Free From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz Page B

had not been a busy man with such varied interests; his cultural aspirations were greater than the time he was able to devote to them.
    Vanadium said, “Do you know who I am, Enoch?”
    Thomas Big Butt Vanadium.
    “Do you know
what
I am?”
    Pimple on the ass of humanity.
    “No,” said Vanadium, “you only think you know who I am and what I am, but you don’t know anything. That’s all right. You’ll learn.”
    This guy was spooky. Junior was beginning to think that the detective’s unorthodox behavior wasn’t a carefully crafted strategy, as it had first seemed, but that Vanadium was a little wacky.
    Whether the cop was unhinged or not, Junior had nothing to gain by talking to him, especially in this disorienting darkness. He was exhausted, achy, with a sore throat, and he couldn’t trust himself to be as self-controlled as he would need to be in any interrogation conducted by this brush-cut, thick-necked toad.
    He stopped straining to see through the black room to the corner armchair. He closed his eyes and tried to lull himself to sleep by summoning into his mind’s eye a lovely but calculatedly monotonous scene of gentle waves breaking on a moonlit shore.
    This was a relaxation technique that had worked often before. He had learned it from a brilliant book,
How to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis.
    Junior Cain was committed to continuous self-improvement. He believed in the need constantly to expand his knowledge and horizons in order to better understand himself and the world. The quality of one’s life was solely the responsibility of oneself.
    The author of
How to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis
was Dr. Caesar Zedd, a renowned psychologist and best-selling author of a dozen self-help texts, all of which Junior owned in addition to the literature that he had acquired from the book club. When he had been only fourteen, he’d begun buying Dr. Zedd’s titles in paperback, and by the time he was eighteen, when he could afford to do so, he’d replaced the paperbacks with hardcovers and thereafter bought all the doctor’s new books in the higher-priced editions.
    The collected works of Zedd constituted the most thoughtful, most rewarding, most reliable guide to life to be found anywhere. When Junior was confused or troubled, he turned to Caesar Zedd and never failed to find enlightenment, guidance. When he was happy, he found in Zedd the welcome reassurance that it was all right to be successful and to love oneself.
    Dr. Zedd’s death, just last Thanksgiving, had been a blow to Junior, a loss to the nation, to the entire world. He considered it a tragedy equal to the Kennedy assassination one year previous.
    And like John Kennedy’s death, Zedd’s passing was cloaked in mystery, inspiring widespread suspicion of conspiracy. Only a few believed that he had committed suicide, and Junior was certainly not one of those gullible fools. Caesar Zedd, author of
You Have a Right to Be Happy,
would never have blown his brains out with a shotgun, as the authorities preferred the public to believe.
    “Would you pretend to wake up if I tried to smother you?” asked Detective Vanadium.
    The voice had come not from the armchair in the corner, but from immediately beside the bed.
    If Junior had not been so deeply relaxed by the soothing waves breaking on the moonlit beach in his mind, he might have cried out in surprise, might have bolted upright in bed, betraying himself and confirming Vanadium’s suspicion that he was conscious.
    He hadn’t heard the cop get out of the chair and cross the dark room. Difficult to believe that any man with such a hard gut slung over his belt, with a bull neck folded over his too-tight shirt collar, and with a second chin more prominent than the first could be capable of such supernatural stealth.
    “I could introduce a bubble of air into your IV needle,” the detective said quietly, “kill you with an embolism, and they would never know.”
    Lunatic. No doubt