Free Strange Highways by Dean Koontz Page A

pounding out “Rosalita,” “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers—and all of them were new songs, the big hits of the day, although Joey had been listening to them on other radios in far places for twenty years.
    By the time he had recounted his recent experiences to the point at which he had seen her disabled Valiant, they had reached the top of the long slope above Coal Valley. He coasted to a stop in gravel at the side of the road, beside a lush stand of mountain laurels, though he knew that they couldn’t linger for long without risking a reassertion of the pattern of fate that would result in her murder and in his return to living damnation.
    Coal Valley was more a village than it was a town. Even before the insatiable mine fire had eaten a maze of tunnels under the place, Coal Valley had been home to fewer than five hundred people. Simple frame houses with tar-shingle roofs. Yards full of peonies and lush huckleberry bushes in the summer, hidden under deep blankets of snow in the winter. Dogwood trees that blazed white and pink and purple in the spring. A small branch of County First National Bank. A one-truck volunteer fire station. Polanski’s Tavern, where mixed drinks were rarely requested and most orders were for beer or for beer with shooters of whiskey on the side, where huge jars of pickled eggs and hot sausages in spicy broth stood on the bar. A general store, one service station, a small elementary school.
    The village wasn’t big enough to have streetlights, but before the government had finally begun condemning properties and offering compensation to the dispossessed, Coal Valley had produced a respectable warm glow in its snug berth among the surrounding night-clad hills. Now all the small businesses were shuttered and dark. The beacon of faith in the church belfry had been extinguished. Lights shone at only three houses, and those would be switched off forever when the final residents departed before Thanksgiving.
    On the far side of town, an orange glow rose from a pit where the fire in one branch of the mine maze had burned close enough to the surface to precipitate a sudden subsidence. There the seething subterranean inferno was exposed, where otherwise it remained hidden under the untenanted houses and the heat-cracked streets.
    “Is he down there?” Celeste asked, as though Joey might be able to sense clairvoyantly the presence of their faceless enemy.
    The fitful precognitive flashes he had experienced thus far were beyond his control, however, and far too enigmatic to serve as a map to the lair of the killer. Besides, he suspected that the whole point of his being allowed to replay this night was to give him the chance to succeed or fail, to do right or do wrong, drawing only on the depth of his own wisdom, judgment, and courage. Coal Valley was his testing ground. No guardian angel was going to whisper instructions in his ear—or step between him and a razor-sharp knife flashing out of shadows.
    “He could’ve driven straight through town without stopping,” Joey said. “Could’ve gone to Black Hollow Highway and maybe from there to the turnpike. That’s the route I usually took back to college. But … I think he’s down there, somewhere down there. Waiting.”
    “For us?”
    “He waited for me after he turned off the county route onto Coal Valley Road. Just stopped on the roadway and waited to see if I was going to follow him.”
    “Why would he do that?”
    Joey suspected that he knew the answer. He sensed suppressed, sharp-toothed knowledge swimming like a shark in the lightless sea of his subconscious, but he couldn’t entice it to surface. It would soar out of the murky depths and come for him when he was least expecting
    “Sooner or later we’ll find out,” he said.
    He knew in his bones that confrontation was inevitable. They were captured by the fierce gravity of a black hole, pulled toward an inescapable and crushing truth.
    On the far side of Coal Valley, the