Free Deeply Odd by Dean Koontz Page B

if I’d been able by then to come up with a line worthy of Cary Grant, before I could have delivered it, the director soaredthrough the roof of the elevator and disappeared. I had never known a ghost to be this exuberant, this frolicsome, and his apparent delight in his supernatural abilities flummoxed me.
    Stepping out of the elevator into the hallway lined with shops on the main floor of Star Truck, I spotted Mr. Hitchcock to my right, standing by the service-map kiosk in the lobby. He raised his right arm high and waved at me, as though I might not recognize him among the dozen or so truck drivers currently entering and leaving the building.
    As I approached, he winked out of existence—and then reappeared on the far side of the glass doors of the main entrance.
    Exiting the building, joining Mr. Hitchcock, I sensed the cowboy nearby, although he was nowhere in sight. Then I saw the ProStar+ receding along the exit lanes from Star Truck, speeding toward the Coast Highway.
    The roar of a nearer engine followed by the shrill squealing of brakes startled me backward. The superstretch Mercedes limo ran down Mr. Hitchcock and slid to a smoking-rubber stop in front of me.
    He couldn’t have been roadkill, of course, because he lacked material substance. He was just
gone
.
    Through the open window in the driver’s door, Mrs. Edie Fischer said, “Hurry, child, or we might lose him.”
    In the distance, the red-and-black rig disappeared into the underpass beneath the highway.
    I darted around the car, climbed in the front passenger seat, pulled my door shut, and glanced through the open privacy panel into the passenger compartment. “Where is he?”
    Of course Mrs. Fischer didn’t know that I was looking for Mr.Hitchcock, who I thought must have entered the limousine through the undercarriage.
    Perched on her booster pillow, barely able to see over the steering wheel, piloting the immense car around the service islands, she said, “You called him a flamboyant rhinestone cowboy, but I saw him, and there’s no honest honky-tonk in that man. He’s flam with none of the buoyant. All deceit, lies, trickery. Planning murder, is he? Child, you need to take him down.”
    “I knocked him flat with apples—Red Delicious, Granny Smiths—but even as much as I hate guns, I probably need one.”
    Indicating the purse on the seat between us, she said, “Take the pistol I showed you earlier.”
    “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
    “Sweetie, that gun’s even harder to trace than apples.”
    I didn’t feel that it was proper to open her purse, even though she invited me to do so. Besides, I didn’t have an immediate use for the weapon. For the time being, we were only following my enemy. I wasn’t going to shoot out his tires or leap from the speeding limo to the driver’s door of the truck. I’m not Tom Cruise. I’m not even Angelina Jolie.
    Entering one of the exit lanes, Mrs. Fischer accelerated toward the underpass. “Belt up,” she advised.
    By this point, I knew her well enough to take such advice without hesitation.
    Coming out of the underpass, ascending the curved on-ramp to the Coast Highway, she rapidly accelerated, as if the laws of physics did not apply to her. If we’d been in an SUV or an ordinary car, we might have demonstrated the power of centrifugal force, might have rolled off the roadway at the apex of the arc. The limo washeavy, however, with a low center of gravity, and we rocketed to the top of the ramp at launch speed.
    Contemptuous of the yield sign, Mrs. Fischer pressed great blasts of sound from the car horn as a warning to any motorists who might be approaching from behind her in the right-hand lane. The limo shot onto the highway, whistling south toward the targeted ProStar+.
    “Take it easy,” I warned. “We don’t want to catch him.”
    “But you said he’s going to murder three people. He has to be stopped.”
    “We’ll stop him, but not yet. We need to see where he’s