Final Hour (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page A

her that he had poured his all upon her without conditions.
    Now she drives her Monday car at high speed, pleasured by the doting sun.
    Ursula slows as little as possible for an off-ramp and enters an industrial area that, measured in miles traveled, is not far from Newport Beach. Considering the graceless nature of the structures, considering the cruelty with which the sunlight falls upon these buildings and the vigor with which it is rebuffed, this place might as well be on a different planet from the one on which Newport shines.
    Among her father’s numerous properties that she inherited, there is a four-acre parcel surrounded by a high chain-link fence. The motorized gate responds to her remote control.
    She parks between two large buildings of concrete block and corrugated steel panels. She gets out of the gleaming car. From the luggage space behind the two seats, she retrieves a small picnic cooler.
    An overhanging roof paints its sharp-edged black shadow across half the ground between structures. Sunlight claims the other half.
    She stands in sunshine. Although no one is here to see her, she is pleased with how dazzling she looks in this crude setting.
    With a key, she disengages two heavy-duty deadbolts. She steps through a door into the larger of the two buildings.
    She stands for a moment in the warm velvet darkness, which seems alive and alert and approving of her.
    High overhead is a row of windows so filthy that the midday sun is pale on the glass and all but incapable of penetrating.
    When she switches on banks of fluorescent lamps, a cavernous space appears. Concrete floor. Rows of steel support posts rising to massive tie beams. A catwalk high above. The machinery is long gone.
    Something was once manufactured here. She doesn’t know what product they made. She has no interest in the making of things, only in the taking of them.
    Steeling herself for the encounter ahead, carrying the picnic cooler, she walks toward the north end of the building.
    Ursula isn’t driven by greed, as is the despicable Benetta, that secret skank in starlet’s skin. Ursula has many millions, more than she will ever need.
    Greed is a sick motivation, the reason for the want and ruin of the world.
    Greed is the blood in every movie villain’s veins.
    Ursula is inspired instead by the emotion that, in her time, is widely honored and celebrated: envy. She is a correct-thinking woman who wants to take only what other people have
but don’t deserve.
    Carved, injected, clipped, stretched, and pinned to be made desirable, Benetta did not deserve a wealthy husband.
    Deceiving others, making them think that they wanted the land he developed and the houses he built, even at outrageous prices, Proctor was an exploiter of the worst kind, deserving nothing.
    At the north end of the structure are single-story offices side by side, drywall boxes with windows facing the production floor. And a door to a stairwell.
    The stairs lead down into darkness.
    She can feel the evil radiating from below.
    She reminds herself that all of the sunlight that has revered her is now contained within her, that she is radiant, and that she will triumph here as always she triumphs.
    She switches on the stairwell light.
    Boldly she descends, though below waits the monster that is her twin sister, Undine.

5
The Necessary Computer Wiz
    In Makani’s ’54 Chevy, she and Pogo and Bob crossed the harbor on the bargelike ferry to visit Simon Hunter. They found a parking place a block from their destination, in the shade of an Indian laurel. The day was warm, and they left each of the four windows open a few inches, to ensure Bob’s comfort.
    “Guard duty,” she told the Labrador as she locked the car.
    He was the most mellow of dogs, but he answered those two words with a growl of werewolfian menace. In Makani’s absence, if anyone tested the doors, good Bob would growl with such ferocity that the scoundrel would be reminded of the savage attack dogs who often