Saint Odd (16 page)

“Sonny Wexler and Billy Mundy should be there by now.”

“Your two best. I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, sir.”

“I always take you seriously, son. Even when there’s a dwarf in a bear suit.”

“He’s a nice little person, by the way. He doesn’t have an edge like that guy in the reality-TV show.”

“There’s another thing happened,” Chief Porter said. “Just a few minutes ago. An alert came over the wire from Homeland Security. Three armed guards were transporting a truckload of C-4 between the manufacturer and a weapons depot at an Army base.”

“Plastic explosives.”

“That’s right. One of the guards killed the other two and hijacked the shipment.”

“How much C-4?”

“It might have been a thousand kilos.”

I shivered in the warm night. “Enough to blow up the dam.”

“Twice over,” the chief said.

“When did this happen?”

“About three hours ago, but we just got word on the wire.”

“Where did it happen?”

“They think about thirty miles from here. The feds say not to
worry, they’re all over it. They just found the truck. The C-4 had been off-loaded into another vehicle.”

“What vehicle?”

“That seems to be anyone’s guess. When the feds say they’re all over it, that doesn’t mean they’re all over it.”

“I better get my mojo working,” I said.

“I sure hope you can, son. We need you on this. So why did you call it a
Ficus didida
?”

“
Nitida
. That’s the correct botanical name, sir. Ozzie Boone insists that even if a writer uses the common name of a tree or other plant, he ought to know the correct botanical name. He says that no matter what you’re writing about, you need to know a whole lot more on the subject than what you put on the page, or otherwise the work won’t have any depth.”

“So you’re still writing your memoirs.”

“Yes, sir. As I get the chance.”

“I guess you know a lot about Indian laurels, then.”

“I could go on for hours.”

“I just realized I don’t have your phone number.”

I gave it to him.

“Things are moving fast,” he said. “I’ll be back to you soon.”

I terminated the call.

A faint trace of cigarette smoke scented the still air. In the darkness of the porch, the smoker took a deep drag, and the end of his cigarette glowed hot orange.

Watching the man, I thought of a fuse on a stick of dynamite.

Plastic explosives were detonated with an electric current, not with a fuse, not with a flame, but I thought of a fuse anyway.

Driving around, odd as I’ve always been, thinking:
Jim. Bob. Jim. Bob. Jim, Bob. Jim, Bob. Jim Bob, Jim Bob, Jim Bob, Jim Bob …

Although neither of the executioners had spoken with a southern accent, I sounded to myself as though I must be trying to track down some good old boy with a red neck and a tattoo of the Confederate flag somewhere on his body, good old Jim Bob, with a juicy wad of chewin’ tobacco tucked up in his cheek and Merle Haggard playing on the radio of his pickup, while he drove around with a loaded rifle, looking for a possum to shoot so that he could bring it home to the little woman and have her make her mighty fine stew that she served over buttered grits with collard greens on the side.

Psychic magnetism doesn’t work if I’m distracted, and I was so distracted that the word
distracted
wasn’t strong enough to describe my state of mind. Spinning Jim and Bob into a fantasized good old boy wasn’t the only thing that kept me from focusing my paranormal gift for tracking people. I kept thinking about my dream, too, chewing it over like Jim Bob with his chaw. My
mind also kept bouncing back to
Ficus nitida
versus Indian laurel, which had nothing to do with this crisis except that the chief happened to ask me about it. When it wasn’t
Ficus nitida
, it was the plump woman with the masses of curly auburn hair, giving me the admission ticket and assuring me that I would be a big winner at 11:45 if I remained on the midway. And when the plump cashier stayed out of my head for a minute, her place was taken by bear-suited Lou and mega-tattooed Ollie. Or by Gypsy Mummy spitting out blank cards. Or by the coyote that had stood in the street and stared boldly at me as I’d climbed onto the Big Dog bike early that morning, after leaving the abandoned mall to the bats and carnivorous beetles that now called it home.

I also began to feel that I was being tailed. I couldn’t stop glancing at the rearview mirror. Three times, when a vehicle behind struck me as suspicious, I turned at the first intersection, but none of them followed me.

Only fifteen minutes after terminating the phone call with Wyatt Porter, I realized that I was cruising the state route to Malo Suerte Lake, doing eighty miles per hour, twenty over the limit. Considering that my psychic magnetism currently functioned even less well than a ten-billion-dollar government computer system, I had no expectation of finding Bob and Jim at the dam. Either I was hurtling toward Malo Suerte out of desperation, hoping for a new lead now that those two men without faces and surnames had proved elusive, or my usually reliable intuition had kicked in once more.

Suddenly I remembered that although Jim and Bob were without faces, I had two—the one I was born with and the one Connie had given me at the carnival. The cops guarding the dam would be edgy already, on the lookout for armed-to-the-teeth cultists
with over a ton of C-4. If I showed up painted like the most recent theatrical psychopath to terrorize Gotham City, a tragic mistake might be made. This was a world, after all, of tragic mistakes.

I didn’t want to waste time driving back across town to the farther outskirts where the Bullocks maintained the safe house, just to scrub off my mask. If I stopped at a service station to use their facilities, I’d have to ask for the key, at which point there would probably be some tedious back-and-forth about my painted face, which would seem as bizarre outside the carnival as it had seemed ordinary on the midway.

Instead of going directly to the dam, I drove to the park on the north shore, where I’d had breakfast that morning with Ozzie Boone and Chief Porter. The park was closed for the night. I left the Explorer on the shoulder of the highway, scaled the gate, and walked about thirty yards through darkness to the buff-brick building that housed the public restrooms.

Two security lights, two doors. Both were locked.

Fortunately the desert-style landscaping around the premises offered cacti and succulents and mostly decorative rocks. Because Maravilla County wasn’t so prosperous that it could afford night patrols of gated parks, I picked up two rocks the size of oranges, hesitated because of a lifelong tendency toward good citizenship, and then pitched the first one through a window. After using the second rock to break out the jagged shards that remained around the edges of the frame, I boosted myself over the sill and into the building.

I had never before broken into a bathroom. It wasn’t one of those firsts that you include on a résumé.

Using the little flashlight that hadn’t been left on the dresser in the safe house, glass snapping and crunching underfoot, I went to
the paper-towel dispenser and yanked several sheets from it. At the middle sink in a bank of five, I regarded myself in the mirror and confirmed the wisdom of a thorough face washing. When not in the context of the carnival, the harlequin mask and the black-and-white diamond pattern looked sinister in the extreme.

For the task at hand, the flashlight wasn’t as bright as I would have liked, but both common sense and paranoia argued against switching on the overhead fluorescent panels.

When finished, I leaned close to the mirror. As far as I could tell, I’d scrubbed off all the paint. Yet something was wrong with my face.

I’d never had a high opinion of my looks. I had always felt that I was ordinary, which was all right, because a girl as beautiful as Stormy Llewellyn had still found reasons to love me.

But now something about my face unsettled me, and the longer that I looked at myself, the more disturbed I became. I told myself that the quality of the light distorted my reflection, because no matter how I angled the beam of the flashlight, stark shadows carved my face into a more fierce countenance than I actually possessed.

But it wasn’t just the light. This was not the face of the fry cook I had been, not the face of the boy who had walked hand-in-hand with Stormy into an arcade to pose an important question to Gypsy Mummy. I found my eyes distressing. I turned from the mirror.

I had not seen any of my current adversaries’ faces, except for that of Wolfgang on his driver’s license. In mirrors, did they see the wickedness behind their masks, and was there a point past which they avoided mirrors?

I thought I would leave by the door, but it could be neither
locked nor unlocked from inside. When I climbed out of the window, flashlight in hand, the first thing that caught my attention was my Explorer out along the road, beyond the gate, illuminated by the headlights of the SUV that was now parked behind it.

A white Mercedes SUV. Like the one that had cruised slowly by while I’d hidden behind the
Ficus nitida
. The vehicle that I had assured myself was driven by an elderly couple coming home from a church supper.

If there had been retirees in it back then, they must have been carjacked in the meantime. Two men, neither of them elderly, were looking over the Explorer, clearly visible even at thirty yards, because the headlights of their vehicle revealed them.

Reverse psychic magnetism. Jim and Bob. I had thought too intently about them, had sought them too insistently. Because I didn’t have faces to go with their names, not even a distinctive voice for either one, I had been unable to find them. But they had been drawn, and here they were.

One of them happened to be looking toward me. When I came out of the shattered window, he pointed, and at once the second man turned his attention to me as well. The security lamps over the comfort-station entrances betrayed me, as did the feeble beam of my small flashlight, but that wasn’t why I had caught their attention. They could not have missed me, for I was to them what a magnet is to iron filings.

I could run from them. But to what end? I needed the Explorer. The chief had been right when he’d said that things were moving fast. Whatever catastrophe might make Pico Mundo the biggest story of the year, it would unfold within the next several hours, surely before dawn. If I had any hope of discovering what the cult intended and putting a stop to it, I had to be mobile. I couldn’t chase down the truth on foot or by hoping to thumb a ride every time I needed one.

If I had an advantage, it was that people who were drawn to me by reverse psychic magnetism were not aware of what had brought them into my presence. They felt no compulsion to find me, no attracting power. They made excuses to themselves for why they deviated from their plans and set off to places that they had no intention of visiting. Maybe they told themselves that they needed time to think about what they intended to do next. Maybe they convinced themselves that just cruising around would free their minds to consider their options more clearly. Whatever the case, they were always surprised to see me.

Without hesitation, I started toward the gate at the entrance,
as if I had no concern about these men’s intentions, as if I assumed that people who drove Mercedes SUVs were all upstanding citizens who wanted only the best for their fellow men, an end to all hunger, and world peace.

They probably didn’t even know who I was. They hadn’t seen me with the Explorer when they had cruised past it in town. Here the Ford was again, yes, and they would be puzzled as to why they had been interested in it earlier and why they should stumble upon it now when they were just cruising around at random, miles from where it had been parked before.

Whether they had tumbled to my identity or not, they would know me when I drew closer to them. The cult had been searching for me, and they surely had old newspaper photographs to go by, if nothing else. By the time I reached the fence, they would recognize me, and they would for a moment be surprised. A moment. Three seconds, four.

For another moment, they would wonder what I was doing out there at that hour, if I knew about the nearby dam and the C-4, and if I might have told anyone what I knew. Two seconds, three.

For another moment, they would look at each other, consulting on a course of action with or without words. They would want to kill me, yes, but they might also want to capture me, so that they could first torture me into revealing anything I knew about Edie Fischer and her organization, which was as secret as theirs and opposed to them at every turn. Four seconds, five.

Those three moments gave me a fearfully narrow path to survival. In fact, it wasn’t even a path, but a tightrope, a high wire across which I had to run, not walk.

I pretended no suspicion, calling out, “Hello,” as I approached them through the darkness. Pretending the kind of inebriation
that can be detected not so much by the drunk’s slurred words as by his too-loud and too-hearty speech, pretending also that I assumed they were park employees, I said, “Needed a damn toilet! Why’d you lock up, God’s sake? Had to bust out a window, ’cause you
locked it up
!”

I couldn’t shoot at them through a chain-link fence with any hope of scoring a hit. I had to climb it before they drew on me.

As I came out of the darkness into the backwash of their SUV’s headlights, I faked a stumble and cursed and ducked my head to hide my face. I believe I started climbing the chain-link before they realized who I was. I reached the top by the time they were getting to the end of the second of those three moments.

Instead of coming down the other side of the gate, I froze at the top, drew the Glock from my shoulder rig, thought for an instant it was going to snag on the powder-blue sport coat, and as they went for their weapons too late, I fired down on them. The first round took one of them in the gut, and he began to scream, his gun slipping out of his grip even as he drew it. The second round took the other man point-blank in the face, blowing out the back of his skull, and he was no doubt dead before he hit the ground.