Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the

porch door at the head of the steps.

“There’s one other way,” he said, leaning close to her to be heard above

the storm without shouting. “If it’s me that he’s drawn to, maybe I

should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from

you as I can.”

“Forget it.”

“But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with

him.”

“And if he kills you instead?”

“At least we wouldn’t all go down.”

“You think he won’t come looking for us again? He wants your life,

remember. Your life, your wife, your children.”

“So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you’d still have a chance

to blow his brains out.”

“Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of

opportunity I’ll have before he gets close to me, how would I know

whether it was him or you?”

“You wouldn’t,” he admitted.

“So we’ll play it this way.”

“You’re so damned strong,” he said.

He couldn’t know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking

violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.

They hugged but briefly.

Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps,

across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without

looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her

fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.

Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded

hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like

openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky.

Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and

as shrill as banshees.

Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to

traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sun light.

Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and

the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to

the county road.

The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface

here and there, all ancient and smooth.

The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin

and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway.

It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high,

like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur

much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.

Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as

condensed pine tar pooled behind the “molars,” Paige suddenly had the

feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from

that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding

slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.

If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have

killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued

against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again,

she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and

was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire

sea.

Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its

shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn’t waiting for her.

She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the

hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible

among the shadows and against the dark stone.

Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the

driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.

Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a

full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway

between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as

if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.

Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn’t ward off

the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat

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