Free Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz Page B

indication of a serious degenerative condition or disease.
        Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children, entertain them, and prevent them from getting cranky for an entire busy day unless he was in extraordinarily good health. Speaking as the other half of the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, Paige was exhausted.
        Curiously, after putting away the popcorn, she found herself checking window and door locks.
        Last night Marty had been unable to explain his own heightened sense of a need for security. His trouble, after all, was internal.
        Paige figured it had been simple psychological transference. He had been reluctant to dwell on the possibility of brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages because those things were utterly beyond his control, so he had turned outward to seek enemies against which he might be able to take concrete action.
        On the other hand, perhaps he had been reacting on instinct to a real threat beyond conscious perception. As one who incorporated some Jungian theory into her personal and professional worldview, Paige had room for such concepts as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and intuition.
        Standing at the French doors in the family room, staring across the patio to the dark yard, she wondered what threat Marty might have sensed out there in a world that, throughout her lifetime, had become increasingly fraught with danger.
        His attention deviates from the road ahead only for quick glances at the strange shapes that loom out of the darkness and the rain on both sides of the highway. Broken teeth of rock thrust from the sand and scree as if a behemoth just beneath the earth is opening its mouth to swallow whatever hapless animals happen to be on the surface.
        Widely spaced clusters of stunted trees struggle to stay alive in a stark land where storms are rare and drenching downpours rarer still, gnarled branches bristle out of the mist, as jagged and chitinous as the spiky limbs of insects, briefly illuminated by headlights, thrashing in the wind for an instant but then gone.
        Although the Honda has a radio, the killer does not switch it on because he wants no distraction from the mysterious power which pulls him westward and with which he seeks communion. Mile by dreary mile, the magnetic attraction increases, and it is all that he cares about, he could no more turn away from it than the earth could reverse its rotation and bring tomorrow's sunrise in the west.
        He leaves the rain behind and eventually passes from under the ragged clouds into a clear night with stars beyond counting. Along part of the horizon, luminous peaks and ridges can be seen dimly, so distant they might define the edge of the world, like alabaster ramparts protecting a fairy-tale kingdom, the walls of Shangri-la in which the light of last month's moon still glimmers.
        Into the vastness of the Southwest he goes, past necklaces of light that are the desert towns of Tucumcari, Montoya, Cuervo, and then across the Pecos River.
        Between Amarillo and Albuquerque, when he stops for oil and gasoline, he uses a service-station restroom reeking of insecticide, where two dead cockroaches lie in a corner. The yellow light and dirty mirror reveal a reflection recognizably his but somehow different. His blue eyes seem darker and more fierce than he has ever seen them, and the lines of his usually open and friendly face have hardened.
        "I'm going to become someone," he says to the mirror, and the man in the mirror mouths the words in concert with him.
        At eleven-thirty Sunday night, when he reaches Albuquerque, he fuels the Honda at another truckstop and orders two cheeseburgers to go.
        Then he is off on the next leg of his journey-three hundred and twenty-five miles to Flagstaff, Arizona eating the sandwiches out of the white paper bags in which they came and into which drips fragrant grease,