After death, p.1
After Death, page 1
ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ
The House at the End of the World · The Big Dark Sky · Quicksilver · The Other Emily · Elsewhere · Devoted · Ashley Bell · The City · Innocence · 77 Shadow Street · What the Night Knows · Breathless · Relentless · Your Heart Belongs to Me · The Darkest Evening of the Year · The Good Guy · The Husband · Velocity · Life Expectancy · The Taking · The Face · By the Light of the Moon · One Door Away from Heaven · From the Corner of His Eye · False Memory · Seize the Night · Fear Nothing · Mr. Murder · Dragon Tears · Hideaway · Cold Fire · The Bad Place · Midnight · Lightning · Watchers · Strangers · Twilight Eyes · Darkfall · Phantoms · Whispers · The Mask · The Vision · The Face of Fear · Night Chills · Shattered · The Voice of the Night · The Servants of Twilight · The House of Thunder · The Key to Midnight · The Eyes of Darkness · Shadowfires · Winter Moon · The Door to December · Dark Rivers of the Heart · Icebound · Strange Highways · Intensity · Sole Survivor · Ticktock · The Funhouse · Demon Seed
JANE HAWK SERIES
The Silent Corner · The Whispering Room · The Crooked Staircase · The Forbidden Door · The Night Window
ODD THOMAS SERIES
Odd Thomas · Forever Odd · Brother Odd · Odd Hours · Odd Interlude · Odd Apocalypse · Deeply Odd · Saint Odd
FRANKENSTEIN SERIES
Prodigal Son · City of Night · Dead and Alive · Lost Souls · The Dead Town
MEMOIR
A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by The Koontz Living Trust
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662500466 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781662513060 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662500473 (digital)
Cover design by Damon Freeman
Interior illustrations by Edward Bettison
Cover image: ©pixelparticle / Shutterstock; ©LightField Studios / Shutterstock; ©Andrei Cosma / ArcAngel
First edition
To David and Robin Gaulke,
with admiration and affection.
CONTENTS
START READING
ONE: MICHAEL IN MOTION
A LITTLE NIGHT WORK
A KITCHEN CONVERSATION
TEN DAYS EARLIER: BEAUTIFICATION RESEARCH
THE BLUE HOUSE
A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
THE BOY
THE ARM OF THE STATE
TAKING A BREATHER
TWO: THE HOLLOW MEN
MICHAEL MULTITASKS
CHASING A GHOST
OUT OF THE STORM
CONVENIENT RUINS
LEANING TOGETHER, HEADPIECES FILLED WITH STRAW
A VIRTUAL JOURNEY
FIRE MARSHAL
OUT OF HERE
FOR THE RECORD
VOICES AS MEANINGLESS AS WIND IN DRY GRASS
IN THE TWILIGHT KINGDOM
TRIGGER
THREE: BURY THE LIVING
EDEN
THE HAUNTED ORCHARD
REMOTE CONTROL
GOING TO SEE THE WIZARD
VIEWPOINTS
THE PAIN OF LIVING AND THE DRUG OF DREAMS
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
EN ROUTE
BEING PREPARED
THE RED-EYED SCAVENGERS ARE CREEPING
SAFE HOUSE
WE ARE ENCOMPASSED WITH SNAKES
RAT HOLE
WHAT LIFE HAVE YOU IF YOU HAVE NOT LIFE TOGETHER?
FOUR: THE STILL POINT
HORSEMEN
THE ONLY WISDOM WE CAN HOPE TO ACQUIRE
HERE IN DEATH’S DREAM KINGDOM
LUCKY
THE BITTER BITE
UNNERVED BY MEMORIES
WHIRLED IN A VORTEX
A BRIEF DEBATE
A PHONE CALL
THE WINE OF VIOLENCE
LIFE YOU MAY EVADE, BUT DEATH YOU SHALL NOT
A TROUBLED GUEST ON THE DARK EARTH
THERE COMES A MOMENT WHEN EVERYTHING IS STILL AND RIPENS
THE BUSY BEE HAS NO TIME FOR SORROW
FIVE: IN THE GAME
TILT
A MOMENT ON THE EARTH
WITH SPIDERS I HAD FRIENDSHIP MADE
A NAMELESS PLACE
WHO RIDES AT NIGHT, WHO RIDES SO LATE?
AN ISSUE OF SOME IMPORTANCE
THE NIGHT ISN’T DARK; THE WORLD IS DARK
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
DEEP INTO THE DARKNESS PEERING
SIX: NO WAY OUT
FIREPOWER
BACKUP
MAN OF ACTION
NOTHING AT ALL AROUND ME BUT THE BEAST
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL
OLD FRIENDS
PRIDE AND ANGER, ALWAYS AND ONLY
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
HOME IS THE HUNTER
OF WHAT IS PAST, OR PASSING, OR TO COME
NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stand fast therefore in liberty . . . and be not
entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
—Paul of Tarsus
A LITTLE NIGHT WORK
The stars are extinguished, and the drowned moon floats just under the surface of a translucent lake of clouds.
Rats breed in the crowns of the phoenix palms, flea-tormented trespassers that mostly keep to their high nests and are seldom seen in this illustrious community where the masters of art and industry live sequestered on guarded estates, in denial of vermin.
At 3:10 in the morning, as Michael Mace moves briskly through an elegant residential neighborhood, a plump long-tailed rat freezes in its descent of a palm bole, oil-drop eyes filmed with a yellowish reflection of the streetlamp light. He is no threat to the creature, but it decides otherwise and retreats at speed into the cascade of fronds from which it had ventured.
Less than ten miles to the south, streets that were once as stately as this one are now dangerous to rat and man alike. The filthy sidewalks and parks are impassable in places, obstructed by ramshackle encampments of the addicts and mentally ill who give an undeserved bad name to the smaller number of sober, sane, genuinely homeless people whose needs authorities ignore. Those farther precincts crawl with feral cats that know where to find rodents, cockroaches, and other delectables in abundance.
By contrast, this monied community has no tolerance for such dreary bacchanals. The city council recently added officers to the police department in response to a sharp increase in crime, which spills across borders from adjacent jurisdictions where those in the ruling class see themselves as admirably tolerant and enlightened.
A Dodge Charger, the choice of police in this city, turns the corner half a block away. Shadows expand and arc and then contract as headlights sweep the avenue, which once carried frequent traffic at any hour. Now the lanes are deserted. The sidewalks accommodate but one pedestrian.
Illuminated, Michael neither seeks the cover of shadows nor breaks his stride. He has an urgent task ahead of him, one that might remain urgent for as long as he walks the Earth.
Past midnight, a man alone on foot is inevitably a subject of interest to law enforcement in a city as encrusted with wealth as this one. Yet the lightbar on the roof of the patrol car remains dark. The vehicle gains speed as it approaches him.
Perhaps the man behind the wheel is distracted and sleepy as he nears the end of his shift. Or maybe he has received a call to go to the immediate assistance of a fellow officer. In the light of the car’s computer terminal and digital citation printer, as he flashes past, the driver seems like an apparition, less fact than form, his face a pale oval, spectral and without features.
Two blocks later, Michael arrives in a commercial district. The engine noise of unseen trucks and other vehicles arises, perversely reflected through the ranks of tall buildings, so that it seems to issue from mysterious machinery deep underground.
Here lampposts stand unlit. The city obtains its electricity from a regional power company that, in this time of shortages, has restricted usage by both the implementation of penalties and high prices. In the interest of suppressing burglaries and home-invasion robberies, outdoor lighting is largely reserved for residential neighborhoods. In these storied streets of restaurants and high-end shops offering luxury goods, businesses that once glittered from dusk to dawn are now dark after closing time.
A plague of smash-and-grab robberies has been largely cured by installing display windows and doors of bulletproof glass backed up by hidden stainless-steel shutters that slam down with pneumatic force if the glass begins to give way under attack. The shutters thwart even vehicles used as battering rams. While still on the sidewalk, potential customers are scanned for weapons—guns, knives, hammers, whatever—even as they approach the doors, which can instantly lock if a threat is detected. Regular, valued shoppers and clients are unaware that they are identified by facial-recognition program
A surprisingly clean brick-paved alleyway offers doors to rear entrances and merchandise-receiving rooms that are as secure as the doors to munitions bunkers and presented with simple elegance rarely found in the backstreets of commercial districts. Even the dumpsters are in good repair, freshly painted, and discreet.
In gloom that the veiled moon little relieves, preferring light but well adapted to darkness, Michael proceeds to a five-story brick building on the right. A man-size door and a double-wide garage roll-up are matte black and bear no street number or business name.
There is an electronic lock he must release and a security-system circuit he must sustain while he steps into a dimly lighted vestibule and quietly closes the door. He is so new to this life and his abilities that he still amazes himself.
The law firm of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman owns this building, occupies all five aboveground floors, and employs sixty-one people. To Michael’s left is a door that leads to two floors of subterranean parking.
He pushes through a swinging door directly in front of him and follows a ground-floor hallway that leads past rooms of records and the offices of certain members of the legal-support staff. At the end of the hallway, he passes through another swinging door.
The wealth and power of the firm are implied by the cavernous amount of unproductive space dedicated to the lobby, which at this late hour is revealed only by soft, indirect lighting. Black granite floors. Honey-toned quarter-cut anigre paneling. A domed, scalloped ceiling leafed in white gold. Millions of dollars’ worth of large, dramatic—and, in Michael’s opinion, tedious—paintings by Jackson Pollock present snarls of meaningless color that distract from the lustrous elegance of the piano-finish paneling.
Two elevators feature stainless-steel doors with a subdued Art Deco design. For security reasons, these lifts can be accessed only by entering five digits in a keypad. Each person who works here has a unique pass code. During business hours, clients and guests are escorted into the elevators by one of two receptionists. Although lacking a code, Michael can obtain that of anyone who works here and use an elevator if he wishes, but even if the pneumatic-rail system is quiet, the sound might alert those he’s come here to see.
An emergency stairwell is required in the event of fire. One is detailed in the blueprints that are on file with the city’s building department and readily accessible to him. The stairs are concealed behind paneling on which hangs a large vertical-format Pollock work that convincingly depicts and celebrates the mental chaos of extreme alcoholism. A concealed pressure latch in the frame of the painting releases the lock, and the hidden door swings out.
The switchback stairs are concrete, not metal, and each tread is cushioned with ribbed rubber to minimize the danger of a slip-and-fall lawsuit. The regularly spaced LED wall sconces operate around the clock, seven days a week.
At the fifth-floor landing, Michael listens to his own breath drawn and expelled, which is such a soft sound that what he hears might be entirely internal, the rhythmic billow and abatement of his lungs. To an observer, his stillness could suggest that he is a dead man standing, but he isn’t dead anymore.
From this side, the door is not concealed, and the electronic lock is released with a simple lever handle. He steps into a room paneled in anigre. The floor is shimmering white quartzite laid in six-by-four-foot slabs instead of cheaper tiles. The receptionist’s desk is a marvel of brushed stainless steel formed into curves, as if it is molten and flowing, with a celadon quartzite top. Eight comfortable chairs are available to accommodate those visitors who will be made to wait long enough to establish that they are of less importance than the man whose counsel they have come here to seek.
Currently, illumination is provided by only a pair of alabaster sconces that flank a door on the far side of the room.
To the left, beyond a wall of glass etched with a cityscape, a conference room waits in shadow—twenty empty chairs around a long table. To the right, windows look out on streets impoverished of light and rich with threat.
Michael steps around the desk and goes to the ensconced door. It opens into the office of Carter Woodbine, founder of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman.
Ordinarily, Woodbine schedules appointments only between ten o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. On this occasion, however, he isn’t meeting with ordinary clients, and even the great man will bestir himself before dawn when the matter requiring his attention is sufficiently rewarding.
Like the public spaces in this building, Woodbine’s office is an exacting and fastidious marriage of high drama and good taste. The desk is an uncharacteristically large work by Ruhlmann, circa 1932. The lamp upon it is not from Office Depot, but shines forth from the long-ago studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany; the dragonfly motif is a rare specimen executed largely in gold glass with vivid blue insects and no doubt appeals to Woodbine because it suggests mystery and power, the two cloaks in which he’s wrapped himself throughout his career.
Although the attorney owns a fifteen-thousand-square-foot residence on two acres, a half-hour’s drive from his office, he maintains an apartment here on the fifth floor. In addition to a living room, dining room, chef’s kitchen, bedroom, bath, and gym, there is a concealed panic room that can withstand any assault that might be made against it. His third wife, forty-year-old Vanessa, twenty-two years his junior, lives with him in the mansion, but she has no access to his apartment, which she assumes—or pretends to assume—is of modest size and used solely when he’s so overwhelmed by the demands of the law that he can’t spare the time even for a short commute. This allows Woodbine to have a parallel life of quiet but intense debauchery at odds with his public image.
The apartment entrance is concealed in the office paneling, behind a large and excruciatingly pretentious cubist painting that might be by Picasso or Braque—or by a barber who cut their hair. The lock responds to a signal when an electronic key is held to a blue triangle that symbolizes something in the painting; a code reader behind the canvas confirms the signal and releases the lock.
Michael neither has a key nor needs one to finesse the code reader. The door opens, and he enters a small foyer, proceeding from there into the living room.
The apartment security system tracks all occupants by their heat signatures and pinpoints them on a floor plan displayed on a large screen in the panic room. In a crisis, sheltering behind steel plate and concrete, Woodbine would be aware of where each invader could be found, and he would be able to coordinate with a police SWAT team, by phone, to facilitate their efforts to locate the culprits and secure the premises.
Michael is now represented by a blinking red dot on that panic-room display, where at the moment there is no one to see it. Three other signifiers are also blinking.
Although Michael would prefer to be an ordinary man, he is unique by any standard, and no return to a normal life is possible for him. He proceeds.
The three men are gathered at the kitchen island on which packets of hundred-dollar bills are stacked high. The thickness of the packets suggests each contains ten thousand dollars. Together, the ordered piles must amount to at least three or four million. Tall and handsome and white-haired, Carter Woodbine is dressed in a midnight-blue silk robe over matching pajamas. His associates, Rudy Santana and Delman Harris, are fresh from the street, their duffel bag emptied of cash.
They are confident that the building’s security system cannot be breached without triggering an alarm, just as they are certain that no one can know about this meeting.
When Michael steps into the room, the three men’s astonishment is so great as to preclude an immediate reaction. Their heads turn in perfect synchronization, their expressions as ghastly as if he’s someone they murdered and is now risen from the grave, though in fact he is a total stranger to them.
Harris is the first to shrug out of the mesmeric moment. He draws a Heckler & Koch .45 from a shoulder holster under his gray leather sport coat. Rudy Santana’s thigh-length black denim jacket hangs open, and he retrieves a pistol from a hip sheath.
Because Michael has no weapon in hand and enters smiling and appears so self-assured as to be mentally deficient, the thugs are uncertain—hard-eyed and tight-lipped, but at the same time puzzled and wondering if drawing their guns will prove foolish.
