Yes, I could see what others could not, but seeing wasn’t the same as understanding. I had been given perceptions that Sherlock Holmes would have envied; but I didn’t have Sherlockian wit to make the most of what I saw. With fewer clues than I possessed, Holmes routinely puzzled his way to the mystery’s solution, with little or no violence. In spite of my hatred of violence, I more often than not had to bludgeon and shoot my way to a resolution.
When last Pico Mundo was threatened, I had put the pieces together a few minutes too late, saving some potential victims, but not nineteen. And not her.
I looked at my wristwatch. Nine o’clock. Not only minutes were slipping through my fingers, but also the lives of those I might fail to save.
When I returned from the dam, Sonny Wexler said, “Anything?”
“You must’ve thought of a boat, sir. An electric boat?”
Billy Mundy shook his head. “It couldn’t get close enough. A hundred yards out from the dam, there’s a loose-woven net of steel cables shore to shore. Starts about two feet above the high-water line and goes almost all the way to the bottom.”
“One-inch-diameter cable,” Sonny added. “You’d need acetylene torches and a few hours to get through it — and either night or day, you’d draw a lot of attention to yourself.”
“The net’s to keep recreational boats and jet skis from getting too near the dam,” Billy explained. “If a swimmer was in the water when tainter gates were opened, he might be pulled in and over the spillway. Or dragged under by a current and drowned.”
“Can the net be raised and lowered mechanically?” I asked.
“Sure. From the outlet-control building. But no one’s getting in there as long as we’re guarding the place.”
Sonny Wexler said, “And the chief’s sending backup. Two more guys will be here soon.”
I knew why Chief Porter made that decision, and I was reminded of Jim’s and Bob’s driver’s licenses. I fished the plastic rectangles from a jacket pocket and handed them to Sonny.
“I told the chief I’d give you these. They’re conspirators in all this. Very bad guys.”
As he and his partner examined the licenses, Billy Mundy said, “Memorable faces. We’ll know ’em if we see ’em.”
“You won’t be seeing them,” I said. “Those are just for you to give to the chief.”
Sonny frowned. “We won’t be seeing them? How’d you get their licenses, anyway?”
I said only, “The chief knows all about it, sir.”
Their stares were of the kind that make the most law-abiding citizens feel as if there’s a crime to which they should confess.
I didn’t look away from them, met the eyes of one and then the eyes of the other. They didn’t look away from me, either.
Peripherally, I was aware of heat lightning to the south, as if an alien spaceship or a colossal creature of light passed through the shrouding clouds along the horizon, but the storm wasn’t here, wasn’t now.
At last Sonny tucked the licenses in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “I thought you came home just to come home, but I guess there’s more to it than that.”
“Well, sir, I’m sure glad to be home, it’s where I belong, but there’s always more to everything than there seems to be.”
“That’s as true as it gets,” said Billy Mundy.
Sonny put one of his enormous hands on my shoulder. “You be careful out there, Odd.”
“Yes, sir. I want to be.”
I drove the Explorer all the way along the service road to the state highway before the connection occurred to me. It wasn’t one I wanted to make, but I knew immediately that it was right.
For the time during which they had stalked me, the coyotes at the dam had been more than they appeared to be. Some dark spirit had taken possession of them.
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!”
Twenty-nine
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.