Читать книгу Dean Koontz 3-Book Thriller Collection: Breathless, What the Night Knows, 77 Shadow Street - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 54

Driving to Grady’s place, Cammy’s attention repeatedly strayed from the highway to her hands on the steering wheel.

Having resisted embracing victim status for so long and having lived with the scars for most of her life, she thought about this disfigurement hardly more often than she stopped to think that each of her hands had five fingers and fourteen knuckles. The scars were a fact of her hands that embarrassed her no more than the fact that she had fingernails. A survivor could not be embarrassed by proof of her resolute spirit and endurance.

She kept glancing at the scars now because she felt trapped for the first time since her fifteenth birthday, for the first time in more than twenty years.

The trap from which she escaped on that long-ago birthday had been one that she endured from the age of five. It began when her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Jake Horner, took Cammy across state lines to avoid abiding by a child-custody decision handed down by the divorce court in Texas.

The court gave both parents joint – and equal – custody. Cammy’s mother, Zena, didn’t like anyone telling her what to do.

Jake Horner had inherited some money. He used part of it to buy a boat, a fifty-six-foot coastal cruiser, which he named Therapy.

Jake, Zena, and Cammy cruised ceaselessly, from Vancouver south to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and back again. They were never in port more than two weeks at a time.

Mike Rivers, Cammy’s dad, tracked them down at a marina in Northern California, eight months later. Because differences in the laws between California and Texas hampered him, he took matters into his own hands.

When Mike Rivers appeared on the dock, he was talked aboard Therapy by Zena, who expressed remorse and fear of the authorities, and by Jake, who said he was unaware that Mike either wanted custody of his daughter or was granted any such arrangement by a judge. Jake was angry with Zena and assured Mike that they could settle the issue quickly and to everyone’s satisfaction.

The spacious main cabin included a galley with teak cabinets and a matching teak floor, a dining area, and a salon. There, Jake and Zena stabbed Mike Rivers to death.

In the aft stateroom, beyond a closed door, five-year-old Cammy heard the brutal assault. She didn’t see the murder – except in her imagination.

Her father took a while to die. But he did not beg for his life. She never forgot that he refused to beg.

Jake and Zena wrapped the body in a tarp, then in chains. Later that day, more than two miles offshore, they added a spare anchor to the package and dropped it overboard.

Cammy was on deck when the bundled body went over the side. Near twilight, the green and purple sea opened as if it were a great dark maw, hungrily swallowed her father in an instant, and licked the hull of the boat, wanting more.

At the marina again, Jake found Mike’s car, drove it elsewhere, and abandoned it. That night, he was in high spirits.

In the morning, they cruised south toward Mexico. As if nothing had changed, nothing at all, the sea rolled vast and bright, the air smelled fresh, the sky was blue, and white gulls soared with a grace they did not possess when on the land.

Jake Horner loved books. He read fiction and nonfiction, but he especially liked volumes about therapeutic psychologies. He called himself a “journeyer,” as if it were a vocation, an avocation, and a faith. He said life was about one thing and one thing only: the next possibility.

Because Cammy never went to school, Jake taught her to read. After that, being a dedicated autodidact, she taught herself what else she needed to know.

Zena appreciated the mood-altering power of drugs, particularly ecstasy, and Jake liked to torment children. And burn them. Their arrangement was beneficial for them; it was a living hell for Cammy.

Her patient reading tutor, who cheered her on when she caught fish and who personally baked her birthday cake each year, was also her torturer.

For ten years they plied the sea, and Jake himself was a sea of contradictions. When Cammy sustained a cut or an abrasion, Jake dressed it tenderly and monitored her healing with concern. In less compassionate moods, he burned her with cigarettes, with objects like spoons and cast-metal religious medallions that he first heated with a butane lighter, and with melted candle wax.

Her mother, having dissolved moral conscience with the chemical bliss of ecstasy, told her to be grateful for the generosity with which Jake shared his wealth and for his restraint. He hurt Cammy like that only twice a month, after all, always on the first and third Sundays, so she did not, Zena counseled, have to be afraid every day. Besides, he didn’t mar her face or body, restricting his attention to her hands, her feet. And although the threat of sexual assault was present, he never touched her that way. Her obsequious obedience, her abject capitulation even to torture, gave him a sense of power that he needed. Her pain was his ecstasy.

“The poor thing’s had a hard life,” Zena told young Cammy. “His father was a psychiatrist. His mother was his father’s patient. She suffered spells of ennui and psychosomatic rashes. Neither could heal the other. They conceived Jake as their cause, but he fulfilled them no more than did fund-raising for the symphony and donating to the opera. At night, he sometimes cries in my arms, he’s so sweet.”

Cammy never knew the significance of first and third Sundays or why burning mattered to him. He treated every burn with ointment, and when the wound healed, he kissed the scar and wept.

When she was eleven and a half, she learned that he had a gun. He kept it always loaded in a locked metal box, in a locked cabinet, in the galley. The day after her twelfth birthday, she discovered where he kept the keys to the cabinet and the box.

Cammy didn’t act for three years. Later, she was shamed by this failure to free herself when the means to do so existed. She could not reason her way to an explanation or intuit one that satisfied and exculpated her.

After seven years of slavery, after being abused and humiliated and terrorized for so long, she had known no other way to live. All memories of her father had been washed away by time and by the tides of chaos on which Therapy cruised.

Despair was an emotion too intense to sustain for long. Somehow, she had allowed her despair to mutate into despondency instead of into desperation. Desperation was energized despair; it would have much sooner led to action, heedless of consequences. Despondency was the dismal incapacity to hope, and hopelessness fostered apathy.

The cake he made for Cammy’s fifteenth birthday, however, was one cake too many. Although she could not explain why despondence abruptly became desperation, she got the keys, opened the cabinet, opened the metal box, went topside, and shot Jake Horner to death as he stood at the stern railing, watching dolphins frolic in Therapy’s wake.

She had learned how to drive the boat and navigate by watching Jake over the years. She needed three hours to make port.

Throughout the journey, Zena lay on the deck, cradling Horner’s body, alternately singing to him and laughing. She had no ability to weep because she was so high on ecstasy that neither grief nor fear could touch her.

So confused had Cammy become by that decade of journeying from one possibility to the next, port to port, outrage to outrage, that she expected to be arrested and imprisoned for murder. For three years, she lived instead with her father’s sister, Janice, who kept three dogs, two cats, and a horse, and thereafter she attended the university.

Eventually Zena went to prison. So many years of taking ecstasy gravely and permanently diminished her body’s ability to produce endorphins, those peptides that stimulated feelings of happiness and that raised the pain threshold in times of injury and illness. In fact, after ten years of continuous chemical bliss, she could not feel unassisted happiness at all. And she was acutely sensitive to every smallest injury, so that to her a minor scratch felt like a saber slash and every headache was a splitting migraine. She served four years of her sentence before finding a way to hang herself in her cell.

The hands on the steering wheel could steer well, and the scars did not affect their function, and the things they had done to heal the innocent had redeemed Cammy from the dishonor of her servile submission to intimidation and disfigurement.

As she approached Grady’s house, Cammy felt trapped as she had not been in twenty years. She feared that she might have no choice but to do something more terrible than she had ever done or had ever allowed to be done to her while aboard Jake Horner’s Therapy.

If she cooperated with Paul Jardine and surrendered Puzzle and Riddle to him, she would have taken their freedom and consigned them to imprisonment, inevitably to anguish, and possibly to torments that she couldn’t know. She would have betrayed the innocent that she was sworn to serve.

On the other hand, the laws that compelled her to cooperate with the authorities in a matter like this were reasonable laws. They were enacted to protect public health and ensure civil order. Thwarting those who enforced the statutes might land her in prison, might at least result in the revocation of her license to practice veterinary medicine.

But insofar as these laws related to animals, they concerned laboratory subjects on which experiments had been performed: animals that might have been intentionally infected with disease and needed to be contained for that reason, or animals whose release would put in jeopardy thousands of hours of important research that would have come to nothing without further analysis of the subjects.

Yes, and the nub of it was there: Puzzle and Riddle were not lab animals. They weren’t engineered. She couldn’t prove that contention, but she knew in her mind and heart that it was true.

Regardless of glow-in-the-dark pigs, pigs with organs suitable for human transplant, and pigs with human brains, scientists’ ability to manipulate genes and create whole new life forms was not so far advanced that wondrous creatures like these could be conjured out of test tubes and petri dishes.

Paul Jardine and Homeland Security were hot about this, but not for the stated reasons. They knew something they were not revealing. An additional factor drove their crisis response. As astonishing as Puzzle and Riddle were, they were but a part of something bigger.

When Cammy stopped in Grady’s driveway, Merlin and his new friends were chasing one another around the yard with great energy and with a joy that, in less somber circumstances, she would have found contagious.

She got out of the Explorer, and the three raced to her. She dropped to her knees, and they swarmed her, three tails lashing, panting happily.

As she stroked all three, scratched them, and told them they were beautiful, Cammy Rivers knew that whatever integrity she might claim depended on continued commitment to animals, that what honor she had regained would be lost forever if she did the wrong thing this morning. She could have no virtue without duty, and her hard-won self-respect hung now by a filament as thin as spider silk.