Read Online Night Chills by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page A

days, just before you went home, you seemed to have made up your mind. You said that we were right for each other, that you just needed a little more time.” He had proposed to her last Christmas. Ever since, in bed and out, he had been trying to convince her that they were two halves of an organism, that neither of them could be whole without the other. In March, he thought he had made some headway. “Now,” he said, “you’ve changed your mind again.”
    She took his hand from her chin, and kissed the palm. “I’ve got to be sure.”
    “I’m not like your husband,” he said.
    “I know you’re not. You’re a—”
    “Very nice man?” he asked.
    “I need more time.”
    “How much more?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He studied her for a moment, then put the car in gear and drove back onto the blacktop. He switched on the radio.
    A few minutes later she said, “Are you angry?”
    “No. Just disappointed.”
    “You’re too positive about us,” she said. “You should be more careful. You should have some doubts like I do.”
    “I have no doubts,” he said. “We’re right for each other.”
    “But you should have doubts,” she said. “For instance, doesn’t it seem odd to you that I’m such a physical match for your first wife, for Annie? She was the same build as I am, the same size. She had the same color hair, the same eyes. I’ve seen those photographs of her.”
    He was a little upset by that. “Do you think I’ve fallen for you only because you remind me of her?”
    “You loved her a great deal.”
    “That has nothing to do with us. I just like sexy, dark women.” He smiled, trying to make a joke of it—both to convince her and to stop himself from wondering if she was at least partly right.
    She said, “Maybe.”
    “Dammit, there’s no maybe about it. I love you because you’re you, not because you’re like anyone else.”
    They rode in silence.
    The eyes of several deer glittered in the brush at the side of the road. When the car passed, the herd moved. Paul caught a glimpse of them in the rearview mirror—graceful, ghostly figures—as they crossed the pavement.
    At last Jenny said, “You’re so sure we’re meant for each other. Maybe we are—under the right circumstances. But Paul, all we’ve ever shared is good times. We’ve never known adversity together. We’ve never shared a painful experience. Marriage is full of big and little crises. My husband and I were fairly good together too, until the crises came. Then we were at each other’s throats. I just can’t ... I won’t gamble my future on a relationship that has never been tested with hard times.”
    “Should I start praying for sickness, financial ruin, and bad luck?”
    She sighed and leaned against him. “You make me sound foolish.”
    “I don’t mean to.”
    “I know.”
    Back in Black River, they shared one kiss and went to separate rooms to lie awake most of the night.

4
    Twenty-eight Months Earlier: Saturday, April 12, 1975
    The helicopter—a plush, luxuriously appointed Bell JetRanger II—chopped up the dry Nevada air and flung it down at the Las Vegas Strip. The pilot gingerly approached the landing pad on the roof of the Fortunata Hotel, hovered over the red target circle for a moment, then put down with consummate skill.
    As the rotors stopped churning overhead, Ogden Salsbury slid open his door and stepped out onto the hotel roof. For a few seconds he was disoriented. The cabin of the JetRanger had been air-conditioned. Out here, the air was like a parching gust from a furnace. A Frank Sinatra album was playing on a stereo, blasting forth from speakers mounted on six-foot-high poles. Sunlight reflected from the rippling water in the roof-top pool, and Salsbury was partially blinded in spite of his sunglasses. Somehow, he had expected the roof to bobble and sway under him as the helicopter had done; and when it did not, he staggered slightly.
    The swimming pool and the glass-walled recreation