Saint Odd (19 page)

Earlier in the day, shortly after dawn, when I’d encountered the coyote on the street where I’d parked the Big Dog motorcycle, it must have been more than it appeared to be, as well.

And at the safe house, when I’d come downstairs to the kitchen for dinner, Deacon Bullock had at that moment entered through the back door, carrying a shotgun. His wife, Maybelle, had said to him,
Seein’ as you’re alive, must’ve been a false alarm like you thought
.

Dang coyote
, Deke had said.
Slinkin’ around, maybe hopin’ for one of the chickens we don’t even raise, set off a motion detector
.

Indicating the sunlight at the windows, she had said,
Early for one of their kind bein’ on the hunt
.

It was a bonier specimen than usual
, he’d replied,
maybe too hungry to wait out the sun
.

That coyote, like the others in my day, must have been more than it appeared to be.

The four who had been the only members of the cult that shot up Green Moon Mall—Eckles, Varner, Gosset, Robertson—had
been pretend satanists, men with a taste for murder, cruel sadists who dressed up their barbarism with occult nonsense that had nothing to do with real devil worship.

As I’d told Chief Porter earlier in the day, the cult that had owned the isolated estate in Nevada was serious about its satanism. It had been established in England, in 1580, and among its founding members had been clergymen and nobility. Over the generations, the cultists accumulated enormous wealth, which bought them political influence, but not only wealth. During the centuries, they also acquired genuine supernatural power, not so much that they could stop me from rescuing the kidnapped children and bringing about the destruction of that estate, but power nonetheless. I had spied upon a ceremony for which they conjured demonic entities to witness their human sacrifices. Using animals as their remote eyes and ears might be well within their abilities.

The coyote that had triggered the motion detectors outside the safe house might have been a proxy for the cultists, a proxy through which the property’s perimeter alarm system could be explored and its weak points discovered.

I phoned the number that Mr. Bullock had asked me to memorize. He’d said that he would be available whenever I called, even after midnight. Following four rings, I was sent to voice mail.

Dreading that I had called too late, I left a brief message.

“This is me, this is Odd Thomas. Get out of the house. Get out
now
!”

Driving back to town, I repeatedly checked my rearview mirror. Apparently I had no tail.

I didn’t drive directly to the safe house or cruise past it. I concluded that would be suicide. I wasn’t ready to die, not until I had stopped—or had done my best to stop—whatever catastrophe might be planned for Pico Mundo.

I knew my hometown well, even here in its rural outskirts. In an area of horse farms and ranchettes and undeveloped land, I pulled off the two-lane blacktop and parked among a stand of cottonwoods, far enough from the road that the headlights of passing vehicles wouldn’t reveal the Explorer.

After switching off the engine, I called Deke Bullock again, and as before, he didn’t answer. Which most likely meant he was dead. Maybelle Bullock had probably been killed, too.

Perhaps the safe house had been discovered and invaded, its caretakers murdered, because of the astronaut who had seen something shocking in space and had been running for his life ever since, or because of some other hapless fugitive who had been given shelter there for a while. Maybe. But I was convinced
that the responsibility lay with me, that unknowingly I’d led someone to it when I arrived that morning on the Big Dog bike.

Maybelle had made my favorite peach pie. She had hugged me and kissed my cheek before I’d left. She and Deacon had been so sweet together, bantering about whether they’d endured five or, instead, six bad days in twenty-eight years of marriage. My anger might serve me well in the hours ahead, but it came with a gray despair that I had to resist.

If the Bullocks were dead, there could be no good reason for me to return to the house—and no wisdom in doing so. If my only purpose was to confirm their deaths, I would most likely ensure my own.

Supposing they were not dead, however, I had an obligation to assist them. Perhaps they were under siege and needed reinforcements. Or one of them, wounded and left for dead, might still be saved.

Our world was a battleground on which good and evil clashed, and many of the combatants on the dark side were known to everyone. Terrorists, dictators, politicians who were merchants of lies and hate, crooked businessmen in league with them, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupted policemen, embezzlers, street thugs, rapists, and their ilk waged part of the war, and their actions were what made the evening news so colorful and depressing.

But those fighting in that dark army had their secret schemes, too, intentions and desires and goals that would make their public villainy seem almost innocent by comparison. They were assisted by other politicians who concealed their hatred and envy, by judges who secretly had no respect for the law, by clergymen who in private worshipped nothing but money or the tender bodies of children, by celebrities who trumpeted their concern for the common
man while in their off-screen lives assiduously hobnobbing with and advancing the interests of the elite of elites.…

The war
unseen
by most people was one of clandestine militias, unincorporated businesses, unchartered organizations, philosophical movements that could not survive fresh air and sunlight, secretive coalitions of lunatics who didn’t recognize their own lunacy, nature cults and science cults and religious cults. And, as I knew too well, there was supernatural evil participating in this secret war against order, good, and innocence; however, the supernatural was only one regiment of that army and, you might be surprised to hear, numbered far fewer troops than the flesh-and-blood human beings who fought in the countless other battalions.

Until I had met Mrs. Edie Fischer two months earlier, on the Pacific Coast Highway, when she’d come cruising along in a humongous limousine, I hadn’t realized that my side in this secret war had its own clandestine militias and unchartered organizations determined to defeat all the aforementioned malevolent individuals and forces. I now had companions-at-arms, like Mr. and Mrs. Bullock, with resources to match those of the enemy.

On our side of this war, one didn’t leave a friend unsupported. You never,
never
left a friend to die alone.

I walked out of the grove of cottonwoods and crossed the quiet country lane, marveling at how ordinary the night seemed, as every night and day seemed if you saw only the surface of things. I climbed a split-rail fence into a pasture where, during the day, horses grazed on sweet grass.

Remaining properly oriented in a night so deeply overcast, with nothing to illuminate my way except the glow of downtown Pico Mundo reflected dimly off the low clouds, I would have stumbled
or fallen, or stepped in a pile of horse product more than once, if not for my psychic magnetism. Focusing on a mental image of the Victorian house at the end of the driveway that led between colonnades of velvet ashes, I followed the fence to a corner, turned right, and followed it farther before my sixth sense told me to climb it again and to cross a graveled lane into an unfenced field.

I stayed away from stables and outbuildings, and avoided the occasional house with lighted windows. In ten minutes, I came to the ground behind the stable that had been converted into the long garage where my Big Dog Bulldog Bagger awaited deconstruction. I drew the Glock from my shoulder rig and crept along the back wall of the garage to a corner from which I could see the safe house.

Lamplight, none of it very bright, filtered by curtains and draperies, shone at some windows, and others were dark. The back door stood open, which I interpreted as meaning either that Mr. and Mrs. Bullock had fled an assault or that the assassins had done their dirty work and gone away.

I considered both those possibilities, but my usually reliable intuition wouldn’t endorse either of them.

Although I stood listening for a minute or two, I heard nothing that warned me off. The night was so quiet that it almost seemed to be already submerged under fathoms of water.

I left the cover of the garage and crossed the yard. Warily I climbed four brick steps to the back porch.

When we’d sat down for dinner, the kitchen windows had been open to the late-spring light. Now they were covered by blinds.

Surprisingly, the porch floor didn’t creak underfoot. Although it appeared to be painted wood, it felt as solid as concrete.

At the open door, I hesitated, but then went inside quick and low, with the Glock in a two-hand grip.

A light above the sink and another under the cooktop hood kept darkness at bay, but the kitchen was large, and shadows draped a few corners. Rounding the dinette table, I almost stepped into a pool of some liquid that was difficult to see on the dark floor. Judging by the more obvious scarlet spatters on the nearby doors of the glossy-white cabinetry, the pool must be blood.

The pantry door stood open on darkness. I assumed that if anyone had been waiting in there, he would already have shot me.

The swinging door between the kitchen and the downstairs hallway was blocked half open by a large dead man—not Deacon Bullock—lying facedown across the threshold, dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t describe what a dead man was wearing any more than I would describe the design on a ten-dollar bill that I used to buy a burger and fries. But in this case, the hombre’s outfit was important because he was clearly dressed like an assassin. And then there were the ski mask and the latex gloves.

Professional killers, sent to clean out one of their enemy’s safe houses, would expect resistance. This guy wouldn’t have come alone to do such dangerous work, and in fact his team probably would have numbered three or four.

Two interior doors led out of the kitchen, and the second opened into the dining room. To avoid the dead man and the soup
of bodily fluids in which he sprawled, I preferred to stay out of the bright hallway. I eased open the swinging door to a dining room that was dimly revealed by the crystal chandelier hanging in the center of that space. The fixture had been adjusted to a low setting, and in the faint light, the table appeared to be intended not for serving a meal, but for conducting a séance.

Earlier, during my stay in this house, I hadn’t noticed the uncanny silence with which doors moved on hinges and with which the floors received each footstep. For all the noise I made, I might as well have been a ghost.

A half-open door on the left led to the hallway. Another at the far end connected to the parlor, which I knew because Deacon Bullock had brought me this way from the kitchen when he had first taken me upstairs to see my room.

Another sizable dead man lay across the threshold between the dining room and parlor. He and the first stiff were dressed alike in every detail. He hadn’t purged bowels and bladder in his death throes, as had the other guy, but he still lay in a bit of a mess. His head was turned sideways. Through one of the holes in the ski mask, a fixed eye stared into another world. Just beyond his reaching hand, on the floor of the next room, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.

I had seen so few of these people’s faces that I was tempted to pull off the dead man’s ski mask. I resisted the urge when I thought, irrationally,
What will you do if the face is yours?

I didn’t want to step in blood or on a corpse, but the latter was unavoidable because of the dead man’s size and the limitations of my stride. The heel of my right shoe came down on the fingers of his right hand. Fortunately, the contact produced little sound—the faintest squeak of the latex glove stretching under my shoe—
and I didn’t stumble, although I almost revealed my presence by saying,
Sorry, sir
.

Doorways were the worst. When you’re on the hunt, you must clear them properly, low and fast, weapon in a two-hand grip, tracking the muzzle left to right or right to left, depending on the situation, seeking a target. Even fry cooks know that. The two men who had stopped bullets were dressed and armed like professionals who were trained and experienced in making such transitions, and yet they were dead in doorways.

The parlor was poorly lighted by a single lamp with a pleated blue-silk shade, and crowded with heavy Victorian furniture. A pair of chesterfields, wing-back armchairs: things to crouch behind for concealment. No one popped out of hiding to blast away at me, though the metronomic
tock-tock-tock
of the pendulum in the grandfather clock seemed to be counting off my last seconds.

As in the dining room, the draperies had been drawn shut at all the windows, perhaps to prevent anyone outside from determining the location of the residents.

A wide archway, instead of a door, connected the parlor to the foyer. I found it refreshing to see that no one lay dead on that threshold.

The foyer. Deserted. To the right, the front door was closed. To the left of the archway lay the brightly lighted hall. Opposite the dining room and parlor were three other rooms that I hadn’t explored.

My sense of things was that the action had moved on from the ground floor after the first two men had been shot. I regarded the stairs, hesitating to climb them and leave unsearched rooms behind me.

Overhead, someone said,
“Ahwk,”
as though violently clearing
his throat, and immediately thereafter something thudded to the floor in an upstairs room.

If, as I had every reason to expect, a third dead man had just given up his ghost, the thud wasn’t as loud as it ought to have been. The floors allowed me to walk as quietly as a cat, and they soaked up most of the sound of dead men falling, which suggested that silence favored the Bullocks and that the place had been constructed as both a safe house and a trap.