Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City. Dean Koontz
the car rose from the garage on what I thought must be a hydraulic ram, I faced the floor, to avoid being revealed by the fluorescent lights behind the ceiling grid.
She said, “Not even Teague Hanlon knows about this place. Daddy set up a trust in the Cayman Islands to buy it. The trust pays the taxes and utilities. It’s my emergency bolt-hole.”
“In case of what?”
“In case of anything. Right now, in case of Ryan Telford. If he found one of my other eight apartments, he’ll find them all, because all of those are linked through the domestic trust that owns them.”
“Your father set all this up by the time you were thirteen?”
“I think he had a premonition or something, I mean that he wouldn’t live long. Though he didn’t expect to be murdered—either by honey or otherwise.”
We were going to the fifth floor at the top of the building.
I asked, “What’s on floors two, three, and four?”
“Nothing. You might not have noticed, but the windows on the first four floors have been bricked shut. This is now designated a warehouse, but nothing’s stored on those levels.”
The elevator opened, revealing a vestibule. The formidable steel door between that small space and the rest of the apartment could be unlocked only by entering a four-digit code and the star sign into a keypad.
I said, “Such heavy security.”
“I’m embarrassed to tell you, but Daddy called me a priceless treasure. This is my vault.”
In the living room, she switched on a lamp and then went to set out candles, in the light of which I would be more comfortable. The room was nearly as minimally furnished as the one in the apartment where we had eaten scrambled eggs and brioche, except that this one contained a grand piano.
At the wall of windows, I discovered three Clears on the roofs of the two buildings across the street, a woman and two men, glowing softly. The falling snow, all of it vaguely luminous as it reflected the ambient light of the city, was brighter in their vicinity, but it appeared to pass through them, and it wove no lace mantillas in their hair. One of the men gazed into the sky, and the other two peered down into the street along which we had recently arrived.
The heavens offered nothing but the sea of snow. In the street, on the farther sidewalk, a man bent into the wind, two lengths of his long scarf trailing behind him as if he were a walking weather vane. Also trailing behind him on a leash was a German shepherd, judging by its deep chest, straight back, and sloping hindquarters.
As they passed out of shadow and under a lamppost, the shepherd raised its bowed head and turned its face out of the wind-driven snow to look up as if suddenly aware of me at the window high above, its eyes radiant in the lamplight. I didn’t step back from the glass. The Fogs may take tenancy in bad people and sleep dreaming in certain objects, but I have reason to trust dogs.
In the living room behind me, Gwyneth finished strategically placing candles in ruby-glass cups and turned off the lamp.
She said, “I’ve put a glass of pinot grigio on a coaster on the piano. You do drink wine?”
Turning away from the window, I said, “Father and I would from time to time have a glass or even two.”
“I want to hear all about your father.”
Not ready to open that door yet, I said, “And I want to hear all about you.”
“There’s not that much to me.”
The most that I could clearly see of her in the lambent ruby glow of isolated votives was her right hand as it gripped a wineglass, in the bowl of which glimmered the reflection of a nearby flame.
“For every small thing I’ve learned about you,” I said, “I’m sure there are a thousand things of greater importance.”
“You are a hopeless romantic.”
“For instance, do you play the piano?”
“I play and I compose.”
“Will you play something for me?”
“After dinner. Music is a better brandy than it is an aperitif.”
Her cell phone rang, and she fished it from a jacket pocket.
The ring tone was a bar or two of lovely music, but somehow I knew that the call was bad news.
SIX YEARS EARLIER, IN ANOTHER NIGHT OF HEAVY snow …
The windows of the performing-arts center and the museum were blind dark, and to the south the towers of St. Saturnius thrust high into a night that had become as Gothic as their finials, crockets, spires, and belfries.
Kneeling beside my father, I looked into his ruined face, that I might always remember how cruel had been his martyrdom and what he had endured to save me. One of his eyes was lost beneath a pool of blood, the socket like a cup and, in that light, the blood as dark as cabernet.
I half expected cathedral bells to ring out across the city in memoriam, a carillon of joyous bells that said Someone is free at last, and simultaneously a monody of heavy bells, iron bells, as solemn as those rung for heroes and for statesmen, bells that said He is gone who was much loved. But the night was empty of all bells. There were no bells for such as us, no funerals, no crowd of mourners around our graves.
The distraught policemen might return at any moment. Although in part motivated by regret, they were likely to repeat with me the violence visited upon my father.
After rolling up the ski mask that he had taken off and putting it in a pocket of my coat, I slipped the scarf from his neck. I wound that length of wool around his head, covering his face, and secured it with the hood, which I tied beneath his chin, cinching up his sagging, broken jaw.
Snow fell so heavily now through the windless night that, from this midpoint of the block, I couldn’t see past either corner. The strike by workers in the Street and Sanitation Department had led to the deserted avenues that enticed us aboveground for a night of play, and now the same strike all but ensured that, here atop the most treacherous slopes in the metropolis, hours past midnight, no one would happen upon me in the next few minutes.
Cathedral Hill was the highest point in the city, which meant the drains were the smallest, because no higher culverts existed to feed them. I could not bring Father’s body at once down into our world below the street, for there was no entrance here to a tunnel large enough to accommodate us.
I had only two options, but I didn’t like the first. I could drag or carry the body through one of the long, steep streets that led down from this high plateau, block after block, until I reached a largely horizontal neighborhood that would offer entrances to storm drains through which I could travel upright. Even in this feathery downpour, with visibility diminished, the longer that I stayed aboveground, the more likely that I would be seen either by the returning policemen or others. Besides, I could not carry Father that far, not in snow halfway to my knees, and I was loath to drag him, as a hunter might drag a deer carcass from the woods.
My second option was St. Saturnius. In the full block occupied by the cathedral complex, there were associated buildings, including not just the archbishop’s residence and the offices of the diocese, but also a monastery with chapter house, refectory, and a cloister surrounding a garden. There was a secret passage off the great hill, but to access it, I had to get Father into St. Saturnius.
Already in those days, and in fact years earlier, churches were locked tight after vespers or any lay activity that might be the last meeting of the day. Previously, they had been open around the clock, and any troubled soul was free to enter and sit or kneel alone. But for a few decades,