Shadowfires

VIP免费
2024-12-03 0 0 707.94KB 351 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Shadowfires [067-011-5.0]
By: Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
A fearful divorcee is relieved when her enraged ex-husband dies in a
freak accident, but her terror returns when his body disappears and she
is stalked by a man who looks just like him.Rachel wants no part of her
husband Eric's research empire or his fortune. She just wants to be free
of his obsessions. Her request for a quick and clean divorce enrages
Eric. Consumed by pure and terrifying hatred, he storms into the
street--only to be killed in a horrible traffic accident. Rachel thinks
her nightmare is over, but it's only just begun. Previously published by
Avon under the pseudonym of Leigh Nichols.
Berkley Pub Group;
ISBN: 0425136981 ; copyright 1994
Brightness fell from the air, nearly as tangible as rain, rippled down windows,
formed colorful puddles on the hoods and trunks of parked cars, and impafled a
wet sheen to the leaves of trees and to the chrome on the bustling traffic that
filled the street. Miniature images of the California sun shimmered in every
reflective surface, and downtown Santa Ana was drenched in the clear light of a
late june morning.
When Rachael Leben exited the lobby doors of the office building and
stepped onto the sidewalk, the summer sunshine felt like warm water on
her bare arms. She closed her eyes and, for a moment, turned her face
to the heavens, bathing in the radiance, relishing it.
"You stand there smiling as if nothing better has ever happened to you
or ever will," Eric said sourly when he followed her out of the building
and saw her luxuriating in the June heat.
"Please," she said, face still tilted to the sun, "let's not have a
scene."
"You made a fool of me in there."
"I certainly did not."
"What the hell are you trying to prove, anyway?"
She did not respond, she was determined not to let him spoil the lovely
day. She turned and started to walk away.
Eric stepped in front of her, blocking her way. His gray-blue eyes
usually had an icy aspect, but now his gaze was hot.
"Let's not be childish," she said.
"You're not satisfied just to leave me. You've got to let the world
know you don't need me or any damn thing I can give you."
"No, Eric. I don't care what the world thinks of you one way or the
other."
"You want to rub my face in it."
"That's not true, Eric."
"Oh, yes," he said. "Hell, yes. You're just reveling in my
humiliation. Wallowing in it."
She saw him as she had never seen him before, a pathetic man.
Previously he'd seemed strong to her, physically, emotionally, and
mentally strong, strong-willed, strongly opinionated. He was aloof,
too, and sometimes cold. He could be cruel. And there had been times
during their seven years of marriage when he had been as distant as the
moon. But until this moment, he'd never seemed weak or pitiable.
"Humiliation?" she said wonderingly. "Eric, I've done you an enormous
favor. Any other man would buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate."
They had just left the offices of Eric's attorneys, where their divorce
settlement had been negotiated with a speed that had surprised everyone
but Rachael. She had startled them by arriving without an attorney of
her own and by failing to press for everything to which she was entitled
under California's community-property laws. When Eric's attorney
presented a first offer, she had insisted it was too generous and had
given them another set of figures that had seemed more reasonable to
her.
"Champagne, huh? You're going to be telling everyone you took twelve
and a half million less than you deserved just so you could get a quick
divorce and be done with me fast, and I'm supposed to stand here
grinning? Christ."
"Eric-" "Couldn't wait to be done with me. Cut off a goddamn arm to be
done with me. And I'm supposed to celebrate my humiliation?"
"It's a matter of principle with me not to take more than-" "Principle,
my ass."
"Eric, you know I wouldn't-" "Everyone'll be looking at me and saying,
Christ, just how insufferable must the guy have been if it was worth
twelve and a half million to be rid of him!"' "I'm not going to tell
anyone what we settled for," Rachael said.
"Bullshit."
"If you think I'd ever talk against you or gossip about you, then you
know even less about me than I'd thought."
Eric, twelve years her senior, had been thirty-five and worth four
million when she'd married him. Now he was forty-two, and his fortune
totaled more than thirty million, and by any interpretation of
California law, she was entitled to thirteen million dollars in the
divorce settlement-half the wealth accumulated during their marriage.
Instead, she insisted on settling for her red Mercedes 560 SL sports
car, five hundred thousand dollars, and no alimony-which was
approximately one twenty-sixth of what she could have claimed. She had
calculated that this nest egg would give her the time and resources to
decide what to do with the rest of her life and to finance whatever
plans she finally made.
Aware that passemby were staring as she and Eric confronted each other
en the sun-splashed street, Rachael said quietly, "I didn't marry you
for your money."
"I wonder," he said acidly and irrationally. His boldfeatured face
wasn't handsome at the moment. Anger had carved it into an ugly
mask-all hard, deep, downslashing lines.
Rachael spoke calmly, with no trace of bitterness, with no desire to put
him in his place or to hurt him in any way. It was just over. She felt
no rage. Only mild regret. "And now that it's finally over, I don't
expect to be supported in high style and great luxury for the rest of my
days. I don't want your millions. You earned them, not me.
Your genius, your iron determination, your endless hours in the office
and the lab. You built it all, you and you alone, and you alone deserve
what you've built. You're an important man, maybe even a great man in
your field, Eric, and I am only me, Rachael, and I'm not going to
pretend I had anything to do with your triumphs."
The lines of anger in his face deepened as she complimented him. He was
accustomed to occupying the dominant role in all relationships,
professional and private.
From his position of absolute dominance, he relentlessly forced
submission to his wishesr crushed anyone who would not submit.
Friends, employees, and business associates always did things Eric
Leben' 5 way, or they were history. Submit or be rejected and
destroyedthose were their only choices. He enjoyed the exercise of
power, thrived on conquests as major as milliondollar deals and as minor
as winning domestic arguments. Rachael had done as he wished for seven
years, but she would not submit any longer.
The funny thing was that, by her docility and reasonableness, she had
robbed him of the power on which he thrived. He had been looking
forward to a protracted battle over the division of spoils, and she had
walked away from it. He relished the prospect of acrimonious squabbling
over alimony payments, but she thwarted him by rejecting all such
assistance. He had pleasurably anticipated a court fight in which he
would make her look like a gold-digging bitch and reduce her, at last,
to a creature without dignity who would be willing to settle for far
less than was her due. Then, although leaving her rich, he would have
felt that the war had been won and he had beaten her into submission.
But when she made it clear that his millions were of no importance to
her, she had eliminated the one power he still had over her. She had
cut him off at the knees, and his anger arose from his realization that,
by her docility, she had somehow made herself his equal-if not his
superiorin any further contact they might have.
She said, "Well, the way I see it, I've lost seven years, and all I want
is reasonable compensation for that time.
I'm twenty-nine, almost thirty, and in a way, I'm just beginning my
life. Starting out later than other people.
This settlement will give me a terrific start. If I lose the bundle, if
someday I have reason to wish I'd gone for the whole thirteen million..
. well, then that's my tough luck, not yours. We've been through all
this, Eric. It's finished."
She stepped around him, trying to walk away, but he grabbed her arm,
halting her.
"Please let me go," she said evenly.
Glaring at her, he said, "How could I have been so wrong about you? I
thought you were sweet, a bit shy, an unworldly little fluff of a girl.
But you're a nasty little ball-buster, aren't you?"
"Really, this is an absolutely crazy attitude. And this crude behavior
isn't worthy of you. Now let me go."
He gripped her even tighter. "Or is this all just a negotiating ploy?
Huh? When the papers are drawn up, when we come back to sign everything
on Friday, will you suddenly have a change of heart? Will you want
more?"
"No, I'm not playing any games."
His grin was tight and mean. "I'll bet that's it. If we agree to such
a ridiculously low settlement and draw up the papers, you'll refuse to
sign them, but you'll use them in court to try to prove we were going to
give you the shaft. You'll pretend the offer was ours and that we tried
to strong-arm you into signing it. Make me look bad. Make me look as
if I'm a real hard-hearted bastard.
Huh? Is that the strategy? Is that the game?"
"I told you, there's no game. I'm sincere."
He dug his fingers into her upper arm. "The truth, Rachael."
"Stop it."
"Is that the strategy?"
"You're hurting me."
"And while you're at it, why don't you tell me all about Ben Shadway,
too?"
She blinked in surprise, for she had never imagined that Eric knew about
Benny.
His face seemed to harden in the hot sun, cracking with more deep lines
of anger. "How long was he fucking you before you finally walked out on
me?"
"You're disgusting, she said, immediately regretting the harsh words
because she saw that he was pleased to have broken through her cool
facade at last.
"How long?" he demanded, tightening his grip.
"I didn't meet Benny till six months after you and I separated," she
said, striving to keep a neutral tone that would deny him the noisy
confrontation he apparently desired.
"How long was he poaching on ,the Rachael?"
"If you know about Benny, you ve had me watched, something you've no
right to do."
"Yeah, you want to keep your dirty little secrets."
"If you have hired someone to watch me, you know I've been seeing Benny
for just five months. Now let go. You're still hurting me.
A young bearded guy, passing by, hesitated, stepped toward them, and
said, "You need help, lady?"
Eric turned on the stranger in such a rage that he seemed to spit the
words out rather than speak them, "Butt out, mister. This is my wife,
and it's none of your goddamn business."
Rachael tried to wrench free of Eric's iron grip without success.
The bearded stranger said, "So she's your wife-that doesn't give you the
right to hurt her."
Letting go of Rachael, Eric fisted his hands and turned more directly
toward the intruder.
Rachael spoke quickly to her would-be Galahad, eager to defuse the
situation. "Thank you, but it's all right.
Really. I'm fine. Just a minor disagreement."
The young man shrugged and walked away, glancing back as he went.
The incident had at last made Eric aware that he was in danger of making
a spectacle of himself, which a man of his high position and
self-importance was loath to do. However, his temper had not cooled.
His face was flushed, and his lips were bloodless. His eyes were the
eyes of a dangerous man.
She said, "Be happy, Eric. You've saved millions of dollars and God
knows how much more in attorneys fees. You won. You didn't get to
crush me or muddy my reputation in court the way you had hoped to, but
you still won. Be happy with that."
With a seething hatred that shocked her, he said, "You stupid, rotten
bitch. The day you walked out on me, I wanted to knock you down and
kick your stupid face in. I should've done it. Wish I had. But I
thought you'd come crawling back, so I didn't. I should've. Should've
kicked your stupid face in." He raised his hand as if to slap her.
But he checked himself even as she flinched from the expected blow.
Furious, he turned and hurried away.
As she watched him go, Rachael suddenly understood that his sick desire
to dominate everyone was a far more fundamental need than she'd
realized. By stripping him of his power over her, by turning her back
on both him and his money, she had not merely reduced him to an equal
but had, in his eyes, unmanned him. That had to he the case, for
nothing else explained the degree of his rage or his urge to commit
violence, an urge he had barely controlled.
She had grown to dislike him intensely, if not hate him, and she had
feared him a little, too. But until now, she had not been fully aware
of the immensity and intensity of the rage within him. She had not
realized how thoroughly dangerous he was.
Mthough the golden sunshine still dazzled her eyes and forced her to
squint, although it still baked her skin, she felt a cold shiver pass
through her, spawned by the realization that she'd been wise to leave
Eric when she had-and perhaps fortunate to escape with no more physical
damage than the bruises his fingers were certain to have left on her
arm.
Watching him step off the sidewalk into the street, she was relieved to
see him go. A moment later, relief turned to horror.
He was heading toward his black Mercedes, which was parked along the
other side of the avenue. Perhaps he actually was Ninded by his anger.
Or maybe it was the briNiant June sunlight flashing on every shiny
surface that interfered with his vision. Whatever the reason, he dashed
across the southbound lanes of Main Street, which were at the moment
without traffic, and kept on going into the northbound lanes, directly
into the path of a city garbage truck that was doing forty miles an
hour.
Too late, Rachael screamed a warning.
The driver tramped his brake pedal to the floorboards.
But the shriek of the truck's locked wheels came almost simultaneously
with the sickening sound of impact.
Eric was hurled into the air and thrown back into the southbound lanes
as if by the concussion wave of a bomb blast. He crashed into the
pavement and tumbled twenty feet, stiffly at first, then with a horrible
looseness, as if he were constructed of string and old rags.
He came to rest facedown, unmoving.
A southbound yellow Subaru braked with a banshee screech and a hard flat
wail of its horn, halting only two feet from him. A Chevy, following
too close, rammed into the back of the Subaru and pushed it within a few
inches of the body.
Rachael was the first to reach Eric. Heart hammering, shouting his
name, she dropped to her knees and, by instinct, put one hand to his
neck to feel for a pulse. His skin was wet with blood, and her fingers
slipped on the slick flesh as she searched desperately for the throbbing
artery.
Then she saw the hideous depression that had reshaped his skull. His
head had been staved in along the right side, above the torn ear, and
all the way forward past the temple to the edge of his pale brow. His
head was turned so she could see one eye, which was open wide. staring
in shock, though sightless now. Many wickedly sharp fragments of bone
must have been driven deep into his brain. Death had been
instantaneous.
She stood up abruptly, tottering, nauseated. Dizzy, she might have
fallen if the driver of the garbage truck had not grabbed hold of her,
provided support. and escorted her around the side of the Subaru, where
she could lean against the car.
There was nothin' I could do," he aid miserably.
"I know," she said.
"Nothin' at all. He run in front of me. Didn't look Nothin' I could
do."
At firt Rachael had difficulty breathing. Then she realized she was
absentmindedly seflibbing her bloodcovered hand on her sundress, and the
sight of those damp rusty-scarlet stains on the pastel-blue cotton made
her breath come quicker, too quick. Hyperventilating, she slumped
against the Subaru, closed her eyes, hugged herself, and clenched her
teeth. She was determined not to faint. She strove to hold in each
shallow breath as long as possible, and the very process of changing the
rhythm of her breathing was a calming influence.
Around her she heard the voices of motorists who had left their cars in
the snarl of stalled traffic. Some of them asked her if she was all
right, and she nodded, others asked if she needed medical attention, and
she shook her head-no.
If she had ever loved Eric, that love had been ground to dust beneath
his heel. It had been a long time since she'd even liked him. Moments
before the accident, he'd revealed a pure and terrifying hatred of her,
so she supposed she should have been utterly unmoved by his death. Yet
she was badly shaken. As she hugged herself and shivered, she was aware
of a cold emptiness within, a hollow sense of loss that she could not
quite understand. Not grief. Just. .. loss.
She heard sirens in the distance.
Gradually she regained control of her breathing.
Her shivering grew less violent, though it did not stop entirely.
The sirens grew nearer, louder.
She opened her eyes. The bright June sunshine no longer seemed clean
and fresh. The darkness of death had passed through the day, and in its
wake, the morning light had acquired a sour yellow cast that reminded
her more of sulfur than of honey.
Red lights flashing, sirens dying, a paramedic van and a police sedan
approached along the northbound lanes.
"Rachael?"
She turned and saw Herbert Tuleman, Eric's personal attorney, with whom
she had met only minutes ago. She had always liked Herb, and he had
liked her as well. He was a grandfatherly man with bushy gray eyebrows
that were now drawn together in a single bar.
"One of my associates.. . returning to the office...
saw it happen," Herbert said, "hurried up to tell me.
My God."
Yes," she said numbly.
"My God, Rachael."
"Yes."
"It's too . . . crazy.
"Yes."
"But..."
"Yes," she said.
And she knew what Herbert was thinking. Within the past hour, she had
told them she would not fight for a large share of Eric's fortune but
would settle for, proportionately, a pittance. Now, by virtue of the
fact that Eric had no family and no children from his first marriage,
the entire thirty million plus his cunrently unvalued stock in the
company would almost certainly, by default, come into her sole
possession.
SPOOKED The hot, dry air was filled with the crackle of police radios, a
metallic chorus of dispatchers' voices, and the smell of sun-softened
asphalt.
The paramedics could do nothing for Eric Leben except convey his corpse
to the city morgue, where it would lie in a refrigerated room until the
medical examiner had time to attend to it. Because Eric had been killed
in an accident, the law required an autopsy.
"The body should be available for release in twenty-four hours," one of
the policemen had told Rachael.
While they had filled out a brief report, she had sat in the back of one
of the patrol cars. Now she was standing in the sun again.
She no longer felt sick. Just numb.
They loaded the draped cadaver into the van. In spots, the shroud was
dark with blood.
Herbert Tuleman felt obliged to comfort Rachael and repeatedly suggested
that she return with him to his law office. "You need to sit down, get
a grip on yourself," he said, one hand on her shoulder, his kindly face
wrinkled with concern.
"I'm all right, Herb. Really, I am. Just a little shaken."
"Some cognac. That's what you need. I've got a bottle of Remy Martin
in the office bar."
"No, thank you. I guess it'll be up to me to handle the funeral, so
I've got things to attend to."
The two paramedics closed the rear doors on the van and walked
unhurriedly to the front of the vehicle. No need for sirens and
flashing red emergency beacons.
Speed would not help Eric now.
Herb said, "If you don't want brandy, then perhaps coffee. Or just come
and sit with me for a while. I don't think you should get behind a
wheel right away."
Rachael touched his leathery cheek affectionately. He was a weekend
sailor, and his skin had been toughened and creased less by age than by
his time upon the sea.
"I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I'm fine. I'm almost
ashamed of how well I'm taking it. I mean...
I feel no grief at all."
He held her hand. "Don't be ashamed. He was my client, Rachael, so I'm
aware that he was . . . a difficult man.
"Yes."
"He gave you no reason to grieve."
"It still seems wrong to feel . . . so little. Nothing."
"He wasn't just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not
recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was
necessary to make you want to stay with him."
"You're a dear."
"It's true. If it weren't very true, I wouldn't speak of a client like
this, not even when he was . . . deceased."
The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene.
Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer
sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers,
making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved
from ice.
Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his office
building, to her red 560 SL. He said, "I could have someone drive
Eric's car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys
at your place."
"That would be helpful," she said.
When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to the
window and said, "We'll have to talk soon about the estate."
"In a few days," she said.
"And the company."
"Things will run themselves for a few days, won't they?"
"Certainly. It's Monday, so shall we say you'll come see me Friday
morning? That gives you four days to.
adjust."
"All right."
"Ten o'clock?"
"You sure you're okay?"
"Yes," she said, and she drove home without incident, though she felt as
though she were dreaming.
She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The
neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had
loads of charm, French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a
used-brick fireplace, and more. She'd made the down payment and moved a
year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the
place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and
which boasted every luxury, however, she liked her cozy bungalow better
than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed
more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by
countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.
She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands and
face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she wore.
Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming effect.
Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness remained at the
摘要：

Shadowfires[067-011-5.0]By:DeanR.KoontzSynopsis:Afearfuldivorceeisrelievedwhenherenragedex-husbanddiesinafreakaccident,butherterrorreturnswhenhisbodydisappearsandsheisstalkedbyamanwholooksjustlikehim.RachelwantsnopartofherhusbandEric'sresearchempireorhisfortune.Shejustwantstobefreeofhisobsessions.He...

展开>> 收起<<
Shadowfires.pdf

共351页,预览10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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：351 页 大小：707.94KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-03

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 351
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注