Koontz, Dean- (2003) - Odd Thomas

by Odd Thomas(Lit)

  aware of precious minutes passing, fully in the PMS zone, I expected to find Officer Simon Varner in the vicinity of either the bowling alley or the multiplex theater where the dog movie would unreel shortly after one o'clock. Instead, I was led unexpectedly to the Green Moon Mall.

  What I saw was unusual for a Wednesday in summer: a packed parking lot. The giant banner reminded me that the mall merchants' annual summer sale had begun at ten o'clock this morning and would continue through the weekend.

  What a crowd.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  A GALAXY OF SUNS BLAZED ON THE WINDSHIELDS OF the serried cars and SUVs, a lightquake that shocked my bloodshot eyes and forced me to squint.

  Three-story department stores anchored the north and south ends of the mall. Numerous specialty shops occupied the two levels be­tween those leviathans.

  PMS drew me to the department store at the north end. I drove around to the back and parked near a wide descending ramp that led to the subterranean loading docks where trucks delivered merchan­dise.

  Three spaces away stood a black-and-white police cruiser. No cop in sight.

  If this was Varner's car, he was already in the mall.

  My hands shook. The buttons on my cell phone were small. To get it right, I had to key in the number of Burke & Bailey's twice.

  I intended to tell Stormy to leave work immediately, to get out of the mall by the nearest door, to go quickly to her car and drive away fast, drive anywhere, just drive.

  As the number was ringing, I hung up. She might not at this mo­ment be destined to cross Varner's path, but if I persuaded her to get the hell out of there, she might cross his sights at the instant that he pulled his gun and opened fire.

  Her destiny is to be with me forever. We have the card from the fortune-telling machine as proof. It hangs above her bed. Gypsy Mummy had given us, for a single quarter, what that other couple couldn't buy at any price.

  Logic argued that if I did nothing, she would be safe. If she changed her plans at my urging, I might be thwarting her destiny and mine. Trust in fate.

  My responsibility was not to warn off Stormy but to stop Simon Varner before he was ready to put his plan in action, before he killed anyone.

  There you have your classic easier-said than-done. He was a cop, and I wasn't. He carried at least one firearm, and I didn't. Taller than me, stronger than me, trained in every possible method to subdue an aggressive citizen, he enjoyed all the advantages - except a sixth sense.

  The gun that had killed Robertson was stashed under the driver's seat. I had put it there the previous night, meaning to dispose of it later.

  Leaning forward, I fumbled under my seat, found the weapon, and withdrew it. I felt as if I were holding hands with Death.

  After more fumbling, I figured out how to eject the magazine. I counted nine rounds. Bright brass. Loaded nearly to capacity. The only round missing was the one that had put a hole in Robertson's heart.

  I shoved the magazine back into the pistol. It clicked in place.

  My mother's gun has a safety. A red dot is revealed when the safety is switched off.

  This piece appeared to have no comparable feature. Perhaps the safety was built into the trigger, requiring a double pull.

  No safety on my heart. It was booming.

  I felt as though I were holding hands with death, all right - my death.

  With the pistol in my lap, I picked up the phone and punched in Chief Porter's private cell number, not his police-department line. The keys seemed to be growing smaller, as if this were a phone Alice had gotten from a hookah-smoking caterpillar, but I entered the seven digits correctly on the first try, and pressed SEND.

  Karla Porter answered on the third ring. She said that she was still in the ICU waiting room. She'd been allowed to see the chief on three occasions, for five-minute visits.

  "He was awake the last time, but very weak. He knew who I was. He smiled for me. But he's not able to talk much, and not coherently. They're keeping him semisedated to facilitate healing. I don't think he'll be really talking much before tomorrow."

  "But he's going to be all right?" I asked.

  "That's what they say. And I'm beginning to believe it."

  "I love him," I said, and heard my voice break.

  "He knows that, Oddie. He loves you, too. You're a son to him."

  "Tell him."

  "I will."

  "I'll call," I promised.

  I pressed END and dropped the phone on the passenger's seat.

  The chief could not help me. No one could help me. No sad, dead prostitute to quell the killing frenzy of this coyote. Just me.

  Intuition told me not to take the pistol. I slid it under the seat again.

  When I switched off the engine and got out of the car, the fiery sun was both a hammer and an anvil, forging the world between itself and its reflection.

  Psychic magnetism works whether I'm rolling on wheels or afoot. I was drawn to the delivery ramp. I went down into the coolness of the subterranean loading docks.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  WITH A LOW CEILING AND ENDLESS GRAY CONCRETE, the mall-employee underground parking garage and loading dock had the bleak and ominous atmosphere of an ancient tomb deep under Egyptian sands, the tomb of a hated pharaoh whose subjects had buried him on the cheap, without glittering gold vessels or ornamen­tation of any kind.

  The elevated dock ran the length of the immense structure, and big trucks were backed up to it at various points. At the department store, two semis at a time could bypass the dock and pull directly into an enormous receiving room,

  This place clattered and hummed with activity as the truck crews off-loaded late-arriving sales merchandise and the harried stockroom employees prepped it for delivery to the sales floors after the close of business.

  I passed among racks, carts, carousels, bins, boxes, and drums of merchandise, everything from women's party dresses to culinary gadgets to sporting goods. Perfume, swimwear, gourmet chocolates.

  Nobody challenged my right to be there, and when I plucked a

  hardwood baseball bat out of a drum full of them, no one ordered me to put it back.

  Another drum contained hollow aluminum bats. They weren't what I wanted. I preferred a bat with heft. I required a certain balance to the instrument. You can better break an arm with a wooden club, more easily shatter a knee.

  Maybe I would need the baseball bat, maybe I wouldn't. The fact that it was there - and that PMS brought me to it - seemed to suggest that if I didn't avail myself of it, then I would later regret my decision.

  The only extracurricular activity I went out for in high school was baseball. As I wrote earlier, I had the best stats on the team, even though I could only play home games.

  I'm not out of practice, either. The Pico Mundo Grille has a team. We play other businesses and civic organizations; we whup ass, year after year.

  Repeatedly, loaded forklifts and electric carts announced their ap­proach with soft beeps and musical toots. I stepped out of their way but kept moving, though I had no idea where I was going.

  In my mind's eye: Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm. Find the bastard.

  A pair of extra-wide double doors swung into a corridor with a bare concrete floor and painted concrete walls. I hesitated, looked right, turned left.

  My stomach churned. I needed antacids.

  I needed a bigger bat, a bulletproof vest, and backup, too, but I didn't have them, either. I just kept moving.

  Doors led to rooms off the right side of the corridor. Most were la­beled. BATHROOMS. SHIPPING OFFICE. MAINTENANCE OFFICE.

  Seeking Simon Varner. Sweet face. Prince of Darkness. Feel the pull of him, drawing me forward.

  I passed two men, a woman, another man, We smiled and nodded.

  None of them seemed to wonder where the game was, what the score might be, whose team I was on.

  Soon I came to a door marked SECURITY. I stopped. This didn't feel righ
t... and yet it did.

  When PMS works, I usually know that I've arrived. This time I felt that I'd arrived. I can't explain the difference, but it was real.

  I put my hand on the knob but hesitated.

  In my mind, I heard Lysette Rains as she'd spoken to me at the chief's recent barbecue: / was just a nail technician, and now I'm a certi­fied nail artist.

  For the life of me - and it really might be for the life of me, consid­ering that I was about to plunge into a fire of one kind or another - I didn't know why I should recall Lysette at this juncture.

  Her voice haunted me again: It takes a while to realize what a lonely world it is, and when you do... then the future looks kinda scary.

  I took my hand off the knob.

  I stepped to one side of the door.

  Iron-shod hooves on hard-baked ground could have made no louder thunder than the internal booming of my galloping heart.

  My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said Batter up, I didn't ar­gue that I wasn't ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.

  The door opened, and a guy stepped boldly into the corridor. He was dressed in black boots, a lightweight black jumpsuit with hood, a black ski mask, and black gloves.

  He carried an assault rifle so big and wicked that it looked as unreal as the weaponry in an early Schwarzenegger movie. From a utility belt hung eight or ten spare magazines.

  He looked to his left when he came out of the security room. I stood to his right, but he sensed me at once and in midstep turned his head toward me.

  Never one who liked to bunt, I swung hard, high above the strike zone, and hit him in the face.

  I would have been surprised if he hadn't gone down cold. I was not surprised.

  The corridor was deserted. No one had seen. For the moment.

  I needed to handle this as anonymously as possible, to avoid ques­tions later if the chief remained unable to run interference for me.

  After rolling the baseball bat into the security room and sliding the assault rifle after it, I grabbed the gunman by the jumpsuit and dragged him in there, too, out of the hallway, and shut the door.

  Among overturned office chairs and spilled mugs of coffee, three unarmed security guards lay dead in this bunker. Apparently they had been killed with a silencer-fitted pistol, because the shots had not at­tracted attention. They looked surprised.

  The sight of them tortured me. They were dead because I had been too slow on the uptake.

  I know that I'm not responsible for every death I can't prevent. I un­derstand that I can't carry the world on my back, like Atlas. But I feel that I should.

  Twelve oversize TV monitors, each currently in quartered-screen format, featured forty-eight views provided by cameras positioned throughout the department store. Everywhere I looked, the aisles were busy; the sale had pulled in shoppers from all over Maravilla County.

  I knelt beside the gunman and stripped off his ski mask. His nose was broken, bleeding; breath bubbled in the blood. His right eye would probably swell entirely shut. A welt had already begun to form on his forehead.

  He wasn't Simon Varner. Before me lay Bern Eckles, the deputy who had been at the barbecue, who had been invited because the chief and Karla Porter had been trying to match him up with Lysette Rains.

  FIFTY-NINE

  BOB ROBERTSON HAD NOT ONE COLLABORATOR BUT two. Maybe more. They probably called themselves a coven, unless that was only for witches. One more, and they could have a satanic combo, provide their own music for Black Mass, buy group health in­surance, get a block discount at Disneyland.

  At the chief's barbecue, I'd seen no bodachs around Bern Eckles. Their presence had tipped me to Roberston's nature but not to either of his co-conspirators - which now began to seem intentional. As if they had become aware of my gift. As if they had... manipulated me.

  After turning Eckles on his side to ensure that he wouldn't choke on his own blood and saliva, I searched for something to tie his hands and feet.

  I didn't expect him to regain consciousness within the next ten min­utes. When he finally did come around, he would be crawling and puking and begging for painkillers, in no condition to snatch up the assault rifle and return to his mission.

  Nevertheless, I disabled two security-room phones and quickly used their cords to bind his hands behind his back and to shackle his

  ankles. I yanked the knots tight and didn't worry unduly about in­hibiting his circulation.

  Eckles and Varner were the newest officers on the Pico Mundo Police Department. They had applied and signed up only a month or two apart.

  Smart money would take the proposition that they had known each other before they arrived in Pico Mundo. Varner had been hired first and had paved the way for Eckles.

  Robertson had moved to Pico Mundo from San Diego and pur­chased the house in Camp's End ahead of his two collaborators. If my memory could be trusted, Varner had previously been a police officer in the San Diego area if not in the city itself.

  I didn't know in what jurisdiction Bern Eckles served before he had signed up with the PMPD. Greater San Diego would be a better bet than Juneau, Alaska.

  The three of them had targeted Pico Mundo for reasons impossible to guess. They had planned long and carefully.

  When I had gone to the barbecue, suggesting that a background profile on Bob Robertson might be a good idea, the chief had enlisted Eckles's assistance. At that instant, Robertson had been marked for death.

  Indeed, he must have been murdered within half an hour. No doubt Eckles had telephoned Varner from the chief's house, and Varner had pulled the trigger on their mutual friend. Perhaps Simon Varner and Robertson had been together when Varner got Eckles's call.

  With Eckles securely tied, I unzipped the front of his jumpsuit far enough to confirm that under it he wore his police uniform.

  He had come into the security room in his blues and badge. The guards would have greeted him without suspicion.

  Evidently he'd carried the assault rifle and the jumpsuit in a suit­case. A two-suiter lay open and empty on the floor. Samsonite.

  The plan had most likely been to go on a shooting spree in the de­partment store and then, as the police arrived, to find a private place to strip out of the jumpsuit and the ski mask. Abandoning the assault ri­fle, Eckles could mingle with his fellow officers as though responding to the same call that they had received.

  The why of it wasn't as easy to understand as the how.

  Some people said that God talked to them. Others heard the devil whispering in their heads. Maybe one of these guys thought Satan had told him to shoot up Green Moon Mall.

  Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.

  Simon Varner remained on the loose. Maybe he and Eckles had not come to the mall alone. I had no idea how many might be in a coven.

  Using one of the working phones, I called 911, reported three mur­ders, and without answering any questions, put the phone down, leav­ing it off the hook. The police would come, and a SWAT team. Three minutes, four. Maybe five.

  That wouldn't be fast enough. Varner would be blasting away at shoppers before they arrived.

  The baseball bat hadn't cracked. Good wood.

  As effective as the bat had been with Eckles, I couldn't expect to be lucky enough to surprise Varner in the same way. Regardless of my fear of guns, I needed a better weapon than a Louisville Slugger.

  On a counter in front of the security monitors lay the pistol that Eckles had used to kill the guards. On inspection, I found that four rounds remained in the ten-shot magazine.

  As much as I wanted to avoid looking at them, the dead men on the floor commanded my attention. I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.

  I unscrewe
d the silencer, tossed it aside. Pulled my T-shirt our of my jeans. Tucked the pistol under my waistband.

  Without success, I tried not to think of my mother with the gun under her chin, against her breast. I tried not to remember what the muzzle of that pistol had felt like when she pressed it against my eye and told me to look for the brass of the bullet at the bottom of that narrow bore of darkness.

  The T-shirt hid the weapon but not perfectly. Shoppers would be too preoccupied finding bargains and salesclerks would be too busy serving shoppers to notice the bulge.

  Cautiously, I opened the door barely wide enough to slip out of the security room, and closed it behind me. A man was walking away from me, in the direction I needed to go, and I followed him, wishing that he would hurry.

  He turned right, through the swinging doors to the receiving room, and I ran past elevators reserved for company employees to a door labeled STAIRS. I took them two at a time.

  Somewhere ahead, Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm.

  At the first floor of the department store, I left the stairs and pushed through a door into a stockroom.

  A pretty redhead was busy pulling small boxes off the packed shelves. She said, "Hey," in a friendly way.

  "Hey," I said back at her, and I went out of the stockroom onto the sales floor.

  The sporting-goods department. Bustling. Men, a few women, a lot of teenagers. The kids were checking out Rollerblades, skateboards.

  Beyond the sporting goods were aisles of athletic shoes. Beyond the shoes, men's sportswear.

  People, people everywhere. Too many people too tightly bunched. An almost festive atmosphere. So vulnerable.

  If I hadn't waylaid him as he came out of the security room, Bern Eckles would have killed ten or twenty by now. Thirty.

  Simon Varner. Big guy. Beefy arms. Prince of Darkness. Simon Varner.

  Reliably guided by my supernatural gift as any bat is guided by echolocation, I crossed the first floor of the department store, heading toward the exit to the mall promenade.