Chapter 21

There had been other times in his life before this one when Brian Kettering had felt like an utter and complete asshole. Plenty of them. On none of those occasions, however, did he feel more utter and complete than on this warm California night as he drove away from his confrontation, if you could call it that, with Enzo DuLac at The Pit.

He had failed to connect the little sleaze in any way with the killing of Al Diaz. He had wanted so badly for DuLac to be guilty that it knocked the props out when the little shithead had come up with an alibi. Beyond the subject of Diaz's murder, he had not even thought of a way to bring up Trevor or any of the other shit that was plaguing him.

What made the whole fiasco even worse was that the oily little bastard had made a fool of him.

"Shit!" Kettering pounded the steering wheel as though it were the greasy top of Enzo DuLac's head. "Shit shit shit!"

When was this losing streak going to end? Kettering asked himself. He had fucked up at the department, his wife had moved in with another woman, his son was working at a pesthole. Charity Moline had walked out on him, and finally, he had come off second best against a lightweight like Enzo DuLac.

"Shit!"

There were, as usual, no parking places on the street where Kettering now lived. Overbuilt with apartments on both sides, there seemed to be cars permanently lining the curbs, as though they had grown there and sunk roots into the concrete.

He swung into a U-tum to reach his usual spot in the red zone next to the fire hydrant. What the hell? Kettering hit the brakes. A car was already parked there. A familiar little Honda. He eased forward and checked the license plate. It was Mavis's Honda, all right. What was she doing here? It had to be more bad news.

Kettering double-parked the Camaro and got out. He peered into the Honda. Empty.

He stepped back and shuddered as though a cold breath had blown on the back of his neck. Something was wrong.

He sprinted across the street to his old three-story building. A dark, indistinct mound lay at the bottom of the wooden stairs. An outflung hand, pale under the overhanging bulb, identified it as a body. After a quick scan of the area Kettering ran to the body and knelt beside it. He looked down into the pale, bruised face of his wife.

"No!" he cried to the unhearing night.

He felt her neck for a pulse. It was there. Weak and fluttery, but the pulse was there. She was alive; that was something. But the unnatural position of her limbs did not look good.

As gently as he could, Kettering arranged her in a more comfortable-looking position. Mavis's eyes did not open, She looked fragile and young lying there in her jeans and thin sweater.

He stripped off his coat and spread it across her upper body for warmth. Then he ran up the stairs, banged into his room and grabbed the telephone. He dragged it to the end of the cord so he could stand in the doorway to keep a watch on Mavis lying two flights down. He punched out the emergency number, 911.

If you put me on hold, I'll kill you.

His call was answered promptly. He was not put on hold.

He gave his name and the address. "Woman here, badly injured. Looks like a fall. Needs an ambulance."

The impersonal voice of 911 told him to remain at the scene; an ambulance would be there directly. Kettering dropped the phone into its cradle and ran back down the stairs.

He knelt again by Mavis's side and peered out toward the street, looking for the ambulance. That was dumb; it would take two or three minutes at best for it to get there.

His wife's face was pale and cold. The bruises showed in dark contrast. Kettering smoothed her hair and felt a sticky mass on one side of her head. He lifted the matted hair and saw a trickle of dark blood from her ear. Another bad sign.

"Don't die, Mavis," he said, unaware he was speaking aloud. "Please don't die on me."

Her eyes opened.

"Mavis, can you hear me?"

She looked up at him and beyond him, frowning, unfocused. "Bri?"

"I'm here."

"Is it gone?"

"What? Is what gone?"

"It was here, Bri. It came after me."

"Ssshhh. Don't try to talk. Help is coming."

She gave no sign that she had heard. "The thing from your dreams, Bri. The nightmare beast that you never wanted to tell me about."

"Hush," he said, feeling the cold breath again on the back of his neck.

Mavis rolled her head slowly from side to side. "It's not a dream, Bri. It's real. You knew that, didn't you?"

An icy hand gripped Kettering's heart. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"It came after me, Bri. It was in our house when I went there. I got away, but it followed me here and it came up the stairs after me and it ... it caught me."

"What was it? What did it look like?"

"It looked ... it looked like a little piece of Hell."

Mavis's jaw sagged. Her eyes rolled back until only the bottom rim of the irises showed. She groaned once and her eyelids lowered.

Kettering cradled his wife's head and glared at the empty street. Where was that fucking ambulance? He turned back to Mavis. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse unsteady, but she was alive.

She had been lucid enough to talk about the attack. That was good. She didn't have to tell Kettering what it looked like. He knew.

Doomstalker.

***

The ambulance showed up in just under five minutes from the time Kettering had called. The attendants checked Mavis quickly, eased her onto a stretcher, and loaded her efficiently into the back of the van. Kettering followed them to the hospital in the Camaro.

He paced the Emergency waiting room while Mavis was being examined. Passing through as he waited were the sad and broken creatures who show up at late-night Emergency. Druggies and drunks and accident victims. A stabbing, a battered baby, a woman leaking blood from her mouth.

After what seemed like an hour a doctor emerged in a blood-spotted smock.

"You're the husband?"

"Yes. How is she?"

"She has broken ribs, multiple contusions and abrasions, possible internal injuries, and puncture wounds on her upper back and shoulders."

"Puncture wounds?"

"Yes. Hard to tell what might have caused them. We're lucky they weren't any deeper."

Kettering groaned.

"But most serious is a subdural hematoma. That's bleeding under the skull."

"I know what it is," Kettering snapped. "What has to be done?"

"We have to drill through the skull to release the pressure. I'll need your permission."

"You've got it. Do whatever has to be done. For chrissakes, hurry."

The doctor looked for a moment as though he were going to say something more, then he turned and walked away.

***

The waiting room upstairs was furnished in noncommittal beige and pastels and was open to the main hallway. It was cleaner than the one downstairs in Emergency and it smelled better. Except for Kettering, the room was empty. The occasional hospital employee who passed along the hall on silent feet avoided his eye. They had seen too much of other people's pain, and they had their own troubles.

Kettering sat on the couch and gnawed his fingernails and leafed through a month-old copy of People. The activities of Cher and Bruce Springsteen and Princess Di and the latest edition of Kennedys made no impression on his mind. Turning the pages merely gave his hands something to do.

Other than visits to friends, Kettering had been in a hospital twice in his life. Once, at age seven, when his appendix had burst suddenly and unexpectedly as he ran home from the Liberty Theater in Prescott after seeing The Thing. That was but a dim memory filled with falsely smiling adult faces, whispered conversations just out of his hearing, and cramping pain in his gut.

The other time was to have a bullet removed from his head. Not as bad as it sounded. A kid stoked to the eyebrows on PCP had shot him with a little .22 popgun. The slug had not enough power to penetrate the skull, but had tunneled around under the scalp to a spot just over his left ear. It gave him a hell of a headache at the time, but left him with only a tiny scar and a good story for parties at the Dutchman's.

What Kettering remembered most about both his hospital stays, brief though they were, was the awful anxiety to get the hell out and breathe the free air of the street. Even as a visitor he cut his stays to the minimum.

Now, sitting in the waiting room while they drilled a hole in his wife's head, he wished desperately to be out of there. He was not hanging around out of any sense of marital responsibility. Okay, so he was not the ideal tender husband. He never claimed to be perfect. Hell, he was not even officially a husband anymore. He was an estranged husband. That curious breed so often written up in the papers when they blew away their estranged wife or their estranged wife's new boyfriend.

Kettering tossed People aside and picked up a copy of Newsweek. He recognized what he was doing. He was cluttering his mind with extraneous thoughts to keep out what was really trying to get in. The terror of his dreams and his childhood, the desecrater of his family, murderer of his friend, had struck again. And he was powerless to do anything about it.

"Come and get me, you sonofabitch," he muttered under his breath. "Me! I'm the one you want. Take me if you can. What are you waiting for?"

He tried to concentrate on an ad for Newport cigarettes in the magazine. Several young people were frolicking at the beach, smiling like crazy, cigarettes poised in their photogenic hands. Kettering tried to remember if he had ever had that much fun smoking. Or doing anything else. He didn't think so.

H? became aware that someone had come into the waiting room and had not passed on through as did the nurses, doctors, and attendants. He looked up to see Gabrielle Wister standing there watching him. She had on no makeup and wore a blue blazer over a pair of designer jeans.

"Hello," she said after several seconds. Her expression was unreadable.

Kettering grunted.

"How is she?"

"I don't know. They're operating now. How did you hear about it?"

"The hospital called me. Mavis has my name in her wallet, to call in case of accident."

"Oh. Yeah." Somehow that fact made Kettering painfully aware of how far he and his wife had drifted apart.

Gabrielle took a chair well away from the couch where Kettering sat. He put down the magazine and pulled a Marlboro from his pack. As an afterthought he offered her one.

"I don't think you're supposed to smoke in here."

"Tough." He lit the cigarette and tossed the spent match on the floor. Gabrielle Wister watched him. The faintest of smiles twitched at a corner of her mouth.

Kettering grew uneasy under her gaze. A hot ash dropped from the cigarette and smoldered on his pants leg before he slapped it out. Her mouth twitched again.

A doctor came down the hall and frowned at the cigarette.

"I'll have to ask you to put that out. This is a nonsmoking area."

Kettering did not look at the woman as he ground the cigarette out against his sole.

"You don't like me very much," Gabrielle Wister said.

"I don't know you well enough to have an opinion."

"You don't approve of my lifestyle."

"Is there any reason why I should?"

"I didn't steal Mavis from you, you know."

"I don't think I want to talk about it."

"It's something that will have to be faced sooner or later."

"Maybe we could wait until we find out if she's going to live."

"She said you were tough."

"You had long talks about me?"

"No. But she told me some things. She told me you were hard on the outside, but inside you were a tender, caring man."

"Did you believe that?"

"Not completely. But I knew about people who are other than what they appear."

"Yeah, I suppose you would."

"I hope we're not going to have to fight over her. Because I'd win."

Kettering leaned toward the dark-haired woman. "Listen, Miss Wister, I don't really understand what happened between you and my wife. I can't pretend to like it because I don't. I'm not a moralist, and I'm not a prude, but I do not and will not believe that people of the same gender belong together in sexual combinations. Apparently whatever happened between you two happened because Mavis wanted it to. I am not going to give you my blessing, and I am not going to be your pal. I'll accept it as done, but that's the best I can do."

"I'll take that," she said.

Kettering ground his teeth at the note of triumph in her voice. He wanted nothing more than to slap her off the chair.

Another doctor approached. He turned into the waiting room and looked uncertainly from one of them to the other.

"Are you both with Mrs. Kettering?"

"How is she?" Kettering said. He and Gabrielle stood up at the same time.

"She's conscious and she's out of danger."

Kettering's twisted nerves eased a notch.

"You can see her, but one at a time, and for no more than five minutes."

The man and the woman looked at each other.

"You go in," Gabrielle said. "I'll have plenty of time with her later."

Kettering held her eye for a moment longer, then followed the doctor down the hall to the recovery room.

Mavis lay in a tall, narrow bed, her head bandaged, her face swollen and bruised. But her eyes were open and alert.

"Hi," she said weakly.

"You're a mess," he said.

"I'll bet."

"How do you feel?"

"Sleepy."

"Is there anything I can bring for you?"

"There's something you can do," she said. "Find Trevor. He never came home. Find him, Bri. Find out if he's all right."

Trevor. Kettering had almost forgotten that he had a son. His original reason for checking out Enzo DuLac had been to trace Trevor, but in the aftermath of Al Diaz's death he had forgotten everything else.

"I'll find him," he told Mavis. "Don't worry."

She took his hand. Her fingers were cold but her grip was strong. "Bri, I'm sorry about the way things worked out. I wish ... I wish ..."

"I know," he said. "Don't worry about it now. Get better." He shifted uncomfortably. "Uh, there's someone else waiting to see you."

The flash of eagerness in his wife's eyes told Kettering all he needed to know. There was an ache in his throat as he kissed her fingers lightly and went out of the room.

As he passed the waiting room he saw Gabrielle Wister. Their eyes locked for a moment. Then Gabrielle rose and walked silently past him toward Mavis's room.

Kettering swore softly under his breath and strode off in the other direction.