Dean Koontz - Velocity

Also by Dean Koontz from Headline

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of his Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Sole Survivor

Intensity

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Mr Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Ticktock

Strange Highways

Demon Seed

Icebound

Winter Moon

The Funhouse

The Face of Fear

The Mask

Shadowfires

The Eyes of Darkness

The Servants of Twilight

The Door to December

The Key to Midnight

The House of Thunder

Phantoms

Whispers

Shattered

Chase

Twilight Eyes

The Voice of the Night

Strangers

Darkness Comes

The Vision

Night Chills

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VELOCITY

Dean Koontz

headline

Copyright © 2005 Dean Koontz

The right of Dean Koontz to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, without the prior written

permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

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Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 553-80415-X

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Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent

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— Night Flight , Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life has no meaning except in terms

of responsibility.

— Faith and History , Reinhold Niebuhr

Now take my hand and hold it tight.

I will not fail you here tonight,

For failing you, I fail myself

And place my soul upon a shelf

In Hell's library without light.

I will not fail you here tonight.

— The Book of Counted Sorrows

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VELOCITY

Dean Koontz, © 2005

This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio,

Vito and Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra.

I’ll never figure out why Gerda said yes to me.

But now your family has a crazy wing.

A man can be destroyed but not

defeated.

—Ernest Hemingway,

The Old Man and the Sea

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour

Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,

But all dash to and fro in motorcars,

Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

—T.S. Eliot,

Choruses from “The Rock”

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PART 1

THE CHOICE IS YOURS

Chapter 1

With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.

Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fallen off the roof of his two-story house, onto that cheerful-looking figure. The gnome was made of concrete. Henry wasn’t.

A broken neck, a cracked skull: Henry perished on impact.

This death-by-gnome had occurred four years previously. Ned Pearsall still toasted Henry’s passing at least once a week.

Now, from a stool near the curve of the polished mahogany bar, an out-oftowner, the only other customer, expressed curiosity at the enduring nature of Ned’s animosity.

“How bad a neighbor could the poor guy have been that you’re still so juiced about him?”

Ordinarily, Ned might have ignored the question. He had even less use for tourists than he did for pretzels.

The tavern offered free bowls of pretzels because they were cheap. Ned preferred to sustain his thirst with well-salted peanuts.

To keep Ned tipping, Billy Wiles, tending bar, occasionally gave him a bag of Planters.

Most of the time Ned had to pay for his nuts. This rankled him either because he could not grasp the economic realities of tavern operation or because he enjoyed being rankled, probably the latter.

Although he had a head reminiscent of a squash ball and the heavy rounded shoulders of a sumo wrestler, Ned was an athletic man only if you

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thought barroom jabber and grudge-holding qualified as sports. In those events, he was an Olympian.

Regarding the late Henry Friddle, Ned could be as talkative with outsiders as with lifelong residents of Vineyard Hills. When, as now, the only other customer was a stranger, Ned found silence even less congenial than conversation with a “foreign devil.”

Billy himself had never been much of a talker, never one of those barkeeps who considered the bar a stage. He was a listener.

To the out-of-towner, Ned declared, “Henry Friddle was a pig.”

The stranger had hair as black as coal dust with traces of ash at the temples, gray eyes bright with dry amusement, and a softly resonant voice.

“That’s a strong word—pig.”

“You know what the pervert was doing on his roof? He was trying to piss on my dining-room windows.”

Wiping the bar, Billy Wiles didn’t even glance at the tourist. He’d heard this story so often that he knew all the reactions to it.

“Friddle, the pig, figured the altitude would give his stream more distance,” Ned explained.

The stranger said, “What was he—an aeronautical engineer?”

“He was a college professor. He taught contemporary literature.”

“Maybe reading that stuff drove him to suicide,” the tourist said, which made him more interesting than Billy had first thought.

“No, no,” Ned said impatiently. “The fall was accidental.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Why would you think he was drunk?” Ned wondered.

The stranger shrugged. “He climbed on a roof to urinate on your windows.”

“He was a sick man,” Ned explained, plinking one finger against his empty glass to indicate the desire for another round.

Drawing Budweiser from the tap, Billy said, “Henry Friddle was consumed by vengeance.”

After silent communion with his brew, the tourist asked Ned Pearsall,

“Vengeance? So you urinated on Friddle’s windows first?”

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“It wasn’t the same thing at all,” Ned warned in a rough tone that advised the outsider to avoid being judgmental.

“Ned didn’t do it from his roof,” Billy said.

“That’s right. I walked up to his house, like a man, stood on his lawn, and aimed at his dining-room windows.”

“Henry and his wife were having dinner at the time,” Billy said. Before the tourist might express revulsion at the timing of this assault, Ned said, “They were eating quail, for God’s sake.”

“You showered their windows because they were eating quail?”

Ned sputtered with exasperation. “No, of course not. Do I look insane to you?” He rolled his eyes at Billy.

Billy raised his eyebrows as though to say What do you expect of a tourist?