Free Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz Page B

The twin windows of his eyes and the view of Hell beyond.
    Harry was no less surprised to be alive now than when they had pulled the dead man and the department-store dummies off him. His stomach still ached dully where the plaster hand of the mannequin had poked into him with the full weight of the perp behind it. He’d thought he’d been shot. The perp had fired twice at close range, but evidently both rounds had been deflected by the intervening plaster torsos and limbs.
    Of the five rounds that Harry had fired, at least three had done major damage.
    Plainclothes detectives and techs passed in and out of the nearby, bullet-torn kitchen door, on their way to or from the second floor and attic. Some spoke to him or clapped him on the shoulder.
    “Good work, Harry.”
    “Harry, you okay?”
    “Nice job, man.”
    “You need anything, Harry?”
    “Some shitstorm, huh, Harry?”
    He murmured “thanks” or “yes” or “no” or just shook his head. He wasn’t ready for conversation with any of them, and he certainly wasn’t ready to be a hero.
    A crowd had gathered outside, pressing eagerly againstpolice barriers, gawking through both broken and unbroken windows. He tried to ignore them because too many of them seemed to resemble the perp, their eyes shining with a fever glaze and their pleasant everyday faces unable to conceal strange hungers.
    Connie came through the swinging door from the kitchen, righted an overturned chair, and sat at the table with him. She held a small notebook from which she read. “His name was James Ordegard. Thirty-one. Unmarried. Lived in Laguna. Engineer. No police record. Not even a traffic citation.”
    “What’s his connection with this place? Ex-wife, girlfriend work here?”
    “No. So far we can’t find a connection. Nobody who works here remembers ever seeing him before.”
    “Carrying a suicide note?”
    “Nope. Looks like random violence.”
    “They talk to anyone where he works?”
    She nodded. “They’re stunned. He was a good worker, happy—”
    “The usual model citizen.”
    “That’s what they say.”
    The photographer took a few more shots of the nearest corpse—a woman in her thirties. The strobe flashes were jarringly bright, and Harry realized that the day beyond the windows had grown overcast since he and Connie had come in for lunch.
    “He have friends, family?” Harry asked.
    “We have names, but we haven’t talked to them yet. Neighbors either.” She closed the notebook. “How you doin’?”
    “I’ve been better.”
    “How’s your gut?”
    “Not bad, almost normal. It’ll be a lot worse tomorrow. Where the hell did he get the grenades?”
    She shrugged. “We’ll find out.”
    The third grenade, dropped through the attic trapdoorinto the room below, had caught a Laguna Beach officer by surprise. He was now in Hoag Hospital, desperately clinging to life.
    “Grenades.” Harry was still disbelieving. “You ever hear anything like it?”
    He was immediately sorry he had asked the question. He knew it would get her started on her favorite subject—the pre-millennium cotillion, the continuing crisis of these new Dark Ages.
    Connie frowned and said, “Ever hear anything like it? Not like, maybe, but just as bad, worse, lots worse. Last year in Nashville, a woman killed her handicapped boyfriend by setting his wheelchair on fire.”
    Harry sighed.
    She said, “Eight teenagers in Boston raped and killed a woman. You know what their excuse was? They were bored. Bored. The city was at fault, you see, for doing so little to provide kids with free leisure activities.”
    He glanced at the people crowding the crime-scene barriers beyond the front windows—then quickly averted his eyes.
    He said, “Why do you collect these nuggets?”
    “Look, Harry, it’s the Age of Chaos. Get with the times.”
    “Maybe I’d rather be an old fogey.”
    “To be a good cop in the nineties, you’ve gotta be
of
the nineties. You gotta be in sync with the