The Face. Dean Koontz

what?”

      “Probably nothing, maybe something. He’s either high wired or a natural-born headcase. And he’s got a pistol.”

      Hazard’s gaze tracked across Ethan’s face as though reading his secrets as readily as an optical scanner could decipher any bar pattern of Universal Product Code. “Thought you wanted me to check for gun registration.”

      “A neighbor told me,” Ethan lied. “Says Reynerd’s a little paranoid, keeps the piece close to himself most of the time.”

      While Ethan returned the computer-printed photos to the manila envelope, Hazard stared at him.

      The papers didn’t seem to fit in the envelope at first. Then for a moment the metal clasp was too large to slip through the hole in the flap.

      “You have a shaky envelope there,” said Hazard.

      “Too much coffee this morning,” Ethan said, and to avoid meeting Hazard’s eyes, he surveyed the lunchtime crowd.

      The flogged air of human voices flailed through the restaurant, beat against the walls, and what seemed, on casual attention, to be a celebratory roar sounded sinister when listened to with a more attentive ear, sounded now like the barely throttled rage of a mob, and now like the torment of legions under some cruel oppression.

      Ethan realized that he was searching face to face for one face in particular. He half expected to see toilet- drowned Dunny Whistler, dead but eating lunch.

      “You’ve hardly touched your salmon,” Hazard said in a tone of voice as close as he could ever get to motherly concern.

      “It’s off,” Ethan said.

      “Why didn’t you send it back?”

      “I’m not that hungry, anyway.”

      Hazard used his well-worn fork to sample salmon. “It’s not off.”

      “It tastes off to me,” Ethan insisted.

      The waitress returned with the lunch check and with pink bakery boxes full of walnut mamouls packed in a clear plastic bag bearing the restaurant’s logo.

      While Ethan fished a credit card from his wallet, the woman waited, her face a clear window to her thoughts. She wanted to flirt more with Hazard, but his daunting appearance made her wary.

      As Ethan returned the check with his American Express plastic, the waitress thanked him and glanced at Hazard, who licked his lips with theatrical pleasure, causing her to scurry off like a rabbit that had been so flattered by a fox’s admiration that she had almost offered herself for dinner before recovering her survival instinct.

      “Thanks for picking up the check,” Hazard said. “Now I can say Chan the Man took me to lunch. Though I think these mamouls are going to turn out to be the most expensive cookies I ever ate.”

      “This was just lunch. No obligations. Like I said, if you can’t, you can’t. Reynerd’s my problem, not yours.”

      “Yeah, but you’ve got me intrigued now. You’re a better flirt than the waitress.”

      Midst a clutter of darker emotions, Ethan found a genuine smile.

      A sudden change in the direction of the wind threw shatters of rain against the big windows.

      Beyond the hard-washed glass, pedestrians and passing traffic appeared to melt into ruin as though subjected to an Armageddon of flameless heat, a holocaust of caustic acid.

      Ethan said, “If he’s carrying a potato-chip bag, corn chips, anything like that, there might be more than snack food in it.”

      “This the paranoid part? You said he keeps his piece close.”

      “That’s what I heard. In a potato-chip bag, places like that, where he can reach for it, and you don’t realize what he’s doing.”

      Hazard stared at him, saying nothing.

      “Maybe it’s a nine-millimeter Glock,” Ethan added.

      “He have a nuclear weapon, too?”

      “Not that I know of.”

      “Probably keeps the nuke in a box of Cheez-Its.”

      “Just take a bagful of mamouls, and you can handle anything.”

      “Hell, yeah. Throw one of these, you’d crack a guy’s skull.”

      “Then eat the evidence.”

      The waitress returned with his credit card and the voucher.

      As Ethan added the gratuity and signed the form, Hazard seemed almost oblivious of the woman and did not once look at her.

      With needles of rain, the blustering wind tattooed ephemeral patterns on the window, and Hazard said, “Looks cold out there.”

      That was exactly what Ethan had been thinking.

       CHAPTER 11

      SLICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE same jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.

      Although his shirt wasn’t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he’d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.

      He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.

      Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a new order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.

      Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.

      He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.

      He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.

      To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.

      Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.

      Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.

      In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.

      She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.

      Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.

      Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.

      Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.

      If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.

      She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and