Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

The two from the hospital attacked the first man. The janitor had some kind of club. He knocked the man down with it and then hit him, hit him, hit him.

Travis didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t look away. Nobody could be clubbed that hard, that often, and still be alive. Travis had never seen a man killed before, and even from a distance, it was so terrible that he had to lean against the windowsill to keep his trembling legs from failing him.

Nurses, a security guard, and other hospital workers rushed into the parking lot. They took the club away from the janitor, and they gathered around the beaten man as though they were concerned about him, but they were really just blocking him from the sight of anyone who, like Travis, might be at a window.

Already, an orderly and a doctor had appeared with a gurney. The physician was Kevin Flynn. Travis’s doctor. Flynn and the orderly, with the help of the security guard, began to lift the dead man onto the gurney.

Nobody seemed particularly interested in the janitor. They were not restraining him for the police.

Anyone just now looking out a window might think someone had collapsed of a heart attack and was fortunate to be so close to the aid he needed. The chase and the beating had lasted no more than a minute, most likely less. Perhaps no one but Travis had seen it.

One of the nurses turned toward the hospital and looked up, as if searching the windows for witnesses.

Hoping he had moved before her gaze could travel to his room, Travis stepped away from the glass. He backed into the armchair, almost fell over it, but instead fell into it.

He couldn’t think of anywhere to hide.

He waited for hurried footsteps in the hall, Dr. Flynn in his lab coat, the security guard, the janitor with the club in his hand once more.

But the second floor remained quiet.

From the chair, through the window, he could see only the gray sky. The clouds were as flat as an ironed sheet.

Travis thought of his mother and tried to picture her at work in the big kitchen at Meriwether Lewis Elementary. He couldn’t make that picture form in his mind.

He strove to imagine her in her car, the seven-year-old Honda with the slightly damaged fender, on her way to the hospital to visit him. His imagination failed him again.

Closing his eyes, covering his face with his hands, he struggled to raise the memory of her face, and he succeeded. When she was there in his mind’s eye, he wanted desperately to see her smiling, but her face remained without expression. Her eyes were as flat as the ironed clouds beyond the window.

Frost sat on one of the benches in Memorial Park as if to watch the feral pigeons-rock doves, the locals called them-pecking seeds from grass already beginning to wither toward the golden-gray shade with which it welcomed the winter.

The birds walked with mincing steps and bobbing heads. Most were dark gray, some were checkered, and a few were pied.

Frost had been surprised to learn that although some pigeons would migrate south, many would stay here all year. He had thought a Montana winter must be too severe for anything other than the likes of owls, eagles, turkeys, pheasants, and grouse.

For three days, he had been in Rainbow Falls and the surrounding countryside, and as far as he was concerned, nights in early October already had too sharp a bite.

Although the digital clock at the First National Bank said the current temperature was fifty-six degrees, the day felt colder than that to Frost. He wore insulated boots, jeans, and a ski jacket, but he wished he had put on a pair of long underwear, as well. In spite of his name, if offered a meager retirement in a shack in some low warm desert or a rich pension tied to a palace in snow country, he would have taken the former with no regrets, subsisting on rice, beans, and sunshine.

Now thirty-five, he doubted that he would live to retire. A case could be made that he might be fortunate if he survived the next few days.

Anyway, old age had no more appeal to him than did living in an ice castle. The way this country was going, the golden years would be years of iron and rust for most people.

Frost had been pretending to be fascinated with the pigeons for almost five minutes when Dagget appeared on the winding walkway. He was eating ice cream on a stick.

The two of them had more in common than they had differences, and one thing they shared was the pleasure of needling each other. Dagget was as comfortable in Montana as in Key West, and he chose to emphasize that fact by strolling through the park in shirtsleeves.

Not far from Frost’s bench stood a trash receptacle, and Dagget stopped beside it as if to dispose of the stick and his paper napkin after he finished the ice cream, of which little remained.

No one else was nearby, so Dagget said, “Warm enough for you?”

“I think it’s getting warmer,” Frost said.

“Me too. Spent any time with your police scanner this morning?”

“More than the usual traffic,” Frost said, referring to the recent flurry of communications among the local police.

“Yeah. Very crisp, no chitchat. And what’s this code they’re using?”

“I don’t know. Tried working with it on my laptop. It won’t be broken easily.”

“So this time the whistle-blower blew some truth.”

Unfortunately, the information that launched this investigation had given them no sense of what was coming down in Rainbow Falls, only that it must be something of importance.

Frost said, “Chief Jarmillo’s been on the move. The hospital. Elementary school. High school. This country-western roadhouse out past the edge of town. Hard to see how any of it’s policework.”

They had placed a transponder on Jarmillo’s cruiser, which transmitted his constant whereabouts to an antitheft service on a commercial satellite, from which Frost periodically downloaded-hacked might be the more honest term-the chief’s itinerary.

Along the park pathway came a middle-aged man on a skateboard. His beard was unkempt, his ponytail tied with a blue cord. He wore khakis, two layers of flannel shirts, and a toboggan cap. Without glancing at either of them, he shot past.

“Only a loser?” Dagget asked.

“Definitely just a loser.”

“I keep thinking we’ve been made.”

“Why?” Frost asked. “Your room been tossed or something?”

Dropping the ice-cream stick and the napkin in the trash can, Dagget said, “No good reason. I just have this creepy feeling… I can’t explain it.”

Frost and Dagget were FBI agents, though a kind of which even the Director had no knowledge. Their names appeared nowhere on the official rolls of the Bureau.

“Personally,” Frost said, “I think no one’s interested in us. I was going to suggest we can start working together safely if you want.”

“Works for me,” Dagget said. “I get the feeling any moment now we’re going to need each other for backup.”

As one, with a furious beating of the air, the flock of pigeons flew.

Riding shotgun, Michael phoned Erika Swedenborg to tell her that they were en route and would be at her door in a few minutes. Because they had been in San Francisco when she called them less than an hour earlier, their arrival surprised her.

Michael said, “Our elderly friend knew a shortcut. We took a right turn at nevermore and then a hard left at everafter.”