Dean Koontz: Breathless

Sixty years old, with a round brown grandfatherly face that reminded people of a beloved comedian and sitcom star, with wiry white hair, twenty pounds overweight, Lamar Woolsey seldom inspired suspicion. The pit crew glanced at him and showed no interest.

The black dealer was outgoing-“Have a seat, brother”-too young to have grown bored with table talk. Of the three other players, two were loquacious, one sullen.

Lamar identified himself as Benny Mandelbrot, and he chatted up everyone, patiently waiting to learn why he was there.

Decades earlier, when the effectiveness of card counting became widely known, most casinos went to six-deck shoes. Keeping a running mental inventory of a 312-card shoe to calculate the odds in your favor hand by hand was geometrically more difficult than doing the same with a single deck, foiling both amateurs and most hustlers.

When rich veins appeared in a six-deck game, however, they could run longer and be more rewarding than in single-deck play. In three hours, his six-hundred stake had grown to eleven thousand.

The pit crew had become interested in him but not suspicious. They hoped to keep him at the table until he gave back his winnings.

He allayed suspicion with occasional bad plays. When the dealer showed a king and the deck was full of face cards, Lamar split a pair of sevens “on a hunch,” and lost. His highly calculated erratic play made him appear to be an ordinary mark on a lucky streak.

Lamar still didn’t know why he was there until, at a quarter to six, the cocktail waitress-her name tag identified her as Teresa-asked if he wanted another diet soda.

She was an attractive brunette with a spray of freckles and a forced smile. When he glanced at her to confirm he wanted another soft drink, unshed tears stood in her eyes, barely repressed.

The current dealer, a redhead named Arlene, finished shuffling the six decks. Lamar had been tipping her well, so they had rapport.

As Arlene loaded the shoe, Lamar looked after Teresa, then asked the dealer, “What’s her story?”

“Terri? Husband was a Marine. Died in the war last year. One kid. Marty, eight years old, he’s a sweetie. She loves him to death. He has Down syndrome. She’s tough, but tough isn’t always enough.”

Lamar played three hands and won two before the cocktail waitress returned with his soft drink.

Of his stake on the table, he gave seven hundred and change to Arlene. He scooped up the remaining eleven thousand in chips and poured them onto Teresa’s drink tray.

Startled, the waitress said, “Hey, no, I can’t take this.”

“I don’t want anything for it,” Lamar assured her, “and there’s nothing I need it for.”

Leaving her astonished and stammering, he followed the bank of blackjack tables toward the street entrance to the casino.

So meticulously barbered, manicured, and well-dressed that he might have been a mannequin come to life, the pit boss caught up with Lamar and stepped between two game tables. “Mr. M., wait,” he said, referring to the Mandelbrot name that Lamar had used. “Mr. M., are you sure you want to do that?”

“Yes. Quite sure. Is there a problem?”

“You were only drinking diet soda. I don’t see a problem.” Still half suspicious of some scheme, he added, “But it’s unusual.”

“What if I were to tell you that I’ve got an incurable cancer, four months to live, no need for money and no one to leave it to?”

In the fantasy world of the casino, death was the truth most aggressively repressed. No clock could be found in any casino, as if games of chance were played outside of time. Gamblers now and then petitioned God for help, but they never talked to Death.

The pit boss was disconcerted, as if the C word might break the spell that had been cast upon everyone within these walls, as if the mere mention of metastasis would transform the swank and glitter into mud and ashes. He straightened the knot in his tie, which was not crooked. “That’s tough. Take care of yourself. Good luck, Mr. M.”

Lamar Woolsey did not have cancer. He had not claimed to have it. But the what-if question served as a sufficient reminder of reality to scare off the pit boss.

Outside, in the sharply angled gold-and-orange sunlight, the world seemed about to burst into flames. Acres of neon signs welcomed the oncoming evening.

Many people in the crowds of tourists no longer wore sunglasses, but their eyes couldn’t be read behind cataracts of brilliant colors.

With darkness at the windows and with the great mass of Merlin slumped at his feet, Grady Adams ate dinner at the kitchen table. The dog hoped for a piece or two of chicken but did not beg, feigning disinterest to preserve his dignity.

The CD player on a nearby counter provided music. Grady didn’t have a TV, and he didn’t want one. Although he usually preferred silence even to the most elegant noise, at times Merlin’s presence and books did not adequately fill his leisure hours.

At the moment, books were giving him little of what he sought from them, while Beethoven’s Opus 27, Number 2-the “Moonlight” Sonata-was both balm and inspiration.

Having exhausted his collection of illustrated volumes, he pored through essays about the Colorado mountains while he ate, through memoirs of lives passed in these precincts of the natural world. He skimmed pages in search of references to unknown animals, for strange tales about white-furred creatures that were playful but shy.

He suspected the books would not help him, but he searched them anyway. The encounter in the meadow had affected him powerfully for reasons he could understand but for others that he only half grasped. Something more about the creatures than their uniqueness and their mysterious nature affected him, some quality he sensed that they possessed but that remained too elusive to name.

Merlin leaped to his feet so suddenly that he knocked his head against the underside of the table. The wolfhound was at no risk of concussion. The table would collapse long before the dog did.

When Merlin padded out of the kitchen, into the hallway that led to the living room, Grady put down his fork, let his book fall shut, and sat listening for a bark. After half a minute, having heard neither a bark nor the thudding paws of the returning son of Ireland, he opened the book again.

As Grady picked up his fork, Merlin thumped along the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he stood in a posture of alarm. Easily read, his expression said, We’ve got a situation, Dad. What do I have to do-learn Morse code and beat out a message with my tail?

“All right, okay,” Grady said, rising from the dinette chair.

The dog hurried toward the front of the house once more. Grady found him in the open vestibule, off the living room, his back to the front door, facing the stairs to the second floor, ears pricked.

The rooms above were as silent as they should have been, as they always were in a house where a man lived alone with a dog that seldom left his side.

Nevertheless, Merlin abruptly galloped up the stairs two at a time. He disappeared into the second-floor hallway before his master had climbed three steps behind him.

In the upper hall, Grady switched on the ceiling light. Past a half-open door, he found the dog standing in shadows in the master bedroom. The wolfhound was at a window that faced onto the roof of the front porch, alert to something beyond the glass.

Grady left the lamps unlit. With its secondhand light, the moon painted the peeling white bark of the spreading birch that overhung the house, and silvered the autumn leaves that would be sovereign-gold in sunshine.

As Grady moved toward Merlin, before he could lean close to the window, a tom-tom and pitter-patter quickened across the porch roof. Several racing feet, by the sound of them.