Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Read online

  Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far

  back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel,

  where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the

  first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who

  else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was

  to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and

  conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but

  when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half

  as bright as he thought he was.

  Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was

  huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears they were a bit

  ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons,

  squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.

  Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with

  the sheriffs department, where Sampson had served before joining the

  City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been present or he had

  striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad

  and rocklike. He held a little box that contained four small floppy

  diskettes.

  He showed it to Julie and said, "Is this what he was after?"

  "Could be," she said, accepting the box.

  Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, "I'll have to go down one

  floor to Ackroyd's office, switch on the computer POP these in, and see

  what's on them."

  "Go ahead," Sampson said.

  "You'll have to accompany me," Bobby said to McGrath the officer who had

  brought them up on the elevator.

  "keep a watch on me, make sure I don't tamper with the evidence, he

  indicated toward Rasmussen. "We don't want this piece of slime thinking

  they were blank disks, saying I framed him copying the real stuff onto

  them myself."

  As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the

  second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen.

  "You know who I am?"

  Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.

  "I'm Bobby Dakota's wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It

  was my Bobby you tried to kill."

  He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.

  She said, "Know what I'd like to do to you?" She held one of her hands

  down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails.

  "For starters, I'd like to grab you by the throat hold your head against

  the wall, and ram two of these nice sharp fingernails straight through

  your eyes, all the way deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and

  twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever's messed in

  there."

  "Jesus, lady," Sampson's partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside

  anyone but Sampson, he would have been a better man.

  "Well," she said, "he's too screwed up to get any help from a prison

  psychiatrist."

  Sampson said, "Don't do anything foolish, Julie."

  Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that

  was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be

  frightened by it. A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had

  accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale.

  To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and querulous to be as tough

  as he intended, Rasmussen said, "Keep this crazy bitch away from me."

  "She's not actually crazy," Sampson said. "Not clinically speaking, at

  least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I'm

  afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I

  wouldn't say she's crazy."

  Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, "Thank you so much,

  Sam."

  "You'll notice I didn't say anything about the other half of his

  accusation," Sampson said good-naturedly.

  "Yeah, I got your point."

  While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.

  Everyone harbored a special fear, a private bogeyman built to his own

  specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew

  what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights.

  Not confining spaces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or

  darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent

  weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of

  blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true

  obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was

  deteriorating, and he'd petitioned to be tested periodically for

  syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases that, untreated, could result in

  blindness. When not in prison-and he had been there twice-he had a

  standing, monthly appointment with an ophthalmologist in Costa Mesa.

  Still squatting in front of Rasmussen, Julie took hold of his chin. He

  flinched. She twisted his head toward her. She thrust two fingers of

  her other hand at him, raked them down his cheek, making red welts on

  his wan skin, but not hard enough to draw blood.

  He squealed and tried to strike her with his cuffed hands, but he was

  inhibited by both his fear and the chain that tethered his wrists to his

  ankles.

  "What the hell you think you' doing?"

  She spread the same two fingers with which she'd scratched him, and now

  she poked them at him, stopping just two inches short of his eyes.

  He winced, made a mewling sound, and tried to pull loose of her, but she

  held him fast by the chin, forcing a confrontation.

  "Me and Bobby have been together eight years, more than seven, and

  they've been the best years of my life but you come along and think you

  can just squash him the way you'd squash a bug."

  She slowly brought her fingertips closer to his eyes. An inch and a

  half. One inch.

  Rasmussen tried to pull back. His head was against the wall He had

  nowhere to go.

  The sharp tips of her manicured fingernails were less than half an inch

  from his eyes.

  "This is police brutality," Rasmussen said.

  "I'm not a cop," Julie said.

  "They are," he said, rolling his eyes at Sampson and Burdock. "Better

  get this bitch away from me, I'll sue your ass off."

  With her fingernails she flicked his eyelashes.

  His attention snapped back to her. He was breathing fast and suddenly

  he was sweating too.

  She flicked his lashes again, and smiled.

  The dark pupils in his yellow-brown eyes were open wide.

  "You bastards better hear me, I swear, I'll sue, they'll kick you off

  the force-"

  She flicked his lashes again.

  He closed his eyes tight.

  "-they'll take away your god damned uniforms and badges, they'll throw

  you in prison, an you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, they get

  the shit kicked out of them, broken, killed, raped!" His voice spiraled

  up, cracked on the last word, like the voice of an adolescent boy.

  Glancing at Sampson to be sure she had his tacit if not active approval

  to carry this just a little further, glancing also at Burdock and seeing

  that h
e was not as placid as Sampson but would probably stay out of it

  for a while yet, Julie pressed her fingernails against Rasmussen's

  eyelids.

  He attempted to squeeze his eyes even more tightly shut.

  She pressed harder.

  "You tried to take Bobby away from me, so I'll take your eyes away from

  you."

  "You're nuts!"

  She pressed still harder.

  "Make her stop," Rasmussen demanded of the two cops.

  "If you didn't want me to have my Bobby to look at, why should I let you

  look at anything ever again?"

  "What do you want?"

  Perspiration poured down Rasmussen's face; he looked like a candle in a

  bonfire, melting fast.

  "Who gave you permission to kill Bobby?"

  "Permission? What do you mean? Nobody. I don't need-"

  "You wouldn't have tried to touch him if your employer hadn't told you

  to do it."

  "I knew he was on to me," Rasmussen said frantically, and because she

  had not let up the pressure with her nails, thin tears flowed from under

  his eyelids.

  "I knew he was out there, tumbled to him five or six days ago, even

  though he used different vans, trucks, even that orange van with the

  county seal on it. So I had to do something, didn't I? I couldn't walk

  away from the job, too much money at stake. I couldn't just let him

  nail me when I finally got Wizard, so I had to do something. Listen,

  Jesus, it was as simple as that."

  "You're just a computer freak, a hired hacker-morally bent, sleazy, but

  you're no tough guy. You're soft, squishy-soft. You wouldn't plan a

  hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it."

  "I don't have a boss. I'm freelance."

  "Somebody still pays you." She risked more pressure, not with the

  points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was

  so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could

  feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of

  his eyelids. He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and

  whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain. He was shaking;

  his shackles clinked and rattled. More tears squeezed from beneath his

  lids.

  "Delafield." The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying

  simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might.

  "Kevin Delafield."

  "Who's he?" Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen's chin with one hand,

  her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.

  "Microcrest Corporation."

  "That's who hired you for this?"

  He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the

  slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his

  eyes.

  "Yeah. Delafield. A nut case. A renegade. They don't understand

  about him at Microcrest. They know he gets results for them. When this

  hits the fan, I won't be surprised by it, blown away. So let go of me.

  What do you want?"

  She let go of him.

  Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision then broke

  down and sobbed with relief.

  As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned

  with the officer who had accompanied him down stairs to Ackroyd's

  office. Bobby looked at Rasmussen, his head at Julie, clucked his

  tongue, and said,

  "You've been naughty, haven't you, dear? Can't I take you anywhere

  "I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen. That's all."

  "He seems to have found it stimulating," Bobby said.

  Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping

  uncontrollably.

  "We disagreed about something," Julie said.

  "Movies, books?"

  "Music."

  "Ah."

  Sampson Garfeuss said softly, "You're a wild woman Julie."

  "He tried to have Bobby killed," was all she said.

  Sampson nodded.

  "I'm not saying I don't admire will sometimes... a little. But you

  sure as hell owe me on this one."

  "I do," she agreed.

  "You owe me more than one," Burdock said.

  "This guy's going to file a complaint. You can bet your ass on it."

  "Complaint about what?" Julie asked. "He's not marked."

  Already the faint welts on Rasmussen's cheek were faint Sweat, tears,

  and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.

  "Listen," Julie told Burdock, "he cracked because I just happened to

  know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap,

  like cutting a diamond. It worked because scum like him thinks everyone

  else is scum, too, thinks we're capable of doing what he'd do in the

  same situation. I'd never put out his eyes, but he might've put mine

  out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I'd do him like

  he would've done me. All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes

  against him. Psychology. Nobody can file a complaint about the

  application of a little psychology."

  She turned to Bobby and said, "What was on those diskettes?"

  "Wizard. Not trash data. The whole thing. These have to be the files

  he duplicated. He only made one set while I was watching, and after the

  shooting started he didn't have time to make backup copies."

  The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board. When

  the doors opened, a plain-clothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer,

  stepped into the hallway.

  Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.

  She said, "This is evidence. The whole case might rest on it. You

  think you can keep track of it?"

  Dainer grinned.

  "Gosh, ma'am, I'll try."

  FRANK POLLARD-alias James Roman, and George Farris-looked in the trunk

  of the stolen Chevy found a small bundle of tools wrapped in a felt

  pouch tucked in the wheel well. He used a screwdriver to take the

  plates off the car.

  Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and more quiet

  neighborhoods in fog bound Laguna, he parked on a dark side street and

  exchanged the Chevy's plates for those on an Oldsmobile. With luck, the

  owner of the Olds wouldn't notice the new plates for a couple of days,

  maybe even a day or longer; until he reported the switch, the Chevy

  wouldn't match anything on a police hot sheet and he would, therefore be

  relatively safe to drive. In any case, Frank intended to get rid of the

  car by tomorrow night and either boost a new one or use some of the cash

  in the flight bag to buy legal wheels. Though he was exhausted, he

  didn't think it wise to check into a motel. Four-thirty in the morning

  was a damned hour for anyone to be wanting a room. Furthermore, he was

  unshaven, and his thick hair was matted and oily, and his jeans and

  checkered blue flannel shirt were dirty and filthy from his recent

  adventures. The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to

  himself, so he decided to catch a couple hours of sleep in the car.

  He drove farther south, into Laguna Niguel, where he parked on a quiet

  residential street, under the immense bow of a date palm. He stretched

  out on the back seat, as foully as possible without benefit o
f

  sufficient legroom or pillow and closed his eyes.

  For the moment he was not afraid of his unknown pursuers because he felt

  that the man was no longer nearby. Temporarily, at least, he had given

  his enemy the shake, and had no desire to lie awake in fear of a hostile

  face suddenly appearing at the window. He was also able to put out of

  his mind all questions about his identity and the money in the flight

  bag; he was so tired-and his thought processes were so fuzzy-that any

  attempt to puzzle out solutions to those mysteries would be fruitless.

  He was kept awake, however, by the memory of how strange the events in

  Anaheim had been, a few hours ago. The foreboding gusts of wind. The

  eerie flowerlike music. Imploding windows, exploding tires, failed

  brakes, failed steering...

  Who had come into that apartment behind the blue light?

  Was "who" the right word... or would it be more accurate to ask what

  had been searching for him?

  During his urgent flight from Anaheim to Laguna, he'd not had the

  leisure to reflect upon those bizarre incidents, but now he could not