Nameless: Season One by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, fiction, horror, thriller, mystery

21

W ell, that was different. The confrontation between mother and daughter has not ended in any of the ways that Ace and team imagined when they planned this mission.

And Nameless’s moment of clairvoyance, when he had thought he’d foreseen Lucia with a knife, eviscerating him, was in fact Lucia with a knife being eviscerated by Valjean with another knife.

Sans weapon, with the communications device removed from her left ear, Valjean is conducted to the living room by Devlin, where she reposes in a Ruhlmann armchair, in the lightfall from a Tiffany lamp with a red-and-green oriental-poppy shade. Cats lie clustered at her feet.

Nameless sits in a chair facing hers, and Devlin stands by the fireplace. “We had Lucia’s confession on tape,” says Nameless. “Why did you keep pushing her so hard?”

“The greedy pig needed to apologize for treatin’ me like shit all these years. All she needed to do was apologize.”

“But now you’ve killed her,” Devlin says.

“It was self-defense.”

“Where did you get the knife? You didn’t have it on the plane.”

Valjean grins and winks, a most disconcerting expression. “She learned from me how to hide knives under furniture. They’re all over my place—and hers. No lust-crazed man is gonna surprise me. I felt a knife under the foyer table when I come through the front door.”

“That could be seen as proof of homicidal intention.”

“Self-defense,” she insists. “No court will convict me.”

“My friends and I don’t deal with courts.”

“Well, I’ll have to,” Valjean says, “to get my inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“What’s hers is now mine.”

“I’d bet my life you’re not mentioned in her will. Besides, we have her confession. She murdered to get her wealth. You’ve no right to it, Mrs. Jones. You can no longer stay here, like we planned, and share your recording with the authorities. We’ll keep the recording and send you back to Florida with the money we promised. You’ll live quietly there with your cats and forget about inheriting a fortune.”

She puffs out her chest and raises her head high and says, “No damn man tells me what to do. You listen to me, Shepherd Shaw, or whoever the hell you are. I want my millions, and I’ll get them.”

Devlin has called the three members of the team that came here with him the previous Sunday. They will arrive in the same truck and strip the house of most of what they installed before housekeepers return on Monday and find Lucia’s corpse in strange circumstances. There is no longer a need for the confession that would have gotten Lucia committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

The only problem now is Valjean.

Nameless loathes having to decide what to do with her. She murdered her husband and made a monster of her daughter. He has executed murderers before, some of them with warmer personalities than Mrs. Jones, but he never takes pleasure in the necessity.

He looks at Devlin. Their eyes lock. But it’s wrong to put this burden on the other man. Devlin isn’t the senior operative here.

As Nameless rises

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