Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

She put down her pen, for she would be making no notes. All she wanted to do was get away from Louise, off the playground, back into the real world-even though the real world had always struck her as just slightly less screwy than this encounter. But the least she owed Tom Corvey was sixty to ninety minutes of taped interview, which would provide another reporter with enough material to write the piece.

"Louise," she said, "in light of what you've told me, I think you're the most natural person I've ever met.”

Louise didn't get it. Perceiving a compliment instead of a slight, she beamed at Holly.

"Trees are sisters to us," Louise said, eager to reveal another facet of her philosophy, evidently having forgotten that human beings were lice, not trees. "Would you cut off the limbs of your sister, cruelly section her flesh, and build your house with pieces of her corpse?" "No, I wouldn't," Holly said sincerely. "Besides, the city probably wouldn't approve a building permit for such an unconventional structure.”

Holly was safe: Louise had no sense of humor-therefore, no capacity to be offended by the wisecrack.

While the woman prattled on, Holly leaned into the picnic table, feigning interest, and did a fast-backward scan of her entire adult life. She decided that she had spent all of that precious time in the company of idiots, fools, and crooks, listening to their harebrained or sociopathic plans and dreams, searching fruitlessly for nuggets of wisdom and interest in their boobish or psychotic stories.

Increasingly miserable, she began to brood about her personal life. She had made no effort to develop close women friends in Portland, perhaps because in her heart she felt that Portland was only one more stop on her peripatetic journalistic journey. Her experiences with men were, if anything, even more disheartening than her professional experiences with interviewees of both sexes. Though she still hoped to meet the right man, get married, have children, and enjoy a fulfilling domestic life, she wondered if anyone nice, sane, intelligent, and genuinely interesting would ever enter her life.

Probably not.

And if someone like that miraculously crossed her path one day, his pleasant demeanor would no doubt prove to be a mask, and under the mask would be a leering serial killer with a chainsaw fetish.

Outside the terminal at Portland International Airport, Jim Ironheart got into a taxi operated by something called the New Rose City Cab Company, which sounded like a corporate stepchild of the long-forgotten hippie era, born in the age of love beads and flower power. But the cabbie Frazier Tooley, according to his displayed license-explained that Portland was called the City of Roses, which bloomed there in multitudes and were meant to be symbols of renewal and growth. "The same way," he raid, "that street beggars are symbols of decay and collapse in New York," displaying a curiously charming smugness that Jim sensed was shared by many Portlanders.

Tooley, who looked like an Italian operatic tenor cast from the same mold as Luciano Pavarotti, was not sure he had understood Jim's instructions. "You just want me to drive around for a while?" "Yeah. I'd like to see some of the city before I check into the hotel.

I've never been here before.”

The truth was, he didn't know at which hotel he should stay or whether he would be required to do the job soon, tonight, or maybe tomorrow. He hoped that he would learn what was expected of him if he just tried to relax and waited for enlightenment.

Tooley was happy to oblige-not with enlightenment but with a tour of Portland-because a large fare would tick up on the meter, but also because he clearly enjoyed showing off his city. In fact, it was exceptionally attractive. Historic brick structures and nineteenth-century cast-iron-front buildings were carefully preserved among modern glass high rises. Parks full of fountains and trees were so numerous that it sometimes seemed the city was in a forest, and roses were everywhere, not as many blooms as in the summer but radiantly colorful.

After less than half an hour, Jim suddenly was overcome by the feeling that time was running out. He sat forward on the rear seat and heard himself say: "Do you know the McAlbery School?" "Sure," Tooley said.

"What is it?" "The way you asked, I thought you knew. Private elementary school over on the west side.”

Jim's heart was beating hard and fast. "Take me there.”

Frowning at him in the rearview mirror, Tooley said, "Something wrong?" "I have to be there.”

Tooley braked at a red traffic light. He looked over his shoulder "What's wrong?" "I just have to be there," Jim said sharply, frustratingly.

"Sure, no sweat.”

Fear had rippled through Jim ever since he had spoken the words "life line" to the woman in the supermarket more than four hours ago. those ripples swelled into dark waves that carried him toward McAlbery School.

With an overwhelming sense of urgency that he could not explain he said, "I have to be there in fifteen minutes!" "Why didn't you mention it earlier?" He wanted to say, I didn't know earlier. Instead he said, "Can you me there in time?" "It'll be tight.”

"I'll pay triple the meter.”

"Triple?" "If you make it in time," he said, withdrawing his wallet from his pocket. He extracted a hundred-dollar bill and thrust it at Tooley. " this in advance.”

"It's that important?" "It's life and death.”

Tooley gave him a look that said: What-are you nuts? "The light just changed," Jim told him. "Let's move!" Although Tooley's skeptical frown deepened, he faced front again, took a left turn at the intersection, and tramped on the accelerator.

Jim kept glancing at his watch all the way, and they arrived at the school with only three minutes to spare. He tossed another bill at Tooley paying even more than three times the meter, pulled open the door, scrambled out with his suitcase.

Tooley leaned through his open window. "You want me to wait?" Slamming the door, Jim said, "No. No, thanks. You can go.”

He turned away and heard the taxi drive off as he anxiously studied the front of McAlbery School. The building was actually a rambling colonial house with a deep front porch, onto which had been added two three-story wings to provide more classrooms. It was shaded by Douglas and huge old sycamores. With its lawn and playground, it occupied the entire length of that short block.

In the house part of the structure directly in front of him, kids were coming out of the double doors, onto the porch, and down the steps.

Laughing and chattering, carrying books and large drawing tablets and bright lunchboxes decorated with cartoon characters, they approached Jim along the school walk, passed through the open gate in the spearpoint iron fence, and turned either uphill or down, moving away from him in both directions.

Two minutes left. He didn't have to look at his watch. His heart was pounding two beats for every second, and he knew the time as surely as if he had been a clock.

Sunshine, filtered through the interstices of the arching trees, fell in delicate patterns across the scene and the people in it, as if everything had been draped over with an enormous piece of gossamer lace work stitched from golden thread. That netlike ornamental fabric of light seemed to shimmer in time to the rising and falling music of the children's shouts and laughter, and the moment should have been peaceful, idyllic.

But Death was coming.

Suddenly he knew that Death was coming for one of the children, not for any of the three teachers standing on the porch, just for one child. Not a big catastrophe, not an explosion or fire or a falling airplane that would wipe out a dozen of them. Just one, a small tragedy. But which one? Jim refocused his attention from the scene to the players in it, studying the children as they approached him, seeking the mark of imminent death on one of their fresh young faces. But they all looked as if they would live forever.