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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust
eISBN: 9781542016247
1
The sole passenger aboard a Gulfstream V, the man who has no name doesn’t look through a window at the world below, but at a photograph of Regina Belmont’s once lovely and now disfigured face, wondering at her courage after the terrible losses she has suffered.
2
She not only lost her children, but also her husband, who was away on business the night of the fire. He filed for divorce after his first visit to the hospital, when he saw the severity of her burns. She hadn’t really known even him, her own husband, hadn’t known how immature, gutless, and faithless he would prove to be.
“They were blunt,” she says, as thunder vibrates in the rain-washed glass. She quotes them. “Stop pushing the fire marshal’s office, hag face. Stop haranguing the cops, you ugly bitch. Stop goading the media to investigate. You make the Bride of Frankenstein look like Jennifer Lawrence, Regina. Nobody pities you. Nobody gives a shit about your dead kids. No one meant for them to die. They were collateral damage. Everybody just wants you to get over it, shut the fuck up, go away, stop making everyone sick at the sight of you.”
“They tell me that if I keep agitating about arson, they’ll snatch me when I’m out some night, when I least expect it. They’ll take me to the cemetery where Sherry and Andy are buried, right to their graves, soak me in gasoline, set me on fire, do it in such a way it looks like suicide. I believe them. They’ve got everyone in their pocket, from people in the medical examiner’s office to the fire marshal’s investigators, to the police. They can get away with anything. So they’ll do it; they’ll burn me. The one with the butane lighter will even enjoy doing it. Maybe the other one will, too.”
Regina says, “Is something wrong?” He turns from the lost past to the fleeting present. “Those who killed your children and think of it as just collateral damage—do you want them dead?”
3
After a while, Regina says, “Paul?” “What?” “All right.” “All right?” “I’ll take the money. I’ll move. And . . .” “And?” “I want them dead.”
4
Ace of Diamonds has sent a fruit basket. Whether male or female or something else, Ace is not just a brilliant strategist and tactician, but also thoughtful.
5
Danny Doyle knows everything there is to know about fire. No one can more quickly calculate the fuel load, the total Btu per square foot, of any structure and its contents. He can quote you the heat-release rate of the combined material involved without using a calculator, just compute it all in his head.
He prefers hookers because with them there’s no obligation to think about the future. Danny doesn’t believe in the future. He believes in now. So does Jolie, who’s saying, “Now, now, now!”
His old man wanted him to go to law school, and his mom wanted him to be a priest, of all things; but he doesn’t believe in either the law or God. He believes in himself, and he believes in fire.
6
In this brave new world, there is no place for a lone paladin venturing forth on tasks of knightly honor. Both Galahad and Shane would be toast. In times as complex as these, any caped crusader must work sans cape, but with backup that amounts to scores of specialists.
After Nameless provides the address and sets a meeting for ten o’clock the following evening, he terminates the call. In the living room of the suite, he settles down with his book, The Violent Bear It Away. He’s at the point where the boy, Tarwater, is setting the woods afire, when the page seems to explode silently, casting millions of tiny bits of paper in his face, whiting out the room around him before the vision floods upon him in vivid color. A montage of images, maybe sequential, maybe not, shuffle through his mind: A dimpled little girl with a ponytail, holding a floppy-eared
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Regina . . . Regina . . . The name echoes along the corridors of his mind, through empty chambers from which amnesia has removed all furnishings. Presences haunt that abandoned mental architecture, people he once knew, who might be dead or might still be alive but dead to memory. He says aloud, “Regina,” and in the ghost-ridden halls within his skull, a figure floats, more mist than material, a beautiful woman with pale hair and purple-blue eyes, who passes in a moment and recedes into a darkness where he cannot follow.
His head touches the pillow. He sleeps. He does not dream.
7
8
9
If Nameless is going to kill this man or set him up to be killed, he wants to know him, who he is other than a fire mechanic, whether he’s got redeeming qualities that to any extent somewhat mitigate his responsibility for the human suffering that results when one of his fires involves unintended “collateral damage.”
Nameless takes a small pump-spray bottle from an inside jacket pocket. “What’s that?” Doyle asks. Rather than explain, Nameless sprays him point-blank in the face with chloroform. The arsonist’s pale-blue eyes pale further. When he folds to the floor as though boneless, he licks his lips because chloroform has a sweet taste.
10
In spite of himself, Doyle says, “GPS archives? What’re you talking about? Who the hell are you?” Rockwell stares at him in silence for a moment and then says, “Not just those two kids. Four other deaths, collateral damage.” Danny thinks it was five others, but who’s counting? “What do you want?” “I want the truth to prevail. But you’re so well connected that all the evidence in the world won’t get the law to move against you. There’ll be no justice. But for you, at least, there will be the truth and its consequences.”
Truth. There is no one truth. Everyone has his own truth. It’s all about point of view. The way this guy yammers about truth, maybe he’s some raving nut case, some true-believing crusader. If that’s what he is, then this isn’t psychological warfare, after all. This is a shit storm, a firestorm about to happen, and Danny Doyle is part of the fuel. You can’t reason with a self-righteous lunatic, whether he believes in truth or that space aliens run the world.
Rockwell puts the key on the floor near the cage door, retrieves the recorder. “Hey, my man, I can’t reach the key.” “It’s not for you,” Rockwell says as he walks off into the darker part of the vast warehouse. “Goodbye. Have a nice death.”
Rockwell seems to have left the warehouse. Danny needs to pee.
11
Nameless uses the USB port to load the recording into his laptop. The warehouse has Wi-Fi. He sends the recording to Ace for the voice to be processed and synthesized by Paramimic. Within an hour, calls will be made, and the recipients will be convinced they are talking to Danny Doyle.
12
Tall and handsome and black, Nelson has put in nine years as a city firefighter and has been working as an investigator in the fire marshal’s office for eighteen years. In three years, he will take retirement and move to Belize, where he owns a sweet house on the beach, two rental houses, and a souvenir shop.
Nelson parks his Honda behind the Lamborghini. The man-size door is unlocked. He hurries through the downpour and enters the warehouse and makes a discovery that alarms him. He has a passport, but he faults himself for not knowing if Belize has an extradition treaty with the United States.
13
“What’re you doing here?” he asks, pretty sure he shouldn’t be in the least bit relieved, pretty sure this is a deepening of the catastrophe. Nelson frowns. “You called me.” “Shit, I didn’t call you. Does it look like I’m in a position to make phone calls?” “It was your voice, your caller ID. You called me.”
