Dean R. Koontz - Dragon Tears

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Dragon Tears 067-011-4.8]
By: Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
A startlingly original masterpiece of suspense--a #1 New York Times
bestseller. In a shootout, police detective Harry Lyon kills a man on
a murderous rampage. Suddenly, Harry is being stalked by someone, or
something, with a twisted lust for revenge.
Harry Lyon, a decent cop struggling to remain rational in a crazy
world, finds his sanity threatened after being forced to shoot a man
and having a homeless stranger chant haunting words at him predicting
his death by dawn.
Berkley Publishing Group;
ISBN: 0425140032 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.15 x
Copyright 1995
You know a dream is like a river, Ever changing as it flows.
And a dreamer's just a vessel, That must follow where it goes.
Trying to learn from what's behind you.
And never knowing what's in store, Makes each day a constant battle,
Just to stay between the shores.
The River.
Garth Brooks, Victoria Shaw.
Rush headlong and hard at life, Or just sit at home and wait.
All things good and all the wrong Will come right to you: it's fate.
Hear the music, dance if you can.
Dress in rags or wear your jewels.
Drink your choice, nurse your fear In this old honkytonk of fools.
-The Book of Counted Sorry.
Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until
Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.
For breakfast, sitting at his kitchen table, he ate toasted English
muffins with lemon marmalade and drank strong black Jamaican coffee. A
pinch of cinnamon gave the brew a pleasantly spicy taste.
The kitchen window provided a view of the greenbelt that wound through
Los Cabos, a sprawling condominium development in Irvine. As president
of the homeowners' association, Harry drove the gardeners hard and
rigorously monitored their work, ensuring that the trees, shrubs, and
grass were as neatly trimmed as a landscape in a fairy tale, as if
maintained by platoons of gardening elves with hundreds of tiny
shears.
As a child, he had enjoyed fairy tales even more than children usually
did. In the worlds of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen,
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springtime hills were always flawlessly green, velvetsmooth. Order
prevailed. Villains invariably met with justice, and the virtuous were
rewarded-though sometimes only after hideous suffering. Hansel and
Gretel didn't die in the witch's oven; the crone herself was roasted
alive therein. Instead of stealing the queen's newborn daughter,
Rumpelstiltskin was foiled and, in his rage, tore himself apart.
In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century,
Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen's daughter He would no
doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate
her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape
justice by claiming that society's intolerance for bad-tempered,
evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.
Harry swallowed the last of his coffee, and sighed. Like a lot of
people, he longed to live in a better world.
Before going to work, he washed the dishes and utensils, dried them,
and put them away. He loathed coming home to mess and clutter.
At the foyer mirror by the front door, he paused to adjust the knot in
his tie. He slipped into a navy-blue blazer and checked to be sure the
weapon in his shoulder holster made no telltale bulge.
As on every workday for the past six months, he avoided trafficpacked
freeways, following the same surface streets to the MultiAgency Law
Enforcement Special Projects Center in Laguna Niguel, a route that he
had mapped out to minimize travel time. He had arrived at the office
as early as 8:15 and as late as 8:28, but he had never been tardy.
That Tuesday when he parked his Honda in the shadowed lot on the west
side of the two-story building, the car clock showed 8:21. His
wristwatch confirmed the time. Indeed, all of the clocks in Harry's
condominium and the one on the desk in his office would be displaying
8:21. He synchronized all of his clocks twice a week.
Standing beside the car, he drew deep, relaxing breaths. Rain had
fallen overnight, scrubbing the air clean. The March sunshine gave the
morning a glow as golden as the flesh of a ripe peach.
To meet Laguna Niguel architectural standards, the Special Projects
Center was a two-story Mediterranean-style building with a columned
promenade. Surrounded by lush azaleas and tall melaleucas with lacy
branches, it bore no resemblance to most police facilities. Some of
the cops who worked out of Special Projects thought it looked too
effete, but Harry liked it.
The institutional decor of the interior had little in common with the
picturesque exterior. Blue vinyl-tile floors. Pale-gray walls.
Acoustic ceilings. However, its air of orderliness and efficiency was
comforting.
Even at that early hour, people were on the move through the lobby and
hallways, mostly men with the solid physique and selfconfident attitude
that marked career cops. Only a few were in uniform. Special Projects
drew on plainclothes homicide detectives and undercover operatives from
federal, state, county, and city agencies to facilitate criminal
investigations spread over numerous jurisdictions. Special Projects
teams-sometimes whole task forcesealt with youth-gang killings, serial
murders, pattern rapists, and large-scale narcotics activities.
Harry shared a second-floor office with Connie Gulliver. His half of
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the room was softened by a small palm, Chinese evergreens, and the
leafy trailers of a pothos. Her half had no plants. On his desk were
only a blotter, pen set, and small brass clock. Heaps of files, loose
papers, and photographs were stacked on hers.
Surprisingly, Connie had gotten to the office first. She was standing
at the window, her back to him.
"Good morning," he said.
"Is it?" she asked sourly.
She turned to him. She was wearing badly scuffed Reeboks, blue jeans,
a red-and-brown-checkered blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket. The
jacket was one of her favorites, worn so often that the cords were
threadbare in places, the cuffs were frayed, and the inner arm creases
in the sleeves appeared to be as permanent as river valleys carved in
bedrock by eons of flowing water.
In her hand was an empty paper cup from which she had been drinking
coffee. She wadded it almost angrily and threw it on the floor. It
bounced and came to rest in Harry's half of the room.
"Let's hit the streets," she said, heading toward the hall door.
Staring at the cup on the floor, he said, "What's the rush?"
"We're cops, aren't we? So let's don't stand around with our thumbs up
our asses, let's go do cop stuff."
As she moved out of sight into the hall, he stared at the cup on ho
side of the room. With his foot, he nudged it across the imaginary
line that divided the office.
He followed Connie to the door but halted at the threshold. He glanced
back at the paper cup.
By now Connie would be at the end of the corridor, maybe even
descending the stairs.
Harry hesitated, returned to the crumpled cup, and tossed it in the
waste can. He disposed of the other two cups as well.
He caught up with Connie in the parking lot, where she yanked open the
driver's door of their unmarked Project sedan. As he got in the other
side, she started the car, twisting the key so savagely that it should
have snapped off in the ignition.
"Have a bad night?" he inquired.
She slammed the car into gear.
He said, "Headache?"
She reversed too fast out of the parking slot.
He said, "Thorn in the paw?"
The car shot toward the street.
Harry braced himself, but he was not worried about her driving.
She could handle a car far better than she handled people. "Want to
talk about whatever's wrong?"
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"No."
For someone who lived on the edge, who seemed fearless in moments of
danger, who went skydiving and breakneck dirt-biking on weekends,
Connie Gulliver was frustratingly, primly reticent when it came to
making personal revelations. They had been working together for six
months, and although Harry knew a great many things about her,
sometimes it seemed he knew nothing imrtant about her.
"It might help to talk about it," Harry said.
"It wouldn't help."
Harry watched her surreptitiously as she drove, wondering if her anger
arose from man problems. He had been a cop for fifteen years and had
seen enough of human treachery and misery to know that men were the
source of most women's troubles. He knew nothing whatsoever of
Connie's love life, however, not even whether she had one.
"Does it have to do with this case?"
"No."
He believed her. She tried, with apparent success, never to be stained
by the filth in which her life as a cop required her to wade.
She said, "But I sure do want to nail this sonofabitch Durner. I think
we're close."
Doyle Durner, a drifter who moved in the surfer subculture, was wanted
for questioning in a series of rapes that had grown more violent
incident by incident until the most recent victim had been beaten to
death. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.
Durner was their primary suspect because he was known to have undergone
a circumferential autologous penile engorgement. A plastic surgeon in
Newport Beach liposuctioned fat out of Durner's waist and injected it
into his penis to increase its thickness. The procedure was definitely
not recommended by the American Medical Association, but if the surgeon
had a big mortgage to pay and the patient was obsessed with his
circumference, the forces of the marketplace prevailed over concerns
about post-operative complications. The circumference of Durner's
manhood had been increased fifty percent, such a dramatic enlargement
that it must have caused him occasional discomfort. By all reports, he
was happy with the results, not because he was likely to impress women
but because he was likely to hurt them, which was the whole point. The
victims' description of their attacker's freakish difference had helped
authorities zero in on Durner-and three of them had noted the tattoo of
a snake on his groin, which had been recorded in his police file upon
his conviction for two rapes in Santa Barbara eight years ago.
By noon that Tuesday, Harry and Connie had spoken with workers and
customers at three hangouts popular among surfers and other beach
habitue's in Laguna: a shop that sold surfboards and related gear, a
yogurt and health food store, and a dimly lighted bar in which a dozen
customers were drinking Mexican beers at eleven o'clock in the
morning.
If you could believe what they said, which you couldn't, they had never
heard of Doyle Durner and did not recognize him in the photo they were
shown.
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In the car between stops, Connie regaled Harry with the latest items in
her collection of outrages. "You hear about the woman in Philadelphia,
they found two infants dead of malnutrition in her apartment and dozens
of crack-cocaine vials scattered all over the place? She's so doped up
her babies starve to death, and you know all they could charge her
with? Reckless gm" Harry only sighed. When Connie was in the mood to
talk about what she sometimes called "the continuing crisis or when she
was more sarcastic, "the pre-millennium cotillion"; or in her bleaker
moments, "these new Dark Ages"-no response was expected from him. She
was quite satisfied to make a monologue of it.
She said, "A guy in New York killed his girlfriend's two-year-old
daughter, pounded her with his fists and kicked her because she was
dancing in front of the TV interfering with his view. Probably
watching 'Wheel of Fortune,' didn't want to miss a shot of Vanna
White's fabulous legs."
Like most cops, Connie had an acute sense of black humor. It was a
defense mechanism. Without it you'd be driven crazy or become
terminally depressed by the endless encounters with human evil and
perversity that were central to the job. To those whose knowledge of
police life came from half-baked television programs, real-life cop
humor could seem crude and insensitive at times-though no good cop gave
a rat's ass for what anybody but another cop thought of him.
"There's this Suicide Prevention Center up in Sacramento," Connie said,
braking for a red traffic light. "One of the counselors got sickof
getting calls from this depressive senior citizen, so he and a friend
went to the old guy's apartment, held him down, slashed his wrists and
throat."
Sometimes, beneath Connie's darkest humor, Harry perceived a bitterness
that was not common to cops. Perhaps it was worse than mere
bitterness. Maybe even despair. She was so self-contained that it was
usually difficult to determine exactly what she was feeling.
Unlike Connie, Harry was an optimist. To remain an optimist, however,
he found it necessary not to dwell on human folly and malevolence the
way she did.
Trying to change the subject, he said, "How about lunch? I know this
great little Italian trattoria with oilcloth on the tables, wine
bottles for candleholders, good gnocchi, fabulous manicotti."
She grimaced. "Nah. Let's just grab tacos at a drive-through and eat
on the fly."
They compromised on a burger joint half a block north of Pacific Coast
Highway. It had about a dozen customers and a Southwest decor. The
tops of the whitewashed wood tables were sealed beneath an inch of
acrylic. Pastel flame-pattern upholstery on the chairs.
Potted cacti. Gorman and Parkison lithographs. They ought to have
been selling black-bean soup and mesquite-grilled beef instead of
burgers and fries.
Harry and Connie were eating at a small table along one wall-a dry
grilled-chicken sandwich for him; shoestring fries and sloppy, aromatic
cheeseburger for her-when the tall man entered in a flash of sunlight
that flared off the glass door. He stopped at the hostess station and
looked around.
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摘要：

file:///G|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Dean%20R.%20Koontz%20-%20Dragon%20Tears.txtDragonTears067-011-4.8]By:DeanR.KoontzSynopsis:Astartlinglyoriginalmasterpieceofsuspense--a#1NewYorkTimesbestseller.Inashootout,policedetectiveHarryLyonkillsamanonamurderousrampage.Suddenly,Harryisbeingstalkedbysomeone,ors...

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