Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

The guy in the green shirt studiously avoided looking directly at Joe. He cupped one hand to his right ear, as if were wearing a bad hearing aid and needed to block the music from the sun-bathers’ radios in order to focus on something else that he wanted to hear.

At this distance, Joe could not be certain, but he thought the man’s lips were moving. He appeared to be engaged in a conversation with his missing companion.

Leaving his towel and cooler, Joe walked south toward the public restrooms. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the guy in the green Hawaiian shirt was watching him.

On reconsideration, he decided that getting soused on the sand probably was still against the law, even these days. After all, a society with such an enlightened tolerance of corruption and savagery needed to bear down hard on minor offences to convince itself that it still had standards.

Nearer the pier, the crowds had grown since Joe’s arrival. In the amusement centre, the roller coaster clattered. Riders squealed.

He took off his sunglasses as he entered the busy public restrooms.

The men’s lavatory stank of urine and disinfectant. In the middle of the floor between the toilet stalls and the sinks, a large cockroach, half crushed but still alive, hitched around and around in a circle, having lost all sense of direction and purpose. Everyone avoided it — some with amusement, some with disgust or indifference.

After he had used a urinal, as he washed his hands, Joe studied the other men in the mirror, seeking a conspirator. He settled on a long-haired fourteen-year-old in swim trunks and sandals.

When the boy went to the paper-towel dispenser, Joe followed, took a few towels immediately after him, and said, ‘Outside, there might be a couple of cop types hanging out, waiting for me.’

The boy met his eyes but didn’t say anything, just kept drying his hands on the paper towels.

Joe said, ‘I’ll give you twenty Blicks to reconnoitre for me, then come back and tell me where they are.’

The kid’s eyes were the purple-blue shade of a fresh bruise, and his stare was as direct as a punch. ‘Thirty Blicks.’

Joe could not remember having been able to look so boldly and challengingly into an adult’s eyes when he himself had been fourteen. Approached by a stranger with an offer like this, he would have shaken his head and left quickly.

‘Fifteen now and fifteen when I come back,’ said the kid.

Wadding his paper towels and tossing them in the trash can, Joe said, ‘Ten now, twenty when you come back.’

‘Deal.’

As he took his wallet from his pocket, Joe said, ‘One is about six two, tan, blond, in a green Hawaiian shirt. The other is maybe five ten, brown hair, balding, pale, in a red and orange Hawaiian.’

The kid took the ten-dollar bill without breaking eye contact. ‘Maybe this is jive, there’s nobody like that outside, and when I come back, you want me to go into one of those stalls with you to get the other twenty.’

Joe was embarrassed, not for being suspected of paedophilia but for the kid, who had grown up in a time and a place that required him to be so knowledgeable and street smart at such a young age. ‘No jive.’

“Cause I don’t jump that way.’

‘Understood.’

At least a few of the men present must have heard the exchange, but none appeared to be interested. This was a live and let live age.

As the kid turned to leave, Joe said, ‘They won’t be waiting right outside, easy to spot. They’ll be at a distance, where they can see the place but aren’t easily seen themselves.’

Without responding, the boy went to the door, sandals clacking against the floor tiles.

‘You take my ten Blicks and don’t come back,’ Joe warned, ‘I’ll find you and kick your ass.’

‘Yeah, right,’ the kid said scornfully, and then he was gone.

Returning to one of the rust-stained sinks, Joe washed his hands again so he wouldn’t appear to be loitering.

Three men in their twenties had gathered to watch the crippled cockroach, which was still chasing itself around one small portion of the lavatory floor. The beetle’s track was a circle twelve inches in diameter. It twitched brokenly along that circumference with such insectile single-mindedness that the men, hands full of dollar bills, were placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.

Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water in his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.

The building wasn’t well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.

The kid seemed to be taking a long time.

Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn’t look healthy. His eyes were grey, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright grey of polished iron or wet indulines; now it was the soft dead grey of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.

A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty and sophomoric humour. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the restroom traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line. ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’ They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antenna were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.

Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.

He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquillising precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.

He didn’t need distractions. He didn’t need action. He didn’t need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.

Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. ‘Didn’t see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one’s out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.’

Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or slower than its time for the previous lap.

Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.

‘Where?’ Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.