Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

After blotting my wet feet on the small rug, I snatched a cookie from the plate that stood on the center island, and I headed for the door to the downstairs hall.

I intended to go upstairs with the stealth of a Ninja assassin, quickly shower, dress my head wound if it didn’t need stitches, and put on fresh clothes.

When I was halfway across the kitchen, the swinging door opened. Hutch switched on the overhead lights, stork-walked into the room, and said, “I just saw a tsunami many hundreds of feet high.”

“Really?” I asked. “Just now?”

“It was in a movie.”

“That’s a relief, sir.”

“Uncommonly beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Not the wave, the woman.”

“Woman, sir?”

“Téa Leoni. She was in the movie.”

He stilted to the island and took a cookie from the plate.

“Son, did you know there’s an asteroid on a collision course with the earth?”

“It’s always something,” I said.

“If a large asteroid strikes land”-he took a bite of the cookie-“millions could die.”

“Makes you wish the world was nothing but an ocean.”

“Ah, but if it lands in the ocean, you get a tsunami perhaps a thousand feet high. Millions dead that way, too.”

I said, “Rock and a hard place.”

Smiling, nodding, he said, “Absolutely wonderful.”

“Millions dead, sir?”

“What? No, of course not. The cookie. Quite wonderful.”

“Thank you, sir.” I raised the wrong hand to my mouth and almost bit into the two wallets.

He said, “Soberingly profound.”

“It’s just a cookie, sir,” I said, and took a bite of mine.

“The possibility all of humanity could be exterminated in a single cataclysmic event.”

“That would put a lot of search-and-rescue dogs out of work.”

He lifted his chin, creased his brow, and drew his noble face into the expression of a man always focused on tomorrow. “I was a scientist once.”

“What field of science, sir?”

“Contagious disease.”

Hutch put down his half-eaten cookie, fished a bottle of Purell from a pocket, and squeezed a large dollop of the glistening gel into the cupped palm of his left hand.

“A terrible new strain of pneumonic plague would have wiped out civilization if not for me, Walter Pidgeon, and Marilyn Monroe.”

“I haven’t seen that one, sir.”

“She was marvelous as an unwitting pneumonic-plague carrier.”

His gaze refocused from the future of science and mankind to the glob of germ-killing goop on his palm.

“She certainly had the lungs for the role,” he said.

Vigorously, he rubbed his long-fingered hands together, and the sanitizing gel made squishy sounds.

“Well,” I said, “I was headed up to my room.”

“Did you have a nice walk?”

“Yes, sir. Very nice.”

“A ‘constitutional’ we used to call them.”

“That was before my time.”

“That was before everyone’s time. My God, I am old.”

“Not that old, sir.”

“Compared to a redwood tree, I suppose not.”

I hesitated to leave the kitchen, out of concern that when I started to move, he would notice that I was without shoes and pants.

“Mr. Hutchison-”

“Call me Hutch. Everyone calls me Hutch.”

“Yes, sir. If anyone comes around this evening looking for me, tell them I came back from my walk very agitated, packed my things, and split.”

The gel had evaporated; his hands were germ-free. He picked up his half-eaten cookie.

With dismay, he said, “You’re leaving, son?”

“No, sir. That’s just what you tell them.”

“Will they be officers of the law?”

“No. One might be a big guy with a chin beard.”

“Sounds like a role for George Kennedy.”

“Is he still alive, sir?”

“Why not? I am. He was wonderfully menacing in Mirage with Gregory Peck.”

“If not the chin beard, then maybe a redheaded guy who will or will not have bad teeth. Whoever-tell him I quit without notice, you’re angry with me.”

“I don’t think I could be angry with you, son.”

“Of course you can. You’re an actor.”

His eyes twinkled. He swallowed some cookie. With his teeth just shy of a clench, he said, “You ungrateful little shit.”

“That’s the spirit, sir.”

“You took five hundred in cash out of my dresser drawer, you thieving little bastard.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“I treat you like a son, I love you like a son, and now I see I’m lucky you didn’t slit my throat while I slept, you despicable little worm.”

“Don’t ham it up, sir. Keep it real.”

Hutch looked stricken. “Hammy? Was it really?”

“Maybe that’s too strong a word.”

“I haven’t been before a camera in half a century.”

“You weren’t over the top,” I assured him. “It was just too…fulsome. That’s the word.”

“Fulsome. In other words, less is more.”

“Yes, sir. You’re angry, see, but not furious. You’re a little bitter. But it’s tempered with regret.”

Brooding on my direction, he nodded slowly. “Maybe I had a son I lost in the war, and you reminded me of him.”

“All right.”

“His name was Jamie, he was full of charm, courage, wit. You seemed so like him at first, a young man who rose above the base temptations of this world…but you were just a leech.”

I frowned. “Gee, Mr. Hutchison, a leech…”

“A parasite, just looking for a score.”

“Well, okay, if that works for you.”

“Jamie lost in the war. My precious Corrina dead of cancer.” His voice grew increasingly forlorn, gradually diminishing to a whisper. “So alone for so long, and you…you saw just how to take advantage of my vulnerability. You even stole Corrina’s jewelry, which I’ve kept for thirty years.”

“Are you going to tell them all this, sir?”

“No, no. It’s just my motivation.”

He snared a plate from a cabinet and put two cookies on it.

“Jamie’s father and Corrina’s husband is not the type of old man to turn to booze in his melancholy. He turns to the cookies…which is the only sweet thing he has left from the month that you cynically exploited him.”

I winced. “I’m beginning to feel really bad about myself.”

“Do you think I should put on a cardigan? There’s something about an old man huddled in a tattered cardigan that can be just wonderfully pathetic.”

“Do you have a tattered cardigan?”

“I have a cardigan, and I could tatter it in a minute.”

I studied him as he stood there with the plate of cookies and a big grin.

“Look pathetic for me,” I said.

His grin faded. His lips trembled but then pressed together as if he struggled to contain strong emotion.

He turned his gaze down to the cookies on the plate. When he looked up again, his eyes glistened with unshed tears.

“You don’t need the cardigan,” I said.

“Truly?”

“Truly. You look pathetic enough.”

“That’s a lovely thing to say.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“I better get back to the parlor. I’ll find a deliciously sad book to read, so by the time the doorbell rings, I’ll be fully in character.”

“They might not get a lead on me. They might not come here.”

“Don’t be so negative, Odd. They’ll come. I’m sure they will. It’ll be great fun.”

He pushed through the swinging door with the vigor of a younger man. I listened to him walk down the hallway and into the parlor.

Shoeless, pantless, bloody, I scooped some cubes from the icemaker and put them in a OneZip plastic bag. I wrapped a dishtowel around the bag.

Pretending the confidence of a fully dressed man, I walked down the hallway. Passing the open doors to the parlor, I waved to Hutch when, from the solace of his armchair, moored in melancholy, he waved listlessly at me.