Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

Dewey wouldn’t try to stop him. They were friends, after all, or had once been friends, and the man on the phone was just a voice.

Joe shifted the Honda into drive.

Coming down the steps, Dewey shouted something. He didn’t sound alarmed. He sounded confused, concerned.

Ignoring him nonetheless, Joe drove toward the exit. Under the dirty Cinzano umbrella, the attendant rose from the folding chair. He was only two steps from the rolling gate that would close off the lot.

Atop the chain-link fence, the coils of razor wire flared with silver reflections of late-afternoon sunlight.

Joe glanced at the rear-view mirror. Back there, Dewey was standing with his hands on his hips.

As Joe went past the Cinzano umbrella, the attendant didn’t even come forth out of the shade. Watching with heavy-lidded eyes, as expressionless as an iguana, he wiped sweat off his brow with one hand, black fingernails glistening.

Through the open gate and turning right into the street, Joe was driving too fast. The tyres squealed and sucked wetly at the sun-softened blacktop, but he didn’t slow down.

He went west on Strathern Street and heard sirens by the time that he turned south on Lankershim Boulevard. Sirens were part of the music of the city, day and night; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him.

Nevertheless, all the way to the Ventura Freeway, under it, and then west on Moorpark, he repeatedly checked the rear-view mirror for pursuing vehicles, either marked or unmarked.

He was not a criminal. He should have felt safe going to the authorities to report the men in the cemetery, to tell them about the message from Rose Marie Tucker, and to report his suspicions about Flight 353.

On the other hand, in spite of being on the run for her life, Rose apparently hadn’t sought protection from the cops, perhaps because there was no protection to be had. My life depends on your discretion. He had been a crime reporter long enough to have seen more than a few cases in which the victim had been targeted not because of anything he had done, not because of money or other possessions that his assailant desired, but merely because of what he had known. A man with too much knowledge could be more dangerous than a man with a gun.

What knowledge Joe had about Flight 353 seemed, however, to be pathetically inadequate. If he was a target merely because he knew that Rose Tucker existed and that she claimed to have survived the crash, then the secrets she possessed must be so explosive that the power of them could be measured only in megatonnage.

As he drove west toward Studio City, he thought of the red letters emblazoned on the black T-shirt worn by the attendant at the Post parking lot: FEAR NADA. That was a philosophy Joe could never embrace. He feared so much.

More than anything, he was tormented by the possibility that the crash had not been an accident, that Michelle and Chrissie and Nina died not at the whim of fate but by the hand of man. Although the National Transportation Safety Board hadn’t been able to settle on a probable cause, hydraulic control systems failure complicated by human error was one possible scenario — and one with which he had been able to live because it was so impersonal, as mechanical and cold as the universe itself. He would find it intolerable, however, if they had perished from a cowardly act of terrorism or because of some more personal crime, their lives sacrificed to human greed or envy or hatred.

He feared what such a discovery would do to him. He feared what he might become, his potential for savagery, the hideous ease with which he might embrace vengeance and call it justice.

In the current atmosphere of fierce competitiveness that marked their industry, California bankers were keeping their offices open on Saturdays, some as late as five o’clock. Joe arrived at the Studio City branch of his bank twenty minutes before the doors closed.

When he sold the house here, he had not bothered to switch his account to a branch nearer his one-room apartment in Laurel Canyon. Convenience wasn’t a consideration when time no longer mattered.

He went to a window where a woman named Heather was tending to paperwork as she waited for last-minute business. She had worked at this bank since Joe had first opened an account a decade ago.

‘I need to make a cash withdrawal,’ he said, after the requisite small talk, ‘but I don’t have my chequebook with me.’

‘That’s no problem,’ she assured him.

It became a small problem, however, when Joe asked for twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Heather went to the other end of the bank and huddled in conversation with the head teller, who then consulted the assistant manager. This was a young man no less handsome than the current hottest movie hero; perhaps he was one of the legion of would-be stars who laboured in the real world to survive while waiting for the fantasy of fame. They glanced at Joe as if his identity was now in doubt.

Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets.

Heather returned with a guarded expression and the news that they were happy to accommodate him, though there were, of course, procedures that must be followed.

At the other end of the bank, the assistant manager was talking on his phone, and Joe suspected that he himself was the subject of the conversation. He knew he was letting his paranoia get the better of him again, but his mouth went dry, and his heartbeat increased.

The money was his. He needed it.

That Heather had known Joe for years — in fact, attended the same Lutheran church where Michelle had taken Chrissie and Nina to Sunday school and services — did not obviate her need to see his driver’s license. The days of common trust and common sense were so far in America’s past that they seemed not merely to be ancient history but to be part of the history of another country altogether.

He remained patient. Everything he owned was on deposit here, including nearly sixty thousand dollars in equity from the sale of the house, so he could not be denied the money, which he would need for living expenses. With the same people seeking him who were searching for Rose Tucker, he could not go back to the apartment and would have to live out of motels for the duration.

The assistant manager had concluded his call. He was staring at a note pad on his desk, tapping it with a pencil.

Joe had considered using his few credit cards to pay for things, supplemented by small sums withdrawn as needed from automated teller machines. But authorities could track a suspect through credit-card use and ATM activity — and be ever on his heels. They could even have his plastic seized by any merchant at the point of purchase.

A phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. He snatched it up, glanced at Joe, and turned away in his swivel chair, as if he worried that his lips might be read.

After procedures were followed and everyone was satisfied that Joe was neither his own evil twin nor a bold impersonator in a clever rubber mask, the assistant manager, his phone conversation concluded, slowly gathered the hundred-dollar bills from other tellers’ drawers and from the vault. He brought the required sum to Heather and, with a fixed and uneasy smile, watched as she counted it for Joe.

Perhaps it was imagination, but Joe felt they disapproved of his carrying so much money, not because it put him in danger but because these days people who dealt in cash were stigmatised. The government required banks to report cash transactions of five thousand dollars or more, ostensibly to hamper attempts by drug lords to launder funds through legitimate financial institutions. in reality, no drug lord was ever inconvenienced by this law, but the financial activities of average citizens were now more easily monitored.