Last Light (Novella) by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

was able to read his mind.
    By turning to him for help, by revealing her own darkest secret, she had put their friendship at risk. He might well be offended that she had read him since first touch and had not until now revealed her gift. Though she believed that he was sufficiently comfortable with himself and too generous a soul to retreat into anger or fear, she also knew there was truth in what Rainer Sparks had said about anyone with her power being seen as a freak and a threat.
    Pogo pushed his chair back from the table, got to his feet, carried his mug to the kitchen sink, and poured out his coffee.
    “Pogo?”
    “I’m thinking,” he said.
    He returned to the table, took her mug, and poured that coffee down the drain as well.
    Having lost interest in the blue bunny, Bob came to Makani’s side and laid his head in her lap. He rolled his eyes, following Pogo from sink to refrigerator.
    Pogo took two bottles of beer from the fridge, opened them, and said, “Come on, let’s get some real air, where we can hear the surf,” and he opened the back door for her and Bob.
    From the patio, the softly lighted lawn sloped gently to a stainless-steel-post-and-glass-panel fence along the bluff. On the right, at the corner of the property, a gate led to stairs that switchbacked down to the beach.
    Near the gate stood a small white gazebo with decorative wood details and a peaked roof. Inside were a table and four chairs. She and Pogo took the two chairs that most directly faced the sea and the beach below, where the black water cast foaming surf, as white as bridal lace, onto the paler sand.
    Bob stood with his head between two balusters of the railing that formed the low wall of the gazebo, the twenty-four muscles in his nose working the air as the four muscles in the human nose could never do. The sea was a rich source of subtle scents, and any dog’s sense of smell was its best tool for observing and understanding the world.
    “You can really do it,” Pogo said.
    “Yes.”
    “Just by a touch.”
    “Yes.”
    “But you don’t see everything.”
    “Just flashes. I see what, at that moment, the other person is most concentrating on, most obsessed about…and wouldn’t want known.”
    He was silent for a while.
    They both stared out to sea.
    Makani was grateful for the beer. At first, gripped in one trembling hand, the bottle clicked against her teeth when she took a drink, but then not.
    Eventually, he said, “It’s something you wish with all your heart you couldn’t do.”
    “God, yes.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    She spoke of being sixteen and burdened with this wild talent. Of friends and family suddenly too well known. Of leaving Hawaii before she became irrevocably estranged from those she loved.
    When she began, the recently risen moon was too far in the east to paint the sea. By the time she got to Rainer Sparks, Pogo went into the house to fetch two more beers. When she finished, they sat in silence again, gazing at the frost of moonlight on the crests of the breakers and the distorted reflection of the lunar face drawn long across the vast waters.
    She could bear the silence less well than Pogo could. She spoke first. “I shouldn’t have dumped this on you. There’s nothing you can do. And there’s nothing I can do but run.”
    Stroking Bob’s head, which was resting on his left knee, Pogo said, “Don’t go Kerouac on me, O’Brien.”
    “Which means?”
    “When you called, I was trying to read
On the Road
for like the thousandth time. I’m not going to try again.”
    Pogo came from a family of achievers. His older brother and sister were driven and successful in their different professions, just as were their parents. He wanted none of that, only the sun and the sea and the surfing community. He avoided college by crafting an image of intellectual vacuity and by maintaining a perfect 2.0 grade average throughout his school years, which made him unwelcome at institutions of higher learning. His