Free Last Light (Novella) by Dean Koontz Page A

suffocation.
    Lying atop her, his face next to hers, he let her see him.
    Her left eye bulged like that of a frightened horse.
    She struggled to suck in air, got instead the taste of a cotton pillowcase, perhaps the faintest flavor of feathers.
    He was reading her, savoring the panic that overwhelmed her mind.
    She was reading him, too, terrified not only of suffocating, but also of the images of his many victims with all the indignities and wounds that he had inflicted on them.
    Into her exquisitely shaped ear, Rainer whispered, “The cat wins Round Two.”
    He licked the lobe, the curve of helix.
    “Better run, little mouse. Far and fast.”
    He licked again.
    “Round Three comes later today,” he whispered. “After the last light.”
    His hot breath flushed back to him out of the delicate shell of her ear.
    “Enjoy your final sunset.”
    He clambered off her, to his feet, still jamming her face into the pillow.
    To leave her with a reminder of his great strength, he lifted her off the bed by the twist of hair and by the belt that held her jeans, and he threw her aside as if she weighed nothing and were of no consequence.
    * * *
    Pogo followed as the excited Labrador toured the master suite, bedroom and bath and walk-in closet, snout to the floor, sneezing to refresh his nasal passages, now whimpering as some quality of the spoor disturbed him.
    Earlier, when Makani first arrived, Bob had with great interest sniffed her shoes, her jeans, her hair. He would have made himself familiar with Rainer Sparks’s scent, which Makani carried on her from the encounter that she’d had with the sonofabitch in her house.
    But was that the scent troubling him now? And how would Sparks have found her so quickly? How could he have gotten into the house without setting off the alarm?
    Moments ago, leaving Makani in the guest bedroom, Pogo had wondered if he had been so caught up in the dog’s excited searching that he had missed something along the way. Suddenly he knew what had not registered with him.
    The alarm was set in the at-home mode. Sensors on all perimeter doors and windows were activated, but not any of the interior motion detectors. The garage doors were omitted from the system, so that Ollie Watkins wouldn’t set off the alarm every time he drove home and wouldn’t have to make a mad dash to the control pad to enter the disarming code. However, the door between the garage and the laundry room was included when the alarm was set in
either
the at-home mode or the away-from-home mode. Pogo had forgotten that detail. When he had opened that door to let Bob continue the search into the garage, the alarm had not sounded.
    Someone had turned it off without triggering the through-house tones that accompanied every entry made in any security-system keypad.
    Having made his way through the house from the laundry room, and having found the bedroom wing, Sparks might have gone first to the master bedroom. Maybe the dog had wanted to follow the spoor path as it had been laid down.
    But Sparks had not found his quarry here. He would not be in the master suite now.
    He would be in the second of two guest bedrooms. With Makani.
    “Bob, let’s go!”
    Berating himself for in fact being the dimwit that he’d long pretended to be, Pogo sprinted into the hallway and back to the room that he had left two minutes earlier. He threw open the door and crossed the threshold with the pistol in a two-hand grip, just in time to see Makani levitate inexplicably from the bed and seemingly fling herself six or eight feet across the room, where she hit the floor and tumbled against the armchair.
    Rainer Sparks was here, as invisible as a poltergeist. Pogo didn’t know where to aim, and he didn’t want to squeeze off a spray of bullets, for fear that one of them—directly or by ricochet—might hit Makani, also for fear that he would use all ten rounds without nailing Sparks, and then be weaponless.
    The Taser resolved his dilemma. The positive