Winter.Moon

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 528.56KB 279 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Winter Moon [067-037-5.0]

By: Dean R. Koontz

Synopsis:

The #1 bestselling author of Dragon Tears returns with a thriller. A

Hollywood director goes on a killing spree in the streets of L.A. while

an old caretaker on a lonely Montana ranch witnesses a chilling

vision.

Connecting both incidents is policeman Jack McGarvey, who is drawn into

a terrifying confrontation with something unearthly.

Ballantine Books;

ISBN: 0345386108

PART ONE.

The City of the Dying Dy.

Beaches, surfers, California girls. Wind scented with fabulous

dreams.

Bougainvillea, groves of oranges. Stars are born, everything gleams.

A weather change. Shadows fall. New scent upon the wind--decay.

Cocaine, Uzis, drive-by shootings. Death is a banker. Everyone

pays.

the Book of Counted Sorrows.

CHAPTER ONE.

Death was driving an emerald-green Lexus. It pulled off the street,

passed the four self-service pumps, and stopped in one of the two

full-service lanes.

Standing in front of the station, Jack McGarvey noticed the car but not

the driver. Even under a bruised and swollen sky that hid the sun, the

Lexus gleamed like a jewel, a sleek and lustrous machine. The windows

were darkly tinted, so he couldn't have seen the driver clearly even if

he had tried.

As a thirty-two-year-old cop with a wife, a child, and a big mortgage,

Jack had no prospects of buying an expensive luxury car, but he didn't

envy the owner of the Lexus. He often remembered his dad's admonition

that envy was mental theft. If you coveted another man's possessions,

Dad said, then you should be willing to take on his responsibilities,

heartaches, and troubles along with his money.

He stared at the car for a moment, admiring it as he might a priceless

painting at the Getty Museum or a first edition of a James M. Cain

novel in a pristine dust jacket--with no strong desire to possess it,

taking pleasure merely from the fact of its existence.

In a society that often seemed to be spinning toward anarchy, where

ugliness and decay made new inroads every day, his spirits were lifted

by any proof that the hands of men and women were capable of producing

things of beauty and quality. The Lexus, of course, was an import,

designed and manufactured on foreign shores, however, it was the entire

human species that seemed damned, not just his countrymen, and evidence

of standards and dedication was heartening regardless of where he found

it.

An attendant in a gray uniform hurried out of the office and approached

the gleaming car, and Jack gave his full attention, once more, to

Hassam Arkadian.

"My station is an island of cleanliness in a filthy sea, an eye of

sanity in a storm of madness," Arkadian said, speaking earnestly,

unaware of sounding melodramatic.

He was slender, about forty, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed

mustache. The creases in the legs of his gray cotton work pants were

knife-sharp, and his matching work shirt and jacket were immaculate.

"I had the aluminum siding and the brick treated with a new sealant,"

he said, indicating the facade of the service station with a sweep of

his arm. "Paint won't stick to it. Not even metallic paint. Wasn't

cheap. But now when these gang kids or crazy-stupid taggers come

around at night and spray their trash all over the walls, we scrub it

off, scrub it right off the next morning."

With his meticulous grooming, singular intensity, and quick slender

hands, Arkadian might have been a surgeon about to begin his workday in

an operating theater. He was, instead, the owner-operator of the

service station.

"Do you know," he said incredulously, "there are professors who have

written books on the value of graffiti? The value of graffiti? The

value?"

"They call it street art," said Luther Bryson, Jack's partner.

Arkadian gazed up disbelievingly at the towering black cop. "You think

what these punks do is art?"

"Hey, no, not me," Luther said.

At six three and two hundred ten pounds, he was three inches taller

than Jack and forty pounds heavier, with maybe eight inches and seventy

pounds on Arkadian. Though he was a good partner and a good man, his

granite face seemed incapable of the flexibility required for a

smile.

His deeply set eyes were unwaveringly forthright. My Malcolm X glare,

he called it. With or without his uniform, Luther Bryson could

intimidate anyone from the Pope to a purse snatcher.

He wasn't using the glare now, wasn't trying to intimidate Arkadian,

was in complete agreement with him. "Not me. I'm just saying that's

what the candy-ass crowd calls it. Street art."

The service-station owner said, "These are professors. Educated men

and women.

Doctors of art and literature. They have the benefit of an education

my parents couldn't afford to give me, but they're stupid. There's no

other word for it. Stupid, stupid, stupid." His expressive face

revealed the frustration and anger that Jack encountered with

increasing frequency in the City of Angels. "What fools do

universities produce these days?"

Arkadian had labored to make his operation special. Bracketing the

property were wedge-shaped brick planters in which grew queen palms,

azaleas laden with clusters of red flowers, and impatients in pinks and

purples. There was no gnme, no litter. The portico covering the pumps

was supported by brick columns, and the whole station had a quaint

colonial appearance.

In any age, the station would have seemed misplaced in Los Angeles.

Freshly painted and clean, it was doubly out of place in the grunge

that had been spreading like a malignancy through the city during the

nineties.

"Come on, come look, look," Arkadian said, and headed toward the south

end of the building.

"Poor guy's gonna blow out an artery in the brain over this," Luther

said.

"Somebody should tell him it's not fashionable to give a damn these

days," Jack said.

A low and menacing rumble of thunder rolled through the distended

sky.

Looking at the dark clouds, Luther said, "Weatherman predicted it

wouldn't rain today."

"Maybe it wasn't thunder. Maybe somebody finally blew up city hall."

"You think? Well, if the place was full of politicians," Luther said,

"we should take the rest of the day off, find a bar, do some

celebrating."

"Come on, officers," Arkadian called to them. He had reached the south

corner of the building, near where they had parked their patrol car.

"Look at this, I want you to see this, I want you to see my

bathrooms."

"His bathrooms?" Luther said.

Jack laughed. "Hell, you got anything better to do?"

"A lot safer than chasing bad guys," Luther said, following Arkadian.

Jack glanced at the Lexus again. Nice machine. Zero to sixty in how

many seconds? Eight? Seven? Must handle like a dream.

The driver had gotten out of the car and was standing beside it. Jack

noticed little about the guy, only that he was wearing a loose-fitting,

double-breasted Armani suit.

The Lexus, on the other hand, had wire wheels and chrome guards around

the wheel wells. Reflections of storm clouds moved slowly across its

windshield and made mysterious smoky patterns in the depths of its

jewel-green finish.

Sighing, Jack followed Luther past the two open bays of the repair

garage. The first stall was empty, but a gray BMW was on the hydraulic

lift in the second space. A young Asian man in mechanic's coveralls

was at work on the car. Tools and supplies were neatly racked along

the walls, floor to ceiling, and the two bays looked cleaner than the

average kitchen in a fourstar restaurant.

At the corner of the building stood a pair of softdrink vending

machines. They purred and clinked as if formulating and bottling the

beverages within their own guts.

Around the corner were the men's and women's rest rooms, where Arkadian

had opened both doors. "Take a look, go ahead--I want you to see my

bathrooms."

Both small rooms had white ceramic-tile floors and walls, white

commodes, white swing-top waste cans, white sinks, gleaming chrome

fixtures, and large mirrors above the sinks.

"Spotless," Arkadian said, talking fast, running his sentences together

in his quiet anger. "No streaks on the mirrors, no stains in the

sinks, we check them after every customer uses them, disinfect them

every day, you could eat off those floors and it would be as safe as

eating off the plates from your own mother's kitchen."

Looking at Jack over Arkadian's head, Luther smiled and said, "I think

I'll have a steak and baked potato. What about you?"

"Just a salad," Jack said. "I'm trying to lose a few pounds."

Even if he had been listening to them, Mr. Arkadian couldn't have been

joked out of his bleak mood. He jangled a ring of keys.

"I keep them locked, give the keys only to customers. City inspector

stops around, he tells me a new rule says these are public facilities,

so you've got to let them open for the public, whether they buy

anything at your place or not."

He jangled the keys again, harder, more angrily, then harder still.

Neither Jack nor Luther tried to comment above the strident ring and

raffle.

"Let them fine me. I'll pay the fine. When these are unlocked, the

drunks and junkie bums who live in alleys and parks, they use my

bathrooms, urinate on the floor, vomit in the sinks. You wouldn't

believe the mess they make, disgusting, things I'd be embarrassed to

talk about."

Arkadian was actually blushing at the thought of what he could have

told them.

He waved the jangling keys in the air in front of each open door, and

he reminded Jack of nothing so much as a voodoo priest casting a

spell--in this case, to ward off the riffraff who would despoil his

rest rooms. His face was as mottled and turbulent as the stormy sky.

"Let me tell you something. Hassam Arkadian works sixty and seventy

hours a week, Hassam Arkadian employs eight people full time, and

Hassam Arkadian pays half of what he earns in taxes, but Hassam

Arkadian is not going to spend his life cleaning up vomit because a

bunch of stupid bureaucrats have more compassion for some

lazy-drunken-psychojunkie bums than they have for people who are trying

their damnedest to lead decent lives."

He finished his speech in a rush, breathless. Stopped jangling the

keys.

Sighed. He closed the doors and locked them.

Jack felt useless. He could see that Luther was uncomfortable too.

Sometimes a cop couldn't do much more for a victim than nod in sympathy

and shake his head in sorry amazement at the depths into which the city

was sinking. That was one of the worst things about the job.

Mr. Arkadian went around the corner to the front of the station

again.

He wasn't walking as fast as before.

His shoulders were slumped, and for the first time he looked more

dejected than angry, as if he had decided, perhaps on a subconscious

level, to give up the fight.

Jack hoped that wasn't the case. In his daily life, Hassam was

struggling to realize a dream of a better future, a better world. He

was one of a dwindling number who still had enough guts to resist

entropy. Civilization's soldiers, warring on the side of hope, were

already too few to make a satisfactory army.

Adjusting their gun belts, Jack and Luther followed Arkadian past the

soft-drink dispensers.

The man in the Armani suit was standing at the second vending machine,

studying the selections. He was about Jack's age, tall, blond,

clean-shaven, with a golden-bronze complexion that could have been

gotten locally at that time of year only from a tanning bed. As they

walked by him, he pulled a handful of change from one pocket of his

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

WinterMoon[067-037-5.0]By:DeanR.KoontzSynopsis:The#1bestsellingauthorofDragonTearsreturnswithathriller.AHollywooddirectorgoesonakillingspreeinthestreetsofL.A.whileanoldcaretakeronalonelyMontanaranchwitnessesachillingvision.ConnectingbothincidentsispolicemanJackMcGarvey,whoisdrawnintoaterrifyingconfr...

展开>> 收起<<

Winter.Moon.pdf

共279页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Winter.Moon

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: