From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

was at last able to make out the vague, angular lines of an armchair. And in the chair: a shape as lacking in detail as that of the robed and hooded gondolier on the Styx.
    He was uncomfortable, achy, thirsty, but he remained utterly still and observant.
    After a while, he realized that the sense of oppression with which he’d awakened was not entirely a psychological symptom: Something heavy lay across his abdomen. And it was cold—so cold, in fact, that it had numbed his middle to the extent that he hadn’t immediately felt the chill of it.
    Shivers coursed through him. He clenched his jaws to prevent his teeth from chattering and thereby alerting the man in the chair.
    Although he never took his eyes off the corner, Junior became preoccupied with trying to puzzle out what was draped across his midsection. The mysterious observer made him sufficiently nervous that he couldn’t order his thoughts as well as usual, and the effort to prevent the shivers from shaking a sound out of him only further interfered with his ability to reason. The longer that he was unable to identify the frigid object, the more alarmed he became.
    He almost cried out when into his mind oozed an image of Naomi’s dead body, now past the whitest shade of pale, as gray as the faint light at the window and turning pale green in a few places, and
cold,
all the heat of life gone from her flesh, which was not yet simmering with any of the heat of decomposition that would soon enliven it again.
    No. Ridiculous. Naomi wasn’t slumped across him. He wasn’t sharing his bed with a corpse. That was DC Comics stuff, something from a yellowed issue of
Tales from the Crypt.
    And it wasn’t Naomi sitting in the chair, either, not Naomi come to him from the morgue to wreak vengeance. The dead don’t live again, neither here nor in some world beyond. Nonsense.
    Even if such ignorant superstitions could be true, the visitor was far too quiet and too patient to be the living-dead incarnation of a murdered wife. This was a predatory silence, an animal cunning, not a supernatural hush. This was the elegant stillness of a panther in the brush, the coiled tension of a snake too vicious to give a warning rattle.
    Suddenly Junior intuited the identity of the man in the chair. Beyond question, this was the plainclothes police officer with the birthmark.
    The salt-and-pepper, brush-cut hair. The pan-flat face. The thick neck.
    Instantly to Junior’s memory came the eye floating in the port-wine stain, the hard gray iris like a nail in the bloody palm of a crucified man.
    Draped across his midsection, the terrible cold weight had chilled his flesh; but now his bone marrow prickled with ice at the thought of the birthmarked detective sitting silently in the dark, watching.
    Junior would have preferred dealing with Naomi, dead and risen and seriously pissed, rather than with this dangerously patient man.

Chapter 10
    WITH A CRASH as loud as the dire crack of heaven opening on Judgment Day, the Ford pickup broadsided the Pontiac. Agnes couldn’t hear the first fraction of her scream, and not much of the rest of it, either, as the car slid sideways, tipped, and rolled.
    The rain-washed street shimmered greasily under the tires, and the intersection lay halfway up a long hill, so gravity was aligned with fate against them. The driver’s side of the Pontiac lifted. Beyond the windshield, the main drag of Bright Beach tilted crazily. The passenger’s side slammed against the pavement.
    Glass in the door next to Agnes cracked, dissolved. Pebbly blacktop like a dragon flank of glistening scales hissed past the broken window, inches from her face.
    Before setting out from home, Joey had buckled his lap belt, but because of Agnes’s condition, she hadn’t engaged her own. She rammed against the door, pain shot through her right shoulder, and she thought,
Oh, Lord, the baby!
    Bracing her feet against the floorboards, clutching the seat with her left hand, fiercely gripping the