Free Innocence: A Novel by Dean Koontz Page B

cross street that bisected the avenue on which the library fronted. I could see for several blocks.
    Emergency beacons flashing but without siren, a police sedan glided past on the avenue and arced left onto the cross street. No engine noise or squeal of tires rose to me, as if the panes of leaded glass were a window on a silent dream. When I had come to the city eighteen years earlier, it had been a brighter place. But in these days of electricity shortages and high energy prices, the buildings weren’t as brightly lighted as they once had been. As the car receded along the shadowy canyon of high-rises, the murky quality of the night conjured the illusion of an undersea metropolis in which the sedan was a blinking bathysphere descending an oceanic trench toward some deep enigma.
    Although the illusion lasted only a moment, it disturbed me to such an extent that a shiver of dread became a shudder, and my palms were suddenly damp enough that I needed to blot them on my jeans. I don’t see the future. I don’t have the ability to recognize an omen, let alone to interpret one. But that specter of a cold, drowned city resonated with me so profoundly that I could not lightly dismiss it as meaningless, yet I didn’t want to dwell on it.
    Assuring myself that what had really spooked me was the police sedan, I turned from the window and spoke into the darkness where the girl sat. “We better get out of here. If you’ve stolen something—”
    “I’ve stolen nothing. Just copied evidence.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of the case I’m building against the murdering thief.”
    “You’ve been in here before, at his computer.”
    “Several times, though he doesn’t know it.”
    “But he was chasing you.”
    “I came into the library an hour before closing time and hid in the nook behind that painting. Fell asleep and woke after midnight. I was climbing the south stairs with my flash when the door opened above me, the light came on, and there he was, as shocked to see me as I was to see him. First time he’d seen me in five years. He never works so late. Besides, he was supposed to be in Japan another two days on business. I guess he came back early.”
    “Five years. Since you were thirteen.”
    “The night he tried to rape me. The worst night of my life, and not only for that reason.”
    I waited for her to explain that curious comment, but when she didn’t, I said, “He’s above you on the stairs, you run, and you fake him out so he thinks you left the library.”
    “Not that easy. He chases me down the stairs. He’s fast. In the hallway, he catches me by the arm, swings me around, throws me to the floor. He drops to one knee, arm pulled back, going to punch me in the face.”
    “But here you are.”
    “Here I am because I have a Taser.”
    “You Tasered him.”
    “A Taser doesn’t drop a guy as hard if he’s really furious, if he’s hot with rage and flooded with adrenaline, totally wild. I should have given him another jolt or two after he went down and I got up, but all I wanted was away from him, so I ran.”
    “If he recovered that quick, he must really hate you.”
    “He’s had five years for the hate to distill. It’s pure now. Pure and potent.”
    She got up from the chair, a dark shape in a darker room.
    Stepping away from the window, I said, “Why does he hate you?”
    “It’s a long story. We better hide until they open in the morning. He’s not as smart as you might think a big-time curator would be. But if it dawns on him that maybe I’ve been here before at night and that maybe I didn’t leave the way it looked like I did, he’ll be back soon.”
    In the first soft flare of her flashlight, the girl’s painted face appeared both beautiful and eerie, as if she were a character in an edgy graphic novel in the manga style.
    I followed her into the reception lounge, marveling at the ease of our regard for each other, wondering if it might strengthen into friendship. However, if my own mother