Dean Koontz - (1973) Read online

  "oh, I don't know about that. it might be pretty boring when you have to follow a crook for weeks before he does something exciting."

  "Well, it can't be any more boring than sitting under a seatbelt all the way to California, " Colin said.

  God, Alex thought, I walked into that one. He took the car into the right lane again, set the automatic accelerator for an even seventy miles per hour so that if Colin got too interesting they would still make decent time. "When that guy following us gets us on a lonely stretch of road and runs us into a ditch, you'll thank me for making you wear your belt. It'll save your life."

  Colin turned and looked at him, his big brown eyes made even larger by the eyeglasses. "I guess you aren't going to give in."

  "You guessed right."

  Colin sighed. "You're more or less my father now. Aren't you?"

  "I'm your sister's husband. But . . . Since your sister has custody of you, I guess you could say I have a father's right to make rules you'll live by."

  Colin shook his head, brushed his long hair out of his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe it was better being an orphan."

  "Oh, you think so, do you?" Doyle asked, full of mock anger.

  "If you hadn't come along, I wouldn't have gotten a plane ride to Boston," Colin admitted. "I wouldn't get to go to California either.

  But . . . I don't know."

  "You're too much," Doyle said, ruffling the boy's hair with one hand.

  Sighing loudly, as if he needed the patience of job in order to get along with Doyle, the boy smoothed his mussed hair with a comb he kept in his hip pocket. He put the comb away, straightened his King Kong T-shirt. "Well, I'll have to think about it. I'm just not sure yet."

  The engine was silent. The tires made almost no noise on the well-surfaced roadbed.

  Five minutes slipped by without awkwardness; they were comfortable enough with each other to endure silence. However, Colin grew restless and began to tap wildly elaborate rhythms on his bony knees.

  "You want to find something on the radio?" Alex asked.

  Is "I'll have to unbuckle my seatbelt."

  "Okay. But just for a minute or two."

  The boy relished the slithering retreat of the cloth belt. for an instant he was on his knees on the seat, turned and looking out the car window. "He's still behind us!"

  "Hey!" Alex said. "you're supposed to be finding a radio station."

  Colin turned and sat down. "Well, you'd have thought I was slipping if I didn't try."

  His grin was irresistible.

  "Get some music on that thing," Alex said.

  Colin fiddled with the AM-FM radio until he located a rock-and-roll show. He set the volume, then suddenly popped up on his knees and looked out the rear window. "Staying right on our tail," he said. Then he dropped into his seat and grabbed for his belt.

  "You're a real troublemaker, aren't you?"

  Alex asked.

  "Don't worry about me," the boy said. "We have to worry about that guy following us."

  At eight-fifteen they stopped at a Howard Johnson's restaurant outside of Harrisburg. The moment Alex slotted the car into a parking space in front of the orange-roofed building, Colin was looking for the van. "He's here. Like I expected."

  Alex looked out his side window and saw the van pass in front of the restaurant, heading for the service station at the other end. On the side of the white Chevrolet, brilliant blue and green letters read: automover. ONE WAY MOVE-IT-YOURSELF CONVENIENCE! Then the van was out of sight.

  "Come on," Alex said. "Let's get some breakfast. "

  "Yeah," Colin said. "I wonder if he'll have the nerve to walk in after us?"

  "He's just here to get gas. By the time we come out, he'll be fifty miles down the turnpike. " When they came outside again nearly an hour later, the parking spaces in front of the restaurant were all occupied. A new Cadillac ' two ageless Volkswagens, a gleaming red Triumph sports car, a battered and muddy old Buick, their own black Thunderbird, and a dozen other vehicles nosed into the curb like several species of animals sharing a trough. The rented van was nowhere in sight.

  "He must have phoned his superiors while we were eating-and discovered he was following the wrong people," Alex said.

  Colin frowned. He jammed his hands into his dungaree pockets, looked up and down the row of cars as if he thought the Chevrolet were really there in some clever new disguise. Now he would have to make up a whole new game.

  Which was just as well, so far as Doyle was concerned. It was not likely that even Colin could devise two games with built-in excuses for his popping out of his seatbelt every fifteen minutes.

  They walked slowly back to the car, Doyle savoring the crisp morning air, Colin squinting at the parking lot and hoping for a glimpse of the van.

  just as they were to the car, the boy said, "I'll bet he's parked around the side of the restaurant." Before Doyle could forbid him, Colin jumped back onto the sidewalk and ran around the corner of the building, his tennis shoes slapping loudly on the concrete.

  Alex got in the car, started it, and set the air conditioning a notch higher to blow out the stale air that had accumulated while they were having breakfast.

  By the time he had belted himself in, Colin was back. The boy opened the passenger's door and climbed inside. He was downcast. "Not back there either." He shut and locked the door, slumped down, thin arms folded over his chest.

  "Seatbelt." Alex put the car in gear and reversed out of the parking lot.

  Grumbling, Colin put on the belt.

  They pulled across the macadam to the service station and stopped by the pumps to have the tank topped off.

  ,__o The man who hurried out to wait on them was in his forties, a beefy farmer-type with a flushed face and gnarled hands.

  He was chewing tobacco, not a common sight in Philly or San Francisco, and he was cheerful. "Help you folks?"

  "Fill it with regular, please," Alex said, passing his credit card through the window. "It probably only needs half a tank."

  "Sure thing." Four letterS-CHET-were stitched across the man's shirt pocket. Chet bent down and looked past Alex at the boy. "How are you, Chief?"

  Colin looked at him, incredulous. "F-f-fine," he stammered.

  Chet showed a mouthful of stained teeth. "Glad to hear it." Then he went to the back of the car to put in the gasoline.

  "Why did he call me Chief?" Colin asked. He was over his incredulity now, and he was embarrassed instead.

  "Maybe he thinks you're an Indian," Alex said.

  "Oh, sure."

  "Or in charge of a fire company."

  Colin scrunched down in the seat and looked at him sourly. "I should have gone on the plane with Courtney. I can't take your bad jokes for five days."

  Alex laughed. "You're too much." He knew that Colin's perceptions and vocabulary were far in advance of his real age, and he had long ago grown accustomed to the boy's sometimes startling sarcasm and occasional good turn of phrase. But there was a forced quality to this precocious banter. Colin was trying hard to be grown up. He was straining out of childhood ' trying to grit his teeth and will his way through adolescence and into adulthood.

  Doyle was familiar with that temperament, for it had been his own when he was Colin's age.

  Chet came back and gave Doyle the credit card and sales form on a hard plastic holder. While Alex took the pen and scrawled his name, the attendant peered at Colin again. "Have a long trip ahead of you, Chief?"

  Colin was as shaken this time as he had been when Chet had first addressed him. "California," he said, looking at his knees.

  "Well," Chet said, "ain't that something?

  You're the second in an hour on his way to California. I always ask where people's going. Gives me a sense of helping them along, you know? An hour ago this guy's going to California, and now you.

  Everyone's going to California except me." He sighed.

  Alex gave back the clipboard and tucked his credit card into his wallet. He glanced at
Colin and saw that the boy was intently cleaning one fingernail with the other in order to have something to occupy his eyes if Chet should want to resume their one-sided conversation.

  "here you go." Chet handed Alex the receipt. "Way out to the coast?" He shifted his wad of tobacco from the left to the right side of his mouth.

  "That's right."

  "Brothers?" Chet asked.

  "Excuse me?"

  "You two brothers?"

  "Oh, no," Alex said. He knew there was no time or reason for a full explanation of his and Colin's relationship. "He's my son."

  "Son?" Chet seemed not to have heard the word before.

  "Yes." Even if he was not Colin's father, he was old enough to be.

  Chet looked at Doyle's coarse hair, at the way it spilled over his collar. He looked critically at Doyle's brightly patterned shirt with its large wooden buttons. Alex almost thanked the man for implying that he was not old enough to have a son Colin's age and then he realized that the attendant's mood had changed. The man was not saying Doyle was too young to be father to an eleven-year-old, but that a father ought to set a better example. Doyle could look and dress strangely if he were Colin's brother, but if he were Colin's father, it was inappropriate-at least, it was to Chet's way of thinking.

  "Thought you was twenty, twenty-one," Chet said, tonguing his tobacco.

  "Thirty," Alex said, wondering why he bothered to answer.

  The attendant looked at the sleek black car. A subtle hardness came into his eyes. Clearly, he thought that while it was fine for Doyle to be driving a Thunderbird that belonged to his father ' it was a different thing if Doyle owned the car himself. If a man who looked like Doyle could have a fancy car and trips to California, while a workingman half again his age could not-there was no justice. "Well," Alex said, "have a good day."

  Chet stepped back onto the pump island without wishing them a good trip. He frowned at the car. When the power window hummed up in one smooth motion, he frowned more deeply, the lines in his red brow bunched together like rolls in corrugated sheet metal.

  "Such a nice man." Alex put the car in gear and got out of there.

  When they were on the turnpike going west again, Colin suddenly laughed aloud.

  "What's so funny?" Alex asked. He was shivering inside, angry with Chet out of proportion to what the man had done. indeed, the man had done nothing except reveal a rather quiet prejudice.

  "When he said you looked twenty-one, I thought he was going to call you Chief like up "Rim he did me," Colin said. "That would have been good."

  "Oh, sure! That would have been just hysterical."

  Colin shrugged. "You thought it was funny when he called me Chief."

  As Doyle's anger and fear settled, he realized that his own reaction to the attendant's unvoiced hatred was only a milder version of that overreaction which Colin had shown to the man's friendly small talk. Had the boy seen through Chet's original folksy persona to the not-so-folksy core? Or had he just been his usual shy self? It really did not matter. Whatever the case, the fa ct remained that an injustice had been done both of them. "I apologize, Colin. I should never have approved of the condescending tone he used with you."

  "He treated me like I was a child."

  "It's a natural trap for adults to fall into," Alex said. "But it isn't right. Are you going to accept my apology?"

  Colin was especially serious, sitting straight and stiff, for this was the first time an adult had asked his forgiveness. "I accept," he said soberly. Then his gamin face broke into a wide smile. "But I still wish that he had called you Chief just like he did me.

  . . .

  Thick pines and black-trunked elms crowded against the sides of the road now, swaying gently in the spring wind.

  The highway rose nearly a mile. At the crest it did not slope down again but continued across a flat table of land toward another gradual slope a mile away. The forest still loomed up, the tall sentinel pines in grand array, the sprawling elms like generals inspecting the troops.

  Halfway along this flat stretch, on the right, was a picnic and rest area. The brush had been cleared from beneath the trees. A few wooden tables-anchored to concrete stanchions to guard against theft-and several trash baskets were fixed at intervals under the scattered pines. A sign announced public rest rooms.

  At this hour of the morning there was no one at the picnic tables.

  However, at the far western end of the miniature park, stopped in the exit lane and waiting to pull back onto the pike, was the delivery van.

  automover CONE-WAY MOVE-IT-YOURSELF CONVENIENCE!

  It was unquestionably the same van.

  "There he is again! " Colin said, pressing his nose against the window as they swept past the van at seventy miles an hour. "It really is him!"

  Doyle looked in the rear-view mirror and watched the delivery van pull onto the main road. it accelerated rapidly. In three or four minutes it caught up with them, settling in a quarter of a mile behind, pacing them as it had before.

  Doyle knew that it was just coincidence. There was no reality in Colin's game. It was as much make-believe as all the games he had played with the boy in the past. No one in the world had a grudge against them. No one in the world had a reason to follow them with sinister intent. Coincidence . . .

  Nevertheless, a chill lay the length of his back, a crust of imaginary ice.

  Two George Leland handled the rented twenty-foot Chevrolet van as if he werepushing a baby carriage, not even rattling the furniture and household goods which were packed into the cargo space behind the front seat. The land whizzed past, and the road rumbled underneath, and Leland was in command of it all.

  He had grown up with trucks and other big machines, and he had a special talent for making them perform as they had been built to perform. On the farm near Lancaster, he had driven a hay truck by the time he was thirteen, touring his father's fields and loading from the separate baler beds. Before he was out of high school, he had operated the power, bailer, plow, and all the other powerful equipment that brought a farm full circle from planting to harvesting to planting once more. When he went away to college, he helped pay his tuition by driving a delivery van much like the one he was now pushing across Pennsylvania. Later, when he was of age, he drove a full-size rig for a fuel-oil company, and in two summers of that he had not put a single nick on his truck or any passing automobile. He had been offered a job with the oil company after that second summer, but he had turned it down, of course. A year later, when he received his second degree in civil engineering and took his first real job, he often hopped up on one of the gigantic earth-moving machines and ran it through its paces-not because he was worried that the job was going badly, but because he enjoyed using the machine, enjoyed knowing that his touch with it was sure.

  Now, all Monday morning and then past noon, he nursed the rented van westward. He stayed the same distance behind the black Thunderbird at all times. When the car slowed down, he slowed down too. When it accelerated, he quickly caught up with it. For the most part, however, the Thunderbird maintained a precise seventy miles an hour. Leland knew that the top-of-the-line model T-Bird had a speed-set control on the steering wheel which took some of the effort out of long-distance driving. Doyle was probably using that device. But it did not matter. Effortlessly, skillfully, George Leland matched the car's automatically controlled pace for hour after hour, almost as if he were a machine himself.

  Leland was a big man, six-three and over two hundred pounds. He had once been twenty pounds heavier, but lately he had suffered a weight loss because he forgot to eat regular meals. His broad shoulders were more hunched than they had once been, his narrow waist even narrower. He had a square face framed with blond, almost white, hair. His eyes were blue, complexion clear except for a spray of freckles across his blunt nose. His neck was all muscle, gristle, and corded veins. When he gripped the steering wheel with his big hands and made his biceps swell with the unconscious fierceness of his grip, he look
ed absolutely immovable, as if he were welded to the vehicle.

  He did not switch on his radio.

  He did not look at the scenery.

  He did not smoke, chew gum, or talk to himself.

  Mile after mile, his attention was on the road, the car ahead, the machine that hummed satisfactorily all around him. Not once in those first hours of the journey did he think specifically about the man and the boy in the Thunderbird. His discordant thoughts, but for his driving, were vague and undetailed.

  Mostly he was riveted by a broad mesmeric hatred that had no single focus. Somehow the car ahead would eventually become that focus. He knew this. But for the moment he only followed like a machine.

  From Harrisburg, the Thunderbird went west on the turnpike, switched from that to Interstate 70, and passed across the northernmost sliver of West Virginia. Past Wheeling, barely inside of Ohio, the car signaled its intention to take an exit lane into a service area full of gasoline stations, motels, and restaurants.

  The moment he saw the flashing signal, Leland braked and allowed the van to fall a mile behind Doyle. When he took the ramp a minute after the Thunderbird, the big black car was nowhere in sight. At the bottom of the ramp, Leland hesitated only a second, then turned west toward the heaviest concentration of tourist facilities. He drove slowly, looking for the car. He found it parked in front of a rectangular aluminum diner that looked like an old-fashioned railroad passenger car. The T-Bird was cooling in the shade of a huge sign that proclaimed HARRY's FINE FOOD.

  Leland drove until he came to Breen's, the last diner in the chrome, plastic, fake-stone, neon jungle of the interchange. He parked the Chevrolet on the far side of the small structure so that no one down at Harry's Fine Food, five hundred yards away, would see it.

  He got out, locked the van, and went to have his own lunch.

  Breen's was, at least on the outside, much like the restaurant where Doyle and the kid had stopped. It was eighty feet long, an aluminum tube designed to look like a railroad passenger car, with one long narrow window row around three sides and an entrance cubicle tacked on the front almost as an afterthought.

  Inside, a single width of cracked plasticcoated booths was built onto the wall beside the contiguous windows. Each booth was equipped with a scarred ashtray, cylindrical glass sugar dispenser, glass salt and pepper shakers, a stainless-steel napkin dispenser, and a selector for the jukebox that stood next to the rest rooms at the extreme east end of the restaurant. A wide aisle separated the booths from the counter that ran from one end of the place to the other.