Sometimes I wondered if I had everything backward, my life and purpose and meaning all backward. Maybe the best thing I had to offer was fry cookery of a high order, and maybe my paranormal abilities were nothing more than the equivalent of a talent for farting on command, better repressed than indulged. I, no less than anyone, was capable of self-delusion, of pride that led me to embrace a grander image of myself than was the truth.
If the people of Pico Mundo were destined to become both victims and perpetrators of violence, if I’d mistaken their expressions of rage-hatred-agony-anguish for terror, then perhaps I was wrong to think that the image of a flood should be taken literally, no matter how real it had seemed. Maybe the dam wouldn’t be blown. Maybe there would be no tsunami from any source. But then what did the water mean?
“We’re here,” Lauren Ainsworth declared, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, across from the main entrance to the Maravilla County Fairgrounds.
My watch read 10:39, and I said, “You made incredible time, ma’am. I owe you one.”
I holstered the Glock.
When I looked up, I saw that Lauren, who had been a rock until now, had stopped repressing her emotions. Tears streamed down her face. She leaned over the console, put an arm around my shoulders, and pulled me toward her until her forehead and mine met. “You don’t owe me one, Oddie. I owe you everything. You saved our lives.”
Because I still didn’t know what horror was coming, she and the girls might yet be dead before the night was done. “Get the girls to your sister’s house in the heights, ma’am. Maybe it’ll be safer in the heights.”
She kissed my cheek and let me go, but then the twins wanted to kiss me on the cheek, too. Also in tears, Veronica leaned forward from the back and then Victoria, weeping as well, but that wasn’t the end of the good-byes.
Muggs scrambled off the backseat. Standing with his hind feet on the floor, he pawed forward between the front seats and came face-to-face with me. I would have been fine with a dog kiss, as long as it was on the cheek; but Muggs had something else in mind. His eyes met mine, and he grew very still, his gaze penetrating, his demeanor solemn. As when I had met Lou Donatella, the dwarf in a bear suit, I thought, This is A Moment, stay with it. Also as when I’d met that little person, I had no idea what I meant by A Moment.
Muggs and I remained eye-to-eye just long enough for the girls and their mother to recognize the strangeness of this final good-bye, if that’s what it was. Then the dog shook his head, flapping his floppy ears, and terminated our moment with a sneeze.
“Got to go,” I said, and threw open the passenger door.
Forty-nine
At this late hour, three of the ticket booths at the fairground were closed, leaving only the fourth and fifth. As previously, I went to ticket booth number four. The plump woman with long ringlets of auburn hair remained on duty. She was reading a paperback book, and when she put it aside to take my money, I saw that it was The Last Good Bite by P. Oswald Boone, my friend and mentor, which wasn’t surprising, considering that he had sold more than a hundred million copies of his mysteries and that his fans were legion. Handing me an admission ticket, the cashier said, “Smart of you to come back. You should never have left before the big drawing. Got to be here to win. You’re the one tonight, honey. You’re the one tonight.”
The midway was more crowded than I had ever seen it, the recent explosions having been too distant for the sound to penetrate the ceaseless whiz-bang and ballyhoo of the carnival. People waited in line at every ride, stood two-deep at the game booths, swarmed the concourse. I dodged and juked and slipped through the throng, using so many excuse-mes that I was glad they didn’t cost anything.
The first people I saw when I arrived at the Face It tent were three lovely black girls in their late teens and early twenties, so similar that they must be sisters, two of them standing, one of them in the chair where Connie’s mother worked on her face with a brush and sponge. The seated girl was being painted to match her sisters, and they were the bird women from my dream of the amaranth. In the dream, I had been lying on my back, clutching an urn full of ashes, and these three pretty girls with white-and-gold feathered faces had been standing close, looking down at me, as had been Blossom Rosedale and Terri Stambaugh, who was an Elvis fan of the first rank as well as my friend and boss from the Pico Mundo Grille.
Chief Porter stood on the farther side of the tent, talking to Connie. The artist saw me first and said, “You washed off your face.”
“Yes, ma’am. I liked it so much I would have worn it for days, except when I left the fairground for a while, it kind of freaked out people.”
“Want me to paint you again?”
“Thank you, no. I need to talk to the chief here.”
She looked at my left hand. “Are you all right?”
I realized the wound had opened. Blood slowly soaked through the thickness of gauze I had taped over it.
“Nothing serious,” I assured her. “Just an accident with a stapler.”
“I wish my brother was here,” Connie said. “You need an Ethan on your side.”
Evidently, she didn’t buy the stapler story. To give the chief and me privacy, she went to her mother’s station to watch as the third bird woman’s face was completed to perfection.
I expect that Wyatt Porter could maintain his cool through a volcanic eruption, although on this occasion he appeared undeniably harried. With his bloodhound jowls and his bagged, heavy-lidded eyes, he made people think of their favorite uncle. If you were perceptive, however, you saw a little bit of a Robert Mitchum look to him, and you knew that the avuncular face disguised a whip-smart no-nonsense hard-assed officer of the law. Now he had more of a Mitchum look than ever, as if anyone gave him the slightest reason to bust their chops, he would keep on punching even after he’d broken all his knuckles.
He said, “I told you ten or twelve thousand on the fairground, but now we have the gate count, and it’s over fifteen thousand. Six of my guys plus nine state police are walking the midway, looking for something suspicious, all in plainclothes so they won’t spook these crazy bastards into pushing the button early. Fifteen guys in a crowd of fifteen thousand, with no idea what ‘suspicious’ looks like in this case.”
“Earlier, on the phone, sir, you said Wolfgang bought a couple of concessions. Maybe that’s where it’ll all go down.”
Chief Porter shook his head. “That would be too easy. According to Lionel Sombra, Wolfgang — his real name was Woodrow Creel — hired longtime carnies to work his places, people that have been with Sombra Brothers in one role or another for fifteen, twenty years and more. Anyway, using the murder investigation as an excuse, about two hours ago, we closed both concessions for the night, sent the workers away. Left my guys, Taylor Pipes and Nick Korker, guarding both locations. It didn’t seem to alarm these cultists, didn’t cause them to pull the trigger.” He indicated my bandaged hand, which I held down at my side, letting it drip. “That doesn’t look good, son.”
“Looks bad, but it doesn’t hurt,” I lied.
As Chief Porter watched fairgoers streaming past the open front of the Face It tent, a sea of humanity in its infinite variety, he said, “Doesn’t seem right that these lunatics should look like anyone else. Can’t you do your magnetism thing and draw a couple of them to you?”