Cold Fire by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

suddenly he knew what had happened.
    And he knew what he must do.
    In the Camaro again, he filled the roomy pockets of his blue cotton slacks with shotgun shells. Already loaded, the short-barreled pump-action 12-gauge was within easy reach.
    He checked the rearview mirror. On this Monday morning, the desert highway was empty. No help in sight. It was all up to him.
    Far ahead, the motor home vanished through shimmering thermal currents like undulant curtains of glass beads.
    He threw the Camaro in gear. The tires spun in place for an instant, then skidded on the clutching sun-softened blacktop, issuing a scream that echoed eerily across the desert vastness. Jim wondered how the stranger and his family had screamed when he’d been shot point-blank in the chest. Abruptly the Camaro overcame all resistance and rocketed forward.
    Tramping the accelerator to the floor, he squinted ahead to catch a glimpse of his quarry. In seconds the curtains of heat parted, and the big vehicle hove into view as if it were a sailing ship somehow making way on that dry sea.
    The motor home couldn’t compete with the Camaro, and Jim was soon riding its bumper. It was an old thirty-foot Roadking that had seen a lot of miles. Its white aluminum siding was caked with dirt, dented, and rust-spotted. The windows were covered with yellow curtains that had no doubt once been white. It looked like nothing more than the home of a couple of travel-loving retirees living on dwindling Social Security assets, unable to maintain it with the pride they had when it had been new.
    Except for the motorcycle. A Harley was chained to a wrought-iron rack to the left of the roof-service ladder on the back of the motor home. It wasn’t the biggest bike made, but it was powerful—and not something that a pair of retirees typically tooled around on.
    In spite of the cycle, nothing about the Roadking was suspicious. Yet in its wake Jim Ironheart was overcome by a sense of evil so strong that it might as well have been a black tide washing over him with all the power of the sea behind it. He gagged as if he could smell the corruption of those to whom the motor home belonged.
    At first he hesitated, afraid that any action he took might jeopardize the woman and child who were evidently being held captive. But the riskiest thing he could do was delay. The longer the mother and daughter were in the hands of the people in the Roadking, the less chance they had of coming out of it alive.
    He swung into the passing lane. He intended to get a couple of miles ahead of them and block the road with his car.
    In the Roadking’s rearview mirror, the driver must have seen Jim stop at the station wagon and get out to inspect it. Now he let the Camaro pull almost even before swinging the motor home sharply left, bashing it against the side of the car.
    Metal shrieked against metal, and the car shuddered.
    The steering wheel spun in Jim’s hands. He fought for control and kept it.
    The Roadking pulled away, then swerved back and bashed him again, driving him off the blacktop and onto the unpaved shoulder. For a few hundred yards they rattled forward at high speed in those positions: the Roadking in the wrong lane, risking a head-on collision with any oncoming traffic that might be masked by the curtains of heat and sun glare; the Camaro casting up huge clouds of dust behind it, speeding precariously along the brink of the two-foot drop-off that separated the raised roadbed from the desert floor beyond.
    Even a light touch of the brakes might pull the car a few inches to the left, causing it to drop and roll. He only dared to ease up on the accelerator and let his speed fall gradually.
    The driver of the Roadking reacted, reducing his speed, too, hanging at Jim’s side. Then the motor home moved inexorably to the left, inch by inch, edging relentlessly onto the dirt shoulder.
    Being much the smaller and less powerful of the two vehicles, the Camaro could not resist the pressure. It was