Frankenstein: The Dead Town by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

enormous money had gone into some operation in this burg, channeled to a nonprofit named Progress for Perfect Peace. The sum was so huge—the funds laundered through so many accounts before arriving here—that it suggested a criminal enterprise of extraordinary proportions.
    And this past afternoon, from their unit boss, Maurice Moomaw in D.C., they had learned that the Moneyman, source of those funds, was scheduled to arrivesomewhere in the Rainbow Falls area the following day. Weather permitting, he would come in by helicopter from Billings. The Moneyman was a high-profile individual. If he was making a personal appearance, the conspiracy—whatever the hell it might entail—must be approaching one critical point or another.
    “Talk to Jarmillo’s wife?” Frost didn’t like the idea. “I’m not ready yet to drop our cover.”
    “I didn’t say we’d flash bureau ID. We snow her with some story just to see what she might say, just to get a look in the house.”
    Frost shook his head. “I’m not a good bullshit artist.”
    “You’ve seen me in action. I can produce more than a herd. You just stand there smiling and nodding, leave the rest to me.”
    Frost considered the blinking light on the laptop map and then gazed through the windshield at the falling snow. All day, the atmosphere in Rainbow Falls had been strange, disquieting. He could not say why. The behavior of the police suggested they were engaged in some secret and perhaps illegal activity, but that alone wasn’t what made him so deeply uneasy. For the past several hours, he had sensed that the apparent normalcy of Rainbow Falls was a deception, as though the quaint and pretty town were only a hyper-realistic painting on a stage curtain, which at any moment would be swept aside to reveal a different municipality of strange and hideous structures in astate of advanced decay, narrow twisted streets, and in every shadow some creeping feral thing without a name.
    Now, as the town succumbed to the bleaching snow, it seemed not to be vanishing beneath a shroud that would later be drawn aside by the restorative sun, but seemed instead to be fading entirely from the world. As if, when the snow eventually melted away, Rainbow Falls would be gone as though it had never existed.
    Frost was not a man who spooked easily. Until now, he’d never had the kind of imagination that made hobgoblins out of shadows and sensed boogey-men around every corner. The problem wasn’t him. The problem was Rainbow Falls. Something was very wrong with this place.
    “All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a chat with Jarmillo’s wife.”

chapter 8
    In addition to the guy in the Stetson and the greatcoat, two other men materialized out of the night and snow. They were also armed with shotguns.
    Carson and Michael had their Urban Snipers as well as pistols, but seated in the Grand Cherokee, they were not in a position to survive an exchange of fire.
    To Michael, she said, “I could shift gears, tramp the gas.”
    “Bad idea. I didn’t take my invincibility pill this morning.”
    “Then what do we do?”
    “Whatever they want us to do,” Michael said.
    “That’s pussy talk. We’re not pussies.”
    He said, “Sometimes you’re too macho for your own good.”
    The guy with the walrus mustache rapped on her window again with his gun barrel. He looked as if hehad been constipated since birth. When she smiled at him, his scowl curdled into a glower.
    Carson thought of Scout, her baby, not seven months old, back in San Francisco, in the expert care of Mary Margaret Dolan, housekeeper and nanny. Her little daughter had a smile that could melt glaciers. With Scout in her mind’s eye, Carson was overcome by a dread that she would never see the girl again.
    Switching off the engine, she said, “They’ll make a mistake. We’ll get an opening.”
    “ ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ ”
    “Who said that?”
    “I don’t know. One of the