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VELOCITY
Dean Koontz, © 2005
This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio,
Vito and Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra.
I’ll never figure out why Gerda said yes to me.
But now your family has a crazy wing.
A man can be destroyed but not
defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway,
The Old Man and the Sea
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motorcars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
—T.S. Eliot,
Choruses from “The Rock”
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PART 1
THE CHOICE IS YOURS
With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.
Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fallen off the roof of his two-story house, onto that cheerful-looking figure. The gnome was made of concrete. Henry wasn’t.
A broken neck, a cracked skull: Henry perished on impact.
This death-by-gnome had occurred four years previously. Ned Pearsall still toasted Henry’s passing at least once a week.
Now, from a stool near the curve of the polished mahogany bar, an out-oftowner, the only other customer, expressed curiosity at the enduring nature of Ned’s animosity.
“How bad a neighbor could the poor guy have been that you’re still so juiced about him?”
Ordinarily, Ned might have ignored the question. He had even less use for tourists than he did for pretzels.
The tavern offered free bowls of pretzels because they were cheap. Ned preferred to sustain his thirst with well-salted peanuts.
To keep Ned tipping, Billy Wiles, tending bar, occasionally gave him a bag of Planters.
Most of the time Ned had to pay for his nuts. This rankled him either because he could not grasp the economic realities of tavern operation or because he enjoyed being rankled, probably the latter.
Although he had a head reminiscent of a squash ball and the heavy rounded shoulders of a sumo wrestler, Ned was an athletic man only if you
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thought barroom jabber and grudge-holding qualified as sports. In those events, he was an Olympian.
Regarding the late Henry Friddle, Ned could be as talkative with outsiders as with lifelong residents of Vineyard Hills. When, as now, the only other customer was a stranger, Ned found silence even less congenial than conversation with a “foreign devil.”
Billy himself had never been much of a talker, never one of those barkeeps who considered the bar a stage. He was a listener.
To the out-of-towner, Ned declared, “Henry Friddle was a pig.”
The stranger had hair as black as coal dust with traces of ash at the temples, gray eyes bright with dry amusement, and a softly resonant voice.
“That’s a strong word—pig.”
“You know what the pervert was doing on his roof? He was trying to piss on my dining-room windows.”
