Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

Text copyright © 2022 by The Koontz Living Trust All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 9781542019880 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 1542019885 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9781542019903 (...

ISBN-10: 1542019907 (...

CONTENTS

PART 1

GETTING TO KNOW ME

1

With a safety pin, a small envelope was fixed to the blanket in which I was wrapped. Neither Hakeem nor Bailie nor Caesar had dared to open it, evidently because they had watched too many years of CSI shows and feared that they would smear the kidnapper’s fingerprints. Either they thought I had been snatched by some fiend who lost his nerve and left me to the mercy of fate on that hot morning, or they figured someone had nabbed my parents and were demanding a ransom from me. When the sheriff tore open the envelope, he found only a card on which was printed QUINN QUICKSILVER and my date of birth.

Now, inexplicably, I was back, searching with my flashlight not for the tarantula, to which I didn’t feel the need to apologize, but for the item from which the spider had frightened me away. I found it: a very old coin—judging by its sheen, pure gold.

To avoid plunging deeper into the swamp of deceit, I produced the gold coin from a pocket. “Why I stopped by is I found this. I think it might be worth something.” “I’m mainly a philatelist, though I know a lot about Tiffany, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Grandfather is the ace numismatist.”

“Is it worth something?” “At retail, from a collector, it would bring forty thousand dollars, maybe a few thousand less.”

“Then the county owns it. Or Washington. There’ll probably be a finder’s reward.”

He said, “What might the government do with forty thousand dollars? Buy a hand-soap dispenser for one of the Senate restrooms? Add two feet of new track for a train to nowhere? Listen, son, if you were anyone else, I’d offer twenty-six thousand, maybe a smidgen more. But I’m pretty sure in a month I can sell this to a collector for near that price I mentioned, so I’ll take some more risk and come up to thirty thousand. Young as you are and poor as you are, this is a blessing you should just thank God for and get on with your life.”

In retrospect, I think that the idea of suddenly having thirty thousand dollars scared me. I’d come into the world with nothing and had lived on the orphanage’s dime for eighteen years. Even with my job at Arizona!, I’d never had enough money to worry about losing it. I didn’t want to prove to be a fool by misspending thirty thousand, because then not only Sharona would write me off as a loser, but so would any other woman with a brain. So I took the thirty thousand. Julius paid twenty-nine thousand with a check and gave me a thousand in cash, so that I could replace the bald tires on my rust-bucket Toyota right away and even have a small celebration. I went directly to the bank and made a deposit.

On Monday, during my lunch break, I returned to the bank and withdrew two thousand more and put it in the ziplock bag. After I withdrew three thousand more on Tuesday and another three thousand on Wednesday, I had begun to scare myself. No, I didn’t feel that I was out of control. Rather, I sensed that I was preparing myself for something more than the collapse of the bank, that somehow I knew trouble was coming, as I had known where I would find a valuable coin. Thursday, I alarmed myself further by being unable to resist the urge to buy a small suitcase and pack it full of two changes of clothes and toiletries. I put the suitcase in the trunk of my car and left the vehicle in the long-term parking section of a downtown garage, paying a week in advance with cash. I also withdrew another four thousand from the bank, where they must have begun to think that either I’d become a compulsive gambler or was in thrall to a gold digger.

By this time, I was no longer certain of my sanity. A week had passed since I’d come into all that money and since I’d begun to prepare to be a fugitive.

So the threat was surely imaginary, a pinball of anxiety ricocheting around in my disordered head. Or at least that was a theory I entertained until the thugs showed up at lunch.

2

The one with golden eyes said, “Kind of hot out there today.” I said, “Well, it’s May in Phoenix.” “You’ve lived in Phoenix all your life, have you?” “Mostly, yeah.” The hard case on my right said, “You like Phoenix better than where you came from?” “Sure, I like it pretty much. I don’t remember anything about where I came from.” Looking past me at Leftie, Rightie said, “This young man has amnesia.” Leftie traded his easy smile for a look of faux sadness. “I’m sorry to hear that. Must be tough, no memory.” “I don’t have amnesia,” I assured them. “I come from Peptoe, Arizona, but I only spent a few days there after I was born.” I looked back and forth as the men engaged in synchronized, solemn nodding.

She said to me, “Honey, are you all right?” I took a deep breath of diner air scented with fried onions and the sizzling beef on the griddle. “I don’t know yet.” “This here is a good boy,” Hazel told my dining companions. “If you say so,” Leftie said. Rightie added, “We have his best interests at heart.”

When Hazel retreated reluctantly, the man with golden eyes said, “So you don’t remember what happened in Peptoe?” “I was sent to a Catholic orphanage here when I was three days old. Anyway, not much happens in a town of nine hundred and six.” “They’ve had a growth spurt since then,” Leftie said. “There’s now nine hundred and twelve.” “Though it’s become a metropolis,” Rightie said, “a little baby abandoned in the middle of a highway would be a big deal even in the new and improved Peptoe.”

The handsome one on my left produced an ID wallet. He was with the Internal Security Agency. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know how it was different from the FBI, NSA, DSA, ATF, Homeland Security, or any other law-enforcement agency. These days, America is a lot more policed at the federal level than it was only a decade earlier.

They were afraid of me.

The one on my left, who had slipped a hand under his suit coat, murmured, “Two of our people are in the booth behind us. They’ve drawn their guns and are holding them under the table.”

“What we want you to do,” the brutish one said, “is let us cuff your hands behind your back and take you outside to our van. We just need to have a talk, need to understand. We don’t want to hurt you.”

Having drawn a basket of crisp potatoes out of the deep-well fryer, Jill pivoted and threw the hot contents of the basket in Rightie’s face. Having drawn two sixteen-ounce beers from the draft spigot, ostensibly to put them on the counter for the waitress who requested them, Phil instead splashed the contents of one mug and then the other into the golden eyes of the man on my left, just as the guy on my right got an order of fries that he hadn’t requested. Behind me, I heard Pinkie Krankauer say, “Don’t even think about it,” as she dumped a tray heaped with dirty dishes into the laps of the agents in the booth.

The guy in the alley was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, but he was big and alert. He said, “Hey there, boy-o.” No normal person calls a stranger “boy-o,” so I figured he was ISA, and I foamed him relentlessly with the fire extinguisher. As he staggered around like Frosty the Snowman dissolving in the Phoenix sunshine, I ran west, carrying the extinguisher just in case I might encounter another overheated federal employee.

3

He braked to a stop at an intersection and looked down at me as I huddled below window level. His expression was kind and, so it seemed to me, informed more by sympathy than pity. “What’s your plan, Quinn?” “Plan? Well, just to stay free long enough to figure out why they’re after me. It has to be some kind of mistake, a screwup. I just have to get it straightened out.”

A Ford F-150 crew cab cruised toward me, bulging tarps full of landscape clippings swelling like bulbous mushrooms in its open bed. Rather than draw attention to myself by stomping on my smartphone in a fit of Rumpelstiltskin rage, I tossed it among those tarps so that the ISA might chase it around Phoenix for a while.

4

As I piloted the Toyota out of the garage and into streaming traffic in the street, I assured myself that I would find Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar thriving in Peptoe. I could be there in three hours and perhaps would be able to speak with the first of them as early as that evening.

I felt rather like a frightened mouse when, instead of taking Interstate 10 south out of Phoenix, as was my intention, I suddenly began switching from street to street. I whigged along on a zigzag course that seemed to have no purpose other than to elude a tail, though my mirrors didn’t reveal any vehicle whipping this way and that in my erratic wake. That inexplicable compulsion had overtaken me again, a kind of psychic magnetism drawing me toward I knew not what. This time it was alarmingly more powerful than it had been previously. I felt almost as though the car was driving itself, the steering wheel pulling my hands where the possessed Toyota wanted to go. I ran two yellow lights, treating the speed limit as if it were a mere helpful suggestion.

Then I was on federal highway 60, headed northwest toward an outlying suburb aptly named Surprise.

As it turned out, my journey’s end wasn’t the town of Surprise. I blew by that whistle-stop and somehow knew that my destination was in the vicinity of Wickenburg, a little more than an hour from Phoenix.

As a young man who had been raised by nuns and who preferred city life to the rigors of suburbia, a place as far out there as Sweetwater Flying F Ranch would never have been on my just-have-to-see-it list if I had been in control of myself.

Considering the events of the day, I expected trouble when I reached wherever I was going, and that expectation was fulfilled. What I didn’t foresee was that my destiny would be found in that place. An adventure-filled life bathed in as much darkness as light, a life shaken by frequent terror but pierced by greater joy, a life of mysteries and revelations waited for me there, and also a recipe for cinnamon-pecan rolls that was to die for.

5

Although I didn’t have a clue why I was here in daylight, I was nonetheless pulled toward the ranch by a power as irresistible as the sun and moon that attract the tides of the seas. I drove between the stone columns and under the decaying sign.

She was sitting on the barn floor, her back to the metal ladder that led to the hayloft, both arms raised above her head and zip tied to a rung. The ladder was rickety, and when she mumbled and moved in her sleep, the loose rung worked noisily in the side rails.

I hurried to the Toyota, opened the trunk, discarded the gun, opened my suitcase, and retrieved the small pair of scissors from my shaving kit. When I returned to the woman, her head hung low, chin on her chest, as over and over she muttered, “Gotta get, gotta go, gotta be there,” as if she was late for the same appointment as the White Rabbit. I cut one zip tie, and her left arm dropped into her lap. As I cut the second tie, her head snapped up, and her eyes opened wide. She seized my face with her right hand, digging her fingernails into my left cheek. “What’ve you done? What’ve you done with him?” With her hand clamped tightly over my chin and mouth, I wasn’t able to answer her with more than a muffled “Done with whom?” Even I couldn’t understand what I said. Her eyes shone in the shadows as she demanded more fiercely, “Tell me what you’ve done with him, you freakin’ Nazi zombie!”

“Sparky Rainking, my grandfather. What’ve you done with Sparky Rainking?” “I didn’t do anything to him. I never met Sparky Rainking. I don’t want to meet him. Seems like it’s dangerous to know Sparky.” In silence, she seethed at me for a moment. She scanned the barn again, and then she looked me up and down. “Where’s your suit?” “I don’t own a suit.” “Then you’re not one of them?” “They’re all about the suit. How could I be one of them if I don’t have a suit? You do know who they are, don’t you?” “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know who they are. Internal Security Agency Nazi zombies.” Suddenly alarmed, she said, “Oh, shit. I remember now. More of them are coming.” She turned away from me and ran toward where the barn door had once been. Hurrying after her, I said, “Where are you going?” “I think I know what they did with Grandpa Sparky.”

6

“What were you doing here? Why would you be in a place like this, the middle of nowhere?” “We came here to hide for a few days,” Sparky said. “Till we could figure things out. But they found us.” “Figure out what things?” “Later, Quinn. Now we better scoot. When the backup they called for gets here, I suspect there’ll be so damn many, you couldn’t run them all down even if they lined up like tenpins for you.”

“I’ll strip the plate off my car, which I took from a Porsche in a parking garage, and we’ll swap it for yours. It’s not a long-term solution, but it’ll buy us some time.”

“I should’ve been wearing it when those bastards took us by surprise. I thought we were safe here.” He pulled on a sport coat. “I’ve had things too soft for too long. I should’ve remembered—no one is ever safe anywhere.”

In less than six hours, I’d gone from being just another hungry customer of Beane’s Diner to a fugitive hunted by the closest thing the US has to a secret police. Most likely I would soon be charged with two murders that were actually acts of self-defense committed while in the grip of a strange magnetism that compelled me to rescue a young woman and her grandfather, whom I hadn’t known existed until I drove more than seventy miles and crashed through a barn door to free them. When I brought that story before a court, at trial, I’d probably be the first person burned at the stake in centuries.

7