Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz Page B

woefully inadequate description.
        No one could have survived this disaster.
        Yet Rose Tucker, if she was the same Rose Tucker who had boarded the plane that night, had evidently not only survived but had walked away under her own power. Without serious injury. She had not been scarred or crippled.
        Impossible. Dropping four miles in the clutch of planetary gravity, four long miles , accelerating unchecked into hard earth and rock, the 747 had not just smashed but splattered like an egg thrown at a brick wall, and then exploded, and then tumbled in seething furies of flame. To escape unmarked from the God-rattled ruins of Gomorrah, to step as unburnt as Shadrach from the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, to arise like Lazarus after four days in the grave would have been less miraculous than to walk away untouched from the fall of Flight 353.
        If he genuinely believed it was impossible, however, his mind would not have been roily with anger and anxiety, with a strange awe and with urgent curiosity. In him was a crazy yearning to embrace incredibility's, walk with wonder.
        He called directory assistance in Maryland, seeking a telephone number for Dr. Rose Marie Tucker. He expected to be told that there was no such listing or that her service had been disconnected. After all, officially she was dead.
        Instead, he was given a number.
        She could not have walked away from the crash and gone home and picked up her life without causing a sensation. Besides, dangerous people were hunting her. They would have found her if she had ever returned to Manassas.
        Perhaps family still lived in the house. For whatever reasons, they might have kept the phone in her name.
        Joe punched in the number.
        The call was answered on the second ring. “Yes?”
        “Is this the Tucker residence?” Joe asked.
        The voice was that of a man, crisp and without a regional accent: “Yes, it is.”
        “Could I speak to Dr. Tucker, please?”
        “Who's calling?”
        Intuition advised Joe to guard his own name. “Wally Blick.”
        “Excuse me. Who?”
        “Wallace Blick.”
        The man at the other end of the line was silent. Then: “What is this in regard to?” His voice had barely changed, but a new alertness coloured it, a shade of wariness.
        Sensing that he had been too clever for his own good, Joe put down the phone.
        He blotted his palms on his jeans again.
        A reporter, passing behind Joe, reviewing the scribblings on a note pad as he went, greeted him without looking up: “Yo, Randy.”
        Consulting the typewritten message from Rose, Joe called the Los Angeles number that she had provided.
        On the fifth ring, a woman answered. “Hello?”
        “Could I speak to Rose Tucker, please?”
        “Nobody here by that name,” she said in an accent out of the deep South. “You got yourself a wrong number.”
        In spite of what she'd said, she didn't hang up.
        “She gave me this number herself,” Joe persisted.
        “Sugar, let me guess-this was a lady you met at a party. She was just makin' nice to get you out of her hair.”
        “I don't think she'd do that.”
        “Oh, don't mean you're ugly, honey,” she said in a voice that brought to mind magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and humid nights heavy with the scent of jasmine. “Just means you weren't the lady's type. Happens to the best.”
        “My name's Joe Carpenter.”
        “Nice name. Good solid name.”
        “What's your name?”
        Teasingly, she said, “What kind of name do I sound like?”
        “Sound like?”
        “Maybe an Octavia or a Juliette?”
        “More like a Demi.”
        “Like in Demi Moore the movie star?” she said disbelievingly.
        “You have that sexy, smoky quality in your voice.”
        “Honey, my voice is pure grits and collard