Dean Koontz - (1973) Read online

  SHATTERED

  by Dean R. Koontz

  SHATTERED was previously published in hardcover under the pseudonym of K. R. Dwyer.

  SHATTERED A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Random House edition published 1973

  Berkley edition / February 1985

  Copyright @ 1973 by Nkui, Inc.

  Back cover photo copyright @ Jerry Bauer.

  ISBN: 0-425-09933-4

  A BERKLEY BOOK c) TM 757,375

  MONDAY

  Only four blocks from the furnished apartment in Philadelphia, with more than three thousand miles to drive before they joined Courtney in San Francisco, Colin began one of his games. Colin thrived on his games, not those which required a board and movable pieces but those which were played inside the head-word games, idea games, elaborate fantasies. He was a very garrulous and precocious eleven-year-old with more energy than he was able to use. Slender, shy in the company of strangers, bothered by a moderately severe astigmatism in both eyes that required him to wear heavy eyeglasses at all times, he was not much for sports. He could not exhaust himself in a fast game of foot ball, because none of the athletic boys his own age wanted to play with someone who tripped over his own feet, dropped the ball, and was devastated by even the most delicate tackle. Besides, sports bored him. He was an intelligent kid, an avid reader, and he found his own games more fun than football.

  Kneeling on the front seat of the big car and looking out the rear window at the home he was leaving forever, he said, "We're being followed, Alex."

  "Are we now?"

  "Yeah. He was parked down the block when we put the suitcases in the trunk. I saw him. Now he's following us."

  Alex Doyle smiled as he wheeled the Thunderbird onto Lansdowne Avenue. "Big black limousine, is it?"

  Colin shook his head, his thick shoulderlength mop of brown hair flopping vigorously. "No. It's some kind of van. Like a panel truck."

  Alex looked in the rear-view mirror. "I don't see him."

  "You lost him when you turned the corner," Colin said. He pressed his stomach against the backrest, head thrust over the back seat. "There he is! See him now?" Nearly a block behind them, a new Chevrolet van turned the corner onto Lansdown Avenue. At five minutes past six o'clock on a Monday morning, it was the only other moving vehicle in sight.

  "I thought it was always a black 'limousine," Alex said. "In the movies, the heroes are always followed by a big black limousine.

  "That's only in the movies," Colin said, still watching the van, which remained a full block behind them. "Nobody's that obvious in real life."

  The trees on their right cast long black shadows across half the street and made dizzying, flickering patterns on the windshield. The first sun of May had risen somewhere to the east, still too far down the sky for Alex to see it. Crisp spring sunlight bathed the old two-story frame houses and made them new and fresh again.

  Invigorated by the early-morning air and by the spray of green buds on the trees, almost as excited as Colin was about the journey ahead of them, Alex Doyle thought he had never been happier. He handled the heavy car with ease, enjoying the quiet power at his disposal. They were going to be on the road a long time in terms of both hours and miles; but as imaginative as he was, Colin would provide better company than most adults.

  "He's still back there," Colin said.

  "I wonder why he's following us."

  Colin shrugged his thin shoulders but did not turn around. "Could be lots of reasons."

  "Name one."

  "Well . . . He could have heard that we were moving to California. He knows we'll take our valuables with us, see? Family treasures, things like that. So he follows us and runs us into a ditch on some lonely stretch of road and robs us at gunpoint."

  Alex laughed. "Family treasures? All you have is clothes enough for the trip. Everything else went out on the moving van a week ago, or it went with your sister on the plane. And I assure you that I've brought nothing more valuable than my wristwatch. " Colin was unperturbed by Doyle's amusement. "Maybe he's an enemy of yours.

  Someone with an old grudge to settle. He wants to get hold of you before you leave town."

  "I don't have any real friends in Philly," Alex said. "But I don't have any real enemies, either. And if he wanted to beat me up, why didn't he just catch me when I was putting our bags in the trunk?"

  Fluttering laces of sunshine and shadow flipped rapidly over the windshield. Ahead, a stoplight turned green just in time to spare Alex the inconvenience of braking.

  After a while Colin said, "Maybe he's a SPY.

  "A spy?" Alex asked.

  "A Russian or something."

  "I thought we were friends with the Russians these days," Alex said, looking at the van in the rear-view mirror and smiling again.

  "And even if we aren't friends with the Russians these days-why would a spy be interested in you or me?"

  "That's easy," Colin said. "He has us mixed up with someone else.

  He was assigned to tail someone living on our block, and he got confused."

  "I'm not scared of any spy who's that inept," Alex said. He reached out and fiddled with the air-conditioning controls, brought a gentle, cool breeze into the stuffy car.

  "He might not be a spy," Colin said, his attention captured by the unimposing little van. "He might be something else."

  "Like what?

  "Let me think about it awhile," the boy said.

  While Colin thought about what the man in the van might be, Alex Doyle watched the street ahead and thought about San Francisco. That hilly city was not just a geographical identity so far as Alex was concerned. To him, it was a synonym for the future and a symbol for everything that a man wanted in life. The new job was there, the innovative advertising agency that recognized and cultivated talented young commercial artists. The new house was there, the three-bedroom Spanish stucco on the edge of Lincoln Park, with its spectacular view of the Golden Gate area and the shaggy palm outside the masterbedroom window. And Courtney was there, of course.

  If she had not been, the new job and the house would not have meant anything. He and Courtney had met in Philadelphia, had fallen in love there, had been married in the city hall on Market Street, with her brother, Colin, as honorary best man and a woman from the Justice Department steno pool as their required adult witness. Then Colin had been packed off to stay two weeks with Alex's Aunt Pauline in Boston, while the newlyweds flew to San Francisco to honeymoon, to meet Alex's new employers to whom he had spoken only over the telephone, and to find and buy the house in which they would start their life together.

  It was in San Francisco, more than Philly, that the future took shape and meaning. San Francisco became the future. And Courtney became inextricably entwined with that city. In Doyle's mind, she was San Francisco, just as San Francisco was the future. She was golden and even-tempered, exotic, sensuous, intellectually intriguing, comfortable yet exciting-everything that San Francisco was. And now, as he thought about Courtney, the hilly streets and the crisp blue bay rose clearly on the screen behind his eyes.

  "He's still back there," Colin said, peering through the narrow rear window at the van.

  "At least he hasn't tried to run us into a ditch yet," Alex said.

  "He won't do that," Colin said.

  "He'll just tail us. He's a government man. "

  "FBI, is he?"

  "I think so," Colin said, grimly compressing his lips.

  "Why would he be after us?"

  "He's probably got us mixed up with someone else," Colin said.

  "He was assigned to tail some-radicals. He saw our long hair and got confused. He thinks we're the radicals."

  "Well," Alex said, "our o
wn spies are just as inefficient as the Russians', aren't they?"

  Doyle's smile was too large for his face, a generous curve that was punctuated at each end with a dimple. He held the smile both because he felt so damned fine and because he knew that it was the best thing about his face. In all his thirty years, no one had ever told him that he was handsome. Despite the fact that he was one-quarter Irish, there was too much strong-jawed Italian in him, too much of a Roman nose. Three months after they met, when they began to sleep together, Courtney had said, "Doyle, you are just not a handsome man. You're attractive, certainly, but not handsome.

  When you say that I look smashing, I want to reciprocate-but I just can't lie to you. But your smile . . . Now, that's perfect. When you smile, you even look a little bit like Dustin Hoffman." Already they were too honest with each other for Doyle to be hurt by what she'd said. Indeed, he had been delighted by the comparison: "Dustin Hoffman? You really think so?" She had studied him a moment, putting her hand under his chin and turning his face this way and that in the weak orange light of the bedside lamp. "When you smile, you look exactly like Hoffman-when he's trying to look ugly, that is." He had gaped at her. "When he's trying to look ugly, for Christ's sake?" She grimaced. "I meant . . . Well, Hoffman can't really look ugly, even when he tries. When you smile, then, you look like Hoffman but not as handsome . . ." He watched her trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing hole she'd dug, and he had begun to laugh. His laughter had infected her. Soon they were giggling like idiots, expanding on the joke and making it funnier, laughing until they were sick and then settling down and then making love with a paradoxically fierce affection. Ever since that night Doyle tried to remember to smile a lot.

  On the right-hand side of the street a sign announced the entrance to the Schuylkill E xpressway. "Give your FBI man a break," Alex told the boy. "Let him tail us in peace for a while. The expressway's coming up, so you better turn around and buckle your seatbelt."

  "Just a minute," Colin said.

  "No," Alex said. "Get your seatbelt on, or I'll also make you use the shoulder strap."

  Colin despised being bound up by both belts.

  'Half a minute," the boy said, straining even harder against the back of the seat as Alex drove the car onto the approach ramp leading up to the superhighway.

  "Colin-" The boy turned around and bounced down onto the seat. "I just wanted to see if he followed us onto the expressway. He did."

  "Well, of course he did," Alex said. "An FBI man wouldn't be restricted to the city limits. He could follow us anywhere."

  "Clear across the country?" the boy asked.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  Colin laid his head back against the seat and laughed. "That'd be funny. What would he do if he followed us clear across country and found out we weren't the radicals he was after?

  At the top of the ramp, Alex looked southeast at the two empty lanes of blacktop. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, and they started west. "You going to put your seatbelt on?"

  "Oh sure," Colin said, fumbling for the half of the buckle that was rolle up in the trough beside the passenger's door. "I forgot."

  He had not forgotten, of course. Colin never forgot anything. He just didn't like to wear the belt.

  Briefly taking his eyes from the empty highway ahead of them, Alex glanced sideways at the boy and saw him struggling with the two halves of the seatbelt. Colin grimaced, cursed the apparatus, making problems with it so Doyle would know just what he thought of being tied down like a prisoner.

  "You might as well grin and bear it," Alex said, grinning himself as he looked ahead at the highway again. "You're going to wear that belt the whole way to California, whether you like it or not."

  "I won't like it," Colin assured him. The seatbelt in place, he smoothed the wrinkles out of his King Kong T-shirt until the silkscreened photograph of the gigantic, raging gorilla was neatly centered on his frail chest. He pushed his thick hair out of his eyes and straightened the heavy wire-framed glasses which his button nose was hard-pressed to hold in place. "Thirty-one hundred miles," he said, watching the gray roadway roll under and behind them. The Thunderbird's power seat elevated high enough to give him a good view. "How long will it take to drive that far?"

  c won c o ing around ex sal "We ought to get into San Francisco Saturday morning."

  "Five days," Colin said. "Hardly more than six hundred miles a day." He sounded disappointed by the pace.

  "If you could spell me at the wheel," Alex said, "we'd do better.

  But I wouldn't want to handle much more than six hundred a day all by myself."

  "So why didn't Courtney drive out with us?" Colin asked.

  "She's getting the house ready. She met the movers there, and she's arranging for drapes and carpeting-all that stuff."

  "Did you know that when I flew up to Boston to stay with Pauline while you two were on your honeymoon-that was my first plane ride?"

  "I know," Alex said. Colin had talked about it for two solid days after he came back.

  "I really liked that plane ride."

  "I know."

  Colin frowned. "Why couldn't we sell this car and fly out to California with Courtney? "

  "You know the answer to that," Alex said.

  "The car's only a year old. A new car depreciates the most in its first year. If you want to get your money out of it, you keep it for three or four years."

  "You could afford the loss," Colin said, beginning to beat a quiet but insistent rhythm on his dungareed knees. "I heard you and Courtney talking. You'll be making a fortune in San Francisco."

  Alex held one palm out to dry it in the hushed breath of the air-conditioning vent on the dashboard. "Thirty-five thousand dollars a year is not a fortune."

  "I only get a three-dollar allowance," the boy said.

  "True enough," Alex said. "But I've got nineteen years of experience and training on you." The tires hummed pleasantly on the pavement.

  A huge truck hurtled by on the other side of the road, going in toward the city. It was the first traffic, besides the van, that they had seen.

  "Thirty-one hundred miles," Colin said. "That's just about one-eighth of the way around the world."

  Alex had to think a minute. "That's right."

  "If we kept driving and didn't stop in California, we'd need about forty days to circumnavigate the earth," Colin said, holding his hands around

  an imaginary globe at which he was staring intently.

  Alex remembered when the boy had first learned the word "circumnavigate" and had been fascinated with the sound and concept of it. For weeks he did not walk around the room or the block-he "circumnavigated" everything. "Well, we'd probably need more than forty days," Alex said. "I don't know what kind of driving time I can make on the Pacific Ocean."

  Colin thought that was funny. "I meant we could do it if there was a bridge," he said.

  Alex looked at the speedometer and saw that they were only making a moderate fifty miles an hour, twenty less than he had intended to maintain on this first leg of the journey. Colin was good company.

  Indeed, he was too good. If he kept distracting Alex, they'd need a month to get across the damn country.

  "Forty days," Colin mused. "That's half as long as they needed when Jules Verne wrote about it."

  Though he knew that Colin had been skipped ahead one grade in school and that his reading ability was still a couple of years in advance of that of his classmates, Alex was always surprised at the extent of the kid's knowledge. "You've read Around the World in Eighty Days, have you?"

  "Sure," Colin said. "A long time ago." He held his hands out in front of another vent and dried them as he had seen Doyle do.

  Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Doyle. He, too, had been a skinny, nervous kid whose palms were always damp. Like Colin, he had been shy with strangers, not much good at sports, an outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous weightlifting pr
ogram, determined to develop himself into another Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps hardened, he grew bored with weight-lifting and quit bothering with it.

  At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still, he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what it was like to be constantly selfconscious and never self-confident enough. Watching Colin dry his slender hands, Alex understood why he had taken an immediate liking to the boy and why they had seemed comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.

  "He still back there?" Colin asked, breaking into Alex's thoughts.

  "Who? "

  "The van."

  Alex checked the mirror. "He's there. He doesn't give up easily."

  "Can I look?"

  "You keep your belt on."

  "This is going to be a bad trip," Colin said morosely.

  "It will be if you don't accept the rules at the start " Alex agreed.

  Traffic' picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car and the van were the only things in sight.

  The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them. Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds. The hills, on both sides, were green.

  When they got on the Pennsylvania turnpike at Valley Forge and went west toward Harrisburg, Colin said, "What about our tail? "

  "Still there. Some poor FBI agent tracking the wrong prey."

  "He'll probably lose his job," Colin said.

  "That'll make an opening for me."

  "You want to be an FBI agent?"

  "I've thought about it," Colin admitted.

  Alex pulled the Thunderbird into the left lane, passed a car pulling a horse trailer. Two little girls about Colin's age were in the back seat of the car. They pressed against the side window and waved at Colin, who blushed and looked sternly ahead.

  "it wouldn't be dull in the FBI," Colin said.