Read Online Lightning by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

took a direct route home, making no effort to skirt the known police inspection stations. His papers were in order; his exemption from curfew was current; and he was no longer transporting illegally obtained explosives.
    In his apartment he set the alarm on the large bedside clock and fell almost immediately to sleep. He desperately needed his rest because, in the afternoon to come, there would be two arduous journeys and much killing. If he was not fully alert, he might find himself on the wrong end of a bullet.
    His dreams were of Laura, which he interpreted as a good omen.

Two
    THE ENDURING FLAME

1
    Laura Shane was swept from her twelfth through her seventeenth years as if she were a tumbleweed blown across the California deserts, coming to rest briefly here and there in becalmed moments, torn loose and sent rolling again as soon as the wind gusted.
    She had no relatives, and she could not stay with her father’s best friends, the Lances. Tom was sixty-two, and Cora was fifty-seven, and though married thirty-five years, they had no children. The prospect of raising a young girl daunted them.
    Laura understood and bore no grudge against them. On the day in August when she left the Lance house in the company of a woman from the Orange County Child Welfare Agency, Laura kissed both Cora and Tom and assured them that she would be fine. Riding away in the social worker’s car, she waved gaily, hoping they felt absolved.
    Absolved. That word was a recent acquisition. Absolved: freed from the consequences of one’s actions; to set free or release from some duty, obligation, or responsibility. She wished that she could grant herself absolution from the obligation to make her way in the world without the guidance of a loving father, absolution from the responsibility to live and carry on his memory.
    From the Lances’ house she was conveyed to a child shelter—the McIlroy Home—an old, rambling, twenty-seven-room Victorian mansion built by a produce magnate in the days of Orange County’s agricultural glory. Later it had been converted to a dormitory where children in public custody were housed temporarily between foster homes.
    That institution was unlike any she had read about in fiction. For one thing, it lacked kindly nuns in flowing black habits.
    And there was Willy Sheener.
    Laura first noticed him shortly after arriving at the home, while a social worker, Mrs. Bowmaine, was showing her to the room she would share with—she had been told—the Ackerson twins and a girl named Tammy. Sheener was sweeping a tile-floored hallway with a pushbroom.
    He was strong, wiry, pale, freckled, about thirty, with hair the color of a new copper penny and green eyes. He smiled and whistled softly while he worked. “How’re you this morning, Mrs. Bowmaine?”
    “Right as rain, Willy.” She clearly liked Sheener. “This is Laura Shane, a new girl. Laura, this is Mr. Sheener.”
    Sheener stared at Laura with a creepy intensity. When he managed to speak, the words were thick, “Uhhh ... welcome to McIlroy.”
    Following the social worker, Laura glanced back at Sheener. With no one but Laura to see, he lowered one hand to his crotch and lazily massaged himself.
    Laura did not look at him again.
    Later, as she was unpacking her meager belongings, trying to make her quarter of the third-floor bedroom more like home, she turned and saw Sheener in the doorway. She was alone, for the other kids were at play in the backyard or the game room. His smile was different from the one with which he’d favored Mrs. Bowmaine: predatory, cold. Light from one of the two small windows fell across the doorway and met his eyes at such an angle as to make them appear silver instead of green, like the cataract-filmed eyes of a dead man.
    Laura tried to speak but could not. She edged backward until she came up against the wall beside her bed.
    He stood with his arms at his sides, motionless, hands fisted.
    The McIlroy Home was not air conditioned. The