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

you.”
        Leland looked up and saw her sitting on the foot of the bed. This time he was not the least bit surprised by her magical materialization. “It was so bad, Courtney,” he said.
        “Headache?
        “And nightmares.”
        “Did you ever go back to Dr. Penebaker?” she asked.
        “ No.”
        Her gentle voice came to him as if she were speaking from the far end of a tunnel. The hollow, distant tone was curiously in harmony with the shabby room. “You should have let Dr. Penebaker-”
        “I don't want to hear about Penebaker!”
        She said nothing more.
        Several minutes later he said, “I stood by you when your parents were killed in the accident. Why didn't you stand by me when things first started to go sour?”
        “Don't you remember what I told you then, George? I would have stood by you, if you had been willing to get help. But when you refused to admit that your headaches owl and your emotional problems might be caused by some-”
        “Oh, for Christ's sake, shut up! Shut up! You're a rotten, nagging, holier-than-thou bitch, and I don't want to listen to you.”
        She did not vanish, but neither did she speak again.
        Quite some time later he said, “We could have it as good as it once was, Courtney. Don't you agree?” He wanted her to agree more than he had ever wanted anything else.
        “I agree, George,” she said.
        He smiled. “It could be just like it was. The only thing that's really keeping us apart is this Doyle. And Colin, too. You were always closer to Colin than to me. If Doyle and Colin were dead, I'd be all you had. You would have to come back to me, wouldn't you?”
        “Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
        “We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?”
        “Yes.”
        “You'd let me touch you again.”
        “Yes, George.”
        “Let me sleep with you again.”
        “Yes.
        “Live with me?”
        “Yes.
        “And people would stop being nasty to me.
        “Yes.”
        “You're my lucky piece, always were. With you back, it would almost be as if the last two years never even happened.”
        “Yes,” she said.
        But it was no good. She was not as responsive and warm and open as he would have liked. indeed, talking with her was almost like talking with himself, a curiously masturbatory enterprise.
        Angry with her, he turned away and refused to talk any more. A few minutes later, when he looked back to see if she was showing any signs of contrition, he found that she had vanished. She had left him again. She was always leaving him. She was always going away to Doyle or Colin or somebody else and leaving him alone. He did not think that he could tolerate much more of that sort of treatment.
        
        A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the rest area off interstate 70, dome light and emergency blinkers flashing. Behind it, up on the clearing in the shelter of the pines, half a dozen other official cars were parked in a semicircle with their headlights on and engines running. Several portable kliegs had been hooked up to auxiliary batteries and arranged in another semicircle at the south edge of the clearing, facing the automobiles. In that vicinity, at least, night did not exist.
        The focus of all this was, of course, Lieutenant Pulham's cruiser. The bumpers and chrome trim glinted with cold, white light. In the glare, the windshield had been transformed into a mirror.
        Detective Ernie Hoval, who was in charge of the Pulham investigation, watched a lab technician photograph the five bloody fingerprints which were impressed so clearly on the inside of the right front car window, hundreds of fine red whorls. “They Pulham's prints?” he asked the lab man when the last of the shots had been aligned and taken.
        “I'll check in a minute.” The technician was thin, sallow, balding, with hands as delicate