Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Vanessa phoned during their lunch. “You’ll be going through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“I didn’t realize it would be this far.”

“You’re going to whine at me, Bry?”

“No. I’m just saying.”

“Ten years of my life are crap because I had to take care of our Piggy Pig, and now you’re going to whine about one day on the road?”

“Forget I said anything. You’re right. Once we cross the bridge, what?”

“Stay north on 101. I’ll call with details. Anyway, Bry, you couldn’t have flown to San Francisco and driven from there. Not on short notice, not with the dog.”

He glanced out the window at Nickie in the Expedition. “So you really are watching us.”

“My nervous little rich boy says what if the dog’s wired by some scandal-crazy tabloid-TV show. You believe that? The dog ?”

“I told you, I won’t risk blowing this deal.”

“I know you won’t, Bry. His security people were going to do an electronic sweep of you, your SUV, soon as you got here. Now they’ll also sweep the dog. Maybe there’s a microphone built into its collar. Maybe there’s a power pack up its butt. Isn’t that hysterical?”

“If you say so.”

“See you soon, Bry.”

She terminated the call.

Brian picked at the second half of his meal, and Amy seemed to have lost her appetite, too.

“I want it over,” he said. “I just want Hope away from her.”

“Then let’s hit the road,” Amy said.

Back at the Expedition, Nickie got out to take a pee and then graciously accepted two cookies as a reward for having been such a patient girl.

After the dog sprang into the back of the SUV once more and turned to Brian as he stood at the tailgate, he met her stare and held it. On this clouded day, Nickie’s warm-molasses gaze was not brightened by refracted sunshine, but full of shadows, steady and direct and dark.

For a moment, he felt nothing strange, but then the centripetal force of these eyes seemed to pull him toward them. He felt his heart quickening, and his mind was bright with a perception of deep mystery and with the desire to understand it that had led him to draw so many studies of her eyes with such obsession.

In his memory rose the complex and enfolding sound: hiss, whizz, soft clicking, rustle and flump, deep throb and ruffle, crumpcrump-crumpcrump-

The sound stopped abruptly when the dog turned away from him and went forward into the cargo area.

Brian became aware of the traffic noise in the street rising slowly from the hush into which he had not until now realized that it had fallen.

He closed the tailgate and went around to the front passenger door. Amy had expressed the desire to drive.

In the car, on the open road, they would have privacy. Secrets could more easily be shared.

On the interstate, bound for the storied city, she was silent for a while but then said, “When I was eighteen, I married a man named Michael Cogland. He probably intended to kill me from the day that I accepted his proposal.”

The previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.

As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.

Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.

To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did mattered . Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to building something, to a legacy !

He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.

The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.

He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.

With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.

In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.

Then he cruised.

During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS and ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS.

When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.

In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.

He had never been so scared in his life.

When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.

The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.

He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.

At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.

Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.

Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.

Driving toward the city where so many people had claimed to have left their hearts, Amy unburdened hers.

In her senior year at Misericordiæ, she won a scholarship from a major university. Because it was partial, she had to support herself.

For two years in high school, she had worked part-time as a waitress. She had liked the job and had earned good tips.

When she went away to university, she landed a job in an upscale steakhouse. There she met Michael Cogland, a regular customer, when he was twenty-six, eight years her senior.