Chapter 8

Kettering picked up the fallen glass. He rubbed the gooseflesh down on his arm. The temperature in the room was back to normal. Had it really chilled, or was it his overwrought imagination? Like hell! It had got inexplicably cold in here and his leg had started to jump. The causes he could worry about later; it was enough now to know it really happened.

He carried the empty glass over to the mantle. There he set it down next to the family picture taken when Trevor was six years old and the three of them had driven to Yosemite on his vacation. That would have been what, ten years ago? Eleven? Were they really a family then? Kettering studied the smiling faces in the photograph and tried to remember.

Mavis wore her hair longer then. She had on shorts and a loose cotton top. She smiled big into the camera. Trevor, uncomfortable in a stiff new pair of jeans, looked as though he badly wanted to be doing something else. Kettering himself wore an unconvincing grin as he squinted into the sun.

He could not remember who took the photograph. One of the park rangers, he thought. Kettering sent his mind back through time to recapture the emotions of ten or eleven years ago when he stood with his wife and son posing for the thirty-five-millimeter camera. With some surprise, he realized that his feelings when that long-ago shutter snapped were not all that different from what he felt today. Despite the affectionate hand on Mavis's waist, he had been thinking just then about a persistent pain in his back and how it would affect his upcoming annual physical. The pain turned out to be a small kidney stone that later flushed out naturally, but worrying about it had put a chill on the entire vacation.

Mavis had wanted to go that year to Hawaii or Acapulco or somewhere exotic where they had resort hotels and swimming pools and fruity rum drinks with little parasols in them. Kettering had explained the hard financial reasons for choosing Yosemite, but she had never warmed up to the idea. As for Trevor, all he cared about was how soon they would get back home so he could return to his TV cartoons.

Kettering replaced the eleven-year-old photograph and took a critical look at the face in the mirror, matching it to his younger self. He was a little heavier in the jowl, the hair had a peppering of gray, but was still thick. In the eyes he saw a wisdom and a sadness that had not been there before. He looked down beside his reflection to the glass with the droplets of Wild Turkey clinging to the sides.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked himself. "Here you sit drinking alone, getting cold flashes and the shivers, wondering where everything went, while your marriage crashes around your ears."

For almost nineteen years he had been a married man. Not what you'd call nineteen years of bliss, but that many years of anything shouldn't be tossed away like an empty beer can.

Impulsively, Kettering carried the whiskey glass into the kitchen and set it in She sink. He spooned coffee into the Mr. Coffee filter, added water to the machine, and went to take a shower while it brewed.

While he soaped his body in the shower, the memory of Charity Moline slipped in with him. Damned if he wasn't getting a hard-on thinking about her. He had a crazy impulse to walk out stark naked and dripping wet and call her. He swallowed the urge and forced his mind back to his resolve to do something about his collapsing marriage. His hard-on wilted.

Kettering dressed in a soft shirt, slacks, and the gray suede Hush Puppies he hardly ever wore. They felt good on his feet, but if he had to kick in a door or mash somebody's shinbone, they couldn't match good reinforced leather. Back in the kitchen he poured a cup of fresh coffee and sat down to work out what he would say to Mavis when she came home.

Can we sit down and talk about ... us?

Good God, no, that sounded like something out of a crummy soap opera.

Mavis, I've been thinking. You and I haven't exactly been hitting it off lately.

Now there was a news flash for you. And what did he mean lately!

Honey, I love ya. Let's go to bed.

And what if she said no thanks? Or what if she said fine and nothing happened for him? Or what if ...

Wait a minute? What if there was another man? He considered the possibility for a moment, then discarded it. Not Mavis. He would have bet his gun and his badge that she had never been unfaithful to him. He discarded the notion.

To hell with this, he decided. If he sat around here waiting for her to come home and imagining scenarios, he'd rehearse himself right into incoherence. It was time to use some male initiative and go get her.

He found Mavis's address book in the drawer of the nightstand on her side of the bed. He had a pang of guilty Peeping Tom feeling as he thumbed through it looking for Gabrielle Wister's name. His job as a policeman had required him to search through the most intimate belongings of complete strangers, discovering secrets, spying on lives. When you thought about it, there was something warped about that. Like sniffing other people's underwear. But it was his job.

Still, in all the years of his marriage, he had never looked through Mavis's purse. Never read her mail, never eavesdropped on her telephone conversations. Now he was thinking maybe he should have.

Gabrielle Wister, he discovered, lived on Ladonna Place. That was one of the keyhole cul-de-sacs west of Reseda, north of the local branch of Valley State College. It was a nice, quiet residential neighborhood. Kettering memorized the address, replaced the book in the drawer as he had found it, and left the house.

The car was cold. He turned on the heater, a device you rarely used in Southern California. The night was without stars, and it seemed to grow blacker as Kettering drove. The headlights had trouble piercing the darkness, and he drove slowly, straining to see the street signs.

He located Ladonna Place and turned into the short block. All the houses along both sides were dark. No cars were parked along the curb. Had he memorized the wrong address? A mistake like that would be most unlike him, but was it possible an art class was being taught in one of these dark, quiet little houses?

He drove slowly up the street and stopped when he saw Mavis's Honda in the driveway of one of the houses at the keyhole end of the cul-de-sac. That didn't compute. Where were the cars of her classmates? Had Mavis stayed after the class was over? Reluctant to come home, maybe. Kettering knew that feeling. He parked the Camaro and sat for a minute studying the house. Heavy curtains covered the windows in front, but a smudge of light showed dimly around the edges. He got out of the car and walked up to the front door.

Through the narrow center gap in the curtains he could see the pale light from somewhere inside. It was not coming from the living room.

A faint alarm sounded in Kettering's head. Something wrong here? Almost twenty years as a policeman had given him a sense of the abnormal, and something definitely was off center.

He thumbed the door bell, clearly heard the bing-bong of the chimes inside. He waited, the hair prickling as a cold breeze touched the back of his neck.

Again: bing-bong.

Instinctively, Kettering checked to be sure the button of his jacket was not obstructing the hip holster. Not that he expected to have to draw his gun, but when there was no response from behind a door where you knew there were people, you just naturally got set.

He balled his hand into a fist and pounded on the panel, swallowing an impulse to call out, Open up! Police! From inside came a rustle of movement. The door opened three inches. The strip of face he saw was pale and clear in complexion. Delicate mouth. High cheekbones, narrow nose. The eye that peered out at him was dark, with long, moist lashes. Through the open crack he could see that the owner of the eye was wearing a maroon velour robe.

The chill hit him again and Kettering shuddered. His left eyelid began to twitch.

"Yes?" The voice was deep and resonant, but distinctly feminine.

"I'm Brian Kettering."

The eye stared at him, unblinking.

"Mavis Kettering's husband. Is my wife here?"

"What is it, Gaby?" Mavis's voice from somewhere inside.

The eye turned from the doorway. Kettering got a look at dark, close-cropped hair, shaved at the neck.

"Oh!"

Mavis's voice again, with surprise and shock packed into the one syllable.

Kettering put the flat of his hand on the door and gently pushed it all the way open. The woman behind it backed away and did not resist.

Mavis stood in an open doorway that led to the room where the pale light was coming from. Behind her was a double bed with the satin spread thrown back and the powder-blue sheets rumpled. Mavis made a gesture to cover herself as Kettering stepped into the living room, then slowly lowered her hands and faced him.

For what seemed like many seconds the three of them stood there. It was the classic discovery situation. Almost.

The lean, dark woman stood beside the door, eyeing Kettering cautiously. Ready to jump either way. Mavis, wearing only brief panties, her small breasts defiantly upthrust, was framed by the bedroom door. Kettering felt large and clumsy, the cuckolded husband. Or was that the proper term for this situation?

He had to clear his throat before he could speak.

"Is this ... what it looks like?"

One corner of Gabrielle Wister's mouth lifted in a phantom smile. She turned to Mavis. Kettering's wife nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving his.

When she spoke her voice was calm. Calmer than he had heard it in a long time. "That's the way it is, Brian."

There was not, Kettering thought, a hell of a lot a man could do in this situation. If he had caught her in bed with another man, he could have punched the guy's lights out and raised some vocal hell with his wife. But another woman? Kettering had been a cop long enough to have come in contact with deviations from the norm that were beyond most people's imaginings. But Mavis? And another woman? And a little while ago he had been assuring himself there was no chance she was seeing another man. He could still be right about that.

He realized that he was standing there awkward and silent, holding his breath for much too long. Trying to stay calm, he exhaled, nodded once at Mavis, turned away from the scene and walked out.

The night was blacker than ever as he drove home. He met no other traffic. Kettering kept his speed down, fighting the animal rage that wanted to stomp the Camaro's accelerator to the floor and torture the tires as he slid around corners. His mind buzzed without accomplishing anything, like a jammed garbage disposal. Painful images of Mavis and the other woman flicked in and out of his consciousness. He did not even want to think about what they did to each other on those powder-blue sheets. And yet he wanted to know. Perversely, the flickering images excited and disgusted him at the same time.

When his mind finally began to unclog, Kettering saw he had almost driven past his own street. He hit the brakes and made the turn. The neighborhood seemed foreign to him now. His house was like the house of a stranger. Nothing looked quite the same. And it was so very dark.

As he slowed to turn into the drive, he saw a movement between the decorative junipers that framed his driveway.

Kettering's mind instantly voided itself of all extraneous images, and the cop's instincts took over. He drove on slowly past the house.

He traveled half a block to a point that was shielded from his front door by a neighbor's bougainvillea. There he parked, eased out of the car, and walked silently back toward his house. He held the S&W Centennial in his right hand, the muzzle pointed straight up, according to regulations.

Someone, or something, was at his door. For a brief moment Kettering had feared it was a hallucination brought on by the traumatic scene he had witnessed between his wife and Gabrielle Wister. But no. He had seen it, all right.

It appeared to be a man. A tall man, bent over, intent on what he was doing. Trying to break in? Not likely. With windows all around and the sliding glass doors on the patio in back, no burglar would try to get in the front. Whatever he was doing, the man made no sound. The hunched shoulders moved in small, jerky spasms. A twinge of familiarity tugged at Kettering's consciousness.

"Freeze!" he yelled, as dictated by proper police procedure.

The figure at his door rose slowly and turned to face him. In the dim light from the streetlamp at the corner, Kettering could make out no features, but the shape was chillingly familiar - the tall body, the elongated, misshapen head, long, dangling arms, heavy legs. One of the arms came up. Clutched in the talons was something metallic.

"Freeze!" Kettering shouted again. "Drop it." But his voice had lost its authoritarian bellow. It was the piping cry of a small boy.

In the gloom he thought he could make out a smile on the face of the figure at his door. The long arm extended toward him. Metal glinted dully in the diffused light.

When there is an unmistakable threat to your life, you shoot. It might be hard convincing the police board of inquiry and the civilian review board and the city attorney and, especially, the media that you really were in danger, but you could worry about all that later. When you were about to die, you used your piece.

Kettering leveled the revolver and fired. Again. Again. Again.

Kettering was a good shot. He always scored high on the police range. There was no way he could have missed four times at that distance. Yet the figure that loomed in his doorway did not fall.

The 160-grain hollow-point bullets, duly authorized by the police commission over the objections of the ACLU, should have stopped the intruder in his tracks, knocked him back against the door and off his feet.

Then, finally, as Kettering watched with the smoking gun in his hand, the figure sank slowly, almost daintily, facedown on the flagstones in front of the stoop. Kettering raced forward, pistol held high and ready. He knelt beside the victim.

A sour vomit rose in his throat and Kettering had to swallow hard to keep it back. It was not a man who lay there in front of his door. It was smaller. Much smaller than it had looked from the street. More like a woman ... or a little boy.

His hand shaking, Kettering grasped one thin shoulder and turned him over. He groaned aloud as he looked into the face of a child. A dark-eyed, pale-haired boy of about six. Beside his outstretched hand was a spray-paint can. The boy's eyes looked up into his with a terrible familiarity. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but all that came out was a bright red bubble of blood.

"Oh, Jesus God, no!" The strange voice was his own.

Kettering raised his eyes to the door. There, in fresh crimson, was the tall mocking figure that had dogged him since that long-ago summer day in Indiana.

Doomstalker.

Kettering's howl into the night sky blended with the oncoming bray of a siren. The darkness thickened and closed in around him.