Saint Odd (24 page)

There might be a security guard or two at night, not to patrol the orchard, but to prevent thieves from stealing valuable machinery
and vehicles. Problematic. Not that a security guard might be rash enough to shoot me first and ask questions in the afterlife. But if the cultists on my trail would be so bold as to chop the Explorer to pieces with automatic-weapons fire in an area where the noise could trigger calls to 911, they might answer a guard’s challenge with bullets. I didn’t want to be responsible for leading them to a victim. I hoped the orchard buildings were protected only by good steel doors and state-of-the-art alarm systems.

The owls, perhaps as many as half a dozen roosting across the length of the orchard, were hooting regularly to one another, their voices echoing eerily among the trees, as if they were urging me on—or cheering those who pursued me. The time had come to run full tilt, without regard to the noise I would make. Remaining close to the same row of trees, I bolted, taking longer strides, feet slamming against the ground, gasping for breath, making enough noises that I could now hear only the closest owl.

I thought they couldn’t run and fire their weapons at the same time. Not effectively. Not even if they caught sight of me. Afraid of losing me unless they matched my pace, they would have to forgo shooting in order to stay close on my trail. Wrong. If they had Uzis or other fully automatic carbines, they could flick a switch from single-fire to burst-fire, which at least one of them did. The hard stutter of a machine gun rattled through the almond grove, no doubt chasing even the fearless owls from their perches. Full-metal-jacket rounds snapped into the trunks with terrible power, louder than a nail gun driving steel spikes into a four-by-six, loud enough for me to hear those impacts separate from the gunfire.

Dirt and pebbles sprayed across my shoulders and the back of my head, as a low round must have kicked the ground behind me.
I dodged from one side of the row to the other, better using the trees for cover, slaloming among them, which increased the chances of being taken down by a branch harder than my head.

A scream. Loud, shrill, prolonged. As the gunfire abruptly ceased, I thought that maybe one of the searchers, hurrying forward too eagerly, had gotten ahead of the gunner and had taken a round or two.

As the hideous screams seemed to slither through the grove with corporal substance, I stopped dodging around the trees and ran only along the west side of the row. My legs on fire. Chest aching. Each exhalation hot as furnace air. I couldn’t keep up that pace much longer. I was no more a marathon runner than I was a man of action.

I thought the need to tend to one of their own injured would bring a couple of them to a halt, improving my odds of survival. I saw a pale geometry in the darkness ahead, the white boards of the southern fence. If they were delaying ten seconds, twenty, I could be up the fence and over, at least temporarily out of sight. A shot rang out, and the screaming stopped. Another single shot perhaps made certain that the screamer had been permanently silenced. They weren’t the type to leave a wounded comrade behind. They were the type who would finish him off and be done with the distraction. I shouldn’t have expected anything else, considering that Jim and Bob executed Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene merely because I might have seen their faces. True believers. Fanatics. They didn’t fear death. In their view, death came with a reward. They probably thought they would be royalty in Hell. The execution of their own had set them back no more than five seconds, if at all, but the fence loomed immediately in front of me.

I slammed into the fence, grappled for handholds, toed up from the base rail, went monkey-fast over the top, and fell to the ground on the farther side just as a hail of man-stoppers cracked the top rail and the cross-boards. Bullet-plucked chicken wire twanged and plinked as I went flat and squirmed away.

The land sloped down to a wall of boulders stacked as they might be in a breakwater at the entrance to a harbor. I scrambled down them to a flash-flood channel about twelve feet wide and at least ten feet below the elevated orchard. Crane-placed boulders formed the farther wall, as well.

Maybe the cultists knew what lay beyond the fence, knew that I could stand upright and still be well below their line of fire. The guns fell silent again. In seconds, they would be climbing the fence.

We didn’t get a lot of rain in the Mojave, but from time to time we were hit by a storm of such power that everyone made lame jokes about building an ark. In town, a well-planned and extensive drainage system could handle all but the most intense, protracted downpours. But where there were no city streets and
storm drains, the rushing torrents either created temporary lakes or raced through the arroyos that had been carved in the land by centuries of such deluges. This was one such arroyo, fortified for the length of this property to protect the orchard and to prevent further erosion.

If I went to the right, west, I’d eventually reach a two-lane county road. There wouldn’t be much traffic at that hour. Even if I could flag down a vehicle, I would be less likely to escape than to be shot along with whoever stopped to give me a ride.

I hurried to the east, toward the array of buildings that served the orchard. If you’re running for your life, a drainage channel of that kind is no safer than a long hallway, which itself has much in common with a target lane in a shooting range. When my pursuers caught up with me, I wouldn’t have anywhere to hide, because the sloped walls of boulders weren’t as nature might have tumbled them, but were instead stacked tightly and with calculation, to ensure stability.

Far away in the night, a siren wailed. It didn’t give me any hope. The police might have been responding to 911 calls related to the barrage that destroyed the Explorer, but they surely weren’t already aware of events at the orchard.

Delaying a few seconds longer than seemed wise, I finally darted to my right and scrambled up the massive rocks. Maybe the assassins’ weapons, which were more cumbersome than pistols, and whatever other gear they might be carrying slowed them down a little when they had to scale the fence. Or maybe they needed a few seconds to spot me after they reached the channel. Whatever the reason, I made it to the top of the boulders and started toward the nearest building before gunfire rattled again. One brief burst. The keening of a few spent rounds ricocheting off
stone. The subsequent silence suggested that I must have gotten ahead of them to an extent that persuaded them not to waste ammunition.

Here the ground was heavily graveled to keep down workday dust, and it crunched underfoot as I approached the first building, which appeared barnlike but massive. Perhaps two hundred feet long and sixty wide. Two stories. Small windows high on the long wall, maybe thirty of them in a row, a few feet under the eave of the curved roof. All were dark. The narrow end of the structure featured two large roll-up doors and a man door between them. Above each truck-size entrance, a security lamp poured forth a pool of light, and a camera gazed down from higher still.

I feared being an easy target in that brightness, but I didn’t want to waste time running wide of it. I sprinted onto that well-lit stage and hoped that we had not arrived at the death scene. Past the first big door. Past the second. Turned right at the corner. For the next several seconds, they would not have me in sight, with or without night-vision goggles.

Twenty or twenty-five yards beyond the first building stood three others, smaller but still large, each a different size, a different shape. This one wood, that one concrete block skinned with stucco. I ventured among them, putting more walls between me and the cultists. The security lights here were dimmer, regular bulbs, not floodlights like the first two. Shadows were plentiful.

Gravel had been spread in a thinner layer here than elsewhere, but silent movement remained impossible. On the upside, I couldn’t leave footprints in a carpet of small loose stones.

I’d had about enough of running, whether under fire or not. The air temperature was seventy-five degrees or a little higher. I was sweating like you would think a pig would sweat; actually,
however, pigs don’t sweat, another fact that I learned from Ozzie Boone, who wrote a novel in which an expert on hogs trained three of them to kill an enemy of his. Anyway, my mouth was dry. Throat scratchy. Eyes burning from sweat salt. I needed to get out of the chase, find a hidey-hole.

Acutely aware that I had mere seconds to disappear from sight before the search team streamed among the buildings, rejecting one possible hiding place after another, I came to the back of the two-story block-and-stucco building. Ladder rungs embedded in the wall led to the flat roof. I almost didn’t see them in the dim light from a caged security lamp at the farther end of the structure. They were painted to match the stucco.

When you think of hiding places, you imagine crawling under something or behind something, or into a hole, but you can be easily trapped in such places. I could be trapped on a roof, too, but they would not be able to get me in their sights if I stayed below the parapet wall. And the only way to get to me would be by the ladder. Any fool who climbed it, even mildly suspicious that I might have taken refuge up there, would lose the top of his head when he came into view.

I climbed quickly. The parapet wall, encircling the flat roof, was about three feet high, maybe higher. On my hands and knees, I crawled across the forty-foot-wide roof, intending to take a position directly opposite the ladder.

Halfway across the roof, I realized my mistake. Forty feet would be too far from the ladder. In spite of my aversion to guns, I had learned to use them, but I was not a skilled sniper. And the Glock wouldn’t be as reliable at forty feet as it would be from a distance of, say, six inches.

As I crawled back the way that I’d come, I heard the rattle and
crunch of footsteps on gravel. I kept moving, making a lot less noise than the hunters were. Sitting with my back pressed to the parapet wall, immediately to the right of the ladder, I drew the Glock.

As dark as it was on the roof, I could nevertheless see the pale-white stucco of the parapet, the clean sweep of it. If I had been sitting directly opposite the ladder, I would have been spotted the instant the climber’s eyes cleared the top. I would have been the only dark shape silhouetted against the stucco, except for a few low vent stacks.

On the ground, the cultists didn’t like the gravel. Moving among the buildings, they tried to place their feet cautiously, but the loose stones defeated them. After taking several careful steps, each of them made the same decision: to bull forward, clattering through the pebbles without regard to the noise, evidently convinced that too much caution was more dangerous than advancing boldly.

The distant siren had faded to silence. Either the patrol car had been responding to a call about the shooting at the Explorer or to something else altogether that had nothing to do with me and the posse on my trail.

As I waited for the sound of feet on the ladder rungs, I tried to figure out how these people kept finding me. After the events in Nevada, they had revenge on their minds. They were using all of their considerable resources, all their corrupt contacts in everything from the political establishment to law enforcement, to get their hands on me. If they had known about the beach cottage where I’d been living for a couple of months, they would have tried to kill me there. They knew about the Big Dog Bulldog Bagger,
but apparently didn’t know that it had been garaged at the cottage.

With my left hand, through my T-shirt, I felt the tiny silver bell at the end of the chain. I pulled it out from under the T-shirt and held it between thumb and forefinger. My racing heart slowed, and my fear diminished.

If my enemy with a million eyes remained blind to the cottage, if they were unable to locate it, their failure had something to do with Annamaria. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed as though I was not only safe from them but also
invisible
to them while in Annamaria’s company. Almost from the day I met her, I had known that she was more than she appeared to be, that the eccentric things she often said would in fact prove to be the plainest truth if only I knew who and what she was and could consider her words in the context of her identity. I remembered what Mrs. Fischer said:
For all you may think differently, I’m only human. Annamaria’s human, too, though she’s more than that, as you no doubt suspect
. Human but more than human—and with curious powers that, if fully known, would probably make my paranormal abilities seem pathetic by comparison.

Below, the searchers were still crunching through the gravel, but not with as much enthusiasm. Not as many of them, either. From over near the largest building, the one I’d first come upon, I heard voices, but I couldn’t make out the words.

I turned the miniature bell back and forth between thumb and forefinger, pleased by the smoothness of it. It remained pleasantly cool. Neither the warm night nor my body heat nor the friction of my fingers rubbing the smooth, smooth silver could steal the coolness from it.

Okay, the Big Dog motorcycle. I had known since March, since Nevada, that sooner or later I would be returning to Pico Mundo, that the cultists had plans for my hometown. I knew, as well, I must make the trip alone. This threat was mine to thwart or fail to thwart. My fate, whether or not the promise of the fortune-teller’s card would be kept, depended on my success or failure. Mrs. Fischer insisted on buying a car for me, but I worried that Tim and Annamaria would be determined to make the trip with me if I had a car. I would not put them so directly at risk. Furthermore, Blossom Rosedale had sold her house in Magic Beach and had been intending to join us as soon as her affairs there were concluded; I couldn’t put her in jeopardy, either. Finally, and most important, I didn’t want to rely on whatever protection Annamaria’s immediate presence might afford me. This battle was mine to win or lose, by my best efforts, by my choices, by the right or wrong exercise of my free will. And so Mrs. Fischer had bought for me instead the Big Dog bike.