Dean Koontz: Strange Highways

Perhaps Henry Kadinska wasn't comfortable being a small-town lawyer but was simply long resigned to it, trapped first in the orbit of his father and then by the gravity of habit.

Sometimes, especially in a whiskey haze, it was easy for Joey to forget that he himself wasn't the only person in the world whose dearest dreams had come to nothing.

"Your father's last will and testament," said Kadinska as he opened a file folder on his desk.

"A reading of the will?" Joey asked. "I think P.J. should be here for that, not me."

"On the contrary. The will has nothing to do with P.J. Your father left everything to you."

A sickening pang of guilt quivered through Joey. "Why would he do that?"

"You're his son. Why wouldn't he?"

Joey made a point of meeting the attorney's eyes. On this one day, even if never again, he wanted to be honest about these matters, to conduct himself with a dignity of which his father would have approved.

"We both know the hard answer to that, Mr. Kadinska. I broke his heart. Broke my mother's heart too. More than two years she withered from the cancer, but I never came. Never held her hand, never consoled my dad. Never saw him once in the last twenty years of his life. I called maybe six or eight times, no more than that. Half the time he didn't know how to reach me, because I didn't always give him my address or phone number. And when he did have my number, I always kept an answering machine switched on so I wouldn't have to pick up. I was a rotten son, Mr. Kadinska. I'm a drunk, a selfish shit, and a loser, and I don't deserve any inheritance, no matter how little it is."

Henry Kadinska appeared to be pained to hear any man criticize himself so mercilessly. "You're not drunk now, Joey. And the man I see before me isn't bad in his heart."

"I'll be drunk by tonight, sir, I assure you," Joey said quietly. "And if you can't see me the way I described myself, then you're a lousy judge of character. You don't know me at all — and you should count that as a blessing."

Kadinska put his pipe in the glass ashtray again. "Well, your father was a forgiving man. He wanted everything to go to you."

Getting to his feet, Joey said, "No. I can't take it. I don't want it." He started toward the door to the outer room.

"Wait, please," said the lawyer.

Joey stopped and turned to him. "The weather's miserable, and I've got a long drive out of these mountains to Scranton."

Still slumped in his chair, picking up his pipe again, Henry Kadinska said, "Where do you live, Joey?"

"You know. Las Vegas. That's where you got hold of me."

"I mean, where do you live in Las Vegas?"

"Why?"

"I'm a lawyer. I've spent my life asking questions, and it's hard to change this late in the game. Indulge me."

"I live in a trailer park."

"One of those upscale parks with a community swimming pool and tennis courts?"

"Old trailers," Joey said bluntly. "Mostly real old."

"No pool? No tennis?"

"Hell, not even any grass."

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a blackjack dealer. Run roulette wheels sometimes."

"You work regularly?"

"When I need to."

"When the drinking doesn't get in the way?"

"When I can," Joey amended, remembering his promise to himself to deal with all of this truthfully. "Pays well, with the tips from the players. I can save up for when… when I have to take some time off. I do okay."

"But with your work record, always moving on, you don't find jobs in the new, flashy casinos very often any more."

"Not often," Joey agreed.

"Each job is in a seedier place than the one before."

"For a man who sounded so compassionate a minute ago, you sure are showing a cruel streak all of a sudden."

Kadinska's face reddened with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, Joey, but I'm just trying to make the point that you're not exactly in a position to walk away from an inheritance."

Joey was quietly adamant. "I don't deserve it, don't want it, won't take it. That's flat final. Anyway, nobody would buy that old house, and I sure as hell won't move back here to live in it."

Tapping the documents in the open file folder, Kadinska said, "The house has little value. You're right. But the house and its contents aren't the meat of this inheritance, Joey. There's more than a quarter of a million dollars in liquid assets — certificates of deposit and money-market accounts."

Joey's mouth went punk dry. His heart began to pound fiercely. The lawyer's office harbored a terrible darkness of which he had been dangerously unaware, and now it was rising up around him.

"That's crazy. Dad was a poor man."

"But your brother has been a success for a long time now. For about fourteen years, he's been sending your father a check every month, just like clockwork. A thousand dollars. I told you how it drove P.J. crazy that your dad wouldn't spend more than a little of it. Dan pretty much just banked check after check, and through what bankers like to call the miracle of compound interest, the principal has grown."

Joey's voice was shaky: "That's not my money. That belongs to P.J. It came from him, it should go back to him."

"But your father left it to you. All to you. And his will is a legal document."

"Give it to P.J. when he shows up," Joey insisted, and he headed for the office door.

"I suspect P.J. will want whatever your dad wanted. He'll say you should keep it all."

"I won't, I won't," Joey said, raising his voice.

Kadinska caught up with him in the reception lounge, took him by the arm, and halted him. "Joey, it's not that easy."

"Sure it is."

"If you really don't want it, then you have to renounce the inheritance.'

"I renounce it. I already did. Don't want it."

"A document has to be drawn, signed, notarized."

Although the day was cold and the office was on the chilly side, Joey had broken into a sweat. "How long will it take to put these papers together?"

"If you'll come back tomorrow afternoon—"

"No." Joey's heart was jackhammering almost hard enough to shatter the ribs and breastbone that caged it. "No, sir, I'm not staying here another night. I'm going to Scranton. A flight to Pittsburgh in the morning. Vegas from there. All the way out to Vegas. Mail me the papers.'

"That's probably better anyway," Kadinska said. "It'll give you more time to think, to reconsider."

At first the lawyer had seemed to be a gentle, bookish man. Not now.

Joey no longer saw kindness in the man's eyes. Instead he perceived the slyness of a bargainer for souls, something with scales under the disguise of skin, with eyes that in a different light would be like the sulfur-yellow eyes of the dog that had confronted him on the front porch a while ago.

He wrenched loose of the attorney's hand, shoved him aside, and made for the outer door in a state close to panic.

Kadinska called after him: "Joey, what's wrong?"

The hallway. Past the real-estate office. The dentist. Toward the stairs. He wanted desperately to be out in the fresh air, to be washed clean by the rain.

"Joey, what's the matter with you?"

"Stay away from me!" he shouted.

When he reached the head of the stairs, he halted so abruptly that he almost pitched to the bottom. He grabbed the newel post to keep

his balance.

At the foot of the steep stairs lay the dead blonde, bundled in a transparent tarp partly opaque with blood. The plastic was drawn tightly across her bare breasts, compressing them. Her nipples were visible but not her face.

One pale arm had slipped out of her shroud. Although she was dead, she reached out beseechingly.

He could not bear the sight of her mangled hand, the blood, the nail hole in her delicate palm. Most of all he was terrified that she would speak to him from behind her plastic veil and that he would be told things that he shouldn't know, mustn't know.