Free Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz Page A

athletic socks, jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right; the waist is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt. The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket fit perfectly.
    He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized transmitter is connected to a series of watch batteries that seems to extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.
    Not paranoid after all.
    They’re coming.
    Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen counter, he urgently searches Jack’s body and takes the money out of the old man’s wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie’s purse, finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.
    When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent low with the weight of the thunder-heads. Rain by the megaton batters the earth.
    Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.
    On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and excitement.
    His destiny lies somewhere to the west.
    He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives. A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat, reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City, where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.
    The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with him.
    After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado, with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And Shane was set back there in Kansas—wasn’t it?—Jack Palance blowing away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz. Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends, mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway, obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail . . .
    Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV—which constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he possesses—flood his troubled mind, soothing him, and for a while he is lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his speed has fallen to forty miles