The Good Guy. Dean Koontz

      As if following the spoor of the now vanished coyote, Tim drove north. He turned left at the stop sign and headed downhill toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

      He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No one followed them.

      “Where do you want to stay?” he asked.

      “I’ll figure that out later.”

      Still in blue jeans and a midnight-blue sweater, she had added a camel-colored corduroy jacket. She held her purse on her lap, and her carryall was in the backseat.

      “Later when?”

      “After we’ve seen the guy you can trust, the one who can trace that license-plate number.”

      “I figured to go to him alone.”

      “Aren’t I presentable?”

      She was not as pretty as she had been in the photo, yet she struck him as somehow better looking. Her hair, such a dark brown that it seemed black, had been shorter than this, and calculatedly shaggy, when she had stood before the DMV camera.

      “Totally presentable,” he assured her. “But with you there, he’ll be uneasy. He’ll want to know more of what it’s about.”

      “So we tell him whatever sounds good.”

      “This isn’t a guy that I lie to.”

      “Is there one?”

      “One what?”

      “Never mind. Leave it to me. I’ll shine him up something he’ll like.”

      “Not you, either,” Tim said. “We walk the line with this guy.”

      “Who is he—your dad or something?”

      “I owe him a lot. He’s solid. Pedro Santo. Pete. He’s a robbery-homicide detective.”

      “So we’re going to the cops, after all?”

      “Unofficially.”

      They headed north along the coast. Southbound traffic was light. A few cars rocketed past them in excess of the speed limit, but none featured an emergency beacon.

      To the west, the house-crowded bluffs descended to unpopulated lowlands. Beyond coastal scrub and wide beaches, the Pacific folded the sky down to itself at a black horizon.

      Under the night-light of the sentinel moon, ruffled hems of surf and a decorative stitching that fringed the incoming waves suggested billows of fancy bedding under which the sea turned restlessly in sleep.

      After a silence, Linda said, “The thing is, I don’t much like cops.”

      She stared forward at the highway, but in the wash of headlights from approaching traffic, her unblinking eyes seemed to be focused on some other scene.

      He waited for her to continue, but when she lapsed into silence again, he said, “Is there something I should know? Have you been in trouble sometime?”

      She blinked. “Not me. I’m as straight as a new nail that never met a hammer.”

      “Why does that sound to me like there was a hammer, maybe a lot of hammers, but you didn’t bend?”

      “I don’t know. I don’t know why it sounds that way to you. Maybe you’re always inferring hidden meaning when none is implied.”

      “I’m just a bricklayer.”

      “Most car mechanics I know—they think deeper than any college professor I’ve ever met. They have to. They live in the real world. A lot of masons must be the same.”

      “There’s a reason we call ourselves stoneheads.”

      She smiled. “Nice try.”

      At Newport Coast Road, he turned right and headed inland. The land rose ahead, and behind them the sea was pressed down under a growing weight of night.

      “I know this carpenter,” she said, “who loves metaphors because he thinks life itself is a metaphor, with mystery and hidden meaning in every moment. You know what a metaphor is?”

      He said, “‘My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.’”

      “Not bad for a stonehead.”

      “It’s not mine. I heard it somewhere.”

      “You remember where. The way you said it, you remember. Anyway, if this Santo is sharp, he’ll know I don’t like cops.”

      “He’s sharp. But there’s nothing not to like about him.”

      “I’m sure he’s a great guy. It’s not his fault if sometimes the law has no humility.”

      Tim sifted those words a few times but was left with no meaning in his net.

      “Maybe your friend is a boy scout with a badge,” she said, “but cops spook me. And not just cops.”

      “Want to tell me what this is about?”

      “It’s not about anything. It’s just the way I am.”

      “We need help, and Pete Santo can give it.”

      “I know. I’m just saying.”

      When they topped the last of a series of hills, inland Orange County shimmered below them, a great panoply of millions of lights, a challenge to the stars, which were dimmed by this dazzle.

      She said, “It seems so formidable, so solid, so enduring.”

      “What does?”

      “Civilization. But it’s as fragile as glass.” She glanced at him. “I better shut up. You’re starting to think I’m a nut case.”

      “No,” Tim said. “Glass makes sense to me. Glass makes perfect sense.”

      They traveled miles without speaking, and after a while he realized that theirs had become a comfortable silence. The night beyond the windows was an oblivion machine waiting to be triggered, but here in the Explorer, a kind of peace took temporary residence in his heart, and he felt that something good could happen, even something fine.

       Seven

      After walking through the entire bungalow, boldly turning on lights as he went, Krait returned to the bedroom.

      The inexpensive white chenille bedspread was as smooth as the bedding of a military man. Not one tangle spoiled the fringed hem.

      Krait had been in houses where the beds were unmade and the sheets were too seldom changed. Sloppiness offended him.

      If a gun were allowed, an untidy person could be killed from a distance of at least a few feet. Then it mattered less that the target didn’t change underwear every day.

      Often, however, the contract specified strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning, or another more intimate method of execution. If the victim turned out to be a slob, a potentially enjoyable task could become a distasteful chore.

      When a person was being garroted from behind, for instance, he would in desperation attempt to reach back and blind his assailant. You could easily keep your eyes safe, but the victim might pull at your cheek, grip your chin, brush fingers across your lips, and if you suspected he was the type who didn’t always wash his hands after using the men’s room, you sometimes wondered if the good pay and the many benefits of your job really outweighed the negatives.

      Linda Paquette’s closet was small and orderly. She didn’t have a lot of clothes.

      Krait liked the simplicity of her wardrobe. He himself had always been a person of simple tastes.

      From the shelf above the hanging garments, he took down a few boxes. None of them contained anything