Dean Koontz: What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

John glimpsed something on the orderly’s right palm that he had not noticed previously: a red, blue, and black tattoo, the eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps.

“You serve over there?”

“Two tours.”

“Hard duty.”

Hanes shrugged. “That whole country’s a mental hospital, just a lot bigger than this place.”

“In your view, does Billy Lucas belong in a mental hospital?”

The orderly’s smile was as thin as a filleting knife. “You think he should be in an orphanage?”

“I’m just trying to understand him. He’s too young for adult prison, too dangerous for any youth correctional facility. So maybe he’s here because there was nowhere else to put him. Do you think he’s insane … ?”

Hanes finished his coffee. He crushed the paper cup in his fist. “If he’s not insane, what is he?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“I thought you had the answer. I thought I heard an implied or at the end of the question.”

“Nothing implied,” John assured him.

“If he’s not insane, his actions are. If he’s something other than insane, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He tossed the crumpled cup at a wastebasket, and scored. “I thought the case was closed. What did they send you here for?”

John didn’t intend to reveal that he had never been assigned to the case. “Was the boy given my name before he met me?”

Hanes shook his head slowly, and John thought of a tank turret coming to bear on a target. “No. I told him he had a visitor he was required to see. I once had a sister, John. She was raped, murdered. I don’t give Billy’s kind any more than I have to.”

“Your sister—how long ago?”

“Twenty-two years. But it’s like yesterday.”

“It always is,” John said.

The orderly fished his wallet from a hip pocket and flipped directly to the cellophane sleeve in which he kept a photo of his lost sister. “Angela Denise.”

“She was lovely. How old is she there?”

“Seventeen. Same age as when she was killed.”

“Did they convict someone?”

“He’s in one of the new prisons. Private cell. Has his own TV. They can get their own TV these days. And conjugal visits. Who knows what else they get.”

Hanes put away his wallet, but he would never be able to put away the memory of his sister. Now that John Calvino knew about the sister, he read Hanes’s demeanor as less phlegmatic than melancholy.

“I told Billy I was Detective Calvino. I never mentioned my first name. But the kid called me Johnny. Made a point of it.”

“Karen Eisler at the reception desk—she saw your ID. But she couldn’t have told Lucas. There’s no phone in his room.”

“Is there any other explanation?”

“Maybe I lied to you.”

“That’s one possibility I won’t waste time considering.” John hesitated. Then: “Coleman, I’m not sure how to ask this.”

Hanes waited, as still as sculpture. He never fidgeted. He never made a sweeping gesture when a raised eyebrow would do as well.

John said, “I know he was transferred here only four days ago. But is there anything you’ve noticed he does that’s … strange?”

“Besides trying to pee on you?”

“Not that it happens to me all the time, but that isn’t what I mean by strange. I expect him to be aggressive one way or another. What I’m looking for is … anything quirky.”

Hanes considered, then said, “Sometimes he talks to himself.”

“Most of us do, a little.”

“Not in the third person.”

John leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me.”

“Well, I guess it’s usually a question. He’ll say, ‘Isn’t it a nice day, Billy?’ Or ‘This is so warm and cozy, Billy. Isn’t it warm and cozy?’ The thing he most often asks is if he’s having fun.”

“Fun? What does he say, exactly?”

“ ‘Isn’t this fun, Billy? Are you having fun, Billy? Could this be any more fun, Billy?’ ”

John’s coffee had gone cold. He pushed the cup aside. “Does he ever answer his own questions aloud?”

Coleman Hanes thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“He doesn’t take two sides of a conversation?”

“No. Mostly just asks himself questions. Rhetorical questions. They don’t really need an answer. It doesn’t sound all that strange, I guess, until you’ve heard him do it.”

John found himself turning his wedding band around and around on his finger. Finally he said, “He told me that he likes books.”

“He’s allowed paperbacks. We have a little hospital library.”

“What kind of thing does he read?”

“I haven’t paid attention.”

“True-crime stories? True-murder?”

Hanes shook his head. “We don’t have any of those. Not a good idea. Patients like Billy find books like that … too exciting.”

“Has he asked for true-crime books?”

“He’s never asked me. Maybe someone else.”

From a compartment in his ID wallet, John extracted a business card and slid it across the table. “Office number’s on the front. I wrote my home and cell numbers on the back. Call me if anything happens.”

“Like what?”

“Anything unusual. Anything that makes you think of me. Hell, I don’t know.”

Tucking the card in his shirt pocket, Hanes said, “How long you been married?”

“It’ll be fifteen years this December. Why?”

“The whole time we’ve been sitting here, you’ve been turning the ring on your finger, like reassuring yourself it’s there. Like you wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

“Not the whole time,” John said, because he had only a moment earlier become aware of playing with the wedding band.

“Pretty much the whole time,” the orderly insisted.

“Maybe you should be the detective.”

As they rose to their feet, John felt as if he wore an iron yoke. Coleman had a burden, too. John flattered himself to think he carried his weight with a grace that matched that of the orderly.

4

THE ENGINE OBEYED THE KEY AND TURNED OVER SMOOTHLY, but then a hard thump shuddered the Ford. Startled, John Calvino glanced at the rearview mirror to see what had collided with the back bumper. No vehicle occupied the driveway behind him.

Still under the hospital portico, leaving the engine idling, he got out and went to the back of the car. In the cold air, clouds of white exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, but he could see clearly that everything was as it should be.

He stepped to the passenger side, which likewise revealed no damage, and got down on one knee to peer beneath the car. Nothing sagged from the undercarriage, nothing leaked.

The knock had been too loud and too forceful to have been of no importance.

He raised the hood, but the engine compartment revealed no obvious problem.

Perhaps his wife, Nicolette, had stowed something in the trunk, and it had fallen over. He leaned in through the open driver’s door, switched off the engine, and plucked the keys from the ignition. When he unlocked the trunk, he found it empty.

Behind the wheel, he started the engine again. The thump and shudder were not repeated. All seemed well.

He drove away, under the dripping limbs of the purple beeches, off the grounds of the state hospital, and more than a mile along the county road before he found a section of the shoulder wide enough to allow him to park well clear of the pavement. He left the engine running but switched off the windshield wipers.

The car seat had power controls. He put it back as far as it would go from the steering wheel.

He had stopped in a rural area, flat fields to the left of the highway, a rising meadow to the right. On the slope were a few oak trees, almost black against the tall pale grass. Nearer, between the shoulder of the road and the meadow, stood a ramshackle split-rail fence, waiting for wood rot and weather to bring it down.