Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

hour from Phoenix. If you prefer your weather dry and hot, if you favor landscapes with a minimum of annoying shade trees, if you find pea gravel no less attractive than grass, if tall buildings oppress you and beige stucco soothes, Wickenburg is the place for you, a pleasant town of wide streets, little traffic, cheap land, and friendly people.

world-famous three- and four-star dude ranches, where you can learn to fall off a horse,

three pounds of hair swirled up in a fabulous creation and pinned atop her head.

create utopia at the point of a gun.

My gorge rose four or five times, as if something that lived in my throat wanted out, and I successfully swallowed it.

Then he looked at me and seemed to decide that, if it became necessary, he could tear my head off without straining himself. “Come on in, and let’s bargain.”

said, “Handsome fella, huh?” “How’d I ever get to be so old?” “You didn’t die.”

with decades of sunshine stored in his deeply tanned face.

Perhaps we would spend the rest of our lives in the caring custody of the ISA, in some research facility where scientists of numerous disciplines would spend the next fifty years trying to reach a consensus about what galaxy we came from.

We would be subjected to a pharmacopoeia of drugs—if not eventually torture—to squeeze the truth from us, until our brains were no more capable of cognition than were bowls of tapioca.

hundred occasions, but I’ve still got all my pieces. As long as we’re not soaked in blood and trying to stuff our intestines back into our bodies through a gut wound, we’ll be okay.”

My Quinn can handle himself—you know he can—but he looks like a big goof, a whiffet, about as threatening as Mary Poppins, which is just the kind of backup I need for this.” I thought Sparky might come to my defense and insist that I looked at least as threatening as Tinker Bell, but he said, “Okay, yeah, I get your point.”

Nestled in a humongous ear was a giant mouth with a big eyeball clenched between its teeth; on the granite plinth that supported this grotesque work, the following words were engraved: I HEAR WHAT YOU’RE SAYING, AND I SEE THAT IT IS MEANINGLESS.

morbid mysticism and a disturbing attraction to the power of dealing death had even then been sown in his subconscious. That fatal seed would eventually put down deep roots and produce poisonous foliage.

Murder was an act of grave injustice, taking the life of an innocent or one whose crimes didn’t warrant eradication. Killing was the righteous taking of a life, as a soldier acting according to the rules of war, as a policeman shooting an abusive husband who had slashed his wife

The bullets did even to him what bullets do to anyone.

“We don’t have hands so that we can hide from the ugliness of the world, Sister.”