Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Tessa saw how Harry relished the story, and she also saw why he was so pleased by it. For one thing the dog was child and brother and friend, all rolled into one, and Harry was proud that people thought of Moose as clever. More important, Jimmy’s little joke made Harry a part of his community, not just a homebound invalid but a participant in the life of his town. His lonely days were marked by too few such incidents.

“And you are a clever dog,” Tessa told Moose.

Harry said, “Anyway, I decided to have Mrs. Hunsbok put them on the bed next time she came, as a joke, but then I sort of liked them.”

After drawing the drapes at the second window, Sam returned to the stool, sat down, swiveled to face Harry, and said, “They’re the loudest sheets I’ve ever seen. Don’t they keep you awake at night?”

Harry smiled. “Nothing can keep me awake. I sleep like a baby. What keeps people awake is worry about the future, about what might happen to them. But the worst has already happened to me. Or they lie awake thinking about the past, about what might have been, but I don’t do that because I just don’t dare.” His smile faded as he spoke. “So now what? What do we do next?”

Gently removing Moose’s head from her lap, standing and brushing a few dog hairs from her jeans, Tessa said, “Well, the phones aren’t working, so Sam can’t call the Bureau, and if we walk out of town we risk an encounter with Watkins’s patrols or these Boogeymen. Unless you know a ham radio enthusiast who’d let us use his set to get a message relayed, then so as far as I can see, we’ve got to drive out.”

“Roadblocks, remember,” Harry said.

She said, “Well, I figure we’ll have to drive out in a truck, something big and mean, ram straight through the damn roadblock, make it to the highway, then out of their jurisdiction. Even if we do get chased down by county cops, that’s fine, because Sam can get them to call the Bureau, verify his assignment, then they’ll be on our side.”

“Who’s the federal agent here, anyway?” Sam asked.

Tessa felt herself blush. “Sorry. See, a documentary filmmaker is almost always her own producer, sometimes producer and director and writer too. That means if the art part of it is going to work, the business part of it has to work first, so I’m used to doing a lot of planning, logistics. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.”

“Step on them any time.”

Sam smiled, and she liked him when he smiled. She realized she was even attracted to him a little. He was neither handsome nor ugly, and not what most people meant by “plain,” either. He was rather … nondescript but pleasant-looking. She sensed a darkness in him, something deeper than his current worries about events in Moonlight Cove—maybe sadness at some loss, maybe long-repressed anger related to some injustice he had suffered, maybe a general pessimism arising from too much contact in his work with the worst elements of society. But when he smiled he was transformed.

“You really going to smash out in a truck?” Harry asked.

“Maybe as a last resort,” Sam said. “But we’d have to find a rig big enough and then steal it, and that’s an operation in itself. Besides, they might have riot guns at the roadblock, loaded with magnum rounds, maybe automatic weapons. I wouldn’t want to run that kind of flak even in a Mack truck. You can ride into hell in a tank, but the devil will get his hands on you anyway, so it’s best not to go there in the first place.”

“So where do we go?” Tessa asked.

“To sleep,” Sam said. “There’s a way out of this, a way to get through to the Bureau. I can sort of see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I try to look directly at it, it goes away, and that’s because I’m tired. I need a couple of hours in the sack to get fresh and think straight.”