Dean Koontz

RICOCHET JOE

1

FLASH FORWARD

As warm as May in March, Saturday had begun on a light note, with useful work and the promise of romance, and Joe could never have imagined that in mere hours he would arrive at this darkest moment of his life. There was an old song that had been a hit more than once over the years, twice before Joe had been born. He thought of it now: “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” His eyes flooded with tears as he shot her dead.

2

AN ORDINARY JOE

Nothing remarkable happened to Joe Mandel until the winter that he was eighteen, when over the course of one day, more interesting, strange, and perilous events befell him than most people experience in a lifetime. Having floated through so many tranquil years free of adversity, he was ill prepared for his encounters with what his maternal grandmother, Dulcie Rockwell, called “Dedicated Practitioners of Evil,” or DPEs.

Neither tall nor short, Joe stood five ten in his stocking feet and just a little bit shorter when barefoot. Neither fat nor thin, he weighed a hundred sixty pounds. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Neither movie-star handsome nor hideously ugly, he had a pleasant face and a winsome smile. He always wore jeans and T-shirts, except when he wore jeans and flannel shirts.

Everybody liked Joe well enough, and nobody hated him. His mother had died of cancer so long ago that he had no memory of her. His father loved Joe to the extent that he was capable, but being a low-key individual not given to intense emotions, he expressed his love more often with pats on the head and affectionate smiles than with kisses and extravagant proclamations of devotion.

Grandma Dulcie often kissed Joe on the forehead or the cheek, and she told him she loved him “half to death,” which to him always seemed like an odd way to express love. But Grandma Dulcie was what his dad called “a character.” If flamboyance was an inheritable trait, Dulcie evidently had gotten all of it that had been allotted to three generations of the Mandel and Rockwell families.

Joe lived in Little City, which was named after its founder, Thomas Little. Little City wasn’t really a city. It was more like a big town, with twenty thousand citizens. There had been fewer than four hundred residents when Thomas Little founded the place, but he had been a man with big dreams and no regard for the truth.

Saturday, the eleventh day of March, interesting things began to happen to this ordinary Joe. During the week, he attended classes at Little Junior College, which Grandma Dulcie said was “a stupid redundant name,” where he had begun to prepare himself to be either an English teacher or an advertising copywriter, or maybe a destitute novelist. He wasn’t yet certain of his career, though he knew he didn’t want to be a dentist like his father, because looking too deeply into people’s mouths disturbed him. On weekends, Joe read novels or worked on one he was writing, but on the Saturday morning when his life changed, he was doing volunteer work in Central Park.

Joe was grateful to have grown up in a quiet, charming town like Little City. To express his gratitude, he often gave his time to help a local organization called Volunteers for a Better Future.

Grandma Dulcie said that Volunteers for a Better Future sounded like a platoon of time travelers going to the year 2100 to fight in a war against invaders from another planet. What they actually did was mostly pick up trash.

Central Park wasn’t in the center of Little City but on the west side of town, behind the public library. In Joe’s experience, his fellow citizens were largely quiet and pleasant, like the town, but a surprising number were also prodigious litterers. A team of six volunteers, each armed with a heavy-duty plastic trash bag and a stick with a nail on the end, quartered the park to rid it of candy bar wrappers and discarded paper cups and empty cigarette packs and crumpled beer cans and an infinite variety of other trash.

A new volunteer was on duty, a strikingly pretty girl named Portia. She was so nice to look at that Joe twice stabbed his left foot when he thought he was spearing a bit of litter, though neither wound was serious enough to require a tetanus shot. He had no intention of asking Portia for a date. She was so pretty, so sexy, and so elegant that she was not likely to date a guy who didn’t know if he should be an English teacher or a destitute writer.

Although he had no idea that his life was about to be turned upside down and inside out and topsy-turvy, the change happened in an instant when he picked up an empty pint bottle of rum to throw it in his trash bag. Joe was for the most part soft-spoken, though he raised his voice when he said, “Corvette!”

Ten feet to his left, Portia looked up from an empty condom packet pierced on the end of her litter stick and said, “Corvette?”

Joe could not explain why he’d spoken the word with such force, or why he had spoken it at all. Nevertheless, he might have seized the moment to open a conversation with the girl; but that was not to be just then. What was to be astonished him: he dropped the empty rum bottle in his trash bag, dropped the bag, and ran off toward the library with his litter stick raised like a warrior’s pike.

He didn’t know where he might be going, but his bewilderment did not bring him to a halt. He felt compelled to go wherever his feet took him, like a man possessed and harried hither and yon by a demonic spirit, except there was no stink of sulfur, no cursing in Latin, no sense of being occupied by anything evil or even naughty.

Hither and yon actually proved to be the street beyond the library, where he came to a halt beside a parked sports car. A red Corvette.

Joe admired Corvettes, but he didn’t want one. The car seemed too flashy for him. He drove a secondhand Honda.

That might have been the end of the weirdness, except that he felt compelled to touch the Corvette. When he put a hand to it, two words escaped him—“Bus stop!”—and he was off again.

He raced into the street, in the middle of the block. Brakes screeched and horns blared as motorists strove not to run him down. He received a few suggestions in finger language, so rude that he thought the drivers must be from out of town.

Having crossed the street, he turned east and hurried past a series of quaint shops. Little City was a tourist destination in part because of its many specialty stores and the quaint shopping they provided.

The bus stop was at the end of the block. No one sat on the bench or stood waiting.

As he had touched the Corvette, so Joe also felt compelled to put his hand on the seat of the bench, with the consequence that he spoke again without volition: “Rats!”

Although his bewilderment had not diminished, had in fact grown, Joe remained clearheaded enough to recognize a pattern to these events. He was filled with disgust at the likelihood that he would next be compelled to find and snatch up a rat.

It must be said here that during this bizarre ordeal Joe Mandel did not once question his sanity. Neither was he as frightened as it might seem he ought to have been. He felt a rightness about what he was doing, even though to startled observers it appeared wrong.

He was well aware that other pedestrians regarded him with surprise and perplexity, although no one called for police or warned him to back off as he raced here and there with his litter stick. For one thing, he was a wholesome-looking young man with a winsome smile, which was sort of frozen on his face during this adventure, and for another thing, he kept the nail pointed skyward and clearly did not threaten anyone. No doubt some people thought he was merely fulfilling a hazing obligation to a junior-college fraternity or that he was stunting for a YouTube audience.

At a small—and need it be said, quaint—shop selling glass and ceramic art, the window featured a display of hand-sculpted, fired, and hand-painted ceramic mice, not rats, of considerable cuteness, in all manner of costumes and scenes. Joe saw a man’s handprint on the window glass, and he knew that he should place his hand atop it, though the large print looked oily and unclean. On contact, he declared, “Shit!” and hurried onward.

The mice had not been rats, and they hadn’t even been flesh-and-blood mice, but Joe nevertheless dreaded that the filth he would soon be compelled to touch would prove to be the real thing.

At the corner, he pivoted ninety degrees while hardly slowing down, then ran a quarter of a block to a free community parking lot and sprinted among the vehicles until he discovered an elderly woman who had been knocked to the ground. A fierce man bent over her, struggling to wrench her purse from her hands, which he managed to do just as Joe arrived, breathless.

With his litter stick, Joe did not hesitate to prick the assailant’s hand.

The thief cried out—“Shit!”—and dropped the purse.

Although Joe Mandel possessed an admirable sense of civic duty, he fulfilled it largely through Volunteers for a Better Future, as well as by never littering, by never parking in red zones, and by paying his library fines promptly and without complaint. He had never considered becoming a vigilante in search of criminals to obstruct. Now that he found himself in exactly that situation, he didn’t much like being there.

His average height and average build and pleasant face and winsome smile did not seem adequate in a confrontation with a purse snatcher who was maybe six feet one, a hundred ninety pounds, with big hands. Under an oily mass of slicked-back hair, the criminal had a brutish face, rum on his breath, and murder in his eyes.

Where the big knife came from, Joe couldn’t say. The guy seemed to pluck it out of thin air, though it must have been in one pocket or another. After all, if he had been a good enough magician to make switchblade knives appear from nowhere, he would not have needed to knock down old ladies to get drinking money.

“You piss me off, pretty boy,” declared the purse snatcher.

Joe said, “Sorry, but I had to.”

“Know what I do to people who piss me off?”

“I can sort of imagine.”

“I cut their guts out.”

Joe seriously doubted that the creep cut out the intestines of everyone who pissed him off, because he looked like a guy who would be pissed off at someone every half hour. No one could get away with public disembowelments more than, say, two or three times.

Nevertheless, Joe broke into a sweat when the thug lurched forward with a knife that appeared to have been lovingly stropped to razor sharpness. He danced backward and poked at his adversary with the litter stick, acutely aware that he was inadequately armed.

The purse snatcher laughed and feinted left, feinted right, easing closer. But he choked on his laugh and staggered backward when another litter stick flew through the air and stuck in the hollow of his throat. He dropped his switchblade and pulled the nail-tipped spear out of himself and threw it down and ran off, gagging, spitting.

The lovely Portia stepped past Joe, kicked the switchblade into a nearby storm drain, and said to the elderly woman, “Are you all right, Mrs. Cortland?”

As the senior citizen got to her feet, she said, “Yes, dear. I think he was just a common criminal.”

“I think so, too, coming at you in public like that. But you better be careful.” Portia put one hand on Joe’s shoulder. “By the way, this is Joe Mandel. Joe, this is Ida Cortland.”

“Thank you for being so brave, young man,” Mrs. Cortland said.

He blushed. “I wasn’t, really. I just sort of like got caught up in the moment.”

To Portia, Ida Cortland said, “I’ll call in a description of that purse-grabbing bastard, so the chief can try to find him and determine if he’s as common as he seems.”

3

ICE CREAM AND PAINFUL LOSS

The city council and the many business owners of Little City, recognizing that the world was growing darker and more dysfunctional every year, had worked together to provide anxious tourists with a destination that reminded them of a much earlier era. Therefore, on the main street, under the jacaranda trees and the palm trees, along the cobblestone sidewalk, among the quaint shops and the genteel galleries and the wondrous little cafés, there was even a malt shop with a 1950s decor and waitresses wearing white uniforms and pink hats and pink shoes. To even the most critical eye, every detail of the establishment appeared historically correct—except that there were no ashtrays on the tables.

Both Joe and Portia would have chased their adventure with a more fortifying beverage if they had been of drinking age, but as they were both eighteen, they settled for a back booth in the malt shop, ordering a chocolate-ice-cream soda for him and a cherry-ice-cream soda for her.

“So nothing like that ever happened to you before?” she asked.

“Did I look like I knew what I was doing?”

“I wish I could say yes.”

The experience seemed almost like something that he had dreamed, and he was surprised that it hadn’t left him more badly shaken. In fact, a curious sense of well-being had settled over him the moment that the purse snatcher had run off, as if he’d been given antianxiety medication.

“I must have looked crazed.”

“Man, you were like some pinball ricocheting from flipper to buzzer to bell.”

Joe liked the way that Portia stirred her drink to make the ice cream melt faster, how she scooped the creamy foam off the top of the soda, how she ate it with the slightest smacking of her lips.

He said, “Why on earth did you follow me through all of that?”

“Who wants to spend Saturday stabbing litter?”

“Volunteers for a Better Future,” he said.

“I didn’t volunteer. I was dragooned.”

“Dragooned by whom?”

“Who the hell says whom anymore?”

“I might be a writer someday.”

“Oh, I hope not. You seem so nice.”

Joe watched her drawing the pink cherry-flavored slush through her straw. Her lips puckered precisely, and her cheeks dimpled with the suction, and her throat pulsed with each swallow. Joe was not mechanically inclined. Working on car engines and that kind of thing held no appeal for him. But he was riveted by the mechanical process of Portia consuming the cherry-ice-cream soda.

“What’s wrong with writers?” he asked.

“A lot of them hate the world and want to change it, build Utopia.”

“I don’t.”

“Good. Because utopias always turn out to be one version of hell or another.”

“I just want to tell good stories. Or write advertising copy.”

“I am dazzled by your commitment to literature. So what was it that happened to you out there? Are we talking psychic phenomena? Are you some kind of mutant?”

“I’m not one of the X-Men.”

“You’re no Wolverine, for sure. But you’re something.”

“No, not me.” Again his equanimity surprised him. “It was just a two-headed-calf thing.”

“Are you going to drink your ice-cream soda, or just have erotic fantasies while you watch me drink mine?”

“I could be happy either way,” he said, but he turned his attention to his soda.

Portia propped one elbow on the table, rested her chin in the palm of her hand, watched him for a moment, and said, “You do that pretty well yourself.”

He said, “Who dragooned you into volunteering?”

“Chief Montclair.”

“The police chief?”

“Well, he’s not an Indian chief. He was upset with me.”

“That’s not good.”

“Oh, he’s been upset with me at least since my first day in elementary school.”

“You got in trouble with the cops when you were just six? How?”

“I stripped off my clothes and ran naked through the school.”

Joe took a break from his ice-cream soda to consider what she had said. In his mind’s eye, she was eighteen in first grade. “Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t want to be there.”

“An extreme strategy.”

“It worked a few times. Then it didn’t. So I bit the bullet for twelve years of tedium—otherwise known as school.”

“I liked school,” he said.

“I’m not stupid, okay? I got top grades. They just make it all so boring. I have a low tolerance for boring.”

“So why did Chief Montclair make you volunteer?”

“Too many speeding tickets. Either I had to volunteer, or he’d take away my driver’s license.”

“He can’t do that. Can he do that?”

She shrugged. “He’s not just the police chief. He’s also my father, and I still live at home.”

“You’re Portia Montclair.”

“Wow, you put it together just like that.”

She returned to her cherry-ice-cream soda, and for a minute or so, they both enjoyed her enjoyment of it.

She said, “You’ll have to meet my dad. He’s a hard-nosed cop, but you’ll like him.”

“Your mom must be very pretty. I mean, well, ’cause you are.”

“I have some pictures of her. She looked way better than me.”

The wrong kind of chill passed through Joe, and he felt that he had been stupid and thoughtless. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother, too. She died of cancer when I was two.”

“Mine’s still out there somewhere, living the good life. She found a rich guy who didn’t want kids as much as she didn’t, and they went off and didn’t have any together.” Portia’s flippancy seemed calculated to deny her pain. “When I was six, she assured me I’d be better off without her, and she went down the front walk with two suitcases and got in a white Mercedes and was driven away by a man I never saw. She sure was right, ’cause when she left, and it was just Dad and me, everything was way better.”

Joe considered his words before letting loose of them. “My grandma Dulcie says we know we’re finally getting a little wisdom when we’re able to see that even loss can be beautiful if it makes us love more the things we haven’t lost.”

After a silence, she said, “What did you mean earlier when you said ‘a two-headed-calf thing’?”

“Whatever happened to me, ricocheting around like that, it won’t happen again. Strange things happen all the time, but they don’t repeat. Like, there was a rain of frogs in this town in Pennsylvania in 1948, but not since. In 1922, in Chico, California, a lot of stones fell from the sky slowly, as if gravity had little effect on them. But never again. Two-headed calves are born, but rarely.”

“I think it’ll happen again,” she said.

“Nope. It’s just a strange little story to tell the great-grandkids when I’m eighty.”

“Great-grandkids? Are you married?”

“No, of course not. I’m only in my first year of college.”

“College, huh? I’m not going to rack up humongous debt just to be twenty-two without a job instead of eighteen without a job.”

“So what’re you doing instead?”

She winked. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

The prospect of getting to know each other better pleased Joe, and he smiled even more winsomely than usual.

She said, “Okay, Ricochet Joe, take your mental hands off my imagined body until I give you permission to dream.”

“That’s not what I was thinking about.”

“Yeah, right. Don’t try to tell me you were working on the plot of your great American novel.”

4

ANOTHER TWO-HEADED CALF

When they stepped out of the malt shop, Joe was struck by the beauty of the day. Like sheep soon to be sheared, small woolly clouds grazed the sky. The jacarandas along the street were in early bloom, graced with fairy architectures of dazzling blue blossoms. Sunshine passed through the breeze-quivered branches to gild the cobblestone sidewalk with an intricate lacework of shadow and light.

The smallest details drawn by Nature’s hand had never before compelled his notice so powerfully as they did now. Although Joe was thought by everyone to be most pleasantly ordinary, and he shared that assessment of himself, he was certainly not slow witted, and he knew that the world had abruptly become more vivid for him because Portia Montclair had come into his life.

He wondered if his coming into Portia’s life had made the world more vivid for her. He decided not.

They had left their litter sticks propped against a tree, and no one had taken them to run off and do impromptu trash collection.

Outside the malt shop stood a four-foot-high duck molded from resin and painted. He had white feathers, yellow bill and feet, and he wore a gold jacket as well as a gold yachting cap on which was emblazoned the number seven. This statue might have been mystifying if the business in front of which it stood had not been named the Lucky Duck Malt Shop.

Among longtime residents of Little City, it was a tradition to pat the duck’s head for luck. When Joe did this out of habit, almost without thinking, he said, “Trash can!” Unlike before, he didn’t cry out the words, but whispered them. He sprinted south without retrieving his litter stick or asking Portia if they might get together again so that he could watch her drink an ice-cream soda.

A block later, he found himself at a street-corner trash can with a swing-top lid. When he put his fingers to the lid, which his unknown quarry must have touched when throwing something away, he heard himself whisper, “Button,” whereupon he pivoted, turned the corner, and hurried east another block, where he pressed the button on the crosswalk control.

He failed to wait for DON’T WALK to turn to WALK but murmured, “Blue door!”—and again dashed pell-mell into busy traffic, to the consternation of a new crop of motorists, who angrily serenaded him.

By now, he had gone some distance from the quaint touristy area into a semiquaint commercial neighborhood with such businesses as barrooms and designer-knockoff clothing shops and nightclubs and palm readers and shoe stores. There were districts of Little City that were not even semiquaint, of course, because quaint was expensive to build and could be tiresome in excess, though no area of Thomas Little’s namesake burg was downright blighted or sleazy.

In search of the blue door, Joe flung himself into an alleyway and sprinted past Dumpsters and came to a peacock-blue door that in spite of its cheerful color looked like trouble. He knew where he was: at the back entrance to Patsy’s Pool Hall. He preferred not to open the door, but he was no more in control of himself than was a lemming in a fever of flight, though Joe was alone, whereas lemmings threw themselves off cliffs by the hundreds.

When he seized the handle of the door, he whispered, “Lousy stinkin’ bastards!” and pulled the door open and stepped inside and stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to quiet himself.

The dimly lighted hallway smelled as if pastrami sandwiches had recently been heated in a microwave. Bathrooms and storerooms to each side. Pool hall directly ahead through another blue door. Music coming from there, voices, the clatter of billiard balls colliding.

If to any extent Joe labored under the illusion that he had been drawn there to play billiards, he was disabused of it when he opened a fire door to his immediate right and proceeded down a set of stairs to the basement. These were not even semiquaint stairs. They were neither adequately lighted nor scrupulously clean. At the bottom lay a foyer with a concrete floor and concrete walls. The foyer offered three doors, none of them blue.

Joe opened the door directly ahead of him. He entered what he realized must be the office of Patsy O’Day, because it featured a large commander-of-the-empire desk on which a triangular wood frame held a brass plaque engraved with the name PATSY O’DAY, because on the walls were large framed paintings of dogs playing pool, and because Patsy himself was handcuffed to a drainpipe in one corner.

The owner of the pool hall didn’t look good. Even on his best days, Patsy O’Day wasn’t a picture of health. He stood about five eight and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. He looked like a small sausage casing into which an excess of sausage had been stuffed. He was walking cholesterol, a heart attack in black Bally loafers and sharkskin pants and a lemon-yellow polo shirt, one double-decker cheeseburger away from the blockage of both carotid arteries. On this occasion, he looked worse than usual because he had one black eye and was bleeding from his nose.

Just as Joe came through the door, O’Day said with some fear and not a little bitterness, “You lousy stinkin’ bastards!”

He directed this condemnation at two men who looked as bad as O’Day, but bad in a different way from him. One of them was a tall, slab-faced, Karloffian figure with a beetling forehead and dead eyes and a thick white scar from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.

The other was whippet-thin, with a long, pointed face and a mouth like a slash and crooked, yellow teeth that he bared in a sneer when he saw Joe; he issued a thin hiss like a ferret announcing to a mouse that it would be dinner.

Only at that moment did Joe realize he lacked even a litter stick with which to defend himself.

The men who had been beating Patsy O’Day turned their attention to the intruder. The big one with the dead eyes cracked open a wide mouth in what might have been a smile. Unlike his associate, he had great teeth—perfectly straight, as shiny white as toilet porcelain.

“You want some trouble?” the thin man asked Joe. “You come in here lookin’ for some?”

“No, thank you,” Joe said.

“Look what we have here, Hocker. This young man wants trouble.”

“We got plenty left for you,” said Hocker, the one who appeared to have been stitched together from several murderers and brought to life by a lightning bolt.

When it came to crafting a witty reply or even a believable threat, Joe would have benefited from having a team of writers to call upon for inspiration. In the urgency of his situation, his own skills as a would-be novelist, such as they were, failed him. He said, “Better get out while you can—the police are coming.”

“You called them, did you?” the ferret asked.

“Yes. They’ll be here any second.”

“How come I don’t hear no sirens?”

“They’re coming, all right,” Joe said, and he wondered if there could be a more incompetent liar in all of Little City.

Bearing his sledgehammer brow and baring his piano-key teeth, Hocker took a step toward Joe.

Springing through the open office door, Portia Montclair said, “Heads up, Ricochet!”

She had both of the litter sticks, and she tossed one to Joe, which he almost fumbled but didn’t.

The man who was as thin as a paper cut made a vile sound, maybe a laugh, and began to draw something from under his coat.

Hocker reached out, grabbed the end of Portia’s litter stick, nail and all, tore it from her grasp, threw it across the room. To his companion, he said, “She’s nice meat, Jagget.”

“Tasty,” Jagget agreed.

Deducing that the thin man must be drawing a firearm from under his sport coat, Joe lunged forward, trying to stick the gun hand the way he’d stuck the knife hand of the purse snatcher. Jagget dodged. His big companion sidestepped and seized Joe’s stick and wrenched it out of his hand and threw it after the first.

In eighteen years of pleasant, uneventful life, Joe had never imagined himself to have the capacity to be a hero, never claimed to possess great courage. Now it seemed unfair that some supernatural force—or whatever it might be—had propelled him headlong into this mess without giving him a magic cudgel or a cloak of invisibility, or at least enough courage to stop his legs from trembling.

Better than cudgel or cloak, as it turned out, was the little canister of Sabre 5.0 high-concentrate pepper spray that Portia drew from a jacket pocket. As Joe would learn, it was the spray used by most police officers, and it was a defense that her father had required her to carry since she had been twelve. She squirted Hocker in the eyes and nose, hosed Jagget, temporarily blinding both men and making it hard for them to get their breath when they inhaled what the label of the canister described as “major capsaicinoids.”

The giant rubbed his eyes with his hands, wished he hadn’t, issued a wheezy series of curses as the burn doubled, staggered backward, collided with the desk, and fell to the floor.

Streaming tears, a long string of snot depending from his narrow nostrils, gasping for breath, Jagget proved to be such a bad sport that he blindly opened fire with the pistol he’d drawn from a shoulder holster.

Portia dropped to the floor. Joe would have dropped, too, if he hadn’t realized that Jagget was disoriented and shooting high. He crouched, went in fast, and drove the man hard against the desk. The impact rocked the shooter and ripped a scream of pain out of him, and he dropped the pistol.

Joe grabbed the gun and stepped back as Hocker started to get up. He wasn’t going to shoot the guy. He didn’t feel capable of that. Therefore, it was good that Portia booted the brute between the legs. She must have kicked with exquisite aim, because between his frantic inhalations, Hocker’s curses rose from bass to soprano.

“The key,” Patsy O’Day said. “On the desk. The handcuff key.”

Wary of the men on the floor, Joe got the key and unlocked the cuff that secured the pool-hall owner to the drainpipe.

“Better be careful with that,” O’Day said, taking the pistol from Joe. “Still five rounds in it.”

Hocker and Jagget performed a duet of misery. Joe realized how little would’ve had to go wrong for him and Portia to be lying dead on the floor.

To Patsy O’Day, Portia said, “This sucks.”

“They didn’t get anything from me.”

“But… damn.”

There appeared to be unshed tears in Portia’s eyes.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked.

“No. Yes. I’m fine.” She met his stare, and regardless of what she said, her eyes revealed her anguish. “I’m fine.”

O’Day said, “Before I call the cops, you kids better scoot.”

Portia put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ricochet. Uncle Patsy can handle it from here.”

“Uncle Patsy?”

“Her mother is my sister,” O’Day said.

“But we can’t just go,” Joe protested. “The police will need us to make a statement.”

“Not if I say I took a gun away from one of them, got the upper hand. You kids were never here.”

“But that’s not true.”

Portia tugged Joe toward the door. “The truth will get us in a world of trouble, Joe.”

“The truth frequently does,” O’Day said.

“But I always tell the truth,” Joe insisted.

Portia raised an eyebrow. “Always?”

“Nearly always.”

“You really want to try to explain your ricocheting to the police? To my father?”

Joe thought about how insane he would sound, about how her dad was likely to forbid her to associate with someone who spun such deranged stories. “I guess not. But what about Hocker and Jagget? They won’t go along with the lie.”

“Don’t you worry, kid,” said O’Day. “Who’s gonna believe scum like them?”

Reluctantly, Joe followed Portia out of the office, up the stairs, into the alley. “What was that about? Why were they beating on your uncle?”

“It’s a long story.”

As after the incident with the purse snatcher, a calm settled upon Joe. Although he found this serenity inexplicable, considering all that had just happened, he succumbed to it.

They were moving away from the building when he thought he heard a muffled gunshot. He stopped and turned. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

Another distant report.

“Your uncle might be in trouble.”

She caught him by the arm. “Not Patsy. Not now.”

“You didn’t hear that?”

“Come on, Joe.” She took his hand.

His peculiar tranquility undisturbed, he walked with her and did not even wonder where they were going.

As had happened outside the malt shop, the world revealed a greater charm and comeliness than he’d perceived before he met her, though this time it was a more solemn beauty than before. Palisades of zinc-gray storm clouds had risen in the north, and where the sky still remained clear, it was a paler shade, an off-blue like the petals of bird’s-foot violet. Although the sky had faded, the sun seemed more intense as the clouds threatened to swallow it, so that red-brick buildings became crimson and yellow-brick buildings shone like stacked bars of gold, and everywhere shadows were inked with precise edges.

Portia said, “I’m taking you home with me,” which sounded promising to Joe.

5

WHERE THE WATERS OF TIME FLOW

The house was just a house, white stucco under a red clay-tile roof, cozy and well kept, but not what would be wanted for a feature in an interior-design magazine. Yet there was something about the place that enchanted Joe, that made every ordinary thing seem to be special. He supposed the magic was only that this was where she lived, where she slept and woke and cooked and ate and shared her life with her father, and where perhaps she sometimes sat at a window, gazing out at the walkway that her mother had followed to the white Mercedes.

She brewed a pot of coffee. She put on the kitchen table a small pitcher of cream, two mugs, two spoons, two napkins, and two bottles of brandy. One bottle was full, the other empty and lacking a label.

“Do you drink at all?” she asked.

“A little.”

“You’ll need a little,” she said, but did not explain herself.

“What will your father do if he shows up?”

“Pour some coffee and spike the hell out of it.”

They sat at the table, catercorner to each other. She poured a little cream and a lot of brandy in her coffee. He poured a little brandy and a lot of cream.

For a minute or two, she stared at the empty bottle. Her silence was strange, her expression troubled.

Joe thought he should ask about the empty bottle—why it was there, why she regarded it with evident anxiety, whether it might symbolize something for her. Her silence was so profound, however, that his questions seemed inadequate to break the quiet. He feared that they would make him sound ordinary to this extraordinary girl.

“We experience time,” she said, “as flowing from the past, from the moment of the big bang, through the present to the future, but that’s not how it is at all. Do you know quantum mechanics?”

Joe only meant that she continually surprised him, but what he said sounded like the disappointment of a guy hoping for a make-out session. “The last thing I thought we’d talk about is science.”

Still gazing at the empty bottle, she said patiently, “What we’re talking about is life and death. Your life and death.”

He regarded the bottle with interest. “Tell me about time.”

“Everything in the universe was once condensed into something smaller than a pea. Which is why, thirteen billion years after the big bang, atoms at one end of the universe still have an eerie connection with atoms at the other end of the universe. Set up the same experiment in a lab in Los Angeles and one in Boston, run them simultaneously, and events in one lab instantly affect the outcome in the other lab three thousand miles away. It’s called ‘spooky effects at a distance.’”

“Time,” Joe reminded her.

“Getting to it. In some way not easily comprehended, every place in the universe is the same place, so that some physicists think what we perceive as distance is a misperception, an illusion that we require to make sense of it all.”

A thin stream of water issued from the air above the table. Winking and rippling with reflected light, but silent as time is silent, the water drizzled down into the empty brandy bottle.

The water had no apparent source, so it shouldn’t have taken Joe more than an instant to be astonished to his feet, but he gaped at the glimmering stream for three or four seconds before he pushed his chair away from the table.

Portia reached out, took his hand, and said, “Don’t be afraid. You’re only remembering what you’ve always known but forgot when you were born.”

Joe looked from the magical water to Portia. She was still a beautiful girl, but if she’d been slightly mysterious before, she was deeply so now. He didn’t fear her. But he was disturbed in mind and heart in ways that he could not have explained to her, that he could not define even to himself.

He said, “How… ?”

“How is always less important than why.”

“Then why… ?”

“Why is for later, Joe.”

Hesitantly, he drew his chair back to the table and remained seated, though it seemed to him as if the floor under him yawed ever so subtly, like a ship’s deck.

The stream continued to pour forth from midair. Two inches of water had collected in the empty bottle.

She said, “We’re as confused about time as we are about distance. We think time flows from the past through the present to the future. But time doesn’t flow. All time—past, present, future—existed in the first instant of the universe’s creation. Textbooks will tell you so. Time is not a river. It’s an invisible ocean encompassing the universe, with tides that run in all directions simultaneously.”

“My watch,” Joe said, hoping to quiet his heart and stop the floor from moving. “Time only goes forward on my watch.”

“Clocks are human inventions. We made them to measure time as we need to perceive it in order to function as we do. Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.”

“We grow old and die,” he argued.

The once-empty bottle was more than half full of the water from nowhere.

“Time is ours to use,” she said. “But we fail to understand it, and so we ride it always in one direction, straight to the grave.”

Joe reached for the full fifth of brandy to add an ounce to his coffee, but he snatched his hand back when he saw that the bottom quarter of the bottle now seemed to be filled with water on which the spirits floated. Just then, a stream of brandy, forced out of the neck of the bottle, rose slowly two feet into the air and then vanished at a spot parallel to the point at which the stream of water issued and fell into the first container.

He thought perhaps he’d had enough brandy, anyway.

“There are some scientists who believe that the universe is in fact an infinite number of parallel universes, and that perhaps we never die. If the forward motion of time is only our perception and not true, then perhaps when we appear to age and die, we actually continue in a parallel universe… and so on and on.”

Mesmerized by her lips, but this time because of the words that spilled from them, Joe had turned his eyes away from the bottles. When he looked at them again, he thrust to his feet, knocking over his mug of coffee. Thirty or more bottles stood on the table, some with labels and some without, some with golden spirits silently exiting them, some with the same elixir silently drizzling into them from thin air, others with water entering, and still others from which water exited.

“They’re only bottles, Joe. Or worlds, if you will.”

After everything that had already happened to him on this fateful Saturday, he felt foolish for being frightened or even startled. No matter how he felt, he didn’t want to look foolish in front of Portia.

He sat once more, and he saw that the coffee mug he had knocked over… had not been knocked over after all. The coffee that had slopped across the table was in the righted mug, and the table was dry once more. He checked his wristwatch, but time for him had moved forward, separate from how time dealt with the mug and its contents.

Earlier, after the encounter with the purse snatcher and after the events in the pool hall, an inexplicable calm had poured through Joe, a serene acceptance of those impossible pursuits and the danger that they entailed. Such a tranquility quieted him now. He supposed it was a gift from Portia, conveyed into him by psychic injection, although a still, small voice suggested that the soother of nerves might be someone other than her and perhaps someone less pleasing to the eye.

He saw now that brandy and water were not just entering and exiting the mouths of the bottles in vertical flows but were also transferring from one container to another in horizontal streams that pierced glass without cracking it. Each of the myriad bottles held water and brandy layered like parfaits.

“All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time.”

Joe began to discern the shape of what she meant to tell him, and though it surely would be as terrible as it would be grand, his calm did not desert him.

“Here in Little City,” she said, “lives a traveler who didn’t come from this world. Or perhaps it came from a million years in the future. Or from outside of time, from before this universe or any other was created. Either I am thought incapable of understanding the fine details—or I am thought to be safer not knowing them. Or maybe knowing them would destroy my sanity. In any case, I call this traveler Parasite, because its real name is nothing I can pronounce. This vile thing invades a human host and lives secretly among us, and by our definition, it is pure evil. It infects others, not with its substance but with a controlling poison, and those it infects eventually infect still others. It is a parasite but it’s also a puppeteer, and it pulls a million strings, ten times a million, all over the world.”

6

THE MASQUERADE

She’d said this was a matter of life and death, and the life that hung pendant over the abyss was Joe’s.

As he met Portia’s pellucid eyes and listened to her speak of evil, however, he realized that her life was at risk no less than his. He had never claimed to be a man of courage; and he made no claim to courage now. He had thought he didn’t have in him the stuff that made a hero, but in light of the danger to this girl, he hoped he might be braver than he knew.

“The purse snatcher was under its control?”

“We don’t think so. Petty crime doesn’t entertain it, and its puppets aren’t dysfunctional drunkards. The infinite varieties of violence are what it craves.”

“The two men at the pool hall.”

Her blue-gray eyes seemed grayer now than blue, and surely her role in all this haunted her. “They belonged to Parasite. The shots you heard and that I pretended not to hear—they were the shots my uncle fired to kill them.”

Although he remained in his chair, Joe reeled at this news, and again the floor beneath him seemed to roll as if the house were a ship. Acid rose in his throat, and he swallowed hard to press back the reflux.

“Infected people can never be made well,” Portia said, not with a note of defensiveness, but confidently, as if she’d seen too much to doubt the rightness of the killing. “Only death can break their bond to Parasite. In their case, death is a mercy when it comes. The parasite has evidently identified Patsy as an enemy, and he’ll have to leave town quickly and never contact us again until the day this war is over or moves on to another city.”

Joe was deeply distressed to hear this girl speak of murder, to hear her countenance it, even if this wild story were as true as it seemed to be. When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time’s ocean.

“I didn’t conjure all of that,” she said. “The seeker worked through me to instruct you. I have no power. I’m only me. The seeker has sought Parasite and others like it for maybe a thousand years, maybe forever. I can’t be sure how long the hunt has lasted, because the seeker speaks of time in ways that exceed what I described to you, in ways I can’t understand.”

This revelation seemed to be one too many: that she was host to something that pursued the parasite, that looking out at Joe through her eyes was Portia but also another presence perhaps not born on this world, perhaps not born in this universe.

His horror must have been as evident as his desire when he had watched her drinking a cherry-ice-cream soda through a straw, for she said, “No, I’m not possessed. There’s no one in here but me. The seeker doesn’t use us the way Parasite uses people. The hunter and the hunted play their game in masquerade, but they wear far different costumes.”

Into the kitchen padded a golden retriever. Although the dog came directly to Joe, he didn’t realize that it was anything more than it appeared to be until he reached down to pet it.

He was overcome with a gladness unlike anything he had ever experienced. The kitchen fell away from him and he was borne into another room, which for a moment he considered from a curious perspective. Then he found himself gazing up at the mother he had known only from photographs and a bit of video, she who had died when he was two. She smiled down at him, and in her arms he was no more than a year old, returned to a time of which he had no memory. Although he had been too young to understand her then, her words had meaning now. She said he was beautiful, her special boy. She said that she loved him and always would. She told him he would grow up to do great things. She bent her face to his and kissed him, and gladness became a joy so sharp that it cut loose all the sadnesses that had been tethered to his heart. She wore a blue ribbon in her hair. With one small hand, he seized it, and the ribbon unraveled as she raised her face from his. He was delivered out of that time, that place, and returned to the kitchen.

The dog smiled up at him.

Wound through Joe’s fingers was the length of blue ribbon.

7

HOUND OF THE HOUND

The dog lay in the corner on her bed, by all appearances a dog and nothing more, except that her head remained raised and her ears slightly lifted throughout Joe and Portia’s conversation.

Joe paced, excited and restless and ecstatic and afraid, while Portia, who had never touched her mug of spiked coffee, sipped brandy straight from a snifter as she counseled him.

“Seeker doesn’t control us like Parasite controls its puppets. She gives us the confidence to be as brave, quick, and competent as we have the potential to be. But in the end, she does not force us to join in the chase… or to pull the trigger.”

“How long have you been… caught up in this?”

“The parasite moves often. We think it came here seven years ago. Seeker homed in on Little City four years ago. Parasite has been damn hard to find, and it’s changed bodies several times.”

“How was I chosen?” Joe wondered.

“I don’t know—other than your innocent heart. Because of your special role, you have to have an innocent heart.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“That’s up to Seeker. As for the rest of us, no one knows why she chose us to help her. Anyway, she gave you that tracking skill, and you ricocheted through town. Neither fear nor disbelief stopped you from using it. And you had better control on the second chase. She was right to choose you for a paladin.”

The dog made a low pleasant sound more purr than grumble.

“Why doesn’t she enter a more ferocious dog than a golden retriever,” Joe wondered, “something with big jaws and bigger teeth, and then go after the parasite herself?”

“By senses we don’t possess, it’ll detect her when she’s still blocks away. Before she can get there, it’s gone. She always needs a knight like you, someone Parasite isn’t likely to suspect.”

He thrilled at hearing Portia call him a knight. Nevertheless, the ordinary Joe whom he had been still lived in him; he remained prudent. “So I’m like the hound of the hound.” He wasn’t sure he was ready for the answer, but he had to ask, “What are the chances that I come out of this alive?”

“If you find the thing—and you will—when you’re alone with it, don’t turn your back. Never turn your back alone with it. Never, Joey. When you’ve identified it, kill it at once.”

“Yeah. But how do I identify it?”

“You’ve been given the vision to see the hidden form of it. Just for God’s sake, don’t get within arm’s reach of it. And, Joey, I can’t stress enough… don’t hesitate to kill it. Act at once.”

“It can die? It lives thousands of years, but it can die?”

“The host will die. Parasite has to come out of the host to find another—which might be you. It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes. When it exits, you’ll know it. And yes, you can kill it. Though it’s… hardy.”

She put down the brandy and came to him and put her arms around him and held him tight, her head against his chest, as if she were listening to his heart.

Being hugged by Portia felt good, felt wonderful. Somewhat awkwardly, he put his arms around her, and that felt even better.

Best of all, she kissed him. The kiss was long and warm and deep. By the end of it, Joe felt a little drunk, though not because of the residue of brandy in her mouth.

Another question occurred to him. “Uh… how do I kill it?”

She took her smartphone from the table and speed-dialed the chief. “Daddy, he’s ready.”

8

THE CHIEF

Chief Harold Montclair appeared to be too hard a man to have fathered a daughter as lovely as Portia. In fact, if you were to encounter him out of uniform at night, you’d cross the street to avoid him. Scabs crusted his knuckles, as though he had been punching a brick wall for sport. For his stone-gray stare to have been any harder, his eyes would have had to fossilize.

He took Joe into his home office, to a locked gun safe. Before selecting a firearm, he said, “So you donate time to Volunteers for a Better Future.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you volunteer, Joseph?”

“I don’t know. I guess I like to feel good about myself.”

The chief’s eyes were as direct as two drill bits. “Many of our worst criminals have very high self-esteem. Do you have very high self-esteem, Joseph?”

“Not as high as I think you mean.”

“Daddy,” Portia said, “this isn’t necessary. Seeker chose him. Seeker knows his character.”

The chief grunted noncommittally and said to Joe, “So you asked my daughter to the malt shop.”

“We sort of went for a walk and ended up there.”

“So you have an interest in my daughter.”

“Daddy.”

“Yes, sir. She’s like the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

“That’s what drew you to her—how interesting she was?”

“Well, I also noticed how pretty she was.”

“You really noticed that, did you?”

Portia growled, and Seeker barked.

The chief said, “Okay, okay. I’m the father here, let’s not forget.” He unlocked the gun safe and opened the door and pondered the selection of weapons.

“I’ve never fired a gun,” Joe said.

“Doesn’t matter,” the chief said. “When Seeker gave you the tracking talent, she gave you expertise with guns, too.”

This was something Joe had been wondering about. “When exactly did Seeker give me all this?”

“One of the times she came in your house at night while you were sleeping.”

“One of the times? How did she get in even once?”

Touching one gun and then another with fondness, the chief said, “Whether she came from a million years in the future, from another universe, or wherever the hell, it should be obvious she can go anywhere she damn well pleases.” He took a pistol from the gun safe. “This here is a Heckler and Koch .45ACP with a ten-round magazine. We’ll load it with hollow points, screw a sound suppressor on it.”

“A silencer?” Joe frowned. “Is that legal?”

“In some states, it’s entirely legal. Besides, I’m a cop, and you’re a…” He turned to his daughter. “Pumpkin, what do you call it—what he is now?”

“A paladin.”

“For what’s got to be done,” the chief declared, “it’s legal enough. I’ve got a special shoulder rig that holds it with the sound suppressor attached and breaks away when you draw.”

When the pistol was loaded, Chief Montclair gave Joe minimal instructions in its operation. “Thanks to Seeker, you’ll feel like a lifelong shooter once you draw it.”

Evidently, on her nightly visits, Seeker hadn’t granted Joe a familiarity with shoulder holsters, because he tangled himself in the rig as if it were as complex as a straitjacket.

“Damn it all, son, let me do that for you.”

The chief had Joe rigged neatly in half a minute.

“I need a sport coat to hide it. I’ll go home and get one.”

“Pumpkin, go to the spare closet and get Joe a sport coat from when I was a bit less beefy.”

“It’ll probably still be too big,” Joe said.

“Won’t know till we try, son.”

While they waited for Portia to return, Joe said, “Seems like you would be better for this job than me.”

The chief gave him a look that said, Are you as smart as my daughter keeps saying you are?

“Oh,” Joe said. “Yeah, I guess Parasite would suspect the jig was up if an armed cop came to the door.”

“It’s important the thing suspects nothing. Otherwise, you’ll never get a chance. But there is another reason Seeker chose you.”

“What’s that?”

Chief Montclair glanced at the open door to be sure that Portia hadn’t returned. He lowered his voice and with evident chagrin said, “Parasite can detect the difference between an innocent heart and one… well, that’s maybe not so innocent. It won’t fear you and your innocent heart, but it would smell me coming a mile away, sad to say.”

This was a revelation that Joe could have done without, for if this was his future father-in-law, he would be forever wondering to what degree the chief’s heart was not innocent.

Portia returned with the coat, which was too big, though not as big as Joe expected.

“Helps hide the gun,” Portia said as she adjusted the lapels. “Just seems like maybe you’re wearing your father’s coat. And the last thing you look like is an assassin.”

“She’s right about that,” the chief said. “Last thing you look like is an assassin.”

“When do I start?” Joe asked.

To his daughter, the chief said, “Now?”

“Now,” she agreed.

Another thought occurred to Joe. “Where do I start?”

“You’re the tracker, Joey. Start where intuition tells you. But Parasite has a special vibe. You won’t mistake it for the vibe of a purse snatcher.”

Yet another thought occurred to him. “Seeker and all of you have been hunting it the last four years. Does it always escape by changing bodies? Have there been other paladins?”

“Seven,” the chief said.

“And they all failed?”

“Five of them were not innocent enough in their hearts,” Portia said. “They could track it but never get close enough without it being able to know they were coming.”

In the doorway, the dog wagged its tail and smiled at Joe as if to say, But you’re the one!

“Five failed, huh? What about the other two?”

“They’re dead,” the chief said.

9

MADE STUPID BY LOVE

Portia had said that Joe should let his intuition guide him. Unfortunately, intuition wasn’t like a Corvette or even a secondhand Honda; you couldn’t just get into it and start it up and cruise to where a parasite from another universe was living inside someone.

For want of a better plan, Joe retraced the route that earlier he and Portia had followed from Patsy’s Pool Hall to the Montclairs’ house. Hoping to detect the special residual vibe of his evil quarry, he touched parked cars, lampposts, crosswalk-control buttons, benches in the park, trash-can lids, the handrails flanking a set of steps leading out of the park. He picked up and fingered various items that people had discarded, because the parasite seemed likely to be the type who littered.

As the day waned, the sky recomposed itself until it appeared Wagnerian, the clouds such a bleak gray and so curdled and woven through with veins of black and in general so operatic that they were the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, foretelling the end of all things.

In his too-large borrowed sport coat, with the pistol heavy against his left side, his innocent heart sometimes thumping loudly in his ears and sometimes as silent as if it had ceased functioning, Joe moved through his hometown as if he had come upon it for the first time, all things new and strange and forbidding.

They said that Seeker had given him not just the skills but also the confidence to do what needed to be done. Indeed, he strode the neighborhoods with self-assurance, afraid but fortified with courage that prevented him from being crippled by his fear.

But the heart is deceitful above all things. Theologians agreed on that issue, as did most philosophers, and if such a view of the human condition hadn’t been widely held, there would have been less Shakespeare to celebrate and no TV dramas whatsoever. For all his confidence and newfound courage, now that he was alone, beyond the immediate influence of the lovely Portia, Joe began to be troubled by the haste with which he had progressed from being an ordinary litter-collecting volunteer in Central Park to a believer in creatures from other universes and a stalker of cosmic evil.

True, amazing things had happened since that morning. He did not doubt his sanity or wonder if he might have been subjected to hallucinations after being secretly drugged. The events of the past several hours had been as real as they had been fantastic. Without Portia at his side, however, without her delightfully distracting presence, which in a delicious way sort of clouded his thinking, Joe’s mind seemed to clear. He began to consider whether the very real events of the day might have a different explanation from the one that she had given him. Although the story of Seeker and Parasite was a wild narrative, it felt true, and as he rambled around Little City, he could not find a contradiction in anything she’d told him.

Yet… something that Grandma Dulcie often said now echoed in his memory: Men are often made stupid by love. She meant that a woman’s charms could distract men from truths that the charms might cloak, that men could fall in love with love as easily as could any woman.

Grandma had a cruder aphorism related to the first: Men too often think with their little head instead of their big one. Joe was embarrassed to hear those words even in the privacy of his mind, and guilt rose in him that he would associate such a thought with the kind and virtuous Portia.

Yet…

Still he roamed the town, pressing one hand or the other to everything with which the person who hosted Parasite might have made contact, as if he had gone blind and must make his way by touch alone.

Twilight could not marry day to night with the densely clotted sky intervening in the ceremony. The gray and shadowed afternoon became night, seemingly between one breath and another, and the lights of Little City brought faux warmth to the cool evening air. The street lamps and the strings of tiny bulbs wound through tree branches and the luminous shop windows in the quainter districts created a festive air for tourists and residents alike.

At the malt shop, when Joe patted the resin head of Lucky Duck, a psychic residue of perfect evil shuddered through his hand and up his arm. The vibe of the parasite centipeded through the chambers of his heart, as if it might turn those pulsing tissues to ice, and Joe nearly dropped to his knees. He snatched his hand back, however, and whispered, “Button,” and was on the hunt.

10

WHAT LIVES WITHIN

Along a route defined by nine points of contact, Joe went from one marker of evil to another, the effect of each more intense than the one before it. At the ninth, he whispered, “House,” and though he had come to a residential neighborhood with many houses, he went directly to the one in which his grandmother lived.

He stood on the sidewalk, paralyzed by disbelief. Of all the people he had ever known, he would have put this woman last on the list in a search for evil’s harbor. She was kind and generous and good. If his father’s seldom-expressed affection was love, then of the three people who might love Joe, he would have said that Dulcie loved him most of all, if only because she had loved him without a moment of exception for far longer than Portia had loved him, if indeed she did.

He would not act precipitously. He would not assume that the tracking skill conferred on him by Seeker was foolproof. For this woman, he must make every allowance. He’d been told that those poisoned by Parasite and operated by its thousands of psychic strings were not salvageable once they had been in its thrall. Surely, then, the host in which the creature actually lived, its pirated body of flesh and blood, would also be beyond all hope of rehabilitation.

If he went inside, he might have to kill his grandmother.

If he saw the creature within her, as Portia said he would see it in the host, and if he could not bring himself to kill her, then she, in some strange power’s employ, would likely kill him.

When he visited her, he always went to the kitchen door. Now he opened the side gate and walked around to the back porch.

She took her dinner at five thirty. Now at seven, her dinner hour had passed. Yet she was at work in the kitchen. Joe stood at the back door, watching her through its upper panes, as she busied herself cubing cheese and sticking a decorative toothpick in each cube.

It seemed to strain credulity to believe that a wickedness from across a sea of worlds, having inserted itself in a host, would in the privacy of its home, its nest, occupy itself with mundane domestic activities.

On the other hand, maybe such a masquerade could be successful only if conducted with unwavering continuity.

When he knocked on the door, she looked up and broke into a broad smile when she saw him in the porch light. “Come in, child!”

He stepped into the kitchen, which was redolent of some savory treat—cilantro, black pepper, phyllo dough—baking in the oven. He closed the door behind him.

“I like surprise visits best of all,” Dulcie declared as she continued to cube the block of cheese. “Whatever brings you here, sweetie?”

“Oh, I was just knocking around downtown, thought I’d go to a movie, but nothing’s playing that I want to see.” His voice sounded unnatural to him, as if he were reading lines. On the dinette table lay a deck of cards, a pen, and a notepad for keeping score. “Are you going to take some poor devil’s money at poker?”

“Don’t I wish,” Dulcie said. “But it’s just Agnes coming over from next door for a little five hundred rummy and gossip.”

Here was the sweet face that had brightened his life for eighteen years, the same Dulcie under a cap of white hair, her voice no less musical than ever, her green eyes bright with intelligence and good humor and love.

“Come here and give Grandma a kiss,” she said.

In memory, he heard Portia’s voice: When you’re alone with it, don’t turn your back… don’t get within arm’s reach of it…

He had been here only three days earlier, had spent two hours with her, had kissed her hello and good-bye. And lived. She could be no one but Dulcie.

As Joe took a step toward her, she said, “Oh shoot! I forgot to check on the mini biscuits.” She put down the knife with which she had been cubing cheese, snatched up a pair of pot holders, then hurried to the oven and opened the door.

He reached down to the deck of cards on the table, which she would have recently touched.

A bleak current flashed from hand to arm, into the walls of his heart, icier than the residue on any of the nine points of contact he’d followed from the malt shop. This time a darkness swelled behind his eyes, and there rose in his mouth a taste more bitter than bile. When the darkness and foul taste receded, he was overcome with grief. She was already lost to him, whether he killed her or walked away and left her in the control of her otherworldly master.

Portia again in memory: You’ve been given the vision to see the hidden form of it.

Joe saw nothing but Dulcie removing a tray of little biscuits from the oven, just Grandma Dulcie, his mother’s mother. In fact, she’d been his surrogate mother all these years, his playmate in childhood, his good counsel in adolescence.

She set the tray of biscuits on a cooling rack near the sink, put aside the pot holders, and turned to him, smiling. His expression must have been less well controlled than he believed, for her smile faltered. “Joey? Is something wrong, sweetie?”

Emotion trembled his voice as he heard himself say, “My mother told me I was her special boy. She said she loved me and always would. She told me I would grow up to do great things.”

Love and worry and sympathy reshaped Dulcie’s expression. “Oh, honey, Joey, something is wrong. Give Grandma a hug and tell me all about it.”

When she started toward him, Joe saw the fiend within. Dulcie became semitransparent, as if made of milky glass. Fixed to her brain stem, the parasite hung like a fat inky-black poor broken body on the floor leech, a leech with a long, thin tail spiraling down through her spine. When he saw it, he knew its history, which was broadcast to him in a condensed psychic flash. The thing had passed through millennia, across uncounted universes, a cruel rider of humanity and of other species, feeding on the anguish of those it enslaved and on the violence of the others whom it poisoned and used to murderous ends.

The woman ceased to be semitransparent and once more appeared to be the loving grandmother she had always been. She opened her arms to him as she approached.

For God’s sake, don’t get within arm’s reach of it. And, Joey, I can’t stress enough… don’t hesitate to kill it. Act at once.

He stepped back from Dulcie as she approached, and his retreat halted her. Love, worry, sympathy ebbed from her face like a tide from the shore, and in her suddenly wide eyes he saw suspicion.

She was almost within arm’s reach, and although she had halted, Joey drew the pistol that was fitted with a silencer. “Stay back.”

She was for a long moment silent, and in her silence he read neither fear nor sorrow, but cold calculation. Then she said, “Oh, honey, Joey baby, something’s very wrong with you. Your poor mind, sweetie. Your mind isn’t right. Keep the gun if you want, but sit down with Grandma—sit down and tell me all about it.”

She took a step toward him and reached out a hand to him.

An old song came into his mind, a favorite of his grandmother’s, written long before Joe had been born: “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” His eyes flooded with tears as he shot her dead.

The first round staggered her backward, into the table. Her face distorted less with pain than with bewilderment as she said, “Why? Why?”

The sound suppressor softened the shots but didn’t come close to silencing them. As he fired twice again and saw her body torn by the terrible impact of the hollow-point rounds, as she collapsed to the floor, he knew that he would hear these half-muffled pistol shots in dreams for the rest of his life.

11

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Shaking with horror and grief, weeping as he had not wept since childhood, making the most pitiful sounds that he’d ever heard issue from himself or anyone, Joe Mandel backed away from the bullet-riven corpse, still holding the Heckler & Koch in a two-hand grip, the muzzle trained on the dead woman.

Like a lifelong shooter, he had drawn the weapon smoothly, taken an ideal isosceles stance, adjusted for the recoil, and done what he’d come there to do.

Portia spoke in memory: The host will die. Parasite has to come out of the host to find another—which might be you.

The blood. The awful blood. Her lying in it. Eyes open wide in a sightless stare. Blood climbing from the floor through her white hair, like oil rising in a lantern wick.

It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes. When it exits, you’ll know it.

The gun felt heavy, seemed to weigh ten times what it had weighed when Chief Montclair first put it in Joe’s hand. His arms shook with the burden of the gun, with the burden of what he had done, and the muzzle kept jumping off target.

A clock hung on the wall, within his line of sight. Perhaps a minute had passed.

He thought he heard the corpse move, and his attention leaped away from the clock, but the dead woman was in the same position as before.

Why? She had asked, Why? Why?

If she had been possessed and ridden, she would have known why. She would have known.

He struggled to calm himself, to stay ready.

Two minutes. Three.

How would it exit the body? How would it come for him? Out of her mouth that even in death hung open in surprise? Out of an ear? From one of the grievous wounds?

Never turn your back alone with it. And yes, you can kill it. Though it’s… hardy.

Five minutes.

Each minute had begun to seem like ten.

Eyes to the clock and quickly back to the corpse. Give the parasite no opening, no chance.

Instead of Portia, Grandma Dulcie spoke in memory: Men are often made stupid by love.

No. Joe knew what he had seen inside his grandmother. The hideous fat leech. Its ribbon of a tail twining through her spine.

Portia hadn’t described the thing to him. He hadn’t merely seen what she had told him he should see, would see. He had seen what was really there.

Six minutes.

He had been borne back in time to lie in his mother’s arms and hear her say she loved him. He had not imagined that. He had touched the dog, had touched Seeker, and it had taken him back in time. It couldn’t have been hallucination, some form of dream, produced by a drug in his coffee.

Seven minutes. Eight.

It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes.

A few might be three or four. Or might be ten.

The woman’s unblinking green eyes stared at the ceiling. A starburst hemorrhage in the right one.

The house lay in a dreadful hush. The silence felt sacred, as though this was a place where mourning would be done and prayers should be said.

Eleven minutes.

A noise. Not from the corpse.

Joe looked up and saw the back door opening.

Agnes Jordan, the next-door neighbor, stepped into the kitchen, carrying a plate of cookies in plastic wrap—her contribution to an evening of cards. She saw Joe and started to smile, saw the gun an instant later and did not smile after all, saw the dead woman on the floor and dropped the cookies.

Gray-faced, Agnes turned her eyes on Joe again. “What have you done? What have you done? Oh God, what have you done?”

He knew what he had done, or thought he knew, but he could not speak in his defense. Anything that he could say would sound like a demented, paranoid fantasy.

He backed away from the dead woman, to the hall door, which stood open. He reversed across the threshold and into the hallway as the neighbor lady asked for a fourth time, “What have you done?”

With doubt came panic and horror multiplied. He turned and hurried toward the foyer and the front door.

12

NOTHING LESS THAN EVERYTHING

In the kitchen, Agnes Jordan began to scream.

Joe almost kept going, almost fled the house. As he reached the foyer, however, he realized that Agnes had not screamed when she’d seen Dulcie dead. And these were neither shouts of shocked discovery nor cries of grief. These were screams of terror.

As in a nightmare where the dreamer runs away only to find himself running toward the thing he hoped to escape, Joe hurried along the hall to the back of the house and stepped into the kitchen and saw that Agnes had fallen to the floor. She scrambled backward, retreating from something born in another universe or born before time began.

Less like a leech outside of its host, the parasite was a thing so different from all other creatures of the earth that there was no name for it, no comparison to be drawn between it and another living thing. Black it was, though not merely black in color, a squirming void in the scene, as if its perfect blackness were both color and substance, so that the human eye could see it but not fully define it. The size of a can of cola, with six multijointed legs—now four, or maybe eight, or six after all—and a thin lashing tail. Faster than the laws of physics allowed, it proceeded not in a straight line but darted and jigged frantically in an apparently random series of movements, yet always drawing closer to Agnes. Perhaps it had been hunted over so many millennia that it had learned to augment speed with the chaotic misdirection of Brownian motion. It seemed to have a head, but then didn’t, a carapace, but then not, as though it must be continuously bombarded by particles undetectable to human beings, by some radiation that instantly and ceaselessly mutated it.

With a scuttling sound, a hissing, a high-pitched twittering almost beyond the range of human hearing, it found Agnes’s right foot and moved directly now, fast up her leg, seeking entrance to her by some means unknowable, unthinkable.

Unable to shoot the thing without wounding or killing Agnes, Joe hurried forward. He held the pistol in his left hand, reached down with his right, and seized the parasite. It furiously resisted his grip, at one moment a prickling spiny mass, but the next moment a gelid mush that oozed between his fingers, foreign in every way, profoundly contrary to all human experience, so that he felt that he had reached into the body of some evil angel to grasp its foul and throbbing heart.

He meant to throw the thing aside and bring the gun to bear on it. The parasite seemed to realize his intent. It stopped resisting and clung fast to him, as an octopus might cling with suction. Joe’s scream was entirely internal, a shrill tinnitus of terror. He swung his arm, slammed the refrigerator, battering the creature between the back of his hand and the stainless-steel door. Taking the brunt of the impact, it lost its grip and fell to the floor and zigzagged across Dulcie’s dead body, pattering through her cooling blood, each incremental move sheering obliquely from the one before it, and disappeared under the dinette table.

The feel of the parasite had filled Joe with such abhorrence that every square inch of his skin seemed to be acrawl with ants.

With exquisite caution, he eased around the corpse and dropped onto one knee to look under the table. Nothing.

He surveyed the room from that low perspective, listening for telltale movement. Quiet.

Scrambling off the floor, to her feet, Agnes Jordan warned him, “There!”

He looked where she pointed and saw the quivering black mass cuddling itself in a corner, under the toe kick of the cabinetry.

Before Joe could squeeze off a shot, the parasite raced along the cabinet base, staying in that recess, for once proceeding in a straight line, almost faster than the eye could follow. Somehow it flicked open a door on a lower cabinet and squirmed through the gap. The door banged shut behind it.

For a moment, the clink-rattle of jostled dishes and bowls arose from within the cabinet, but then the creature either went still or crept through the contents with greater stealth.

If ever Joe considered abandoning all principles and fleeing from a challenge, this was the moment when he might have done so. But he heard in memory his grandmother’s voice and took guidance from it: Whatever task you’ve taken, whatever fight you’re facing, you must bring to it nothing less than everything you’ve got, or otherwise you’ll fail for sure and always wonder what might have been if only you had given your all.

Thinking about the five paladins who had failed and the two who had perished in the effort, he approached the cabinet into which the parasite had disappeared. Pistol in his right hand, he reached with his left to open the door. Plates, crockery, and casseroles. Shadows toward the back. He leaned in closer, wishing he had a flashlight.

The clatter, knock, and rattle of brooms and mops tumbling through the flung-open door of a tall corner closet brought him to his feet with a cry of alarm. He thought the parasite had burst out of hiding with the spill of household cleaning items, but as he swung the pistol left and right in search of a target, he realized that it had not come into the open yet.

Stealthy sounds inside an upper cabinet. Joe stepped back, gun in a two-hand grip once more. If the creature flung open an upper door and sprang out, it would be above his head and might fall upon him and fix itself to his face.

He held his breath, listening intently.

Agnes Jordan made small whimpering sounds of distress. When Joe motioned her to the back door, intending that she should clear the battlefield and leave the fight to him, she did not move, apparently paralyzed with fright.

Deep silence. Silence persistent.

Agnes must have heard a faint warning sound to which Joe was deaf, because she gasped and ducked defensively and moved fast to her right just as an upper cabinet door flew open. Having maneuvered itself to drop upon her head, Parasite exited the cabinet in a cascade of drinking tumblers. The thing fell to the countertop as half a dozen tall glasses rang and shattered against that granite surface, its absolute-black contours crankling and shifting as splinters and shards of glass raised a glittering spray and then rained to the floor.

Joe squeezed off a round from a distance of eight feet—six bullets remaining in the magazine—and Parasite was flung against the backsplash by a direct hit. Anything its size, if born in this world, would have been stone dead. Still alive, the thing zigzagged away from him, across the granite, a dissonance of broken glass shifting under it. He fired again, missed, fired again—four rounds left—and scored another hit.

When the creature rebounded from the backsplash again, now all black bristle and menacing hiss, Joe could hear Portia speaking as clearly as if she had been in the room: You can kill it. Though it’s… hardy.

Adopting a new strategy, Parasite stopped fleeing, instead jittered across the L-shaped counter, toward Joe. With a skill that improved with each shot, Joe tracked it, nailed it once more. Three direct hits. Still it came, turning the corner of the L, streaking toward him across the granite, no longer moving evasively.

Three rounds left. Risk nothing less than everything. He waited until it was four feet from him, until it sprang for his face. He brought the .45 higher, so that instead of sailing over the pistol, Parasite clutched the thrusting barrel, for an instant embracing the muzzle. An instant was all Joe needed to squeeze off a shot.

If the slug passed through the body of the beast, he didn’t hear it crack a cabinet or ricochet off a hard surface. Parasite swelled, as if the overpressure of the captured bullet inflated it.

Joe triggered his next-to-last round, his hope of escape fading as Parasite endured another point-blank hit. It swelled further, like some vile blowfish… and then the alien substance of it exploded backward, away from him, splattering the cabinets and the countertop, as if a ladle of infinity matter had been scooped out of the void beyond the outermost edge of the universe, where not one star shone, and had been cast here by some prankster god.

Every glob and smear of that unearthly tissue spiderwebbed and crackled with a visible electric current. A thin black smoke rose from each morsel, but only briefly. With the withering of the smoke, nothing remained as evidence of invasion.

Joe could not at once accept that he had seen the last of the parasite. He stood shaking, weapon extended, his mind ricocheting through the memory of the encounter, searching for the mistake that he might have made, the error that would allow the creature to rise again and launch itself at his face.

Slowly, he became aware of Agnes Jordan weeping. He lowered the Heckler & Koch and went to her. He put a hand upon her shoulder, and she didn’t recoil from him. He held her for a long moment.

Suddenly he wanted to see Portia, needed to see her. His need was so urgent, he understood that he had not yet been released from his role as paladin, that a grave task awaited him.

“Go home,” he advised Agnes. “Wait there. Chief Montclair will come to see you. He’ll explain everything. You understand?”

She nodded, and off her nod, Joe turned and ran.

13

THE PUPPET

Joe ran for his life, ran to preserve the meaning that had so recently been given to his life. The overcast brightened as chain lightning traveled pathways of oblique angles through convolutions of thunderheads. The flesh of the storm was rent, and rain roared down upon him in torrents.

Five blocks to the Montclair house seemed like five light-years and five millennia. As he bounded up the porch steps, he could have sworn they telescoped ahead of him, adding risers and treads to the climb.

If he had heard the shot, he had thought it was one with the peals of thunder. When he rushed through the front door and into the living room, Joe believed that, no matter what might be about to happen, he had arrived to thwart it. The sight of Portia dead on the floor brought him to a halt and wrenched from him a wretched sob of grief and self-disgust.

Evidently, the chief was not at home. Her uncle Patsy O’Day had come calling with a Colt revolver. Whatever had happened under the pool hall, after Joe and Portia had left, even if Hocker and Jagget had been shot to death, Patsy had been poisoned.

The puppet master was dead. It didn’t live in Patsy or anyone else. But its poison still circulated through this man’s veins.

Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.

Joe didn’t hesitate to shoot Patsy dead, for otherwise Patsy would have shot him.

He could not bear the sight of Portia in death. Yet he was about to kneel and take her in his arms when the dog came through the archway from the hall. It regarded Joe with an intensity that conveyed to him that psychic tracking and the skill of an experienced gunman were not the only gifts he had been given in his role as a paladin.

He left her poor broken body on the floor and retreated through the living-room arch. When he crossed the threshold, the hallway was not as it had been. In its place lay a white corridor of luminous walls, with every so often the ghostly suggestion of a door. He did not seem to walk, but glide. When he passed through the door to which he felt drawn, he found himself in Chief Montclair’s home office, alone.

Night pressed at the windows. But no rain streamed down the glass. The digital clock on the desk read SATURDAY. The time was ten minutes before he had arrived in this place after shooting Dulcie.

The gun safe remained unlocked, and he selected a .45 pistol.

He opened a box of ammunition and loaded the magazine.

Portia sat at the table in the kitchen, in a state of distress, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in front of her, a snifter of brandy beside it.

Perhaps her father had ventured out in search of Joe, concerned about how long he had been gone.

She looked up when Joe entered the room, and relief wiped the worry from her face.

Because he didn’t know what word or action might bend the past the wrong way and make an even greater nightmare of the future, he meant to say and do only what seemed essential.

As she started to get up from her chair, he raised one hand.

“No. I haven’t returned yet. I’m still at my grandmother’s house.”

She regarded him solemnly, and he believed she understood.

He put the pistol on the table.

“When the doorbell rings, let him in and shoot him in the foyer. He isn’t who he appears to be. And if you let him, he’ll kill you in the living room.”

Although he longed to touch her, he walked away, directly to the back door. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. No porch lay where a porch should have been, no yard, not even the dark of night. Ahead was only a whiteness more terrible than might have been the dead and starless blackness beyond the universe.

When he walked into the blinding brightness of the sea of time, he might have thought that he was drowned by it, dissolved to atoms and his atoms scattered into eternity—except one thing remained to assure him that he lived: the mental image of Portia, vivid and vibrant and beautiful.

In the whiteness, a door. Beyond the door, his grandmother’s kitchen, where she still lay dead.

Agnes had gone.

Joe hurried to the hallway and saw himself running toward the front door. He waited a moment before following.

Lightning revealed the Wagnerian heavens in dark tumult, the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, here at the end of all things. Sabers of lightning eviscerated the thunderheads, and rain chased down the night in torrents.

Joe pursued himself at a distance, for he knew that the first Joe, the self ahead of him, would not look—had not looked—back.

The five blocks to the Montclair house seemed to pass beneath his feet in seconds, though he knew the journey was one of minutes. Just short of his destination, he left the sidewalk, crossed the street, and stood in the darkness under a tree.

Over there at the house, where a bright future might yet await Joe Mandel, that ordinary young man raced up the steps just as the front door of the Montclair house opened. She appeared, the pistol in one hand. He halted, almost recoiled, surprised by her weapon. But Portia came into his arms, and he embraced her. They held each other in silence for a moment, and then their excited voices carried into the stormy night…

… carried across the rain-swept street to the Joe who stood in the darkness under the tree. He waited until they went inside and closed the door, the terror of the night and all the killing behind them, a cover story in need of invention, a discussion between the chief and Agnes Jordan certainly necessary. But now, the future had angled sharply away from despair to hope. Evil, which endured all of time, was for this precious moment held at bay.

Joe set out into the rain, heading downtown toward the quaint shops and the sparkling cafés, and then past them to a semiquaint district where the bus station stood. A counter clerk sold him a ticket to a town five hundred miles away.

He didn’t have much money, only what was in his wallet. He did not know what he would do, where he would go after this night. But he knew it would be somewhere special, for every place on the earth was special in its way. And he knew that whatever life he led would not be ordinary.

His beloved grandmother, whom he would never see again in this life, said that you knew you were getting a little wisdom when you were able to see that even loss could be beautiful if it made you love more the things that hadn’t been lost. Portia had been lost to him, but not to death, and the lesser loss was one that he could survive.

Perhaps she would marry that other Joe, the version of himself that never knew his girl had been shot dead and resurrected. Maybe they would have children, a long and happy life.

He found some welcome solace in knowing that the other Joe would have her to hold and cherish. In this world of suffering, there was no perfect consolation, and this one was especially melancholy. In this momentous night, however, he knew far more sadness than grief, and while deep sadness bruises the heart, it doesn’t leave the enduring scars of profound grief.

In the long bus ride away from Little City, he stared out the window at the rainy dark. Sometimes the lights of habitation were many, sometimes they were few and far between in the distance, but he cherished all of them and wondered what lives they illuminated.

An excerpt from The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz

1

Jane Hawk woke in the cool dark and for a moment could not remember where she had gone to sleep, only that as always she was in a queen- or king-size bed and that her pistol lay under the pillow on which the head of a companion would have rested had she not been traveling alone. Diesel growl and friction drone of eighteen tires on asphalt reminded her that she was in a motel, near the interstate, and it was… Monday.

With a soft-green numerical glow, the bedside clock reported the bad but not uncommon news that it was 4:15 in the morning, too early for her to have gotten eight hours of sack time, too late to imagine that she might fall back to sleep.

She lay for a while, thinking about what had been lost. She had promised herself to stop dwelling on the bitter past. She spent less time on it now than before, which would have counted as progress if recently she hadn’t turned to thoughts of what was yet to be lost.

She took a change of clothes and the pistol into the bathroom. She shut the door and braced it with a straight-backed chair that she had moved from the bedroom upon checking in the previous night.

Such was the maid service that in the corner above the sink, the radials and spirals of a spider’s architecture extended across an area larger than her hand. When she had gone to bed at eleven o’clock, the only provision hanging in the web had been a struggling moth. During the night, the moth had become but the husk of a moth, the hollow body translucent, the wings shorn of their velvet dust, brittle and fractured. The plump spider now watched over a pair of captured silverfish, leaner fare, though another morsel would soon find its way into the gossamer abattoir.

Outside, the light from a security lamp gilded the frosted glass in the small crank-out bathroom window, which was not large enough to allow even a child to gain entrance. Its dimensions would also preclude her from escaping through it in a crisis.

Jane put the pistol on the closed lid of the toilet and left the vinyl curtain open while she took a shower. The water was hotter than she expected from a two-star operation, melting accumulated soreness out of muscle and bone, but she didn’t linger in the spray as long as she would have liked.

2

Her shoulder rig featured a holster with swivel connectors, a spare-magazine carrier, and a suede harness. The weapon hung just behind her left arm, a deep position that allowed unparalleled concealment beneath her specially tailored sport coats.

In addition to the spare magazine clipped to the rig, she kept two others in the pockets of the jacket, a total of forty rounds, counting those in the pistol.

The day might come when forty was not enough. She had no backup anymore, no team in a van around the corner if everything went to shit. Those days were over for the time being, if not forever. She couldn’t arm herself for infinite combat. In any situation, if forty rounds proved not enough, neither would eighty or eight hundred. She did not delude herself regarding her skills or endurance.

She carried her two suitcases out to the Ford Escape, raised the tailgate, loaded the bags, and locked the vehicle.

The sun that had not yet risen must have been producing a solar flare or two. The bright silver moon declining in the west reflected so much light that the shadows of its craters had blurred away. It looked not like a solid object but instead like a hole in the night sky, pure and dangerous light shining through from another universe.

In the motel office, she returned the room key. Behind the front desk, a guy with a shaved head and a chin beard asked if everything had been to her satisfaction, almost as if he genuinely cared. She nearly said, With all the bugs, I imagine a lot of your guests are entomologists. But she didn’t want to leave him with a more memorable image of her than the one he got from picturing her naked. She said, “Yeah, fine,” and walked out of there.

At check-in, she had paid cash in advance and used one of her counterfeit driver’s licenses to provide the required ID, according to which Lucy Aimes of Sacramento had just left the building.

Early-spring flying beetles of some kind clicked in the metal cones of the lamps mounted to the ceiling of the covered walkway, and their exaggerated spriggy-legged shadows jigged on the spotlit concrete underfoot.

As she walked to the diner next door, which was part of the motel operation, she was aware of the security cameras but didn’t look directly at any of them. Surveillance had become inescapable.

The only cameras that could undo her, however, were those in airports, train stations, and other key facilities that were linked to computers running real-time state-of-the-art facial-recognition software. Her flying days were over. She went everywhere by car.

When all this started, she’d been a natural blonde with long hair. Now she was a brunette with a shorter cut. Changes of that kind could not foil facial-recognition if you were being hunted. Short of spackling herself with an obvious disguise that would also draw unwanted attention, she could not have done much to change the shape of her face or the many unique details of her features to escape this mechanized detection.

3

A three-egg cheese omelet, a double rasher of bacon, sausage, extra butter for the toast, hold the home fries, coffee instead of orange juice: She thrived on protein, but too many carbs made her feel sluggish and slow-witted. She didn’t worry about fat, because she’d have to live another two decades to develop arteriosclerosis.

The waitress brought refill coffee. She was thirtyish, pretty in a faded-flower way, too pale and too thin, as if life whittled and bleached her day by day. “You hear about Philadelphia?”

“What now?”

“Some crazies crashed this private jet plane straight into four lanes of bumper-to-bumper morning traffic. TV says there must’ve been a full load of fuel. Almost a mile of highway on fire, this bridge collapsed totally, cars and trucks blowing up, those poor people trapped in it. Horrible. We got a TV in the kitchen. It’s too awful to look. Makes you sick to watch it. They say they do it for God, but it’s the devil in them. What are we ever gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said.

“I don’t think anybody knows.”

“I don’t think so either.”

The waitress returned to the kitchen, and Jane finished eating breakfast. If you let the news spoil your appetite, there wouldn’t be a day you could eat.

4

The black Ford Escape appeared to be Detroit-lite, but this one had secrets under the hood and the power to outrun anything with the words TO SERVE AND PROTECT on its front doors.

Two weeks earlier, Jane had paid cash for the Ford in Nogales, Arizona, which was directly across the international border from Nogales, Mexico. The car had been stolen in the United States, given new engine-block numbers and more horsepower in Mexico, and returned to the States for sale. The dealer’s showrooms were a series of barns on a former horse ranch; he never advertised his inventory, never issued a receipt or paid taxes. Upon request, he provided Canadian license plates and a guaranteed-legitimate registration card from the Department of Motor Vehicles for the province of British Columbia.

When dawn came, she was still in Arizona, racing westward on Interstate 8. The night paled. As the sun slowly cleared the horizon in her wake, the high feathery cirrus clouds ahead of her pinked before darkening to coralline, and the sky waxed through shades of increasingly intense blue.

Sometimes on long drives, she wanted music. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt. This morning she preferred silence. In her current mood, even the best of music would sound discordant.

Forty miles past sunrise, she crossed the state line into southernmost California. During the following hour, the high white fleecy clouds lowered and congested and grayed into woolpack. After another hour, the sky had grown darker, swollen, malign.

Near the western periphery of the Cleveland National Forest, she exited the interstate at the town of Alpine, where General Gordon Lambert had lived with his wife. The previous evening, Jane had consulted one of her old but useful Thomas Guides, a spiral-bound book of maps. She was sure she knew how to find the house.

In addition to other modifications made to the Ford Escape in Mexico, the entire GPS had been removed, including the transponder that allowed its position to be tracked continuously by satellite and other means. There was no point in being off the grid if the vehicle you drove was Wi-Fied to it with every turn of the wheels.

Although rain was as natural as sunshine, although Nature functioned without intentions, Jane saw malice in the coming storm. Lately, her love of the natural world had at times been tested by a perception, perhaps irrational but deeply felt, that Nature was colluding with humanity in enterprises wicked and destructive.

5

Fourteen thousand souls lived in Alpine, a percentage of them sure to believe in fate. Fewer than three hundred were from the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, who operated the Viejas Casino. Jane had no interest in games of chance. Minute by minute, life was a continuous rolling of the dice, and that was as much gambling as she could handle.

Graced with pines and live oaks, the central business district was frontier-town quaint. Certain buildings actually dated to the Old West, but others of more recent construction aped that style with varying degrees of success. The number of antique stores, galleries, gift shops, and restaurants suggested year-round tourism that predated the casino.

San Diego, the sixth largest city in the country, was less than thirty miles and eighteen hundred feet of elevation away. Wherever at least a million people lived in close proximity to one another, a significant portion needed, on any given day, to flee the hive for a place of less busy buzzing.

The white-clapboard black-shuttered Lambert residence stood on the farther outskirts of Alpine, on approximately half an acre of land, the front yard picket-fenced, the porch furnished with wicker chairs. The flag was at full mast on a pole at the northeast corner of the house, the red-and-white fly billowing gently in the breeze, the fifty-star canton pulled taut in full display against the curdled, brooding sky.

The twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit allowed Jane to cruise past slowly without appearing to be canvassing the place. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. But if they suspected that she might come here because of the bond she shared with Gwyneth Lambert, they would be circumspect almost to the point of invisibility.

She passed four other houses before the street came to a dead end. There, she turned and parked the Escape on the shoulder of the lane, facing back the way she had come.

These homes stood on the brow of a hill with a view of El Capitan Lake. Jane followed a dirt path down through an open woods and then along a treeless slope green with maiden grass that would be as gold as wheat by mid summer. At the shore, she walked south, surveying the lake, which looked both placid and disarranged because the rumpled-laundry clouds were reflected in the serene mirrored surface. She gave equal attention to the houses on her left, gazing up as if admiring each.

Fences indicated that the properties occupied only the scalped-flat lots at the top of the hill. The white pickets at the front of the Lambert house were repeated all the way around.

She walked behind two more residences before returning to the Lambert place and climbing the slope. The back gate featured a simple gravity latch.

Closing the gate behind her, she considered the windows, from which the draperies had been drawn aside and the blinds raised to admit as much of the day’s dreary light as possible. She could see no one gazing out at the lake—or on the watch for her.

Committed now, she followed the pickets around the side of the house. As the clouds lowered and the flag rustled in a breeze that smelled faintly of either the rain to come or the waters of the lake, she climbed the porch steps and rang the bell.

A moment later, a slim, attractive, fiftyish woman opened the door. She wore jeans, a sweater, and a knee-length apron decorated with needlepoint strawberries.

“Mrs. Lambert?” Jane asked.

“Yes?”

“We have a bond that I hope I can call upon.”

Gwyneth Lambert raised a half smile and her eyebrows.

Jane said, “We both married Marines.”

“That’s a bond, all right. How can I help you?”

“We’re also both widows. And I believe we have the same people to blame for that.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, a figure that increases by more than seventeen million copies per year, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

American oddball illustrator and designer Oliver Barrett grew up in Ohio on a steady diet of science fiction, role-playing games, and below-average athletics. He cut his teeth working as an art director at advertising and branding agencies before setting off on his own to make his mark on the world. This background set the stage for a career of clever concepts, frenetic line work, and engaging imagery that’s sought after by the Nikes, Amazons, and Netflixes of the globe, to name a few. He can also deadlift almost four hundred pounds.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

Ashley Bell

The City

Innocence

77 Shadow Street

What the Night Knows

Breathless

Relentless

Your Heart Belongs to Me

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Good Guy

The Husband

Velocity

Life Expectancy

The Taking

The Face

By the Light of the Moon

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of His Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Mr. Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Strangers

Twilight Eyes

Darkfall

Phantoms

Whispers

The Mask

The Vision

The Face of Fear

Night Chills

Shattered

The Voice of the Night

The Servants of Twilight

The House of Thunder

The Key to Midnight

The Eyes of Darkness

Shadowfires

Winter Moon

The Door to December

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Icebound

Strange Highways

Intensity

Sole Survivor

Ticktock

The Funhouse

Demon Seed

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Odd Interlude

Odd Apocalypse

Deeply Odd

Saint Odd

Frankenstein

Prodigal Son

City of Night

Dead and Alive

Lost Souls

The Dead Town

Nonfiction

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

PRAISE FOR DEAN KOONTZ

“Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler.”

—Times (London)

“Dean Koontz writes page-turners, middle-of-the-night-sneak-up-behind-you suspense thrillers. He touches our hearts and tingles our spines.”

—Washington Post Book World

“A modern Swift… a master satirist.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Koontz has a knack for making the bizarre and uncanny seem as commonplace as a sunrise. BOTTOM LINE: the Dean of Suspense.”

—People

“If Stephen King is the Rolling Stones of novels, Koontz is the Beatles.”

—Playboy

“A superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition [and] demonstrating that the real horror of life is found not in monsters, but within the human psyche.”

—USA Today

“Far more than a genre writer. Characters and the search for meaning, exquisitely crafted, are the soul of his work. This is why his novels will be read long after the ghosts and monsters of most genre writers have been consigned to the attic. One of the master storytellers of this or any age.”

—Tampa Tribune

“Dean Koontz almost occupies a genre of his own. He is a master at building suspense and holding the reader spellbound.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Demanding much of itself, Koontz’s style bleaches out clichés while showing a genius for details. He leaves his competitors buried in the dust.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Koontz has always had near-Dickensian powers of description, and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Tumbling, hallucinogenic prose.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Koontz raises intriguing questions about life, death, evil, and faith that are worthy of C. S. Lewis.”

—Flint Journal

“If there’s an element of menacing chaos in Koontz’s body of work, there’s also another common thread: Good people, fighting back, can make a difference… Koontz knows how to set hooks throughout his novels and has a knack for foreshadowing without giving away the plot store.”

—Associated Press

“Perhaps more than any other author, Koontz writes fiction perfectly suited to the mood of America: novels that acknowledge the reality and tenacity of evil but also the power of good; that celebrate the common man and woman; that at their best entertain vastly as they uplift.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Koontz’s astonishing novel[s] show him making moral fable[s] out of dark fantasy materials… object lesson[s] in the unfashionable virtues of fortitude, prudence, and a faith far firmer than with-it moderns generally tolerate… Loaded with dialogue the likes of which haven’t been rampant since the 1930s heyday of screwball comedy… Richly sympathetic [characters]… emotionally powerful and thought-provoking.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Koontz is a master of melding the supernatural with the commonplace. [His] writing crackles with dry, tongue-in-cheek wit.”

—Boston Globe

“Dean Koontz straddles the genres… he provides a giddy ride.”

—Observer (UK)

“Classic Koontz features a distinctive narrative that verges on the wise-crackingly facetious… He is also a dab hand at tying in a wacky love story… an acquired taste, but one acquired by millions.”

—Times (London)

“Koontz skillfully blends elements… of romance, horror, fantasy, mystery, suspense, thriller, and detective fiction… All of Koontz’s novels are about how to live and his people are the main event. You can believe them. You can believe in them… He can be wickedly satirical and funny… he has a good deal of faith—like Dickens and Chekhov—in individuals.”

—Tampa Tribune

“Dean Koontz is as much philosopher as mystery weaver… as much mystic as realist, as much romantic as pragmatist.”

—Asbury Park Sunday Press

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2017 by Dean Koontz

Illustration copyright © 2017 Oliver Barrett

Motion design by Belief Agency

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Oliver Barrett

Content

Dean Koontz
RICOCHET JOE

1 FLASH FORWARD

2 AN ORDINARY JOE

3 ICE CREAM AND PAINFUL LOSS

4 ANOTHER TWO-HEADED CALF

5 WHERE THE WATERS OF TIME FLOW

6 THE MASQUERADE

7 HOUND OF THE HOUND

8 THE CHIEF

9 MADE STUPID BY LOVE

10 WHAT LIVES WITHIN

11 WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

12 NOTHING LESS THAN EVERYTHING

13 THE PUPPET

An excerpt from The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

PRAISE FOR DEAN KOONTZ

Copyright