Final Hour (Novella)

Final Hour
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Bantam Books eBook Original

Copyright © 2015 by Dean Koontz

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

B
ANTAM
B
OOKS
and the
H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

eBook ISBN 9781101965474

Cover design: Scott Biel

Cover image: Beth D. Yeaw/Moment Open/Getty Images

randomhousebooks.com

v4.1

ep

That September day, an offshore breeze polished the glassy breakers, which were sweet ten-footers pumping in powerful sets, and though Makani wanted to be surfing, a chance encounter with a wicked woman left her riding instead waves of dread and chaos.

Morning broke over scattered reefs of eastern clouds painted coral-rose by the early light. From the high hills graced with fine houses pinked and gilded by the sun to the harbor where thousands of sleek vessels were moored, Newport Beach seemed to assemble itself from sunlight, as if it were a Fata Morgana, too beautiful to be other than a mirage.

Some men said that Makani Hisoka-O'Brien was also too beautiful to be true, but she was real enough: at twenty-six already a local surfing legend, an entrepreneur whose car-customizing shop booked all the work that it could handle, a hot-rod aficionado who could build a stylish street-eating machine from the ground up, a woman with a secret that distanced her from those she loved and that for a long time had made the prospect of a lover too dangerous to contemplate.

The problem with being real was that reality kept intruding on a life that, to others, seemed like a dream. After walking her black Labrador, Bob, at first light, she and the dog went to her office at Wheels Within Wheels. Patience was the heart of hoping, and good Bob had a heroic capacity for hope, watching his mistress adoringly as she reviewed accounts payable, in expectation of a touch or treat, and then padding along at her side when she toured the sprawling shop to determine what progress had been made on the four current jobs. The primo was a sleek root-beer-red '49 Ford Tudor that had been given a 1.5-inch chop, a two-inch nose rake, a five-inch deck-lid extension, a custom grille, and enough tasteful sparkle to out-bling a Rose Parade float.

When her employees arrived, a couple of them had problems to share with her. They were good people, hard workers, gifted stylists and mechanics, but they were human and, as such, had their worries and dissatisfactions. In addition to being the boss, Makani had to listen and sympathize, offer considered opinions, provide thoughtful counseling, and have a ready purse. Financial crises arose, children fell into trouble, wives and husbands cheated, beloved parents died, and to one degree or another, her employees' problems were her own.

More than she realized, those who worked with her thought of her as unusually caring. Although there was a sense of family among those at Wheels Within Wheels, though Makani was seen as a generous person and emotionally available, everyone remained aware that she was physically reserved. Except with Bob, she wasn't a toucher and had a sense of personal space that she maintained by countless small strategies and evasions. The theory that she might be gay, physically available and fully comfortable only with women, came and receded and returned, but no one was ever convinced of that. Perhaps she'd been badly hurt by a man too foolish to see what a treasure he had in her. Perhaps she had suffered a loss so terrible that she couldn't talk about it; and now she saw herself as a widow forever. New theories bloomed from time to time, and withered, and all were wrong.

Her gift, her curse—she knew not which—was that by a touch, skin on skin, she saw the other person's darkest secret or whatever hatred or acidic envy or unworthy desire corroded his soul at that moment. If violence coiled in the other's heart, Makani felt it as sharp as a serpent's bite. Usually, their angers and jealousies and resentments were petty, but too often seeing just pettiness in their minds diminished her opinion of those she read, until the mere act of touching threatened to deny her the blessings of friendship and leave her isolated. Being able to read their minds entire or to see some of their worthier thoughts might have helped, but she was wired to receive only their darkest emotions and wickedest desires.

Her one defense was a certain physical distance, an enforced personal space that made others wonder about her reticence.

By the time she and Bob left Wheels Within Wheels, shortly before 11:00 that morning, her longing for the ocean was no less compelling than it had been when she had awakened to see the painted clouds and the gold-leafed morning light. Her shop was inland from the harbor, but in minutes she could be on Balboa Peninsula. At the peninsula point was a surfing destination called the Wedge, where the Pacific often mounted powerfully to the shore. In extreme conditions, surfers had died on the rocks of the channel-entrance breakwater, so that when she dared those waves, she felt the mortal challenge in her bones, felt the bond of all those who lived for the love of the ride and who felt the truth of eternity most vividly when they were as one with the eternal sea.

From her ideal Hawaiian childhood on the island of Oahu until now, Makani's best friend had been the ocean, which concealed nothing worse than sharks and rip currents. It possessed no capacity for calculated deceit. Even Bob, for all his sweetness and loyalty, had an agenda of his own, but the sea had none.

On any other day, with her surfboard already slung in a padded vinyl case in the backseat, she might have left Bob in the care of her employees, might have driven her street rod—a fully customized, glossy black '54 Chevrolet Bel Air—straight to the Wedge. But that evening she would be having a man to dinner, the first hope of romance in a long lonely time, in fact the best chance ever, and she had preparations to make.

Bob rode shotgun.

Instead of the Wedge, she allowed herself a quick drive to the part of Corona Del Mar that locals called the Village, stopped for a large latte, curbed her car on Ocean Boulevard, and sat with Bob on a bench in the seaside park. She watched formations of pelicans ply the air with only a rare beating of wings, dolphins schooling south through the sun-sequined deeps, and glassy surf breaking on the beach, leaving filigrees of foam upon the ebbing water.

Having finished the latte, she disposed of the cup in a trash can and, with Bob on a leash, headed back toward her car, which was when she spared a young woman from a serious fall and, by doing so, brought darkness into the day.

The stranger was about thirty, a blonde in a baseball cap, a well-filled yellow tank top, cunningly tailored white shorts, and running shoes: a variety of eye candy not uncommon to the wealthy neighborhoods of Newport. With an iPod clipped to her belt, a wire trailing to her left ear, she maintained the remorseless stride of a girl who knew the profound social and financial value of well-toned muscles, who yet had miles to go before she would allow herself a lunch of cantaloupe and thin slices of Italian ham. Her expression was one of grim determination. Behind her wraparound sunglasses, her eyes no doubt looked straight ahead with the resolve of one who dared not look back.

Maybe the woman was lost in whatever music she piped into her ear, or maybe she was distracted by the thoughts that Makani would soon read, ruminations about a murder and the rewards that it would bring her. She didn't hear the two rude and perhaps pot-high teenage boys who were in violation of various city rules when they bore down upon her from behind, hooting and raucous as they competed to see who could maneuver more recklessly on his skateboard, racing side by side, flailing out at each other in hope of scoring an upset.

The park was largely deserted at the moment, and the boys were as oblivious of the woman as she was of them. Only Makani saw the three of them and the collision imminent.

She snared the blonde by one arm, pulling her off the sidewalk, onto the grass, as the teenagers rocketed past in a clatter of wheels and squeals of idiot laughter. The runner's momentum sent her staggering with her rescuer for a few feet, at risk of falling over the dog and his leash, before they regained their balance.

Looking after the skateboarders, the blonde muttered, “Dimwit little shits.”

At first Makani couldn't speak, because she had seen into the stranger's rat-maze mind and glimpsed at the center a windowless room where a woman was kept in chains, a woman being tormented and starved to death. The room existed somewhere, as real as this park and the plumb-fall of sun that had shrunk the late-morning shadows. The victim was real, too, in a desperate condition, pale and gaunt and hollow-eyed, and fiercely hated by the blonde, who wished for the prisoner a slow and painful death.

“Somebody should cut off their pathetic little peckers,” said the stranger, “teach them a lesson.”

Makani had snatched her hand away in horror at what she had seen. Still reverberating with the shock, she asked,
“Why?”

Regarding her rescuer through a black-plastic curve that didn't reveal the color of her eyes, let alone the expression in them, the blonde said, “Why? I'll tell you why. Their useless shit-for-brains parents don't know how to spell the word
discipline,
let alone enforce any.”

Bob liked people more than he liked other dogs, but he did not wag his tail for this woman.

As the vision echoed through Makani's mind, she realized that the prisoner's hair had been the same shade as her jailer's, and in spite of being painfully thin and haggard, she also had resembled this woman who wanted her dead. Relief trembled through Makani at the thought that she had misunderstood, that what she had seen was not another woman in dire circumstances, but instead this runner's mental image of herself as someone's victim, trapped perhaps in a bad marriage or in some other relationship that left her feeling tormented and starved for affection.

“Something wrong?” the runner asked, pulling her sunglasses down on her sculpted nose to fix Makani with a cold blue stare.

Makani's eyes were blue as well, but a different shade from the pair that chilled her now, the warm color of certain hydrangeas, in striking contrast to her Hawaiian features and complexion.

The blonde searched Makani's eyes as if she, too, were psychic and sought secret knowledge. “Hey, anybody home? Is something wrong with you?”

“No. Nothing, no. I just…That was close. I mean, they could have hurt you big-time, broken your neck or something.”

Bob had backed away as far as his leash would allow.

Perhaps as intuitive as she was well put-together, the blonde regarded Makani with suspicion. “Something's wrong here.”

Because she could not bear to leave the issue unresolved, Makani reached out and, with a hesitancy that might have seemed like tenderness, touched the runner's bare arm. She knew at once that what she had seen was not this woman's mental image of herself, born of self-pity. The prisoner was real, alive now but being starved to death, and she was this murderous creature's twin sister.

The blonde snatched her arm away from Makani as if she felt some alternating current jittering back and forth between them. She rubbed her flesh where she had been touched, and in a voice heavy with scorn, she said, “What're you going all creepy on me for?” Her eyes widened. “You're a girl's girl, aren't you? I don't swing that way, honey. Find some Jane who's a Tarzan, or go home and make it with a mirror.”

She pushed her glasses higher on her nose and set off once more in a run. She glanced back just once with mild contempt, not as if she expected to be pursued, but as though she knew from experience that people she turned off would stay turned off.

In the grip of sudden purpose, Makani hurried with Bob across the street to her car. She started the engine and waited until the blonde was almost out of sight before pulling into the street and following at a distance.