Bad Place by Dean Koontz

squishy-soft. You wouldn’t plan a hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it.”
    “I don’t have a boss. I’m freelance.”
    “Somebody still pays you.”
    She risked more pressure, not with the points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of his eyelids. He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain. He was shaking; his shackles clinked and rattled. More tears squeezed from beneath his lids.
    “Delafield.” The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might. “Kevin Delafield.”
    “Who’s he?” Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen’s chin with one hand, her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.
    “Microcrest Corporation.”
    “That’s who hired you for this?”
    He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his eyes. “Yeah. Delafield. A nutcase. A renegade. They don’t understand about him at Microcrest. They just know he gets results for them. When this hits the fan they’ll be surprised by it, blown away. So let go of me. What more do you want?”
    She let go of him.
    Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision, then broke down and sobbed with relief.
    As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned with the officer who had accompanied him downstairs to Ackroyd’s office. Bobby looked at Rasmussen, cocked his head at Julie, clucked his tongue, and said, “You’ve been naughty, haven’t you, dear? Can’t I take you anywhere?”
    “I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen. That’s all.”
    “He seems to have found it stimulating,” Bobby said.
    Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping uncontrollably.
    “We disagreed about something,” Julie said.
    “Movies, books?”
    “Music.”
    “Ah.”
    Sampson Garfeuss said softly, “You’re a wild woman, Julie.”
    “He tried to have Bobby killed,” was all she said.
    Sampson nodded. “I’m not saying I don’t admire wildness sometimes ... a little. But you sure as hell owe me one.”
    “I do,” she agreed.
    “You owe me more than one,” Burdock said. “This guy’s going to file a complaint. You can bet your ass on it.”
    “Complaint about what?” Julie asked. “He’s not even marked.”
    Already the faint welts on Rasmussen’s cheek were fading. Sweat, tears, and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.
    “Listen,” Julie told Burdock, “he cracked because I just happened to know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap, like cutting a diamond. It worked because scum like him thinks everyone else is scum, too, thinks we’re capable of doing what he’d do in the same situation. I’d never put out his eyes, but he might’ve put mine out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I’d do him like he would’ve done me. All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes against him. Psychology. Nobody can file a complaint about the application of a little psychology.” She turned to Bobby and said, “What was on those diskettes?”
    “Whizard. Not trash data. The whole thing. These have to be the files he duplicated. He only made one set while I was watching, and after the shooting started he didn’t have time to make backup copies.”
    The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board. When the doors opened, a plainclothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer, stepped into the hallway.
    Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.
    She said, “This is evidence. The whole case might rest on it. You think you can keep track of it?”
    Dainer grinned. “Gosh, ma’am, I’ll try.”

11
    FRANK