Read Online The Bad Place by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

Karaghiosis—whose Greek-American family had been fans of Clint Eastwood from the earliest days of his first television show, “Rawhide”—was Bobby and Julie’s right-hand man at the office. He could be trusted to handle any problem. Bobby left a long message for him, summarizing the events at Decodyne and noting specific tasks that had to be done to wrap up the case.
    When he hung up, he stepped down into the adjoining family room, switched on the CD player, and put on a Benny Goodman disc. The first notes of “King Porter Stomp” brought the dead room to life.
    In the kitchen again, he got a quart can of eggnog from the refrigerator. They had bought it two weeks ago for their quiet, at-home, New Year’s Eve celebration, but had not opened it, after all, on the holiday. He opened it now and half-filled two waterglasses.
    From the bathroom he heard Julie make a tortured sound; she was finally throwing up. It was mostly just dry heaves because they had not eaten in eight or ten hours, but the spasms sounded violent. Throughout the night, Bobby had expected her to succumb to nausea, and he was surprised that she had retained control of herself this long.
    He retrieved a bottle of white rum from the bar cabinet in the family room and spiked each serving of eggnog with a double shot. He was gently stirring the drinks with a spoon to blend in the rum, when Julie returned, looking even grayer than before.
    When she saw what he was doing, she said, “I don’t need that.”
    “I know what you need. I’m psychic. I knew you’d toss your cookies after what happened tonight. Now I know you need this. ” He stepped to the sink and rinsed off the spoon.
    “No, Bobby, really, I can’t drink that.” The Goodman music didn’t seem to be energizing her.
    “It’ll settle your stomach. And if you don’t drink it, you’re not going to sleep.” Taking her by the arm, crossing the breakfast area, and stepping down into the family room, he said, “You’ll lie awake worrying about me, about Thomas”—Thomas was her brother—“about the world and everyone in it.”
    They sat on the sofa, and he did not turn on any lamps. The only light was what reached them from the kitchen.
    She drew her legs under her and turned slightly to face him. Her eyes shone with a soft, reflected light. She sipped the eggnog.
    The room was now filled with the strains of “One Sweet Letter From You,” one of Goodman’s most beautiful thematic statements, with a vocal by Louise Tobin.
    They sat and listened for a while.
    Then Julie said, “I’m tough, Bobby, I really am.”
    “I know you are.”
    “I don’t want you thinking I’m lame.”
    “Never.”
    “It wasn’t the shooting that made me sick, or using the Toyota to run that guy down, or even the thought of almost losing you—”
    “I know. It was what you had to do to Rasmussen.”
    “He’s a slimy little weasel-faced bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve to be broken like that. What I did to him stank.”
    “It was the only way to crack the case, because it wasn’t near cracked till we’d found out who hired him.”
    She drank more eggnog. She frowned down at the milky contents of her glass, as if the answer to some mystery could be found there.
    Following Tobin’s vocal, Ziggy Elman came in with a lusty trumpet solo, followed by Goodman’s clarinet. The sweet sounds made that boxy, tract-house room seem like the most romantic place in the world.
    “What I did... I did for The Dream. Giving Decodyne Rasmussen’s employer will please them. But breaking him was somehow . . . worse than wasting a man in a fair gunfight.”
    Bobby put one hand on her knee. It was a nice knee. After all these years, he was still sometimes surprised by her slenderness and the delicacy of her bone structure, for he always thought of her as being strong for her size, solid, indomitable. “If you hadn’t put Rasmussen in that vise and squeezed him, I would’ve done it.”
    “No, you