The Face by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

people who didn’t know him personally. “Being a friend of mine,” he once said, “you’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”
    Hazard’s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn’t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.
    In Ethan’s experience, the universe didn’t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.
    You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.
    Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.
    Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.
    Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.
    Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”
    “You applying for the position?”
    “Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”
    “Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”
    “Literally?” Ethan asked.
    “Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”
    “If you’re about to make a collar—”
    “I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”
    “How about you and I have lunch, and Charming Manheim pays?”
    “As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”
    “Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.
    “They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.
    “There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”
    “Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”
    “I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”
    When he pressed END , terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.
    His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.
    Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.
    In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.
    Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.
    With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.

CHAPTER 6
    O UR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL WAS A TALL white structure with ziggurat-style step-backs in its higher floors, crowned with a series of diminishing plinths that supported a final column. Aglow in the storm, a dome light capped the high column and was itself surmounted by a radio mast with a winking red aircraft-warning beacon.
    The hospital seemed to signal mercy to sick souls across the Angelean hills and into the densely populated flatlands. Its tapered shape suggested a rocket ship that might carry to Heaven those whose lives could not be saved either by medicine or by prayer.
    Ethan first stopped in the