Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

They set right to work unloading the trunk of the Cadillac. Juliette carried the bag of shredded dog’s-eye drawings, and Billy toted the wastebasket full of e-mail files.

The funeral home had two superefficient Power-Pak II Cremation Systems, and one of them was ready to be fired up.

Billy left the wastebasket full of e-mails with Juliette, and by the time he returned with the brain to Brian McCarthy’s computer, she had fed all the papers into the cremator. He tossed in the bag of shredded drawings, and pointing to the computer logic unit, he said, “I want to pour something corrosive into it.”

“Why, if we’re going to burn it down to char and twisted scrap?”

“I like to be double sure.”

“Billy, I’m having a rotten day, don’t bust my chops.”

“Well, you know cremators better than I do. You say it’ll do the job, that’s good enough for me.”

Before he could move, she snared the logic unit with one hand, swung it up and into the cremator as if it weighed less than a dead cat. Juliette hated cats, and more than a few of them had most likely gone through this Power-Pak II.

She was a beautiful woman and hard and strong, but she was not a good person.

“What kind of rotten day?” he asked as she closed the cremator door and fired up the burner.

“Gunny wants it to get more serious between us.”

The thought of those two in bed seemed, to Billy, to be about as serious as sex could get, except maybe if a grizzly bear tried to get it on with a puma.

“He wants to dump the wife in San Francisco and marry me. She’s Chinese, has some connection to China ’s military-security apparatus, and she collects knives. I don’t know what Gunny’s thinking.”

“Gunny has a hopeless romantic streak,” Billy said, which was true.

“Tell me about it. He says, just shacking up with me doesn’t fulfill him like marriage would. I’m his destiny, he says.”

“I could talk to him.”

“I’m nobody’s destiny, Billy, except mine. The thing is, I’ve been thinking of ending it with him even before this, but he’s as tight with Harrow as you are, and I don’t want Gunny getting pissy and bad-mouthing me to Harrow.”

“He’s maybe not as important to Harrow as you think.”

“Is that right? Well, anyway, he’s such a big sonofabitch, he scares me.”

“We go way back, Gunny and me. I can talk to him so he doesn’t get a mad-on for you.”

“Could you? Would you? That would be great. He’s up on the top floor, making dinner.”

She maintained a large and beautifully furnished apartment above the funeral home.

“I could go up there and see him,” Billy said, “or you could get on the intercom and ask him to come down here.”

“I just redid the kitchen cabinetry.”

“What was wrong with the old cabinets? They were beautiful.”

“Too dark,” Juliette said. “All that egg-and-dart crown molding. I wanted a lighter, more modern look.”

“Are you happy with it?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s gorgeous.”

“Good cabinetry can bust your bank these days.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So ask him to come down here.”

She used the intercom in the garage, just outside the door to the crematorium. “Hey, Big Gun,” she said, “are you there?”

Gunny’s voice issued from the intercom speaker: “What’s up?”

“I’ve got a really fat dead guy here I need some help with.”

“What about Herman and Werner?”

They were her brothers and business partners.

“Viewing hours are over. They went home,” she said. “We weren’t expecting a stiff.”

“I’ve got to keep an eye on the rack of lamb.”

“I just need help getting the stiff into the cooler. One minute. He’s a big old hog of a guy or I could do it myself.”

“Be right there.”

Because it had to accommodate a casket, the elevator was large, but quieter than Billy expected.

When the doors opened, Gunther Schloss looked as big as a steer in a rodeo pen.

He said, “Shit,” and Billy shot him three times while he was upright, once while he was falling, and four times as he lay half in and half out of the elevator.

“Is he dead?” Juliette asked.

“He ought to be.”

“You want to check for a pulse?”

“Not yet,” Billy said, and shot Gunny two more times.

He would have shot Gunny four more times, but no rounds remained in the pistol.

Billy ejected the empty magazine and snapped a full one into the pistol, and during that quarter of a minute, Gunny didn’t move.

“Okay, he’s dead. I guess that was the easy part, after all.”

“It could have gone different,” Juliette said.

“It could have, you’re right. But I’m fifty now, and the part that’s getting not so easy for me is this hauling-them-around part.”

“Piece of cake, Bookworm. In this business, I’m always moving dead weight.”

She went away and returned in less than a minute, rolling a state-of-the-art hydraulic gurney.

Only the push of a button was required to lower the stainless-steel bed of the gurney until it was two inches from the floor.

With little difficulty, Billy and Juliette wrestled the corpse facedown onto the stainless steel.

She pressed the button again, and the bed rose to its usual height, bearing the cadaver.

“Excellent,” Billy said.

They rolled the gurney into the crematorium. Juliette adjusted the height of the bed to match the door on the second cremator, and then the bed telescoped forward, carrying Gunny into the furnace.

Holding a toilet plunger by its long wooden handle, pressing the rubber suction cup against Gunny’s head, Juliette held the body in the crematorium while the telescoping bed retracted into its original position.

“That’s damn clever,” Billy said, indicating the plunger.

Hearing this simple praise, Juliette ducked her head almost shyly. “A technique I developed.”

As the woman closed the door and fired up the furnace, Billy said, “Gunny makes the best rack of lamb. Sorry if it’s overdone.”

“I’m sure it’ll be perfect. You want to stay for dinner?”

“I’d love to, but I can’t. My day isn’t done yet.”

“You work too hard, Billy.”

“I’m gonna slow down.”

“How long have you been saying that?”

“I mean it this time,” he assured her.

“All you do is work. You don’t take care of yourself.”

“I’m having a colonoscopy next week.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, I’m good. My internist just recommends it at my age.”

“Maybe he’s some kind of pervert.”

“No. He doesn’t do the exam. I go to a specialist for that.”

“Me, I’ve got high cholesterol.”

“Have an arterial scan. I did. My cholesterol’s high, too, but they didn’t find any plaque.”

“It’s all about genes, Billy. If you have good genes, you can eat nothing but fried cheese and doughnuts, live to be a hundred.”

“You look like good genes to me,” he told her.

From the funeral home, Billy drove the Shumpeter Cadillac to the hotel where he had previously booked luxurious accommodations in the name of Tyrone Slothrop.

He left the Cadillac with the valet, presented his Slothrop American Express card to the registration clerk, and got his key. He carried the white trash bag to the elevator and went up to his suite.

Harrow wanted to see everything in the bag, especially the snapshots from Amy Redwing’s previous life. Until Billy could turn the bag over to Harrow, he needed to keep it safe.

The suite consisted of an immense overfurnished living room, two large overfurnished bedrooms, and two baths. The bathrooms were glittering wonderments of marble and mirror.