Microsoft Word - Dragon Tears - Dean Koontz.doc by User

Author:User
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-04T17:18:08+00:00

7

The Green House on Pacific Coast Highway included a large and typical California-style restaurant filled with too many ferns and pothos even for Harry's taste, and a sizable barroom where fern-weary patrons had long ago learned to keep the greenery under control by poisoning the potting soil with a dribble of whiskey every now and then. The restaurant side was closed at that hour.

The popular bar was open until two o'clock. It had been remodeled in a black-silver-green Art Deco style that was nothing like the adjacent restaurant, a strained attempt to be chic. But they served sandwiches along with the booze.

Midst stunted and yellowing plants, about thirty customers drank, talked, and listened to jazz played by a four-man combo. The musicians were performing quirky semi-progressive arrangements of famous numbers from the big-band era. Two couples, who didn't realize the music was better for listening, were gamely dancing to quasi-melodic tunes marked by constant tempo changes and looping extemporaneous passages that would have thwarted Fred Astaire or Baryshnikov.

When Harry and Connie entered, the thirtyish manager-host met them with a dubious look. He was wearing an Armani suit, a hand-painted silk necktie, and beautiful shoes so soft-looking that they might have been made out of a calf fetus. His fingernails were manicured, his teeth perfectly capped, his hair permed. He subtly signaled one of the bartenders, no doubt to help give them the bum's rush back into the street.

Aside from the dried blood at the corner of her mouth and the bruise only beginning to darken one whole side of her face, Connie was reasonably presentable, if slightly rumpled, but Harry was a spectacle. His clothes, baggy and misshapen from having been rain-soaked, were more wrinkled than an ancient mummy's shroud. Formerly crisp and white, his shirt was now mottled gray, smelling of smoke from the house fire he'd barely escaped. His shoes were scuffed, scraped, muddy.

A moist bloody abrasion as big as a quarter marred his forehead. He had heavy beard stubble because he hadn't shaved in eighteen hours, and his hands were grimy from pawing through the pile of dirt on Ordegard's lawn. He realized he must appear to be only a treacherous step up the ladder from the hobo outside the bar to whom Connie had just delivered a warning about forced detoxification, even now socially devolving before the scowling host's eyes.

Only yesterday, Harry would have been mortified to appear in public in such a state of dishevelment. Now he didn't particularly care. He was too worried about survival to fret about good grooming and sartorial standards.

Before they could be ejected from The Green House, they both flashed their Special Projects ID.

"Police," Harry said.

No master key, no password, no blue-blood social register, no royal lineage opened doors as effectively as a badge. Opened them grudgingly, more often than not, but opened them nonetheless.

It also helped that Connie was Connie:

"Not just police," she said, "but pissed-off police, having a bad day, in no mood to be refused service by some prissy sonofabitch who thinks we might offend his effete clientele.

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