Odd Thomas (17 page)

CHAPTER 28

W
HEN WE GOT OUT OF THE MUSTANG, THE FAMILIAR alleyway dwindled north and south into deeper gloom than I recalled from other nights, little-revealed by moonlight, obscured by moonshadows.

Above the back entrance to the restaurant kitchen, a security lamp glowed. Yet the darkness seemed to press toward it rather than to shrink away.

Uncovered stairs led to a second-floor landing and the door to Terri Stambaugh’s apartment. Light shone behind the curtains.

At the top of the steps, Stormy pointed at the northern sky. “Cassiopeia.”

Star by star, I identified the points of the constellation.

In classic mythology, Cassiopeia was the mother of Andromeda. Andromeda was saved from a sea monster by the hero Perseus, who also slew the Gorgon Medusa.

No less than the fabled Andromeda, Stormy Llewellyn, daughter of another Cassiopeia, is stellar enough to deserve a constellation named for her. I have slain no Gorgons, however, and I am no Perseus.

Terri answered the door when I knocked, accepted the car keys, and insisted that we come in for coffee or a nightcap.

Light from two candles throbbed pleasantly over the kitchen walls as cool drafts of conditioned air teased the flames. Terri had been sitting at the table when I knocked. A small glass of peach brandy stood on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth.

As always, the background music of her life was Elvis: this time, “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.”

We had known that she would expect us to visit for a while, which is why Stormy hadn’t waited at the bottom of the stairs.

Terri sometimes suffers from insomnia. Even if sleep slips upon her with ease, the nights are long.

When the
CLOSED
sign is hung on the front door of the Grille at nine o’clock and after the last customer leaves between nine and ten, whether Terri is drinking decaf coffee or something stronger, she opens as well a bottle of loneliness.

Her husband, Kelsey, her high-school sweetheart, has been dead for nine years. His cancer had been relentless, but being a fighter of uncommon determination, he had taken three years to die.

When his malignancy was diagnosed, he swore that he would not leave Terri alone. He possessed the will but not the power to keep that oath.

In his final years, because of the unfailing good humor and the quiet courage with which Kelsey waged his long mortal battle, Terri’s love and respect for him, always deep, had grown profound.

In a way, Kelsey had kept his promise never to leave her. His ghost does not linger around the Grille or anywhere else in Pico Mundo. He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

After three or four years, her grief had matured into a settled sorrow. I think she has been surprised that even after arriving at an acceptance of her loss, she has had no desire to mend the tear in her heart. The hole that Kelsey left has become more comforting to her than any patch with which she could close it.

Her fascination with Elvis, his life and music, began nine years ago, when she was thirty-two, the same year that Kelsey died.

The reasons for her intense interest in Presley are numerous. Without a doubt, however, among them is this one: As long as she has an Elvis collection—music, memorabilia, biographical facts—to build and maintain, she has no time to be attracted to a living man and can remain emotionally true to her lost husband.

Elvis is the door that she closes in the face of romance. The architecture of his life is her mountain retreat, her high redoubt, her nunnery.

Stormy and I sat at the table. Terri subtly steered us away from the fourth chair, the one that Kelsey had always occupied when alive.

The subject of our impending wedding came up before we properly settled in our seats. With the peach brandy that she poured for us, Terri raised a toast to our enduring happiness.

Every autumn, she brews crocks full of peach skins into this elixir: ferments, strains, bottles it. The flavor is irresistible, and the brandy packs a punch best handled in small glasses.

Later, as Stormy and I were finishing our second servings, and as the King was singing “Love Me Tender,” I told Terri about taking Elvis for a ride in her car. She was thrilled at first, but then saddened to hear that he had wept throughout our travels.

“I’ve seen him cry a few times before,” I said. “Since his death, he seems emotionally fragile. But this was the worst he’s ever been in my experience.”

“Of course,” Terri said, “there’s no mystery why he would be a total mess today of all days.”

“Well, it’s a mystery to me,” I assured her.

“It’s August fourteenth. At three-fourteen in the morning on August 14, 1958, his mama died. She was only forty-six.”

“Gladys,” Stormy said. “Her name was Gladys, wasn’t it?”

There is movie-star fame like that enjoyed by Tom Cruise, rock-star fame like that of Mick Jagger, literary fame, political fame…. But mere fame has grown into real legend when people of different generations remember your
mother’s
name a quarter of a century after your death and nearly half a century after hers.

“Elvis was in the service,” Terri recalled. “August twelfth, he flew home to Memphis on emergency leave and went to his mother’s bedside in the hospital. But the sixteenth of August is a bad day for him, too.”

“Why?”

“That’s when he died,” Terri said.

“Elvis himself?” Stormy asked.

“Yes. August 16, 1977.”

I had finished the second peach brandy.

Terri offered the bottle.

I wanted more but didn’t need it. I covered my empty glass with my hand and said, “Elvis seemed concerned about me.”

“How do you mean?” Terri asked.

“He patted me on the arm. Like he felt sympathy for me. He had this…this melancholy look, as if he was taking pity on me for some reason.”

This revelation alarmed Stormy. “You didn’t tell me this. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything. It was just Elvis.”

“So if it doesn’t mean anything,” Terri asked, “why did you mention it?”

“It means something to
me,
” Stormy declared. “Gladys died on the fourteenth. Elvis died on the sixteenth. The fifteenth, smack between them—that’s when this Robertson sonofabitch is going to go gunning for people.
Tomorrow
.”

Terri frowned at me. “Robertson?”

“Fungus Man. The guy I borrowed your car to find.”

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah. He lives in Camp’s End.”

“And?”

“The chief and I…we’re on it.”

“This Robertson is a toxic-waste mutant out of some psycho movie,” Stormy told Terri. “He came after us at St. Bart’s, and when we gave him the slip, he trashed some of the church.”

Terri offered Stormy more peach brandy. “He’s going to go gunning for people, you said?”

Stormy doesn’t drink heavily, but she accepted another round. “Your fry cook’s recurring dream is finally coming true.”

Now Terri looked alarmed. “The dead bowling-alley employees?”

“Plus maybe a lot of people in a movie theater,” Stormy said, and then she tossed back her peach brandy in one swallow.

“Does this also have something to do with Viola’s dream?” Terri asked me.

“It’s too long a story for now,” I told her. “It’s late. I’m whipped.”

“It has everything to do with her dream,” Stormy told Terri.

“I need some sleep,” I pleaded. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, Terri, after it’s all over.”

When I pushed my chair back, intending to get up, Stormy seized my arm and held me at the table. “And now I find out Elvis Presley himself has warned Oddie that he’s going to die tomorrow.”

I objected. “He did no such thing. He just patted me on the arm and then later, before he got out of the car, he squeezed my hand.”

“Squeezed your hand?” Stormy asked in a tone implying that such a gesture could be interpreted only as an expression of the darkest foreboding.

“It’s no big deal. All he did was just clasp my right hand in both of his and squeeze it twice—”

“Twice!”

“—and he gave me that look again.”

“That look of
pity
?” Stormy demanded.

Terri picked up the bottle and offered to pour for Stormy.

I put my hand over the glass. “We’ve both had enough.”

Grabbing my right hand and holding it in both of hers as Elvis had done, Stormy said insistently, “What he was trying to tell you, Mr. Macho Psychic Batman Wannabe, is that his mother died on August fourteenth, and he died on August sixteenth, and
you’re
going to die on August fifteenth—the three of you like a hat trick of death—if you don’t
watch your ass
.”

“That isn’t what he was trying to tell me,” I disagreed.

“What—you think he was just
hitting
on you?”

“He doesn’t have a romantic life anymore. He’s dead.”

“Anyway,” Terri said, “Elvis wasn’t gay.”

“I didn’t claim he was gay. Stormy made the inference.”

“I’d bet the Grille,” Terri said, “and my left butt cheek that he wasn’t gay.”

I groaned. “This is the craziest conversation I’ve ever had.”

Terri demurred: “Gimme a break—I’ve had a hundred conversations with you a
lot
crazier than this.”

“Me too,” Stormy agreed. “Odd Thomas, you’re a fountain of crazy conversations.”

“A geyser,” Terri suggested.

“It’s not me, it’s just my
life,
” I reminded them.

“You better stay out of this,” Terri worried. “Let Wyatt Porter handle it.”

“I
am
going to let him handle it. I’m not a cop, you know. I don’t pack a gun. All I can do is advise him.”

“Don’t even advise this time,” Stormy said. “Just this one time, stay out of it. Go to Vegas with me. Now.”

I wanted to please her. Pleasing her pleases me, and then the birds sing sweeter than usual and the bees make better honey and the world is a place of rejoicing—or so it seems from my perspective.

What I
wanted
to do and the
right
thing to do were not one and the same. So I said, “The problem is that I was put here for this work, and if I walk away from the job, it will only follow me, one way or another.”

I picked up my glass. I’d forgotten it was empty. I put it down again.

“When I’ve got a specific target, my psychic magnetism works in two directions. I can cruise at random and find who I need to find…in this case Robertson…or he’ll be drawn to me if he wants to be, sometimes even if he doesn’t. And in the second case, I have less control and I’m more likely to be…unpleasantly surprised.”

“That’s just a theory,” Stormy said.

“It’s nothing I can prove, but it’s true. It’s something I know in my gut.”

“I’ve always figured you don’t think with your head,” Stormy said, her tone changing from one of insistent—and almost angry—persuasion to one of resignation and affection.

Terri said to me, “If I were your mother, I’d box your ears.”

“If you were my mother, I wouldn’t be here.”

These were the two most important women in the world to me; I loved each of them in a different way, and declining to do what they wanted, even in the interest of doing the right thing, was difficult.

The candlelight burnished their faces to the same golden glow, and they regarded me with an identical anxiety, as though by virtue of their female intuition they knew things that I could not perceive even with my sixth sense.

From the CD player, Elvis crooned, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

I consulted my wristwatch. “It’s August fifteenth.”

When I tried to get to my feet, Stormy didn’t restrain me as she had done previously. She, too, rose from her chair.

I said, “Terri, I guess you’ll have to cover for me on the first shift—or get Poke to come in if he’s willing.”

“What—you can’t cook and save the world at the same time?”

“Not unless you want the bacon burnt. Sorry to give you such short notice.”

Terri accompanied us to the door. She hugged Stormy, then me. She boxed one of my ears. “You be here day after tomorrow, on time, at the griddle, flippin’ those cakes, or I’m going to demote you to fountain jockey.”

CHAPTER 29

A
CCORDING TO THE BIG DIGITAL SIGN AT THE Bank of America, the temperature had fallen to a comparatively chilly ninety degrees here on the side of midnight when broomsticks are licensed to fly.

A lazy breeze stirred through town, repeatedly dying and rising again, as though rust inhibited the mechanisms of the wind gods. Hot and dry, it traveled in crisp and fitful whispers among ficuses, palms, and jacarandas.

The streets of Pico Mundo were quiet. When the breeze held its breath, I could hear the click of the switches in the traffic-signal control boxes as the lights changed from green to yellow to red at the intersections.

As we walked to Stormy’s apartment, we remained alert, half expecting Bob Robertson to pop like a jack-in-the-box from behind a parked car, out of a doorway.

Other than the wind-licked leaves, the only movement was the dart-and-swoop of a swarm of bats pursuing a flurry of moths through the glow of a streetlamp, to the moon, and then out past Cassiopeia.

Stormy lives three blocks from the Pico Mundo Grille. We held hands and walked in silence.

My course was set irrevocably. In spite of her objections, she knew as well as I did that I had no choice but to do whatever I could to help Chief Porter stop Robertson before he committed the slaughter that had drenched my dreams for three years.

Anything that could be said on the subject now would be useless repetition. And here on the dark side of a threatening dawn, small talk had no charm.

The old, two-story Victorian house had been divided into four apartments. Stormy lives in the ground-floor unit on the right.

We didn’t expect Robertson to be waiting there for us. Though he had somehow learned who I was, it didn’t follow that he would easily discover Stormy’s address.

If he was lying in wait for me, my apartment over Rosalia Sanchez’s garage was a better bet than Stormy’s place.

Prudence, however, made us cautious as we entered the foyer and then her apartment. Inside, the cool air had a faint peach scent. We left the Mojave far behind us when we closed the door.

She has three rooms, a bath, and a kitchen. Switching on lights, we went directly to her bedroom, where she keeps her 9-mm pistol.

She ejected the magazine, checked it to be sure that it was fully loaded, and snapped it back into the weapon.

I am wary of any gun, anywhere, anytime—except when it’s in Stormy’s hand. She could sit with her finger on the detonation button of a nuclear weapon, and I would feel safe enough to nap.

A quick check of the windows revealed that they were locked, as she had left them.

No boogeyman had taken up residence in any of the closets.

While Stormy brushed her teeth and changed for bed, I called Green Moon Lanes and listened to a recorded message regarding their hours, services, and prices. They opened for business at 11:00
A.M.
Thursday through Sunday, and at 1:00
P.M.
Monday through Wednesday.

The earliest that Robertson could walk into the bowling center with murder in mind was when they unlocked the doors at one o’clock.

Two multiplex cinemas with a total of twenty screens serve the greater Pico Mundo area. By phone, I learned that the movie to which Viola had intended to take her daughters was playing at two theaters in only one multiplex. I made a mental note of the show times, the earliest of which was 1:10
P.M.

In the bedroom, I turned down the bedclothes, took off my shoes, and stretched out atop the thin blanket, waiting for Stormy.

She has furnished her humble home with items from thrift shops run by Goodwill and the Salvation Army; however, the look is neither shabby nor without character. She has a talent for eclectic design and for discerning the magic in objects that others might see as merely old or peculiar, or even grotesque.

Floor lamps featuring silk shades with beaded fringes, chairs in the Stickley style paired with plump Victorian footstools upholstered in tapestries, Maxfield Parrish prints, colorful carnival-glass vases and bibelots: The mix should not work, but it does. Her rooms are the most welcoming that I have ever seen.

Time seems suspended in this place.

In these rooms I am at peace. I forget my worries. The problems of pancakes and poltergeists are lifted from me.

Here I cannot be harmed.

Here I know my destiny and am content with it.

Here Stormy lives, and where she lives, I flourish.

Above her bed, behind glass, in a frame, is the card from the fortune-telling machine:
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

Four years ago, on the midway of the county fair, a gaudy contrivance called Gypsy Mummy had waited in a shadowy back corner of an arcade tent filled with unusual games and macabre attractions.

The machine had resembled an old-fashioned phone booth and had stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were entirely enclosed. The upper four feet featured glass on three sides.

In the glass portion sat a dwarfish female figure attired in a Gypsy costume complete with garish jewelry and colorful headscarf. Her gnarled, bony, withered hands rested on her thighs, and the green of her fingernails looked less like polish than like mold.

A plaque at her feet claimed that this was the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf. In eighteenth-century Europe, she had been renowned for the accuracy of her prognostications and foretellings.

The mottled skin of her face stretched tight over the skull. The eyelids were stitched shut with black thread, as were her lips.

Most likely this was not the art of Death working in the medium of flesh, as claimed, but instead the product of an artist who had been clever with plaster, paper, and latex.

As Stormy and I arrived at Gypsy Mummy, another couple fed a quarter to the machine. The woman leaned toward a round grill in the glass and asked her question aloud: “Gypsy Mummy tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”

The man, evidently Johnny, pushed the
ANSWER
button, and a card slid into a brass tray. He read it aloud: “A cold wind blows, and each night seems to last a thousand years.”

Neither Johnny nor his bride-to-be regarded this as an answer to their question, so they tried again. He read the second card: “The fool leaps from the cliff, but the winter lake below is frozen.”

The woman, believing that Gypsy Mummy had misheard the question, repeated it: “Will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”

Johnny read the third card: “The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit.”

And the fourth: “A stone can provide no nourishment, nor will sand slake your thirst.”

With irrational persistence, the couple spent four more quarters in pursuit of an answer. They began bickering on receipt of the fifth card. By the time Johnny read number eight, the cold wind predicted by the first fortune was blowing at gale-force between them.

After Johnny and his love departed, Stormy and I took our turn with Gypsy Mummy. A single coin produced for us the assurance that we were destined to be together forever.

When Stormy tells this story, she claims that after granting to us what the other couple had wanted, the mummified dwarf winked.

I didn’t see this wink. I don’t understand how a sewn-shut eye could perform such a trick and yet fail to pop a single stitch. The image of a winking mummy resonates with me nonetheless.

Now, as I waited under the Gypsy Mummy’s framed card, Stormy came to bed. She wore plain white cotton panties and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt.

All the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, in thongs and skimpy teddies and peekaboo bras, collectively possess a fraction of the erotic allure of Stormy in schoolgirl briefs and SpongeBob top.

Lying on her side, cuddling against me, she put her head upon my chest to listen to my heart. She got an earful.

She often likes to be held in this way until she falls asleep. I am the boatman she trusts to row her into restful dreams.

After a silence, she said, “If you want me…I’m ready now.”

I am no saint. I have used my driver’s license to trespass in homes to which I’ve not been invited. I answer violence with violence and never turn the other cheek. I have had enough impure thoughts to destroy the ozone layer. I have often spoken ill of my mother.

Yet when Stormy offered herself to me, I thought of the orphaned girl, then known to the world as Bronwen, alone and afraid at the age of seven, adopted and given safe harbor, only to discover that her new father wanted not a daughter but a sex toy. Her confusion, her fear, her humiliation, her shame were too easy for me to imagine.

I thought also of Penny Kallisto and the seashell that she had handed to me. From the glossy pink throat of that shell had come the voice of a monster speaking the language of demented lust.

Though I didn’t confuse my clean passion with Harlo Landerson’s sick desire and savage selfishness, I could not purge from memory his rough breathing and bestial grunts. “Saturday is almost here,” I told Stormy. “You’ve taught me the beauty of anticipation.”

“What if Saturday never comes?”

“We’ll have this Saturday and thousands more,” I assured her.

“I need you,” she said.

“Is that something new?”

“God, no.”

“It’s not new for me, either.”

I held her. She listened to my heart. Her hair feathered like a raven’s wing against her face, and my spirits soared.

Soon she murmured to someone she seemed pleased to see in her sleep. The boatman had done his job, and Stormy drifted on dreams.

I eased off the bed without waking her, drew the top sheet and thin blanket over her shoulders, and switched the bedside lamp to its lowest setting. She doesn’t like to wake in darkness.

After slipping into my shoes, I kissed her forehead and left her with the 9-mm pistol on her nightstand.

I turned out the lights elsewhere in the apartment, stepped into the public hall, and locked her door with a key she’d given to me.

The front door of the apartment house featured a large oval of leaded glass. The beveled edges of the mosaic pieces presented a fragmented and distorted view of the porch.

I put one eye to a flat piece of glass to see things more clearly. An unmarked police van stood at the curb across the street.

Law enforcement in Pico Mundo involves few clandestine operations. The police department owns only two unmarked units.

The average citizen wouldn’t recognize either vehicle. Because of the assistance that I’ve provided to the chief on numerous cases, I have ridden in and am familiar with both.

Of the beige van’s identifying features, the stubby shortwave antenna spiking from the roof at the back was the clincher.

I had not asked the chief to grant protection to Stormy; she would have been angry at the implication that she couldn’t take care of herself. She has her pistol, her certificate of graduation from a self-defense course, and her pride.

The danger to her, if any, would seem to exist only when I was with her. Bob Robertson had no beef with anyone but me.

This chain of logic brought me to the realization that Chief Porter might be providing protection not to Stormy but to me.

More likely, it wasn’t protection but surveillance. Robertson had tracked me to Little Ozzie’s place and had found me again later at St. Bart’s. The chief might be keeping a watch on me in the hope that Robertson would sniff out my trail once more, whereupon he could be taken into custody for questioning about the vandalism at the church.

I understood his thinking, but I resented being used as bait without first being asked politely if I minded having a hook in my ass.

Besides, in the course of meeting the responsibilities of my supernatural gift, I sometimes resort to tactics frowned upon by the police. The chief knows this. Being subjected to police surveillance and protection would inhibit me and, if I acted in my usual impulsive fashion, would make Chief Porter’s position even more difficult.

Instead of leaving by the main entrance, I walked to the end of the public hall and departed by the back door. A small moonlit yard led to a four-car garage, and a gate beside the garage opened into an alleyway.

The officer in the van thought that he was running surveillance on me, but now he served as Stormy’s guardian. And she couldn’t get angry with me because I had never asked that she be provided with protection.

I was tired but not ready to sleep. I went home anyway.

Maybe Robertson would be waiting for me and would try to kill me. Maybe I would survive, subdue him, call the chief, and thereby put an end to this.

I had high hopes of a violent encounter with a satisfactory conclusion.