Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

grinned at him. “For a cop, you’re fun.”

      “I majored in banter at the police academy.”

      “Isn’t he fun?” Jenna asked Carson.

      Rather than stuff one or both of them into a damn cookie jar, Carson said impatiently, “Miss Parker, how long have you been Jonathan Harker’s neighbor?”

      “I moved in about eleven months ago. From day one, he was a sweetie.”

      “A sweetie? Did you and he …”

      “Oh, no. Johnny was a man, yeah, and you know what they’re like, but we were just good buds.” To Michael, she said, “That thing I just said about men – no offense.”

      “None taken.”

      “I like men,” she said.

      “I don’t,” he assured her.

      “Anyway, I’ll bet you’re not like other men. Except where it counts.”

      “Peu de chose,” he said.

      “Oh, I’ll bet it’s not,” Jenna said, and winked.

      Carson said, “Define ‘buds’ for me.”

      “Once in a while Johnny would come over for dinner or I’d go across the hall to his place. He’d cook pasta. We’d talk about life, you know, and destiny, and modern dance.”

      Boggled, Carson said, “Modern dance? Harker?”

      “I was a dancer before I finally got real and became a dental hygienist.”

      Michael said, “For a long time, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

      “That’s very brave,” Jenna said with admiration.

      Michael shrugged and looked humble.

      Carson said, “Miss Parker, were you conscious any time after he chloroformed you?”

      “On and off, yeah.”

      “Did he talk to you during this? Did he say why?”

      “I think maybe he said having sex with me would be like having sex with a monkey.”

      Carson was nonplussed for a moment. Then she said, “You think he said it?”

      “Well, with the chloroform and whatever he pumped into me through the IV, I was sort of in and out of it. And to be perfectly frank, I was going out to a party when he grabbed me, and I had a little bit of a pre-party buzz on. So maybe he said it or maybe I dreamed he said it.”

      “What else did you maybe dream he said?”

      “He told me I was pretty, a fine example of my species, which was nice, but he said that he was one of the new race. Then this weird thing.”

      “I wondered when this would get weird,” Michael said.

      “Johnny said he wasn’t allowed to reproduce but was reproducing anyway, dividing like an ameba.”

      Even as those words chilled Carson, they invoked in her a sense of the absurd that made her feel as if she were a straight man in a burlesque revival. “What do you think he meant by that?”

      “Well, then he pulled up his T-shirt, and his belly was like a scene from Alien, all this squirming inside, so I’m pretty sure all of that was just the drugs.”

      Carson and Michael exchanged a look. She would have liked to pursue this subject, but doing so would alert Jenna to the fact that she might have experienced what she thought she had only dreamed.

      Jenna sighed. “He was a sweetie, but sometimes he could get so down, just totally bummed out.”

      “About what?” Carson asked.

      Jenna nibbled her cookie, thinking. Then: “He felt something was missing in his life. I told him happiness is always an option, you just have to choose it. But sometimes he couldn’t. I told him he had to find his bliss. I wonder …”

      She frowned. The expression came and went from her face twice, as though she wore a frown so seldom that she didn’t know how to hold on to one when she needed it.

      Carson said, “What do you wonder?”

      “I told him he had to find his bliss, so I sure hope his bliss didn’t turn out to be chopping people to pieces.”

       CHAPTER 76

      THROUGH THE CODED DOOR, out of Mercy, Randal Six finds himself in a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-high corridor with block-and-timber walls and a concrete floor. No rooms open from either side of this passageway.

      Approximately a hundred and forty feet from him waits another door. Happily, there are no choices. He has come too far to retreat. He can only go forward.

      The floor has been poured in three-foot-square blocks. By taking long strides – sometimes bounding – Randal is able to spell himself along these oversize boxes toward the farther end of the corridor.

      At the second door, he finds a locking system identical to the first. He enters the code he used previously, and this barrier opens.

      The corridor is actually a tunnel under the hospital grounds. It connects to the parking garage in the neighboring building.

      Father owns this five-story structure, too, in which he houses the accounting and personnel-management departments of Biovision. He can be seen coming and going from there without raising questions.

      Using the secretly constructed underground passageway between buildings, his visits to the Hands of Mercy, which he owns through a shell company, can be concealed.

      This second door opens into a dark place. Randal finds a light switch and discovers a twelve-foot-square room with concrete walls.

      The floor is concrete, as well, but it is a single pour, with no form lines. In other words, it is one big empty box.

      Directly opposite the doorway at which he stands is another door no doubt opening to the parking garage.

      The problem is that he can’t cross twelve feet and reach that door in a single step. To spell himself to that exit, he will have to take several steps within the same empty box.

      Every step is a letter. The rules of crosswords are simple and clear. One letter per box. You can’t put multiple letters in one box.

      That way lies chaos.

      Just considering the possibility, Randal Six shudders with fear and disgust.

      One block, one letter. No other method is able to bring order to the world.

      The threshold in front of him shares an h with the chamber that waits before him. Once across the threshold, he must finish spelling the last five letters of the other word a-m-b-e-r.

      He can reach the next door in five steps. That is no problem. But he only has one empty box.

      Randal stands at the threshold of this new room. He stands. He stands at the threshold. He stands, thinks, puzzles, puzzles.… He begins to weep with frustration.

       CHAPTER 77

      WHEN BULLETS WEREN’T FLYING, Carson could take a more thoughtful look at Harker’s apartment. Signs of a dysfunctional personality were at once evident.

      Although every piece of furniture was a different style from the others, in clashing colors and uncomplementary patterns, this might mean nothing more than that Harker had no taste.

      Although his living room had considerably