Outside, the night was cool and damp, although not unpleasant. The woolen clouds unraveled, revealing a silver moon skating serenely across the lake of the sky, before quickly knitting up again.
Shallow puddles remained in the parking lot, and Valet weaved to the limits of his leash to prance through each of them.
When Dusty reached the van, he looked back at the hacienda-style clinic. With queen palms whispering lullabies in the sleepy breeze, with bougainvillea entwining the columns of the loggias and draping like bedclothes in graceful swags across the arches, this might have been the home of Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
Yet Dusty was unable to peel off a clinging suspicion that there was another, darker reality beneath the picturesque surface: a place of ceaseless activity, of secret scurrying and scheming, a nest, a hive, in which a nightmare colony labored to some hideous purpose.
Tom Wong, Dr. Donklin, Jasmine Hernandez, Wally Clark, and all the staff at New Life appeared to be smart, professional, dedicated, and compassionate. Nothing in their behavior or demeanor gave Dusty the slightest reason to question their motives.
Perhaps what bothered him was that they were all too perfect to be real. If one New Life employee had been slow on the uptake or sloppy, rude or disorganized, Dusty might have been free of this peculiar new distrust of the clinic.
Of course, the unusual competence, commitment, and friendliness of the staff meant only that New Life was well managed. Evidently, the head of personnel had a gift for hiring and nurturing first-rate employees. The happy consequences should have inspired gratitude in Dusty, not a paranoid perception of conspiracy.
Yet something felt
The spring-action clippers with the long blades and the battery-powered hedge trimmer were so wicked- looking that Martie was not satisfied merely to throw them away. She would not feel safe until they were reduced to useless scrap.
Larger garden tools were stored neatly in a tall cabinet. Rake, leaf rake, shovel, hoe. Sledgehammer.
She put the hedge trimmer on the concrete floor, where Dusty would park his van when he came home, and she swung the sledge at it. Under the impact of the large blunt hammerhead, the trimmer shrieked as though it were a living thing, but Martie judged the damage to be insufficient. She hefted the hammer and swung it again, then a third time, a fourth.
Pieces of plastic from the shattered handle, a couple screws, and other debris rattled off nearby cabinets, pinged off the Saturn. With each loud blow, the garage windows vibrated in their frames and chips of concrete exploded out of the floor.
All this shrapnel peppered Martie’s face. She recognized the danger to her eyes, but she didn’t dare pause to search for safety goggles. Much work remained to be done, and at any moment, the big garage door might rumble upward, announcing Dusty’s arrival.
She threw the hedge clippers on the floor. She pounded them ferociously, until the spring popped out and the handles came apart.
Then a spading fork. Pounding and pounding it until the wooden handle was smashed into splinters. Until the tines were bent and squashed together in a useless tangle.
The sledgehammer was a three-pound rather than a five-pound model. Nevertheless, strength and balance were required to wield it with the desired devastating effect. Sweating, gasping for breath, mouth dry, throat hot, Martie repeatedly swung the hammer high and drove it down smoothly, with calculated rhythm.
She would suffer in the morning; every muscle in her shoulders and arms would ache, but right now the sledge felt so glorious in her hands that she didn’t care about the pain to come. A sweet current of power flowed through her, a gratifying sense of being in control for the first time all day. Each solid thud of the hammerhead thrilled her; the hard reverberation of the impact, traveling up the long handle, into her hands, along her arms, into her shoulders and neck, was deeply satisfying, almost erotic. She sucked air with each upswing, grunted when she drove the hammer down, issued a wordless little cry of pleasure each time that something bent or cracked under the pummeling weight—
— until abruptly she heard herself and realized that she sounded more animal than human.
Panting, still gripping the hammer in both hands, Martie turned from the ruined tools and caught sight of her reflection in a side window of the Saturn. Her shoulders were hunched, head thrust forward and cocked at a weird angle, like that of a condemned murderess who had been reprieved but deformed when a hangman’s noose had snapped. Her dark hair was tangled and bristling as though she’d received an electric shock. Dementia carved her face into that of a hag, and a wild thing glared from behind her eyes.
Crazily, she recalled an illustration in a storybook she’d treasured as a child: an evil troll under an old stone bridge, bent over a glowing forge, working with hammer and tongs to make chains and shackles for his victims.
What would she have done to Dusty if he had arrived at the very moment when her frenzied hammering had been at a peak — or, for that matter, if he arrived now?
With a shudder of revulsion, she dropped the hammer.
25
Having expected to be away from home past feeding time, Dusty had brought Valet’s dinner in a Ziploc bag: two cups of dry lamb-and-rice kibble. He poured it into a plastic bowl and put the bowl on the pavement beside the van.
“Sorry about the lousy ambience,” he apologized.
If the clinic parking lot had been a lush meadow or a penthouse, Valet would have approached his dinner with no greater pleasure than he showed now. Like all of his kind, he had no pretensions.
Dogs possessed so many admirable qualities, in fact, that Dusty sometimes wondered if God had created this world expressly for them above all other creatures. Human beings might have been put here as an afterthought, to ensure that dogs would have companions to prepare their meals, to groom them, to tell them they were cute, and to rub their bellies.
While Valet made quick work of the kibble, Dusty fished his cell phone from under the driver’s seat and called home. On the third ring, the answering machine responded.
Assuming that Martie was screening calls, he said, “Scarlett, it’s me. Rhett. Just calling to say I
She didn’t pick up.
“Martie, are you there?” He waited. Then, stretching the message to give her time to get to the study — and the answering machine — from anywhere in the house, he said: “Sorry I’m running late. Hell of a day. I’ll be there in half an hour, we’ll go out for dinner. Somewhere we can’t afford. I’m sick of always being so damn responsible. Choose something extravagant. Maybe even a place where the food comes on real plates instead of in Styrofoam containers. We’ll take a bank loan if we have to.”
Either she hadn’t heard the phone or she wasn’t home.
Valet had finished his kibble. He used his tongue to imitate an airplane propeller, making 360-degree sweeps of his chops and muzzle, collecting crumbs.
When traveling with the dog, Dusty carried bottled water. He poured a few ounces into the blue dish.
After Valet finished drinking, they walked the dimly lighted lawns that embraced three sides of New Life Clinic. This stroll was ostensibly for the purpose of giving the dog a chance to do his postdinner dump, but it also provided Dusty with an opportunity to examine more closely the rambling structure.
Even if the clinic were less legitimate than it appeared to be, Dusty had no idea where he should look for clues to its true nature. There would be no hidden door to the vast subterranean headquarters of a flamboyant James Bond-style villain. Nor could he expect to discover the soulless personal servant of Count Dracula clandestinely transferring the undead nobleman’s coffin from a horse-drawn lorry into the basement of the building. This was southern California in the dazzling new millennium, and it was, therefore, full of far stranger creatures
