“Don’t have a name. Don’t have a face. Don’t have anything to focus on, sir. What about the other two who were executed in that motor home, Jonathan and Selene? Do you know anything about them?”
“Real names were Jeremy and Sibyl von Witzleben. Husband and wife. Both of them doctors of some kind.”
The hundred different tunes issuing from attractions up and down the long midway had usually before seemed more festive than not, even if the many braided melodies were to the ear what a line of prose would be to the eye of a dyslexic reader. But now the music began to slide slowly into a sour disharmony.
“Those two,” the chief continued, “had more stamps in their passports than a coyote has fleas. Spent most of last year down in Venezuela, which is a sewer these days. Food shortages, toilet-paper rationing, runaway inflation, death squads. Who in his right mind would want to spend a year there?”
“Doctors of what?”
“We’re researching that. I’m waiting for a call.”
We were standing near the front of the tent, and as we looked out at the midway, the razzle-dazzle of carnival lights seemed to be brighter and more frantic than before. The blinkers blinked faster. The pulsers pulsed faster. Waves of color chased one another faster, faster through the various fiber-optic designs.
Indicating the people on the concourse, the chief sounded as if frustration was about to make him scream. “Point me to one of these hateful bastards, Oddie. You see things I can’t. You always have. See something for me. I really need you to see something for me, son.”
My mind was still awash with the flood dream that evidently wasn’t about a flood, the coyotes that had been something more than coyotes, the sandpiper that had flown from Tim’s hand and vanished from our perspective only to come into view to people farther up the beach, the safe house that had appeared to be so Victorian but had been woven through with hidden high-tech defenses, the angelic face of the cult girl in Lauren’s house and the vicious face of the same girl gone poltergeist.…
As the chief’s cell phone rang and he answered it, I tried to sweep clean the junk shop that was my mind, and began to study the people on the concourse, mere feet away. He was right. I had always seen things he couldn’t, things that no one else could see. Why not here, why not now, when it mattered so very much and so urgently?
He had several short questions for his caller and was terminating the call just as I saw two men ambling by as if they had never known a care in their entire lives, eating ice-cream bars dipped in chocolate and served on sticks, chatting and laughing and enjoying the flash and bustle of the carnival. They were in their twenties. Looked like surfer dudes from out of town. Blond and tanned and fit. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts. One of them had a red-and-black tattoo that began at his wrist and wound up his right arm, where it disappeared under the sleeve of his T-shirt. It was not an ordinary tattoo of a dragon or a snake or a mermaid, but a series of hieroglyphics, a statement of some kind, maybe a scrap of satanic prayer or a defiant pledge spelled in the singular symbols of the same pictographic language that I had seen on the coven’s estate in Nevada, that had been painted on the tailgate of the Cadillac Escalade that tried to run me down during my motorcycle trip to Pico Mundo.
“Sir,” I said, and by my tone alerted him. “See the surfer guys eating ice cream? The one with the tattoo, he’s one of them. Which means the guy with him must be one of them, too.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Looking away from the cultists lest they notice his interest and take flight, Chief Porter unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt. It was the size of a cell phone. He pressed SEND and held it down while he talked. To the fifteen plainclothes officers walking the midway, he said, “Contact. Outside the Face It tent.” He described the two men. “Converge if you’re nearby.”
One designated respondent said, “Ten-four,” to confirm that the message had been received.
“If they go in an attraction, off the concourse, maybe we can take them quietly. Squeeze them hard for information.”
“Ten-four.”
“That phone call,” the chief said to me, “was a prelim report on Jeremy and Sibyl von Witzleben.”
The ice-cream eaters had stopped to watch people playing a dart game involving a spinning wheel, an array of balloons, and a barker who distracted the players with amusing patter.
“The von Witzlebens were both microbiologists. She was also an epidemiologist, a specialist in epidemic diseases. He had an advanced degree in virology.”
“What were they up to in Venezuela?” I wondered.
Having lost interest in the dart game, the ice-cream eaters meandered east along the concourse.
The chief said, “They were doing something that could be done only where the government, courts, and cops are all hugely corrupt.”
The ice-cream eaters began to melt into the crowd.
“Damn, where are my guys? Gotta keep those two in sight till I can turn them over to plainclothes.”
“I’ll do it, sir.”
“You don’t have one of these,” he said, indicating the walkie-talkie, “and you can’t have mine.”
As he hurried from the tent to trail the ice-cream eaters at a distance, all the thoughts and memories ricocheting through my head at last coalesced:
Standing at the sink in the half-bathroom at Lauren Ainsworth’s house, watching the rushing water pour over the wound in my hand, the water too hot, exacerbating the pain, but I don’t cool it down, because I’m gripped by a sense of a pending revelation related to the water and the blood and the pain, aware that there is something I know but do not know I know, something about blood and terrible pain and water. The plump cashier with the auburn hair saying, “You’re the one tonight, honey, you’re the one tonight.” Gypsy Mummy and the four blank cards, four blank cards suggesting no future, no future at all, four when one would have conveyed the message. Perhaps the one thing I knew about the true and hidden nature of the world was that there were no coincidences. The Cadillac Escalade burning at the bottom of the desert arroyo. On the phone with Chief Porter, while he’s telling me about Wolfgang and Jonathan and Selene, now known to be Woodrow and Jeremy and Sibyl, and he says, “One or all three look to’ve been junkies … hypodermic needles … ampules of drugs.” Being chased through the pitch-black department store, relying on my special guide dog, my psychic magnetism. Eye-to-eye with Muggs. Microbiologists, epidemiology, virology. Four blank cards, four predictions of death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. But no bodachs. Why no bodachs if mass murder is about to happen? The dying girl in the closet, saying, “You a dog. Oh, yeah, you a dog.” Blood and terrible pain and water. Blind in the death-black department store, led by my faithful guide dog, good old psychic magnetism, led to the man-made cave of suburban bats. A minimum of thirty percent of any colony of bats is infected with rabies. The auburn-haired woman in ticket booth number four, reading Ozzie Boone’s The Last Good Bite, a novel in which death by bats was the red herring. There are no coincidences. The dying girl saying, “Hey, dog, you got papers?” Papers meaning proof of vaccination. Hypodermic needles, ampules of some drug. No, ampules of a vaccine. Blood and terrible pain and water. Hydrophobia. Another name for rabies. Hydrophobia. More facts courtesy of Ozzie Boone: The victim of rabies suffers intense thirst, but any attempt to drink induces violent, agonizing spasms of the throat, hence the word hydrophobia, fear of water. Eye and facial muscles become paralyzed. Infected dogs foam at the mouth, are wild with rage and quick to bite. Venezuela, a dictatorship, virtually a terrorist state. The first two of the Four Horsemen, Pestilence and War. Pestilence as a weapon in the silent war that is part of the true and hidden nature of the world. Weaponized rabies. The cultists vaccinated, the rest of us not. No bodachs because tonight involves only a quiet infection of thousands, no one aware, and the dying doesn’t start for days, the dying and the violence, people raging like rabid dogs, which is when the bodachs would show up in legions. The sandpiper winging through the air, vanishing to one observer but visible to others. To infect the thousands on the midway, the weaponized rabies would have to be airborne, invisible to those who breathed it in, its presence known only to the vaccinated cultists.