Shadowfires by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

and broke
her out in a sweat along the back of her neck and all over her
scalp.
    “Wait a second,” Benny said. He turned to the door through which
they had come, pushed down on the bar handle, and opened it,
startling Walt, who was just returning to his desk on the other side.
Letting the heavy door fall shut again, Benny looked at Kordell and
said, “Although it's always locked from the outside, it's always open
from the inside?”
    “That's right, of course,” Kordell said. “It'd be too much trouble
to have to summon the attendant to be let out as well as in. Besides,
we can't risk having someone accidentally locked in here during an emergency. Fire or earthquake, for example.”
    Their footsteps echoed eerily off the highly polished tile floor
as they continued along the corridor toward the exterior service door
at the far end. When they passed the two large rooms, Rachael saw
several people in the chamber on the left, standing and moving and
talking softly in a glare of crisp, cold fluorescent light. Morgue
workers wearing hospital whites. A fat man in beige slacks and a
beige-yellow-red-green madras sports jacket. Two men in dark suits
looked up as Rachael walked by.
    She also saw three dead bodies: still, shrouded shapes lying on
stainless-steel gurneys.
    At the end of the hall, Everett Kordell pushed open the wide metal
door. He stepped outside and beckoned them.
    Rachael and Benny followed. She expected to find an alleyway
beyond, but though they had left the building, they were not actually
outside. The exterior morgue door opened onto one of the underground
levels of an adjacent multistory parking garage. It was the same
garage in which
she'd parked her 560 SL just a short while ago, though she'd left it
a few levels above this one.
    The gray concrete floor, the blank walls, and the thick pillars
holding up the gray concrete ceiling made the subterranean garage
seem like an immense, starkly modernistic, Western version of a
pharaoh's tomb. The sodium-vapor ceiling lights, widely spaced, provided a jaundice-yellow illumination that Rachael found fitting for a place that served as an antechamber to the hall of the dead.
    The area around the morgue entrance was a no-parking zone. But a
score of cars were scattered farther out in the vast room, half in
the crepuscular bile-yellow light and half in purple-black shadows
that had the velvet texture of a casket lining.
    Looking at the cars, she had the extraordinary feeling that
something was hiding among them, watching.
    Watching her in particular.
    Benny saw her shiver, and he put his arm around her shoulders.
    Everett Kordell closed the heavy morgue door, then tried to open
it, but the bar handle could not be depressed. “You see? It locks
automatically. Ambulances, morgue wagons, and hearses drive down that
ramp from the street and stop here. The only way to get in is to push
this button.” He pushed a white button in the wall beside the door.
“And speak into this intercom.” He brought his mouth close to a wire
speaker set flush in the concrete. “Walt? This is Dr. Kordell at the
outer door. Will you buzz us back in, please?”
    Walt's voice came from the speaker. “Right away, sir.”
    A buzzer sounded, and Kordell was able to open the door again.
    “I assume the attendant doesn't just open for anyone who asks to be let in,” Benny said.
    “Of course not,” Kordell said, standing in the open doorway. “If
he's sure he recognizes the voice and if he knows the person, he buzzes him through. If he doesn't
recognize the voice, or if
it's someone new from a private mortuary, or if there's any reason to
be suspicious, the attendant walks through the corridor that we just
walked, all the way from the front desk, and he inspects whoever's seeking admittance.”
    Rachael had lost all interest in these details and was concerned
only about the gloom-mantled garage around them, which provided a
hundred excellent hiding places.
    Benny