Ashley Bell: A Novel by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Literary, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy, Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780345545961
Amazon: B00VCZOKM6
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2015-12-08T06:00:00+00:00

Although it might be a sunny March day inland, the fog would not relent along the coast. As noon approached and the lowering element failed to lift, there was every reason to expect that it would remain throughout the afternoon.

In the Honda, Bibi tossed the professor’s handbag and decorative pillow cover on the passenger seat. She fished her keys from a pocket of her blazer and started the engine.

The immediacy with which Terezin had traced and called back the professor’s cell number alarmed Bibi. Maybe Homeland Security could do that trick. But how wired into the government security apparatus could this vicious mother-killer be? His quickness seemed more supernatural than techno-savvy.

She didn’t think he could drop a couple of assassins into the neighborhood by drone or circus cannon as fast as he had placed the call. But she remembered what Chubb Coy had said: There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources. She wanted out of there yesterday.

She drove uphill, under a canopy of tree limbs, and on the left-hand sidewalk, near the corner, she spotted a man walking a dog. A tall man in a hoodie. Walking a golden retriever. Bibi almost failed to see them in the fog, a ghostly pair, hardly more substantial than an apparition, and then they turned the corner, out of sight.

With the thick mist and the chill in the air, a hoodie made sense. Dozens of people would be wearing hoodies to walk their dogs in this weather. And a golden retriever wasn’t unusual. This wasn’t the guy from the hospital the night before last. Couldn’t be. Ridiculous.

At the intersection, she didn’t brake for the stop sign, wheeled left around the corner, and scanned the street. More trees. Parked cars and SUVs and light trucks. There, on the right-hand sidewalk, man and dog moved away through the earthbound clouds, less real now than they’d been when she had first glimpsed them. If this was the night visitor at the hospital, he couldn’t be on the same side of the fence as Terezin. This man had wanted her to live, not die.

She raced forward, and from the right-hand curb, a pickup pulled into traffic. Bibi stamped on the brake pedal and blew the horn, and the Honda yelped and shuddered, and the other driver blew his horn longer than she had, a back-at-you statement. By the time that the pickup jockey reached the next intersection and turned downhill, she had lost track of the man with the dog.

Then she saw them half a block uphill, on the farther side of the street, passing through an opening in a low stone wall, into a park. By the time she drove up there and curbed the Honda in a no-parking zone, the duo had melted into the mist among the cascading branches of a grove of California pepper trees.

As parks went, this wasn’t a sprawling affair, not a destination for tourists, but a modest neighborhood amenity, maybe ten acres that encompassed a walk

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