The Praying Mantis Bride (Nameless: Season One, #3)

by Dean Koontz

twenties and hundreds, which he may use for expenses—dining, entertainment—that he may incur outside the hotel. He plugs in the laptop, removes the flash drive

Stranger still are the clairvoyant visions that occasionally—only occasionally—afflict him, regarding events that have occurred at remote places in the past, as well as events that might occur in the future. Not all the things he foresees come to fruition. The past cannot be altered, but he can take steps to change the future. He isn’t always successful. Horrors he has seen have been averted, while others have come to pass. He keeps the .45 close at hand, because he’s seen a vision of Lucia Jones Stossel Roskin Rickenbah in which she eviscerates him with a knife.

Each of their missions is instead meant to bring truth and its consequences into the life of someone who has woven a persona of lies, thereby putting an end to his or her crimes.

There’s no doubt that Lucia deserves to be terrified and tormented as reparations for all the evil she has done, but there is peril in this approach. Nameless is on the front line, which means he’ll be the one to deal with the danger of unexpected developments.

Considering his clairvoyant vision—Lucia’s face twisted in a snarl, the steel blade flashing with reflected light as it arcs into his gut—he would prefer to dispatch her with the words This is for Michael Rickenbah, followed at once by a bullet. However, he is a tool of the program, a status for which he is sure that he volunteered before amnesia was imposed on him. A hammer should not argue with the carpenter who wields it. Perhaps he once knew Michael Rickenbah. They might even have been dear friends. He has been told this is personal, and he will handle it that way even if it kills him. At eleven o’clock that morning, he sets out from the Peninsula hotel, driving south about 120 miles to the upscale seaside town of La Jolla, where Lucia Rickenbah owns a house, inherited from her most recent husband, to which she is scheduled to return in seven days. 7 The house is not a McMansion, not one of those wedding-cake constructs of faux French or faux Italian architecture with a massive columned portico and balustraded balconies grossly out of scale with the rest of the structure. It’s merely six or seven thousand square feet of Mediterranean Art Deco with smooth white pl...

Carrying a single human passenger, yet another Gulfstream V accelerates along the runway, achieves lift, rises toward the increasingly sullen light, and seems to soar above the setting sun. Service is provided by two flight attendants who have been carefully selected for this mission according to a list of criteria to which other women in their line of work are

Her only regrets about Mikey Rickenbah

Each husband has been wealthier than the one before him, but all of them were fools who could have enriched her vastly more if they had not all been infected by the I-want-to-give-back virus.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come back, Lucia. You went to the ladies’ room, and you didn’t come back for the longest time.”

He had no clue whatsoever that her face and body were weapons in her arsenal as surely as were the hit men she hired and the hypodermic syringe that she herself used to inject her second husband, Samuel Roskin, with carefully cultured filth while he was sleeping.

No mere ghost can expel her from this comfort and luxury that she’s earned by enduring Michael for almost three years.

Those who refuse a spirit can’t be haunted by it. That is a truth well understood by those who know ghosts are real. Consciously or unconsciously—because of guilt, fear, curiosity—you have to invite the spirit’s attention. She has not invited this and will not countenance it. She turns her back on the TV and leaves the room. She must show him that he can’t faze her and should fade into the oblivion he deserves. Earlier she plated her dinner but never

“Johnny drowned Felix Stossel, and I cut Johnny. I did Sam Roskin while he slept on Ambien, injected him with filth. A man named Cary shot Michael for me, in Paris, and I slit his throat two days later. I’ll pay you. You hear me, you vicious old bitch? I’ll pay you. But you can’t stay, not with the cats or without them. Even

There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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