Cold Fire by Dean Koontz

arms, asleep. Occasionally he snored loud enough for the sound to carry all the way to Holly. When the bars closed, George sometimes returned to the newsroom instead of to his apartment, just as an old dray horse, when left on slack reins, will haul its cart back along a familiar route to the place it thinks of as home. He would wake sometime during the night, realize where he was, and wearily weave off to bed at last. “Politicians,” George often said, “are the lowest form of life, having undergone devolution from that first slimy beast that crawled out of the primordial sea.” At fifty-seven, he was too burnt-out to start over, so he continued to spend his days writing about public officials whom he privately reviled, and in the process he had come to hate himself, as well, and to seek solace in a prodigious daily intake of vodka martinis.
    If she’d had any tolerance for liquor, Holly would have worried about winding up like George Fintel. But one drink gave her a nice buzz, two made her tipsy, and three put her to sleep.
    I hate my life, she thought.
    “You self-pitying wretch,” she said aloud.
    Well, I do. I hate it, everything’s so hopeless.
    “You nauseating despair junkie,” she said softly but with genuine disgust.
    “You talking to me?” Tommy Weeks said, piloting a push broom along the aisle in front of her desk.
    “No, Tommy. Talking to myself.”
    “You? Gee, what’ve you got to be unhappy about?”
    “My life.”
    He stopped and leaned on his broom, crossing one long leg in front of the other. With his broad freckled face, jug ears, and mop of carroty hair, he looked sweet, innocent, kind. “Things haven’t turned out like you planned?”
    Holly picked up a half-empty bag of M & Ms, tossed a few pieces of candy into her mouth, and leaned back in her chair. “When I left the University of Missouri with a journalism degree, I was gonna shake up the world, break big stories, collect Pulitzers for doorstops—and now look at me. You know what I did this evening?”
    “Whatever it was, I can tell you didn’t enjoy it.”
    “I was down at the Hilton for the annual banquet of the Greater Portland Lumber Products Association, interviewing manufacturers of prefab pullmans, plyboard salesmen, and redwood-decking distributors. They gave out the Timber Trophy—that’s what they call it—for the ‘lumber-products man of the year.’ I got to interview him, too. Rushed back here to get it all written up in time for the morning edition. Hot stuff like that, you don’t want to let the bastards at The New York Times scoop you on it.”
    “I thought you were arts and leisure.”
    “Got sick of it. Let me tell you, Tommy, the wrong poet can turn you off the arts for maybe a decade.”
    She tossed more chocolate morsels in her mouth. She usually didn’t eat candy because she was determined not to wind up with a weight problem like the one that had always plagued her mother, and she was gobbling M & Ms now just to make herself feel more miserable and worthless. She was in a bad downward spiral.
    She said, “TV and movies, they make journalism look so glamorous and exciting. It’s all lies.”
    “Me,” Tommy said, “I haven’t had the life I planned on, either. You think I figured to wind up head of maintenance for the Press, just a glorified janitor?”
    “I guess not,” she said, feeling small and self-centered for whining at him when his lot in life was not as desirable as her own.
    “Hell, no. From the time I was a little kid, I knew I was gonna grow up to drive one of those big damn old sanitation trucks, up there in that high cab, pushin’ the buttons to operate the hydraulic-ram compactor.” His voice became wistful. “Ridin’ above the world, all that powerful machinery at my command. It was my dream, and I went for it, but I couldn’t pass the city physical. Have this kidney problem, see. Nothin’ serious but enough for the city’s health insurers to disqualify me.”
    He