The Bad Place by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

he has the right diskettes?”
    “Yeah,” Bobby said.
    “Definitely,” Julie said, and her throaty voice didn’t sound at all sexy now, just tough.

9
    KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds. He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with $140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it belonged to him.
    The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded another surprise—a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a California driver’s license. With the wallet was a United States passport. The photographs on the passport and license were of the same man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked like, he tilted the rearview mirror and was able to see enough of his face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was ... the license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.
    He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found another Social Security card, passport, and California driver’s license. These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of Frank.
    James Roman meant nothing to him.
    George Farris was also meaningless.
    And Frank Pollard, whom he believed himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could recall.
    “What the hell am I tangled up in?” he said aloud. He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for the one to which death had entitled him.
    As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him. He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere to which he could retreat and be assured of safety. A man without a past was also a man without a future.

10
    WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor, in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd’s office he had cold-bloodedly given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.
    The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently, standing at Ackroyd’s window to watch the fireworks, he had been surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel, where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but when