Odd Thomas Part 33

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Thomas, you have a rare opportunity for perfect bliss, and you would be ill advised to poison your life with either academia or drug dealing. I have a cla.s.s this morning, followed by two student conferences. Then I'm having lunch and seeing a movie with my family, so I'm afraid tomorrow is the absolute earliest we can discuss this self-destructive impulse of yours."

"Where are you having lunch, sir? At the Grille?"

"We're allowing the children to choose. It's their day."

"What movie are you seeing?"

"That thing about the dog and the alien."

"Don't," I said, though I hadn't seen the film. "It stinks."

"It's a big hit."

"It sucks."

"The critics like it," he said.

"Randall Jarrell said that art is long and critics are but the insects of a day."

"Give my office a call, Mr. Thomas. We'll talk tomorrow."

He put up his window, backed out of the driveway, and drove off toward the university and, later in the day, an appointment with Death.

CHAPTER 47.

NICOLINA PEABODY, AGE FIVE, WORE PINK sneakers, pink shorts, and a pink T-shirt. Her wrist.w.a.tch featured a pink plastic band and a pink pig's face on the dial.

"When I'm old enough to buy my own clothes," she told me, "I'll wear nothing but pink, pink, pink, every day, all year, forever."

Levanna Peabody, who would soon be seven, rolled her eyes and said, "Everybody'll think you're a wh.o.r.e."

Entering the living room with a birthday cake on a plate under a clear-gla.s.s lid, Viola said, "Levanna! That's an awful thing to say. That's just half a step from trash talk and two weeks with no allowance."

"What's a wh.o.r.e?" Nicolina asked.

"Someone who wears pink and kisses men for money," Levanna said in a tone of worldly sophistication.

When I took the cake from Viola, she said, "I'll just grab their box of activity books, and we'll be ready to go."

I had taken a quick tour of the house. No bodachs lurked in any corner.

Nicolina said, "If I kiss men for free, then I can wear pink and not be a wh.o.r.e."

"If you kiss lots of men for free, you're a s.l.u.t," Levanna said.

"Levanna, enough!" Viola reprimanded.

"But Mom," Levanna said, "she's got to learn how the world works sooner or later."

Noticing my amus.e.m.e.nt and interpreting it with uncanny skill, Nicolina confronted her older sister: "You don't even know what a wh.o.r.e is, you only think you do."

"I know, all right," Levanna insisted smugly.

The girls preceded me down the front walk to Mrs. Sanchez's car, which was parked at the curb.

After locking the house, Viola followed us. She put the box of activity books in the backseat with the girls, and then she sat up front. I handed the cake to her and closed her door.

The morning was pure Mojave, blazing and breathless. The sky, an inverted blue ceramic cauldron, poured out a hot dry brew.

With the sun still in the east, all shadows slanted westward, as if yearning for that horizon over which the night had preceded them. And along the windless street, only my shadow moved.

If supernatural ent.i.ties were present, they were not evident.

As I got in the car and started the engine, Nicolina said, "I'm never going to kiss any men, anyway. Just Mommy, Levanna, and Aunt Sharlene."

"You'll want to kiss men when you're older," Levanna predicted.

"I won't."

"You will."

"I won't," Nicolina firmly declared. "Just you, Mommy, Aunt Sharlene. Oh, and Cheevers."

"Cheevers is a boy," Levanna said as I pulled away from the curb and set out for Sharlene's house.

Nicolina giggled. "Cheevers is a bear bear."

"He's a boy bear."

"He's stuffed stuffed."

"But he's still a boy," Levanna contended. "See, it's started already - you want to kiss men."

"I'm not a s.l.u.t," Nicolina insisted. "I'm going to be a dog doctor."

"They're called veterinarians, and they don't wear pink, pink, pink, every day, all year, forever."

"I'll be the first."

"Well," Levanna said, "if I had a sick dog and you were a pink veterinarian, I guess I'd still bring him to you 'cause I know you'd make him well."

Following a circuitous route, checking the rearview mirror, I drove six blocks to wind up two blocks away on Maricopa Lane.

Using my cell phone en route, Viola called her sister to say that she was bringing the girls for a visit.

The tidy white clapboard house on Maricopa has periwinkle-blue shutters and blue porch posts. On the porch, a social center for the neighborhood, are four rocking chairs and a bench swing.

Sharlene rocked up from one of the chairs when we parked in her driveway. She is a large woman with a rapturous smile and a musical voice perfect for a gospel singer, which she is.

A golden retriever, Posey, rose from the porch floor to stand at her side, lashing a gorgeous plumed tail, excited by the sight of the girls, held in place not by a leash but by her master's softly spoken command.

I carried the cake into the kitchen, where I politely declined Sharlene's offer of ice-cold lemonade, an apple dumpling, three varieties of cookies, and homemade peanut brittle.

Lying on the floor with four legs in the air, forepaws bent in submission, Posey solicited a belly rub, which the girls were quick to provide.

I dropped to one knee and interrupted long enough to say happy birthday to Levanna. I gave each of the girls a hug.

They seemed terribly small and fragile. So little force would be required to shatter them, to rip them out of this world. Their vulnerability frightened me.

Viola accompanied me through the house to the front porch, where she said, "You were gonna bring me a picture of the man I'm supposed to be on the lookout for."

"You don't need it now. He's out of the picture."

Her huge eyes were full of trust that I didn't deserve. "Odd, tell me honest-to-Jesus, do you still see death in me?"

I didn't know what might be coming, but though the desert day made a bright impression on my eyes, it seemed storm-dark to my sixth sense, with great thunder pending. Changing their plans, canceling the movie and dinner at the Grille - that would surely be enough to change their fate. Surely. "You're okay now. And the girls, too."

Her eyes searched mine, and I dared not look away. "What about you, Odd? Whatever's coming is there a path for you to walk through it to someplace safe?"

I forced a smile. "I know about all that's Otherly and Beyond - remember?"

She locked eyes with me a moment longer, then put her arms around me. We held each other tight.

I didn't ask Viola if she she saw death in saw death in me. me. She had never claimed to have a foretelling gift but I was afraid nevertheless that she would say She had never claimed to have a foretelling gift but I was afraid nevertheless that she would say yes. yes.

CHAPTER 48.

LONG AFTER "ALL NIGHT WITH SHAMUS COCOBOLO" had gone off the air and the strains of Glenn Miller had traveled out of the stratosphere toward distant stars, with no Elvis CDs to comfort me, I cruised the streets of Pico Mundo in the silence of the sun, wondering where all the bodachs had gone.

At a service station, I stopped to fuel the Chevy and to use the men's room. In the streaked mirror above the sink, my face suggested that I was a hunted man, haggard and hollow-eyed.

From the adjacent minimart, I bought a screw-top sixteen-ounce Pepsi and a small bottle of caffeine tablets.

With the chemical a.s.sistance of No-Doz, cola, and the sugar in the plate of cookies that Mrs. Sanchez had given me, I could remain awake. Whether I could think clearly enough on such a regimen would not be entirely evident until the bullets started flying.

Lacking a name or face to put to Robertson's collaborator, my psychic magnetism would not lead me to my quarry. Cruising randomly, I would arrive nowhere of consequence.

With clear intention, I drove to Camp's End.

The chief had ordered surveillance on Robertson's house the previous evening, but that stakeout had apparently been withdrawn. With the chief shot and the entire police department in shock, someone had decided to shift resources elsewhere.

Suddenly I realized that the chief might not have been targeted solely to frame me for a second murder. Robertson's kill buddy might have wanted to eliminate Wyatt Porter in order to ensure that the Pico Mundo PD would be shaken, disoriented, and slow to respond to whatever crisis was coming.

Instead of parking across the street and down the block from the pale yellow casita with the faded blue door, I left the Chevy at the curb in front of the place. I walked boldly to the carport.

My driver's license still served its fundamental purpose. The door latch popped, and I entered the kitchen.

For a minute, I stood inside the threshold, listening. The hum of the refrigerator motor. Faint ticks and creaks marked the steady expansion of the old house's joints in the ascending heat of the new morning.

Instinct told me that I was alone.

I went directly to the neatly kept study. Currently, it didn't serve as a train station for incoming bodachs.

From the wall above the file cabinets, McVeigh, Manson, and Atta watched me as if with conscious awareness.

At the desk, I sifted through the contents of the drawers once more, seeking names. On my previous visit, I had considered the small address book to be of little value, but this time I paged through it with interest.

The book contained fewer than forty names and addresses. None resonated with me.

I didn't peruse the bank statements again, but I stared at them, thinking about the $58,000 in cash that he'd withdrawn over the past two months. More than four thousand had been in his pants pockets when I found his body.

If you were a rich sociopath interested in funding well-planned acts of ma.s.s murder, how big a circus of blood could you purchase for approximately $54,000?

Even sleep-deprived, with a caffeine headache and a sugar buzz, I could answer that one without much consideration: big. You could buy a three-ring circus of death - bullets, explosives, poison gas, just about anything short of a nuclear bomb.

Elsewhere in the house, a door closed. Not with a bang. Quietly, with a soft thump and click.

Moving stealthily but quickly, I went to the open door of the study. I stepped into the hall.

No intruder in sight. Except me.

The bathroom and bedroom doors stood open, as they had been.

In the bedroom, the closet door was a slider. That couldn't have made the sound I heard.

Aware that death is frequently the reward for the reckless and the timid alike, I moved with cautious haste into the living room. Deserted.