Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

She was genuinely enjoying herself, but he knew that she was also needling him a little and getting a kick out of that too. He tried to hold fast to his gloom, and when she smiled at him, he did not return her smile, but damn she was cute. Her hair was tousled, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her clothes were wrinkled from having been slept in, but her slightly disheveled look only added to her allure.

Sometimes she paused in her soft singing and humming to ask him questions, but she continued to sing and dance in place even while he answered her. “You figured what we’re going to do yet to get out of this corner we’re in?”

“I have an idea.”

“Patti La Belle, ‘New Attitude,’ ” she said, identifying the song she was singing. “Is this idea of yours a deep, dark secret?”

“No. But I have to go over it with Harry, get some information from him, so I’ll tell you both at breakfast.”

At her direction he was hunched over the low counter, cutting thin slices of cheese from a block of Cheddar when she broke into her song long enough to ask, “Why did you say life is hard and mean?”

“Because it is.”

“But it’s also full of fun—”

“No.”

“—and beauty—”

“No.”

“—and hope—”

“Bullshit.”

“It is.”

“It isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It isn’t.”

“Why are you so negative?”

“Because I want to be.”

“But why do you want to be?”

“Jesus, you’re relentless.”

“Pointer Sisters, ‘Neutron Dance.'” She sang a bit, dancing in place as she put eggshells and other scraps down the garbage disposal. Then she interrupted her tune to say, “What could’ve happened to you to make you feel that life’s only mean and hard?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

He finished with the cheese and put down the slicer. “You really want to know?”

“I really do.”

“My mother was killed in a traffic accident when I was just seven. I was in the car with her, nearly died, was actually trapped in the wreckage with her for more than an hour, face to face, staring into her eyeless socket, one whole side of her head bashed in. After that I had to go live with my dad, whom she’d divorced, and he was a mean-tempered son of a bitch, an alcoholic, and I can’t tell you how many times he beat me or threatened to beat me or tied me to a chair in the kitchen and left me there for hours at a time, until I couldn’t hold myself any more and peed in my pants, and then he’d finally come to untie me and he’d see what I’d done and he’d beat me for that.”

He was surprised by how it all spilled from him, as if the floodgates of his subconscious had been opened, pouring forth all the sludge that had been pent up through long years of stoic self-control.

“So as soon as I graduated from high school, I got out of that house, worked my way through junior college, living in cheap rented rooms, shared my bed with armies of cockroaches every night, then applied to the Bureau as soon as I could, because I wanted to see justice in the world, be a part of bringing justice to the world, maybe because there’d been so little fairness or justice in my life. But I discovered that more than half the time justice doesn’t triumph. The bad guys get away with it, no matter how hard you work to bring them down, because the bad guys are often pretty damned clever, and the good guys never allow themselves to be as mean as they have to be to get the job done. But at the same time, when you’re an agent, mainly what you see is the sick underbelly of society, you deal with the scum, one kind of scum or another, and day by day it makes you more cynical, more disgusted with people and sick of them.”

He was talking so fast that he was almost breathless.

She had stopped singing.

He continued with an uncharacteristic lack of emotional control, speaking so fast that his sentences sometimes ran together, “And my wife died, Karen, she was wonderful, you’d have liked her, everybody liked her, but she got cancer and she died, painfully, horribly, with a lot of suffering, not easy like Ali McGraw in the movies, not with just a sigh and a smile and a quiet goodbye, but in agony. And then I lost my son too. Oh, he’s alive, sixteen, nine when his mother died and sixteen now, physically alive and mentally alive, but he’s emotionally dead, burnt out in his heart, cold inside, so damned cold inside. He likes computers and computer games and television, and he listens to black metal. You know what black metal is? It’s heavy-metal music with a twist of satanism, which he likes because it tells him there are no moral values, that everything is relative, that his alienation is right, that his coldness inside is right, it tells him that whatever feels good is good. You know what he said once?”