The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz
She did not explain what brought her to that place or mention whether she had been there alone or with others.
Brian seemed to sense that questions would inhibit her and that the wrong question, asked too soon, would halt her altogether.
She spoke of the rugged shore and the thrilling seascapes, of the spectacular views from the lantern room at the top of the tower, and of the charming details of the lightkeeper’s house.
She dwelt at length on the beauty of the lighthouse itself, the walnut paneling of the round vestibule, the ornate fretwork of the circular iron staircase. At the summit, in the lantern room, waited the marvelous Fresnel lens, oval in shape, with integrated series of prismatic rings at bottom and top, which reflected the rays of a one-thousand-watt halogen bulb to the center of the lens, amplifying them. Thus concentrated, the light was beamed outward, across the dark Atlantic.
They arrived at the restaurant in Monterey as she finished telling him that, in the early nineteenth century, Fresnel lenses were so heavy, the only way to turn them—and make the beam sweep the coast—was to float them in pools of mercury. Extremely dense, mercury will support great weight and reduce friction to a minimum.
Mercury is highly toxic. Gradually, mercury flotation was phased out in favor of clockworks and counterweights, which were subsequently replaced by electric motors.
Before then, however, some lightkeepers were driven insane by mercury poisoning.
Chapter
52
Billy Pilgrim flew as the lone passenger in a chartered Learjet from Santa Barbara to Monterey.
The steward wore black slacks, a white coat, a white shirt, and a black bowtie. He had a British accent.
Airborne at ten o’clock, Billy was served a late breakfast of strawberries in clotted cream, a lobster omelet, and toasted brioche with raisin butter.
He’d left his suitcase of clothes at the hotel in Santa Barbara because, sometime in the evening, when everyone who needed to be dead was dead, he intended to resume his vacation as Tyrone Slothrop.
He had brought the second suitcase containing the guns. The first was a Glock 18 with thirty-three rounds in its magazine. The second was a disassembled sniper rifle.
Before leaving Santa Barbara, he had taken the tabloid newspaper for gun aficionados out of the suitcase and had left it on the living-room coffee table. He was not concerned that the publication would once more transform itself into Brian McCarthy’s drawings of the dog. That had been a hallucination born of weariness. Billy was rested and past all that. He merely wanted to save the paper for reading later in the week. Nothing more. Just that. He felt fine.
The steward brought him an array of glossy magazines, and when he opened one, the first thing he saw was an advertisement for high-end men’s suits. In the double-page spread, three well-tailored young men were walking three golden retrievers.
Billy closed the magazine and put it aside. The photo had meant nothing. Coincidence.
Suspecting that the same two-page spread might appear in many publications, Billy did not leaf through the front matter of the next magazine, but opened it to the middle, where he was more likely to encounter editorial content than advertising. The story in front of him concerned a dog-loving celebrity and her three golden retrievers.
In the opening photograph, all three dogs were looking directly into the camera, and something in their eyes suggested to Billy that months ago, when the photo shoot occurred, the dogs had known that he, Billy Pilgrim, would many weeks later be looking at them as he was looking at them now, in a state of agitation. The three dogs were grinning, but he saw no laughter in their eyes, quite the opposite.
Billy dropped the magazine and went at once into the bathroom. He didn’t throw up. He felt good about not throwing up. Not throwing up indicated that he had pretty much regained control of his nerves.
He looked in the mirror, saw that sweat beaded his brow, and blotted his face with a towel. After that, he looked good. He wasn’t pale, but he pinched his cheeks anyway, to get more color in them. He looked fine. He hadn’t wept a single tear. He winked at himself.
In Monterey, when Brian McCarthy and Amy Redwing arrived, Billy had the restaurant under surveillance from a rental car parked across the street.
He knew that she rescued goldens and owned them. But he had not expected her to bring one with her on a trip like this. They didn’t know their ultimate destination. They didn’t know how far they were going or where they might be staying, or what situation they would find on the other end. Taking the dog with them made no sense. It made no sense. He couldn’t see any way it made sense.
The restaurant didn’t accept dogs, so they locked the golden in the Expedition with the windows cracked. The SUV was parked at the curb. They went inside, and after a minute, Billy saw them in one of the windows. They had taken a table from which they could watch over the dog.
Billy telephoned Harrow to report that the pair had arrived in Monterey.
“Do they have a shadow?”
“If they’re suspicious and they came with backup, it’s way discreet. I’d bet my ass, no, they’re alone. Except they brought a golden retriever.”
Harrow surprised him by saying, “Kill it.”
To be sure he made no mistake, Billy said, “Kill the dog?”
“Kill it good. Kill it hard. That’s what she wants.”
“Who wants?”
“Vanessa. Kill the dog. But not until they get here. They’re flying on good feelings, coming to get his precious child. We want to keep them in a ‘What-me-worry?’ mood.”
Harrow hung up.
Billy watched the golden watching McCarthy and Redwing in the restaurant window. They occasionally looked up to check on the dog.
The Glock 18 featured a selector switch on the slide with which he could convert it from a semiautomatic to a full automatic that cycled at thirteen hundred rounds per minute. When the time came, he could pump twenty bullets into the dog in like one second. That seemed to qualify as kill-it-good-kill-it-hard.
The dog was watching Billy.
It had been intently focused on the restaurant window where McCarthy and Redwing were eating lunch, but it had turned around.
From across the street, Billy stared right back at it.
The dog seemed to have lost all interest in its owners. It appeared to be fascinated with Billy.
Not in the least intimidated, Billy narrowed his eyes to pull the golden retriever into even clearer focus.
The dog raised its nose to the two-inch gap at the top of the open window. It was getting Billy’s scent.
At once, Billy started the rental car. He drove back to the airport. He had a schedule to keep. He needed to get moving. Nothing more. Just that. He felt fine.
Chapter
53
In the restaurant, Amy did not return to the subject of the lighthouse. Brian sensed that she didn’t want to talk about that period of her life within earshot of anyone but him.
He realized that she must be leading to some disclosure that she was loath to make, to that ringbolt in the past to which he had long suspected she was tethered.
His own revelation surely had helped her. For ten years, he had failed the child whom he had fathered. Whatever Amy had done was not likely to have burdened her with the weight of guilt that Brian felt he had earned.
Vanessa phoned during their lunch. “You’ll be going through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“I didn’t realize it would be this far.”
“You’re going to whine at me, Bry?”
“No. I’m just saying.”
“Ten years of my life are crap because I had to take care of our Piggy Pig, and now you’re going to whine about one day on the road?”
“Forget I said anything. You’re right. Once we cross the bridge, what?”
“Stay north on 101. I’ll call with details. Anyway, Bry, you couldn’t have flown to San Francisco and driven from there. Not on short not
He glanced out the window at Nickie in the Expedition. “So you really are watching us.”
“My nervous little rich boy says what if the dog’s wired by some scandal-crazy tabloid-TV show. You believe that? The dog?”
“I told you, I won’t risk blowing this deal.”
“I know you won’t, Bry. His security people were going to do an electronic sweep of you, your SUV, soon as you got here. Now they’ll also sweep the dog. Maybe there’s a microphone built into its collar. Maybe there’s a power pack up its butt. Isn’t that hysterical?”
“If you say so.”
“See you soon, Bry.”
She terminated the call.
Brian picked at the second half of his meal, and Amy seemed to have lost her appetite, too.
“I want it over,” he said. “I just want Hope away from her.”
“Then let’s hit the road,” Amy said.
Back at the Expedition, Nickie got out to take a pee and then graciously accepted two cookies as a reward for having been such a patient girl.
After the dog sprang into the back of the SUV once more and turned to Brian as he stood at the tailgate, he met her stare and held it. On this clouded day, Nickie’s warm-molasses gaze was not brightened by refracted sunshine, but full of shadows, steady and direct and dark.
For a moment, he felt nothing strange, but then the centripetal force of these eyes seemed to pull him toward them. He felt his heart quickening, and his mind was bright with a perception of deep mystery and with the desire to understand it that had led him to draw so many studies of her eyes with such obsession.
In his memory rose the complex and enfolding sound: hiss, whizz, soft clicking, rustle and flump, deep throb and ruffle, crumpcrump-crumpcrump—
The sound stopped abruptly when the dog turned away from him and went forward into the cargo area.
Brian became aware of the traffic noise in the street rising slowly from the hush into which he had not until now realized that it had fallen.
He closed the tailgate and went around to the front passenger door. Amy had expressed the desire to drive.
In the car, on the open road, they would have privacy. Secrets could more easily be shared.
On the interstate, bound for the storied city, she was silent for a while but then said, “When I was eighteen, I married a man named Michael Cogland. He probably intended to kill me from the day that I accepted his proposal.”
Chapter
54
The previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.
As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.
Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.
To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did mattered. Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to building something, to a legacy!
He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.
The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.
He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.
With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.
In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.
Then he cruised.
During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS and ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS.
When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.
In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.
He had never been so scared in his life.
When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.
The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.
He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.
At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.
Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.
Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.
Chapter
55
Driving toward the city where so many people had claimed to have left their hearts, Amy unburdened hers.
In her senior year at Misericordiæ, she won a scholarship from a major university. Because it was partial, she had to support herself.
For two years in high school, she had worked part-time as a waitress. She had liked the job and had earned good tips.
When she went away to university, she landed a job in an upscale steakhouse. There she met Michael Cogland, a regular customer, when he was twenty-six, eight years her senior.
He was charming and intense, but when he asked her out, she did not initially accept the invitation. He proved to be indefatigable.
Amy thought she knew what she wanted: a first-rate education, including a doctorate, a career as a professor, a quiet academic life with many friends, and an opportunity to enrich the lives of students as the sisters of Misericordiæ had enriched hers.
Michael Cogland not only persisted until he swept her out of her waitressing shoes, but he also swept her into a world of wealth that she found irresistibly seductive.
Later she would realize that being abandoned at the age of two with only the clothes she wore, having lost the Harkinsons and the solid middle-class life they would have given her, and having been raised in an orphanage, she had grown up with a thirst for security that had not been quenched by all the love that the sisters had rained on her. She had gotten along for eightee
Cogland had recognized her subconscious yearning for security and, with subtlety and cunning, had presented her with a vision of a cozy future that she could not resist.
Because she was a modest Catholic-school girl, he treated her with respect, too, and delayed a physical relationship until they were married. He knew precisely how to play her.
They were engaged two months after they met, and were married in four. She dropped out of university and into a life of leisure.
He wanted a family. Soon she was pregnant. But there would be a nanny, maids.
Only much later did she learn that although Michael was a rich man by most standards, his greatest wealth was held in trust. By the terms of his grandfather’s will, those funds would pass to him only on two conditions: Before his thirtieth birthday, he must marry a girl acceptable to his parents, and he must father a child by her.
Apparently his grandfather, if not also his parents, had seen in him, even when he’d been a boy, a tendency toward bad attitudes and ill-considered actions. As the Coglands had been a scandal-free family of faith, whose wealth had been built with a strong sense of community service, they believed in the power of a good wife and children to settle a man who might otherwise indulge his weaknesses.
Amy gave birth to a daughter when she was nineteen, and for a while all seemed well, a long life of privilege and joy propitiously begun. Michael came into his inheritance—and still she didn’t know that she had been the vehicle by which he obtained it.
Gradually, she began to see in him a different man from the one whom she had thought she married. The better she knew him, the less that his charm seemed genuine, the more it appeared to be a tool for manipulation. His warm manner wore thin, and a colder mind at times revealed itself.
He had a goatish streak, and he jumped the fence to more than a few other women. Twice she found evidence, but in most cases she knew the truth not from facts but from inference. He had a temper, well concealed until the beginning of their third year.
By the time they were married two years, Amy had begun to stay more often and longer in their vacation home, a stunning oceanfront property on which a handsome residence had been expanded from the lightkeeper’s house. The lighthouse itself, while owned by the Coglands, had long been automated; it was serviced once a month by Coast Guard engineers who flew to the site in a helicopter.
Michael was content to remain in the city. He visited as seldom as he could while maintaining the appearance of a marriage, but his desire for her faded so that even during his visits, he often slept in his own room. He seemed to view her with a contempt that she had not earned and could not understand.
She remained married to him solely for the sake of their one child, whom Amy loved desperately and whom she wanted to raise in the stable family environment that characterized the Coglands, generation after generation. In truth, she told herself that she remained for no other reason, but she engaged in self-delusion.
Although she yearned for a genuine husband-wife relationship, and though she suffered loneliness, she liked the lifestyle, liked it perhaps too much: the magisterial aura of old money, the peaceful rhythms of daily life without struggle, the beauty of her property.
Now, years later, having become a far different Amy from that young woman, she braked behind traffic crawling along the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Without glancing at Brian, she said, “He wanted to name our daughter Nicole, and I was pleased with that, it’s a lovely name, but by the time she was three, I