might need to laugh a little when he came home from a hard day of blowing people's brains out. But most of the movies weren't legit. Most of them were pornographic, with titles like Debbie Does Dallas and The Sperminator. There must have been two to three hundred porno titles.

The books were of more interest because that was what the intruder apparently had been after. A cardboard carton stood on the floor in front of the bookcases; several volumes had been plucked off the shelves and piled in the box. First, Dan examined the collection and saw that every one of the books was a nonfiction study of one branch of the occult or another. Then, still holding the gauze to his forehead with one hand, he pawed through the seven volumes in the carton and saw they were all by the same author, Albert Uhlander.

Uhlander?

He reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out the small address book that he had taken from the Studio City house last night, from Dylan McCaffrey's wrecked office. He paged to the U listings and found only one.

Uhlander.

McCaffrey, who was interested in the occult, had known Uhlander. Rink, who was interested in the occult, had at least read Uhlander; maybe he had known Uhlander too. This was a link between McCaffrey and Ned Rink. But were they on the same side, or were they enemies? And what did the occult have to do with this?

His thoughts were spinning, and not merely because he had been clubbed on the forehead.

Anyway, Uhlander was evidently a key to understanding what was going on. Apparently, the intruder had broken in there only to remove those books from the house, to conceal the Uhlander connection.

Pressing the gauze to his forehead, Dan left the study. Like an electric current, the pain seemed to pass through the gauze, into his hand, up his arm, into his right shoulder, down to the middle of his back, up to his left shoulder, into his neck, along the side of his face, completing the circuit by returning to his forehead, starting all over again.

Favoring his left knee, sorting through things with one hand, feeling like a big crippled bug, he searched the place perfunctorily and found nothing more of interest. Rink was a hit man, and hit men didn't assist police investigations by keeping handy little address books and paper records of their affairs.

In the bathroom again, he removed the compress and saw that the superficial bleeding had, indeed, finally stopped.

He looked like hell. But that was fitting, because he felt like hell too.

When Dan limped out to the curb, carrying the small box of books, George Padrakis was still behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, sitting in darkness, his window half open. He cranked it all the way down when he saw Dan.

'I was just on the squawk-box. Mondale wants… Hey, what happened to your forehead?'

Dan told him about the intruder.

Padrakis opened the door and got out of the car. He looked and sounded like Perry Como, and he moved like him too: lazily, casually, with unconscious grace. He was even casual as he reached inside his coat and drew his revolver.

'The guy's gone,' Dan said as Padrakis took a step toward Rink's house. 'Long gone.'

'But how'd he get in there?'

'Through the back.'

'This street's been quiet, and I had my window down,' Padrakis protested. 'I'd have heard breaking glass, anything like that.'

'I didn't find a broken window,' Dan said. 'I think he came in by the kitchen door, probably with a key.'

'Well, hell, then they can't blame it on me,' Padrakis said, holstering his revolver. 'I can't be two places at once. They want to watch the back of the house too, they should have put two men on the place. You get a good look at the joker who jumped you?'

'Not real good.' Dan returned the key Padrakis had given him. 'But if you see a guy with a badly mangled ear, that's him.'

'Ear?'

'I nearly tore his ear off.'

'Why'd you do that?'

'For one thing, because he was trying to bash my brains in,' Dan said impatiently. 'Besides, I'm sort of like a matador. I always try to take a trophy home with me, and this guy didn't have a tail.'

Padrakis looked baffled.

A gigantic motor home turned the corner, engine roaring, and lumbered down the block, like a dinosaur.

Frowning at the box in Dan's hands, Padrakis raised his voice above the shrieking engine of the nature lovers' vehicle. 'What's that you've got there?'

'Books.'

'Books?'

'Assembled sheets of paper with words on them, for the purpose of conveying information or providing entertainment. Now what about the squawk-box? What's Mondale,want?'

'You taking those books with you?'

'That's right.'

'Don't know if you can do that.'

'Don't worry. I can manage. They aren't that heavy.'

'That's not what I mean.'

'What's Mondale want?'

Staring unhappily at the box in Dan's arms, Padrakis waited until the motor home had passed like a brontosaurus making its way through a primeval swamp. Its wake of cold air and exhaust fumes washed over them.

'I called in to let Mondale know you were here.'

'How thoughtful of you, George.'

'He was about to head over to the Sign of the Pentagram on Ventura.'

'Good for him.'

'He really wants you to meet him there.'

'What the hell's the Sign of the Pentagram? Sounds like a bar where werewolves hang out.'

'I think it's a bookstore or something,' Padrakis said, still frowning at the box of books. 'Guy's been killed over there.'

'What guy?'

'The owner, I think. Name's Scaldone. Mondale says it's like the bodies in Studio City.'

'There goes dinner,' Dan said. He headed along the sidewalk, through alternating pools of purple-black shadows and wan amber light, toward his own car.

Padrakis followed him. 'Hey, about those books—'

'Do you read, George?'

'They're the property of the deceased—'

'Nothing like curling up with a good book, though they're not nearly so entertaining when you're deceased.'

'And this isn't like a crime scene where we can just cart away anything that might be evidence.'

Dan balanced the box on the bumper of his car, unlocked the trunk, put the box inside, and said, '"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." Mark Twain said that, George.'