Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

“You don’t ever need to be afraid, Birdie Hopkins. Not a woman like you.”

She reached out to me. I held her hand.

“Keep safe,” she said.

When she was ready to let go of my hand, I got out of the sedan and closed the door. I slid her cell phone into a pocket of my jeans, and I tucked the pistol in the waistband so that the sweatshirt would cover it.

As I walked to the corner, crossed the intersection, and headed toward the harbor, the big engine of the Cadillac idled in the night until I went too far to hear it anymore.

ALONG THE SOUTHERN HORN OF THE NARROW-MOUTHED bay, toward the seaward end, the vessels in the small commercial-fishing fleet tied up where they could come and go with the least disturbance to the bayside residents and to the noncommercial boat traffic.

Where I stood on the quay, along the crescent shore of the northern horn, I could not see those distant trawlers, seiners, and clippers through the thousand white veils of the night. From their direction, however, once every thirty seconds, came the low mournful bleat of the foghorn out on the southern arm of the harbor-entrance breakwater.

Here in the north, the marina offered protection from the storm surges that, in bad weather, muscled in through the entrance channel. Four hundred slips were occupied by a variety of pleasure craft: small electric-motor bay cruisers, sportfishers with metal lookout towers rising above their bridges, sailing yachts with canvas furled, motor yachts, and racing boats. The largest of these craft were sixty feet, and most were smaller.

As I descended a short flight of stairs from the sea wall to the wharf, I could see only a few of the closest craft through the soup. Even those appeared to be ghost vessels, moored in a dream.

Regularly spaced dock lamps receded into the mist, a necklace of radiant pearls, and under them the wet planks glistened darkly.

I remained alert for the sound of voices, for footsteps, but no one seemed to be out and about in the chilly mist.

Some of the sailing yachts were full-time residences. Their lighted portholes were as golden as scattered coins, faux doubloons that shimmered and, as I walked, paled away into the murk.

Avoiding the dock lamps was easy enough, for the feathered air constrained their reach. I made my way through shadows, my sneakers squishing so faintly on the wet planks that even I could barely hear the noise I made.

The sea beyond the bay had been flatline all day; and the currents in the harbor were so gentle that the boats wallowed only slightly in their berths. They creaked and sometimes softly groaned, but the motion was not strong enough to clink halyards against metal masts.

As I walked, I took slow deep breaths of the briny air, and relying on psychic magnetism to pull me toward the conspirators, I concentrated on the images from my dream. Red sky. Red tide. Fiery phantoms of reflected flames swarming the beach.

At the west end of the marina, on the sea wall above the wharf, stood the building housing the harbor department, which was under the authority of the city police. Here below, the last several berths were reserved for department vessels.

Three were the twenty-foot, firehouse-red harbor-patrol boats that, among other tasks, chased down those who violated the five-mile-per-hour speed limit pertaining from the main channel to shore.

Of the other three craft, only one drew my interest: a seagoing tugboat, half again as big as the sturdy tug that worked only in the bay. From it came the rhythmic laboring of a generator. Many of the portholes and the large windows of the bridge were aglow; a work lamp shone upon a small crane fixed to the long, low afterdeck; and the running lights were on, as if the boat would soon leave port.

The sudden scent of cigarette smoke warned me that someone shared the dock with me. The fog would have filtered out the smell if the smoker had been as far away as the tugboat.

I moved closer to the stone face of the quay and took shelter against a wharf shack, which had been painted red to indicate that it stored firefighting gear.

When I peered around the corner of the shack, I could see the break in the dock railing where a gangway led down to the slip in which the tug was berthed.

After I had stared for a couple of minutes, and only when the eddying fog briefly opened a clearer line of sight for me, I saw the guard move. He was hunkered down this side of the entrance to the gangway, his back against the dock railing. The lamp above him had been broken, probably a short while ago, to provide a dark place where he could not be seen as long as he remained still.

At police headquarters, when Polterfrank had done his thing, Shackett must have thought that I, Harry Lime, federal psychic agent, had tapped a power of my own to escape.

Those events had occurred within the hour, so the conspirators would be at their highest alert, searching for me all over town but expecting that I might come to them. Panic would have seized them: the fear that with one phone call I would bring a hundred FBI agents, or others, down on them before they could take delivery of the nukes and get them out of town.

Evidently, loath to forfeit their newfound wealth, they hadn’t canceled the rendezvous at which they would acquire possession of the deadly cargo. Judging by preparations at the tugboat, they intended to transship the weapons from another vessel at sea.

Now that I knew their intentions and I was on the loose, they might have decided that they dared not return to the harbor with the bombs. If they executed a contingency plan to bring the nukes ashore elsewhere along the coast, I had no chance of stopping the operation unless I stowed away with them.

To get aboard, I would have to take out the guard here on the dock, but I could see no way to do so quietly.

Besides, I had to cross a swath of open planking to reach him, and I had no doubt that he would be better armed than I was. A better marksman. A better fighter. Tougher than I was. More brutal. Probably a kung fu master. Wicked with knives and martial-arts throwing stars that would be secreted in six places on his superbly fit body. And if I was somehow able to disarm him of every murderous implement, this guy would know how to make a lethal weapon from one of his shoes, either the left or right, he wouldn’t care which.

As I worried myself toward paralysis, a man appeared on the long afterdeck of the tug. In spite of the fog, I could see him, a shadowy figure, because of the brightness of the big work lamp focused on the deck crane.

He called out to someone named Jackie, and Jackie proved to be the guard who was hunkered along the deck railing, waiting to kill me with either of his shoes. Jackie rose out of his shadowy lair and disappeared down the gangway to the slip in which the tug was berthed.

Crouched, I crossed the dock to the sentinel position that the guard had just vacated. Through a gap in the railing, I had trouble seeing Jackie on the unlighted slip below, but after a moment, he appeared as a shrouded form on a shorter gangway that led up to the low afterdeck of the tug.

He joined the other man at the deck crane, and together they attended to some final task before departure, sacrificing a kitten to Beelzebub or whatever deeply evil men did to ensure a safe sea journey.

Unlike the boat slip to which it led, the gangway was lighted, but it offered the only sensible approach to the berth below. The noise I would make by diving from here and swimming to the nearest finger of the slip would bring everyone aboard the tug to the open decks to discover if the fabled Harry Lime might be as bulletproof as he was psychic.

Both men at the crane had their backs to me.

All things in their time, and the time had come for reckless commitment.