Last Light

14 Thunder Crusher

Tail held high but not wagging, nose to the floor, Bob padded out of the family room, and Pogo followed.

The dog was intent on pursuing a scent, but he didn’t seem to be in the least distressed, as presumably he would be if an imminent threat existed. Curious, yes, and perhaps puzzled, he sniffed rapidly, deeply, sweat dripping from his black nose, which could gather and hold scents better when it was wet.

In the hallway, Bob paused, looked left, right, left, and then continued to the right, claws clicking on the wood floor. His snout was now so close to the mahogany that he left an almost continuous smear of nose sweat, like a snail trail.

The laundry-room door was ajar. As lithe as smoke drawn by a draft, the swivel-hipped dog squeezed through the narrow gap, into the dark room beyond. In the absence of a bark, Pogo trusted that no one waited behind the door, and he pushed it open. Bob pawed at the next door, the one to the garage, remembered that his surfing buddy was with him, and looked up beseechingly.

Wondering if he might be attributing the wrong motive to the Labrador’s urgency, Pogo said, “Hey, dude, you sure this isn’t just about taking a pee?”

Bob chuffed.

Choosing to interpret the chuff as a declaration of serious intent, Pogo opened the door. Bob dashed across the threshold, into the darkness, his sniffing amplified as it echoed off the cars and the garage walls.

Finding the switch and flipping on the fluorescent ceiling panels took maybe ten seconds, by which time Bob had wound among the three vehicles, which included Pogo’s thirty-year-old primer-gray pity-the-poor-boy Honda, and had begun to return to the laundry room. He was a canine on the hunt, no doubt about that. However, he continued to seem more excited and more puzzled than anxious, not in an obviously protective state of mind.

Makani slept in soft lamplight, fully dressed, on her back, atop the bedclothes. Head turned to her left. Arms at her sides. One palm turned up, the other flat to the blanket.

Standing bedside, gazing down at her, Rainer felt triumphant, powerful, indestructible.

The woman’s eyes moved rapidly behind their lids, a sign of dreaming.

No doubt she dreamed of him.

She feared him, but she wanted him.

She would never admit to the desire.

But he knew.

Power and sex were linked. People wanted both equally and more than anything else.

Likewise, power and death were two sides of the same card. The purpose of power was to control others. And to get rid of them if you couldn’t effect control.

Therefore sex and death were linked as well.

He had known women who wanted him to take them, by which they really meant kill them. And he had done both.

Rainer had thought about this a lot. He was a deep thinker. A philosopher. You knew you were a serious philosopher when you were always right, and he had never yet found himself to be wrong.

The bedroom door opened.

The not-Ollie and the dog entered.

When Bob sniffed and snorted along the main hallway, past the public rooms, toward the bedrooms, Pogo became alarmed even if the dog was not yet growling or making other sounds of distress. He dashed past the Labrador, reached the T intersection, and turned right into the guest-bedroom wing.

By the time Pogo opened the door to Makani’s room, the dog had caught up with him. Bob padded first across the threshold.

Lying asleep on the bed, the radiant daughter of Oahu reminded Pogo of a fairy-tale princess, bespelled and awaiting a kiss to free her from her dark enchantment. As a fantasy fan, he had read many such tales when he was a young boy, always secretly, so that his ambitious parents wouldn’t discover that his dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and problematic IQ were all pretense, all elements of a scam to ensure that he could escape higher education in favor of a life on the beach.

Although Pogo knew that Rainer Sparks, with the powers Makani had attributed to him, might be in the bedroom at this minute, it was hard to believe that the creepy wanker was indeed present. Makani hadn’t been assaulted. She looked as peaceful as she was beautiful. With whatever weapons Sparks possessed in addition to a Taser, he could already have shot Pogo, his position revealed by nothing but the muzzle flash a fraction of a second before the bullet found its target. If he had murdered as many people as Makani’s psychic vision had implied, as often as he had claimed, he wouldn’t hesitate to add one more to his scorecard.

In her sleep, the dear girl murmured and then sighed.

The dog seemed to have raveled up the last of whatever pursued scent had frenzied him. He stood at the foot of the bed, sniffing the blanket, the carpet, the air to his left, the air to his right, but with less enthusiasm than he had exhibited en route. He looked at Pogo as though to say, Pray thee, m’lord, what brought me here and has now steeped my senses in forgetfulness? Or perhaps only, Dude, wha’sup?

The comic quality of the dog’s bewilderment melted some of the ice in Pogo’s veins. He found it difficult to hold on to the sense of imminent peril that had brought him to the guest room in a rush. Near the window stood an armchair in which he could sit guard, the pistol ready in his lap, the dog at his feet. If he brewed another pot of Armenian coffee and chose a book other than On the Road, he could counter the tendency to doze off in a comfortable chair.

Just then, pleased by a turn of events in her sleep, Makani issued a sound of amusement softer than a laugh and more melodious than a chuckle, a charming childlike expression, and then sighed as if with gentle regret or gentler satisfaction.

It seemed to Pogo that a psychic, even one with limitations to her power, would not be able to lie in happy dreams if her would-be killer was near at hand. Besides, he began to feel that he had been too swept up in the dog’s excitement, that he had missed something along the way because of being thereby misdirected. When Bob began to wander from one corner of the room to another, in an evident state of perplexity, Pogo whispered to him, calling him to the door, and together they retreated into the hallway.

Other than violent sex and murder, nothing pleased Rainer Sparks quite as much as observing the inadequacies of lesser men when they were foiled by his power.

Clearly, Makani had told the not-Ollie that someone wished to do her harm.

He had chosen to be her guardian.

Hooray for the hero.

Perhaps Makani had broken her own rule of secrecy. Perhaps she had also told not-Ollie about her power.

And about Rainer’s as well.

The guardian’s behavior suggested a suspicion of things not seen.

Yet the fool had convinced himself of Makani’s safety.

In Rainer’s immediate presence, the dog could not see or hear or smell him. His power shrouded him completely.

Elsewhere in the house, however, Rainer had left spoor.

Spoor. The tiny particles of skin that people continuously shed. Loose hairs. Microdrops of perspiration. Atomized skin oil. With every breath were expelled particles of sinus secretions so minute as to be visible only under the highest magnification.

Each thing that spalled from Rainer bore his DNA signature.

Every dog’s sense of smell was thousands of times greater than that of any human being. In some breeds — tens of thousands of times greater.

Retrievers, like Labradors and goldens, had a highly refined olfactory sense.

Out of Rainer’s line of sight, beyond his power’s sphere of influence, the dog could smell the spoor.

This had never before exposed Rainer to danger.

It would not be a problem this time, either.

Bob was not smart enough to matter.

Although the dog might have been smarter than not-Ollie.

On the bed, in sleep, Makani groaned softly.

Rainer whispered a promise to her. “I’ll make you groan, little bitch, when you’re under me. And then I’ll make you scream.”

Gazing down on her, he wanted to cut off her face and feed it to her.

But this was only Round Two. The face-off would have to wait until Round Three.

Perhaps his whisper found its way into the world of her dream. She opened her eyes.

The moment that Bob left the bedroom, he was again electrified by some scent. He set off in urgent pursuit of its source, his paws digging frantically at the carpet runner, displacing it, so that it slid out from under him, curling against one wall, and sent him skidding along the hardwood floor.

As Pogo quietly closed the door behind him and saw the dog launch across the T intersection where the two hallways met, he thought he had made a grave mistake earlier. He’d been sure that Bob was following the scent to Makani’s room, and he’d raced ahead of him, leading the way. But there were two lengths to the bedroom wing, with guest quarters in one and the master suite in the other. Now it appeared that, left to his own devices, the dog would have turned left at the intersection, not right toward the guest bedrooms.

As Bob disappeared into the master suite, through a door that should have been closed but was not, Pogo followed, the pistol in a two-hand grip.

Makani did not see Rainer standing bedside.

He did not allow her to see him.

She yawned.

She turned her head to look at the digital clock in the fall of buttery light from the nightstand lamp.

How tender she was. How succulent.

She sat up. Swung her legs off the bed. Perched on the edge.

Such a lithe girl. Yet full-figured. Provocative.

Those vivid blue eyes. Blind to him.

As she stood up, he Tasered her.

All grace abandoned the maiden. Her body jerked, arms flailed, head tossed back to expose her throat, which he Tasered, triggering one shock, two.

Palsied, wild-eyed, teeth clacking together, hands scrabbling uselessly at herself, as if to peel off and throw away the alien current that jigged along her nerve paths, she tried to scream, but gagged out only a throttled sound.

Pocketing the stun gun with his left hand, Rainer seized her dark hair with his right, twisted it in his fist, turned her, and pressed her down onto the bed.

When he fell upon her, twice her weight, she was as effectively pinned as a dead butterfly to a specimen board.

He forced her face into the pillows. Familiarized her with the fear of suffocation.

Lying atop her, his face next to hers, he let her see him.

Her left eye bulged like that of a frightened horse.

She struggled to suck in air, got instead the taste of a cotton pillowcase, perhaps the faintest flavor of feathers.

He was reading her, savoring the panic that overwhelmed her mind.

She was reading him, too, terrified not only of suffocating, but also of the images of his many victims with all the indignities and wounds that he had inflicted on them.

Into her exquisitely shaped ear, Rainer whispered, “The cat wins Round Two.”

He licked the lobe, the curve of helix.

“Better run, little mouse. Far and fast.”

He licked again.

“Round Three comes later today,” he whispered. “After the last light.”

His hot breath flushed back to him out of the delicate shell of her ear.

“Enjoy your final sunset.”

He clambered off her, to his feet, still jamming her face into the pillow.

To leave her with a reminder of his great strength, he lifted her off the bed by the twist of hair and by the belt that held her jeans, and he threw her aside as if she weighed nothing and were of no consequence.

Pogo followed as the excited Labrador toured the master suite, bedroom and bath and walk-in closet, snout to the floor, sneezing to refresh his nasal passages, now whimpering as some quality of the spoor disturbed him.

Earlier, when Makani first arrived, Bob had with great interest sniffed her shoes, her jeans, her hair. He would have made himself familiar with Rainer Sparks’s scent, which Makani carried on her from the encounter that she’d had with the sonofabitch in her house.

But was that the scent troubling him now? And how would Sparks have found her so quickly? How could he have gotten into the house without setting off the alarm?

Moments ago, leaving Makani in the guest bedroom, Pogo had wondered if he had been so caught up in the dog’s excited searching that he had missed something along the way. Suddenly he knew what had not registered with him.

The alarm was set in the at-home mode. Sensors on all perimeter doors and windows were activated, but not any of the interior motion detectors. The garage doors were omitted from the system, so that Ollie Watkins wouldn’t set off the alarm every time he drove home and wouldn’t have to make a mad dash to the control pad to enter the disarming code. However, the door between the garage and the laundry room was included when the alarm was set in either the at-home mode or the away-from-home mode. Pogo had forgotten that detail. When he had opened that door to let Bob continue the search into the garage, the alarm had not sounded.

Someone had turned it off without triggering the through-house tones that accompanied every entry made in any security-system keypad.

Having made his way through the house from the laundry room, and having found the bedroom wing, Sparks might have gone first to the master bedroom. Maybe the dog had wanted to follow the spoor path as it had been laid down.

But Sparks had not found his quarry here. He would not be in the master suite now.

He would be in the second of two guest bedrooms. With Makani.

“Bob, let’s go!”

Berating himself for in fact being the dimwit that he’d long pretended to be, Pogo sprinted into the hallway and back to the room that he had left two minutes earlier. He threw open the door and crossed the threshold with the pistol in a two-hand grip, just in time to see Makani levitate inexplicably from the bed and seemingly fling herself six or eight feet across the room, where she hit the floor and tumbled against the armchair.

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.