Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Something hit the door. Hard.

Tessa scrambled to her feet and out of the foyer.

Crazed voices filled the hall that same weird mix of harsh animal sounds punctuated by bursts of breathlessly spoken but for the most part disconnected words.

She went around the bed to the window, disengaged the pressure latch, and slid the movable pane aside.

Again the door shook. The boom was so loud that Tessa felt as if she were inside a drum. It would not collapse as easily as the other guests’ door, thanks to the chair, but it would not hold for more than a few additional blows.

She sat on the sill, swung her legs out, looked down. The fog-dampened walk glistened in the dim yellow glow of the serviceway lamps about twelve feet below the window. An easy jump.

They hit the door again, harder. Wood splintered.

Tessa pushed off the windowsill. She landed on the wet walkway and, because of her rubber-soled shoes, skidded but did not fall.

Overhead, in the room she had left, wood splintered more noisily than before, and tortured metal screeched as the lock on the door began to disintigrate.

She was near the north end of the building. She thought she saw something moving in the darkness in that direction. It might have been nothing more than a clotting of fog churning eastward on the wind, but she didn’t want to take a chance, so she ran south, with the vast black sea beyond the railing at her right side. By the time she reached the end of the building, a crash echoed through the night—the sound of the door to her room going down—which was followed by the howling of the pack as it entered that place in search of her.

35

Sam could not have slipped out of the patrol car without drawing Danberry’s attention. Four cruisers awaited the cop’s use, so there was a seventy-five-percent chance that Sam would be undetected if he stayed in the car. He slid down in the driver’s seat as far as he could and leaned to his right, across the computer keyboard on the console.

Danberry went to the next car in line.

With his head on the console, his neck twisted so he could look up through the window on the passenger’s side, Sam watched as Danberry unlocked the door of that other cruiser. He prayed that the cop would keep his back turned, because the interior of the car in which Sam slouched was revealed by the sulfurous glow of the parking-lot lights. If Danberry even glanced his way, Sam would be seen.

The cop got into the other black-and-white and slammed the door, and Sam sighed with relief. The engine turned over. Danberry pulled out of the municipal lot. When he hit the alley he gunned the engine, and his tires spun and squealed for a moment before they bit in, and then he was gone.

Though Sam wanted to hot-wire the car and switch on the computer again to find out whether Watkins and Shaddack were still conversing, he knew he dared not stay any longer. As the manhunt escalated, the police department’s offices in the municipal building were sure to become busy.

Because he didn’t want them to know that he had been probing in their computer or that he had eavesdropped on their VDT conversation—the greater they assumed his ignorance to be, the less effective they would be in their search for him—Sam used his tools to replace the ignition core in the steering column. He got out, pushed the lock button down, and closed the door.

He didn’t want to leave the area by the alleyway because a patrol car might turn in from one end or the other, capturing him in its headlights. Instead he dashed straight across that narrow back street from the parking lot and opened a gate in a simple wrought-iron fence. He entered the rear yard of a slightly decrepit Victorian-style house whose owners had let the shrubbery run so wild that it looked as if a macabre cartoon family from the pen of Gahan Wilson might live in the place. He walked quietly past the side of the house, across the front lawn, to Pacific Drive, one block south of Ocean Avenue.