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What in the hell would a small police force in rural California need with all those sources of information?
And there was encies in cities like Los Angeles would not have easy access By law, some of it was stuff that police could not obtain without a court order, such as the files at TRW, the nation’s preht Cove Police department’s ability to access TRW’s data base at will had to be a secret kept from TRW itself, for the coement of its files without a subpoena The systeinia, which were supposedly secured against access froency’s walls, and to certain FBI files which were likewise believed to be inviolate
Shaken, Sam retreated from the OUTSYSTEM MODEM options and returned to the
When briefing Saht Cove’s police s, and that New Wave’s generosity with coht indicate complicity on the part of certain unidentified officers of that firm But the Bureau was also interested in the possibility that New Wave was illegally selling sensitive high technology to the Soviets and that it had bought the Moonlight Cove police because, through these law-enforcement contacts, the company would be alerted at the earliest possible moment to a nascent federal probe into its activities They had no explanation of how either of those crimes accounted for all the recent deaths, but they had to start with some theory
Now Sam was ready to discount both the idea that New Wave was selling to the Soviets and that so trade The far-reaching web of data bases that the police had h their reatly in excess of anything they would require for either drug trafficking or sniffing out federal suspicions of possible Soviet connections at New Wave
They had created an informational network more suitable to the operational necessities of an entire state government--or, even more accurately, a sned to provide its oith enormous power It was as if this picturesque little town suffered under the governing hand of a alomaniac whose central delusion was that he could create a tiny kingdom from which he would eventually conquer vast territory
Today, Moonlight Cove; to?" Sam wondered aloud
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Safely locked in her rooe--dressed for bed in pale yellow panties and a white T-shirt e face--Tessa drank Diet Coke and tried to watch a repeat of the Tonight show, but she couldn’t get interested in the conversations that Johnny Carson conducted with a witless actress, a witless singer, and a witless coht to accompany Diet Coke
Theexperience in the motel’s halls and stairwells, thestalked She was distraught about Janice’s death, after all, preoccupied by the thought that it was murder rather than suicide And she was still dyspeptic froer she’d eaten for dinner, which had been so greasy that it ht have been deep-fried, bun and all, in ie had first believed of Marley’s ghost, so Tessa now began to view the phantohtened her earlier Perhaps they’d been nothing ested bit of beef, a blot of uest talked about a weekend he’d spent at an arts festival in Havana with Fidel Castro--"a great guy, a funny guy, a coot up from the bed and went to the bathroo Crest onto the brush, she heard someone try the door to her room
The small bath was off the smaller foyer When she stepped to the threshold, she ithin a couple of feet of the door to the hall, close enough to see the knob twisting back and forth as so subtle about it The knob clicked and rattled, and the door clattered against the frame
She dropped her toothbrush and hurried to the telephone that stood on the nightstand
No dial tone
She jiggled the cutoff buttons, pressed 0 for operator, but nothing worked The motel switchboard was shut down The phone was dead
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Several ti cover in the brush along the verge, until an approaching car or truck went past One of the toward town, and she was pretty sure it was the one that had corass and milkweed stalks, and rehts dwindled to tiny red dots and finally vanished around a turn
A few houses were built along the first mile and a half of that two-lane blacktop Chrissie knew some of the people who lived in them: the Thoo to one of those places, knock on the door, and ask for help But she couldn’t be sure that those people were still the nice folks they had once been TheySUPERNATURAL or fro possession of people in and around Moonlight Cove, and she had seen enough scary h scary books to know that when those kind of forces were at work, you could no longer trust anyone
She was betting nearly everything on Father Castelli at Our Lady of Mercy because he was a holy rip on him Of course, if the problem was aliens from another world, Father Castelli would not be protected just because he was a man of God
In that case, if the priest had been taken over, and if Chrissie et away from hio straight to Mrs Irene Tokawa, her teacher Mrs Tokaas the s over Moonlight Cove, Mrs Tokaould have realized so before it was too late She would have taken steps to protect herself, and she would be one of the last that the et their hooks into Hooks or tentacles or claws or pincers or whatever
So Chrissie hid fro the county road, and proceeded haltingly but steadily toward town The horned , had traversed one A stiff breeze had swept in froh to whip her hair straight up in the air as if it were a blond flah the teht feltthose turbulentwind The positive side was that the more miserable the cold and wind made her, the less aware she was of that other discory and Dazed After Encounter with Space Aliens," she said, reading that iined headline from an issue of The National Enquirer that existed only in herthe intersection of the county route and Holliwell Road, feeling good about the progress she was , when she nearly walked into the ar to avoid
To the east of the county route, Hollias a dirt road leading up into the hills, under the interstate, and all the way to the old, abandoned Icarus Colony--a dilapidated twelve-rooroup of artists had tried to establish an ideal communal society back in the 1950s Since then it had been a horse-breeding facility (failed), the site of a weekly flea market and auction (failed), a natural food restaurant (failed), and had long ago settled into ruin Kids knew all about it because it was a spooky place and thus the site of e To the west, Holliwell Road was paved and led along the edge of the town limits, past some of the newer homes in the area, past New Wave Microtech, and eventually out to the north point of the cove, where Thoe, weird-looking house Chrissie didn’t intend to go either east or west on Holliwell; it was just a milestone on her trek, and when she crossed it she would be at the northeast corner of the Moonlight Cove city limits
She ithin a hundred feet of Hollihen she heard the low but swiftly swelling sound of a racing engine She stepped away froh weeds, and took cover against the thick trunk of an ancient pine Even as she hunkered down by the tree, she got a fix on the direction fro--west--and then she saw its headlights spearing into the intersection just south of her A truck pulled into view on Holliwell, ignoring the stop sign, and braked in thewhirled and plumed around it
Chrissie could see that heavy-duty, black, extended-bed pickup fairly well because, as the junction of Holliwell and the county road was the site of frequent accidents, a single streetlight had been installed on the northeast corner for better visibility and as a warning to drivers The truck bore the distinctive New Wave insignia on the door, which she could recognize even at a distance because she had seen it maybe a thousand times before: a white and blue circle the size of a dinner plate, the bottoe bed, and at thein the back
The instant that the pickup halted in the intersection, two ate One of them went to the wooded point at the northwest corner of the intersection and slipped into the trees, no more than a hundred feet south of the pine fro him The other crossed to the southeast corner of the junction and took up a position in weeds and chaporral
The pickup turned south on the county road and sped away
Chrissie suspected that the rethe eastern periht Cove, where they would take up watch positions Further h to carry at least twenty men, and no doubt others had been dropped off as it had co in the west They were surrounding Moonlight Cove with sentries She was quite sure they were looking for her She had seen so she had not been meant to see--her parents in the act of a hideous transforuise--and now she had to be found and "converted"--as Tucker had put it--before she had a chance to warn the world
The sound of the black truck receded