Dean Koontz: Strange Highways

He put one hand on Linski's head, smoothed his hair.

Linski leaned into the comforting touch.

"Everybody's damaged," Chase said.

Linski looked up at him through tears.

"Some are just damaged too much. Far too much."

"I'm sorry," Linski said.

"It's okay."

"I'm sorry."

"Open wide for me."

Linski knew what was coming. He opened his mouth.

Ben put the muzzle between Linski's teeth and pulled the trigger. He dropped the gun and turned away from the dead man, walked into the hall, and opened the bathroom door. He put up the lid of the toilet bowl, dropped to his knees, and vomited. He remained on his knees for a long time before he could control the spasms that racked him. He flushed the toilet three times. He put the lid down and sat on it, blotting the cold sweat on his face with his gloved hands.

Having won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the most sacred and jealously guarded award his country bestowed, he had wanted nothing more than to return to the attic room in Mrs. Fielding's house and resume his penitence.

Then he met Glenda, and things changed. There was no question about living as a hermit any more, sealed off from experience. All that he wanted now was quietude, a chance for their love to develop, a life. Fauvel, the police, the press, and Richard Linski had not allowed him even that.

Chase rose and went to the sink. He rinsed his mouth out until the bad taste was gone.

He no longer had to be a hero.

He left the bathroom.

In the front room, he unwound the tape from Richard Linski's wrists and ankles. He let the body slide out of the chair and sprawl onto the floor.

When he considered the pistol, he realized that there would be three slugs missing from the clip. In the den he found a gun cabinet and drawers of ammunition. He reloaded the clip, leaving out only one round. In the kitchen, he put the gun on the floor, near the dead man's right hand.

In the living room, he searched for the two slugs that Judge had expended earlier. He found the one that had passed through his shoulder; it was embedded in the baseboard, and he dug it out without leaving a particularly noticeable mark. The other was on the floor behind the portable bar, where it had fallen after striking the bronze frame of the shattered bar mirror.

It was a quarter of twelve when he reached the Mustang and put the garbage bag and the cotton gloves into the trunk.

He drove past Linski's bungalow. The lights were on. They would burn all night.

Ben knocked twice, and Glenda let him into the motel room.

They held each other for a while.

"You're hurt." When she realized the nature of the wound, she said, "I'd better get you back to my place. You'll stay with me. I'll have to nurse you through this. We can't risk infection. Doctors have to report gunshot wounds to the police."

She drove the Mustang.

He slumped in the passenger seat. A great weariness overcame him — not merely a result of the experiences of the past couple of hours but a weariness of years.

Heroes need monsters to slay, and they can always find them — within if not without.

"You haven't asked," he said as they rolled through the night.

"I never will."

"He's dead."

She said nothing.

"I think it was the right thing."

"It was a door you had to go through, whether you wanted to or not," she said.

"Only the Karneses can connect me to him, and they're never going to talk. The cops can't nail me for it."

"Anyway," she said, "you'll make your own punishment."

A full moon rode the night sky. He stared at its cratered face, trying to read the future in the destruction of the past.

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, I WROTE SHORT STORIES ON TABLET paper, drew colorful covers, stapled the left margin of each story, put electrician's tape over the staples for the sake of neatness, and tried to peddle these "books" to relatives and neighbors. Each of my productions sold for a nickel, which was extremely competitive pricing — or would have been if any other obsessive-compulsive writers of grade-school age had been busily exercising their imaginations in my neighborhood. Other children, however, were engaged in such traditional, character-building, healthful activities as baseball, football, basketball, tearing the wings off flies, terrorizing and beating smaller kids, and experimenting with ways to make explosives out of ordinary household products such as laundry detergent, rubbing alcohol, and Spam. I sold my stories with such relentless enthusiasm that I must have been a colossal pest — like a pint-size Hare Krishna panhandler in a caffeine frenzy.

I had no special use for the pittance that I earned from this activity, no dreams of unlimited wealth. After all, I had taken in no more than two dollars before savvy relatives and neighbors conducted a secret and highly illegal meeting to agree that they wouldn't any longer permit trafficking in hand-printed fiction by eight-year-olds. This, of course, was at least restraint of trade, if not a serious abridgment of my First Amendment rights. If anyone in the United States Department of justice is interested, I think some of these co-conspirators are still around and available for prison.

Although I had no intention of either investing the nickels in a playground loan-sharking operation or squandering them on Twinkie binges, I knew instinctively that I must charge something for my stories if I wanted people to take them seriously. (If Henry Ford had launched the automotive industry by giving cars away, people would have filled them with dirt and used them for planters. Today there would still be no federal highway system, no drive-in burger joints, a gajillion fewer chase movies than Hollywood has thus far churned out, and none of those aesthetically pleasing wobbly-headed dog statues with which so many of us accessorize the ledge between the backseat and the rear window.) Nevertheless, when the local fiction-consumer cartel tried to close me down at the age of eight, I continued to produce stories and gave them away without charge.

Later, as an adult (or as close as I have gotten to being one), I began to write stories that were published by real publishers in New York City, who didn't bind them with staples and electrician's tape and who actually produced more than a single copy of each tale. They paid me more than nickels too — although, at first, not a lot more. In fact, for years, I wasn't convinced that it was possible to make a living as a writer without a second source of income. Aware that second occupations for writers need to be colorful in order to make good biographical copy, I considered bomb disposal and hijacking airliners for ransom. Fortunately, my wonderful wife's earning capacity, frugality, and awesome common sense prevented me from becoming either a resident of a federal penitentiary or a pile of unidentifiable remains.

Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels piled up, and one day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was as lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn't have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.

When word of my good fortune got around, some people — including a number of writers — said to me, "Wow, when you finish this contract, you'll never have to write again!" I expected to deliver all four novels before I turned forty-two. What was I then supposed to do? Start frequenting bars that feature dwarf-tossing contests? That is exactly the kind of aberrant and socially unacceptable activity that guys like me are liable to slide into if we don't keep busy.