Dean Koontz - Dragonfly

Picking up his two pieces of luggage, he turned and looked at the busy crowd ebbing and flowing through the terminal. He paid particularly close attention to everyone in the vicinity of the Pan Am facilities, but he couldn't spot the men who had to be watching him — which meant they were damned good.

He turned his back on the Pan Am check-in counter and walked across the terminal toward the main entrance. He walked slowly at first, hoping he could get at least halfway to the doors before he alarmed the Committeemen who were surely watching him. Gradually he picked up speed and covered the last half of the lobby at a brisk walk. He glanced back and saw two obviously distraught men hurrying through the crowd, well behind him. Smiling, he went through the main doors.

Outside, he got into the first taxi line.

“Where to?” the driver asked. He was a young, mustachioed man with a broad scar on his chin and a broad smile above it.

Canning opened his wallet, which was thickened by five thousand dollars in U.S. currency and Japanese yen. This was the operational fund that McAlister had included in the packet that contained the Otley identification. Canning handed the driver a fifty-dollar bill and said, “There's a hundred more for you if you'll help me.”

“I'm no killer.”

“You don't have to be.”

“Then you name it,” he said, folding the bill and thrusting it into his shirt pocket.

“Get moving first.”

The driver put the cab in gear and pulled away from the terminal.

Looking through the rear window, Canning saw the two agents hail the next taxi in line.

“We being followed?” the cabbie asked.

“Yes.”

“Cops?”

“Does it matter?”

“For one-fifty in cash? I guess it doesn't.” He smiled at Canning in the rear-view mirror. “Want me to lose them?”

“No. I want them to follow us. Just keep them from getting too close.”

“That cab behind us?”

“That's right.” Canning looked back at it again. “Give them all the breaks. It isn't easy to run a tail at night.”

“Got you.”

“But don't be too obvious.”

The cabbie said, “Trust me. Where we going?”

“Do you know the Quality Inn on West Century Boulevard?” Canning asked.

“It's a little over a mile from here.”

“That's the one.”

“Sure. I've taken people there.”

“First, I want you to drop me in front of the lobby.”

“And then?”

Crisply, succinctly, with his characteristic orderliness, Canning told him the rest of it.

“One of the oldest tricks in the book,” the cabbie said, showing his broad white teeth in the mirror.

“You sound like an expert.”

“I watch the old movies.”

Canning grinned. “Think it'll work?”

“Sure. What you got going for you here's the simplicity of it. These guys won't be looking for anything that uncomplicated.”

“No trouble on your end?”

“Easiest money I ever made,” the cabbie said.

The other taxi stayed between a hundred and a hundred-fifty yards behind them, nearly far enough back to blend in with the other sets of headlights. Canning had no trouble keeping it in sight because one of its headlamps was dimmer than the other and flickered continuously. Just as, he thought, something about the tail end of this car individualized it and helped the Committeemen to keep it in sight.

“Here we are,” the driver said.

“You remember everything?”

“What's to remember?”

Before the screech of the brakes had died away, while the car was still rocking back and forth on its springs, Canning opened the door and got out. He grabbed both suitcases, kicked the door shut, and started toward the lobby entrance. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the flickering headlight of the other cab, which was now rushing across the motel parking lot.

The super-cooled lobby air snapped whiplike against his sweat-slicked face and sent shivers through him. At the back of his mind, just for a fraction of a second, there was a vivid picture of the dead man lying in blood on his kitchen floor. But the dead man was not Damon Hillary: he was David Canning, himself. He was standing over his corpse, looking down at his own dead body. He had shot himself. One David Canning had killed the other David Canning.

What the hell did that mean?

Forcing himself to walk slowly, he went past the front desk and on across the lobby. He entered a carpeted side corridor and kept going. He moved faster now.

None of the desk clerks called after him. He might have checked in earlier and left his bags in the car until he had eaten dinner. Or perhaps his wife had registered during the afternoon, and he was joining her. Or joining his mistress. Or his girl friend. Whatever the case, because he was tall and handsome and well dressed, he aroused no suspicion.

At the end of the corridor, he climbed a set of stairs, the two suitcases banging against his legs. He stopped at the top to catch his breath, and he looked down to the bottom of the stairwell.

It was silent, empty.

The two agents were either at the front desk or searching frantically through other parts of the motel maze in the hope of finding out which room he had entered.

He had to move.

In the second-floor corridor, with closed and numbered doors on both sides, Canning turned left and went to the intersection at the end of that wing. He turned right into another carpeted hall, and it was also silent, deserted. At the next set of stairs, he went back down to the first level, although he was now in a different wing from the motel lobby. He crossed a small concrete foyer that contained a rattling ice machine and two humming, clinking, syncopated soda vendors. Pushing open the outer door, he went into the parking lot at the rear of the motel.

The taxi was waiting there, lights on, engine running, and back door open wide.

Canning threw his suitcases inside, climbed in, closed the door, and laid down on the back seat.

“ Hot-diggity-damn! So far so good,” the driver said with sheer delight.

Massaging his strained, aching arms, Canning said “Back to the airport. Better move it.”

“Sure enough.”

After three or four minutes had passed, the cabbie said, “There's no one behind us.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive. I've been circling around through these back streets all alone. If anyone was following me, he'd be as obvious as a pimple on Raquel Welch's ass.”

Canning sat up. He straightened his suit coat and shirt collar, adjusted the knot in his tie, and shot his cuffs to what he considered the proper one-half inch beyond his coat sleeves. Then he took a hundred dollars from his wallet and gave it to the driver. “You do very good work.”

“I told you so. I watch the old movies.”

Smiling, Canning said, “Good thing I didn't get a cabdriver who was an opera buff.”

“He'd have told you to give yourself up and sing.”

Canning winced.

“Well, a pun is supposed to be bad.”

“It was.”

“If you're ever in town again and need to make a fast getaway,” the driver said, “don't forget me. Name's Harry Tollins.”

“I'll recommend you to all my friends, Harry.”

They got back to the airport in plenty of time for Canning to check in at the airline counter and pay for his ticket to Hawaii. There were even ten minutes for him to take a cup of coffee in the line's VIP lounge before he had to board the plane.

Forty-five minutes after the jet lifted off from Los Angeles International, a stewardess came back the aisle and stopped in front of Canning. “Mr. Otley?”

“Yes?”

She held out a folded sheet of beige stationery. “From Captain Giffords, sir.”