Dean R. Koontz - Bruno

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BRUNO By Dean R. Koontz 1 I WAS SLEEPING OFF HALF A BOTTLE OF GOOD SCOTCH

AND A BLONDE named Sylvia, who hadn't been so bad herself. But no one can

sneak up on me, no matter how bushed I am. You have to be a light sleeper to

last long in this business. I heard the thump near the foot of my bed, and I

was reaching under the pillow for my Colt .38 in the next instant. If I

hadn't been out celebrating the successful conclusion of a case, the blinds

and drapes wouldn't have been drawn. But I had been, and they were, so I

didn't see anything. I thought I heard footsteps in the hallway to the

living room, but I couldn't be sure. I slid out of bed, stared intently around

the room. Brown gloom, no intruder. I padded into the hall, looked both ways.

No one. In the front room, I distinctly heard the rod of the police-special

lock pull out of its floor groove. The door opened, closed, and footsteps

pounded in the outside hall, then down the apartment-house steps. I ran

into the living room and almost into the corridor before I remembered I was in

my skivvies. It's not a building where anyone would care - or maybe even

notice - a guy in his briefs, but I like to think I have higher standards than

some of the weird creeps I call neighbors. Turning on the lights, I saw

that the police lock had been disengaged. I slid the bolt back in place. I

carefully searched the apartment from the john to the linen closet. There

weren't any bombs or other dirty work, at least as far as I could see. I

checked the bedroom twice, since that was where I first heard him, but it was

clean. I brewed some coffee. The first sip was so bad that I poured half

the mug in the sink, wondering if the old plumbing could take it, and then

laced what was left with some good brandy. Better. My kind of breakfast. So

there I stood in my shorts on the cold kitchen floor, warming my gut with

liquor and wondering who had broken in and why. Then I had a bad thought.

When the intruder left, he'd pulled the rod of the special lock out of its

nest in the floor. Which meant he'd entered the apartment through a window or

that, when he'd first come through the door, he had replaced the police rod.

The last idea was stupid. No dude is going to make it hard for himself to get

out if the job goes sour. I went around checking all the windows. They were

locked as always. I even checked the bathroom window, though it has no lock,

is barred, and is set in a blank wall eight floors above the street. No one

had come in any of the windows. I slapped my head a few times, as if I

might knock some smarts into myself and figure this out. No smarter, I decided

to take a shower and get on with the day. It must have been hallucinations.

I'd never had what the two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrinks call postcoital

depression. Maybe this was what it was supposed to be like. After all, no one

walks into your apartment after achieving the near impossible of silently

throwing a police lock, then sneaks into your bedroom, just to look you over

and leave. And none of my enemies would send a killer who would chicken out

after he got that far. I finished the shower at four-thirty and did my

exercises until five. Then I showered again - cold, this time - toweled hard

enough to raise blisters, combed my mop into a semblance of order, and

dressed. By five-thirty, I was sliding into a booth down at the Ace-Spot,

and Dorothy, the waitress, was plopping a Scotch and water in front of me

before the smell of the place was properly in my nose. "What'll it be,

Jake?" she asked. She has a voice like glass dropped into a porcelain basin.

I ordered steak and eggs with a double helping of french fries, then topped it

off with a question: "Anybody been asking around about me, Dory?" She wrote

half the question down on the order pad before she realized that I had stopped

ordering. Dory was supposed to have been a fine-looking street girl in her

day, but no one ever said she had many smarts. "Not me," she said. "I'll

ask Benny." Benny was the bartender. He was smarter than Dory. Some days,

he was capable of winning a debate with a carrot. I don't know why I tend

to hang around with so many chumps, saps, and blockheads. Maybe it makes me

feel superior. A guy who's dumb enough to be trying to make a living as an

old-fashioned shamus in the late twentieth century, in the age of computers

and space-age eavesdropping equipment and drug thugs who'd kill their

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grandmothers for a nickel - hell, he needs some reason to feel good about

himself. When Dory came back, she brought a negative from Benny, plus the

food. I took it down in large bites, thinking about the stranger who had

walked through the wall into my bedroom. After two more big Scotches, I

went home to look the place over again. Just as I reached my apartment door

and thrust the key toward the lock, this dude opened it from the inside and

started coming out. "Hold it right there, creepo," I said, leveling my .38

on his big belly. I pushed him back into the living room, closed the door

behind us, and turned on the light. "What do you want?" he asked. "What

do I want? Look, buster, these are my digs, see? I live here. And the last

time I looked, you didn't." He was dressed like something out of a Bogart

film, and I might have laughed except that I was angry enough to chew up a

little bunny rabbit and spit out good-luck charms. He had a huge hat pulled

down over half his face. The overcoat might have been tailored for Siamese

twins. It hung to his knees, and after that there were wide, sloppy trousers

and big - I mean BIG - stuffy tennis shoes. The tennis shoes didn't fit

Bogart, but the air of mystery was there. For size, this guy reminded me of

that actor from the old movies, Sidney Greenstreet, though with a serious

gland condition. "I don't want to harm you," he said. His voice was about a

thousand registers below Dory's, but it had that same harsh sound of something

breaking. "You the same dude who was here earlier?" I asked. He hunched

his head and said, "I never been here before." "Let's see what you look

like." I reached for his hat. He tried to pull away, discovered I was

faster than he was, tried to slug me in the chest. But I got the hat off and

managed to take the clip on the shoulder instead of over the heart where he

had aimed it. Then I smiled and looked up at his face and stopped smiling

and said, "Good God!" "That kicks it!" His face contorted, and his big

square teeth thrust over his black lip. I was backed up against the door.

And though I was terrified for the first time in years, I wasn't about to let

him out. If my threats didn't keep him where he was, a hot kiss from the .38

would manage just fine - I hoped. "Who ... what are you?" I asked. "You

were right the first time. Who." "Answer it, then." "Can we sit down?

I'm awful tired." I let him sit, but I stayed on my feet to be able to move

fast, and while he walked to the sofa and collapsed as if he were on his last

legs, I looked him over good. He was a bear. A bruin. He was a big one too, no

little Teddy, six feet four. His shoulders were broad, and under those baggy

clothes he probably had a barrel chest and legs like tree trunks. His face was

a block of granite that some artist had tried to sculpt with a butter knife, a

straight pin, and a blunt screwdriver. All sharp planes, eyes set under a

shelf of bone, a jaw better than Schwarzenegger's. Over all that: fur. If I

hadn't been used to watching afternoon TV talk shows when business was slow,

all those programs featuring husbands-who-cheat-with-their-wives'-mothers and

transvestite-dentists-who-have-been-abducted-by-aliens, then sure as hell the

sight of a talking bruin would have crumpled me like an old paper cup. But

even being a couch potato in the nineties and facing up to what's creeping

around on our city streets is enough to make you tougher than Sam Spade and

Philip Marlowe combined. "Spill it," I said. "My name is Bruno," he

said. "And?" "You only asked who I was." "Don't get cute with me."

"Then you weren't being literal?" "Say what?" "By asking who I was, you

were actually asking for a general accounting, a broader spectrum of data."

"I could blow your head off for that," I told him. He seemed surprised and

shifted uneasily on the sofa, making the springs sing. "For what?" "Talking

like a damn accountant." He considered for a moment. "Okay. Why not? What

do I have to lose? I'm after Graham Stone, the first man you heard in here a

few hours ago. He's wanted for some crimes." "What crimes?" "You

wouldn't understand them." "Do I look like I was raised in a nunnery, don't

understand sin? Nothing any sleazeball would do could surprise me. So how did

this Stone character get in here? And you?" I waved the .38 at him when he

hesitated. "I guess there's no concealing it," Bruno said. "He and I came

through from another probability." "Huh?" It was hard to make even that

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