Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

Norquist. After their marriage, however, when she began to show up with him at charity galas, the photos in the glossy lifestyle magazines (included in Simon’s file) revealed not just a woman of stunning beauty, but also, at the edges and in the corners of her marvelous face, something that might have been anxiety about—or only impatience with—the attention that she was receiving.
    “I don’t think she really wanted to be at all these charity events,” Pogo said. “She’s for sure not like Frankie, all wound up about Jarvis’s wedding.”
    “Frankie who, what Jarvis?”
    “From a novel.
The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers.”
    “I don’t know when you have time to read so much.”
    “I don’t know when I wouldn’t.”
    Recalling what she had read by touch of skin to skin that morning, Makani said, “Ursula’s no more charitable than a snake.”
    The day was warm, the sun insistent, but Makani shivered.
    “Look at Norquist in these photos. He’s showing her off, don’t you think?” Pogo studied Ursula’s face again. “She’s enduring it, but she’s not happy.”
    “She only had to endure it a little while,” Makani said as Pogo turned the page and revealed the newspaper article about J. Proctor Norquist’s drug overdose. “Seems as if there’s a sad tendency for people in her life to die before their time. How did her old man kick off?”
    Henning Liddon’s obituary was the next page in Simon’s file.
    Scanning the obit, Pogo said, “Three years ago.”
    “Did he fall off a tall ladder?”
    “Says here, he was fifty-six.”
    “Car brakes fail?” Makani wondered. “Set himself on fire while barbecuing? Accidentally shoot himself while hunting?”
    “He’d been under treatment for a heart condition since he was fifty. Massive heart attack.”
    “Would there have been an autopsy?”
    “Probably not. I don’t think they bother doing one if you die from a preexisting condition.”
    “They should have done one.”
    “Totally,” Pogo agreed.
    Bob the dog returned from his contemplation of the sea, bumped open the lid of the pizza box with his nose, and snorted in disgust when he discovered not one slice left.
    Makani said, “Uncle Pogo has spoiled my Bobby.”
    The dog wagged his tail as though the word
spoiled
inspired hope.
    Pogo reversed through the pages to study the photographs of Ursula. “You were so right that she’s a major hottie. Smokin’ hot.”
    “Oh, good. So now you can trust me to pick out girls for you.”
    He shook his head. “I’m too wise to respond to that with a smart-ass comeback.”
    “Too wise or just unable to think of one? Anyway, she’s hot but she’s hard.”
    “I have a
great
comeback for that one.”
    “Because you’re twenty-one going on fourteen. I’m serious. She is perfect, she really is, but she has this gloss about her….”
    “Gloss?”
    After chewing on her lip, thinking about what she meant, Makani said, “It’s such a
polished
beauty, way polished, you know? Not that she’s had a surgeon’s help, she’s real enough, über-real. It’s just that…she almost has this shine to her, the hard shine like a newly waxed surfboard, like polyester resin or something.”
    Take polyester resin, a liquid plastic, mix it with the proper catalyst and accelerator, and you had the hard outer skin that sheathed the foam core of a modern surfboard.
    “Smooth, sleek,” Makani said, “glimmering, irresistible, but with hidden hooks.”
    “You make her sound like a fishing lure.”
    “Is that what I meant? I think it is. The way she was dressed this morning, the way she ran—certain she was watched,
wanting
to be watched. Like she was out to catch something.”
    The final item in Simon Hunter’s file was a lifestyle magazine article about Ursula Norquist having eight expensive cars. She used a different one for each day of the week—a list of days and cars was provided—and a Rolls-Royce for special occasions. She posed for