Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City. Dean Koontz

       Twenty-nine

      WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I GOT MY WATCH FROM a dead man. Father assured me that it wasn’t stealing, but I never really thought it was in the first place. Before he finished dying, the man wanted to give the Rolex to Father; and under the circumstances it would have been a great unkindness not to accept it.

      On a night in November, we were abroad with little fear of being unmasked and savaged, because pounding cold rain roared down like a judgment. The people of the city were proud of being tough. They said of themselves that they were case-hardened negotiators, brutal competitors, sharp with fools, stripped of illusions by the realities of the streets and therefore not softened by sentimentalism, never looking for a fight but ever ready for one. I can’t say whether any significant portion of the population actually possessed all of these qualities or any of them. What I do know is that the city was a comfort machine designed to provide amenities and conveniences, and regardless of how flinty and indurate its people might have been with outsiders and even with one another, they retreated at once from Nature when she turned furious. They took refuge in warm cozy rooms replete with so many forms of entertainment that the wet and windy world beyond their walls could be forgotten for hours at a time.

      That night, the sky poured out such torrents that the city was a drum set, every surface a source of rhythms, pavements and windows and canvas awnings, street signs and parked cars, Dumpsters throbbing like tom-toms, garbage-can lids swishing as the wind swirled bursts of rain in imitation of a drummer brush-stroking the batter head of a snare.

      Father and I wore rubber boots, gloves, fleece-lined black raincoats that had hoods secured under the chin with Velcro closures. We hid behind ski masks, too, though pedestrians were rare and, when seen, were bent and hurrying, sheltering under umbrellas that had to be held close over their heads to prevent the wind from turning them inside out.

      The storm, which would prove to be the worst of the decade, also sluiced most of the traffic from the streets. In this post-midnight tempest, no taxis were cruising for fares on the deserted avenues. The drivers of the few cabs answering calls were challenged by flooded intersections and blinding sheets of water that overwhelmed their windshield wipers, and they had no time to be curious about us. Even police patrols were at a minimum, perhaps because, as statistics confirm, crime drops sharply during nasty weather because criminals prefer warm and cozy rooms as much as do law-abiding folks.

      The outlaws weren’t all tucked in their beds or playing video games, however, because we came upon four of them during our explorations.

      We had no pressing errand to run, nothing that we needed. We were out and about sightseeing.

      In good weather, even at night, we had to avoid well-lighted places and scurry through shadows like two cockroaches anticipating the stamp of a crushing shoe. Most nights, of necessity, our time aboveground was efficiently managed and spent on essential tasks.

      When the raw wind shrieked through the canyons of high-rises, when the deluge blurred those monoliths as if intent on erasing in one night a civilization that would otherwise be reduced to dust only by a thousand years of history, then Father and I were as free in the city as we would ever be. We could travel where we wished and linger without fear at the lighted display windows of the best stores and galleries on the most elegant streets. As window-shoppers, we could enjoy fine art and the sparkle of luxuries that we would never be able to afford and that, even if a fortune fell on us, we could not purchase without coming face-to-face with a salesclerk who would judge us, by our eyes alone, to be abominations.

      On such nights, the freedom to go places we usually had to avoid was no more satisfying than the weather itself, which we relished. Underground, there was no weather, save for the runoff from a storm. We yearned as much for open air and the feel of the sun on our skin and the buffeting wind as we did for daylight. We were delighted by weather so wild that others fled from it, because it was the only weather we could ever experience leisurely and without fear.

      We were blocks from the finest stores, in a different kind of neighborhood, when the gunfire started.

      The soaring wind and the rush of rain felt and sounded like a flock of a million birds continuously startling into flight around us, wings beating against us, as we walked a street, enchanted by the Beaux Arts architecture of the low-rise commercial buildings dating to the early years of the twentieth century. Some of those structures had been rehabilitated but others were in decline, and lights shone in one of the latter.

      As we approached that place, gunshots tunneled through the white noise of the rain, and a pane in one of the ground-floor windows shattered. A door flew open, and a man came through the door into the storm, but his hair didn’t even have a chance to get wet before he was shot in the back and folded down onto the sidewalk as if he had no more substance than the suit that he wore.

      Inside the building, rapid gunfire from at least two weapons continued for much the lesser part of a minute, and after the last shot, the silence in there sounded as final as the hush in a casket under six feet of freshly spaded earth. The door stood open, but no one stepped outside either to help or to finish off the back-shot man, who was lying on his side and weeping.

      The street remained empty of traffic. No light suddenly bloomed in the windows of the surrounding buildings. Nothing moved except the silver skeins of rain and the wind tearing through them.

      We were hooded and masked, but we could be known by our eyes alone. Although our genuine concern would surely be met with fear and disgust, we could do nothing but attend the weeping victim.

      Father first went to the open door, dared to look inside, stepped out of sight, but returned quickly. When he knelt with me beside the wounded man, he said, “Five men in there, all dead.”

      We were in the pooled darkness between streetlamps, but if we had been in light, the man still would not have known us by our eyes or perhaps not even if we revealed our faces. In his delirium, he saw not what lay before him but what he wished to see. He allowed my father to lift his left hand from the pavement to check his pulse, but he didn’t realize that he was in the company of strangers.

      To my father, he said, “Papa Gino, where’d you come from? Ain’t seen you a long time.” Weariness and bewilderment marked his voice. Death would settle on him soon. Father asked the man for his name, so that he might say a prayer for him. “Don’t you recognize me, Papa Gino? It’s me, your own Jimmy. All grown up and done real good for myself.” Jimmy coughed, and a little blood, black in the poor light, spilled between his lips. Perhaps because my father was holding Jimmy’s left wrist, the dying man said, “See my watch, Papa? Bitchin’ Rolex, solid gold. You take it. I ain’t never given you a damn thing. I wished I could of, now I can. Take it, Papa.” When my father did not at once accept the watch, Jimmy began to sob wretchedly and asked to be forgiven, for what we could not know, and his anguish seemed greater than his pain. Twice he spat blood between his words as he said, “Please take it, Papa Gino, it’s something I can do, it’s a little something.” My father took the watch from