Last Light

7 Round One

Her house was a modest Craftsman-style bungalow in the sunny highlands above Newport Harbor, shaded by queen palms and skirted with ferns. The land had more value than the structure, though the lot offered no view of anything except the larger houses on the farther side of the street. Hers was a cozy home, with a deep front porch, and Makani hoped that she wouldn’t have to leave it forever.

She parked in the driveway rather than in the garage, took the porch steps two at a time, keyed open the front door, and slammed it behind her. She stripped off her long-sleeve wrap and T-shirt and sports bra and boardshorts, discarding them as she hurried through the front rooms to the master bedroom at the back of the house.

Naked, she felt two things: vulnerable and the need for a shower to wash off the sea salt, though the first ruled out the second. She donned fresh underwear, jeans, a bra, a clean T-shirt.

After fetching an overnight bag from the walk-in closet and filling it with a change of clothes and a pre-packed travel kit of toiletries, she went into the kitchen. She kept twenty thousand dollars in a secret stash in the cabinet to the left of the refrigerator.

Although confident and practiced at concealing her difference from other people, Makani had never been able to free herself of a measure of paranoia. Rainer Sparks had been right when he suggested that anyone with the ability to read minds, even to a limited extent, would be feared and hated if her power were revealed. A public stoning would not be in the cards these days. But depending on who discovered that she could read them by a touch, a bullet to the head or a razor-sharp stiletto across the throat was not an unlikely fate. Therefore, she kept the getaway money in a metal lockbox in the kitchen.

She removed cook pots of various sizes, set them aside, lifted an inch-thick slab of Melamine that served as the false floor of the cabinet, and extracted the foot-square three-inch-deep box that contained stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills tightly wrapped in plastic.

In the bedroom again, she transferred the cash to the overnight bag, wishing that her simmering paranoia had also induced her to buy a firearm. She didn’t like guns. She had never struck another human being in anger, and although she was not a pacifist, she had always found it difficult to imagine committing an act of significant violence. Until now. She didn’t like guns, yeah, okay, but she also didn’t like dentists’ drills, either, and yet she got her cavities filled when they were discovered. Now she thought that she’d been stupid when she’d considered guns evil. Revolvers, dental drills, pistols, hammers — they were tools, nothing more than tools, and evil was a word applicable only to people and their worst actions.

Rainer Sparks had promised to rape her and kill her. She had read enough of him, through one touch, to be certain that between the sexual assault and the murder, he would enjoy torturing her in ways that she, in her naïveté, could not imagine.

He was evil.

And she had no defense against him.

Makani latched the suitcase and stood staring at the bedside telephone, trying to think of someone she knew who was likely to have a firearm. She couldn’t bring a single name to mind. On the other hand, maybe everyone she knew was armed as if for imminent war. Maybe she’d wrongly assumed that the people she liked all shared her aversion to guns.

She longed for the sea, for the dependability of its rhythms, for the honesty of water in motion, which could be read reliably, for depths that concealed nothing worse than sharks. Oceans were the antithesis of the sea of humanity. Oceans killed, but without anger or intent. For all the poets who wrote of the soul of the ocean, the waters could not envy, neither could they hate. Oceans did not revel in their power, and the storms that afflicted them always passed, as the storms of the human heart never quite did. At night, in the dark of the moon and the faintness of stars, the rolling waters did not dream of blood.

Although she had changed clothes, she suddenly realized that the faint smell of spilled beer clung to her skin and hair. No time to wash even her face, and certainly not her hair.

After setting the suitcase beside the front door, Makani hurried into the kitchen. She pulled open the knife drawer and considered the array of blades. No item of culinary cutlery would serve her as well as a dagger or a switchblade, but it would be better than nothing.

Rainer Sparks allowed her to be aware of him only when he thrust the handheld Taser against her neck and triggered it.

She fell.

Knees, elbows, and one side of her head rapped the mahogany floor, which seemed to distort and thrum beneath her, as if it were the stretched-tight membrane of a trampoline, though she did not rebound from the hardwood.

Pain was the least of it. The electric current traveled every byway of her peripheral nervous system, wreaking havoc with the messaging of both sensory and motor nerves. As she twitched and shuddered, a few words stuttered from her, although she didn’t intentionally speak and could not understand what she had said.

Sparks’s voice, however, was clear and coherent when, standing over her, he said, “Stupid bitch.”

Makani knew what was happening to her, fully understood the peril, bitterly railed at herself for not realizing that he could blind and deafen even her to his presence, just as he had done with all the “common” people in the restaurant. She and Sparks were alike in their great difference from others, but that didn’t mean she was immune to his spell-casting.

He bent down, his face a grinning moon — the beery odor was his — and this time the stun gun delivered the charge through her right arm.

She felt as if she were falling again. But she was already on the floor and couldn’t tumble through it.

Gagging, gasping, she spasmed like some beached fish, as if she did not belong — could not survive — in this realm of air. Her flesh felt stiff, her bones like jelly.

How strange that she could think with reasonable clarity, even while her brain confused her nervous system’s natural signals with the jigging static injected by the Taser and continued to be unable to control her body. Her condition seemed to argue that the mind was within the brain but in some fundamental way not subject to it, which was an odd bit of philosophy to have flashed upon her under the circumstances.

Rainer Sparks had pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and had turned it to face Makani. He sat down.

As the effects of the Tasering diminished, she lay prostrate, with her head turned to her right, watching him as a beaten dog might watch its abuser, with fear and smoldering resentment.

“I first saw you two days ago,” he said.

If she’d been sucking on a mineral pill, specifically a tablet of iron, that would have explained the taste of rust in her mouth.

“You were at a supermarket, carrying a bag of groceries to your cool car. You didn’t see me, but I recognized you right away, from that day so long ago on Oahu.”

Although she closed her eyes, wishing him gone, ghost images of the bastard seemed to float on the backs of her eyelids, perhaps an effect from the Tasering.

“I almost ran up to you then, but something held me back. Maybe intuition. I don’t know. But I was so jazzed, totally amped. I mean, one glance and I was erect, girl, same way you had me when you were just sixteen, so I could hardly walk.”

She opened her eyes. The knife drawer seemed to be a mile above her.

“Followed you home from the supermarket. Then yesterday, when you went to work with that dog of yours, I spent a few hours here in your crib. You need a good lock. Anyway, I got to know you better.”

Infuriated by her helplessness, Makani gathered herself into a sitting position, her back against the cabinets.

“You didn’t come home with the dog last night. Where is he?”

She didn’t answer him.

“Hey, gee, don’t be like that. We’re in this together, Makani. Talk to me,” he said in a pleasant voice that made his threat more terrible, “or I’ll smash this Taser against your lips and see if I can make ’em smoke.”

“I knew I’d go surfing today. I left my dog with a friend.”

“Bob. That’s the name on his food and water dishes.”

“Yeah, Bob.”

“What breed is he — a Labrador?”

“Yes.”

“Black as coal, old Bob. You love old Bob, do you?”

“He’s a good dog.”

“Maybe after I kill you, I’ll kill him. Especially if you dis me again, like you did in the restaurant. Still tingling?”

“No.”

“You feel able to get up and walk when I tell you to?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, let me explain what just happened here. This was Round One. This is my favorite game. The outcome isn’t in doubt, but I still get a kick playing it. I like a three-round game. Any longer than that, it gets tedious. The mouse has three chances, for what they’re worth. You know who the mouse is?”

“Me.”

“That wasn’t too hard to figure, was it? You know who won the first round?”

“You did.”

“Me. The cat. You know how often the mouse wins?”

“Never.”

“Sad but true. But then I’ve never had a mouse with sharp teeth, like you.” He got up from the chair, approached her, closed the knife drawer. “Get up, sweet stuff. I’ll walk you to your car.”

For more than one reason, she was loath to be touched by him. She was relieved when he didn’t offer to help her to her feet.

In spite of what Sparks had said, Makani couldn’t quite believe that he would let her go.

With the Taser in his right hand, he accompanied her into the living room, where she had left her suitcase. She picked it up.

How long had he been in the house, watching her without her knowledge? Had he seen her transfer the money?

Without the twenty thousand cash, she’d have to resort to Visa and American Express — but she suspected that he would have a way to find her if she used the cards. Plastic money left a trail.

Sparks opened the door, Makani stepped onto the porch, and he followed. He walked her to her car in the driveway and watched her put the suitcase in the trunk.

Over the Pacific, feathery cirrus clouds embellished the sky, glowing crimson with the light of a low sun, mottled with purple, reminiscent of the patterns of blood and bruises that hung in the gallery of Rainer Sparks’s demented mind.

He opened the driver’s door, and when she got behind the wheel, he said, “Work up a clever plan, girl. Give me a run for my money. Go far, go fast. Make it fun. You have till tomorrow morning. Then it’s Round Two.”

She started the engine, and he closed the door.

When she backed out of the driveway, she saw his Mercedes SUV parked on the farther side of the street, half a block away.

As she shifted out of reverse, he climbed the porch steps and sat in one of the rocking chairs, as if her home were his. He waved at her and began to rock.

She was still looking at him when suddenly he disappeared. The chair kept rocking.

Although he worked his will upon her mind, editing himself from her awareness, she felt no presence in her head, no slightest touch.

On the porch, the apparently empty chair kept rocking. Rocking and rocking.