Free Last Light (Novella) by Dean Koontz Page B

and negative poles—two cold steel pegs—pressed against his neck, and mean centipedes skittered through him, their centuries of legs plucking chaos from his nerve fibers. The gun fell from his hands, and a second jolt from the Taser staggered him backward even as his knees buckled. Ink spilled through his vision when he hit the floor, but he blinked it away, leaving no permanent stain, and looked up just as an unseen man, seeming to speak directly above him, said, “Welcome to the game, you hopeless feeb.”
    The bedroom door that Pogo had flung open a moment ago now slammed shut, as if thrown by a fierce draft. Moving away through the house, like some overgrown and demented child, Rainer Sparks sang, “Two blind mice, two blind mice. See how they run, see how they run. Each of ’em ran in fear of its life, but I cut out their guts with a big freakin’ knife. Two blind mice.”
    There was a gnarly wave that some surfers called a “thunder crusher” and others called a “dumper,” a wave both steep and thick that broke straight down from the top and hit you like a wall of wet concrete, leaving you wiped out and your board broken. Pogo felt as if he had just been hammered by one.
    Crawling to the pistol, holding fast to it, struggling to his feet, he asked Makani if she was all right. She said she was okay, and when he opened the door, she begged him not to go after Sparks, but he went. He was still in the main hallway when the front door crashed shut. By the time Pogo made his way through the living room and across the foyer and outside to the front walkway, Sparks was either still working his mojo or he was gone.
    Pogo waited in the growing blackness of the setting moon until an engine started farther down the street. Crisp white headlights drilled the darkness. A white Mercedes SUV approached, picking up speed. As it roared past the cottage, Pogo couldn’t get a clear view of the driver, but he could see that the guy was big, hulking over the steering wheel as though he might be a troll that had immigrated to California from some sulfurous underworld.

15
Who Are We If We Are Not Us?
    Having been prosecuted by the sea more often than she could count, clamshelled and creamed and stacked on the rocks, Makani Miomio Hisoka-O’Brien was accustomed to aches and pains. Those bruises and abrasions with which Rainer Sparks had left her were not worth complaining about, and they certainly were not sufficient to rob her of courage.
    After washing down two Tylenol with beer, sitting at the kitchen table, holding an ice-pack on her left wrist, which had suffered a mild sprain, she said, “Anyway, there’s nowhere to run.”
    Although four years younger than Makani, Pogo had been biffed and dumped and quashed and rinse-cycled as often as any surfer his age. As he sat across the table from Makani, holding an ice pack to the back of his neck, he said, “What’s the freak expect—that we’ll slide away to Kansas, forget there’s such a thing as an ocean, hide out in a tornado cellar?”
    “That’s not me,” she said.
    “It’s not me, either.”
    “Not that there’s anything wrong with Kansas.”
    “Wild Bill Hickock was from Kansas.”
    “That alone justifies it,” she said.
    “Sparks is a big bastard, though.”
    “And invisible.”
    “There’s got to be a way around that.”
    “What way?”
    Bob the Labrador, who had been sitting beside Makani, his chin in her lap, raised his head and sniffed the plate on the table that had been set aside for him. It contained chunks of roast beef that were his reward for being the first to realize that Rainer Sparks was in the house.
    After Makani gave him one cube of meat and then another, he made a thin sound of entreaty, and she said, “You shouldn’t gobble them all at once, sweetie. Learn to savor, Bobby. Life’s all about savoring.”
    The dog lowered his big black head and rested his chin on her thigh once more.
    “I’m not changing my name and getting false