Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

dreading it.”
    He sighed. “I don’t want to be—”
    “Madonna with a snake in your teeth. I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the magazine than you realize.”
    “Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”
    “Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”
    Marty looked skeptical.
    Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this. Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”
    “I hear you,” he said, holding her close.
    “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing. ”

10
    After midnight.
    The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn-stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information about potential threats to the well-being of those who sleep beyond the brick and stone walls.
    The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.
    Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.
    A cold northwest breeze.
    A moonless sky.
    A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.
    The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is encircled by a spear-point iron fence.
    The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.
    As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he extracts a key.
    Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn’t know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose. This has happened to him before.
    The key fits the dead-bolt lock.
    He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door softly behind him.
    After putting the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the system; otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit disarming sequence just when it’s required, punches it in.
    He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside pocket: a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently, by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.
    Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains eighteen cartridges.
    A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it, and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without waking others in the house and neighborhood.
    Eight shots should be more than he needs.
    The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped second-floor hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar with