Last Light (Novella) (8 page)

Rainer Sparks was here, as invisible as a poltergeist. Pogo didn't know where to aim, and he didn't want to squeeze off a spray of bullets, for fear that one of them—directly or by ricochet—might hit Makani, also for fear that he would use all ten rounds without nailing Sparks, and then be weaponless.

The Taser resolved his dilemma. The positive and negative poles—two cold steel pegs—pressed against his neck, and mean centipedes skittered through him, their centuries of legs plucking chaos from his nerve fibers. The gun fell from his hands, and a second jolt from the Taser staggered him backward even as his knees buckled. Ink spilled through his vision when he hit the floor, but he blinked it away, leaving no permanent stain, and looked up just as an unseen man, seeming to speak directly above him, said, “Welcome to the game, you hopeless feeb.”

The bedroom door that Pogo had flung open a moment ago now slammed shut, as if thrown by a fierce draft. Moving away through the house, like some overgrown and demented child, Rainer Sparks sang, “Two blind mice, two blind mice. See how they run, see how they run. Each of 'em ran in fear of its life, but I cut out their guts with a big freakin' knife. Two blind mice.”

There was a gnarly wave that some surfers called a “thunder crusher” and others called a “dumper,” a wave both steep and thick that broke straight down from the top and hit you like a wall of wet concrete, leaving you wiped out and your board broken. Pogo felt as if he had just been hammered by one.

Crawling to the pistol, holding fast to it, struggling to his feet, he asked Makani if she was all right. She said she was okay, and when he opened the door, she begged him not to go after Sparks, but he went. He was still in the main hallway when the front door crashed shut. By the time Pogo made his way through the living room and across the foyer and outside to the front walkway, Sparks was either still working his mojo or he was gone.

Pogo waited in the growing blackness of the setting moon until an engine started farther down the street. Crisp white headlights drilled the darkness. A white Mercedes SUV approached, picking up speed. As it roared past the cottage, Pogo couldn't get a clear view of the driver, but he could see that the guy was big, hulking over the steering wheel as though he might be a troll that had immigrated to California from some sulfurous underworld.

Having been prosecuted by the sea more often than she could count, clamshelled and creamed and stacked on the rocks, Makani Miomio Hisoka-O'Brien was accustomed to aches and pains. Those bruises and abrasions with which Rainer Sparks had left her were not worth complaining about, and they certainly were not sufficient to rob her of courage.

After washing down two Tylenol with beer, sitting at the kitchen table, holding an ice-pack on her left wrist, which had suffered a mild sprain, she said, “Anyway, there's nowhere to run.”

Although four years younger than Makani, Pogo had been biffed and dumped and quashed and rinse-cycled as often as any surfer his age. As he sat across the table from Makani, holding an ice pack to the back of his neck, he said, “What's the freak expect—that we'll slide away to Kansas, forget there's such a thing as an ocean, hide out in a tornado cellar?”

“That's not me,” she said.

“It's not me, either.”

“Not that there's anything wrong with Kansas.”

“Wild Bill Hickock was from Kansas.”

“That alone justifies it,” she said.

“Sparks is a big bastard, though.”

“And invisible.”

“There's got to be a way around that.”

“What way?”

Bob the Labrador, who had been sitting beside Makani, his chin in her lap, raised his head and sniffed the plate on the table that had been set aside for him. It contained chunks of roast beef that were his reward for being the first to realize that Rainer Sparks was in the house.

After Makani gave him one cube of meat and then another, he made a thin sound of entreaty, and she said, “You shouldn't gobble them all at once, sweetie. Learn to savor, Bobby. Life's all about savoring.”

The dog lowered his big black head and rested his chin on her thigh once more.

“I'm not changing my name and getting false ID and moving to Mexico,” Makani said.

After a long pull at his beer, Pogo said, “There
is
some killer surf in Baja. Down to Todos Santos and Scorpion Bay, even all the way to Mazatlán.”

“You changing your name, then?”

“Hell, no. Nothing would be as easy to remember as Pogo.”

“I like Pogo.”

“I like Makani.”

“I don't mean just the name.”

“I don't mean just the name, either.”

They smiled at each other.

Bob raised his head.

“Screw it,” Makani said. “Gobble away if you want.” And she put the plate of beef on the floor.

“It's who Bobby is,” Pogo said. “Bobby's a gobbler.”

“Who are we if we are not us?” she said.

“Then we'd be nobody.”

“Well, I'm not nobody, and you're not nobody, and Bobby is somebody, too.”

A pause for beer.

Pogo reminded her, “Sparks is one big bastard.”

“And invisible,” she said.

“There's got to be a way around that.”

“You think of it yet?”

“I have a kind of idea.”

They had preparations to make, shopping to do, second thoughts to consider, and a lot of mutual encouragement to perform. Being of high spirits most of the time, Bob didn't need encouragement, but he went with them to the hardware store, which he enjoyed, not least of all because the owner always brought his Labrador, Gracie, to work.

By noon, they were ready. Or as ready as they could be.

Over a lunch of sandwiches, eaten on the patio, Makani said, “It's good not to be alone.”

Pogo nodded. “I never have been.”

“Well, I have been for almost ten years.”

“Where do you see this going?”

“You mean if he doesn't kill us?”

“Exactly.”

“He will probably kill us.”

“Probably.”

“But if he doesn't, I don't see us plunging into things.”

Pogo nodded. “Nothing worthwhile happens overnight.”

“You really feel that way?”

“I've got to get used to being read all the time.”

“And I've got to figure how I cope with you knowing that you're being read.”

“Maybe I'll learn how to hide my darker thoughts.”

“What darker thoughts? I've known you two years, and I've never seen one.”

“Right now, I'm planning to kill a man.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That's not as dark as what
I'd
like to do to him.”

Under the table, where he was lying in the shade and summer heat, Bob grumbled his agreement.

Pogo wanted to nap for a few hours, to be sure his head was clear when sunset came.

Although they didn't expect Sparks to show up sooner than he had promised, Makani insisted on sitting in a chair in the second guest room, the pistol in her lap, while Pogo slept in the nearby bed. She kept Bob at her side, hoping he understood that he was their early-warning system.

In all her conversations with Pogo, she had tried to match his light tone, which was natural to him because it was a reflection of his confident and buoyant spirit. In truth, however, she expected to die this evening, and she hoped only that Pogo would survive and that she would not have been the cause of his death.

Two hours before sunset.

Having returned to Makani's bungalow to sleep in her bed with the scent of her, eat her food, shower with her soap and her loofah sponge, and again use her toothbrush, Rainer was rested and primed for the encounter ahead.

When he checked the GPS for the location of her '54 Chevy, he found that it remained at the house of Oliver Watkins.

He was not surprised.

There were people who ran like the frightened mice they were. He destroyed them.

Then there were people who would not run and who thought they were clever enough to outwit him. In the end, they died, too.

Makani most likely believed that her power made her a harder target than ordinary people. But her power
was
ordinary when compared to Rainer's.

Anyway, Rainer had analyzed the situation from every angle. He was confident that she had no advantage that would save her or the pretty-boy feeb who imagined he was her guardian.

One of the many things at which Rainer excelled was analysis. Of data. Of situations. Of people.

He would have become the winningest chess player in history if he had been interested enough to learn the rules of the game. Chess looked boring. Too slow, no sex, no killing.

Pogo and Makani sat at the table in the gazebo to enjoy the sunset. The rope lighting under the encircling handrail and around the perimeter of the ceiling was hardly noticeable at the moment, but with nightfall, it would cast a warm glow over them, so that their location would be obvious.

On the table stood two bottles of Corona. They had not drunk any beer, and they would not until this was over. The gazebo was a stage. The bottles were props. They intended that Rainer Sparks should interpret their demeanor as either reckless confidence or fatalistic indifference, though it was neither.

Bob paced around the gazebo, pausing now and then to stick his snout between balusters and sample the thousands of scents that the sea and the city offered him. He was
not
a prop.

Part of the day had been spent encouraging the Labrador to smell the threshold at the side door to the garage, by which Sparks had evidently gained entry, the alarm keypad outside the laundry room, which he had somehow overridden, the carpet of the guest bedroom, the blanket and sheets, and the clothes that Makani had been wearing when he had forced her facedown onto the bed and had lain atop her, pressing her into the smothering pillow. Initially, Bob wagged and capered and grinned, seeming to think that they were teaching him a new game, but soon he began to take the instruction seriously. He apparently found Sparks's scent complex, disturbing, and endlessly fascinating.

A spectacular sunset required scattered clouds to provide reflection, and the day's end was furnished with a perfect mix.

Feathery cirrus at the highest altitude. Cirrostratus farther down. And nearest the sea, a procession of puffy stratocumulus clouds, like unsheared sheep, wandered slowly northward.

Not sure if they were yet under observation by the murderer, Makani pretended to take a sip of her beer and then said, “When this is over, we need to do something special for Bob.”

“We'll give him a special day,” Pogo said. “Start out cutting up a couple frankfurters in his morning kibble.”

“A long walk in Corona del Mar, the Village. He loves all the smells there, the other dogs out walking.”

“Some Frisbee at the dog park.”

“Lunch at a restaurant that takes dogs on the patio.”

“Go over to Muttropolis, buy some cool new toys.”

“The dog beach. A long nap on a blanket, in the sun.”

“Get him on the board. He's more an inlander than a surf mongrel, but he's game.”

“Shut your face,” Makani said. “He's no inlander. He's born to thrash the waves.”

“If you say so. I haven't seen him channeling Kahuna yet.”

The sinking sun phased from lemon-yellow to orange, and the lower clouds caught fire first, though soon the blaze laddered up to higher elevations.

Makani said, “I'm afraid.”

“Who wouldn't be?”

“You seem way cool.”

Pogo said, “I've been thinking I might need an adult diaper.”

The heavens were as full of fire as Hell when Rainer parked three blocks from the Watkins house.

He waited in the GL550, listening to music, as night crept in from the east and the sun went to its daily death and the bloody light drained down the sky to the horizon.

Currently, he was sampling symphonic music. Wagner.

His life was so eventful, so epic, that he felt it needed theme music. He was a demigod, and demigods didn't stride through their days without a soundtrack.

He had tried gangsta rap, but it didn't seem important enough.

Beethoven was too spiritual. Glenn Miller too ebullient.

The movie soundtrack for
The Terminator
had possibilities, as did certain tunes from that old TV show
Twin Peaks.

Wagner was the closest to being right, but it wasn't ideal.

Rainer had begun to think he would have to write his own music. He had never written music before, but he was sure he could do it.

When the sunset had diminished to a thin red wound along the horizon, he got out of the Mercedes.

He walked without haste to the Watkins house and the pleasures that the night held for him.

As before, he wore his stylish and practical khaki coat with cargo pockets.

Makani and her guy had probably figured out by what route he had previously entered the house. It didn't matter if they were waiting for him.

He was unstoppable.

Nevertheless, this time he went directly to the front door.

It would have been amusing to ring the bell, but he did not.

A deadbolt. The LockAid released the pin tumblers in less than half a minute.

With a pistol in hand, he entered the foyer fast, in a half crouch, but no one waited to greet him.

Since he was invisible to them, he didn't expect to be fired upon. Just in case, he was wearing a bulletproof Kevlar vest under his coat, a custom model to which had been added short sleeves.

The house was quiet.

A few lamps were lit, dialed low.

In the family room, through the French doors, he saw the dark patio, the dark yard, and the lighted gazebo toward the end of the property.

Makani and her guy were sitting in the gazebo. Downlighted.

“What game is this?” he wondered aloud.

Makani lifted a bottle to her mouth. Maybe a beer bottle.

Not-Ollie lifted a bottle to his mouth, too.

Who were they trying to kid? After he had kicked their ass in Round Two, less than twenty-four hours earlier, they weren't lying back, relaxed, and getting juiced.

It looked like a trap of some kind.

Now and then, other people had tried to set a trap for him. Idiots, all of them.

If he opened a patio door and stepped outside, they wouldn't see him, but they might see the door open.

So he'd go out by way of the side garage door.

He hesitated, watching them.

The gazebo was near the gate in the glass-panel fence. A gate on a bluff meant there must be stairs leading down to the shore.

Maybe they expected him to come at them from the beach.

Maybe they figured that at the first sound of him on those stairs, they'd step through the gate and shoot down on him.

Did they think he was a loser?

Rainer wasn't a loser.

They
were the losers.

Maybe they thought he wouldn't attack them if they were in the open, under the gazebo lights, visible to neighbors if anyone in a second-floor room or sitting on an upper deck of the flanking houses happened to look this way.

Stupid.

He could simply push out his mojo to affect the neighbors as well. They'd never see him or hear the targets' screams any more than the other diners in Sharkin', the previous day, had seen him throw beer in Makani's face or heard him curse her out.

And his pistol was fitted with a silencer. It would make only a soft, sensuous sucking sound when he shot not-Ollie in the head.

Rainer was ready to be done with that guy. Eager to get started with Makani.

He left the family room, followed the main hall to the laundry room, crossed the garage, and opened the side door.

The moon hung too low to brighten the narrow walkway between the residence and the property wall.

Rainer moved toward the back of the property.

Snout between two balusters, facing the house, Bob became agitated. He growled low in his throat, whimpered, growled again, and turned to look at Makani and Pogo.

“Our guest has arrived,” Pogo said.

Makani said, “I'm going to be sick.”

“You're not going to be sick. You might wind up dead, but you won't embarrass yourself.”

“I think maybe you're right. Which amazes me.”

When the last light had faded from the sky, they had turned their chairs away from the view, angled them more toward the house.

Earlier, they had turned off the landscape-lighting timer. The yard lay in deep darkness. They could not see Rainer coming. Or hear him. But he could not see much, either, except the glowing gazebo and Makani radiant within it.

The previous night, in the guest room, when Bob couldn't see or hear Rainer, but only smell him, he had become confused. Now, in the night, the dog could not
expect
to see him, and therefore should not as easily become disarmed by puzzlement. Besides, that afternoon they had spent two hours sensitizing the Labrador to the murderer's scent.

Bob became increasingly agitated, which suggested that Rainer was crossing the yard, approaching the gazebo. Pogo held in his hand a switch he'd bought that afternoon. A black extension cord ran from the switch, around the yard, to the control box for the lawn sprinklers. The trick was not to activate them too soon, out of fear. He had to wait for the cowbell.

As Rainer approached the gazebo, he heard in his mind's ear a stirring passage from Richard Wagner's
The Ring of the Nibelung.

It was Hitler's favorite music.

Now that Rainer was in action, Wagner's composition proved to be the
perfect
accompaniment for the violence to come. It made him feel ten feet tall. It almost brought him to tears.

Shoot the idiot pretty-boy in the face.

Shoot the dog.

Drag the bitch into the house and teach her the beauty of pain as she had never known it.

In his nearly blind rush, he came to a wire, maybe five or six inches off the ground, stretched taut across the width of the yard.

As he tripped and fell, a cowbell rang.

Still in the thrall of the killer's power, Pogo didn't hear him fall, but the cowbell was a thing apart from Sparks, and it clanged when the wire was violated.

The scent of the murderer excited Bob beyond his ability to control himself. He would have sprung out of the gazebo and dashed into the yard if Makani hadn't been holding his leash with both hands.

Pogo flicked the switch. After a hesitation while relays worked and valves opened, the lawn sprinklers showered the grass with an abundance of water, thanks to the higher-flow heads that he and Makani had installed earlier.

Furious that he had fallen, that he had been embarrassed by the likes of those two losers in the gazebo, Rainer gasped when a veritable storm erupted from the pop-up lawn sprinklers.

What did these morons think they were doing?

Did they imagine they could
humiliate
him to death?

He struggled to kick loose of the wire.

His efforts made the cowbell clang louder.

He would feed the pretty-boy his severed manhood before he fed the bitch her face.

Wagner was
booming
in his mind's ear.

The length of half-inch insulated cable lying on the floor by Pogo's chair was wired at one end into the junction box that served the gazebo. When he picked it up after activating the lawn sprinklers, he was careful to keep his hand well back from the bare copper wires at the end from which he had stripped the insulation.

As Bob strained at his leash and Makani held him safe, Pogo stood up and threw the cable between two of the balusters, onto the sodden grass.

He expected Sparks to scream. The murderer wouldn't be able to maintain the spell that he cast over them, surely not in his death throes. According to Makani, when she had thrown beer in his face, in the restaurant, he had for a moment lost control, and others had suddenly become aware of him in his embarrassment.

The scream didn't come. Still didn't come.

Pogo told himself to stay cool, stay cool, but a fine sweat broke out on his brow.

Rainer thought he was free of the wire, but when he clambered halfway to his feet, he discovered that he was still entangled, and he fell again, face-first, into something disgusting, of which he got a choking mouthful. He didn't have to wonder what it was, he knew instantly what it was, and he was furious—
outraged
—that they had been so busy setting their trap, they hadn't remembered to pick up after the dog.

Had he been standing, the rubber soles of his shoes would have insulated him and, in spite of the electricity arcing through the heavy spray, might have saved him.

Prostrate on the lawn, he never heard the end of the heroic passage from Wagner that boomed through his mind, though an instant before eternal darkness blacked out the last light in his brain, he realized that he was listening to the fourth of the composer's famous tetralogy, which was
Götterdämmerung,
otherwise known as
The Twilight of the Gods.

After counting to twenty, when he still hadn't heard a scream, Pogo counted to twenty again before he reached to the junction box and threw the little breaker in it. He detached the cable from the box, reeled it in from the yard, and coiled it on the floor of the gazebo.