Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

“Relentless in his relaxed way. I think it would have been better if Henry shot me down.”

“But you were innocent.”

“Yes, but sometimes the innocent die, and audiences occasionally like a tragedy.” He frowned. “Son, you came here with one suitcase, and you’re leaving with just the clothes on your back.”

“I prefer to travel light.”

“Just be certain to wear pants.”

“I intend to, sir.”

“Call me Hutch. Everyone does. These thrift-shop clothes of yours…do they come with an obligation?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“When one buys clothing in a thrift shop and is done with it, is one contractually obligated to pass the clothing on to someone poorer than oneself?”

“Oh, no, sir. You can just throw them in the trash.”

“That’s easy, then. I thought there might be some protocol that I would want to honor, if you had committed to it.” He pulled aside the chenille throw on his lap and prepared to get up from the chair.

I said, “One more thing, and I regret having to ask.”

He looked crestfallen. “You want to take the rest of the cookies you made today.”

“No, no. Those are yours.”

“Oh, good. Splendid. Lovely.”

“Sir, I was wondering if I could borrow one of the cars.”

“Of course. You’re a superb driver.”

“I can’t risk trying to leave town by bus or train.”

“They’ll be watching public transport.”

“Precisely. If I could drive your car to Santa Barbara, I could leave it with your nephew there, and maybe he could arrange to get it back to you.”

His brow creased with worry. “But what will you do then?”

“Make it up as I go along. It works for me.”

“Sounds grim.”

“No, sir. It’s adventurous but not grim.” I got up from the footstool. “I’d better change sweatshirts and get moving.”

Each of his long legs seemed to have two knee joints as he unfolded them and got to his feet. “I shall meet you in the kitchen with the car keys.”

“Oh,” I said, “and a flashlight? I’ll need a flashlight. That’s it. I won’t keep asking for stuff.”

“One needs a good flashlight on the lam. No problem.”

Upstairs in my room, I realized that I would also be leaving a collection of Sinatra biographies. I suspected that I would not need them anymore.

In the bathroom, I stripped to the waist, washed my upper body, face, and hands, careful not to disturb the taped wound on my side. I put on a fresh T-shirt and a sweatshirt that did not have a word on either the chest or the back.

When I went down to the kitchen, a flashlight and the keys to the Mercedes were on the kitchen island.

“Sir, I can’t take the Mercedes.”

“It is much better cover than the Explorer. They might expect a young man such as yourself, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, on the lam, to split town in an Explorer, but never in a Mercedes.”

“I’d rather have the Explorer.”

“I refuse to give you the keys to the Explorer. The Mercedes is better cover. And I am the director for once.”

“But-”

Hutch pointed to a plastic-wrapped package also on the kitchen island. The label said PORK RIND, and the plastic was still crusted with frost from the freezer.

“I want you to have that,” he said.

“Gee, sir, I do love pork rind, but I’m not going to have any cooking facilities for a while.”

“ Pork rind is merely my code, so I’ll know what’s in the package. If it said beef tongue, then it would contain entirely twenties. If it said sweetbreads, it would contain a mix of half twenties and half hundreds.”

“Money? Oh, no. No, no, no. I can’t accept that.”

“I have bank accounts, of course, but I don’t entirely trust banks, you see. When I was nine years old, a lot of banks failed.”

“I have money,” I assured him. “I’ve saved some of my pay.”

“That’s not enough to go on the lam. You need to be flush when you go on the lam, as I learned the hard way.”

“But that’s too much, way too much.”

“How would you know? Maybe pork rind is my code for a brick of one-dollar bills.”

“What is it your code for, sir?”

“None of your damn business.”

He produced a pink hostess-gift bag decorated with yellow birds flying with curls of blue ribbon in their beaks. He put the package of so-called pork rind in the bag and held it out to me by the two braided gold-cord handles.

I waved it away. “Really. Really, I can’t.”

His face darkened with disapproval, tightened with authority, thrust forward with the expectation of obedience. His voice was that of the heroic captain demanding of his men more than they think they are capable of giving. He raised his free hand in a bony fist for emphasis.

“Soldier, you are going to take this, and you are going to do the right thing with it, and I will brook no debate, accept no excuse. Is that perfectly clear?”

Annamaria said that people gave her money. I doubted that any of them had forced it upon her with an implied threat of violence.

“This is very generous, sir.”

He broke character and grinned. “Take, take. Don’t be silly. It’s Nibbles’s money, anyway.”

“Nibbles the swashbuckling rabbit.”

“He just keeps earning royalties that I don’t know what to do with.”

Accepting the hostess-gift bag, I said, “If I ever have kids, sir, each of them will have his own full set of Nibbles’s adventures.”

As I put the flashlight in the bag with the frozen money and picked up the keys to the Mercedes, Hutch said, “Through dinner and everything this evening, how many times do you think I sanitized my hands with Purell?”

“Well, you had the chicken enchiladas, and though you like the taste of chicken, it makes you nervous because of all the salmonella and E. coli stories in the press. So I’d say…twenty times?”

“Guess again.”

“Thirty?”

With an unmistakable note of pride, he said, “Five.”

“Only five?”

“Five,” he repeated.

“That’s really something, sir.”

“Isn’t it? Having touched money, even wrapped in plastic and frozen, I’m half desperate to Purell my hands right now, but I’m not going to.”

“You’re not going cold turkey, are you?”

“No, no. I’ll wean myself from it as best I can. I had a brother who was a heroin addict and went cold turkey. It was ghastly.”

“Yes, sir. The young Anthony Perkins.”

“The experience so shattered him that later he wore his mother’s clothes and stabbed people. I shall minimize my use of Purell but not risk such a fate as his.”

He smiled and so did I.

“Take care of yourself, son.”

“I will, sir. You, too.”

I started toward the door.

“Odd?”

I turned.

He said, “We had some fun this past month, didn’t we?”

“Yes, sir. We sure did.”

“Good. Very good. That’s how I feel. I hoped you did.”

“The world is often dark these days, sir. But not in here, in this house. It was a pleasure to work for you. To know you.”

As I opened the door, he said, “Son?”

Again I looked back.

He said, “Maybe…a hug?”

I put down the hostess-gift bag and returned to him. His height and the strong presence that he projected in life, as he had on the screen, disguised his frailty.

When he could, he said, “You know that son I lost in the war?”

“You mean Jamie, the son you never had.”

“That’s the one. Well, if I had married someone named Corrina and if we’d had a son named Jamie and if I had lost him in the war, I now kind of know how that would have felt.”