Free Darkfall by Dean Koontz Page B

her chest!”
    Jack fell back in the chair, laughing harder.
    Rebecca stood over him, looking down, grinning. “I saw the way you were drooling over her.”
    “Not me,” he managed between gales of laughter.
    “Yes, you. Positively drooling. But you might as well forget about her, Jack. She wouldn’t have you.”
    “Oh?”
    “Well, you’ve got a bit of Irish blood in you. Isn’t that right? Your grandmother was Irish, right?” Imitating Shelly Parker’s voice again, she said, “‘Oh, there’s nothing worse than those damned, Pope-kissing, potato-sucking Irish.’”
    Jack howled.
    Rebecca sat on the sofa. She was laughing, too. “And you’ve got some British blood, too, if I remember right.”
    “Oh, yes,” he said, gasping. “I’m a tea-swilling limey, too.”
    “Not as bad as a Sherpa,” she said.
    They were convulsed with laughter when one of the uniformed cops looked in from the hallway. “What’s going on?” he asked.
    Neither of them was able to stop laughing and tell him.
    “Well, show some respect, huh?” he said. “We have two dead men here.”
    Perversely, that admonition made everything seem even funnier.
    The patrolman scowled at them, shook his head, and went away.
    Jack knew it was precisely because of the presence of death that Shelly Parker’s conversations with Rebecca had seemed so uproariously funny. After having encountered four hideously mutilated bodies in as many days, they were desperately in need of a good laugh.
    Gradually, they regained their composure and wiped the tears from their eyes. Rebecca got up and went to the windows and stared out at the snow flurries. For a couple of minutes, they shared a most companionable silence, enjoying the temporary but nonetheless welcome release from tension that the laughter had provided.
    This moment was the sort of thing Jack couldn’t have explained to the guys at the poker game last week, when they’d been putting Rebecca down. At times like this, when the other Rebecca revealed herself—the Rebecca who had a sly sense of humor and a gimlet eye for life’s absurdities—Jack felt a special kinship with her. Rare as those moments were, they made the partnership workable and worthwhile—and he hoped that eventually this secret Rebecca would come into the open more often. Perhaps, someday, if he had enough patience, the other Rebecca might even replace the ice maiden altogether.
    As usual, however, the change in her was short-lived. She turned away from the window and said, “Better go talk with the M.E. and see what he’s found.”
    “Yeah,” Jack said. “And let’s try to stay glum-faced from now on, Chandler. Let’s show them we really do have the proper respect for death.”
    She smiled at him, but it was only a vague smile now.
    She left the room.
    He followed.

2
    As Nayva Rooney stepped into the hall, she closed the door to the kids’ bedroom behind her, so that the rat —or whatever it was—couldn’t scurry back in there.
    She searched for the intruder in Jack Dawson’s bedroom, found nothing, and closed the door on that one, too.
    She carefully inspected the kitchen, even looked in cupboards. No rat. There were two doors in the kitchen; one led to the hall, the other to the dining alcove. She closed them both, sealing the critter out of that room, as well.
    Now, it simply had to be hiding in the dining alcove or the living room.
    But it wasn’t.
    Nayva looked everywhere. She couldn’t find it.
    Several times she stopped searching just so she could hold her breath and listen. Listen.... Not a sound.
    Throughout the search, in all the rooms, she hadn’t merely looked for the elusive little beast itself but also for a hole in a partition or in the baseboard, a breach big enough to admit a largish rat. She discovered nothing of that sort.
    At last, she stood in the archway between the living room and the hall. Every lamp and ceiling light was blazing. She looked around, frowning, baffled.
    Where had it gone?