Relentless by Dean Koontz Page B

the small screen.
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “Stuff,” he said, holding the Game Boy in one hand and eating with the other.
    “What is it? What’s it mean?”
    He said, “We’ll see.”
    I suppose if Mozart’s father was an ignoramus about music, the little genius would have found it frustrating to try to discuss his compositions with the old man—but still would have loved him.
    When Milo and Lassie were safely upstairs in the master suite with Penny, I went to my study.
    I almost dropped the pleated shades at all three windows. But dawn had come, and I doubted that Waxx would still be lingering.
    I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail without freezing up the keyboard, without damaging the mouse, and without destroying the Internet. Because I spend so much of my life writing, a computer is one machine with which I’ve grown comfortable.
    As I was responding to an e-mail from my British editor, the phone rang. Line 3. Caller ID told me only UNKNOWN , but I took the call anyway: “This is Cubby.”
    A man whose voice I did not recognize said, “Cullen Greenwich?”
    “Yes, speaking.”
    The caller sounded anxious, harried: “A lot of people think I’m dead, but I’m not.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “So many others are dead. Most days, I wish I were with them.”
    “Who is this?”
    “John Clitherow.”
    I had never met the man or spoken with him on the phone, but I had corresponded with him, exchanging perhaps a dozen long letters. He had written novels that I much admired.
    More than three years ago, he told his publisher he wished to cancel the remaining book on his contract. He intended never to write again. In publishing circles, the assumption was made that he had a terminal disease and wished to keep his struggle private. I wrote him again, but he did not reply. I’d heard that he and his family—his wife, Margaret, and two children—had moved somewhere in Europe.
    “I shouldn’t be talking to you on your land line,” he said. “Too dangerous for me, maybe for you, too. Do you have a cell phone?”
    I picked up my cell from the desk. “Yes.”
    “If you’ll give me the number, I’ll ring you back. That’ll be safer for both of us. No matter who he is, what he is, he can’t listen in as easily to a cellular call.” When I hesitated, he said, “Your metaphors are damned well
not
ponderous.”
    That reference surely had to be to the Waxx review of
One O’Clock Jump
.
    I gave him the cell-phone number, and after he repeated it, he said,“I’ll call you shortly. I just need to change locations. Give me ten minutes.”
    He hung up, and so did I.
    After staring at the computer for a moment, hardly recognizing the words that I had so recently written to my British editor, I got up and closed the shades at all three windows.

   As I finished lowering the last window shade, my third line rang. According to the caller ID, my agent, Hud Jacklight, wished to speak to me.
    Because of the timing, I assumed this call and Clitherow’s were related, and I picked up.
    “One word,” Hud said. “Short stories.”
    “Those are two words.”
    “Best American. You know it?”
    Disoriented, I said, “Know what?”
    “Short stories. Best American. Of the year.”
    “Sure.
The Best American Short Stories
. It’s an annual anthology.”
    “Every year. Different guest editor. Next year—you.”
    “I don’t write short stories.”
    “Don’t have to. You select. The contents.”
    “Hud, I don’t have time to read a thousand short stories to find twenty good ones.”
    “Hire someone. To read. Everyone does. Winnow it down for you.”
    “That doesn’t sound ethical.”
    “It’s ethical. If nobody knows.”
    “Besides,” I argued, “the guest editor is always someone who writes short stories.”
    “The publisher and me. We’re pals. Trust me. Very prestigious.”
    “I don’t want to do it, Hud.”
    “It’s a literary thing. You’re a Waxx author. Got to do literary things.