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Mr. Murder

Mr. Murder

Titel: Mr. Murder Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Dean Koontz
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whom he wrote.
        Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty's manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone's movie).
        Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn't it? And Salman Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.
        Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.
        Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of blacktop.
        He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual.
        But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal's wicked grin behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and says he's just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink, wink).
        His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping a few years ago.
        Paige, "as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine," was said to be a "psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the darkest secrets of her patients," as if she was engaged not in the counseling of children troubled by their parents' divorces or the death of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era's most savage serial killers.
        "Spooky old Paige Stillwater," he said aloud. "Well, why else would she have married me if she wasn't already a little weird?"
        He told himself he was over-reacting.
        Closing the magazine, he said, "Thank God I didn't let the girls participate. They'd have come out of it looking like the children in "The Addams Family."
        " Again he told himself that he was over-reacting, but his mood didn't improve. He felt violated, trivialized, and the fact that he was talking aloud to himself seemed, annoyingly, to validate his new national reputation as an amusing eccentric.
        He twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine.
        As he drove across the parking lot toward the busy street, Marty was troubled by the feeling that his life had taken more than merely a temporary turn for the worse with the fugue on Saturday, that the magazine article was yet another signpost on this new dark route, and that he would travel a long distance on rough pavement before rediscovering the smooth highway that he had lost.
        A whirlwind of leaves burst over the car, startling him. The dry foliage rasped across the hood and roof, like the claws of a beast determined to get inside.
        Hunger overcomes him. He has not slept since Friday night, has driven across half the country at high speed, in bad weather more than not, and has experienced an exciting and emotional hour and a half in the Stillwater house, confronting his destiny. His stores of energy are depleted. He is shaky and weak-kneed.
        In the kitchen he raids the refrigerator, piling food on the oak breakfast table. He consumes several slices of Swiss cheese, half a loaf of bread, a few pickles, the better part of a pound of bacon, mixing it all together without actually bothering to make sandwiches, a bite of this and a bite of that, chewing the bacon raw because he doesn't want to waste time cooking it, eating fast and with single-minded fixation on the feast, ravenous, oblivious of manners, urgently washing down everything with big swallows of cold beer that foams over his chin. There is so much he wants to do before his wife and kids return home, and he doesn't

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