Dean Koontz - Night Chills

“I’ll go back to the church.”

“God be with you.”

“Good luck.”

They both hung up.

Saturday, August 27, 1977

12:10 A.M.

THE WIND RAISED a steady, haunting whooooo! in the highest reaches of the trees. Thunder rumbled frequently, each peal louder and more unsettling than the one that had come before it. Above the forest, the sky periodically blazed with lightning; the electric glow pulsed down through the canopy of interlaced branches and left in its wake a series of stroboscopic images that dazzled the eye.

In the dense underbrush, small animals scampered this way and that, busily searching for food or water or companionship or safety. Or perhaps, Paul thought as one of them dashed across the path and startled him, they were frightened of the oncoming storm.

Paul and Sam had expected to find armed guards rather than animals at the edge of the woods that surrounded the mill, but there were none. Although all of the lights were on in the main building, the structure seemed — as did the land around it— deserted.

They circled through the woods. Eventually they came to the employee parking lot and studied the scene from behind a thick clump of laurel.

The helicopter was there, on the macadam, thirty feet away. A man stood beside it in the darkness, smoking a cigarette, watching the lightning and the fast-moving clouds.

Paul whispered: “Dawson or Klinger?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said.

“Neither do I.”

“Then he’s the pilot.”

“You see a gun?” “No. Nothing.”

“Move in now?" “Wait.”

“For what?”

“The right moment.”

They watched.

A few seconds later the pilot dropped his cigarette and crushed it under the sole of his shoe. He put his hands in his pockets and began to walk aimlessly about, just killing time. At first he came toward the trees, wandered within ten or twelve feet of them, then turned and went back the way he’d come.

“Quickly,” Sam said.

Paul stood up. He eased through the laurel and ran after the pilot.

The man heard him and turned. His face was a black mask, but his eyes seemed phosphorescent. “Who—”

“I am the key,” Paul said.

“I am the lock.” “Speak softly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Paul looked beyond the helicopter. He could see the windows

— most of them with light behind them — on the second and third floors of the main building at the end of the storage yard. If he could see the windows, anyone who happened to glance Out might be able to see him, in turn, despite the darkness. He hustled the pilot closer to the helicopter, where they were pretty much hidden from the main building.

Sam joined them and said, “What’s your name?”

“Malcolm Spencer.”

“You are the pilot?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Where’s Leonard Dawson?”

“In the mill,” Spencer said.

“Which building?”

“The biggest one.”

“Which floor? First, second, or third?”

“First floor. There’s a sort of public sales area with—.”

“And Ernst Klinger,” Sam said. “Where’s he?”

“He’s in Black River,” Spencer said.

“That can’t be right.”

“Sir?”

“You mean he’s in town?” Paul asked.

“That’s right.”

Paul and Sam glanced at each other.

“Something wrong?” the pilot asked. He seemed to be concerned about them.

“You’re lying,” Paul said.

Surprised, Spencer said, “No, sir.”

“I am the lock,” Paul said.

“I am the key,” Spencer said.

“Where’s Klinger?”

“He’s in Black River.”

Paul stared at Sam. “Christ!”

To the pilot, Sam said, “You took Klinger and Dawson to the logging camp, didn’t you? And then brought them to the mill?”

“No. Just Mr. Dawson. General Klinger went to town from the camp.”

“When?”

“A couple of minutes after we got there,” Spencer said. He smiled uncertainly. His teeth seemed even more radiant than his eyes.

“How did he go? Not in the chopper?”

“No, sir. He took a car.”

“Why-”

Before he could get out more than one word of the question, Sam screamed and stumbled forward against the helicopter.

In the same instant, the night silence was split open by a single rifle shot.

Instinctively, Paul dropped to the ground and rolled.

A bullet cracked into the pavement where he’d just been, ricocheted into the darkness.

A second bullet smashed the macadam on the other side of him, bracketing him.

He rolled onto his back and sat up. He saw the rifleman at once: down on one knee in a sportsman’s pose, thirty feet away at the edge of the woods. On the drive from town, Paul had reloaded the Combat Magnum; now he held it with both hands and squeezed off five quick shots.

All of them missed the mark.

However, the sharp barking of the revolver and the deadly whine of all those bullets skipping across the pavement apparently unnerved the man with the rifle. Instead of trying to finish what he had begun, he stood and ran.

Paul scrambled to his feet, took a few steps after him and fired once more.

Untouched, the rifleman headed away in a big loop that would take him back to the mill complex.

“Sam?”

“Here.”

He could barely see Sam — dark clothes against the macadam

— and was thankful for the older man’s telltale white hair and beard. “You were hit.”

“In the leg.”

Paul started toward him. “How bad?”

“Flesh wound,” Sam said. “That was Dawson. Get after him, for God’s sake.”

“But if you’re hurt—”

“I’ll be fine. Malcolm can make a tourniquet. Now get after him, dammit!”

Paul ran. At the end of the parking area he passed the rifle: it was on the ground; Dawson had either dropped it by accident and had been too frightened to stop and retrieve it — or he bad discarded it in panic. Still running, Paul fished in his pocket with one hand for the extra bullets he was carrying.

12:15 A.M.

The wooden tower stairs creaked under Klinger’s weight. He paused and counted slowly to thirty before going up three more steps and pausing again. If he climbed too fast, the woman and the girl would know that he was coming. And if they were ready and waiting for him — well, he would be committing suicide when he walked onto the belfry platform. He hoped that, by waiting for thirty seconds or as much as a minute between brief advances, he could make them think that the creaking stairs were only settling noises or a product of the wind.

He went up three more steps.

12:16 A.M.

Ahead, Dawson disappeared around a corner of the mill.

When he reached the same corner a moment later, Paul stopped and studied the north work yard: huge stacks of logs that had been piled up to feed the mill during the long winter; several pieces of heavy equipment; a couple of lumber trucks: a conveyor belt running on an inclined ramp from the mill to the maw of a big furnace where sawdust and scrap wood were incinerated. There were simply too many places out there in which Dawson could hide and wait for him.

He turned away from the north yard and went to the door in the west wall of the building, back the way he had come, thirty feet from the corner. It wasn’t locked.

He stepped into a short, well-lighted corridor. The enormous processing room lay at the end of it: the bull chain leading from the mill pond, up feeding shoots, into the building; then a crosscut saw, a log deck, the carriage that moved logs into the waiting blades that would make lumber of them, the giant band saw, edging machine, trimmer saws, dip tank, grading ramp, the green chain, and then the storage racks. He remembered all of those terms from a tour that the manager had given Rya