Read Online Shadowfires by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

Her Mercedes was one level
farther up.
    Benny had wanted to bring his car, but Rachael had insisted on
driving her own. As long as she was behind the wheel, her hands were
occupied and her attention was partly on the road, so she
couldn't become morbidly preoccupied with the frightening situation in which she found herself. If she had nothing to do but brood about recent developments, she would very likely lose the tenuous self-control she now possessed. She had to remain busy in order to hold terror at arm's
length and stave off panic.
    They reached the second floor and kept going up.
    She said, “Benny, step away from the door.”
    “Huh?” He looked down from the lightboard, blinked in surprise
when he saw the pistol. “Hey, where the hell did you get that?”
    “Brought it from home.”
    “Why?”
    “Please step back. Quickly now, Benny,” she said shakily, aiming
at the doors.
    Still blinking, confused, he got out of the way.
“What's going on? You're not going to shoot anybody.”
    Her thunderous heartbeat was so loud that it muffled his voice and
made it sound as if he were speaking to her from a distance.
    They arrived at the third floor.
    The indicator board went ping! The 3 lighted. The
elevator stopped with a slight bounce.
    “Rachael, answer me. What is this?”
    She did not respond. She had gotten the gun after leaving Eric. A
woman alone ought to have a gun… especially after walking out on a
man like him. As the doors rolled open, she tried to remember what
her pistol instructor had said:
Don't jerk the trigger; squeeze it slowly, or you'll pull the muzzle
off target and miss.
    But no one was waiting for them, at least not in front of the
elevator. The gray concrete floor, walls, pillars, and ceiling looked
like those in the basement from which they'd begun their ascent. The silence was the same, too: sepulchral and somehow threatening. The air was less dank and far warmer than it had been three levels below, though it was every bit as still. A few of the ceiling lights were burned out or broken, so a greater number of shadows populated the huge room than had darkened the basement, and they seemed deeper as well, better suited for the complete concealment of an attacker, though perhaps her imagination painted them blacker than they really were.
    Following her out of the elevator, Benny said, “Rachael, who are
you afraid of?”
    “Later. Right now let's just get the hell out of here.”
    “But-”
    “Later.”
    Their footsteps echoed and reechoed hollowly off the concrete, and
she felt as if they were walking not through an ordinary parking
garage in Santa Ana but through the chambers of an alien temple,
under the eye of an unimaginably strange deity.
    At that late hour, her red 560 SL was one of only three cars
parked on the entire floor. It stood alone, gleaming, a hundred feet
from the elevator. She walked directly toward it, circled it warily.
No one crouched on the far side. Through the windows, she could see
that no one was inside, either. She opened the door, got in quickly.
As soon as Benny climbed in and closed his door, she hit the master
lock switch, started the engine, threw the car in gear, popped the
emergency brake, and drove too fast toward the exit ramp.
    As she drove, she engaged the safeties on her pistol and, with one
hand, returned it to her purse.
    When they reached the street, Benny said, “Okay, now tell me what
this cloak-and-dagger stuff is all about.”
    She hesitated, wishing she had not brought him this far into it.
She should have come to the morgue alone.
She'd been weak, needed to lean on him, but now if she didn't break
her dependency on him, if she drew him further into it, she would
without doubt be putting his life in jeopardy. She had no right to
endanger him.
    “Rachael?”
    She stopped at a red traffic light at the intersection of Main
Street and Fourth, where a hot summer wind blew a few scraps of
litter into the center of the crossroads and spun