Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Read online

  to give him up for dead without checking on him, the Dodge might flare

  like a fire primed with starter fluid, toasting him as crisp as a

  marshmallow.

  He had no difficulty imagining himself stepping out of the van and being

  hit immediately by a score of bullets, jerking and twitching in a

  spasmodic death dance across the black street, like a broken marionette

  jerked around on tangled strings. But he found it even easier to

  imagine his skin peel off in the fire, flesh bubbling and smoking, hair

  whooshing like a torch, eyes melting, teeth turning coal-black as flames

  seared his tongue and followed his breath down his throat into his

  lungs.

  Sometimes a vivid imagination was definitely a curse.

  Suddenly the gasoline fumes became so heavy that he had trouble drawing

  breath, so he started to get up.

  Outside, a car horn began to blare. He heard a racing engine drawing

  rapidly nearer.

  Someone shouted, and a machine gun opened fire again. Bobby hit the

  floor, wondering what the hell was going on, but as the car with the

  blaring horn drew nearer, he realized what must be happening: Julie.

  Julie was happening. some times she was like a natural force; she

  happened the way a storm happened, the way lightning happened, abruptly

  crackling down a dark sky. He had told her to get out of there, to save

  herself, but she had not listened to him; he wanted to kick her butt for

  being so bullheaded, but he loved her for it too.

  Sidling AWAY from the broken window, Frank tried to time his steps to

  those of the man in the court yard below, with the hope that any noise

  he made, trotting on gravel would be covered by his unseen enemy's

  advance. He figured that he was in the living room of the apartment,

  that it was pretty much empty except for whatever debris that had been

  left behind by the last tenants or had blown through the missing

  windows, and indeed he made it across that chamber and a hallway in

  relative silence, without colliding with anything. He hurriedly felt

  his way along the hall, which was as dark as a predator's lair. It

  smelled of mold and mildew and urine. He passed the entrance to a room,

  kept going, turned right through the next doorway, and shuffled to

  another broken window. This one had no splinters of glass left in the

  frame, it did not face the courtyard but looked onto a lamplit and empty

  street.

  Something rustled behind him.

  He turned, blinking blindly at the gloom, and almost passed out.

  But the sound must have been made by a rat scurrying over the floor,

  close to the wall, across dry leaves or bits of debris Just a rat.

  Frank listened for footsteps, but if the stalker was still focused on

  him, the hollow heel clicks of his approach were completely muffled by

  the walls that now intervened.

  He looked out the window again. The dead lawn lay as dry as sand and

  twice as brown, offering little cushion.

  He dropped the leather flight bag, which landed with a thud. Wincing at

  the prospect of the leap, he climbed onto the window ledge, crouching in

  the broken-out window, hands braced against the frame, where for a

  moment he hesitated.

  A gust of wind ruffled his hair and coolly caressed his face. But it

  was a normal draft, nothing like the natural whiffs of wind that,

  earlier, had been accompanied by the unearthly and unmelodic music of a

  distant flute.

  Suddenly, behind Frank, a blue flash pulsed out of the living room, down

  the hall, and through the doorway. The strange tide of light was

  trailed closely by an explosion and a concussion wave that shook the

  walls and seemed to churn the air into a more solid substance. The

  front door had been blasted to pieces; he heard chunks of it raining

  down on the floor of the apartment a couple of rooms away.

  He jumped out of the window, landed on his feet. But his knees gave

  way, and he fell flat on the dead lawn.

  At that same moment a large truck turned the corner. Its cargo bed had

  slat sides and a wooden tailgate. The driver smoothly shifted gears and

  drove past the apartment house, apparently unaware of Frank.

  He scrambled to his feet, plucked the satchel off the barren lawn, and

  ran into the street. Having just rounded the corner, the truck was not

  moving fast, and Frank managed to grab the tailgate and pull himself up,

  one-handed, until he was standing on the rear bumper.

  As the truck accelerated, Frank looked back at the decaying apartment

  complex. No mysterious blue light glimmered at any of the windows; they

  were all as black and empty as the sockets of a skull.

  The truck turned right at the next corner, moving away into the sleepy

  night.

  Exhausted, Frank clung to the tailgate. He would have been able to hold

  on better if he had dropped the leather flight bag, but he held fast to

  it because he suspected that its contents might help him to learn who he

  was and from where he had come and from what he was running.

  CUT AND run! Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble

  struck-"Get the hell out of here"

  cut and run? just because he told her to! If she was an obedient

  little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a damned

  good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn't

  take the heat when the nice kicked in. Well, to hell with that.

  In her mind she could see his lovable face-merry blue eyes pug nose,

  smattering of freckles, generous mouth-framed thick honey-gold hair that

  was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who had

  just gotten up from a nap. She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard

  enough to make his blue eyes water, so he'd have no doubt how the cut-an

  run suggestion annoyed her.

  She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the end of the

  corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a massive Indian

  laurel. The moment Bobby signaled trouble she started the Toyota's

  engine. By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had

  shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights,

  and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.

  At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby's name, trying to get an

  answer from him, hearing only the most god awful ruckus from his end.

  Then the set went dead; she couldn't hear anything at all, so she pulled

  it off and threw it into the back seat.

  Cut and run! Damn him!

  When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot she let up

  on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneous tapping the brake

  pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which

  carried it onto the access road that led around the big building. She

  turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas

  again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering. The

  tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-twang of

  tortured metal, the car leaped forward.

  They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn't even able to

  shoot back, b
ecause he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he

  went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to

  involve violence. The Decodyne assignment had looked peaceable enough;

  sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this

  case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a bitch,

  clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of

  theft via computer but with no blood on his hands. He was the high-tech

  equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk-or so he had seemed.

  But Julie was armed on every job. Bobby was the optimist; she was the

  pessimist. Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and

  be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to

  be, in secret, a crazed psychotic.

  A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glove

  box lid, and an Uzi-with two spare, thirty-round magazines-lay on the

  other front seat. From what she had heard on the earphones before

  they'd gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.

  The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled

  hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost

  losing control, but not quite. Ahead, Bobby's Dodge was parked at the

  curb in front of the building, and another van-a dark blue Ford-was

  stopped in the street, doors open wide.

  Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five

  yards from the Dodge, chopping the hell out of it with automatic

  weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be

  after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against

  the Dodge itself. They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came

  out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh

  magazines into their weapons.

  Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the

  men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car

  as cover to blow out the tires on their van and pin them down until

  police arrived. But she didn't have time for all of that. They were

  already raising the muzzles of their weapons.

  She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked this hour in the

  heart of metropolitan Orange County, bare of traffic, washed by the

  urine-yellow light of the sodium-streetlamps. They were in an area of

  banks and office buildings no residences, no restaurants or bars within

  a couple of blocks. It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a

  vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disaster

  that had left only a handful of survivors.

  She didn't have time to handle the two gunmen by the book and she could

  not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they

  least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.

  The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, pressing the

  accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two

  bastards. They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the

  seat and leaning sideways a little trying to keep her head below the

  dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady. Bullets snapped

  and whined off the car. The windshield burst. A second later Julie hit

  one of the gun men so hard that the impact snapped her head forward,

  against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together

  forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her

  face, she heard the body bounce off the front bumper and slam onto the

  hood.

  With blood trickling down her forehead and dripping from her right

  eyebrow, Julie jabbed at the brakes and sat up at the same time. She

  was confronted by a man's wide-eyed corpse jammed in the frame of the

  empty windshield. His face in front of the steering wheel-teeth

  chipped, lips torn, chin slashed, cheek battered, left eye missing-and

  one of his broken legs was inside the car, hooked down over the

  dashboard. Julie found the brake pedal and pumped it. With the sudden

  drop in speed, the dead man was dislodged. His limp body rolled across

  the hood, and when the car slid to a shaky halt he vanished over the

  front end.

  Heart racing, blinking to keep the stinging blood from blue ring the

  vision in her right eye, Julie snatched the Uzi from the seat beside

  her, shoved open the door, and rolled out, moving fast and staying low.

  The other gunman was already in the blue Ford van. He gave it gas

  before remembering to shift out of park, so the tires screamed and

  smoked.

  Julie squeezed off two short bursts from the Uzi, blowing out both tires

  on her side of the van. But the gunman didn't stop. He shifted gears

  at last and tried to drive past her on two ruined tires.

  The guy might have killed Bobby; now he was getting away. He would

  probably never be found if Julie didn't stop him. Reluctantly she swung

  the Uzi higher and emptied the magazine into the side window of the van.

  The Ford accelerated, then suddenly slowed and swung to the right, at

  steadily diminishing speed, in a long arc that carried it to the far

  curb, where it came to a halt with a jolt.

  No one got out.

  Keeping an eye on the Ford, Julie leaned into her car, plucked a spare

  magazine from the seat, and reloaded the Uzi. She approached the idling

  van cautiously and pulled open the door, but caution was not required

  because the man behind the wheel was dead. Feeling a little sick, she

  reached in and switched off the engine.

  Briefly, as she turned from the Ford and hurried toward the

  bullet-riddled Dodge, the only sounds she could hear were the sounds of

  a faint breeze in the lush corporate landscaping that flanked the

  street, punctuated by the gentle hiss and rattle of palm fronds. Then

  she also heard the idling engine of the Dodge, simultaneously smelled

  gasoline, and shouted, "Bobby!"

  Before she reached the white van, the back doors creaked open, and Bobby

  came out, shedding twists of metal, chunks of plastic, bits of glass,

  wood chips, and scraps of paper. He was gasping, no doubt because the

  gasoline fumes had driven most of the breathable air out of the Dodge's

  rear quarters.

  Sirens rose in the distance.

  Together they quickly walked away from the van. They had gone only a

  few steps when orange light flared and flames rose in a wooooosh from

  the gasoline pooled on the pavement, enveloping the vehicle in bright

  shrouds. They hurried beyond the corner of intense heat that surrounded

  the Dodge and stared for a moment, blinking at the wreckage, then at

  each other.

  The sirens were drawing nearer.

  He said, "You're bleeding."

  "Just skinned my forehead a little."

  "You sure?"

  "It's nothing. What about you?"

  He sucked in a deep breath. "I'm okay."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah."

  "You weren't hit?"

  "Unmarked. It's a miracle."

  "Bobby?"

  "What?"

  "I couldn't handle it if you'd turned up dead in there.

  "I'
m not dead. I'm fine."

  "Thank God," she said.

  Then she kicked his right shin.

  "Ow! What the hell?"

  She kicked his left shin.

  "Julie, dammit!"

  "Don't you ever tell me to cut and run."

  "What?"

  "I'm a full half of this partnership in every way."

  "But-"

  "I'm as smart as you, as fast as you-"

  He glanced at the dead man on the street, the other on the Ford van,

  half visible through the open door, and he said, "That's for sure,

  babe."

  "-as tough as you-"

  "I know, I know. Don't kick me again."

  She said, "What about Rasmussen?"

  Bobby looked up at the Decodyne building. "You think he's still in

  there?"

  "The only exits from the parking lot are onto Michaelson and he hasn't

  come out this way, so unless he fled on foot,"

  "In there?"

  "all right. We've got to nail him before he slides out of the trap with

  those diskettes."

  "Nothing worthwhile on the diskettes anyway," Bobby said.

  Decodyne had been on to Rasmussen from the time he applied for the job,

  because Dakota & Dakota Investigation which was contracted to handle the

  company's security checks-had penetrated the hacker's highly

  sophisticated false ID. Decodyne's management wanted to play along with