Brother Odd by Dean Koontz

hash browns.
    Restlessly wandering the library aisles, I turned a corner and came face to face with the Russian, Rodion Romanovich, most recently seen in a dream.
    I never claimed to possess James Bond’s aplomb, so I’m not embarrassed to admit I startled backward and said, “Sonofabitch!”
    Bearish, glowering so hard that his bushy eyebrows knitted together, he spoke with a faint accent: “What’s wrong with you?”
    “You frightened me.”
    “I certainly did not.”
    “Well, it felt like frightened.”
    “You frightened yourself.”
    “I’m sorry, sir.”
    “What are you sorry for?”
    “For my language,” I said.
    “I speak English.”
    “You do, yes, and so well. Better than I speak Russian, for sure.”
    “Do you speak Russian?”
    “No, sir. Not a word.”
    “You are a peculiar young man.”
    “Yes, sir, I know.”
    At perhaps fifty, Romanovich did not appear old, but time had battered his face with much experience. Across his broad forehead lay a stitchery of tiny white scars. His laugh lines did not suggest that he had spent a life smiling; they were deep, severe, like old wounds sustained in a sword fight.
    Clarifying, I said, “I meant I was sorry for my
bad
language.”
    “Why would I frighten you?”
    I shrugged. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
    “I did not realize you were here, either,” he said, “but you did not frighten me.”
    “I don’t have the equipment.”
    “What equipment?”
    “I mean, I’m not a scary guy. I’m innocuous.”
    “And I
am
a scary guy?” he asked.
    “No, sir. Not really. No. Imposing.”
    “I am imposing?”
    “Yes, sir. Quite imposing.”
    “Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them? Or do you know what
innocuous
means?”
    “It means ‘harmless,’ sir.”
    “Yes. And you are certainly not innocuous.”
    “It’s just the black ski boots, sir. They tend to make anybody look like he could kick butt.”
    “You appear clear, direct, even simple.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    “But you are complex, complicated, even intricate, I suspect.”
    “What you see is what you get,” I assured him. “I’m just a fry cook.”
    “Yes, you make that quite plausible, with your exceptionally fluffy pancakes. And I am a librarian from Indianapolis.”
    I indicated the book in his hand, which he held in such a way that I could not see the title. “What do you like to read?”
    “It is about poisons and the great poisoners in history.”
    “Not the uplifting stuff you’d expect in an abbey library.”
    “It is an important aspect of Church history,” said Romanovich. “Throughout the centuries, clergymen have been poisoned by royals and politicians. Catherine de’ Medicis murdered the Cardinal of Lorraine with poison-saturated money. The toxin penetrated through his skin, and he was dead within five minutes.”
    “I guess it’s good we’re moving toward a cashless economy.”
    “Why,” Romanovich asked, “would just-a-fry-cook spend months in a monastery guesthouse?”
    “No rent. Griddle exhaustion. Carpal tunnel syndrome from bad spatula technique. A need for spiritual revitalization.”
    “Is that common to fry cooks—a periodic quest for spiritual revitalization?”
    “It might be the defining characteristic of the profession, sir. Poke Barnett has to go out to a shack in the desert twice a year to meditate.”
    Layering a frown over his glower, Romanovich said, “What is Poke Barnett?”
    “He’s the other fry cook at the diner where I used to work. He buys like two hundred boxes of ammunition for his pistol, drives out in the Mojave fifty miles from anyone, and spends a few days blasting the living hell out of cactuses.”
    “He shoots cactuses?”
    “Poke has many fine qualities, sir, but he’s not much of an environmentalist.”
    “You said that he went into the desert to meditate.”
    “While shooting the cactuses, Poke says he thinks about the meaning of life.”
    The