Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and

bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering

forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets

were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he

slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the

metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was

comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled

manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets

even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the

glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The

continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk

of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself

in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and

introspection.

Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies

of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.

Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew

Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the

state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.

The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of

rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette

lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television

set, mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of

control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background,

interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in

yellow, and county roads in blue, unpaved dirt and gravel byways were

represented by broken black lines. Population centers–precious few in

this part of the world–were pink.

Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen.

The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate

40.

“About four miles ahead now,” Oslett said.

Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times,

Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more

talkative.

The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale,

displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile

grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off,

replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles

on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill the

screen.

The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than

before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the

right side.

Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking

white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of

Interstate 40. X marked the prize.

Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful,

like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a

lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places

were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with

strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps,

tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music,

and oscillating electronic tones.

Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked

sound effects altogether.

Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the

device which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It

wasn’t sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant

that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly.

Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict

national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the

map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and

surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were

currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and

intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar

organizations in co

“Three miles,” he told Clocker.

The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply.

Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter

suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved

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