The Odd Thomas Series 4-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours

by Dean Koontz

  “Go,” I said gently, “back to your home.”

  As if he were more a cousin of the dog than of the wolf, he backed away, turned, and sought the path that would lead him home.

  In a quarter of a minute, the fog closed all its yellow eyes, and the scent of musk faded beyond detection.

  I walked unhindered to the Mercedes and drove away.

  At the corner of Memorial Park Avenue and Highcliff Drive, the Salvation Army collection bin featured a revolving dump-drawer like those in bank walls for night deposits.

  When I tried to lift the satchel from the trunk, it seemed to weigh more than the car itself. Suddenly I knew that the hindering weight was the same as the confrontational coyotes, and both those things the same as the curious light and the shuffling sound under the lightning-bolt drain grating, and all of them of an identical character with the phantom that had sat in the porch swing.

  “Twenty pounds,” I said. “No more than twenty pounds. No more of this. The night is done.”

  I lifted the satchel with ease. It fit in the bin’s revolving drawer, and I let it roll away into the softness of donated clothing.

  I closed the trunk, got in the Mercedes, and drove back toward Blossom Rosedale’s place.

  The fog gave no indication that it would lift on this quieter side of midnight. Dawn might not prevail against it, or even noon.

  One redheaded gunman remained, but I suspected that he had been the wisest of that unwise crowd, that he had tucked his tail, lowered his head, and made for home, and that I would need neither bell nor bullet to dispel him.

  I got Birdie Hopkins’s home phone number from information and called to tell her that I was alive. She said, “Ditto,” and it was a fine thing to think of her out there in Magic Beach, waiting for the next twinge that would send her in search of the person who needed her.

  CHAPTER 49

  In the cottage of the happy monster waited the lingering spirit of Mr. Sinatra, my ghost dog, Boo, the golden retriever once named Murphy, Annamaria—and Blossom in a state of high enchantment.

  That long-ago barrel of fire had neither ruined her life nor stolen the essence of her beauty. When she had delight in her heart, her face transcended all her suffering, whereupon the scars and the deformed features and the mottled skin became the remarkable face of a hero and the cherished face of a friend.

  “Come see, you’ve got to see,” she said, leading me by the hand from the front door to a kitchen suffused with candlelight.

  Annamaria sat at the table, and around her gathered the visible and the invisible.

  On the table lay one of the white flowers with thick waxy petals that grew as large as bowls on the tree I had not been able to name.

  “You have a tree that grows these?” I asked Blossom.

  “No. I’d love such a tree. Annamaria brought this with her.”

  Raphael came to me, tail wagging, wiggling with pleasure, and I crouched to pet him.

  “I didn’t see you bring a flower,” I told Annamaria.

  “She took it from her purse,” said Blossom. “Annamaria, show him. Show him about the flower.”

  On the table stood a cut-glass bowl of water. Annamaria floated the flower in it.

  “No, Blossom,” she said. “This is yours. Keep it to remember me. I’ll show Odd when he’s ready.”

  “Here tonight?” Blossom asked.

  “All things in their time.”

  For Blossom, Annamaria had one of those gentle smiles that you wanted to look at forever, but for me, a more solemn expression.

  “How are you doing, young man?”

  “I don’t feel so young anymore.”

  “It’s the foul weather.”

  “It was very foul tonight.”

  “Do you wish to leave town alone?”

  “No. We’ll go together.”

  The candlelight seemed to attend her.

  “The decision is always yours,” she reminded me.

  “You’re safest with me. And we better go.”

  “I forgot!” Blossom said. “I was packing you a hamper for the road.” She hurried to the farther end of the kitchen.

  “There will be sun in a few hours,” Annamaria said.

  “Somewhere,” I agreed.

  Rising from the table, she said, “I’ll help Blossom.”

  Mr. Sinatra came to me, and I stood up from Raphael to say, “Thank you, sir. And I’m sorry for cranking you up that way.”

  He indicated that all was forgiven. He put one fist under my chin and gave me an affectionate faux punch.

  “I thought you might have gone by now. You shouldn’t have waited for me. It’s too important—moving on.”

  He made that gesture of a magician, rolling his hands over to present empty palms, an introduction to a performance.

  Manifesting now in the clothes that he had worn when he had first fallen into step beside me on a lonely highway—hat tipped at the particular cocky angle he preferred, sport coat tossed over his shoulder—he walked across the kitchen, up a wall of cabinets, and vanished through the ceiling, always the entertainer.

  “How did the golden retriever get here?” I asked.

  “He just showed up at the door,” Blossom said, “and he woofed so politely. He’s a sweet one. He doesn’t look like his people took good care of him. He needed to be better fed and brushed more.”

  I had seen on entering that Raphael was aware of Boo. And I had no doubt that the ghost dog led the living dog to Blossom’s place.

  “We should take him with us,” said Annamaria.

  “The vote’s unanimous.”

  “A dog is always a friend in hard times.”

  “That sounds like you’re buying into trouble,” I warned Raphael.

  He produced a big goofy grin, as if nothing would please him more than trouble, and plenty of it.

  “This town’s no place for us now,” I told Annamaria. “We really need to go.”

  Blossom had packed a hamper to sustain a platoon, including beef and chicken for our four-legged companion.

  She walked us out to the car, and after I stowed the hamper, I held her close. “You take care of yourself, Blossom Rosedale. I’m going to miss beating you at cards.”

  “Yeah, right. As soon as I join up with you, I’ll whup your butt as usual.”

  I leaned back from her and, in the porte-cochere lights, I read in her face the delight that had been there when she opened the door, but also a deeper joy that I had not initially recognized.

  “I’ll conclude business here in a few weeks,” she said, “and then I’ll come to win this Mercedes from you.”

  “It’s borrowed.”

  “Then you’ll have to buy me another one.”

  I kissed her brow, her cheek. Indicating the charming cottage, the diamond-paned windows full of warm light, I said, “You really want to leave all this?”

  “All this is just a place,” she said. “And sometimes such a lonely one.”

  Annamaria joined us. She put one arm around Blossom’s shoulders, one around mine.

  To Blossom, I said, “What is this thing we’re doing? You know?”

  Blossom shook her head. “I don’t understand it at all. But I’ve never wanted anything in my life like going with you.”

  As always, Annamaria’s eyes invited exploration but remained inscrutable.

  I asked her, “Where are we going? Where will she find us?”

  “We’ll stay in touch by phone,” Annamaria replied. “And as for where we’re going … you always say, you make it up as you go along.”

  We left Blossom there alone, but not forever, and with the dogs in the backseat, I drove along the lane between the rows of immense drooping deodar cedars, which seemed to be robed giants in a stately procession.

  I worried that the FBI or Homeland Security, or some nameless agency, would set up roadblocks, checkpoints, something, but the way remained clear. I suppose the last thing they wanted was to draw media attention.

/>   Nevertheless, after we had crossed the town limits, for several miles south, as the fog thinned somewhat across land less hospitable to it, I continued to check the rearview mirror with the expectation of pursuit.

  When abruptly I could not drive anymore, and found it necessary to pull to the side of the highway, I was surprised by how the world fell out from under me, leaving me feeling as if I had fallen off a cliff and could not see the bottom.

  Annamaria seemed not surprised at all. “I’ll drive,” she said, and assisted me around the car to the passenger seat.

  Desperately, I needed to be small, bent forward, curled tight, my face in my hands, so small that I should not be noticed, my face covered so that it should not be seen.

  In recent hours, I had taken in too much of the sea, and now I had to let it out.

  From time to time, she took a hand from the wheel to put it on my shoulder, and occasionally she spoke to comfort me.

  She said, “Your heart shines, odd one.”

  “No. You don’t know. What’s in it.”

  And later: “You saved cities.”

  “The killing. Her eyes. I see them.”

  “Cities, odd one. Cities.”

  She could not console me, and I heard myself saying, as from a distance, “All death, death, death,” as if by chanting I could do penance.

  A time of silence heavier than thunder. The fog behind us. To the east, a disturbing geography of black hills. To the west, a dark sea and a setting moon.

  “Life is hard,” she said, and her statement needed no argument or clarification.

  Miles later, I realized that she had followed those three words with six more that I had not then been ready to hear: “But it was not always so.”

  Well before dawn, she stopped in an empty parking lot at a state beach. She came around the car and opened my door.

  “The stars, odd one. They’re beautiful. Will you show me the constellation Cassiopeia?”

  She could not have known. Yet she knew. I did not ask how. That she knew was grace enough.

  We stood together on the cracked blacktop while I searched the heavens.

  Stormy Llewellyn had been the daughter of Cassiopeia, who had died in my sweet girl’s childhood. Together, we had often picked out the points of the constellation, because doing so made Stormy feel closer to her lost mother.

  “There,” I said, “and there, and there,” and star by star I drew the Cassiopeia of classic mythology, and recognized in that familiar pattern the mother of my lost girl, and in the mother I saw also the daughter, there above, beautiful and bright, for all eternity, her timeless light shining upon me, until one day I at last stepped out of time and joined her.

  This fourth Odd adventure is dedicated to Bruce, Carolyn, and Michael Rouleau.

  To Michael because he makes his parents proud.

  To Carolyn because she makes Bruce happy.

  To Bruce because he has been so reliable all these years, and because he truly knows what it means to love a good dog.

  ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

  The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • Brother Odd • The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • Odd Thomas • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed

  DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN

  Book One: Prodigal Son • with Kevin J. Anderson

  Book Two: City of Night • with Ed Gorman

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, California 92658

  ODD THOMAS IS BACK.

  His mysterious journey of suspense and discovery

  moves to a dangerous new level

  in his most riveting adventure to date.…

  by #1 New York Times bestselling author

  DEAN KOONTZ

  On sale in hardcover

  Summer 2012

  1

  We are buried when we’re born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

  You are no more likely to see that sentiment on a Starbucks cup than you are the words COFFEE KILLS.

  Sorry, but I have recently been in a mood. I’ll cheer up soon. I always do. Regardless of what horror transpires, given a little time, I am as reliably buoyant as a helium balloon.

  I don’t know the reason for that buoyancy. Understanding it might be a key part of my life assignment. Perhaps when I realize why I can find humor in the darkest of darknesses, the mortician will call my number and the time will have come to choose my casket.

  Actually, I don’t expect to have a casket. The Celestial Office of Life Themes—or whatever it might be called—seems to have decided that my journey through this world will be especially complicated by absurdity and violence of the kind in which the human species takes such pride. Consequently, I’ll probably be torn limb from limb by an angry mob of antiwar protesters and thrown on a bonfire. Or I’ll be struck down by a Rolls-Royce driven by an advocate for the poor, knocked into an open storm drain, and washed out to sea, where my remains will be enthusiastically consumed by the teeming fish in a federally enforced no-fishing zone.

  Anyway, at four o’clock that February morning, I was dreaming of Auschwitz.

  My characteristic buoyancy will not occur just yet.

  I woke to a familiar cry from beyond the half-open window of my suite in Roseland’s guest house. As silvery as the pipes in a Celtic song, the wail sewed threads of sorrow and longing through the night and the woods. It came again, nearer, and then a third time from a distance.

  These lamentations were always brief, but when they woke me too near dawn, I could not sleep anymore that night. The cry was like a wire in the blood, conducting a current through every artery and vein. I’d never heard a lonelier sound, and it electrified me with a dread that I could not explain.

  In this instance, I awakened from the Nazi death camp. I am not a Jew, but in the nightmare I was Jewish and terrified of dying twice. Dying twice made perfect sense in sleep, but not in the waking world, and the eerie call in the night at once pricked the air out of the vivid dream, which shriveled away from me.

  According to the current master of Roseland and everyone who worked for him, the source of the disturbing cry was a loon. They were either ignorant or lying.

  I don’t mean to insult my host and his staff. After all, I am ignorant of many things because I am required to maintain a narrow focus. An ever-increasing number of people seem determined to kill me, so that I need to concentrate on staying alive.

  But even in the desert, where I was born and raised, there are ponds and lakes, man-made yet adequate for loons. Their cries were melancholy but never desolate like this, curiously hopeful whereas these were despairing.

  Roseland, a private estate, was a mile from the California coast. But loons are loons wherever they nest; they don’t alter their voices to conform to the landscape. They’re birds, not politicians.

  Besides, loons aren’t roosters with a timely duty. Yet this wailing always came between midnight and dawn, never in the evenin
g, never in sunlight. The earlier it came in the new day, the more often it was repeated during the remaining hours of darkness.

  I threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, and said, “Spare me that I may serve,” which is a morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me to say when I was a little boy.

  Pearl Sugars was a professional poker player who frequently sat in private games against card sharks twice her size, guys who didn’t lose with a smile. They didn’t even smile when they won. My grandma was a hard drinker. She ate a boatload of pork fat in various forms. Only when sober, Granny Sugars drove so fast that police in several Southwestern states knew her as Pedal-to-the-Metal Pearl. Yet she lived long and died in her sleep.

  I hoped her prayer worked as well for me as it did for her; but recently I had taken to following that first request with another. This morning, it was: “Please don’t let anyone kill me by shoving an angry lizard down my throat.”

  That might seem like a snarky request to make of God, but a psychotic and enormous man once threatened to force-feed me an exotic sharp-toothed lizard that was in a frenzy after being dosed with methamphetamine. He would have succeeded, too, if we hadn’t been on a construction site and if I hadn’t found a way to use an insulation-foam sprayer as a weapon. He promised to track me down when released from prison and finish the job with a different lizard.

  On other days during the past week, I had asked God to spare me from death by a car-crushing machine in a salvage yard, from death by a nail gun, from death by being chained to dead men and dropped in a lake.… These were ordeals that I should not have survived in days past, and I figured that if I ever faced one of those threats again, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to escape the same fate twice.

  My name isn’t Lucky Thomas. It’s Odd Thomas.

  It really is. Odd.

  My beautiful but psychotic mother claims the birth certificate was supposed to read Todd. My father, who lusts after teenage girls and peddles property on the moon—though from a comfortable office here on Earth—sometimes says they meant to name me Odd.