The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

1

BORREGO VALLEY AT DAWN, FLEECY clouds blazing bright coral against a turquoise eastern sky paling slowly to blue…

Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose are cruising around, looking for stains on the fabric of normalcy, which might turn out to be indications, signs, manifestations—simply put, clues—to the whereabouts of Travis Hawk.

More accurately, Dubose is thus engaged, while in the front passenger seat Jergen takes note of a seemingly endless series of things about the desert that disturb him.

Three ungainly vultures describe a narrowing gyre in the dry air above the golf course at the Borrego Springs Resort, perhaps eyeing the pathetic cadaver of an early golfer who has dropped dead of heat stroke on the third green.

“Who would want to play golf in a desert?” Jergen wonders.

“Lots of people,” Dubose says. “It’s pleasant to play in such low humidity.”

“Well, you’re never going to find me whacking a golf ball around in hundred-ten-degree heat.”

“I would never look for you there, my friend. I would assume your leisure time is full up with polo, croquet, and fox hunts.”

Another dig at Jergen’s Boston Brahmin roots. The remark has no effect. By now he’s immune to such ridicule.

“Anyway,” Dubose continues, “it doesn’t get a hundred ten for at least another month. Predicted high for today is ninety-two.”

Jergen says, “Positively frigid.”

Ahead, another denizen of the desert is crossing the highway: a six-foot rattlesnake. In awareness of the VelociRaptor, the serpent raises the first three feet of its length off the pavement and turns its head toward them with eerie fluidity.

Dubose purposefully aims for the viper. The truck hits it at fifty miles an hour, and for a minute or so, the entangled creature slaps noisily against the undercarriage, like a length of cable snared around an axle.

When quiet returns, Jergen says, “What if you didn’t kill it? If we get out and it’s alive under there somewhere, it’s going to be pissed. They aren’t that easy to kill.”

“My friend, I think you’re confusing rattlesnakes with the hard-boiled hard-bitten intractable Boston debutantes you remember from your youth.”

Jergen is spared the need to engage in witless tit for tat when Dubose’s smartphone rings. It’s on the seat, between his thighs, and the pride of West Virginia rubs it against his crotch, as though for luck, before taking the call.

Tarantulas, vultures, intolerable heat, rattlesnakes, and now the most disturbing thing yet: a thirty-year-old rust-bucket Dodge pickup broken down at the side of the road and, standing next to it, one of those lifelong desert dwellers, a sunbaked sun-withered old woman in red athletic shoes and cargo-pocket khakis and tan-linen shirt and straw hat, with snow-white tangles of hair and a wrinkled face reminiscent of the pinched countenance of a desert tortoise. She vigorously waves a handkerchief to signal a need for assistance. After at least eight decades in the Anza-Borrego, she’s most likely a half-crazed package of bad attitude, stubbornness, and crackpot opinions that she’ll insist on sharing ad nauseam.

In such circumstances, not reliably but occasionally, Radley Dubose

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