Читать книгу Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 47

THE HOMELESS MAN HAD IN THE NIGHT COME to the bottom of his current bottle, and subsequently he had awakened repeatedly from dreams of deprivation in which everyone that he had failed during his life returned to thwart his every attempt to acquire even just one more pint of the distiller’s art. He was therefore on the move at first light, which was not his habit, to search the commercial alleyways in his territory, seeking redeemable soda cans and other humble treasures in the set-out trash that had long sustained him.

So it was that in a Dumpster he found the badly beaten, naked body of a girl of about three, which he thought was a corpse until from it issued the thinnest mewl of abject misery, like that of a kitten he had once found run down in traffic, with still a minute or two of this world in it. Most of his life, he had chosen to flee from responsibilities. But at the core of him remained the dry kernel of the better man that he had once hoped to become, and the child’s muted cry spoke to that remnant. He discovered that he yet had the capacity for pity.

In his worn-thin, patched, and greasy clothes, tangled hair bristling from beneath a stained and half-crushed brown fedora not otherwise seen on the head of a city man in decades, eyes bloodshot blue, nose scrawled over with visible capillaries, he kicked open the door to a popular doughnut shop a block from the Dumpster. With the battered child draped over his long, bony arms, weeping bitterly, shouting “Ambulance, ambulance,” he entered among the incredulous customers waiting to place their orders, two of whom were police officers.

Initially but not for long, he was suspected of being the party responsible for the girl’s condition. But his discovery of her in the viscous mounds of trash had wrenched something askew in his fragile constitution, and when the girl was taken from his arms, he could no longer stand upright or control his shaking hands, which alternately scrabbled at the floor in useless gestures and plucked at his face and chest as though something offensive clung to him that he was desperate to cast off. He ended the morning not in a jail cell but as a patient in the same hospital to which the girl had been rushed.

The doctors determined that she had been not merely beaten but also tortured, and not once but often, perhaps for half or more of her estimated three years. The authorities were not able to locate her parents. The wide circulation of a pencil portrait of her did not lead to any useful tips from the public, and a photo of her, taken after the bruising on her face faded, likewise brought no leads. They reached the conclusion that she had been imprisoned for most of her short life, hidden away, and in such cases it was with rare exception the mother and father, or one of them, if both were not present in the home, who committed the abuse.

The girl became a ward of the court during her recuperation. In a month, she healed but didn’t wake. Sixty days after she was found, the prognosis for her recovery from coma was dismal. An advisory committee of doctors arrived at the unanimous opinion that, although the girl might not be technically brain-dead, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state. The current wisdom of medical ethicists held that a person in such a condition could feel no discomfort from being denied food and fluids. The court ordered the removal of the feeding tube by which sustenance was introduced to her stomach and a cessation of all extraordinary attempts to keep her alive, although the order was stayed for fifteen days to allow any patient-advocacy groups time to file an appeal.

All this Gwyneth told me as we stood on opposite sides of the nameless girl’s bed in the yellow-brick house, while outside snow and cold wind slanted through the city, a quiet reminder to its people that the shapen world had the power to erase their mightiest works, though few of them would see it as such. She surprised me when, part of the way through her story, she reached down to take one of the child’s hands in hers. Other than her beloved father, when he lived, this was the one person whose touch she did not fear.

Walter worked at the hospital where the girl was given care. He had called Gwyneth to say that the doctors on the advisory panel were certain the judge, who shared their bias against extraordinary care for the comatose, would deny any appeals regardless of their merit and would do so with such timing that the child would be either severely damaged by dehydration or dead before an advocacy group could find a sympathetic judge in a higher court to issue a stay.

“How did you know Walter?” I asked.

“My father once spent a few days in the hospital for a bleeding ulcer. Walter’s wife was his day nurse. She was very kind to him. I stayed in touch with her after he was released. When she died so young, two years after Daddy, I convinced my guardian to use some of my inheritance to set up a trust for the education of her and Walter’s children.”

“And Walter hoped you’d take on the expense of this girl?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t really know what he wanted when he called me. He just said he didn’t think she was vegetative.”

“He’s not a doctor.”

“No. A physician assistant. But he also said there was something special about this girl, he couldn’t define exactly what, but he felt it. He asked me to see her. He sneaked me into her room past midnight when there were few enough people around so I wouldn’t go nuts.”

“You don’t go nuts.”

“I have my moments,” she assured me.

Indicating the child’s limp hand, which Gwyneth held, I said, “Did you touch her that night, too?”

“Yes. I don’t know why I had the courage, but I did.”

“And you think she’s special?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She bent to kiss the girl’s hand. “I’m not sure what I believe about her. But I’m certain I should protect her until she wakes and tells us her name.”

“You’re so certain she’ll revive.”

“I am certain, yes. I’m certain even in spite of this …” Gently she pulled the flaxen hair back from the left side of the girl’s face, revealing an indentation where temple curved to brow, the mark of some beast whose signature was made not with a pen but with an object stone-hard and blunt.

“How did she get here?”

“I’ll tell you over dinner. I don’t want to inconvenience Walter and his family any longer. Wait for me on the front porch while I have a word with Janet and Cora.”

I went down to the foyer. Someone had turned off the television. Alone, I stood in the warm silence, in the wide archway to the living room, still nervous about being here but nevertheless taking a moment to enjoy the domestic charm.

To the left of the archway, on a console, a candle burned in a clear-glass container with a vented lid designed to keep the candle and its flame contained if it should be accidentally knocked to the floor. The luminary served a shrine, brightening a porcelain of the Holy Mother.

When I stepped into the living room for a closer look at the two framed photographs that flanked the sacred statuette, I saw a woman of whom the camera had captured not only her beauty but also the suggestion of kindness and intelligence. Reflections of the honoring flame unfurled in the chased-silver frames into which the silversmith had worked a pattern of roses.

I stood on the front porch, at the head of the steps, watching the ghost parade of snow shapes sculpted by the wind, ever changing as they capered through lamplight and shadow. The bare black limbs of the maples knocked and rattled an idiot rhythm, and creaked like the stair treads in an ill-carpentered house.

After a minute, Gwyneth came out onto the porch, closed the door, and joined me. “You were okay in there. It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“It was bad, worse than I expected, but not in the way I thought it would be bad.”

“Come on. I’m waiting for a couple of calls, but meanwhile we’ll grab dinner.”

In the Rover, as she started the engine, I said, “Walter’s wife, she was kind to your father.”

“From what I know of her, she was kind to everyone.”

I said, “She didn’t just die, she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Was her name Claire?”

“You know the case, then.”

“There were three of them. They dumped her in the pond in the Commons. They threw her away like she was trash.”

As heat poured from the vents and the chill relented, we sat together in silence. Not looking. Not touching. But close.

Then she said, “Ryan Telford has a reputation, respectability, much education, a prestigious position, but under all that, he’s just like those three. He’ll do anything. In the end, for all of their kind, it’s about the same thing—power. Having power over others, to tell you what to do, to take what you have, to use you any way they wish, to demean you and break you and make you obey, and finally to rob you of your faith in truth, make you despair that there’s no hope and never was. Since last night, he’s known I’m a threat to him. That can’t be permitted. He’s on a tear. He isn’t going to stop.”

“Can he find out about this house?”

“I don’t think he can. Or the place I’m staying tonight. But with his connections, I can’t be certain about anything. I shouldn’t have asked you to protect the girl. With your limitations, it’s too much to ask.”

“You did all right for her with your limitations. If it were to come to that, I’d manage somehow. But it won’t come to that. Do you have proof of Telford’s larceny?”

“The proof took time, but I got it. The proof is the easy part. Who to trust with it is a puzzle with half the pieces missing.”

“The police,” I said.

“The police, the district attorney’s office, the courts—you’ll find good people in all those places, Addison. But there’s also deep corruption there, as well. It’s not the city it once was. Everyone talks about justice, but there can be no justice where there is no truth, and these are times when truth is seldom recognized and often despised. It’s a hoglot, money is the mud, a lot of it dirty money or tax money wildly misspent, and more people are wallowing in it than you might think. If I put the proof in the wrong hands, it’ll be fiddled with until it proves nothing, and suddenly I’ll have a lot more enemies than one.”

As she drove away from the curb, snow came down like ashes from a burnt-out sky invisible. In spite of its brightness, the city all around us seemed obscure, its millions of rooms offering no certain safe haven.