Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

He then asked her if she intended to cooperate.

With guilt and humiliation but also with utter sincerity, she nodded again. Yes. She would cooperate. Yes.

Studying a pale oval of cheese like a tiny filleted fish on the point of the blade, he said that he wanted her to be deeply impressed with his determination to ensure her cooperation, so impressed that she would be in no danger of forsaking the pledge she had just made to him. Therefore, on their way out of the hotel, he and his partner would select, at random, an employee or perhaps a guest — someone who just happened to cross their path — and would kill that person on the spot. Three shots: two in the chest, one in the head.

Stunned, Barbara protested from behind the gag, contorting her face in an effort to twist the tape and free her mouth. But it was pulled cruelly tight, and her lips were stuck firmly to the adhesive, and the only argument that she could get out was a pained, muffled, wordless pleading. She didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She was going to cooperate. There was no reason to impress her with their seriousness. No reason. She already believed in their seriousness.

Never taking his great sad eyes from her, without saying another word, he slowly finished his cheese.

His unwavering stare seemed to cause a power backflow, draining her of energy. Yet she could not look away.

When he had consumed the final morsel, he wiped the blade of his knife on the sheets. Then he folded it into the handle and returned the weapon to his pocket.

Sucking on his teeth and rolling his tongue slowly around his mouth, he gathered up the shredded cellophane and the peels of red wax. He rose from the bed and deposited the trash in the waste basket beside the desk.

The younger man stepped out of the shadowy corner. His thin but eager smile no longer fluttered uncertainly; it was fixed.

From behind the strapping tape, Barbara was still attempting to protest the murder of an innocent person when the older man returned to her and, with the edge of his right hand, chopped hard at the side of her neck.

As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.

For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.

When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.

Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.

She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.

Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.

There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.

Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner lace. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.

The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel — by the gunman and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.

Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honour bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it — then went into the bathroom and threw up.

She felt unclean. Withdrawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.

Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.

The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen — uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.

From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.

The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.

Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.

The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.

She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.

After cancelling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.

Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn’t know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and twenty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.

A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.

‘I can’t let you do this,’ Joe said. ‘I can’t let you tell me what was on the cockpit voice recorder if there’s any chance it’s going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.’

‘It’s not for you to decide, Joe.’

‘The hell it’s not.’

‘When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I’ve got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don’t think it is. I don’t think they feel any need to tap it, because they know by now that they’ve got me muzzled.’