Psychlone Read Free Page A

wanted to move to Los Angeles and get into real estate.
    Cynthia lay on the other side of the bed, breathing hard, hair disarrayed, eyes closed and mouth open. Very sensual, Michael thought; he might screw her again if he had the strength. But for the moment he was dog-weary and contented. He put his arm around her and pulled her close.
    She made an animal sound deep in her throat and snuggled closer to him. She was a funny girl. She thought his Right Guard smelled sexy. She liked the way he kept his hair fluffy-clean. And last Christmas, she had given him a white leather-bound Red Letter Edition King James Bible. She had plans for him. The rising wind made her feel very cozy, lying next to him. The house heater clicked on.
    Norman Blake was Lorobu's sheriff. He was on the highway between Montoya and Lorobu when the wind came up. His car swerved and he brought it back in line, swearing, looking up through the windshield at the pristine sky. His radio crackled and went dead. His neck hairs stood up and he pulled the car to the side of the empty highway.
    “What the fuck is going on?” he asked himself. He tried the radio several times, but it was gone. The wind and the radio at the same time. Blake wasn't much on meteorology, but he thought maybe it had something to do with the sun. Was that eleven-year cycle kicking up again?
    He cautiously swung back onto the road, balancing his wheel against the wind, and continued on to Lorobu.
    In the evening, the wind died and the temperature plummeted to forty-five degrees. Blake ate his dinner at the Lorobu Inn, maintaining his loyalty to the owner, even though the food was better at the new Holiday Inn on the east side of town. When he left the restaurant and walked to his car, his neck hairs tingled again and he scrunched his head closer to his shoulders, as if to avoid a blow. The town was dead quiet. He looked up at the still, starbright night sky and lowered his eyebrows, squinting to see something indefinite.
    Then he shook his head, opened the car door, and got in. He sat at the wheel for several minutes, ostensibly to let his food digest before he put in his last few hours cruising the small business district. But something was on his mind.
    He couldn't shake the picture from his head. Thirty-five years ago, when he was twenty-one years old, he had served in the Navy on the small island of Tinian in the Marianas. He was seeing Tinian now as he closed his eyes, and almost feeling the warm heat. What was so important about Tinian that it should come back to haunt him? He saw a pilot waving at him from the window of a bomber. That must have been before they sealed off the runway, because after that he couldn't have gotten within a thousand yards of any planes. He couldn't remember the pilot, but the face was very clear.
    He backed the car out of the parking lot and drove slowly through what he affectionately called “downtown” Lorobu. It was six-thirty and everything was closed and locked, security lights on, streetlights okay, none shot out by the young hooligans who occasionally drove through. When Blake had been a kid, he had taken out his aggressions shooting at jackrabbits, not streetlights. But then, he hadn't had his first car until he was seventeen, just a year before he enlisted.
    That was the year he had met Molly. Back then, she had been young and gangly, not very striking, but after coming home in ‘45 and getting married, she had filled out and become positively beautiful—"my own Miss America,” he had called her. Such foresight, he thought, would have made him rich if he had applied it to stocks and bonds.
    They'd moved to Lorobu in 1950 and he had worked in the sheriff's office ever since.
    It had been a good job, a good life. It still was, although Molly had become more than pleasingly plump after hitting forty. She was no beauty now, but she had kept her sense of humor. That was more important anyway, he told himself. He was going on seventeen stone