The Face. Dean Koontz

from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.

      You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.

      Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.

      Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.

      Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.

      Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”

      “You applying for the position?”

      “Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”

      “Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”

      “Literally?” Ethan asked.

      “Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”

      “If you’re about to make a collar—”

      “I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”

      “How about you and I have lunch, and Channing Manheim pays?”

      “As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”

      “Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.

      “They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.

      “There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”

      “Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”

      “I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”

      When he pressed end, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.

      His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.

      Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.

      In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.

      Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.

      With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.

       CHAPTER 6

      OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL WAS A tall white structure with ziggurat-style step-backs in its higher floors, crowned with a series of diminishing plinths that supported a final column. Aglow in the storm, a dome light capped the high column and was itself surmounted by a radio mast with a winking red aircraft-warning beacon.

      The hospital seemed to signal mercy to sick souls across the Angelean hills and into the densely populated flatlands. Its tapered shape suggested a rocket ship that might carry to Heaven those whose lives could not be saved either by medicine or by prayer.

      Ethan first stopped in the men’s lavatory off the ground-floor lobby, where he washed his hands vigorously at one of the sinks. The lab technician had not scraped every trace of blood from under his fingernails.

      The liquid soap in the dispenser proved to have a strong orange fragrance. The lavatory smelled like a citrus orchard by the time that he finished.

      Much hot water and much rubbing left his skin a boiled red. He could see no slightest stain remaining. Nevertheless Ethan felt that his hands were still unclean.

      He was troubled by the disturbing notion that as long as even a few molecules of that stigmatic residue of his foretold death clung to his hands, the Reaper would track him down by smell and cancel the reprieve that had been granted to him.

      Studying his reflection in the mirror, he half expected to see through his body, as through a sheer curtain, but he was solid.

      Sensing in himself the potential for obsession, concerned that he might wash his hands without surcease, until they were scrubbed raw, he quickly dried them on paper towels and left the men’s room.

      He shared an elevator with a solemn young couple holding hands for mutual strength. “She’ll be all right,” the man murmured, and the woman nodded, eyes bright with repressed tears.

      When Ethan got off at the seventh floor, the young couple rode farther up to higher misery.

      Duncan “Dunny” Whistler had been abed here on the seventh floor for three months. Between confinements to the intensive care unit—also on this floor—he was assigned to different rooms. During the five weeks since his most recent crisis, he’d been in Room 742.

      A nun with a kind Irish face made eye contact with Ethan, smiled, and passed by with nary a swish of her voluminous habit.

      The order of sisters that operated Our Lady of Angels rejected the modern garb of many nuns, which resembled the uniforms of airline flight attendants. They favored instead the traditional floor-length habits with commodious sleeves, guimpes, and winged wimples.

      Their habits were radiant white, rather than white and black. When Ethan saw them gliding ethereally along these halls, seeming less to walk than to drift like spirits, he could almost believe that the hospital did not occupy only Los Angeles real estate, but bridged this world and the next.

      Dunny had existed in a limbo of sorts, between worlds, ever since four angry men shoved his head in a toilet bowl once too often and held him under too long. The paramedics had pumped the water out of his lungs, but the doctors hadn’t been able to stir him from his coma.

      When Ethan arrived at Room 742, he found it in deep shadow. An old man rested in the bed nearest the door: unconscious, hooked to a ventilator that pumped air into him with a rhythmic wheeze.

      The bed nearest the window, where Dunny had spent the past five weeks, stood unoccupied. The sheets were crisp, fresh, luminous in the gloom.

      Drowned daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.

      When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.

      At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.

      Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.

      “I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”

      “When would this have been?” he asked.

      “He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”

      At