Free Forever Odd by Dean Koontz Page A

They are far more skilled than I am at teasing valuable observations from witnesses.
        I walked slowly north to the end of the block. Then I turned and walked south, past the Blue Moon.
        Trucks were angled between the Dumpsters; early deliveries were being received, inspected, inventoried. Shopkeepers, almost an hour ahead of their employees, were busy at the rear entrances of their establishments.
        Death came, Death went, but commerce flowed eternal.
        A few people noticed me. I knew none of them well, some of them not at all.
        The character of their recognition was uncomfortably familiar to me. They knew me as the hero, as the guy who stopped the lunatic who had shot all those people the previous August.
        Forty-one were shot. Some were crippled for life, disfigured. Nineteen died.
        I might have prevented all of it. Then I might have been a hero.
        Chief Porter says hundreds would have perished if I hadn’t acted when I did, how I did. But the potential victims, those spared, do not seem real to me.
        Only the dead seem real.
        None of them have lingered. They all moved on.
        But too many nights I see them in my dreams. They appear as they were in life, and as they might have been if they had survived.
        On those nights, I wake with a sense of loss so terrible that I would prefer not ever to wake again. But I do wake, and I go on, for that is what the daughter of Cassiopeia, one of the nineteen, would want me to do, would expect me to do.
        I have a destiny that I must earn. I live to earn it, and then to die.
        The only benefit of being tagged a hero is that you are regarded by most people with some degree of awe and that, by playing to this awe, by wearing a somber expression and avoiding eye contact, you can almost always ensure that your privacy will be respected.
        Wandering the alleyway, occasionally observed but undisturbed, I came to a narrow undeveloped lot. A chain-link fence restricted access.
        I tried the gate. Locked.
        A sign declared maravilla county flood-control project, and in red letters warned authorized personnel only.
        Here I discovered the unspooled ribbon of my sixth sense. Touching the chain-link gate, I felt certain that Danny had gone this way.
        A lock would be no impediment to a determined fugitive like Simon Makepeace, whose criminal skills had been enhanced by years of prison learning.
        Beyond the fence, in the center of the lot, stood a ten-foot-square slump-stone building with a concrete barrel-tile roof. The two plank doors on the front of this structure were no doubt also locked, but the hardware looked ancient.
        If Danny had been forced through this gate and through those doors, as I sensed he had been, Simon had not chosen this route on impulse. This had been part of his plan.
        Or perhaps he had intended to retreat here only if things went badly at Dr. Jessup’s place. Because of my timely arrival at the radiologist’s house and because of Chief Porter’s decision to block both highways, they had come here.
        After parking in the Blue Moon lot, Simon had not put Danny in another vehicle. They had instead gone through this gate, through those doors, and down into a world below Pico Mundo, a world that I knew existed but that I had never visited.
        My first impulse was to reach Chief Porter and to share what I intuited.
        Turning away from the fence, I felt restrained by a subsequent intuition: Danny’s situation was so tenuous that a traditional search party, pursuing them into the depths, would likely be the death of him.
        Furthermore, I sensed that while his situation might be grave, he was not in imminent danger. In this particular chase, speed wasn’t as important as stealth, and the pursuit would be successful only if I remained acutely observant of every detail the trail provided.
        I had