The Good Guy. Dean Koontz
name had been typed on the back of the photo: LINDA PAQUETTE. Under the name was an address in Laguna Beach.
Although he had just finished a beer, Tim’s mouth was salt-dry and lemon-sour. His heart beat slowly but unusually hard, booming in his ears.
Irrationally, he felt guilty looking at the photo, as though he had somehow participated in the planning of this woman’s death. He put away the picture. He slid the envelope aside.
Another man entered the bar. He was nearly Tim’s size, with brown hair cropped short like Tim’s.
Rooney arrived with a fresh beer and said to Tim, “You keep chugging them at that pace, you won’t qualify as furniture anymore. You’ll be a real customer.”
A persistent feeling of being caught in a dream slowed Tim’s thinking. He meant to tell Rooney what had just happened, but his tongue felt thick.
The newcomer approached, sat where the skydiver had sat, with an empty stool between him and Tim. He said to Rooney, “Budweiser.”
As Rooney went to draw the beer, the stranger stared at the manila envelope, and then met Tim’s gaze. He had brown eyes, just as Tim did.
“You’re early,” said the killer.
Aman’s life can pivot on the smallest hinge of time. No minute is without potential for momentous change, and each tick of the clock might be the voice of Fate whispering a promise or a warning.
When the killer said, “You’re early,” Tim Carrier noticed that the Budweiser clock showed five minutes shy of the hour, and he made an educated guess: “So are you.”
The hinge had turned. The door stood open, and it could never be closed again.
“I’m no longer sure I want to hire you,” Tim said.
Rooney brought the killer’s beer, and then answered a call to the farther end of the bar.
A trick of light, reflecting off the mahogany, gave the contents of the glass a rubescent cast.
The stranger licked his chapped lips, and drank. He had a deep thirst.
When he put down the glass, he said amicably, “You can’t hire me. I’m no one’s employee.”
Tim considered excusing himself to the men’s room. He could call the police on his cell phone.
He worried that the stranger would interpret his departure as an invitation to take the manila envelope and leave.
Carrying the envelope to the lavatory would be a bad idea. Under the assumption that Tim wanted privacy for the transaction, the guy might follow him.
“I can’t be hired, and I’m not peddling anything, either,” said the killer. “You sell to me, not the other way around.”
“Yeah? What am I selling?”
“A concept. The concept of your world profoundly changed by one … alteration.”
In Tim’s mind rose the face of the woman in the photo.
His options weren’t clear. He needed time to think, so he said, “The seller sets the price. You set the price—twenty thousand.”
“That’s not the price. It’s a contribution.”
This conversation made no less sense than typical bar talk, and Tim found its rhythm. “But for my contribution I get your … service.”
“No. I have no service to sell. You receive my grace.”
“Your grace.”
“Yes. Once I accept the concept you’re selling, your world will be profoundly changed by my grace.”
Considering their ordinary color, the killer’s brown eyes were more compelling than they should have been.
When he had sat down at the bar, his face had appeared hard, but that had been a mistaken first impression. A dimple adorned his round chin. Smooth pink cheeks. No laugh lines. No furrows in the brow.
The whimsical quality of his half-smile suggested that he might be remembering a favorite childhood story about fairies. It appeared to be his default expression, as if he were not entirely connected to the moment, perpetually bemused.
“This is not a business transaction,” said the smiling man. “You petitioned me, and I’m the answer to your prayers.”
The vocabulary with which he discussed his work might have been an indication of caution, a technique to avoid incriminating himself. When delivered with a persistent smile, however, his genteel euphemisms were disquieting if not in fact creepy.
As Tim opened the manila envelope, the killer warned, “Not here.”
“Just chill.” Tim removed the photo from the envelope, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’ve had a change of heart.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I was counting on you.”
Sliding the envelope in front of the empty stool that stood between them, Tim said, “Half of what we agreed. For doing nothing. Call it a no-kill fee.”
“You’d never be tied to it,” the killer said.
“I know. You’re good. I’m sure you’re good at this. The best. I just don’t want it anymore.”
Smiling, shaking his head, the killer said, “You want it, all right.”
“Not anymore.”
“You wanted it once. You don’t go as far as wanting it and then not want it anymore. A man’s mind doesn’t work that way.”
“Second thoughts,” said Tim.
“In a thing like this, the second thoughts always come after a man gets what he wants. He allows himself some remorse, so he feels better about himself. He got what he wanted and he feels good about himself, and a year from now it’s just a sad thing that happened.”
The brown-eyed stare disturbed, but Tim dared not look away. A lack of directness might inspire in the killer a sudden suspicion.
One reason those eyes were compelling became clear. The pupils were radically dilated. The black pool at the center of each iris appeared to equal the area of surrounding color.
The light at this end of the bar was reduced but not dim. The pupils were as dilated as they might have been in perfect darkness.
The hunger in his eyes, the greed for light, had the gravity of a black hole in space, of a collapsed star.
A blind man’s eyes might be perpetually dilated like this. But the killer was not blind, not blind to light, although perhaps to something else.
“Take the money,” Tim said.
That smile. “It’s half the money.”
“For doing nothing.”
“Oh, I’ve done some work.”
Tim frowned. “What have you done?”
“I’ve shown you what you are.”
“Yeah? What am I?”
“A man with the soul of a murderer but with the heart of a coward.”
The killer picked up the envelope, rose from the stool, and walked away.
Having successfully passed himself off as the man with a dog named Larry, having for the moment spared the life of the woman in the photograph, having avoided the violent confrontation that could have ensued if the killer had realized what had gone wrong, Tim ought to have been relieved. Instead, his throat tightened, and his heart swelled until it seemed to crowd his lungs