Relentless by Dean Koontz Page A

rules. He loves me anyway. You want one?”
    “All right. I’ll pour the milk.”
    In times of trouble, in times of stress, in times of doubt, in times when even a vague sense of misgiving overcomes her, Penny turns to the same mood elevator: cookies. I don’t know why she doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds.
    She once said just being married to me burns up seven thousand calories a day. I pretended to believe she meant I was a total stud. I love to make her laugh.
    At the table once more, with glasses of cold milk and chocolate-chip-pecan cookies as big as saucers, we restored our confidence.
    “Most critics are principled,” she said. “They love books. They have standards. They tend to be gentle people.”
    “This guy isn’t one of them.”
    “Even the biased and mean ones—they don’t generally wind up in prison for violent crimes. Words are their only weapons.”
    I said, “Remember Josh McGintry and the magazine?”
    Josh is a friend and writer. His Catholicism is an implicit part of his novels.
    Over the course of a year, he received a venomous hate letter once a week from an anti-Catholic bigot. He never responded to them.
    When his new novel came out, the same hater reviewed it in a national weekly magazine for which he was a staff writer. The guy did not reveal his prejudice, but he mocked the book and Josh’s entire career in an outrageously dishonest fashion.
    Josh is married to Mary, and Mary said, “Let it go.”
    Women have been saying “Let it go” since human beings lived in caves; and men responded then pretty much as they respond today.
    Instead of letting it go, Josh wrote the editor in chief of the magazine, copying him on the hate letters. The editor defended his staff writer and suggested Josh could have forged the correspondence.
    Emboldened, the bigot wrote to Josh on magazine stationery. The envelopes were stamped with one of the magazine’s postage meters.
    When Josh copied the editor on this new evidence, he received no reply. But a year later, when his subsequent book was published, the review in the magazine was not written by the same man.
    This vicious review was written by a different bigot, a friend of the first one, who began also to send hate letters to Josh.
    Again, Mary told him to let it go. Josh listened to her this time, though ever since he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep so assiduously that he needed to wear a soft-acrylic bite guard.
    “Neither of those guys showed up at Josh’s house,” Penny said. “They prove my contention—their only weapons were words.”
    “So you don’t think Waxx will come back?”
    “If he were a true nut, wouldn’t he have already shot you?”
    “It would be nice to think so.”
    “Anyway, you can’t report him to the cops. I didn’t see him. Only you saw him. He’ll deny having been here.”
    “It’s just—the whole thing was so freaky.”
    “Clearly, he’s arrogant and eccentric,” she said. “Some little thing you said set him off.”
    “All I did was apologize for Milo nearly peeing on him.”
    “He misinterpreted something. So he’s had his payback. Probably the worst he’ll do now is trash every book you ever write.”
    “Swell.” I locked eyes with her. “You really think it’s over?”
    She hesitated but then said, “Yes.”
    As a truth detector, her double-barreled gaze works both ways. When she did not blink, I knew she was being a straight shooter.
    “Cubby, he thinks you were spying on him, you violated his personal space. So he violated yours. Now, sweetie, let it go.”
    I sighed. “I will. I’ll let it go.”
    Penny’s smile could power a small city.
    Together, we prepared salads, ravioli, and meatballs. Milo never knew that we had indulged in cookies and milk before dinner. But I’mpretty sure Lassie, with her exceptional sense of smell, detected the truth on our breath, because her mismatched eyes said guilty .
    Later that night, I had difficulty falling asleep. When at last I