Last Light (Novella) Read online

  Shoot the idiot pretty-boy in the face.

  Shoot the dog.

  Drag the bitch into the house and teach her the beauty of pain as she had never known it.

  In his nearly blind rush, he came to a wire, maybe five or six inches off the ground, stretched taut across the width of the yard.

  As he tripped and fell, a cowbell rang.

  * * *

  Still in the thrall of the killer’s power, Pogo didn’t hear him fall, but the cowbell was a thing apart from Sparks, and it clanged when the wire was violated.

  The scent of the murderer excited Bob beyond his ability to control himself. He would have sprung out of the gazebo and dashed into the yard if Makani hadn’t been holding his leash with both hands.

  Pogo flicked the switch. After a hesitation while relays worked and valves opened, the lawn sprinklers showered the grass with an abundance of water, thanks to the higher-flow heads that he and Makani had installed earlier.

  * * *

  Furious that he had fallen, that he had been embarrassed by the likes of those two losers in the gazebo, Rainer gasped when a veritable storm erupted from the pop-up lawn sprinklers.

  What did these morons think they were doing?

  Did they imagine they could humiliate him to death?

  He struggled to kick loose of the wire.

  His efforts made the cowbell clang louder.

  He would feed the pretty-boy his severed manhood before he fed the bitch her face.

  Wagner was booming in his mind’s ear.

  * * *

  The length of half-inch insulated cable lying on the floor by Pogo’s chair was wired at one end into the junction box that served the gazebo. When he picked it up after activating the lawn sprinklers, he was careful to keep his hand well back from the bare copper wires at the end from which he had stripped the insulation.

  As Bob strained at his leash and Makani held him safe, Pogo stood up and threw the cable between two of the balusters, onto the sodden grass.

  He expected Sparks to scream. The murderer wouldn’t be able to maintain the spell that he cast over them, surely not in his death throes. According to Makani, when she had thrown beer in his face, in the restaurant, he had for a moment lost control, and others had suddenly become aware of him in his embarrassment.

  The scream didn’t come. Still didn’t come.

  Pogo told himself to stay cool, stay cool, but a fine sweat broke out on his brow.

  * * *

  Rainer thought he was free of the wire, but when he clambered halfway to his feet, he discovered that he was still entangled, and he fell again, face-first, into something disgusting, of which he got a choking mouthful. He didn’t have to wonder what it was, he knew instantly what it was, and he was furious—outraged—that they had been so busy setting their trap, they hadn’t remembered to pick up after the dog.

  Had he been standing, the rubber soles of his shoes would have insulated him and, in spite of the electricity arcing through the heavy spray, might have saved him.

  Prostrate on the lawn, he never heard the end of the heroic passage from Wagner that boomed through his mind, though an instant before eternal darkness blacked out the last light in his brain, he realized that he was listening to the fourth of the composer’s famous tetralogy, which was Götterdämmerung, otherwise known as The Twilight of the Gods.

  * * *

  After counting to twenty, when he still hadn’t heard a scream, Pogo counted to twenty again before he reached to the junction box and threw the little breaker in it. He detached the cable from the box, reeled it in from the yard, and coiled it on the floor of the gazebo.

  During Pogo’s recovery of the cable, Makani let go of Bob’s leash and used the jerry-rigged switch to turn off the Niagara hissing from the lawn sprinklers.

  The grass squished under their shoes and water splashed their ankles as they went in search of the murderer. With the moon still low in the east, they could not see Rainer Sparks until they were almost on top of him.

  He was visible in death.

  “That was radical,” Makani said.

  Pogo agreed. “Totally live.”

  “Should we check for a pulse?”

  “This isn’t a movie.”

  “So the monster doesn’t keep coming back.”

  “Exactly.”

  As far as Pogo could tell, no neighbors were at second-floor windows or lounging on upper decks. The privacy walls prevented anyone on the ground floors of the flanking houses from having a view of recent events. The darkness would shroud what needed to be done next, and there had been no gunshots to draw attention, only a cowbell, which was one of the decorative objects that Ollie Watkins had distributed through his “cottage” to make it feel authentic.

  Bob rolled around in the puddled grass, kicking his feet in the air, as if celebrating Rainer’s end, although of course he was just being a dog.

  They dragged the corpse across the backyard, alongside the house, through the side door that Rainer had left open, and into the garage, where they saw why the murderer hadn’t screamed.

  “Cosmic justice,” Pogo said, and Bob looked on with pride.

  While Pogo moved his primer-gray thirty-year-old Honda from the garage and parked it in the street, Makani searched the many pockets in the khaki coat until she found the keys to the Mercedes GL550. Because he had parked it three blocks away, she needed ten minutes to find it and pull it into the garage stall that Pogo had vacated.

  Getting more than two hundred pounds of dead weight off the garage floor and through the tailgate of the Mercedes was a challenge.

  “That was gnarly,” Makani said.

  “It gnarled,” Pogo agreed.

  Bob didn’t like being left behind in the laundry room.

  “You’re wet, Bobby,” Makani explained, “and you’ve done your part already. You’ve been a good, good, good boy, Mommy’s best boy ever, little Bobby baby.”

  As the Labrador wiggled his butt, delighting in the praise, Pogo assured him that they would be back soon.

  “You drive, O’Brien,” Pogo said. “You look more reputable. No cop would ever pull you over—except to ask for a date.”

  As they drove away from the house, he entered Rainer Sparks’s street address into the vehicle’s navigator. Earlier in the day, they had gone online and, in public records, discovered that he was a property owner.

  Killing for money, Sparks had done well for himself. The house was large, in a good neighborhood.

  They assumed that he lived alone, that he didn’t have a wife and kids, especially since the bride of Frankenstein had been dead for many years. Their assumption proved true.

  In Sparks’s garage, they had to do the gnarly thing again, get him out of the SUV without dropping him and leaving the corpse with an inexplicable injury. He was still a big dude, but he didn’t look so formidable anymore.

  Pogo said, “It’s almost as if he’s…fourteen again.”

  Getting Sparks upstairs, stripping him naked, drawing a hot bath for him, and sliding him into the bathtub would be something they would remember for the rest of their lives.

  “It was a bonding experience,” Makani said.

  “Something to tell our grandkids.”

  “If we ever get married.”

  “If we ever do.”

  “If we ever even go to bed together.”

  “If we ever do.”

  She said, “Don’t you come on to me until I’m ready.”

  “I was just sayin’.”

  From Oliver Watkins’s cottage, they’d brought a Bakelite radio, a yellow-and-red Fada, from the Art Deco period, which Ollie had restored as a conversation piece. After wiping his prints off the Fada with a towel, Pogo plugged it in, switched it on, set it on the edge of the tub, and pushed it into the water.

  They placed the contents of Sparks’s many coat pockets on the dresser in his bedroom, but left all his clothes in his laundry room, where the garments would probably dry out before a
nyone found his corpse.

  On the way out of the house, they wiped down everything they could remember touching.

  “This worries me,” Makani said.

  “What—you think we missed something?”

  “No. What worries me is we’re so good at this.”

  “It was self-defense. That’s no crime.”

  “It feels like a crime.”

  “Nah. It’s more like a Batman thing.”

  They walked seven blocks to a tavern, where they drank one beer each. Then Pogo called Uber, and they were driven to Laguna by Pedro Alvarez, a most pleasant young man who might have been a tad naïve, as he seemed to believe their pretend inebriation was real.

  Bob the Labrador was ecstatic to see them.

  “I’m quashed,” Makani said.

  “I’m totally thrashed,” Pogo agreed.

  They slept in separate guest rooms. He dreamed of her. The next morning, he wanted to ask if she had dreamed of him, but he held his tongue.

  He cut up two frankfurters and added them to Bob’s morning kibble. They dressed for a walk in the Village, and they took the Frisbee for the dog park.

  Sparks’s body wasn’t found for three days.

  On his computer, police discovered a large collection of photos of murdered men, women, and children, with Sparks’s detailed account of how he had felt as he’d taken the life from each of them.

  The authorities weren’t disposed to spend public funds to investigate whether the accident with the antique radio was in fact an accident. The coroner allowed the possibility of suicide.

  For Makani and Pogo and Bob, order returned to their world, at least for a while. As bizarre and frightening as it had been, the affair seemed to be the start of a beautiful friendship, if not something even better.

  Author’s Note

  Although my forthcoming novel, Ashley Bell, is set largely in Newport Beach, California, Makani Hisoka-O’Brien and Bob the dog and Rainer Sparks are not characters in that story. Pogo does have a significant supporting role in Ashley Bell, however, as does his primer-gray thirty-year-old Honda. Makani and Pogo and Bob will return in another novella, Final Hour, available as an e-single on October 27, 2015. As for Ashley Bell, I have seldom had such enormous pleasure writing a book, rank it in my top five, and hope you’ll let me know what you think of it after it is published on December 8, 2015. In the meantime, stay mellow and don’t be a goob.

  BY DEAN KOONTZ

  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

  ODD THOMAS

  Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd • Odd Hours • Odd Interlude • Odd Apocalypse • Deeply Odd • Saint Odd

  FRANKENSTEIN

  Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive • Lost Souls • The Dead Town

  A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

  About the Author

  DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.

  deankoontz.com

  Facebook.com/​DeanKoontzOfficial

  @deankoontz

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, California 92658