Forever Odd by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

pumping another round into the chamber and then into me.
    Above some of these downtown businesses were apartments. Lights had bloomed in a few of them, the shotgun having made moot the later settings of alarm clocks.
    On the move again, I found myself drawn to the next intersection of alleyways, then left without hesitation. Less than half a block ahead stood the white van, this side of the kitchen entrance to the Blue Moon Cafe.
    Beside the Blue Moon is a parking lot that runs through to the main street. The van appeared to have been abandoned at the rear of this lot, nose out toward the alleyway.
    Both front doors stood open, spilling light, no one visible beyond the windshield. As I drew cautiously closer, I heard the engine idling.
    This suggested that they had fled in haste. Or intended to return for a quick getaway.
    The Blue Moon doesn’t serve breakfast, only lunch and dinner. Kitchen workers do not begin to arrive until a couple hours after dawn. The cafe should have been locked. I doubted that Simon had shot his way inside to raid the restaurant refrigerators.
    There are easier ways to get a cold chicken leg, though maybe none quicker.
    I couldn’t imagine where they had gone—or why they abandoned the van if in fact they were not returning.
    From one of the second-floor lighted apartment windows, an elderly woman in a blue robe gazed down. She appeared less alarmed than curious.
    I eased to the passenger’s side of the vehicle, slowly circled toward the rear.
    At the back, the pair of doors on the cargo hold also stood open. Interior light revealed no one inside.
    Sirens rose in the night, approaching.
    I wondered who had fired the shotgun, at whom, and why.
    As deformed and vulnerable as he is, Danny couldn’t have wrested the weapon away from his tormentors. Even if he had tried to use the shotgun, the recoil would have broken his shoulder, if not also one of his arms.
    Turning in a circle, mystified, I wondered what had happened to my friend with brittle bones.

CHAPTER 10
    P . OSWALD BOONE, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND culinary black belt in white silk pajamas, whom I’d recently awakened, moved with the grace and swiftness of a dojo master as he whipped up breakfast in the kitchen of his Craftsman-style house.
    At times his weight scares me, and I worry about his suffering heart. But when he’s cooking, he seems weightless, floating, like those gravity-defying warriors in
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
—though he didn’t actually bound over the center island.
    Watching him that February morning, I considered that if he had spent his life killing himself with food, it might also be true that without the solace and refuge of food, he would have been dead long ago. Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries, and Ozzie’s more than most.
    Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.
    He is a writer, with two successful series of mystery novels and numerous nonfiction books to his credit. He is so productive that the day may come when one copy of each of his books, stacked on a scale, will surpass his body weight.
    Because he had assured me that writing would prove to be psychic chemotherapy effective against psychological tumors, I had written my true story of loss and perseverance—and had put it in a drawer, at peace if not happy. To his dismay, I had told him that I was done with writing.
    I believed it, too. Now here I am again, putting words to paper, serving as my own psychological oncologist.
    Perhaps in time I will follow Ozzie’s every example, and weigh four hundred pounds. I won’t be able to run with ghosts and slip down dark alleyways in quite the swift and stealthy fashion that I do now; but perhaps children will be amused by my hippopotamic heroics, and no one will disagree that bringing laughter to children in a dark world is