Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

He sat down.

I lowered the volume.

"What do you want?" he asked. I had to admit that he was cool about it. He didn't even check out his coat to see how close the round had actually been.

I already had my angle. "You're going to need help. I know this urban dump. You don't."

"I have my own devices," he said.

"Devices? You're not Sherlock Holmes in Victorian England, buster. This is America in the nineties, the big city — they eat bears like you for breakfast."

He looked worried. "I'm not particularly familiar with this reality—"

"So you need me," I said, keeping the Colt aimed in his general direction.

"Go on," he said gruffly. If he could have gotten to me, I'm sure he would have shown me how fast those blocky fists could move.

"It just so happens that I'm a private investigator. I never have much liked the badge-carrying kind of police — like you. But I'm never against working with them if there's a profit in it."

He seemed about to reject the proposal, then paused to give it some thought. "How much?"

"Let's say two thousand for the whole caper."

"Two thousand dollars."

"Or two pair of Spielberg gravity boots, if you've got 'em."

He shook his head. "Can't introduce revolutionary technology across the probability lines. Bad things happen."

"Like what?"

"Little girls spontaneously combusting in New Jersey."

"Don't play me for a fool."

"I'm serious." He looked serious, all right-bearishly dour, bearishly grim. "The effects are unpredictable and often weird. The universe is a mysterious place, you know."

"I hadn't noticed. So do we have a deal for two thousand bucks?"

"You use the gun well," he said. "Okay. Agreed."

He had accepted the figure too smoothly. "Better make that three thousand," I said.

He grinned. "Agreed."

I realized that money meant nothing to him — not the money of this probability line. I could have asked for anything. But I could not squeeze more out of him. It would be a matter of principle now.

"In advance," I said.

"You have any money on you?" he asked. "I'll need it to see what sort of bills you have."

I took two hundred out of my wallet and flopped it on the coffee table in front of him.

He lined up the fifties and twenties on the coffee table, then produced what appeared to be a thin camera from his overcoat. He photographed the bills, and a moment later duplicates slid out of the developing slit in the device's side. He handed them across and waited for my reaction.

They were perfect bills.

"But they're counterfeit," I complained.

"True. But no one will ever catch them. Counterfeiters get caught because they make a couple of thousand bills with the same serial numbers. You only have two bills of each. If you have more cash around, I'll copy that."

I dug out my cash reserves, which were hidden in a lockbox in the false bottom of the kitchen cabinet. I had my three thousand within a few minutes. When I had put everything back under the kitchen cabinet, with the original two hundred in my pocket, I said, "Now let's find Stone."

BY TWILIGHT, WHEN SNOW BEGAN TO FALL AND THE TRAIL STARTED TO get hot, we were in an alley two miles from my apartment.

Bruno checked the silver wafer that had been his ID badge but that obviously served other purposes. He grunted approval at the shimmering orange color. It measured, he said, the residual time energy that Stone radiated, and it changed colors the closer we got to the quarry.

"Neat gadget," I said.

"Spielberg invented it."

Yellow when we had left the apartment, the disc was now turning a steadily deeper shade of orange.

"Getting closer," Bruno said. He examined the rim, where the color changes began, and snorted his satisfaction. "Let's try this alley."

"Not the best part of town."

"Dangerous."

"Probably not for a seven-foot bear with futuristic weapons."

"Good." Hunching to minimize his height, huddling in the big coat and enormous hat, striving to pass for a big bearded human being, he put his head down and plodded forward. I followed him, bent against the brisk wind and the driving snow.

The alley led into a street lined with auto yards, industrial-equipment companies, warehouses, and a few other businesses that didn't look so obviously like mafia front operations. One of the warehouses was an abandoned heap of cinder block and corrugated aluminum; its two windows, high above the street, were shattered.

Bruno checked his disc and looked at the warehouse. "There," he said. The wafer was glowing soft red.

We crossed the street, leaving black tracks in the undisturbed skiff of white. There were two ground-floor entrances: one a man-size door, the other a roll-up large enough to admit trucks. Both were firmly locked.

"I could blast the sucker open," I said, indicating the lock on the smaller door.

"He's upstairs anyway," Bruno said, checking the wafer again. "Let's try the second-story door."

We climbed the fire escape, gripping the icy iron railing because the stairs were treacherous. The door at the top had been forced open and was bowed outward on flimsy hinges. We went inside and stood in the quiet darkness, listening.

Finally I switched on a flashlight when I realized that Bruno could probably see in the dark and I definitely couldn't. We were standing in a wide gallery that encircled an open well to the ground floor of the warehouse.

A hundred feet to the left, a rattling sound arose, like a sack of bones being shaken. When we tracked it down it was only a wooden ladder, still vibrating after someone had descended it.

I peered over the edge, but Stone was gone. We had not heard either of the lower doors open, so we went down after him.

Ten minutes later, we had checked out all the empty crates and broken pieces of machinery, all the blind spots in the row of empty offices along the rear wall. We hadn't found a trace of this Stone joker. The front doors were still locked from the inside.

Neither of us put away his gun. I had replaced the expended shell in the Smith & Wesson and now had a full clip.

Bruno's weapon wasn't anything like I'd seen before, but he assured me it was deadly. "It's a Disney.780 Death Hose."

"Disney?"

"Walt Disney. Best armament manufacturers in the world."

"Really?"

"You don't have them here?"

"Mine's a Smith and Wesson," I said.

"The hamburger people?"

I frowned. "What?"

"You know — the Smith and Wesson golden arches?"

I dropped the subject. There are some pretty weird alternate realities out there.

I heard faint strains of heavy-metal music that seemed to emanate from the thin air around us, but when I looked carefully along the walls, I found an old door that we had missed, painted to match the walls. I opened it cautiously and stared into black depths. Thrashing guitars, a keyboard synthesizer, drums. I went down the steps, and Bruno followed.

"Where's the music coming from?" my bruin friend asked.

I didn't like his hot breath storming down my neck, but I didn't complain. As long as he was behind me, nobody was going to sneak up on me unawares. "Looks like maybe there's a cellar in this place or in some connecting building where they're playing."

"Who?"

"The band."

"What band?"

"How should I know what band?"

He said, "I like bands."

"Good for you."

"I like to dance," said the bear.

"In the circus?" I asked.

"Where?"

Then I realized that maybe I was on the verge of insulting him. After all, he was an intelligent mutant, a probability cop, not one of our bears. He was no more likely to have performed a dance routine in a circus than he was to have worn a tutu and ridden a unicycle.