Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

“Did you kill Mrs. Moran?”

“No, no. Reverend Moran killed her.”

“Then you have killed no one here?”

“No one,” I confirmed.

“But aboard the tugboat,” he said.

“I crawled so he could walk. He walked so you could fly.”

He frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. I just read it off the refrigerator.”

He licked his black and crumbling teeth, wincing as he did so.

“Harry-is your name in fact Harry?”

“Well, it’s not Todd.”

“Do you know why I haven’t killed you yet, Harry?”

“I’ve given you no reason to?” I said hopefully.

“For one thing, my brother and I have a responsibility here.”

“The resemblance is remarkable. Are you identical twins?”

“In this current operation, we represent the nation that produced the bombs.”

“You will absolutely be able to sell film rights.”

“To save our own skins, we will have to give them a perfect story believable in every detail.”

“Oh. Every detail. Well. Talk about a tall order.”

“If you cooperate fully with those details, I don’t have to kill you. But there’s another thing.”

“There’s always another thing.”

He favored me with a sly, calculating look. You might think that was the only look he had, but in fact I had seen one other.

“I was listening outside the study door long before you saw me,” he said.

“Your employers get their money’s worth.”

“I heard something that intrigued me. The pills, Harry.”

“Oh, my.”

“I am always looking for a new experience.”

“Not me. I’ve had too many just tonight.”

I half expected a coyote with a gun to appear behind the redhead and shoot him dead. Then we’d see how long I could keep myself alive with conversation.

“My brother won’t touch drugs,” he said.

“There’s got to be one in every family.”

“For a while I had a minor problem with methamphetamine.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I’m cured now.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I do some heroin, but I don’t overdo it.”

“That’s the key. Moderation.”

He leaned toward me over the dinette table. I waited for his breath to peel up the Formica.

He whispered, “Is it true? Pills that, as Shackett said, facilitate psychic powers?”

“It’s a secret government project.”

“Isn’t America amazing?”

“I’ve got a bottle in my car. They’re disguised as aspirin.”

“You know another reason I haven’t killed you yet, Harry?”

“I am clueless.”

“I never caught you once looking at my teeth.”

“Your teeth? What about your teeth?”

He grinned broadly at me.

“So what?” I said. “Some people don’t even have teeth.”

“You’re a very considerate guy, you know that?”

I shrugged.

“No, Harry, you are. People can be cruel.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve had my own experiences.”

“You? You’re a pretty good-lookin’ guy.”

“Well, I compete okay,” I said. “But I don’t mean me. I have a brother, too. Maybe you heard me telling Shackett about him.”

“No, I must’ve come in after that.”

“My brother, he’s paraplegic.”

“Oh, man, that’s a tough one.”

“And blind in one eye.”

“See, that’s where you learned compassion.”

“It’s learning the hard way.”

“Know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna have all my teeth pulled, replace ’em with implants.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s for Freddie.”

“Love makes the world go ’round. But still…ouch.”

“Oh, they put you in twilight sleep. It’s painless.”

I said, “For your sake, I hope that’s true.”

“If the doctor’s lyin’, I’ll kill him after.”

He laughed, and I laughed, and with Mrs. Moran’s pistol, I shot him under the table.

Reflexively, the redhead squeezed off a round that whistled past my head, and I brought Mrs. Moran’s gun above the table and shot him twice.

He almost rocked his chair over backward, but then he dropped forward on the table, as dead as Lincoln but not as great a man, and his gun fell out of his hand.

For a while I sat there shaking. I could not get up. I was so cold that my breath should have been pluming from me in a frost.

When the redhead had shot the chief, I had stumbled backward and had managed to fall facedown atop the minister’s dead wife.

Reverend Moran had been correct: His wife had been carrying a pistol in a holster under her blazer.

Finally I got up from the kitchen table. I went to the sink and put the pistol on the cutting board.

I turned on the hot water and splashed my face. I couldn’t get warm. I was freezing.

After a while, I realized that I was washing my hands. Evidently, I had washed them several times. The water was so hot that my hands were bright red.

ALTHOUGH I DID NOT WANT TO TOUCH MELANIE Moran’s pistol again, I could hear Fate shouting at me to learn, for heaven’s sake, from experience. The current lesson, which I had absorbed well, was never to visit a clergyman’s house without a firearm.

In the living room, which presently contained no dead bodies, I used Reverend Moran’s telephone to call the Homeland Security field-office number in Santa Cruz that the operator had provided to me earlier at the convenience-store pay phone.

My call was handed off to a bored junior agent who stopped yawning when I told him that I was the guy who had beached the tugboat carrying four thermonuclear weapons in the cove at Hecate’s Canyon. They had recently heard about that, and they had agents on the way from Los Angeles; and he hoped that I had no intention of talking to the news media.

I assured him I would not, that in fact I didn’t even want to talk to him, that all I had done lately was talk, talk, talk, and I was talked out. I told him the triggers for four bombs would be in a leather satchel in the Salvation Army used-clothing collection bin at the corner of Memorial Park Avenue and Highcliff Drive.

To spare Homeland Security confusion, I noted that no Memorial Park existed anywhere along Memorial Park Avenue or at either end, and I cautioned him not to expect to find Highcliff Drive along any of the town’s bluffs.

“I told the FBI about the tugboat, and I’m telling you about the triggers,” I said, “because I don’t fully trust all this with one agency. And you should not trust everyone in the Magic Beach Police Department.”

After I hung up, I went to the front door and looked through one of the flanking sidelights at the porch. I saw no coyotes, so I left the house.

Behind me, the phone began to ring. I knew it would be the young agent from Homeland Security or a telemarketing firm. I had nothing to say to either.

By the time I reached the porch steps, the pack materialized before me, as though the fog were not a weather condition but instead a doorway through which they could step in an instant off the dry inland hills fifty miles distant into this coastal night. Legions of radiant yellow eyes receded into the murk.

Trying to recall the effective words that Annamaria had used on the greenbelt along Hecate’s Canyon, I said, “You do not belong here.”

As I descended the steps, the coyotes failed to retreat.

“The rest of the world is yours…but not this place at this moment.”

As I descended the final step and arrived on the walkway, the coyotes swarmed around me, some growling low in their throats, others mewling with an eager hunger.

They smelled of musk and meadows, and their breath of blood.