Read Online The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

here in the real world, it’s a little paranoid, don’t you think?”
     
    He was right, and she couldn’t sustain her anger with him. As her fury faded, so did her strength, and she sank back against the pillows once more. “Could two people really look so much alike?”
     
    “I’ve heard it said that everyone has an unrelated twin somewhere in the world, what some people call a ’doppelgänger.’”
     
    “Maybe,” Susan said, unconvinced. “But this was ... different. It was weird. I’d swear he recognized me, too. He smiled so strangely. And he—winked at me!”
     
    For the first time since he had returned to her room, McGee smiled. “Winked at you? Well, there’s certainly nothing strange or uncanny about that, dear lady.” His intensely blue eyes sparkled with amusement. “In case you didn’t know it, men frequently wink at attractive women. Now don’t tell me you’ve never been winked at before. Don’t tell me you’ve spent your life in a nunnery or on a desert island.” He grinned.
     
    “There’s nothing attractive about me at the moment,” she insisted.
     
    “Nonsense.”
     
    “My hair needs a real washing, not just brushed with powder. I’m emaciated, and I’ve got bags under my eyes. I hardly think I inspire romantic thoughts in my present condition.”
     
    “You’re being too hard on yourself. Emaciated? No. You’ve just got a haunting Audrey Hepburn quality.”
     
    Susan resisted his charm, which wasn’t easy. But she was determined to say everything that was on her mind. “Besides, it wasn’t that kind of wink.”
     
    “Ahhhh,” he said. “So now you admit you’ve been winked at in the past. Suddenly you’re an expert on winking.”
     
    She refused to be coaxed and kidded into forgetting the man who had stepped out of the elevator.
     
    “What kind of wink was it, exactly?” he asked, a teasing tone still in his voice.
     
    “It was a smartass wink. Smug. There wasn’t anything at all flirtatious about it, either. It wasn’t warm and friendly, like a wink ought to be. It was cold. Cold and smug and nasty and ... somehow threatening,” she said, but even as she spoke she realized how ludicrous it sounded to give such an exhaustively detailed interpretation to something as simple as a wink.
     
    “It’s a good thing I didn’t ask you to interpret his entire facial expression,” McGee said. “We’d have been here until tomorrow morning!”
     
    Susan finally succumbed: She smiled. “I guess it does sound pretty silly, huh?”
     
    “Especially since we know for a fact that his name’s Bill Richmond and that he’s only twenty-one.”
     
    “So the wink was just a wink, and the threat was all in my head?”
     
    “Don’t you figure that’s probably the case?” he asked diplomatically.
     
    She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. And I suppose I should apologize for causing so much trouble about this.”
     
    “It wasn’t any trouble,” he said graciously.
     
    “I’m awfully tired, weak, and my perceptions aren’t as sharp as they should be. Last night, I dreamed about Harch, and when I saw that man step out of the elevator, looking so much like Harch, I just ... lost my head. I panicked.”
     
    That was a difficult admission for her to make. Other people might act like Chicken Little at the slightest provocation, but Susan Kathleen Thorton expected herself to remain—and previously always had remained—calm and collected through any crisis that fate threw at her. She had been that way since she was just a little girl, for the circumstances of her lonely childhood had required her to be totally self-reliant. She hadn’t even panicked in the House of Thunder, when Ernest Harch had kicked in Jerry’s skull; she had run, had hidden, had survived—all because she had kept her wits about her at a time when most people, if thrust into the same situation, would surely have lost theirs. But now she had panicked; worse, she had let others see her