Cold Fire by Dean Koontz Page A

leaned on his broom, gazing off into the distance, smiling faintly, probably visualizing himself ensconced in the kingly driver’s seat of a garbage truck.
    Staring at him in disbelief, Holly decided that his broad face did not, after all, look sweet and innocent and kind. She had misread the meaning of its lines and planes. It was a stupid face.
    She wanted to say, You idiot! I dreamed of winning Pulitzers, and now I’m a hack writing industry puff pieces about the damn Timber Trophy! That is tragedy. You think having to settle for being a janitor instead of a garbage collector is in any way comparable?
    But she didn’t say anything because she realized that they were comparable. An unfulfilled dream, regardless of whether it was lofty or humble, was still a tragedy to the dreamer who had given up hope. Pulitzers never won and sanitation trucks never driven were equally capable of inducing despair and insomnia. And that was the most depressing thought she’d had yet.
    Tommy’s eyes swam into focus again. “You gotta not dwell on it, Miss Thorne. Life ... it’s like gettin’ a blueberry muffin in a coffeeshop when what you ordered was the apricot-nut. There aren’t any apricots or nuts in it, and you can get tied up in knots just thinkin’ about what you’re missin’, when the smarter thing to do is realize that blueberries have a nice taste, too.”
    Across the room, George Fintel farted in his sleep. It was a window-rattler. If the Press had been a big newspaper, with reporters hanging around who’d just returned from Beirut or some war zone, they’d have all dived for cover.
    My God, Holly thought, my life’s nothing but a bad imitation of a Damon Runyon story. Sleazy newsrooms after midnight. Half-baked philosopher-janitors. Hard-drinking reporters who sleep at their desks. But it was Runyon as revised by an absurdist writer in collaboration with a bleak existentialist.
    “I feel better just having talked to you,” Holly lied. “Thanks, Tommy.”
    “Anytime, Miss Thorne.”
    As Tommy set to work with his push broom again and moved on down the aisle, Holly tossed some more candy into her mouth and wondered if she would be able to pass the physical required of potential sanitation-truck drivers. On the positive side, the work would be different from journalism as she knew it—collecting garbage instead of dispensing it—and she would have the satisfaction of knowing that at least one person in Portland would desperately envy her.
    She looked at the wall clock. One-thirty in the morning. She wasn’t sleepy. She didn’t want to go home and lie awake, staring at the ceiling, with nothing to do but indulge in more self-examination and self-pity. Well, actually, that is what she wanted, because she was in a wallowing mood, but she knew it wasn’t a healthy thing to do. Unfortunately, she was without alternatives: weekday, wee-hour nightlife in Portland was a twenty-four-hour doughnut shop.
    She was less than a day away from the start of her vacation, and she desperately needed it. She had made no plans. She was just going to relax, hang out, never once look at a newspaper. Maybe see some movies. Maybe read a few books. Maybe go to the Betty Ford Center to take the self-pity detox program.
    She had reached that dangerous state in which she began to brood about her name. Holly Thorne. Cute. Real cute. What in God’s name had possessed her parents to hang that one on her? Was it possible to imagine the Pulitzer committee giving that grand prize to a woman with a name more suitable to a cartoon character? Sometimes—always in the still heart of the night, of course—she was tempted to call her folks and demand to know whether this name thing had been just bad taste, a misfired joke, or conscious cruelty.
    But her parents were salt-of-the-earth working-class people who had denied themselves many pleasures in order to give her a first-rate education, and they wanted nothing but the best for her. They would be