This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542016223

Cover design by Phantom City Creative

1

Sometimes a girl who doesn’t like guns is nevertheless obliged to carry one if she’s got any common sense at all.

Mia and Kara Benton are twenty-six, fraternal twins, therefore not identical, but equally attractive and athletic and high-spirited and in love with nature. Mia teaches middle school English; Kara teaches high school English. Both are engaged to be married. They are not just sisters; they are also each other’s best friend.

Growing up, they often went hiking with their father. Since graduating college, they hike together twice every summer, for a week at a time. Because every forested wilderness is a church to them, these expeditions are spiritual and a bonding experience.

Once upon a time, the woods were safe. The only threats were mountain lions or bears, and they were rare. Anyway, they could be frightened off by an Attwood signal horn, an earsplitting klaxon in a little aerosol can. These days, stranger beings haunt the wilds.

Both Mia and Kara are licensed to carry. When hiking, they take turns with a Walther PPK/S .38. As they set out on Monday morning from Mammoth Lakes, where Kara’s fiancé dropped them off, Mia has the .38 in a belt holster concealed by a long T-shirt. Over five days, bearing backpacks, they will cover fifty-five miles, for the most part following the course of the San Joaquin River through the Sierra Nevada, past Mammoth Pool Reservoir, to Millerton Lake, where they have rented a cabin for three days.

They are familiar with the trail. They expect to lose about five pounds each, but Mia is not concerned that anything could go awry. Neither is Kara. They are both optimists. The possibility that one or both of them will be dead before reaching Millerton Lake does not even occur to them.

2

By train, burdened by no luggage whatsoever, he arrives in San Bernardino, California, on a warm Tuesday night in June, when the moon is just setting sail on a sea of stars.

As he steps onto the arrival platform, his phone alerts him to an incoming text message. It’ll be a heads-up from Ace of Diamonds. No one else texts him.

He has never met Ace. They have never spoken. He doesn’t know if Ace is a man or a woman—or something stranger than either.

In the terminal, he checks the message, which says LINCOLN AVIATOR and provides a license plate number.

The handsome vehicle is easy to locate in the parking lot. He crouches beside the rear wheel well, reaches within, and retrieves a small, magnetically attached metal box that contains the Aviator’s electronic key.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, he opens the console, where he finds a California driver’s license for Kenton Paul Mallory. It bears his photo. This is a forgery, but if a cop stops him and runs the number, it will show as legitimate in the DMV records, even though it is a phantom insert made by a hacker. A superb hacker.

He usually carries no ID, because even a forged document gives authorities something with which to begin an investigation. This license suggests that the current mission will involve so much on-the-road time that risking a traffic stop with no license is thought more dangerous than presenting bogus plastic.

With the license is a smartphone provided solely for this mission. When he has completed the task before him, he will enter a simple code that will return the phone to its factory setting, erasing the entire history of its use. And then he will smash it.

Now this special phone receives a text from Ace: I-15 NORTH TO US 395 NORTH. LODGING OF YOUR CHOICE.

The man who is not Kenton Mallory is not anyone else, either. He’s all right with being nameless. During the last two years, he’s operated successfully under many identities. The amnesia that denies him all knowledge of his life before that would be psychologically crippling, even devastating, if he wasn’t convinced, intuitively, that he’s much better off not knowing who he once was.

Besides, the current life he’s living is colorful, interesting, and meaningful. He is someone’s tool, taking direction, but he never feels used. He suspects that he may have volunteered for this.

About thirty-five miles later, he arrives in Victorville, a small city on the edge of the Mojave. He takes dinner in a likable-looking roadhouse. Because he’s off duty for the night, he has an extra-dry martini with a twist before dinner, another with an ahi appetizer, plus a glass of cabernet sauvignon with his steak.

He doesn’t know how old he might be, but the thirtysomething waitress, Shawna, is perhaps his age. She’s flirtatious and means it. He plays along, to a point. Although he doesn’t mind being used by an attractive woman, he never uses women casually, so eventually he says, “I’m just passing through.”

“We all are,” she says, but she doesn’t mean it. She’s playing a role in a noir movie of the mind.

Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not.

“Veronica,” she says, referring to another waitress, “says you look dangerous. But the girl has zero spirit of adventure.”

“Good for her,” Nameless says. “Girls who want a little danger in their lives will end up with a lot of it.”

He leaves three hundred dollars for a tip. Generous gratuities are a habit with him, his one extravagance.

Outside, the moon is high, with bright Venus in attendance. The air is dry and clear and faintly scented with lime from one of the cement factories in the area.

As Kenton Mallory, he pays cash in advance for a room in a two-star motel where the clean and fresh-smelling front office suggests cockroaches aren’t tolerated.

Nameless removes a Samsonite suitcase from the cargo area of the Aviator. The bag was left there by a member of the mysterious team that works with Ace of Diamonds.

In his room, he opens the suitcase on the bed. Three changes of clothes, mostly jeans and T-shirts. A sport coat of a lighter weight than the one he’s wearing, tailored to conceal a shoulder holster. An electric razor and toiletries. A mini recorder loaded with background on the current case.

As usual, there is also a gun, his standard Springfield Armory TRP-Pro .45ACP, with a five-inch barrel. A seven-round magazine, a spare magazine, a sound suppressor. A Galco shoulder system for the weapon. And a tranquilizer-dart pistol.

There is also twenty thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties. Not all of it will be used to tip waitresses.

Sitting in bed, he listens to the twenty-minute case file. If he tried to replay it, there would be nothing on the recorder. That’s not a problem. He doesn’t need to listen twice. Ironically, considering that his past lies hidden behind a curtain of amnesia, he has perfect recall regarding anything he’s read or heard during the past two years.

He is surprised by the punishment Ace prescribes for the man who is their target. Should a monster who has no mercy be accorded mercy at his end? Civilized men say yes. But perhaps it’s hard specimens like Ace who make civilization viable in the first place.

Nameless showers so that he won’t need to do it in the morning, brushes his teeth, goes to bed in his briefs, turns out the lamp.

A clock radio is bolted to the nightstand, but he doesn’t set the alarm. He always falls asleep within a minute and wakes at precisely the time he predetermines.

He never dreams, at least not that he remembers. However, when awake, he sometimes has visions, clairvoyant flashes, that are often as terrifying as nightmares.

During the one minute of wakefulness after his head meets the pillow, he wonders not who he once was, not why that life is behind him and beyond recapture, not what organization finances him and crafts his missions. He wonders only how he was made into what he has become. Strange science must be involved, which intrigues him.

Sleep.

3

He is on the road before sunrise, Wednesday morning, northbound on US 395, into the forbidding wastelands of the Mojave. The declining moon reveals little of the night-shrouded desert, and soon no settlement lights are visible on either side of the highway.

Eighty-five miles and one hour later, he stops in the town of Ridgecrest to have a quick breakfast in a restaurant at the Carriage Inn motel. As he’s finishing his meal, a text message reports that his target will be found at Aguereberry Point, taking advantage of the breaking dawn and the dramatic light in the following hours.

Well fed, he continues on State Route 178, toward Death Valley National Park. After he transitions to State Route 190, descends into the Panamint Valley, and ascends into the Panamint Range, the sky blushes in the east and brightens to coral pink. The sun appears with thermonuclear ferocity.

At Emigrant Canyon, he turns right onto an unpaved road. He drives past the long-vanished boomtown of Harrisburg and the once famous Eureka Mine, to Aguereberry Point, which offers a dizzying view of Death Valley, over six thousand feet below. The target’s SUV is parked here.

His name is Palmer Oxenwald, and his SUV is a big white Mercedes GL 550. In most people’s minds, a Mercedes is equated with respectability, and it is a fact of human psychology, endorsed by a thousand movies, that black vehicles are often seen as sinister, but brightly colored or white ones seldom are. No doubt he chose the GL 550 with those considerations in mind.

Nameless parks his white Aviator on the farther side of the unpaved road from the Mercedes. Wearing neither a lightweight sport coat nor a shoulder rig with pistol for this first encounter, he is being casual in jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

According to the Aviator, the temperature is eighty degrees even at this early hour. When he gets out of the vehicle, the air feels hotter than that. He yawns, stretches, and rolls his head as though to work a kink out of his neck.

What plants survive here are as nameless as he is, of tortured shapes. There is rock aplenty. Loose stones. Sand formed from fine grains of quartz. At the moment, the swollen sun oppresses the air, and not even a faint breeze disturbs these commanding heights, everything as still as if time has stopped and eternity is now.

Oxenwald has set up a tripod, to which one camera is fixed, and he’s also shooting with a handheld Rolleiflex. This is a lonely place at any time, especially just after sunrise on a blazing June morning, but it’s in the loneliest of places where this photographer can do as he wants.

A simple fabric tent, anchored to the GL 550, features a top and three sides. It’s open to the view, a shaded retreat from which he can continue his photography or take a break when he is no longer able to endure the direct sun. Providing privacy from the rare vehicles that might come along the dirt track, the shelter surely also serves as a venue for other activities.

Nameless crosses the unpaved road. Oxenwald appears unaware of him, but he is a man of heightened senses who overlooks nothing.

He turns only when Nameless says, “Fantastic view, isn’t it?”

Oxenwald smiles and puts the Rolleiflex down on a small folding table, not annoyed by the interruption. He lives for interruptions if those curious about him are of certain types. Nameless is not one of those types, but Oxenwald is nonetheless friendly and courteous because being surly or curt might inspire suspicion.

The photographer is made for the cover of GQ. Twenty-nine, about six feet two, handsome in a winsome way, muscular, tan. His blond hair is meticulously cut to appear artlessly chopped, carefully combed to look windblown, as if the current stillness was preceded by a gale. In a white tank top, pale-gray summer pants that might be by Berluti, and white Converse sneakers, he is a striking figure, charismatic but unthreatening.

“You working for some magazine?” Nameless asks.

“No, sir. No assignments. I shoot what I’m passionate about.”

Nameless gets chatty. “Well, with this setup, you’re obviously not some amateur. So you must be an artist. The next Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen? You work in color or black-and-white? I’m partial to the latter.”

“So am I. Shadow and light. Texture and form. So you know photography?”

“I know what I like. I’m no expert. I also think a lot of black-and-white movies look better than almost anything in color.”

Oxenwald’s smile is warm, his demeanor almost shy. “Well I’m not in Adams and Steichen’s league. I like to think my work is art, but few galleries represent photos anymore, not like there were when those guys were hot. The mystique is gone, you know. Every Joe and Jane with a smartphone thinks they’re a genius photographer.”

Nameless nods. “Mostly of kittens, puppies, and themselves. You have an online gallery of your work?”

“Palmer Oxenwald dot com. Buy a numbered print or two. I need new shoes.”

“I’ll check it out.” Nameless indicates the GL 550. “But it looks like you do pretty well.”

Oxenwald smiles and shrugs.

“Anyway,” Nameless says, “the reason I stopped was I saw you moving along the drop-off there, the camera up to your face, and it gave me the chills.”

“I’m as sure-footed as a mule.”

“Maybe so, but this spot right here . . . I don’t mean to sound superstitious, but this place has major bad mojo.”

Oxenwald cocks his head. “How so?”

“Nine years ago, a young couple on their honeymoon came up here in their Ford Explorer to enjoy the view. Maybe a tire blew, maybe they lost control, nobody knows, but they went over the edge. What was left six thousand feet below wasn’t enough for the authorities to puzzle out why.”

The photographer’s face clouds with dismay. “Grim. But nine years . . . the beat goes on. You can hardly say the place is cursed.”

“Except it happened again four years ago. A retired couple in their late sixties. Same spot. Coroner said the impact was so great, they and their Mercury Mountaineer were combined like one machine-human organism.”

Glancing toward the drop-off, Oxenwald says, “Freaky. Man, you know how to put the spook on a guy. Are you a local, Mr. . . . ?”

“Kenton Mallory. No, not a local.” The not-a-local part is true. What follows is a lie. “I was here for a three-day vacation about a month after it happened with the retirees. People down at Furnace Creek were still rattled about it.”

The photographer glances toward the drop-off again. “Maybe I’ve got what I came after. The light is changing, anyway.”

“It’s all about the light,” Nameless says.

Oxenwald nods in agreement. “The light and the shadow.”

4

Nameless boards his Lincoln Aviator and follows the unpaved road south. In the rearview mirror, he sees Oxenwald staring after him, perhaps memorizing the license plate.

He descends into Death Valley, turns left, and travels overland until he connects with the main park road east of Funeral Peak. Then it’s north, past Zabriskie Point.

Twelve thousand years earlier, Lake Manly was deep and clear and full of fish, but it vanished millennia before settlers crossed these wastelands. The sole oasis now is at Furnace Creek, where six hundred gallons a minute gush forth from natural springs, slaking the thirst of tourists and trees—date palms, queen palms, tamarisk.

The Furnace Creek Inn, where he has a prepaid reservation, is an elegant mission-style complex of adobe bricks and travertine, with a swimming pool and four lighted tennis courts. A golf course virtually radiates greenness as if in rebuttal to the doctrine of eternal death that the surrounding arid vistas seem to symbolize.

A valet takes his Aviator, a bellman takes his bag, a desk clerk welcomes him, and none wears a black robe or carries a scythe.

Nevertheless, in the privacy of his room, the first thing he unpacks from the suitcase is the .45 pistol snugged in the Galco shoulder rig.

Sitting at a table by the window, after charging the smartphone, he employs one of its functions programmed especially for this mission. A map of Death Valley appears on the screen. He scrolls to the middle third of the display and finds the red indicator that is the GPS signal from Palmer Oxenwald’s Mercedes SUV. The vehicle is still at Aguereberry Point, no doubt because the photographer needs time to fold his tent and pack his gear away.

Soon Oxenwald is on the move. North on the unpaved road to State Route 190 and Stovepipe Wells, a tiny tourist-supported resort village. He drives through Stovepipe and takes another unpaved road almost two and a half miles before he stops.

He is parked near Mosaic Canyon, which offers intrepid hikers many dramatic, winding corridors that, over tens of thousands of years, rushing water carved through breccia and white marble. The water is long gone, and this is another isolated, lonely location where naive people, who feel safe in the arms of Mother Nature, can be surprised by a sociopath spawned by decadent civilization but entirely at home in the barrens and the wilds.

No one has yet disappeared from Mosaic Canyon or been found dead and mutilated in those solemn stone passageways.

Following their chat, Nameless is surprised that Oxenwald is still on the hunt. He crafted his remarks to unnerve the killer and trigger his paranoia. That the man remains sufficiently confident to continue seeking prey is a testament to his unshakable narcissism, his obsessive-compulsive need, and the perfection of his evil.

Whether because of the growing heat—which can soar to 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the valley—or because of a delayed reaction to their encounter on Aguereberry Point, Oxenwald is on the move again after less than an hour. He returns to State Route 190 and heads south toward Furnace Creek.

When Nameless is sure of his target’s destination, he closes the current application and opens another, which taps into the computer in mission headquarters—wherever that may be—providing 24/7 access to the inn’s security cameras. This was designed and achieved by one of Ace’s primo hackers.

He selects the exterior camera at the front entrance to the Furnace Creek Inn. He observes the scene until a white GL 550 arrives and the valet takes possession of it. Carrying two camera bags, Oxenwald returns to the inn, where he is a guest.

After switching to another camera in a second-floor corridor, Nameless watches until the photographer appears and proceeds to his room. He isn’t in a hurry, as he might be if he meant to check out.

Oxenwald will surely eat dinner here. In sparsely populated Death Valley National Park, there is no better or more convenient restaurant than the one at the inn.

Nameless takes a nap to be refreshed for their next encounter.

Later, he uses his phone to consult the inn’s security cameras again and watches until he sees Oxenwald following the corridor to the stairs, going to the ground floor, evidently for dinner.

Given this opportunity, Nameless goes to the photographer’s room, picks the lock, and spends a few minutes inside.

5

By late afternoon on the third day of their five-day hike, the Benton twins cross South Mono Creek and arrive at a campsite north of Mammoth Pool Reservoir, which is not as civilized a place as it sounds. The grassy clearing is surrounded by towering pines.

Because the trail they have chosen is a difficult one, they have encountered only five people in three days, including two state arborists conducting a count of diseased trees. The way will grow easier as they come nearer to Millerton Lake.

They eat high-calorie, high-protein bars and packets of nuts that are not a burden to carry. Their water comes from the river, purified with small pills that they add to it.

The night will be cool but not chilly, and they will build no campfire. Instead, they rely on a squat Tac Light lantern for which they carry spare long-life batteries.

Over dinner and as they settle into their bedrolls, they talk about their future husbands, their childhood, literature, movies, and so much more, for they have been at ease with each other—and loquacious—since infancy.

When their laughter isn’t echoing back to them, the humbling and vast silence all around is broken only occasionally by the call of an owl or other night bird. There are countless stars and the moonglow is magical.

6

Prior to dinner, Palmer Oxenwald is sitting at the bar. Lost in his thoughts, he gazes into his martini as though the future can be read in the subtle interplay of vodka and vermouth.

He’s dressed as though for a fashion-photo session: black sneakers, well-cut black slacks, a white sport coat, and a black shirt with large white polka-dots, possibly from Saint Laurent.

On his left wrist is the watch that, according to background provided by Ace, is a possession in which he takes special pride: a rare 1968 Rolex worth perhaps two hundred grand.

Nameless sits at the bar, leaving an empty stool between him and his quarry. “Are you a fan of Paul Newman?”

Oxenwald looks up, caught off guard. In his surprise, he allows his suspicion and alarm to show for a moment before he shrouds them in an affable expression. “Fan of who?”

“That’s a Rolex Daytona. Collectors call it the Paul Newman Rolex. He wore one like it in that race-car movie, Winning.”

“Oh, the actor. No, I’m not a fan particularly. I just liked the watch when I saw it.”

“Newman made a number of movies where he relied too much on his looks and charm. But he was sometimes great. You ever see Hud?”

“No, never saw it.”

Nameless asks the bartender for a Scotch on the rocks and then says to Oxenwald, “You should give it a look. Hud. I know you’ll like Hud. You’ll identify. Get any good shots today?”

“Maybe. I need to print them and evaluate. I never know at the time if they’re good or not. I need distance.”

“Is this your first shoot in Death Valley?”

Oxenwald sips the martini as an excuse to hesitate and calculate a safe reply. “No. I’ve been here once before.”

In fact, he stayed at Furnace Creek Inn four years earlier and five years prior to that, as the registration records will attest.

“It’s such a timeless place, unchanging,” says Nameless. “I’d think there’s not much reason to shoot it twice.”

“Well, it’s like you said earlier about the light. The land doesn’t change with the seasons, but the angle of sunlight does.”

“The light and the shadow. You know, you might get some dramatic shots in Mosaic Canyon. Have you heard of it?”

Oxenwald’s amiable expression stiffens. For whatever reason, he doesn’t say that, earlier today, he went to Mosaic Canyon directly from Aguereberry Point. “It’s on my list.”

“Also Devil’s Golf Course. It’s not really a golf course—”

Interrupting, the photographer says, “Lots of salt pinnacles, all as hard as rock and wickedly sharp. It’s on my list, too.”

“It’s a strange place, alien,” Nameless says. “Lonely. I’ve always thought something terrible could happen to someone in the Devil’s Golf Course and no one would ever know. But then, Death Valley’s full of lonely places.”

Oxenwald seems fascinated with his drink again. After a silence, he says, “So . . . what do you do, Mr. Mallory?”

Checking his bar tab, Nameless says, “Me? I travel around all the time. Look into this and that. Whatever engages my curiosity.”

“That’s an odd job description.”

Nameless opens his wallet. “It’s not a job. It’s more like a calling. I’m retired.”

“Retired? What are you—thirty-five?”

“I’ve been fortunate. I have all the money I need, my time’s my own, and I’ve avoided driving off a cliff.”

“Surely you don’t travel all the time, continuously. Where do you call home?”

Nameless puts down cash for his drink plus a pair of twenty-dollar bills as a gratuity. “I don’t have a home, only a mission.” He gets up from his stool. “Nice chatting with you, Palmer. Maybe we’ll run into each other tomorrow.”

He walks out, leaving his Scotch untouched, as though the drink was merely an excuse to sit at the bar with the photographer.

Although Nameless enjoys a leisurely dinner with a fine wine in the inn’s restaurant, Palmer Oxenwald never appears. Perhaps he has decided to eat in the bar or alone in his room.

Or perhaps he is soon to go on the run. Ace believes that the photographer has bolt-holes prepared against the day when his crimes are discovered. They hope to encourage him to break for one of those, where they can deal with him in the most satisfying fashion.

Information provided by Ace is reliable. Earlier it had been reported that Oxenwald owns a Heckler & Koch P7M8, and Nameless’s visit to the man’s room had confirmed the existence of that weapon.

7

Kenton Mallory is a nobody in a world of nobodies, and Palmer Oxenwald is one of the few somebodies. Mallory is playing a game, as though he knows something, but he can’t know anything. He’s a know-nothing nobody, too suspicious for his own good.

Palmer has encountered a few others like this man, fools who seem to have a vague psychic ability, like a dog’s heightened sense of smell, that allows them to detect those among them who are their superiors, empowered outsiders like Palmer. They pant at his heels until they become distracted by some other scent and go away—or they have to be killed. He calls them Rochelles, after his older sister, Rochelle, who ratted on him when he was a boy.

Because he can never know if one of the Rochelles might get lucky and stumble upon evidence, he has found it wise to change plans and take an alternate route when he encounters one of them. Just leave them in the dust before they might make some discovery that allows them to act on their suspicions.

He is scheduled to stay at the Furnace Creek Inn through the weekend, four more days. Finding desirable game in isolated places where they are vulnerable requires patience.

After taking dinner in his room, however, he checks out at eight o’clock, telling the man at the front desk that a dear friend in San Diego is terminal and wants to see him before the cancer wins.

In fact, Palmer has no friends. No one does. Friendship is an illusion, like love and compassion. Palmer’s true identity is Death, Death incarnate, and Death has no illusions.

Even before he decides where to go hunting next, he takes the main park road north toward State Route 190.

The US offers many places in which to find satisfying game: at numerous spots along the Bighorn Scenic Byway in Wyoming; on various hiking trails in the Sawtooth Range, along the Salmon River, in Idaho; on trails that lead off Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire; the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas; and so many more. As he waits for game to wander to him, he takes photographs, adding to his portfolio—the one everybody is welcome to view online, not the portfolio that is for his delight alone.

However, his need at the moment is great. He doesn’t want to drive halfway across the country to satisfy it. Better to stay in California, where he has found much pleasure. In less than two and a half hours, he drives from the arid badlands of Death Valley, below sea level, to the forested town of Lone Pine, at an altitude of 3,700 feet, on the perimeter of the Sequoia National Forest.

A three-star motel has a room available. It’s a superb family-operated business. His deluxe accommodations feature Wi-Fi, a whirlpool tub, and a large flat-screen TV.

He is too agitated to sleep. He plugs in his laptop and inserts a flash drive containing his favorite photographs, which he always keeps in a pocket of whatever he’s wearing. The faces of the dead. Young and old. Men and women. And not merely their faces, but also their bodies, their wounds, the damage that he did to them.

He sits naked in bed, with this gallery for amusement. He does not need to touch himself. He isn’t one of those low kind who touch themselves or want others to touch them in private places. He needs no stimulation other than the photos and the memories they evoke. The more images that the screen presents, the more excited Palmer becomes. He spasms with intense pleasure, crying out in his rapture.

He has not touched himself. His pleasure is pure.

After putting away the laptop, he takes a quick shower. When he checks his Rolex Daytona before switching off the bedside lamp, the time is ten minutes till midnight.

He sleeps with the flash drive under his pillow. He believes that the images it contains facilitate the kind of dreams that have thrilled him since he was but a boy.

When he wakes, he consults his watch. It’s a quarter till four in the morning. He has slept four hours.

On any other night, he would turn over and go back to sleep, but he is hyperalert, gripped by the conviction that something is terribly wrong. He sits on the edge of the bed, listening. Quiet.

The feeling of impending peril does not relent.

He dresses, pockets the flash drive that had been under the pillow, goes to the window, and parts the draperies. He cautiously peers out at the parking lot and at South Main Street beyond.

No one is in sight. Lone Pine seems to be a town of the dead.

His intention has been to drive the GL 550 into Sequoia National Forest on an unpaved seldom-used park-service road and take photos while waiting for a hiker or, better yet, a hiking couple to come along. Now he decides to depart Lone Pine immediately.

When he carries two suitcases out to the Mercedes, he realizes that the vehicle parked next to the GL 550 is a white Lincoln Aviator identical to the one that Kenton Mallory was driving when he first appeared on Aguereberry Point. The sight transfixes him.

Maybe this isn’t it. The Aviator is popular. Many thousands have been sold. White is one of the most preferred colors.

But the license plate number, which he committed to memory on that mountain above Death Valley, is the same.

Somehow, Mallory has followed him more than a hundred miles without Palmer becoming aware that he had a tail.

He quietly loads the luggage into the GL 550. After fetching his laptop and camera bags, he closes the motel room door as carefully as if it were made of crystal and finishes loading the Mercedes. At the touch of a button, the tailgate closes and locks automatically, almost silently.

Although Palmer grimaces when he keys the engine, none of the motel room doors opens. There is still no one in sight when he pulls onto South Main Street.

During the two and a half hours cruising south to the town of Mojave, he periodically checks his rearview mirror. The vehicles behind him either eventually pass when he gives them a chance or turn off onto other highways.

From Mojave, he heads north to Bakersfield, convinced that Kenton Mallory can’t have tailed him from Death Valley to Lone Pine without an electronic assist. So the bastard must have attached a transponder to the GL 550 while it was unattended at Furnace Creek Inn.

Whoever Mallory is, he’s not the police. He doesn’t act like a cop. Too snarky. Besides, if the police suspected Palmer, they would investigate quietly and surprise him only when they had evidence.

So Mallory knows something, or maybe only suspects, and he’s trying to intimidate Palmer into rash action. If he’s not a cop, then he’s an independent operator, after money. Blackmail.

But damn it, he can’t know anything. Most of those whom Palmer killed have not been found. They vanished. He is expert at disposing of bodies. Those who have been found never provided a clue to the identity of the hunter who made trophies of them with his camera.

Whatever the situation, Palmer needs to take evasive action. From Bakersfield, he drives north to Fresno, arriving at 10:10 a.m. Thursday morning. He leaves the GL 550 in the long-term parking lot at Fresno Yosemite International Airport, rents a Ford, transfers his luggage, and drives thirty-five miles along a county road to Millerton Lake, which in spite of its remoteness is busy with outdoor enthusiasts from spring through autumn.

He owns a cabin on the wooded slopes overlooking the lake, one of six simple, rustic retreats he has purchased at various places around the country, all owned by an offshore corporation that can’t be traced to him. In a worst-case scenario—which this isn’t—these bolt-holes can serve as safe houses while he grows a beard and shaves his head and prepares to live under a new identity.

On this occasion, the cabin is useful only to leave Mallory at a temporary dead end in Fresno. The sonofabitch can bide his time for a week or two, waiting for someone to collect the Mercedes at the airport.

Whoever fetches it won’t be Palmer Oxenwald. He’ll hire a PI to go over the Mercedes at the airport, find the tracking device that Mallory installed, remove it, and deliver the vehicle to some public venue where Palmer can receive it. And he’ll pay a PI to background Kenton Mallory and write a report on him.

Palmer also needs to pore over his moves during his previous two expeditions to Death Valley, until he can find the clue that led this man, this nobody, to connect the Aguereberry Point tragedies of the honeymooners and the retirees to one unassuming photographer. Although those events occurred nine years and four years earlier, every detail is vivid in his memory. He lives to kill and has an eidetic memory when it comes to his triumphs as a hunter.

Analysis of the past will have to wait, however, because he has not killed in four months, and his desire has attained a critical pressure, an insistency. He is an avatar of Death. He has a duty to kill. What would the world be if Death chose not to cull the herd of humanity? Anyway, at this time, the pleasure to be had merely from reviewing photographs of the dead is not sufficient to his need.

He stops in the tiny town of Friant, buys groceries, and proceeds to the cabin, which is on two private acres. It’s a small, handsome log-and-stone structure with a slate roof. Two bedrooms. Two baths. There’s a gourmet kitchen, because Palmer likes to cook.

A property management firm inspects the residence once a month, keeps it clean and functioning. They’re paid by an offshore company and have never seen Palmer, have never heard his name.

He pulls the rental Ford into the second of two garage stalls. The first houses a Kawasaki KLR650 sport bike.

In the cabin, he puts away the groceries, unpacks his luggage. Except for one adventure—to relieve the extreme pressure in his head, heart, and loins—he expects to stay here for at least a week.

8

Late Thursday afternoon—according to a text from Ace—Oxenwald has stopped at a cabin a few miles north of the miniscule community of Friant. Having trailed his quarry at a leisurely pace, Nameless takes a room in a one-star motel on the outskirts of town, along the main approach road to Millerton Lake.

He will need to roll out again if Oxenwald goes on the move before they are ready to deal with him. The photographer had been trolling for victims in Death Valley. It is the nature of his evil that, once his appetite for murder has been aroused, he will become ever more ravenous until he has satisfied it.

Most people, Palmer Oxenwald perhaps among them, think of a GPS navigation system as a cool feature of their vehicles, as a service. Few are aware that it is as well a tracking system able to reveal their location at all times. Fewer still realize that the National Security Agency, at its one-million-square-foot data center in Utah, preserves a record of everywhere every GPS vehicle has been.

There are firewalls to prevent innocent people—and even those not so innocent but who are merely under suspicion—from having their privacy violated. Most of the time, law enforcement respects these barriers and seeks a court order to access this information only after there is sufficient evidence to have made an arrest.

Nameless and those who support his missions are, as far as he knows, not any branch of law enforcement. They serve justice only to the extent that they serve truth. Justice is often in the eye of the beholder; what is justice to some can look like injustice to others. Justice can be politicized, but truth cannot; truth is what it is.

Ace of Diamonds and crew have hacked into a wide spectrum of government and private-sector computer systems. They installed rootkits that allow them to swim through those data troves without being detected, enabling them, among other things, to track a target like Oxenwald in real time and, through archives, over the history of his travels.

When he ditched the GL 550 at the Fresno airport, he could still be tracked on foot because his smartphone transmits an identifying code to the GPS system. When it placed him at the desk of a rental-car agency, Ace’s team invaded that company’s computer system to identify the rental assigned to Oxenwald. That vehicle, too, has a GPS system.

If necessary, Oxenwald can be followed by the transponder in his laptop. If he wore a high-tech watch, that also would be a tag by which to locate him; but his 1968 Rolex Daytona emits no signal.

At 5:20 p.m., Nameless leaves his motel to have a meal in a nearby diner. Halfway through his cheeseburger, he receives a text message from Ace. Immediate action is not required. The text is only to inform him that it’s been learned Oxenwald’s cabin is owned by Mordor Enterprises, a Cayman Islands LLC, which is most likely an entity established by the photographer.

A Cayman Islands LLC. Wealthy serial killers who inherited fortunes can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with more than just a thumb left over. Rarer is the serial killer whose father was once governor of a major state and is currently a US senator.

9

Near the end of the fourth day of their hike, Mia and Kara Benton come out of the trees into a meadow where a family of mule deer—a buck, two does, a fawn—are grazing. The animals raise their heads from the grass to stare at the twins, their faces grave and gentle. They flare their large ears, which earn them the mule part of their name, but after a moment they decide no threat is imminent, and they return to their grazing.

Mia takes her sister’s hand, and they stand watching for a while before they continue along the perimeter of the meadow, venturing no closer to the deer.

Although she thinks that her sister probably already knows this, Mia says, “Of all wildlife, mule deer fawns are the safest newborns, ’cause during their entire first year, they don’t produce a scent by which a predator might find them.”

“After four days,” Kara says, “we’re producing a nice ripe scent, but I guess we don’t smell like predators to the deer.”

Within half an hour, they come to a suitable place to camp. Familiar with this trail, they realize they’re ahead of schedule, only six miles from Millerton Lake. Friday will be a short day.

10

At 6:25 Thursday evening, Nameless is finishing his meal at the diner when Ace texts him again regarding Mordor Enterprises, LLC.

An exhaustive database of US real estate owned by foreign corporations, maintained by the NSA in its Utah facility, reveals five additional properties purchased by Mordor Enterprises. Judging by the fact that they’re in rural areas in different regions of the country, it’s likely that their primary purpose is to serve as snake holes where Oxenwald can coil out of the reach of the law if ever his crimes become known.

Now that the killer’s potential hideouts are located and he is hunkered down in one of them, Ace is ready to move on him in the morning.

They would take action now, but they have to wait for the arrival of the specialist, Salazar, who will bring with him Oxenwald’s well-earned fate.

Ace texts: BE READY TO ROLL AT 4:30 A.M. AT THAT TIME, WE’LL PLAY THE LITTON-SHERRINGTON TAPE FOR OXENWALD.

Thirteen years earlier, Dr. Lowell Shreve Litton, a physician and a psychiatrist, owner and operator of the Litton School, which is both a fiercely expensive private school and a locked sanitarium for the treatment of troubled youths, had accepted sixteen-year-old Palmer Oxenwald as a student/patient, though at that time the boy’s name was Palmer Sherrington, before he forsook his father’s name and adopted his mother’s maiden name.

The always-careful Dr. Litton keeps meticulous records as well as recordings of every therapy session. He also illegally records telephone and in-person conversations with parents of his charges, without their knowledge, as insurance against the many injustices that extremely wealthy people sometimes attempt to inflict on a humble doctor such as he.

Ace’s crew went fishing in Dr. Litton’s computer-stored audio files and hooked a conversation between him and then governor Reeves Sherrington, related to Litton’s concern about releasing Palmer at the age of eighteen. This has been severely edited. The edited version will be shared with Palmer Oxenwald by phone to distract him as Nameless enters the cabin to overpower him.

Now, Nameless pays for his dinner, tips two hundred dollars to the startled waitress, and walks back to the motel to catch a few hours of sleep.

11

Whoever Kenton Mallory might be, whatever he knows—or thinks he knows—he isn’t going to scare Palmer into cowering in a hidey-hole. No one can frighten him. No one can stop him. Palmer is as inevitable as the passage of time, an irresistible force, and he knows no fear. He has taken prudent action by coming to the cabin, but he is not going to refrain from pursuing his pleasure.

He intends to head inland from Millerton Lake an hour before sunrise, deep into the Sierra Nevada, and station himself with a camera along the San Joaquin River trail, to be prepared for any nature-loving loser who happens along in the early light.

Meanwhile, no less of a superb cook than he is a tireless dealer of death, Palmer prepares a dinner of pasta in an exquisite alfredo sauce with a side of buttered carrots and another of Brussels sprouts in a balsamic sauce.

Dinner, two glasses of white wine, and the flash drive full of photographs under his pillow assure him of a sound sleep and dreams of the kind that arouse him.

His alarm wakes him at 3:50 a.m. After a breakfast muffin with coffee, he takes his Rolleiflex camera bag and his murder kit into the garage and secures them to the luggage rack on the Kawasaki sport bike.

12

At 4:10 a.m., the man who is not Kenton Mallory is sitting in his Lincoln Aviator, in the motel parking lot, facing the street, his window down, listening to the uncanny silence of Friant, where the only sound is the hoot of an owl. And even the bird seems to be whispering in respect of the citizenry’s slumber.

The paneled truck appears and pulls to a stop at the curb. It looks particularly sturdy, as though it might be an unmarked armored vehicle used to transport large sums of cash.

A fortyish man gets out of the truck, comes to the Aviator, and peers in the open driver’s window. “You expecting a delivery?”

“Salazar?”

“I’ve got the goods.”

The specialist for whom they’ve been waiting, Salazar, either has no first name or no last, and perhaps Salazar is a nom de guerre, in which case he is almost as nameless as Nameless.

“I’ll lead the way,” Nameless says, and he starts the Aviator as Salazar returns to his truck.

13

As Palmer Oxenwald straddles the motorcycle in his garage, precisely at four thirty in the morning, his smartphone rings.

He doesn’t recognize the caller, but considering the past two days, he finds it necessary to take the call. If it’s a sales pitch, he’ll hang up. But in case it’s related to recent events, he better have a listen.

“Hello?”

A familiar voice declares, “This is Dr. Lowell Shreve Litton.”

For a moment, Palmer is nonplussed by this return of the shrink who kept him under lock and key for two years. The fine hairs on his neck quiver as if with static electricity.

Before he can speak, another voice, that of his father, Senator Reeves Sherrington, comes across the line. “What the hell do you mean, he shouldn’t be released? I’ve been paying you six figures a year, six figures twice over each year, to cure him.”

“Governor,” says Litton, “the boy is still deeply troubled.”

Governor. Not yet senator. Palmer realizes that he is listening to a recording made years earlier.

“Has he killed any animals since he’s been here? Any gerbils, birds, rabbits, cats?”

“He hasn’t had the opportunity.”

“So the answer is no.”

Since he had been ten years old, he’d taken pleasure in torturing and killing small creatures, starting with caterpillars and beetles and mice that he caught alive in humane traps. Year by year, he became more ambitious, moving on to complex animals.

Dr. Litton says, “Palmer asked for a Polaroid camera when he was eleven. And you gave it to him without asking why he wanted it.”

“Don’t play shrink with me, Litton. Because of his drawing, his mother thought he had talent, thought a camera would encourage him. A lot of artists work from photo studies.”

“Five years later, your daughter, Rochelle, found his hidden collection of Polaroids. Animals being tortured, animals dying, animals dead. Those pictures are in my possession.”

Father’s voice, previously hard-edged, is suddenly also dangerously sharp. “Don’t threaten me, Litton.”

“You infer a threat, Governor. I didn’t imply one. I’m no blackmailer. I make reference to the photographs only because every four to six months, to test the efficacy of the therapy he’s been receiving, I allow Palmer to have the collection for two days. I’m sorry to say, the result is always the same.”

“The result? What result?”

“In the privacy of his room, unaware that he’s being filmed, Palmer strips naked and obsesses over the photos for hours.”

“You will damn well destroy that film, Litton!”

The doctor forges onward. “During these sessions, he is continuously aroused. He despises self-abusers and never fondles himself, but with only the stimulation of the photographs, he achieves orgasm.”

“This is outrageous! If I’d known your establishment is a palace of perversion, Dr. Litton, I would never have trusted you with my son.”

Litton remains unrattled. “Our theories and methods were explicitly described in the admissions form that your wife signed.”

“Then she’s a fool for signing it.”

A few hundred yards south of Oxenwald’s cabin, which remains out of sight around a bend, the shoulder of the lake road widens to accommodate the Aviator. Salazar stops behind the SUV and douses his headlights. He will wait here until he is phoned from the cabin.

Nameless continues on foot. Short of the curve, he leaves the pavement and enters the trees, where he proceeds by the hooded beam of a flashlight until he comes within sight of the cabin, which is downslope from him. He clicks off the light and moves cautiously forward through the woods to the tree line, beyond which lies a moonlit meadow.

“Then she’s a fool for signing it.”

Palmer agrees. His mother is a fool, but then so is Father.

Dr. Litton says, “Please, Governor, let’s not make this about you and me. It’s about your son. When the photos aren’t in his possession, he engages in no sexual activity. None whatsoever. Batteries of psychological tests reveal a boy who’s attracted neither to girls nor to other boys.”

“Nonsense! He’s a damn good-looking kid. Girls are always fawning over him, and he loves it.”

“Because he’s fantasizing about what he wants to do to them, and what he wants to do does not involve sex.”

“I’ve had about enough of this.”

“Your son is aroused only by violence, and he achieves orgasm only when he kills or when he can relive the killing he’s done with the aid of photographs. If his obsession progresses—and it will—he will one day cease to be satisfied with killing merely animals.”

There are no windows in the garage, but the single overhead light makes a murky mirror of the side window of the rental car parked next to the Kawasaki. Listening and mesmerized, Palmer stares at his reflection: a smoky form with blurred features, as if he is staring not at himself but at the ravenous psyche within his flesh.

“My son is not a murderer,” Father declares.

“Not yet. But when he starts, he’ll prey on men as well as women, on the old as well as the young. Death is Eros to him.”

A few clicks, a short buzz, static on the phone line perhaps signifies an edit in the recording.

Then Father speaks in a cool, solemn tone. “A boy of fifteen killed himself while in your care, Dr. Litton.”

“Yes. Nine years ago. It haunts me. We took every precaution, but he hanged himself in a most ingenious manner.”

“Two young women treated in this facility have accused you and staff members of rape.”

“Yes. One subsequently recanted her accusations. The other, who spent only a month here, went on to accuse both her parents of rape as well as her minister, several teachers, an uncle, two neighbors, and a female cousin whom she slashed with a knife. No institution is without regrettable incidents, Governor, but the Litton School has had far fewer than most during its nineteen years of operation, and none that has been substantiated.”

Father is relentless. “Nevertheless, we both know that career prosecutors of high ambition and a grand jury of easily manipulated fools can destroy the innocent as easily as they can destroy the guilty.”

Nameless moves through the tall grass toward the back of the cabin, where there are no lights in any window. The call should have been placed to Oxenwald, and he should even now be listening to it. If so, he is listening in the dark.

Nameless has with him three guns. The first is a police lock-release gun with which he can quickly pick the lock on the back door.

Over the phone comes another click-buzz indicating a splice. Then:

“When my son turns eighteen in a month, he’ll inherit the first tranche of a fortune bequeathed to him by his grandfather, the rest on his twenty-first birthday. When he has those resources, I don’t want to be in a public fight with his attorneys to keep him here.”

“Governor, if for his own good we work together to have him certified—”

“I’m running for the senate next year.”

“Yes, I’ve heard rumors.”

“I’ve no chance with something like this in the press.”

“But you’ve no chance if we release him and he kills someone.”

Another splice in the recording. Followed by:

“Dr. Litton, surely you’re sometimes wrong. Many boys have a cruel streak, but they outgrow it.”

“No psychiatrist has a perfect diagnostic record. However, he’s eighteen, not a child. And his obsession is intensifying.”

“Maybe he’ll remain content with animals. In other ways, he’s a self-disciplined kid. Maybe he can control this compulsion, too. In fact, I’m sure he can.”

Litton disagrees. “Unlikely.”

“Damn it, you’re busting my balls here.”

“That’s not my intention, Governor.”

Palmer is fascinated by their ignorance. They don’t understand him at all. He is not obsessed. He suffers from no compulsion. He is not just another troubled soul. He is unique. He is the incarnation of Death. He fears nothing, because Death has nothing to fear. Death cannot die. Death and Death alone is immortal. He gains power from every killing he commits.

A three-second hum. Another splice.

“I’m going to win that senate seat, Dr. Litton. Your future and mine are entwined, whether we like it or not. Here’s the only way this can work. You give Palmer a clean bill of health. He writes me a letter expressing his great distress about having been sent to Litton School. He goes to court, has his name changed to Oxenwald, the name of his maternal grandfather who made him an heir. I can arrange for all of this to occur quickly, quietly, out of sight of the media. My wife and I make a two-million-dollar charitable contribution to the Litton School Foundation. Forever estranged from me and his mother, Palmer goes off to live under his new name. I am confident that the hundred million he’ll inherit will provide the motivation he needs to control his compulsion. He can buy all the privacy he wants and all the mice and birds and rabbits and cats he’ll ever need. Money is a cure-all, doctor.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“He’s smart. He’s rich. He’ll figure it out. There are backward places in the world where he can buy the license, the freedom, to do what he wants. If he can’t control this, he’ll be smart enough to go to some third-world hellhole where his money allows him to do as he wishes. As far as I can see, that’s the worst-case scenario. Two million dollars, Dr. Litton.”

The recording ends. The caller terminates the call.

Astride his Kawasaki, Palmer switches off his phone, zips it away in a pocket of his windbreaker, and puts up the garage door with a remote.

Nameless pulls the trigger of the LockAid gun four times to flip up all the pins in the deadbolt. This makes some noise but not much, not enough to distract Oxenwald if, in his dark bedroom, he is now riveted by the recording of his father and Dr. Litton.

He pockets the lock-release gun and reaches cross body to draw a sedative-dart pistol from a belt holster on his left hip.

The back door hinges are well oiled. Without a sound, he eases into the kitchen, which is illuminated dimly by digital clocks on the oven and the microwave.

He closes the door and cocks his head, listening—as a sudden creaking-clattering noise shudders through the small house. He realizes it’s a rising garage door just as it thumps against its overhead stops.

Somehow, Kenton Mallory—and whoever may be behind him—got Palmer’s phone number; but that doesn’t mean they know where he is. The cabin is probably still a safe bolt-hole.

He is not fearful. He is never fearful. He is an avatar of Death, Death incarnate, and Death fears nothing.

He puts on his helmet, starts the Kawasaki, pilots it out of the garage, leaving the door open, and follows the long driveway toward the lake road.

Rather than fearful, he is angry that Father and Dr. Litton totally misunderstood him. He isn’t obsessed, suffers no compulsion. What nonsense. He hasn’t confused sex and death. He has no interest in sex because he is above all that, because he is an avatar of Death, and neither Death nor the avatars through which Death works can procreate. Death doesn’t need to procreate, to seek to extend his life through children, because Death is immortal. For Death, the only rapture to be had is when he takes a life. How obvious is that? What is all of Dr. Litton’s education worth if he doesn’t understand this basic truth? Death is king of the world, and his avatars are princes. Without exception, everyone ends in Death and his avatars, and all the rapture they might have known if they had continued living becomes Death’s—and Palmer’s—rapture when he takes them.

“Everyone ends in me,” Palmer says, “but I have no end.” He will prove it now, by dawn if not before, as he’s proved it so often in the past.

He turns north on the lake road, toward the wilds of the Sierra Nevada. With daylight still at least twenty minutes away, he is in no hurry.

The night is pleasantly cool. The dragon-egg moon is fat and strange, and the growl of the motorcycle engine echoes back from the trees with a threat that sounds Jurassic.

Nameless runs through the open garage door and sprints down the driveway in the wake of the sport bike. However, even though Oxenwald isn’t speeding, he can’t be caught by a man on foot. He is moving just fast enough to make it impossible for his pursuer to pull a pistol and shoot him off his saddle.

At the end of the driveway, the killer turns left, away from Friant, toward the Sierra National Forest. Maybe he didn’t receive the call as Ace intended. Whether he received it or not, he is almost certainly on the hunt, intent on laying a trap for some unsuspecting nature lover.

Nameless hurries around the bend in the lake road, to the Aviator, starts the engine, and accelerates north, leaving Salazar to wait. Without headlamps, relying on moonglow reflected in the highway stripes to define the road, he’s doing double the speed limit by the time the taillight of the motorcycle burns like a small cyclopean eye in the darkness ahead.

He has no hope of overtaking his target and wiping him out in a collision. The killer’s helmet and the racket of the motorbike will mask the roar of the SUV, but not if Nameless gets much closer. The best option for now is to keep Oxenwald in sight and hope that he won’t see the dark-running Aviator if he glances in his mirror.

Some highways that lead into the Sierra Nevada wither into mere wilderness-service roads, as does this one. The pavement gives way to gravel, which narrows to a single lane with occasional lay-bys, with walls of conifers soaring to the left and right, and then the gravel becomes hardpan.

As first light pinks the clouds in the east, Oxenwald departs the road, swings right onto what might be a deer trail or a path used by hikers, drastically reducing his speed but wheeling off among legions of conifers, where the Aviator cannot follow.

14

Mia and Kara Benton rise before the sun and eat energy bars for breakfast. Mia has nothing against almonds, macadamias, cocoa powder, raisins, milk-derived protein solids, soy extract, chicory-root extract, stabilizing agents, and other good stuff like that, but she’ll be glad for the three days in a cabin above Millerton Lake, where they can have fried eggs, bacon, potatoes, and cinnamon-bread toast lavishly buttered.

They stand together to watch the eastern sky bloom into a blazing celestial rose garden of gold and pink and coral, which slowly fades as real roses do. Then, in the blue of morning, they set out along the river trail for the lake and the end of their five-day hike. They have gone two miles when they come out of the trees into an oval meadow like a small amphitheater: curved and stepped shelves of weather-smoothed rock to the east, like ascending rows of seats; the grassy flats a stage; the river and the rising land beyond the rushing water serving as a dramatic backdrop.

In the center of the meadow stands a motorcycle. Near it, sitting cross-legged on a single plinth of rock on the grassy stage, is an Adonis, shirtless in the morning warmth, muscled and tan, with a face as striking as his body. He’s photographing the dramatic amphitheater with the pines standing sentinel at its crest.

“Wow,” says Kara.

“Yeah,” says Mia.

“Are we both engaged to be married?”

“I’ve heard it said we are.”

“My guy’s cute.”

“Mine, too.”

“So who’s this dude on the rock?”

“A supernatural temptation.”

“What’s the male equivalent of a succubus?”

“Incubus.”

The photographer becomes aware that he has company, stands up, and begins taking photos of them.

“Wow, even better standing up,” says Mia.

“Yeah,” says Kara. “But we’re strong.”

“We’re strong,” Mia agrees.

Kara sighs. “I don’t like beer, but I like that six-pack.”

Mia laughs. “You think the hair’s a little too . . . coiffed.”

“It’s totally coiffed,” Mia agrees.

The photographer steps down from the rock and, with one hand, he motions for them to come closer while he continues to photograph them.

The sisters move toward him through the tall grass.

15

The Rolleiflex makes its distinctive sound, seductive to so many people in this world of self-admiration, and the approaching pair thrill Palmer. They would thrill him no less if they were men, no less if they were old, for what excites him is that their lives are his to take. He will not touch himself, not even through his jeans, but he is swollen almost painfully with anticipation.

Normally, he would disable them with a tranquilizer-dart gun, get them out of the little meadow to a nearby but even more remote place, restrain them, and work on them with instruments that give him so much pleasure. But his need is great, his satisfaction having been thwarted in Death Valley, thwarted again when he was harried out of Lone Pine before he could even seek game in the Sequoia National Forest. Torturing these two animals will only delay the ultimate thrill of taking their life force for his own.

They are just twenty feet away when he puts the camera on the rock where he has been sitting and smiles at the women and says with real delight, “What an unexpected vision,” and reaches to the belt holster in the small of his back, from which he draws the Heckler & Koch 9 mm pistol. He opens fire, going for chest shots, face shots.

16

They aren’t identical twins, but their reactions are identical: instant gut-clenching heart-hammering terror at the sight of the gun, an explosive fight-or-flight leap into flight at the crack of the first shot and the muzzle flash. No time for Mia to draw the Walther .38 from under her loose T-shirt, not with the bastard firing point-blank. Pivoting in unison, the sisters run back the way they came, hoping their backpacks might stop bullets—ridiculous, a futile hope!—as a second shot booms, a third, a fourth. Mia still on her feet, not hit, running, Kara, too. The coiffed bastard must be the worst shot in the world, but he’s surely sprinting after them as the fifth and sixth rounds roar across the meadow and echo off the stone amphitheater, through the trees, off the rising land beyond the river.

When there are no more shots and they reach the trees alive, Mia dares to glance back. The pretty boy is flat on the ground, near the plinth of natural stone, maybe dead, and this other guy is standing over him, not so pretty but big and stalwart looking and holding some kind of gun in his hand.

“Where the hell did he come from?” Kara gasps.

Drawing the Walther from her belt holster, her heart seeming to ricochet off every rib in its cage, Mia says, “Whatever this is, it isn’t over.”

The new guy calls out to them. “He’s down. It’s safe. I need your help.”

“Maybe he’s a forest ranger,” Kara says.

“He’s not wearing a uniform.”

“Maybe he’s a plainclothes ranger.”

“This sucks.”

The guy puts the gun on the plinth of stone and steps away from it and calls out. “You have a gun. I don’t. I need your help.”

17

The girls want to know who he is, and Nameless assures them they don’t want to know, that they don’t want to get caught up in this except to help him get the shooter out of the meadow.

They want to know who the unconscious pretty boy is, and he tells them this situation is like a dark fairy tale in which once you know the ogre’s name, then you’re trapped in his world forever.

Mia, the one with short brown hair, has a Walther .38 in hand, so Nameless tells the one with long auburn hair, Kara, to take the gun off the stone plinth so that she can be sure he won’t use it on them. “It’s a tranquilizer-dart gun. He’ll be out for maybe twenty minutes. I’ve got to get him down the trail to where I left my SUV.”

“The sonofabitch missed us with six shots point-blank,” Kara says. “How could he miss?”

“The gun was loaded with blanks,” Nameless says. “I changed them out when he left the pistol in his room at Furnace Creek. I thought sooner or later, it’d be me he’d be shooting at.”

“What’s Furnace Creek?”

“Never mind. We have to get him on the bike. One of you on each side holding him with one hand, holding a handlebar with the other hand, and me gripping him from behind and pushing. We’ll walk the bike about a mile, to where I had to leave my wheels.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. Serious. I’m not a naturally funny guy.”

“What’re you going to do with him?” Mia asks.

“You don’t want to know. Anyway, he’s a brutal sociopathic killer, so don’t get all compassionate.”

“We’re not all compassionate, just curious,” Kara says. “I could shoot the fucker, no problem.”

“Leave him to me,” Nameless advises.

“Maybe we should walk away from this,” she says.

“You owe me. I saved your lives.”

Mia says, “I kind of trust him.”

“This is totally crazy, but I kind of trust him, too,” Kara agrees.

“What about pretty boy’s camera?” Mia asks.

Nameless shrugs. “Leave it. The bears can take selfies.”

The three of them get Oxenwald on the motorcycle. Propping him on the seat and holding him there with some difficulty, they roll him across the meadow and onto the trail through the trees.

Halfway to the Lincoln Aviator, he starts to revive, so Kara shoots him with another tranquilizer dart and says, “That felt good.”

After they reach the Aviator and load the unconscious man into it, through the tailgate, Nameless strips off the killer’s Rolex Daytona and offers it to the women.

“What do we want with this?” Mia asks.

“It’s a rare watch, worth two hundred thousand bucks.”

They stare at him wide-eyed and open mouthed.

Kara says, “That can’t be true.”

“It’s true. Say you found it on the trail, lying in the dirt. Sell it through a collectible-watch dealer. Have a nice life.”

As Mia accepts the watch, Nameless experiences one of those infrequent moments of clairvoyance that he suspects might have been engineered into him along with the amnesia and the ability to wake from sleep precisely at a time predetermined.

The brunette—Mia Benton—is lying on the floor in a bedroom where a violent struggle has occurred. She is battered, and a man’s necktie is cinched tightly around her throat, and her wide-open eyes are sightless in death. A man—Dennis, Dennis Yardley—prepares to roll up her body in a blanket to move it, dispose of it.

“Don’t marry him, Mia. For God’s sake, don’t marry Dennis. He isn’t who you think he is. He’ll kill you.”

Both women regard him with more astonishment than that with which they received the Rolex.

Mia says, “How do you know Dennis? You don’t know us, our lives.”

“Sometimes I see things, visions, moments of the past. And sometimes moments of the future that’ll come true unless . . . unless you take steps to change it. It’s two months until the wedding, isn’t it? Yes. It is. Find out who he is, Mia. Find out who he really is. Promise me.”

Bewildered, she says, “But I know already.”

“Find out,” he insists.

“All right. Okay. I guess . . . whatever you say.”

As Kara and Mia walk away, Nameless closes the tailgate of the Aviator, turns, and discovers a woman and two children approaching through the trees. They are not dressed for the wilderness, but they are out of place for other reasons, as well.

Of the children, one is a blond girl of about nine, her hair in a ponytail. She is holding a floppy-eared plush-toy rabbit. He has seen her before, in the most mysterious vision yet to afflict him, a montage of rapid-fire images that might be about some horror that has transpired or one yet to come. He can’t say which.

However, this is no vision. The forest around him hasn’t been blotted out by a scene of action occurring elsewhere and elsewhen. These three are integrated in the moment—yet eerie, unearthly.

The younger child is a boy of about five. Nameless has never seen him before . . . and yet the boy seems familiar.

The lovely woman, a blonde with eyes the very purple blue of that species of clematis called Lasurstern, is more than familiar, she is known to him, well known. And yet he cannot recall her name or in what context they might have met before.

The trio stops about twenty feet short of him, all solemn faced at first. Then the woman smiles, and her smile is a needle through his heart.

When he takes a step toward them, they lose substance. When he takes a second step, the three grow fainter still. With a third step, they vanish.

He stands in torment and knows not why.

Or doesn’t want to know.

Some strange science has made him what he is, and this seems to be a new manifestation of it. He can’t make sense of what he’s seen.

He hears himself say again what he said to Mia moments earlier—“Don’t marry him . . . he’ll kill you”—but the sisters are gone and cannot hear him.

18

The sisters are a few miles behind, completing their hike in a state of shock, when Nameless returns to the cabin owned by Mordor, LLC, with a snoring photographer lying in the cargo hold.

The specialist, Salazar, is still waiting in his small but formidable-looking truck.

Nameless gives Salazar the house key that he took from a pocket of Oxenwald’s jeans.

Salazar drives the truck into the garage. He finds the key to Oxenwald’s rental car in a cup holder, moves the vehicle outside, and parks it at the foot of the driveway. In the garage once more, he puts down the big door, to make the tricky transfer. The transfer takes seventeen minutes.

When Salazar opens the garage door, Nameless pulls the Aviator into the second stall and parks beside the truck. As the garage door rolls down, he puts up the Aviator’s tailgate. Salazar helps drag Oxenwald out of the SUV and carry him to the connecting door to the house, where they sit him on the floor, with his back to the wall, his head lolling to one side.

The photographer is already bare chested. Together, they strip him, though they leave him in his Dolce & Gabbana briefs.

“I never undressed a man before,” says Salazar.

“Me neither, at least as far as I can remember.” He tosses the shoes and clothes into the Aviator, to dispose of them later.

When Oxenwald sheds the effect of the tranquilizer, when he’s fully alert, he’s profoundly pissed off. Even in his condition, even with Salazar holding a pistol on him, the killer feels entitled and is looking for an edge, a way to turn the tables. Imperiously, he demands to know who they are, really are, who they’re working for.

“Better you don’t know,” says the man who isn’t Kenton Mallory. “What I will say is just this: We’re living in a time when private citizens can discover—hack their way to—all the evidence, all the proof, that the police, the FBI, the NSA, and others have access to. If for whatever reason the law can’t or won’t put it all together in a case like yours, there are those who will.”

“What kind of shit are you shoveling?” Oxenwald sneers.

“True shit,” Nameless assures him.

Gesturing with the pistol, Salazar says, “Get to your feet.”

“Why’d you strip me?”

“Why does one shuck the husk off an ear of corn?”

“What does that mean, what’re you doing with me?”

Nameless says, “Better you don’t know.”

With the pistol jammed in the small of his back, Oxenwald is forced to stand before the connecting door to the house. Nameless opens it, and Salazar forces Oxenwald inside.

Nameless says, “This is for all the little animals,” pulls the door shut, holds it closed, and remains in the garage with Salazar.

Oxenwald must have had to wander halfway through the residence to meet his fate, because the screaming takes a little longer to start than they expect.

The male mountain lion—four hundred pounds of muscle, claws, and teeth—has not been fed in several days.

Before the cat wrangler, Salazar, used a cattle prod to transfer it to the house, he went quickly through the place and with a hammer broke off what privacy locks existed on the interior doors, leaving nowhere for the condemned to hide.

Sometimes Ace and his crew have a flamboyant sense of what suitable punishment should be.

When the screaming stops, Salazar says, “We are hard men, sir.”

“I guess we are,” Nameless agrees, “when we have to be. How does the cat get out?”

“We’ll leave this door open and the garage door raised. We’ve nothing to fear from it now. It is well fed and amiable.”

19

Nameless has a week off. The portion of the twenty thousand in cash that he didn’t spend on this mission is his to spend now as he wishes. He drives across California and south to the picturesque coastal town of Carmel, where he takes a motel room as Kenton Mallory and pays cash for a week in advance.

Carmel offers numerous excellent small restaurants. He eats three superb meals a day, with no concern about the calorie count, because he works off any excess by walking the hills of the lovely town and running on the beach. Two-hundred-percent tips quickly make him a popular figure wherever he goes.

He has a lot of time to think during this restful week. One thing he broods about is whether he is a hard man only in the sense Salazar meant it. The specialist did not mean hard as a synonym for cruel, but instead for unsentimental, unforgiving of evil, stoic.

Whoever he was in his former life, beyond the veil of amnesia, perhaps he had been cruel, but he is not now. And he is sentimental about many things: children, dogs, the suffering of the innocent.

But he admits to being unforgiving of the wicked. Forgiveness is the work of priests, and he is no priest, nor does he want to be one.

He is not sentimental when it comes to violent criminals. He doesn’t care what abuse, if any, or other experiences might have twisted Palmer Oxenwald in his youth. He cares instead about the people who were the killer’s targets, for those who loved and lost them. Concerning people who commit the most terrible crimes, he does not believe in second chances or the possibility of rehabilitation. For them, he doesn’t believe in pity or mercy. He believes in hungry mountain lions and the right recompense for the suffering of all the little animals.

He is nameless in a world where nearly everything is named down to the smallest microbes, and yet it is a world of deep and enduring mysteries, including the meaning of it all. He is like the current in a circuit, a power to be reckoned with, and yet he wonders: What is the force that through the circuit drives the current?

The story continues . . .

Check out the next episode of Dean Koontz’s NAMELESS, The Praying Mantis Bride.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times number one bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

Ashley Bell

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

Jane Hawk

The Silent Corner

The Whispering Room

The Crooked Staircase

The Forbidden Door

The Night Window

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

Nonfiction

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

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

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19

The story continues . . .

About the Author

Also by Dean Koontz