Good Guy by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

When he found a film that he enjoyed, he would watch it once or twice a month, sometimes twice in an evening. Often he ate the same dinner every night for a week or two.
    For all their variety of appearance, people were as predictable as the plot turns in a film that he had committed to heart. A man whom Krait admired had once said that human beings were sheep, and in most matters, that was true.
    In Krait’s experience, however, as regarded his most intimate work with the species, human beings were inferior to sheep. Sheep were docile, yes, but vigilant. Unlike many people, sheep were always aware that predators existed and were alert for the scent and the schemes of wolves.
    Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves that it was a dog.
    They denied real threats by focusing their fear on the least likely of armageddons: a massive asteroid striking the earth, superhurricanes twice as big as Texas, the Y2K implosion of civilization, nuclear power plants melting holes all the way through the planet, a new Hitler suddenly rising from the ranks of hapless televangelists with bad hair.
    Krait found people to be less like sheep than like cattle. He moved among them as if invisible. They grazed dreamily, confident in the security of the herd, even as he butchered them one by one.
    His work was his pleasure, and he would have both in abundance until such a day as some more flamboyant murderer hurled fire at the herd, stampeding them by the tens of thousands over a cliff. Then the cattle might be wary, and for a while Krait would find his job more difficult.
    He wanted to know more about the woman, Linda Paquette, because he hoped that through her he might learn about the man who had intervened to spare her from execution. Soon he would receive a name for that interloper, but he didn’t have one yet.
    In her dresser drawers he found only clothes, but they told him things about her. She had many socks in various colors but only two pairs of nylons. Her underwear were simple cotton, much like men’s briefs, without lace or other frills.
    The simplicity of these garments charmed him.
    And they smelled so fresh. He wondered what detergent she used, and hoped it was a brand friendly to the environment.
    After closing the last of the drawers, he regarded his face in the mirror above the dresser, and he liked what he saw. No flush had risen to his cheeks. His mouth was neither tight with tension nor loose with desire.
    The reflection of a framed painting drew his attention from his face before he finished admiring himself. Smile faltering, he turned away from the mirror and toward the true image.
    He should have noticed the painting immediately on entering the room. No other art adorned the walls, and the only decorative items on the pair of nightstands were a luminous clock and an old Motorola radio, both from the 1930s and made out of Bakelite.
    He took no offense at the clock or the radio, but the painting—a cheap print—vexed him. He took it off the wall, smashed the glass on the footboard of the bed, and peeled the artwork from the frame.
    After folding the print three times, he slipped it into an inner pocket of his sports coat. He would save it until he found the woman.
    When he had stripped away her clothes and her defenses, he would shove the wadded poster down her throat, clamp her mouth shut, and insist that she swallow it, and when it proved too much to swallow, he would let her gag it up, only so that he could shove it somewhere else, and then somewhere else again, and shove other things, too, shove in anything he wanted, until she pleaded with him to kill her.
    Unfortunately, he lived in an age when such measures were sometimes necessary.
    Returning to