Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

repository of old and poorly maintained maintenance equipment plus a lot

of stuff that was just plain junk, rusting buckets, tattered brooms,

ragged, motheaten mops, a broken outdoor vacuum cleaner, several

motel-room chairs with broken legs or torn upholstery, which the

previous owners had intended to repair and put back into service, scraps

of lumber, coils of wire and coiled hoses, a bathroom sink, spare brass

sprinkler heads spilling from an overturned cardboard box, one cotton

gardening glove lying palm up like a severed hand, cans of paint and

lacquer, their contents almost surely thickened and dried beyond

usefulness. This trash was piled along the walls, scattered over

portions of the floor, and stacked precariously in the loft.

Just as he unlocked the dead bolt on the side door of the garage, before

he actually opened the door, Whitney heard a rattling in the garage

behind him. The noise was short-lived, in fact, it stopped even as he

turned to see what it was.

Frowning, he let his gaze travel over the piles of junk, the Mercedes,

the gas furnace in the far corner, the sagging workbench, and the

hot-water heater. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

He listened.

The only sounds were the many voices of the wind in the eaves and the

rain on the roof.

He turned away from the door, walked slowly to the car, circled it, but

found nothing that could have caused the noise.

SOME LOVE THING THAT 5 THE DARK Whitney left the manager’s apartment at

the Golden Sand Inn by way of the rear door of the kitchen. It opened

into a dusty garage where, earlier, they had put the black Mercedes.

Now the 560 S.E.L stood in small puddles of rainwater that had dripped

from it. His own car was outside, in the serviceway behind the motel.

Turning to Rachael, who stood on the threshold between kitchen and

garage, Whitney said, “You lock this door behind me and sit tight.

I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got to get the Wildcard

file in order. That’ll keep me busy.”

He had no trouble understanding why Ben had fallen so hard for her.

Even as disheveled as she was, pale with exhaustion and worry, Rachael

was gorgeous. But her beauty was not her only attribute. She was

caring, perceptie, smart, and tough-not a common mix of qualities.

“Ben will probably show up before I do,” he assured 35

Maybe one of the piles ofjunk had shifted under its own weightr had

been disturbed by a rat. He would not be surprised to discover that the

moldering old building was rat-infested, though he had not previously

seen evidence of such an infestation. The trash was piled so

haphazardly that he could not discern if it was all in the same position

as it had been a moment ago.

He returned to the door again, took one last look around, then went out

into the storm.

Even as the wind-harried rain slashed at him, he belatedly realized what

he had heard in the garage, someone trying to pull open the big rear

door from outside. But it was an electric door that could not be

operated manually while in its automatic mode, and was therefore secure

against prowlers. Whoever had tried it must have realized, at once,

that he could not get in that way, which explained why the rattling had

lasted only a moment.

Whitney limped warily toward the corner of the garage and the serviceway

beyond it to see if anyone was still there. The rain was falling hard,

making a crisp sound on the walk, a sloppier sound on the earth,

spilling off the corner of the roof where the downspout was missing. All

that wet noise effectively masked his own footsteps, as it would mask

the activities of anyone behind the garage, and though he listened

intently to the night, he did not at first hear anything unusual. He

took six or eight steps, pausing twice to listen, before the patter and

susurration of the rain was cut by a frightening noise.

Behind him. It was partly a hiss like escaping steam, partly a thin

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