The Bad Place by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half as bright as he thought he was.
    Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears, they were a bit ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons, squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.
    Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with the sheriff’s department, where Sampson also served before joining the City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been prescient or he had striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad and rocklike. He held a lidless box that contained four small floppy diskettes. He showed it to Julie and said, “Is this what he was after?”
    “Could be,” she said, accepting the box.
    Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, “I’ll have to go down one floor to Ackroyd’s office, switch on the computer, pop these in, and see what’s on them.”
    “Go ahead,” Sampson said.
    “You’ll have to accompany me,” Bobby said to McGrath, the officer who had brought them up on the elevator. “Keep a watch on me, make sure I don’t tamper with these things.” He indicated Tom Rasmussen. “We don’t want this piece of slime claiming they were blank disks, saying I framed him by copying the real stuff onto them myself.”
    As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen. “You know who I am?”
    Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.
    “I’m Bobby Dakota’s wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It was my Bobby you tried to kill.”
    He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.
    She said, “Know what I’d like to do to you?” She held one of her hands down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails. “For starters, I’d like to grab you by the throat, hold your head against the wall, and ram two of these nice, sharp fingernails straight through your eyes, all the way in, deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever’s messed up in there.”
    “Jesus, lady,” Sampson’s partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside anyone but Sampson, he would have been a big man.
    “Well,” she said, “he’s too screwed up to get any help from a prison psychiatrist.”
    Sampson said, “Don’t do anything foolish, Julie.”
    Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be frightened by it. A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale. To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and quaverous to be as tough as he intended, Rasmussen said, “Keep this crazy bitch away from me.”
    “She’s not actually crazy,” Sampson said. “Not clinically speaking, at least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I’m afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I wouldn’t say she’s crazy.”
    Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, “Thank you so much, Sam.”
    “You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about the other half of his accusation,” Sampson said good-naturedly.
    “Yeah, I got your point.”
    While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.
    Everyone harbored a special fear, a private boogeyman built to his own specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights. Not confining spaces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was deteriorating, and he’d