Seize the Night by Dean Koontz Page A

two-by-four dropped from his numbed hands, and he cursed vehemently.
    Too bad it hadn’t been an iron pipe. The recoil might have been nasty enough to loosen some of his milk-white baby teeth and make him cry for mama.
    “All right, that’s enough,” I said.
    He made an obscene suggestion and, flexing his powerful hands, snatched the club off the floor, rounding on me.
    He seemed to have little or no fear of the gun, probably because my reluctance to fire it, other than to squeeze off a warning shot, had convinced him that I was too chickenshit to blow him away. He didn’t impress me as a particularly bright individual, and stupid people are often dangerously sure of themselves.
    His body language, a sly look in his eyes, and a sudden sneer told me that he was going to feint, fake another swing with the club but not follow through. He would come at me some other way when I reacted to the false move. Perhaps he’d drive the two-by-four like a pike straight at my chest, hoping to knock me down and then smash my face.
    While I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, persuasion and negotiation were unlikely to bear fruit in this situation, and I manifestly do not like to think of myself as a
dead
Renaissance man. When he feinted, I didn’t wait to see what the bastard’s real plan of attack might be. With apologies to poets and diplomats and gentle persons everywhere, I pulled the trigger.
    I was hoping to hit him in the shoulder or arm, though I suspect it’s only in movies that you can confidently calculate to wound a man rather than kill him. In real life, panic and physics and fate screw things up. Most likely, more often than not, in spite of the best intentions, the polite wounding shot drills through the guy’s brain or bounces among his ribs, off his sternum, and ends up dead-center in his heart—or kills a kindly grandmother baking cookies six blocks away.
    This time, though I
wasn’t
firing another warning shot, I missed his shoulder, arm, heart, brain, and everything else that would have bled. Panic, physics, fate. The bullet tore into the club, spraying his face with splinters and larger fragments of wood.
    Suddenly convinced of his own mortality and perhaps recognizing the incomparable danger of confronting a marksman as poor as I am, the weasel pitched his makeshift cudgel, turned, and ran back toward the elevator alcove.
    I juked when I saw he was going to throw the club, but my Big Bag of Really Smooth Moves was empty. Instead of ducking away from the club, I cunningly dodged straight into it, got rapped across the chest, and fell.
    I was getting up even as I was going down, but by the time I made it to my feet again, my assailant was nearing the end of the hall. My legs were longer than his, but I wasn’t going to be able to catch up with him easily.
    If you’re looking for someone to shoot a man in the back, I’m not your guy, regardless of the circumstances. My attacker safely turned the corner into the elevator alcove—where he switched on a flashlight of his own.
    Although I needed to nail this creep, finding Jimmy Wing was an even higher priority. The boy might have been hurt and left to die.
    Besides, when the kidnapper arrived at the top of the ladder, a toothy surprise would be waiting for him. Orson wouldn’t let the guy get out of the elevator shaft.
    I scooped up the flashlight and hurried to the third in the line of doors along the hall. It was ajar, and I pushed it all the way open.
    Of the three chambers I’d thus far explored, this was the smallest, less than half the size of the other two, so the light swept from wall to wall. Jimmy was not here.
    The only item of interest was a balled-up yellow cloth about ten feet beyond the threshold. I almost ignored it, eager to try the next door along the corridor, but then I ventured inside, and with the same hand that held the gun, I plucked the rag off the floor.
    It wasn’t a rag, after all, but the soft cotton top from a pair of