Dean Koontz - The Taking

"After a year of isolation," he said now, "I'd all but forgotten the feel of your mother-the taste of her mouth, the weight of her breasts. I had cheap whores who stayed in memory better." A smile, a shrug. "Your mother was a boring porcelain bitch."

"Shut up." Molly couldn't summon any volume, only a whisper. As always, Render insisted on dominance, and to her chagrin, Molly was unable to assert herself, as though twenty years had dropped out from under her, plunging her into childhood again. "Shut up."

"After two years, the memory of your head-shot, gut-shot little playmates didn't do it for me anymore, either. A bullet is just too impersonal. A bullet isn't a blade, and a blade isn't bare hands. I've found that strangulation stays vivid in the memory. It's much more intimate than merely pulling a trigger. I stiffen even now at the thought of it."

Molly drew the pistol from her raincoat pocket.

"Ah," he said with evident satisfaction, as though the intention behind his visit to the tavern had been to taunt her into precisely this confrontation. "I've come a long way through bad weather to ask you a few questions-but first to tell you a little story, so you'll better understand your dear old dad."

The moment was increasingly surreal. Claustrophobic. Paralytic. Emblematic.

She stood at the vise point between the jaws of the past and the future, both pressing hard and insistently upon her, constraining her breath, denying her mobility, pinching her voice in her throat.

"I've spent twenty years under lock and key. Internal darkness, deprivation. At least you owe me a friendly ear for a moment. Just one little story, and then I'll go."

Twenty years earlier, when he destroyed his last hope of winning legal custody of Molly, Michael Render resorted to the instrument of persuasion that he now claimed to find unsatisfactory: the gun. He had come to her elementary school to take her from her classroom. Having asked to see his daughter on some pretense that the principal had found unconvincing, Render realized that he'd aroused suspicion, whereupon he pulled a pistol and shot the principal dead.

"After five years of treatment," he told her now, "I was sent to a facility with lower security standards. They had large, lovely grounds. The best-behaved patients who had made the most progress in their therapy, who were judged to have reached a point of remorse on a journey to contrition, were encouraged to work in the various gardens if they wished."

With the principal dead, Render had gone in search of Molly's third-grade classroom, killing one member of the faculty en route and wounding two others. He found her room and grievously wounded her teacher, Mrs. Pasternak, and would have abducted Molly if the police had not then arrived.

"In the gardens, we wore an electronic shackle around one ankle, which would trigger an alarm in the security office if we ventured farther than allowed. I made no attempt to escape. There was a fence, after all, and a world outside that knew my face too well. I became something of a horticulturist, specializing in roses."

With the arrival of the police, he had taken Molly and twenty-two other children hostage. He wasn't a stupid man-in fact he had earned two university degrees-and therefore knew that having killed two and wounded three, he could not hope to negotiate freedom for himself. By then, however, his ever-simmering anger, which was the essence of his personality, had grown into a fiery rage, and he determined that if he could not have the control of the daughter that he had for so long pursued, then he would deny other parents the pleasure of their children's company.

"One day, as I worked alone in the rose garden, what should appear before me but a nine-year-old boy with a disposable camera."

Render had killed five of the twenty-two children before Molly shot him. He'd brought two pistols and spare magazines of ammunition. After reloading both guns, he'd reacted with such fury to something he heard from a police bullhorn outside that in his rage he left one weapon lying on the teacher's desk, and turned his back on it.

His voice these twenty years later, colored by something darker than his usual anger, mesmerized her: "On a dare, to prove his courage to his pals, the boy had cut a hole in a far corner of the fence, distant from the actual sanitarium buildings, and had crept across the grounds, hoping to photograph one of the infamous patients as evidence of his nerve."

Although only eight years old and unfamiliar with firearms, Molly had picked up the second pistol from the teacher's desk. Gripping it with both hands, she squeezed off three shots. Rocked and terrified by the recoil, she still managed to hit Render twice-first in the back, then in the right thigh-and fortunately harmed no one with the third shot, which lodged in a wall.

"The infamous patient the boy chanced to come across was me," said Render. "He was skittish, but I charmed him, mugged for the camera, and let him take eight photographs there among the roses."

When Render, having been shot twice, crashed to the schoolroom floor, the seventeen surviving children fled. In their wake, a SWAT team entered to find Molly weeping at the side of her badly wounded teacher, who would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

"By the end of our little photo shoot, the boy had let down his guard. I hit him very hard in the face, and hit him again, and then strangled him there among the roses. The experience would have been even more satisfying if he'd been a young girl, but you have to work with what you're given."

Later on that bloody day, twenty years before this current encounter, Molly had wondered how she could have wounded him twice with three shots even though she had never handled a gun before, though she had been shaking with terror, though three times the punishing recoil had nearly knocked her off her feet. That she had been able to stop him seemed a miracle.

"Not far from the rose garden was an old cistern, an enormous stonewalled underground tank. They'd once had a complex rainwater-collection system that funneled runoff into the cistern to be used for maintenance of the landscaping in dry months."

Molly had told her mother that some spirit had been with her on that awful day, an angel that could have no influence with Render but could guide her and steady her to do what must be done.

"The cistern hadn't been used in sixty years. They left it there because the cost of tearing it out was prohibitive."

Thalia had assured young Molly that she-and she alone-deserved the credit for her courage, for what she'd done. Angels, Thalia said, didn't work their miracles with guns.

"Using gardening tools, I pried off the cistern lid and dropped the boy into that hole. So dark in there, and such a stench. Shallow water far below. He landed with a splash, and a chorus of rats squeaking in fright."

In spite of her mother's well-meaning counsel, Molly believed then, and to this day, that some guiding spirit had been with her in that schoolroom.

She felt no spirit now, however, and was inexpressibly grateful for the pistol in her hand.

"I buried his little disposable camera at the foot of a rosebush. It was the Cardinal Mindszenty rose, so named because of its glorious robe-red color."

Render moved, not toward her-and risk being shot-but around her, slowly circling away from the toilet stalls, in the direction of the sinks.

"Police came looking for the boy, of course, but they took some time to find him. The rats had done their work. But better yet, the bottom of the cistern had cracked and broken out ages ago. The boy had settled into a natural limestone catacomb under the cistern. His condition, when they discovered him, didn't give the CSI techies much to work with."

Slowly Render moved past the first sink, then past the second.