This book is for Trixie, though she will never read it. On the most difficult days at the keyboard, when I despaired, she could always make me laugh. The words good dog are inadequate in her case. She is a good heart and a kind soul, and an angel on four feet.

Unearned suffering is redemptive.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

Look at those hands, Oh God, those hands toiled to raise me.

—Elvis Presley at his mother’s casket

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

About the Author

Author’s note

Also by Dean Koontz

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

WAKING, I HEARD A WARM WIND STRUMMING the loose screen at the open window, and I thought Stormy, but it was not.

The desert air smelled faintly of roses, which were not in bloom, and of dust, which in the Mojave flourishes twelve months of the year.

Precipitation falls on the town of Pico Mundo only during our brief winter. This mild February night was not, however, sweetened by the scent of rain.

I hoped to hear the fading rumble of thunder. If a peal had awakened me, it must have been thunder in a dream.

Holding my breath, I lay listening to the silence, and felt the silence listening to me.

The nightstand clock painted glowing numbers on the gloom—2:41 A.M.

For a moment I considered remaining in bed. But these days I do not sleep as well as I did when I was young. I am twenty-one and much older than when I was twenty.

Certain that I had company, expecting to find two Elvises watching over me, one with a cocky smile and one with sad concern, I sat up and switched on the lamp.

A single Elvis stood in a corner: a life-size cardboard figure that had been part of a theater-lobby display for Blue Hawaii. In a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, he looked self-confident and happy.

Back in 1961, he’d had much to be happy about. Blue Hawaii was a hit film, and the album went to number one. He had six gold records that year, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and he was falling in love with Priscilla Beaulieu.

Less happily, at the insistence of his manager, Tom Parker, he had turned down the lead in West Side Story in favor of mediocre movie fare like Follow That Dream. Gladys Presley, his beloved mother, had been dead three years, and still he felt the loss of her, acutely. Only twenty-six, he’d begun to have weight problems.

Cardboard Elvis smiles eternally, forever young, incapable of error or regret, untouched by grief, a stranger to despair.

I envy him. There is no cardboard replica of me as I once was and as I can never be again.

The lamplight revealed another presence, as patient as he was desperate. Evidently he had been watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake.

I said, “Hello, Dr. Jessup.”

Dr. Wilbur Jessup was incapable of a response. Anguish flooded his face. His eyes were desolate pools; all hope had drowned in those lonely depths.

“I’m sorry to see you here,” I said.

He made fists of his hands, not with the intention of striking anything, but as an expression of frustration. He pressed his fists to his chest.

Dr. Jessup had never previously visited my apartment; and I knew in my heart that he no longer belonged in Pico Mundo. But I clung to denial, and I spoke to him again as I got out of bed.

“Did I leave the door unlocked?”

He shook his head. Tears blurred his eyes, but he did not wail or even whimper.

Fetching a pair of jeans from the closet, slipping into them, I said, “I’ve been forgetful lately.”

He opened his fists and stared at his palms. His hands trembled. He buried his face in them.

“There’s so much I’d like to forget,” I continued as I pulled on socks and shoes, “but only the small stuff slips my mind—like where I left the keys, whether I locked the door, that I’m out of milk. …”

Dr. Jessup, a radiologist at County General Hospital, was a gentle man, and quiet, although he had never before been this quiet.

Because I had not worn a T-shirt to bed, I plucked a white one from a drawer.

I have a few black T-shirts, but mostly white. In addition to a selection of blue jeans, I have two pair of white chinos.

This apartment provides only a small closet. Half of it is empty. So are the bottom drawers of my dresser.

I do not own a suit. Or a tie. Or shoes that need to be shined.

For cool weather, I own two crew-neck sweaters.

Once I bought a sweater vest. Temporary insanity. Realizing that I had introduced an unthinkable level of complexity to my wardrobe, I returned it to the store the next day.

My four-hundred-pound friend and mentor, P. Oswald Boone, has warned me that my sartorial style represents a serious threat to the apparel industry.

I’ve noted more than once that the articles in Ozzie’s wardrobe are of such enormous dimensions that he keeps in business those fabric mills I might otherwise put in jeopardy.

Barefoot, Dr. Jessup wore cotton pajamas. They were wrinkled from the rigors of restless sleep.

“Sir, I wish you’d say something,” I told him. “I really wish you would.”

Instead of obliging me, the radiologist lowered his hands from his face, turned, and walked out of the bedroom.

I glanced at the wall above the bed. Framed behind glass is a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine. It promises YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

Each morning, I begin my day by reading those seven words. Each night, I read them again, sometimes more than once, before sleep, if sleep will come to me.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.

From a nightstand, I retrieved my cell phone. The first number on speed dial is the office of Wyatt Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department. The second is his home number. The third is his cell phone.

More likely than not, I would be calling Chief Porter, one place or another, before dawn.

In the living room, I turned on a light and discovered that Dr. Jessup had been standing in the dark, among the thrift-shop treasures with which the place is furnished.

When I went to the front door and opened it, he did not follow. Although he had sought my assistance, he couldn’t find the courage for what lay ahead.

In the rubescent light from an old bronze lamp with a beaded shade, the eclectic decor—Stickley-style armchairs, plump Victorian footstools, Maxfield Parrish prints, carnival-glass vases—evidently appealed to him.

“No offense,” I said, “but you don’t belong here, sir.”

Dr. Jessup silently regarded me with what might have been supplication.

“This place is filled to the brim with the past. There’s room for Elvis and me, and memories, but not for anyone new.”

I stepped into the public hall and pulled the door shut.

My apartment is one of two on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. Once a rambling single-family home, the place still offers considerable charm.

For years I lived in one rented room above a garage. My bed had been just a few steps from my refrigerator. Life was simpler then, and the future clear.

I traded that place for this not because I needed more space, but because my heart is here now, and forever.

The front door of the house featured an oval of leaded glass. The night beyond looked sharply beveled and organized into a pattern that anyone could understand.

When I stepped onto the porch, this night proved to be like all others: deep, mysterious, trembling with the potential for chaos.

From porch steps to flagstone path, to public sidewalk, I looked around for Dr. Jessup but didn’t see him.

In the high desert, which rises far east beyond Pico Mundo, winter can be chilly, while our low-desert nights remain mild even in February. The curbside Indian laurels sighed and whispered in the balmy wind, and moths soared to street lamps.

The surrounding houses were as quiet as their windows were dark. No dogs barked. No owls hooted.

No pedestrians were out, no traffic on the streets. The town looked as if the Rapture had occurred, as if only I had been left behind to endure the reign of Hell on Earth.

By the time I reached the corner, Dr. Jessup rejoined me. His pajamas and the lateness of the hour suggested that he had come to my apartment from his home on Jacaranda Way, five blocks north in a better neighborhood than mine. Now he led me in that direction.

He could fly, but he plodded. I ran, drawing ahead of him.

Although I dreaded what I would find no less than he might have dreaded revealing it to me, I wanted to get to it quickly. As far as I knew, a life might still be in jeopardy.

Halfway there, I realized that I could have taken the Chevy. For most of my driving life, having no car of my own, I borrowed from friends as needed. The previous autumn, I had inherited a 1980 Chevrolet Camaro Berlinetta Coupe.

Often I still act as though I have no wheels. Owning a few thousand pounds of vehicle oppresses me when I think about it too much. Because I try not to think about it, I sometimes forget I have it.

Under the cratered face of the blind moon, I ran.

On Jacaranda Way, the Jessup residence is a white-brick Georgian with elegant ornamentation. It is flanked by a delightful American Victorian with so many decorative moldings that it resembles a wedding cake, and by a house that is baroque in all the wrong ways.

None of these architectural styles seems right for the desert, shaded by palm trees, brightened by climbing bougainvillea. Our town was founded in 1900 by newcomers from the East Coast, who fled the harsh winters but brought with them cold-climate architecture and attitude.

Terri Stambaugh, my friend and employer, owner of the Pico Mundo Grille, tells me that this displaced architecture is better than the dreary acres of stucco and graveled roofs in many California desert towns.

I assume that she is right. I have seldom crossed the city line of Pico Mundo and have never been beyond the boundaries of Maravilla County.

My life is too full to allow either a jaunt or a journey. I don’t even watch the Travel Channel.

The joys of life can be found anywhere. Far places only offer exotic ways to suffer.

Besides, the world beyond Pico Mundo is haunted by strangers, and I find it difficult enough to cope with the dead who, in life, were known to me.

Upstairs and down, soft lamplight shone at some windows of the Jessup residence. Most panes were dark.

By the time I reached the foot of the front-porch steps, Dr. Wilbur Jessup waited there.

The wind stirred his hair and ruffled his pajamas, although why he should be subject to the wind, I do not know. The moonlight found him, too, and shadow.

The grieving radiologist needed comforting before he could summon sufficient strength to lead me into his house, where he himself no doubt lay dead, and perhaps another.

I embraced him. Only a spirit, he was invisible to everyone but me, yet he felt warm and solid.

Perhaps I see the dead affected by the weather of this world, and see them touched by light and shadow, and find them as warm as the living, not because this is the way they are but because this is the way I want them to be. Perhaps by this device, I mean to deny the power of death.

My supernatural gift might reside not in my mind but instead in my heart. The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.

Dr. Jessup had no substance, but he leaned heavily upon me, a weight. He shook with the sobs that he could not voice.

The dead don’t talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.

In this moment, my ability to speak gave me no advantage. Words would not soothe him.

Nothing but justice could relieve his anguish. Perhaps not even justice.

When he’d been alive, he had known me as Odd Thomas, a local character. I am regarded by some people—wrongly—as a hero, as an eccentric by nearly everyone.

Odd is not a nickname; it’s my legal handle.

The story of my name is interesting, I suppose, but I’ve told it before. What it boils down to is that my parents are dysfunctional. Big-time.

I believe that in life Dr. Jessup had found me intriguing, amusing, puzzling. I think he had liked me.

Only in death did he know me for what I am: a companion to the lingering dead.

I see them and wish I did not. I cherish life too much to turn the dead away, however, for they deserve my compassion by virtue of having suffered this world.

When Dr. Jessup stepped back from me, he had changed. His wounds were now manifest.

He had been hit in the face with a blunt object, maybe a length of pipe or a hammer. Repeatedly. His skull was broken, his features distorted.

Torn, cracked, splintered, his hands suggested that he had desperately tried to defend himself—or that he had come to the aid of someone. The only person living with him was his son, Danny.

My pity was quickly exceeded by a kind of righteous rage, which is a dangerous emotion, clouding judgment, precluding caution.

In this condition, which I do not seek, which frightens me, which comes over me as though I have been possessed, I can’t turn away from what must be done. I plunge.

My friends, those few who know my secrets, think my compulsion has a divine inspiration. Maybe it’s just temporary insanity.

Step to step, ascending, then crossing the porch, I considered phoning Chief Wyatt Porter. I worried, however, that Danny might perish while I placed the call and waited for the authorities.

The front door stood ajar.

I glanced back and saw that Dr. Jessup preferred to haunt the yard instead of the house. He lingered in the grass.

His wounds had vanished. He appeared as he had appeared before Death had found him—and he looked scared.

Until they move on from this world, even the dead can know fear. You would think they have nothing to lose, but sometimes they are wretched with anxiety, not about what might lie Beyond, but about those whom they have left behind.

I pushed the door inward. It moved as smoothly, as silently as the mechanism of a well-crafted, spring-loaded trap.

2

FROSTED FLAME-SHAPED BULBS IN SILVER-PLATED sconces revealed white paneled doors, all closed, along a hallway, and stairs rising into darkness.

Honed instead of polished, the marble floor of the foyer was cloud-white, looked cloud-soft. The ruby, teal, and sapphire Persian rug seemed to float like a magic taxi waiting for a passenger with a taste for adventure.

I crossed the threshold, and the cloud floor supported me. The rug idled underfoot.

In such a situation, closed doors usually draw me. Over the years, I have a few times endured a dream in which, during a search, I open a white paneled door and am skewered through the throat by something sharp, cold, and as thick as an iron fence stave.

Always, I wake before I die, gagging as if still impaled. After that, I am usually up for the day, no matter how early the hour.

My dreams aren’t reliably prophetic. I have never, for instance, ridden bareback on an elephant, naked, while having sexual relations with Jennifer Aniston.

Seven years have passed since I had that memorable night fantasy as a boy of fourteen. After so much time, I no longer have any expectation that the Aniston dream will prove predictive.

I’m pretty sure the scenario with the white paneled door will come to pass. I can’t say whether I will be merely wounded, disabled for life, or killed.

You might think that when presented with white paneled doors, I would avoid them. And so I would … if I had not learned that fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun. The price I paid for that lesson has left my heart an almost empty purse, with just two coins or three clinking at the bottom.

I prefer to kick open each door and confront what waits rather than to turn away—and thereafter be required to remain alert, at all times, for the creak of the turning knob, for the quiet rasp of hinges behind my back.

On this occasion, the doors did not attract me. Intuition led me to the stairs, and swiftly up.

The dark second-floor hallway was brightened only by the pale outfall of light from two rooms.

I’ve had no dreams about open doors. I went to the first of these two without hesitation, and stepped into a bedroom.

The blood of violence daunts even those with much experience of it. The splash, the spray, the drip and drizzle create infinite Rorschach patterns in every one of which the observer reads the same meaning: the fragility of his existence, the truth of his mortality.

A desperation of crimson hand prints on a wall were the victim’s sign language: Spare me, help me, remember me, avenge me.

On the floor, near the foot of the bed, lay the body of Dr. Wilbur Jessup, savagely battered.

Even for one who knows that the body is but the vessel and that the spirit is the essence, a brutalized cadaver depresses, offends.

This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.

The door to the adjacent bathroom stood half open. I nudged it with one foot.

Although blood-dimmed by a drenched shade, the bedroom lamplight reached into the bathroom to reveal no surprises.

Aware that this was a crime scene, I touched nothing. I stepped cautiously, with respect for evidence.

Some wish to believe that greed is the root of murder, but greed seldom motivates a killer. Most homicide has the same dreary cause: The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they covet.

That is not merely a central tragedy of human existence: It is also the political history of the world.

Common sense, not psychic power, told me that in this case, the killer coveted the happy marriage that, until recently, Dr. Jessup had enjoyed. Fourteen years previously, the radiologist had wed Carol Makepeace. They had been perfect for each other.

Carol came into their marriage with a seven-year-old son, Danny. Dr. Jessup adopted him.

Danny had been a friend of mine since we were six, when we had discovered a mutual interest in Monster Gum trading cards. I traded him a Martian brain-eating centipede for a Venusian methane slime beast, which bonded us on first encounter and ensured a lifelong brotherly affection.

We’ve also been drawn close by the fact that we are different, each in his way, from other people. I see the lingering dead, and Danny has osteogenesis imperfecta, also called brittle bones.

Our lives have been defined—and deformed—by our afflictions. My deformations are primarily social; his are largely physical.

A year ago, Carol had died of cancer. Now Dr. Jessup was gone, too, and Danny was alone.

I left the master bedroom and hurried quietly along the hallway toward the back of the house. Passing two closed rooms, heading toward the open door that was the second source of light, I worried about leaving unsearched spaces behind me.

After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

I worried about that asteroid until I realized I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I am not Superman. I am a short-order cook on a leave of absence from his grill and griddle.

For a longer while, I worried about the TV news lady. What kind of person can deliver such terrifying news—and then smile?

If I ever did open a white paneled door and get skewered through the throat, the iron pike—or whatever—would probably be wielded by that anchorwoman.

I reached the next open door, stepped into the light, crossed the threshold. No victim, no killer.

The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.

Unquestionably, this was Danny’s room. On the wall behind the disheveled bed hung a poster of John Merrick, the real-life Elephant Man.

Danny had a sense of humor about the deformities—mostly of the limbs—with which his condition had left him. He looked nothing like Merrick, but the Elephant Man was his hero.

They exhibited him as a freak, Danny once explained. Women fainted at the sight of him, children wept, tough men flinched. He was loathed and reviled. Yet a century later a movie was based on his life, and we know his name. Who knows the name of the bastard who owned him and put him on exhibit, or the names of those who fainted or wept, or flinched? They’re dust, and he’s immortal. Besides, when he went out in public, that hooded cloak he wore was way cool.

On other walls were four posters of ageless sex goddess Demi Moore, who was currently more ravishing than ever in a series of Versace ads.

Twenty-one years old, two inches short of the five feet that he claimed, twisted by the abnormal bone growth that sometimes had occurred during the healing of his frequent fractures, Danny lived small but dreamed big.

No one stabbed me when I stepped into the hall once more. I wasn’t expecting anyone to stab me, but that’s when it’s likely to happen.

If Mojave wind still whipped the night, I couldn’t hear it inside this thick-walled Georgian structure, which seemed tomblike in its stillness, in its conditioned chill, with a faint scent of blood on the cool air.

I dared not any longer delay calling Chief Porter. Standing in the upstairs hall, I pressed 2 on my cell-phone keypad and speed-dialed his home.

When he answered on the second ring, he sounded awake.

Alert for the approach of a mad anchorwoman or worse, I spoke softly: “Sir, I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“Wasn’t asleep. I’ve been sitting here with Louis L’Amour.”

“The writer? I thought he was dead, sir.”

“About as dead as Dickens. Tell me you’re just lonesome, son, and not in trouble again.”

“I didn’t ask for trouble, sir. But you better come to Dr. Jessup’s house.”

“I’m hoping it’s a simple burglary.”

“Murder,” I said. “Wilbur Jessup on the floor of his bedroom. It’s a bad one.”

“Where’s Danny?”

“I’m thinking kidnapped.”

“Simon,” he said.

Simon Makepeace—Carol’s first husband, Danny’s father—had been released from prison four months ago, after serving sixteen years for manslaughter.

“Better come with some force,” I said. “And quiet.”

“Someone still there?”

“I get the feeling.”

“You hold back, Odd.”

“You know I can’t.”

“I don’t understand your compulsion.”

“Neither do I, sir.”

I pressed END and pocketed the cell phone.

3

ASSUMING THAT DANNY MUST BE STILL nearby and under duress, and that he was most likely on the ground floor, I headed toward the front stairs. Before I began to descend, I found myself turning and retracing the route that I’d just followed.

I expected that I would return to the two closed doors on the right side of the hall, between the master bedroom and Danny’s room, and that I would discover what lay behind them. As before, however, I wasn’t drawn to them.

On the left side were three other closed doors. None of those had an attraction for me, either.

In addition to the ability to see ghosts, a gift I’d happily trade for piano artistry or a talent for flower arranging, I’ve been given what I call psychic magnetism.

When someone isn’t where I expect to find him, I can go for a walk or ride my bicycle, or cruise in a car, keeping his name or face in my mind, turning randomly from one street to another; and sometimes in minutes, sometimes in an hour, I encounter the one I’m seeking. It’s like setting a pair of those Scottie-dog magnets on a table and watching them slide inexorably toward each other.

The key word is sometimes.

On occasion, my psychic magnetism functions like the finest Cartier watch. At other times, it’s like an egg timer bought at a cheap discount store’s going-out-of-business sale; you set it for poached, and it gives you hard-boiled.

The unreliability of this gift is not proof that God is either cruel or indifferent, though it might be one proof among many that He has a sense of humor.

The fault lies with me. I can’t stay sufficiently relaxed to let the gift work. I get distracted: in this case, by the possibility that Simon Makepeace, in willful disregard of his surname, would throw open a door, leap into the hallway, and bludgeon me to death.

I continued through the lamplight that spilled from Danny’s room, where Demi Moore still looked luminous and the Elephant Man still looked pachydermous. I paused in the gloom at an intersection with a second, shorter hallway.

This was a big house. It had been built in 1910 by an immigrant from Philadelphia, who had made a fortune in either cream cheese or gelignite. I can never remember which.

Gelignite is a high explosive consisting of a gelatinized mass of nitroglycerin with cellulose nitrate added. In the first decade of the previous century, they called it gelatin dynamite, and it was quite the rage in those circles where they took a special interest in blowing up things.

Cream cheese is cream cheese. It’s delicious in a wide variety of dishes, but it rarely explodes.

I would like to have a firmer grasp of local history, but I’ve never been able to devote as much time to the study of it as I have wished. Dead people keep distracting me.

Now I turned left into the secondary hallway, which was black but not pitch. At the end, pale radiance revealed the open door at the head of the back stairs.

The stairwell light itself wasn’t on. The glow rose from below.

In addition to rooms and closets on both sides, which I had no impulse to search, I passed an elevator. This hydraulic-ram lift had been installed prior to Wilbur and Carol’s wedding, before Danny—then a child of seven—had moved into the house.

If you are afflicted with osteogenesis imperfecta, you can occasionally break a bone with remarkably little effort. When six, Danny had fractured his right wrist while snap-dealing a game of Old Maid.

Stairs, therefore, pose an especially grave risk. As a child, at least, if he had fallen down a flight of stairs, he would most likely have died from severe skull fractures.

Although I had no fear of falling, the back stairs spooked me. They were spiral and enclosed, so it wasn’t possible to see more than a few steps ahead.

Intuition told me someone waited down there.

As an alternative to the stairs, the elevator would be too noisy. Alerted, Simon Makepeace would be waiting when I arrived below.

I could not retreat. I was compelled to go down—and quickly—into the back rooms of the lower floor.

Before I quite realized what I was doing, I pushed the elevator-call button. I snatched my finger back as though I’d pricked it on a needle.

The doors did not at once slide open. The elevator was on the lower floor.

As the motor hummed to life, as the hydraulic mechanism sighed, as the cab rose through the shaft with a faint swish, I realized that I had a plan. Good for me.

In truth, the word plan was too grandiose. What I had was more of a trick, a diversion.

The elevator arrived with a bink so loud in the silent house that I twitched, though I had expected that sound. When the doors slid open, I tensed, but no one lunged out at me.

I leaned into the cab and pushed the button to send it back to the ground floor.

Even as the doors rolled shut, I hurried to the staircase and rushed blindly down. The value of the diversion would diminish to zero when the cab arrived below, for then Simon would discover that I wasn’t, after all, on board.

The claustrophobia-inducing stairs led into a mud room off the kitchen. Although a stone-floored mud room might have been essential in Philadelphia, with that city’s dependably rainy springs and its snowy winters, a residence in the sun-seared Mojave needed it no more than it needed a snowshoe rack.

At least it wasn’t a storeroom full of gelignite.

From the mud room, one door led to the garage, another to the backyard. A third served the kitchen.

The house had not originally been designed to have an elevator. The remodel contractor had been forced to situate it, not ideally, in a corner of the large kitchen.

No sooner had I arrived in the mud room, dizzy from negotiating the tight curve of the spiral staircase, than a bink announced the arrival of the cab on the ground floor.

I snatched up a broom, as though I might be able to sweep a murderous psychopath off his feet. At best, surprising him by jamming the bristles into his face might damage his eyes and startle him off balance.

The broom wasn’t as comforting as a flamethrower would have been, but it was better than a mop and certainly more threatening than a feather duster.

Positioning myself by the door to the kitchen, I prepared to take Simon off his feet when he burst into the mud room in search of me. He didn’t burst.

After what seemed to be enough time to paint the gray walls a more cheerful color, but what was in reality maybe fifteen seconds, I glanced at the door to the garage. Then at the door to the backyard.

I wondered if Simon Makepeace had already forced Danny out of the house. They might be in the garage, Simon behind the wheel of Dr. Jessup’s car, Danny bound and helpless in the backseat.

Or maybe they were headed across the yard, toward the gate in the fence. Simon might have a vehicle of his own in the alleyway behind the property.

I felt inclined, instead, to push through the swinging door and step into the kitchen.

Only the under-the-cabinet lights were on, illuminating the countertops around the perimeter of the room. Nevertheless, I could see that I was alone.

Regardless of what I could see, I sensed a presence. Someone could have been crouched, hiding on the farther side of the large center work island.

Fierce with broom, gripping it like a cudgel, I cautiously circled the room. The gleaming mahogany floor pealed soft squeaks off my rubber-soled shoes.

When I had rounded three-quarters of the island, I heard the elevator doors roll open behind me.

I spun around to discover not Simon, but a stranger. He’d been waiting for the elevator, and when I hadn’t been in it, as he had expected, he’d realized that it was a ruse. He’d been quick-witted, hiding in the cab immediately before I entered from the mud room.

He was sinuous and full of coiled power. His green gaze shone bright with terrible knowledge; these were the eyes of one who knew the many ways out of the Garden. His scaly lips formed the curve of a perfect lie: a smile in which malice tried to pass as friendly intent, in which amusement was in fact dripping venom.

Before I could think of a serpent metaphor to describe his nose, the snaky bastard struck. He squeezed the trigger of a Taser, firing two darts that, trailing thin wires, pierced my T-shirt and delivered a disabling shock.

I fell like a high-flying witch suddenly deprived of her magic: hard, and with a useless broom.

4

WHEN YOU TAKE MAYBE FIFTY THOUSAND volts from a Taser, some time has to pass before you feel like dancing.

On the floor, doing a broken-cockroach imitation, twitching violently, robbed of basic motor control, I tried to scream but wheezed instead.

A flash of pain and then a persistent hot pulse traced every nerve pathway in my body with such authority that I could see them in my mind’s eye as clearly as highways on a road map.

I cursed my attacker, but the invective issued as a whimper. I sounded like an anxious gerbil.

He loomed over me, and I expected to be stomped. He was a guy who would enjoy stomping. If he wasn’t wearing hobnail boots, that was only because they were at the cobbler’s shop for the addition of toe spikes.

My arms flopped, my hands spasmed. I couldn’t cover my face.

He spoke, but his words meant nothing, sounded like the sputter and crackle of short-circuiting wires.

When he picked up the broom, I knew from the way he held it that he intended to drive the blunt metal handle into my face repeatedly, until the Elephant Man, compared to me, would look like a GQ model.

He raised that witchy weapon high. Before he slammed it into my face, however, he turned abruptly away, looking toward the front of the house.

Evidently he heard something that changed his priorities, for he threw the broom aside. He split through the mud room and no doubt left the house by the back door.

A persistent buzzing in my ears prevented me from hearing what my assailant had heard, but I assumed that Chief Porter had arrived with deputies. I had told him that Dr. Jessup lay dead in the master bedroom on the second floor; but he would order a by-the-book search of the entire house.

I was anxious not to be found there.

In the Pico Mundo Police Department, only the chief knows about my gifts. If I am ever again the first on the scene of a crime, a lot of deputies will wonder about me more than they do already.

The likelihood was small to nonexistent that any of them would leap to the conclusion that sometimes the dead come to me for justice. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances.

My life is already muy strange and so complex that I keep a grip on sanity only by maintaining a minimalist lifestyle. I don’t travel. I walk almost everywhere. I don’t party. I don’t follow the news or fashion. I have no interest in politics. I don’t plan for the future. My only job has been as a short-order cook, since I left home at sixteen. Recently I took a leave of absence from that position because even the challenge of making sufficiently fluffy pancakes and BLTs with the proper crunch seemed too taxing on top of all my other problems.

If the world knew what I am, what I can see and do, thousands would be at my door tomorrow. The grieving. The remorseful. The suspicious. The hopeful. The faithful. The skeptics.

They would want me to be a medium between them and their lost loved ones, would insist that I play detective in every unsolved murder case. Some would wish to venerate me, and others would seek to prove that I was a fraud.

I don’t know how I could turn away the bereft, the hopeful. In the event that I learned to do so, I’m not sure I’d like the person I would have become.

Yet if I could turn no one away, they would wear me down with their love and their hate. They would grind me on their wheels of need until I had been reduced to dust.

Now, afraid of being found in Dr. Jessup’s house, I flopped, twitched, and scrabbled across the floor. No longer in severe pain, I was not yet fully in control of myself, either.

As if I were Jack in the giant’s kitchen, the knob on the pantry door appeared to be twenty feet above me. With rubbery legs and arms still spastic, I don’t know how I reached it, but I did.

I’ve a long list of things I don’t know how I’ve done, but I’ve done them. In the end, it’s always about perseverance.

Once in the pantry, I pulled the door shut behind me. This close dark space reeked of pungent chemical scents the likes of which I had never before smelled.

The taste of scorched aluminum made me half nauseous. I’d never previously tasted scorched aluminum; so I don’t know how I recognized it, but I felt sure that’s what it was.

Inside my skull, a Frankenstein laboratory of arcing electrical currents snapped and sizzled. Overloaded resistors hummed.

Most likely my senses of smell and taste weren’t reliable. The Taser had temporarily scrambled them.

Detecting a wetness on my chin, I assumed blood. After further consideration, I realized I was drooling.

During a thorough search of the house, the pantry would not be overlooked. I’d only gained a minute or two in which to warn Chief Porter.

Never before had the function of a simple pants pocket proved too complicated for me to understand. You put things in, you take things out.

Now for the longest time, I couldn’t get my hand into my jeans pocket; someone seemed to have sewn it shut. Once I finally got my hand in, I couldn’t get it back out. At last I extracted my hand from the clutching pocket, but discovered that I’d failed to bring my cell phone with it.

Just when the bizarre chemical odors began to resolve into the familiar scents of potatoes and onions, I regained possession of the phone and flipped it open. Still drooling but with pride, I pressed and held 3, speed-dialing the chief’s mobile number.

If he was personally engaged in the search of the house, he most likely wouldn’t stop to answer his cell phone.

“I assume that’s you,” Wyatt Porter said.

“Sir, yes, right here.”

“You sound funny.”

“Don’t feel funny. Feel Tasered.”

“Say what?”

“Say Tasered. Bad guy buzzed me.”

“Where are you?”

“Hiding in the pantry.”

“Not good.”

“It’s better than explaining myself.”

The chief is protective of me. He’s as concerned as I am that I avoid the misery of public exposure.

“This is a terrible scene here,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Terrible. Dr. Jessup was a good man. You just wait there.”

“Sir, Simon might be moving Danny out of town right now.”

“I’ve got both highways blocked.”

There were only two ways out of Pico Mundo—three, if you counted death.

“Sir, what if someone opens the pantry door?”

“Try to look like canned goods.”

He hung up, and I switched off my phone.

I sat there in the dark awhile, trying not to think, but that never works. Danny came into my mind. He might not be dead yet, but wherever he was, he was not anywhere good.

As had been true of his mother, he lived with an affliction that gravely endangered him. Danny had brittle bones; his mother had been pretty.

Simon Makepeace most likely wouldn’t have been obsessed with Carol if she had been ugly or even plain. He wouldn’t have killed a man over her, for sure. Counting Dr. Jessup, two men.

I had been alone in the pantry up to this point. Although the door didn’t open, I suddenly had company.

A hand clasped my shoulder, but that didn’t startle me. I knew my visitor had to be Dr. Jessup, dead and restless.

5

DR. JESSUP HAD BEEN NO DANGER TO ME when he was alive, nor was he a threat now.

Occasionally, a poltergeist—which is a ghost who can energize his anger—is able to do damage, but they’re usually just frustrated, not genuinely malicious. They feel they have unfinished business in this world, and they are people for whom death has not diminished the stubbornness that characterized them in life.

The spirits of thoroughly evil people do not hang around for extended periods of time, wreaking havoc and murdering the living. That’s pure Hollywood.

The spirits of evil people usually leave quickly, as though they have an appointment, upon death, with someone whom they dare not keep waiting.

Dr. Jessup had probably passed through the pantry door as easily as rain through smoke. Even walls were no barrier to him anymore.

When he took his hand off my shoulder, I assumed that he would settle on the floor, cross-legged Indian style, as I was sitting, and evidently he did. He faced me in the dark, which I knew when he reached out and gripped my hands.

If he couldn’t have his life back, he wanted reassurance. He did not have to speak to convey to me what he needed.

“I’ll do my best for Danny,” I said too softly to be heard beyond the pantry.

I did not intend my words to be taken as a guarantee. I haven’t earned that level of confidence from anyone.

“The hard truth is,” I continued, “my best might not be good enough. It hasn’t always been enough before.”

His grip on my hands tightened.

My regard for him was such that I wanted to encourage him to let go of this world and accept the grace that death offered him.

“Sir, everyone knows you were a good husband to Carol. But they might not realize just how very good a father you were to Danny.”

The longer a liberated spirit lingers, the more likely he will get stuck here.

“You were so kind to take on a seven-year-old with such medical problems. And you always made him feel that you were proud of him, proud of how he suffered without complaint, his courage.”

By virtue of the way that he had lived, Dr. Jessup had no reason to fear moving on. Remaining here, on the other hand—a mute observer incapable of affecting events—guaranteed his misery.

“He loves you, Dr. Jessup. He thinks of you as his real father, his only father.”

I was thankful for the absolute darkness and for his ghostly silence. By now I should be somewhat armored against the grief of others and against the piercing regret of those who meet untimely deaths and must leave without good-byes, yet year by year I become more vulnerable to both.

“You know how Danny is,” I continued. “A tough little customer. Always the wisecrack. But I know what he really feels. And surely you know what you meant to Carol. She seemed to shine with love for you.”

For a while I matched his silence. If you push them too hard, they clutch up, even panic.

In that condition, they can no longer see the way from here to there, the bridge, the door, whatever it is.

I gave him time to absorb what I’d said. Then: “You’ve done so much of what you were put here to do, and you did it well, you got it right. That’s all we can expect—the chance to get it right.”

After another mutual silence, he let go of my hands.

Just as I lost touch with Dr. Jessup, the pantry door opened. Kitchen light dissolved the darkness, and Chief Wyatt Porter loomed over me.

He is big, round-shouldered, with a long face. People who can’t read the chief’s true nature in his eyes might think he’s steeped in sadness.

As I got to my feet, I realized that the residual effects of the Taser had not entirely worn off. Phantom electrical sounds sizzled inside my head again.

Dr. Jessup had departed. Maybe he had gone on to the next world. Maybe he had returned to haunting the front yard.

“How do you feel?” the chief asked, stepping back from the pantry.

“Fried.”

“Tasers don’t do real harm.”

“You smell burnt hair?”

“No. Was it Makepeace?”

“Not him,” I said, moving into the kitchen. “Some snaky guy. You find Danny?”

“He’s not here.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“The way’s clear. Go to the alley.”

“I’ll go to the alley,” I said.

“Wait at the tree of death.”

“I’ll wait at the tree of death.”

“Son, are you all right?”

“My tongue itches.”

“You can scratch it while you wait for me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Odd?”

“Sir?”

“Go.”

6

THE TREE OF DEATH STANDS ACROSS THE alley and down the block from the Jessup place, in the backyard of the Ying residence.

In the summer and autumn, the thirty-five-foot brugmansia is festooned with pendant yellow trumpet flowers. At times, more than a hundred blooms, perhaps two hundred, each ten to twelve inches long, depend from its branches.

Mr. Ying enjoys lecturing on the deadly nature of the lovely brugmansia. Every part of the tree—roots, wood, bark, leaves, calyxes, flowers—is toxic.

One shred of its foliage will induce bleeding from the nose, bleeding from the ears, bleeding from the eyes, and explosive terminal diarrhea. Within a minute, your teeth will fall out, your tongue will turn black, and your brain will begin to liquefy.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. When Mr. Ying first told me about the tree, I was a boy of eight, and that is the impression I got from his disquisition on brugmansia poisoning.

Why Mr. Ying—and his wife as well—should take such pride in having planted and grown the tree of death, I do not know.

Ernie and Pooka Ying are Asian Americans, but there’s nothing in the least Fu Manchu about them. They’re too amiable to devote any time whatsoever to evil scientific experiments in a vast secret laboratory carved out of the bedrock deep beneath their house.

Even if they have developed the capability to destroy the world, I for one cannot picture anyone named Pooka pulling the GO lever on a doomsday machine.

The Yings attend Mass at St. Bartholomew’s. He’s a member of the Knights of Columbus. She donates ten hours each week to the church thrift shop.

The Yings go to the movies a lot, and Ernie is notoriously sentimental, weeping during the death scenes, the love scenes, the patriotic scenes. He once even wept when Bruce Willis was unexpectedly shot in the arm.

Yet year after year, through three decades of marriage, while they adopted and raised two orphans, they diligently fertilized the tree of death, watered it, pruned it, sprayed it to ward off spider mite and whitefly. They replaced their back porch with a much larger redwood deck, which they furnished to provide numerous viewpoints where they can sit together at breakfast or during a warm desert evening, admiring this magnificent lethal work of nature.

Wishing to avoid being seen by the authorities who would be going to and coming from the Jessup house during the remaining hours of the night, I stepped through the gate in the picket fence at the back of the Ying property. Because taking a seat on the deck without invitation seemed to be ill-mannered, I sat in the yard, under the brugmansia.

The eight-year-old in me wondered if the grass could have absorbed poison from the tree. If sufficiently potent, the toxin might pass through the seat of my jeans.

My cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

A woman said, “Hi.”

“Who’s this?”

“Me.”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’m disappointed,” she said.

“It happens.”

“You know the first rule?”

“Like I said—”

“You come alone,” she interjected.

“—you’ve got a wrong number.”

“I’m so disappointed in you.”

“In me?” I asked.

“Very much so.”

“For being a wrong number?”

“This is pathetic,” she said, and terminated the call.

The woman’s caller ID was blocked. No number had appeared on my screen.

The telecom revolution does not always facilitate communication.

I stared at the phone, waiting for her to misdial again, but it didn’t ring. I flipped it shut.

The wind seemed to have swirled down a drain in the floor of the desert.

Beyond the motionless limbs of the brugmansia, which were leafy but flowerless until late spring, in the high vault of the night, the stars were sterling-bright, the moon a tarnished silver.

When I checked my wristwatch, I was surprised to see 3:17 A.M. Only thirty-six minutes had passed since I had awakened to find Dr. Jessup in my bedroom.

I had lost all awareness of the hour and had assumed that dawn must be drawing near. Fifty thousand volts might have messed with my watch, but it had messed more effectively with my sense of time.

If the tree branches had not embraced so much of the sky, I would have tried to find Cassiopeia, a constellation with special meaning for me. In classic mythology, Cassiopeia was the mother of Andromeda.

Another Cassiopeia, this one no myth, was the mother of a daughter whom she named Bronwen. And Bronwen is the finest person I have ever known, or ever will.

When the constellation of Cassiopeia is in this hemisphere and I am able to identify it, I feel less alone.

This isn’t a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

In the alley, a police car pulled up at the gate. The headlights were doused.

I rose from the yard under the tree of death, and if my buttocks had been poisoned, at least they hadn’t yet fallen off.

When I got into the front passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut, Chief Porter said, “How’s your tongue?”

“Sir?”

“Still itch?”

“Oh. No. It stopped. I hadn’t noticed.”

“This would work better if you took the wheel, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. But that would be hard to explain, this being a police car and me being just a fry cook.”

As we drifted along the alleyway, the chief switched on the headlights and said, “What if I cruise where I want, and when you feel I should turn left or right, you tell me.”

“Let’s try it.” Because he had switched off the police radio, I said, “Won’t they be wanting to reach you?”

“Back there at the Jessup house? That’s all aftermath. The science boys are better at that than I am. Tell me about the guy with the Taser.”

“Mean green eyes. Lean and quick. Snaky.”

“Are you focusing on him now?”

“No. I only got a glimpse of him before he zapped me. For this to work, I’ve got to have a better mental picture—or a name.”

“Simon?”

“We don’t know for certain that Simon’s involved.”

“I’d bet my eyes against a dollar that he is,” Chief Porter said. “The killer beat on Wilbur Jessup long after he was dead. This was a passionate homicide. But he didn’t come alone. He’s got a kill buddy, maybe someone he met in prison.”

“Just the same, I’ll try for Danny.”

We drove a couple of blocks in silence.

The windows were down. The air looked clear yet carried the silica scent of the Mojave vastness by which our town is embraced. Scatterings of crisp leaves, shed by Indian laurels, crunched under the tires.

Pico Mundo appeared to have been evacuated.

The chief glanced sideways at me a couple times, then said, “You ever going back to work at the Grille?”

“Yes, sir. Sooner or later.”

“Sooner would be better. Folks miss your home fries.”

“Poke makes good ones,” I said, referring to Poke Barnett, the other short-order cook at the Pico Mundo Grille.

“They’re not so bad you have to choke them down,” he admitted, “but they’re not in the same league with yours. Or his pancakes.”

“Nobody can match the fluff factor in my pancakes,” I agreed.

“Is it some culinary secret?”

“No, sir. It’s a born instinct.”

“A gift for pancakes.”

“Yes, sir, it seems to be.”

“You feel magnetized yet or whatever it is you feel?”

“No, not yet. And it would be better if we don’t talk about it, just let it happen.”

Chief Porter sighed. “I don’t know when I’m ever going to get used to this psychic stuff.”

“I never have,” I said. “Don’t expect I ever will.”

Strung between the boles of two palm trees in front of the Pico Mundo High School, a large banner declared GO, MONSTERS!

When I attended PMHS, the sports teams were called the Braves. Each cheerleader wore a headband with a feather. Subsequently, this was deemed an insult to local Indian tribes, though none of the Indians ever complained.

School administrators engineered the replacement of Braves with Gila Monsters. The reptile was said to be an ideal choice because it symbolized the endangered environment of the Mojave.

In football, basketball, baseball, track, and swimming, the Monsters haven’t equaled the winning record of the Braves. Most people blame it on the coaches.

I used to believe that all educated people knew an asteroid might one day strike the earth, destroying human civilization. But perhaps a lot of them haven’t heard about it yet.

As though reading my mind, Chief Porter said, “Could’ve been worse. The Mojave yellow-banded stink bug is an endangered species. They could’ve called the team Stink Bugs.”

“Left,” I suggested, and he turned at the next intersection.

“I figured if Simon was ever coming back here,” Chief Porter said, “he would’ve done it four months ago, when he was released from Folsom. We ran special patrols in the Jessup neighborhood during October and November.”

“Danny said they were taking precautions at the house. Better door locks. An upgraded security system.”

“So Simon was smart enough to wait. Gradually everyone let down their guard. Fact is, though, when the cancer took Carol, I didn’t expect Simon would come back to Pico Mundo.”

Seventeen years previously, jealous to the point of obsession, Simon Makepeace had become convinced that his young wife had been having an affair. He’d been wrong.

Certain that assignations had occurred in his own home, when he had been at work, Simon tried to coax the name of any male visitor from his then four-year-old son. Because there had been no visitor to identify, Danny had not been able to oblige. So Simon picked up the boy by the shoulders and tried to shake the name out of him.

Danny’s brittle bones snapped. He suffered fractures of two ribs, the left clavicle, the right humerus, the left humerus, the right radius, the right ulna, three metacarpals in his right hand.

When he couldn’t shake a name out of his son, Simon threw the boy down in disgust, breaking his right femur, his right tibia, and every tarsal in his right foot.

Carol had been grocery shopping at the time. Returning home, she found Danny alone, unconscious, bleeding, a shattered humerus protruding through the flesh of his right arm.

Aware that charges of child abuse would be filed against him, Simon had fled. He understood that his freedom might be measured in hours.

With less to lose and therefore with less to constrain him, he set out to take vengeance on the man whom he most suspected of being his wife’s lover. Because no lover existed, he merely perpetrated a second act of mindless violence.

Lewis Hallman, whom Carol had dated a few times before her marriage, was Simon’s prime suspect. Driving his Ford Explorer, he stalked Hallman until he caught him on foot, then ran him down and killed him.

In court, he claimed that his intention had been to frighten Lewis, not to murder him. This assertion seemed to be contradicted by the fact that after running down his victim, Simon had turned and driven over him a second time.

He expressed remorse. And self-loathing. He wept. He offered no defense except emotional immaturity. More than once, sitting at the defendant’s table, he prayed.

The prosecution failed to get him on second-degree murder. He was convicted of manslaughter.

If that particular jury could be reconstituted and polled, no doubt it would unanimously support the change from Braves to Gila Monsters.

“Turn right at the next corner,” I advised the chief.

As the consequence of a conviction for assault involving a violent altercation in prison, Simon Makepeace had served his full sentence for manslaughter and a shorter term for the second offense. He had not been paroled; therefore, on release, he had been free to consort with whomever he wished and to go wherever he wanted.

If he had returned to Pico Mundo, he was now holding his son captive.

In letters he had written from prison, Simon had judged Carol’s divorce and second marriage to be infidelity and betrayal. Men with his psychological profile frequently concluded that if they couldn’t have the women they wanted, then no one would have them.

Cancer had taken Carol from Wilbur Jessup and from Simon; but Simon might still have felt a need to punish the man who had taken his role as her lover.

Wherever Danny might be, he was in a desperate place.

Although neither as psychologically nor as physically vulnerable as he had been seventeen years ago, Danny was no match for Simon Makepeace. He could not protect himself.

“Let’s drive through Camp’s End,” I suggested.

Camp’s End is a ragged, burnt-out neighborhood where bright dreams go to die and dark dreams are too often born. Other trouble had more than once led me to those streets.

As the chief accelerated and drove with greater purpose, I said, “If it’s Simon, he won’t put up with Danny very long. I’m surprised he didn’t kill him at the house, when he killed Dr. Jessup.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Simon never quite believed he could have produced a son with a birth defect. The osteogenesis imperfecta suggested to him that Carol had cheated on him.”

“So every time he looks at Danny …” The chief didn’t need to finish the thought. “The boy’s a wise-ass, but I’ve always liked him.”

Descending toward the west, the moon had yellowed. Soon it might be orange, a jack-o’-lantern out of season.

7

EVEN STREET LAMPS WITH TIME-OCHERED glass, even moonlight failed to smooth a layer of romance over the crumbling stucco, the warped clapboard, and the peeling paint of the houses in Camp’s End. A porch roof swagged. A zigzag of tape bandaged a wound in window glass.

While I waited for inspiration, Chief Porter cruised the streets as if conducting a standard patrol.

“Since you’ve not been working at the Grille, how do you fill the hours these days?”

“I read quite a bit.”

“Books are a blessing.”

“And I think a lot more than I used to.”

“I wouldn’t recommend thinking too much.”

“I don’t carry it so far as brooding.”

“Even pondering is sometimes too far.”

Next door to an unweeded lawn lay a dead lawn, which itself lay next door to a lawn in which grass had long ago been replaced by pea gravel.

Skilled landscapers had rarely touched the trees in this neighborhood. What had not been permanently misshapen by bad pruning had instead been allowed to grow unchecked.

“I wish I could believe in reincarnation,” I said.

“Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don’t make me go through high school again.”

I said, “If there’s something we want so bad in this life but we can’t have it, maybe we could get it the next time around.”

“Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness, and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we’re here to learn.”

“You once told me that we’re here to eat all the good Mexican food we can,” I reminded him, “and when we’ve had our fill, it’s time to move on.”

“I don’t recollect being taught that in Sunday school,” Chief Porter said. “So it’s possible I’d consumed two or three bottles of Negra Modelo before that theological insight occurred to me.”

“It would be hard to accept a life here in Camp’s End without some bitterness,” I said.

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

Where an owner showed pride in his home, the fresh paint, the upright picket fence, the well-barbered shrubs only emphasized the debris, decay, and dilapidation that characterized the surrounding properties. Each island of order did not offer hope of a community-wide transformation, but instead seemed to be a dike that could not long hold back an inevitably rising tide of chaos.

These mean streets made me uneasy, but though we cruised them for some time, I didn’t feel that we were close to Danny and Simon.

At my suggestion, we headed for a more welcoming neighborhood, and the chief said, “There’s worse lives than those in Camp’s End. Some are even content here. Probably some Camp Enders could teach us a thing or two about happiness.”

“I’m happy,” I assured him.

For a block or so, he didn’t say anything. Then: “You’re at peace, son. There’s a big difference.”

“Which would be what?”

“If you’re still, and if you don’t hope too much, peace will come to you. It’s a grace. But you have to choose happiness.”

“It’s that easy, is it? Just choose?”

“Making the decision to choose isn’t always easy.”

I said, “This sounds like you’ve been thinking too much.”

“We sometimes take refuge in misery, a strange kind of comfort.”

Although he paused, I said nothing.

He continued: “But no matter what happens in life, happiness is there for us, waiting to be embraced.”

“Sir, did this come to you after three bottles of Negra Modelo, or was it four?”

“It must have been three. I never drink as many as four.”

By the time we were circling through the heart of town, I had decided that for whatever reason, psychic magnetism wasn’t working. Maybe I needed to be driving. Maybe the shock from the Taser had temporarily shorted my psychic circuits.

Or maybe Danny was already dead, and subconsciously I resisted being drawn to him, only to find him brutalized.

At my request, at 4:04 A.M. according to the Bank of America clock, Chief Porter pulled to the curb to let me out at the north side of Memorial Park, around which the streets define a town square.

“Looks like I’m not going to be any help with this one,” I said.

In the past, I’ve had reason to suspect that when a situation involves people especially close to me, about whom I have the most intense personal feelings, my gifts do not serve me as well as they do when there is even a slight degree of emotional detachment. Maybe feelings interfere with psychic function, as also might a migraine headache or drunkenness.

Danny Jessup was as close to me as a brother could have been. I loved him.

Assuming that my paranormal talents have a higher source than genetic mutation, perhaps the explanation for uneven function is more profound. This limitation might be for the purpose of preventing the exploitation of these talents toward selfish ends; but more likely, fallibility is meant to keep me humble.

If humility is the lesson, I have learned it well. More than a few days have dawned in which an awareness of my limitations filled me with a gentle resignation that, till afternoon or even twilight, kept me in bed as effectively as would have shackles and hundred-pound lead weights.

As I opened the car door, Chief Porter said, “You sure you don’t want me to drive you home?”

“No, thank you, sir. I’m awake, fully charged, and hungry. I’m going to be the first through the door for breakfast at the Grille.”

“They don’t open till six.”

I got out, bent down, looked in at him. “I’ll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.”

“We don’t have pigeons.”

“Then I’ll feed the pterodactyls.”

“What you’re gonna do is sit in the park and think.”

“No, sir, I promise I won’t.”

I closed the door. The patrol car pulled away from the curb.

After watching the chief drive out of sight, I entered the park, sat on a bench, and broke my promise.

8

AROUND THE TOWN SQUARE, CAST-IRON lampposts, painted black, were crowned with three globes each.

At the center of Memorial Park, a handsome bronze statue of three soldiers—dating from World War II—was usually illuminated, but at the moment it stood in darkness. The spotlight had probably been vandalized.

Recently a small but determined group of citizens had been demanding that the statue be replaced, on the grounds that it was militaristic. They wanted Memorial Park to memorialize a man of peace.

The suggestions for the subject of the new memorial ranged from Gandhi to Woodrow Wilson, to Yasir Arafat.

Someone had proposed that a statue of Gandhi should be modeled after Ben Kingsley, who had played the great man in the movie. Then perhaps the actor could be induced to be present at the unveiling.

This had led Terri Stambaugh, my friend and the owner of the Grille, to suggest that a statue of Gandhi should be modeled after Brad Pitt in the hope that he would then attend the ceremony, which would be a big deal by Pico Mundo standards.

At the same town meeting, Ozzie Boone had offered himself as the subject of the memorial. “Men of my formidable diameter are never sent to war,” he said, “and if everyone were as fat as I am, there could be no armies.”

Some had taken this as mockery, but others had found merit in the idea.

Perhaps someday the current statue will be replaced by one of a very fat Gandhi modeled after Johnny Depp, but for the moment, the soldiers remain. In darkness.

Old jacarandas, drenched with purple flowers come spring, line the main streets downtown, but Memorial Park boasts magnificent phoenix palms; under the fronds of one, I settled on a bench, facing the street. The nearest street lamp was not near, and the tree shaded me from the increasingly ruddy moonlight.

Although I sat in gloom, Elvis found me. He materialized in the act of sitting beside me.

He was dressed in an army uniform dating from the late 1950s. I can’t say with any authority whether it was actually a uniform from his service in the military or if it might have been a costume that he wore in G.I. Blues, which had been filmed, edited, and released within five months of his leaving the army in 1960.

All the other lingering dead of my acquaintance appear in the clothes in which they died. Only Elvis manifests in whatever wardrobe he fancies at the moment.

Perhaps he meant to express solidarity with those who wished to preserve the statue of the soldiers. Or he just thought he looked cool in army khaki, which he did.

Few people have lived so publicly that their lives can reliably be chronicled day by day. Elvis is one of those.

Because even his mundane activities have been so thoroughly documented, we can be all but certain that he never visited Pico Mundo while alive. He never passed through on a train, never dated a girl from here, and had no other connection whatsoever with our town.

Why he should choose to haunt this well-fried corner of the Mojave instead of Graceland, where he died, I did not know. I had asked him, but the rule of silence among the dead was one that he would not break.

Occasionally, usually on an evening when we sit in my living room and listen to his best music, which we do a lot lately, I try to engage him in conversation. I’ve suggested that he use a form of sign language to reply: thumbs-up for yes, thumbs-down for no. …

He just looks at me with those heavy-lidded, half-bruised eyes, even bluer than they appear in his movies, and keeps his secrets to himself. Often he’ll smile and wink. Or give me a playful punch on the arm. Or pat my knee.

He’s an affable apparition.

Here on the park bench, he raised his eyebrows and shook his head as if to say that my propensity for getting in trouble never ceased to amaze him.

I used to think that he was reluctant to leave this world because people here had been so good to him, had loved him in such numbers. Even though he had lost his way badly as a performer and had become addicted to numerous prescription medications, he had been at the height of his fame when he died, and only forty-two.

Lately, I’ve evolved another theory. When I have the nerve, I’ll propose it to him.

If I’ve got it right, I think he’ll weep when he hears it. He sometimes does weep.

Now the King of Rock ’n’ Roll leaned forward on the bench, peered west, and cocked his head as if listening.

I heard nothing but the faint thrum of wings as bats fished the air above for moths.

Still gazing along the empty street, Elvis raised both hands palms-up and made come-to-me gestures, as though inviting someone to join us.

From a distance, I heard an engine, a vehicle larger than a car, approaching.

Elvis winked at me, as if to say that I was engaged in psychic magnetism even if I didn’t realize it. Instead of cruising in search, perhaps I had settled where I knew—somehow—that my quarry would cruise to me.

Two blocks away, a dusty white-paneled Ford van turned the corner. It came toward us slowly, as if the driver might be looking for something.

Elvis put a hand on my arm, warning me to remain seated in the shrouding shadows of the phoenix palm.

Light from a street lamp washed the windshield, sluiced through the interior of the van as it passed us. Behind the wheel was the snaky man who had Tasered me.

Without realizing that I moved, I had sprung to my feet in surprise.

My movement didn’t catch the driver’s attention. He drove past and turned left at the corner.

I ran into the street, leaving Sergeant Presley on the bench and the bats to their airborne feast.

9

THE VAN SWUNG OUT OF SIGHT AT THE corner, and I ran in its windless wake, not because I am brave, which I am not, neither because I am addicted to danger, which I also am not, but because inaction is not the mother of redemption.

When I reached the cross street, I saw the Ford disappearing into an alley half a block away. I had lost ground. I sprinted.

When I reached the mouth of the alley, the way ahead lay dark, the street brighter behind me, with the consequence that I stood as silhouetted as a pistol-range target, but it wasn’t a trap. No one shot at me.

Before I arrived, the van had turned left and vanished into an intersecting passage. I knew where it had gone only because the wall of the corner building blushed with the backwash of taillights.

Racing after that fading red trace, certain that I was gaining now because they had to slow to take the tight turn, I fumbled the cell phone from my pocket.

When I arrived where alley met alley, the van had vanished, also every glimmer and glow of it. Surprised, I looked up, half expecting to see it levitating into the desert sky.

I speed-dialed Chief Porter’s mobile number—and discovered that no charge was left in the battery. I hadn’t plugged it in overnight.

Dumpsters in starlight, hulking and odorous, bracketed back entrances to restaurants and shops. Most of the wire-caged security lamps, managed by timers, had switched off in this last hour before dawn.

Some of the two- and three-story buildings featured roll-up doors. Behind most would be small receiving rooms for deliveries of merchandise and supplies; only a few might be garages, but I had no way to determine which they were.

Pocketing the useless phone, I hurried forward a few steps. Then I halted: unsettled, uncertain.

Holding my breath, I listened. I heard only my storming heart, the thunder of my blood, no engine either idling or receding, no doors opening or closing, no voices.

I had been running. I couldn’t hold my breath for long. The echo of my exhalation traveled the narrow throat of the alleyway.

At the nearest of the big doors, I put my right ear to the corrugated steel. The space beyond seemed to be as soundless as a vacuum.

Crossing and recrossing the alley, from roll-up to roll-up, I heard no clue, saw no evidence, but felt hope ticking away.

I thought of the snake man driving. Danny must have been in back, with Simon.

Again I was running. Out of the alley, into the next street, right to the intersection, left onto Palomino Avenue, before I fully understood that I had given myself to psychic magnetism once more, or rather that it had seized me.

As reliably as a homing pigeon returns to its dovecote, a dray horse to its stable, a bee to its hive, I sought not home and hearth, but trouble. I left Palomino Avenue for another alley, and surprised three cats into hissing flight.

The boom of a gun startled me more than I had frightened the cats. I almost tucked and rolled, but instead dodged between two Dumpsters, my back to a brick wall.

Echoes of echoes deceived the ear, concealed the source. The report had been loud, most likely a shotgun blast. But I couldn’t determine the point of origin.

I had no weapon at hand. A dead cell phone isn’t much of a blunt instrument.

In my strange and dangerous life, I have only once resorted to a gun. I shot a man with it. He had been killing people with a gun of his own.

Shooting him dead saved lives. I have no intellectual or moral argument with the use of firearms any more than I do with the use of spoons or socket wrenches.

My problem with guns is emotional. They fascinate my mother. In my childhood, she made much grim use of a pistol, as I have recounted in a previous manuscript.

I cannot easily separate the rightful use of a gun from the sick purpose to which she put hers. In my hand, a firearm feels as if it has a life of its own, a cold and squamous kind of life, and also a wicked intent too slippery to control.

One day my aversion to firearms might be the death of me. But I’ve never been under the illusion that I will live forever. If not a gun, a germ will get me, a poison or a pickax.

After huddling between the Dumpsters for a minute, perhaps two, I came to the conclusion that the shotgun blast had not been meant for me. If I’d been seen and marked for death, the shooter would have approached without delay, pumping another round into the chamber and then into me.

Above some of these downtown businesses were apartments. Lights had bloomed in a few of them, the shotgun having made moot the later settings of alarm clocks.

On the move again, I found myself drawn to the next intersection of alleyways, then left without hesitation. Less than half a block ahead stood the white van, this side of the kitchen entrance to the Blue Moon Cafe.

Beside the Blue Moon is a parking lot that runs through to the main street. The van appeared to have been abandoned at the rear of this lot, nose out toward the alleyway.

Both front doors stood open, spilling light, no one visible beyond the windshield. As I drew cautiously closer, I heard the engine idling.

This suggested that they had fled in haste. Or intended to return for a quick getaway.

The Blue Moon doesn’t serve breakfast, only lunch and dinner. Kitchen workers do not begin to arrive until a couple hours after dawn. The cafe should have been locked. I doubted that Simon had shot his way inside to raid the restaurant refrigerators.

There are easier ways to get a cold chicken leg, though maybe none quicker.

I couldn’t imagine where they had gone—or why they abandoned the van if in fact they were not returning.

From one of the second-floor lighted apartment windows, an elderly woman in a blue robe gazed down. She appeared less alarmed than curious.

I eased to the passenger’s side of the vehicle, slowly circled toward the rear.

At the back, the pair of doors on the cargo hold also stood open. Interior light revealed no one inside.

Sirens rose in the night, approaching.

I wondered who had fired the shotgun, at whom, and why.

As deformed and vulnerable as he is, Danny couldn’t have wrested the weapon away from his tormentors. Even if he had tried to use the shotgun, the recoil would have broken his shoulder, if not also one of his arms.

Turning in a circle, mystified, I wondered what had happened to my friend with brittle bones.

10

P. OSWALD BOONE, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND culinary black belt in white silk pajamas, whom I’d recently awakened, moved with the grace and swiftness of a dojo master as he whipped up breakfast in the kitchen of his Craftsman-style house.

At times his weight scares me, and I worry about his suffering heart. But when he’s cooking, he seems weightless, floating, like those gravity-defying warriors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—though he didn’t actually bound over the center island.

Watching him that February morning, I considered that if he had spent his life killing himself with food, it might also be true that without the solace and refuge of food, he would have been dead long ago. Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries, and Ozzie’s more than most.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

He is a writer, with two successful series of mystery novels and numerous nonfiction books to his credit. He is so productive that the day may come when one copy of each of his books, stacked on a scale, will surpass his body weight.

Because he had assured me that writing would prove to be psychic chemotherapy effective against psychological tumors, I had written my true story of loss and perseverance—and had put it in a drawer, at peace if not happy. To his dismay, I had told him that I was done with writing.

I believed it, too. Now here I am again, putting words to paper, serving as my own psychological oncologist.

Perhaps in time I will follow Ozzie’s every example, and weigh four hundred pounds. I won’t be able to run with ghosts and slip down dark alleyways in quite the swift and stealthy fashion that I do now; but perhaps children will be amused by my hippopotamic heroics, and no one will disagree that bringing laughter to children in a dark world is admirable.

While Ozzie cooked, I told him about Dr. Jessup and all that had occurred since the dead radiologist had come to me in the middle of the night. Although as I recounted events I worried about Danny, I worried as well about Terrible Chester.

Terrible Chester, the cat about which every dog has nightmares, allows Ozzie to live with him. Ozzie cherishes this feline no less than he loves food and books.

Although Terrible Chester has never clawed me with the ferocity of which I believe he is capable, he has more than once urinated on my shoes. Ozzie says this is an expression of affection. This theory holds that the cat is marking me with his scent to identify me as an approved member of his family.

I have noticed that when Terrible Chester wishes to express his affection for Ozzie, he does so by cuddling and purring.

Since Ozzie opened the front door to me, as we passed through the house, and during the time that I sat in the kitchen, I had not seen Terrible Chester. This made me nervous. My shoes were new.

He is a big cat, so fearless and self-impressed that he disdains sneaking. He doesn’t creep into a room, but always makes an entrance. Although he expects to be the center of attention, he projects an air of indifference—even contempt—that makes it clear he wishes for the most part to be adored from a distance.

Although he does not sneak, he can appear at your shoes suddenly and by surprise. The first indication of trouble can be a briefly mystifying warm dampness of the toes.

Until Ozzie and I moved to the back porch to take our breakfast al fresco, I kept my feet off the floor, on a chair rung.

The porch overlooks a lawn and a half-acre woodlet of laurels, podocarpus, and graceful California peppers. In the golden morning sunshine, songbirds trilled and death seemed like a myth.

Had the table not been a sturdy redwood model, it would have groaned under the plates of lobster omelets, bowls of potatoes au gratin, stacks of toast, bagels, Danish, cinnamon rolls, pitchers of orange juice and milk, pots of coffee and cocoa. …

“‘What is food to one is to others bitter poison,’” Ozzie quoted happily, toasting me with a raised forkful of omelet.

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Lucretius, who wrote before the birth of Christ. Lad, I promise you this—I shall never be one of these health wimps who views a pint of heavy cream with the same horror that saner men reserve for atomic weapons.”

“Sir, those of us who care about you would suggest that vanilla soy milk isn’t the abomination you say it is.”

“I do not permit blasphemy, the F-word, or obscenities such as soy milk at my table. Consider yourself chastised.”

“I stopped in Gelato Italiano the other day. They now have some flavors with half the fat.”

He said, “The horses stabled at our local racetrack produce tons of manure each week, and I don’t stock my freezer with that, either. So where does Wyatt Porter think Danny might be?”

“Most likely Simon earlier stashed a second set of wheels in the lot beside the Blue Moon, in case things went bad at the Jessup house and someone saw him leaving there in the van.”

“But no one saw the van at the Jessup house, so it wasn’t a hot vehicle.”

“No.”

“Yet he switched at the Blue Moon anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Does that make sense to you?”

“It makes more sense than anything else.”

“For sixteen years, he remained obsessed with Carol, so obsessed that he wanted Dr. Jessup dead for having married her.”

“So it seems.”

“What does he want with Danny?”

“I don’t know.”

“Simon doesn’t seem like the type who’d yearn for an emotionally satisfying father-son relationship.”

“It doesn’t fit the profile,” I agreed.

“How’s your omelet?”

“Fantastic, sir.”

“There’s cream in it, and butter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Also parsley. I’m not opposed to a portion of green vegetables now and then. Roadblocks won’t be effective if Simon’s second vehicle has four-wheel drive and he goes overland.”

“The sheriff’s department is assisting with aerial patrols.”

“Do you have any sense whether Danny’s still in Pico Mundo?”

“I get this strange feeling.”

“Strange—how?”

“A wrongness.”

“A wrongness?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, everything’s crystal-clear now.”

“Sorry. I don’t know. I can’t be specific.”

“He isn’t … dead?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“More orange juice? It’s fresh-squeezed.”

As he poured, I said, “Sir, I’ve been wondering—where’s Terrible Chester?”

“Watching you,” he said, and pointed.

When I turned in my chair, I saw the cat ten feet behind me and above, perched on an exposed ceiling truss that supported the porch roof.

He is reddish-orange with black markings. His eyes are as green as emeralds fired by sunlight.

Ordinarily, Terrible Chester favors me—or anyone—with only a casual glance, as if human beings bore him beyond tolerance. With his eyes and attitude, he can express a dismissive judgment of humanity, a contempt, that even a minimalist writer like Cormac McCarthy would need twenty pages to convey.

Never previously had I been an object of intense interest to Chester. Now he held my gaze, did not look away, did not blink, and seemed to find me to be as fascinating as a three-headed extraterrestrial.

Although he didn’t appear to be poised to pounce, I did not feel comfortable turning my back on this formidable cat; however, I felt less comfortable engaging in a staring match with him. He would not look away from me.

When I faced the table again, Ozzie was taking the liberty of spooning another serving of potatoes onto my plate.

I said, “He’s never stared at me like that before.”

“He was staring at you much the same way the entire time we were in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t see him in the kitchen.”

“When you weren’t looking, he crept into the room, pawed open a cabinet door, and hid under the sink.”

“He must’ve been quick.”

“Oh, Odd, he was a prince of cats, lightning-quick and quiet. I was so proud of him. Once inside the cabinet, he held the door ajar with his body and watched you from concealment.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I wanted to see what he would do next.”

“Most likely it involves shoes and urine.”

“I don’t think so,” Ozzie said. “This is all new.”

“Is he still up there on the beam?”

“Yes.”

“And still watching me?”

“Intently. Would you like a Danish?”

“I’ve sort of lost my appetite.”

“Don’t be silly, lad. Because of Chester?”

“He has something to do with it. I’m remembering once before when he was this intense.”

“Refresh my memory.”

I couldn’t prevent my voice from thickening. “August … and all of that.”

Ozzie stabbed the air with a fork: “Oh. You mean, the ghost.”

The previous August, I had discovered that, like me, Terrible Chester can see those troubled souls who linger this side of death. He had regarded that spirit no less intently than he now studied me.

“You aren’t dead,” Ozzie assured me. “You’re as solid as this redwood table, though not as solid as me.”

“Maybe Chester knows something I don’t.”

“Dear Odd, because you’re such a naive young man in some ways, I’m sure there’s a great deal he knows that you don’t. What did you have in mind?”

“Like that my time’s soon up.”

“I’m sure it’s something less apocalyptic.”

“Such as?”

“Are you carrying any dead mice in your pockets?”

“Just a dead cell phone.”

Ozzie studied me solemnly. He was genuinely concerned. At the same time, he is too good a friend ever to coddle me.

“Well,” he said, “if your time is soon up, all the more reason to have a Danish. The one with pineapple and cheese would be the perfect thing with which to end a last meal.”

11

WHEN I SUGGESTED THAT I HELP CLEAN OFF the table and wash the dishes before going, Little Ozzie—who is actually fifty pounds heavier than his father, Big Ozzie—dismissed the suggestion by gesturing emphatically with a slice of buttered toast.

“We’ve only been sitting here forty minutes. I’m never at the morning table less than an hour and a half. I do some of my finest plotting over breakfast coffee and raisin brioche.”

“You should write a series set in the culinary world.”

“Already, bookstore shelves overflow with mysteries about chefs who are detectives, food critics who are detectives. …”

One of Ozzie’s series features a hugely obese detective with a slim sexy wife who adores him. Ozzie has never married.

His other series is about a likable female detective with lots of neuroses—and bulimia. Ozzie is about as likely to develop bulimia himself as he is likely to change his wardrobe entirely to spandex.

“I’ve considered,” he said, “starting a series about a detective who is a pet communicator.”

“One of those people who claims to be able to talk to animals?”

“Yes, but he would be the real thing.”

“So animals would help him solve crimes?” I asked.

“They would, yes, but they’d also complicate his cases. Dogs would almost always tell him the truth, but birds would often lie, and guinea pigs would be earnest but prone to exaggeration.”

“I feel for the guy already.”

In silence, Ozzie spread lemon marmalade on brioche, while I picked at the pineapple-cheese Danish with a fork.

I needed to leave. I needed to do something. Sitting still another moment seemed intolerable.

I nibbled some Danish.

We seldom sit in silence. He’s never at a loss for words; I can usually find a few of my own.

After a minute or two, I realized that Ozzie was staring at me no less intently than was Terrible Chester.

I had attributed this lull in the conversation to his need to chew. Now I realized this could not be the case.

Brioche is made with eggs, yeast, and butter. It melts in your mouth with very little chewing.

Ozzie had fallen silent because he was brooding. And he was brooding about me.

“What?” I asked.

“You didn’t come here for breakfast,” he said.

“Certainly not for this much breakfast.”

“And you didn’t come here to tell me about Wilbur Jessup, or about Danny.”

“Well, yes, that is why I came, sir.”

“Then you’ve told me, and you obviously don’t want that Danish, so I suppose you’ll be going now.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “I should be going,” but I didn’t get up from my chair.

Pouring a fragrant Colombian blend from a thermos shaped like a coffeepot, Ozzie did not once shift his eyes from me.

“I’ve never known you to be deceitful with anyone, Odd.”

“I assure you I can dissemble with the best of them, sir.”

“No, you can’t. You’re a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.”

I looked away from him—and discovered that Terrible Chester had descended from the roof beams. The cat sat on the top porch step, still staring intently at me.

“But more amazing still,” Ozzie continued, “I’ve seldom known you to indulge in self-deceit.”

“When will I be canonized, sir?”

“Smart-mouthing your elders will forever keep you out of the company of saints.”

“Darn. I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.”

“As for self-deceit, most people find it as essential for survival as air. You rarely indulge in it. Yet you insist you came here just to tell me about Wilbur and Danny.”

“Have I been insisting?”

“Not with conviction.”

“Why do you think I came here?” I asked.

“You’ve always mistaken my absolute self-assurance for profound thought,” he said without hesitation, “so when you’re looking for deep insight, you seek an audience with me.”

“You mean all the profound insights you’ve given me over the years were actually shallow?”

“Of course they were, dear Odd. Like you, I’m only human, even if I have eleven fingers.”

He does have eleven, six on his left hand. He says one in ninety thousand babies is born with this affliction. Surgeons routinely amputate the unneeded digit.

For some reason that Ozzie has never shared with me, his parents refused permission for the surgery. He was the fascination of other children: the eleven-fingered boy; eventually, the eleven-fingered fat boy; and then the eleven-fingered fat boy with the withering wit.

“As shallow as my insights might have been,” he said, “they were sincerely offered.”

“That’s some comfort, I guess.”

“Anyway, you came here today with a burning philosophical question that’s troubling you, but it troubles you so much you don’t want to ask, after all.”

“No, that isn’t it,” I said.

I looked at the congealing remains of my lobster omelet. At Terrible Chester. At the lawn. At the small woods so green in the morning sun.

Ozzie’s moon-round face could be smug and loving at the same time. His eyes twinkled with an expectation of being proved right.

At last I said, “You know Ernie and Pooka Ying.”

“Lovely people.”

“The tree in their backyard …”

“The brugmansia. It’s a magnificent specimen.”

“Everything about it is deadly, every root and leaf.”

Ozzie smiled as Buddha would have smiled if Buddha had written mystery novels and had relished exotic methods of murder. He nodded approvingly. “Exquisitely poisonous, yes.”

“Why would nice people like Ernie and Pooka want to grow such a deadly tree?”

“For one thing, because it’s beautiful, especially when it’s in flower.”

“The flowers are toxic, too.”

After popping a final morsel of marmaladed brioche into his mouth and savoring it, Ozzie licked his lips and said, “One of those enormous blooms contains sufficient poison, if properly extracted, to kill perhaps a third of the people in Pico Mundo.”

“It seems reckless, even perverse, to spend so much time and effort nurturing such a deadly thing.”

“Does Ernie Ying strike you as a reckless and perverse man?”

“Just the opposite.”

“Ah, then Pooka must be the monster. Her self-deprecating manner must disguise a heart of the most malevolent intention.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it seems to me that a friend might not take such pleasure in making fun of me as you do.”

“Dear Odd, if one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends. How else would one learn to avoid saying those things that would elicit laughter from strangers? The mockery of friends is affectionate, and inoculates against foolishness.”

“That sure sounds profound,” I said.

“Medium shallow,” he assured me. “May I educate you, lad?”

“You can try.”

“There’s nothing reckless about growing the brugmansia. Equally poisonous plants are everywhere in Pico Mundo.”

I was dubious. “Everywhere?”

“You’re so busy with the supernatural world that you know too little about the natural.”

“I don’t get much time to go bowling, either.”

“Those flowering oleander hedges all over town? Oleander in Sanskrit means ‘horse killer.’ Every part of the plant is deadly.”

“I like the variety with red flowers.”

“If you burn it, the smoke is poisonous,” Ozzie said. “If bees spend too much time with oleander, the honey will kill you. Azaleas are equally fatal.”

“Everybody plants azaleas.”

“Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there’s savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed … all here in Pico Mundo.”

“And we call her Mother Nature.”

“There’s nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either,” Ozzie said.

“But, sir, Ernie and Pooka Ying know the brugmansia is deadly. In fact, its deadliness is why they planted and nurtured it.”

“Think of it as a Zen thing.”

“I would—if I knew what that meant.”

“Ernie and Pooka seek to understand death and to master their fear of it by domesticating it in the form of the brugmansia.”

“That sounds medium shallow.”

“No. That’s actually profound.”

Although I didn’t want the Danish, I picked it up and took a huge bite. I poured coffee into a mug, to have something that I could hold.

I couldn’t sit there any longer doing nothing. I felt that if my hands weren’t busy, I’d start tearing at things.

“Why,” I wondered, “do people tolerate murder?”

“Last time I looked, it was against the law.”

“Simon Makepeace killed once. And they let him out.”

“The law isn’t perfect.”

“You should’ve seen Dr. Jessup’s body.”

“Not necessary. I have a novelist’s imagination.”

As my hands had gotten busy with Danish I didn’t want and with coffee I didn’t drink, Ozzie’s hands had gone still. They were folded on the table in front of him.

“Sir, I often think about all those people, shot. …”

He did not ask to whom I was referring. He knew that I meant the forty-one shot at the mall the previous August, the nineteen dead.

I said, “Haven’t watched or read the news in a long time. But people talk about what’s happening in the world, so I hear things.”

“Just remember, the news isn’t life. Reporters have a saying—‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Violence sells, so violence gets reported.”

“But why does bad news sell so much better than good?”

He sighed and leaned back in his chair, which creaked. “We’re getting close now.”

“Close to what?”

“To the question that brought you here.”

“That burning philosophical thing? No, sir, there isn’t one. I’m just … rambling.”

“Ramble for me, then.”

“What’s wrong with people?”

“Which people?”

“Humanity, I mean. What’s wrong with humanity?”

“That was a very short ramble indeed.”

“Sir?”

“Your lips should feel scorched. The burning question just fell from them. It’s quite a puzzler to put to another mortal.”

“Yes, sir. But I’ll be happy even with one of your standard shallow answers.”

“The correct question has three equal parts. What’s wrong with humanity? Then … what’s wrong with nature, with its poison plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods? And last … what’s wrong with cosmic time, as we know it, which steals everything from us?”

Ozzie may assert that I mistake his absolute self-confidence for profundity; but I do not. He is truly wise. Evidently, however, life has taught him that the wise make targets of themselves.

A lesser mind might try to hide its brilliance behind a mask of stupidity. He chooses, instead, to conceal his true wisdom under a flamboyant pretense of erudition that he is pleased to let people think is the best of him.

“Those three questions,” he said, “have the same answer.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s no good if I just give it to you. You’ll resist it—and waste years of your life looking for an answer that pleases you more. When you arrive at it on your own, however, you’ll be convinced by it.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

He smiled and shrugged.

“I come here with a burning philosophical question, and all I get is breakfast?”

“You got quite a lot of breakfast,” he said. “I will tell you this much—you already know the answer and always have. You don’t have to discover it so much as recognize it.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes, you’re a frustrating man.”

“Yes, but I’m always gloriously fat and fun to look at.”

“You can be as mystical as a damn …” Terrible Chester still sat on the top porch step, riveted by me. “… as mystical as a damn cat.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t meant as one.” I pushed my chair away from the table. “I’d better go.”

As usual when I leave, he insisted on struggling to his feet. I am always concerned that the effort to get up will spike his blood pressure into the stroke zone and fell him on the spot.

He hugged me, and I hugged him, which we always do on parting, as if we do not expect to see each other again.

I wonder if sometimes the distribution of souls gets screwed up, and the wrong spirit ends up in the wrong baby. I suppose this is blasphemous. But then, with my smart mouth, I’ve already blown any chance of sainthood.

Surely, with his kind heart, Ozzie was meant for slim good health and ten fingers. And my life would make more sense if I had been his son instead of the offspring of the troubled parents who had failed me.

When the hug was done, he said, “What now?”

“I don’t know. I never do. It comes to me.”

Chester did not pee on my shoes.

I walked to the end of the deep yard, through the woodlet, and left by the gate in the back fence.

12

NOT ENTIRELY TO MY SURPRISE, AGAIN THE Blue Moon Cafe.

The cloak of night had dressed the alleyway with some romance, but daylight had stripped it of the pretense of beauty. This was not a realm of filth and vermin; it was merely gray, grim, drab, and unwelcoming.

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. For the most part, this is a consequence of limited resources, budgets.

Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about the condition of their souls.

Although I’m not as cynical as Danny, and although I don’t think the analogy between back doors and souls is well drawn, I’ll admit to seeing some truth in what he says.

What I could not see, here in the pale-lemon morning light, was any clue that might lead me a single step closer to him or to his psychotic father.

The police had done their work and gone. The Ford van had been hauled away.

I hadn’t come here with the expectation that I would find a clue overlooked by the authorities and, shifting into Sherlock, would track down the bad guys in a rush of deductive reasoning.

I returned because this was where my sixth sense had failed me. I hoped to find it again, as though it were a spool of ribbon that I’d dropped and that had rolled out of sight. If I could locate the loose end of the ribbon, I could follow it to the spool.

Opposite the kitchen entrance of the cafe was the second-floor window from which the elderly woman in the blue robe had watched as I had approached the van only hours ago. The drapes were shut.

Briefly I considered having a word with her. But she had already been interviewed by the police. They are far more skilled than I am at teasing valuable observations from witnesses.

I walked slowly north to the end of the block. Then I turned and walked south, past the Blue Moon.

Trucks were angled between the Dumpsters; early deliveries were being received, inspected, inventoried. Shopkeepers, almost an hour ahead of their employees, were busy at the rear entrances of their establishments.

Death came, Death went, but commerce flowed eternal.

A few people noticed me. I knew none of them well, some of them not at all.

The character of their recognition was uncomfortably familiar to me. They knew me as the hero, as the guy who stopped the lunatic who had shot all those people the previous August.

Forty-one were shot. Some were crippled for life, disfigured. Nineteen died.

I might have prevented all of it. Then I might have been a hero.

Chief Porter says hundreds would have perished if I hadn’t acted when I did, how I did. But the potential victims, those spared, do not seem real to me.

Only the dead seem real.

None of them have lingered. They all moved on.

But too many nights I see them in my dreams. They appear as they were in life, and as they might have been if they had survived.

On those nights, I wake with a sense of loss so terrible that I would prefer not ever to wake again. But I do wake, and I go on, for that is what the daughter of Cassiopeia, one of the nineteen, would want me to do, would expect me to do.

I have a destiny that I must earn. I live to earn it, and then to die.

The only benefit of being tagged a hero is that you are regarded by most people with some degree of awe and that, by playing to this awe, by wearing a somber expression and avoiding eye contact, you can almost always ensure that your privacy will be respected.

Wandering the alleyway, occasionally observed but undisturbed, I came to a narrow undeveloped lot. A chain-link fence restricted access.

I tried the gate. Locked.

A sign declared MARAVILLA COUNTY FLOODCONTROL PROJECT, and in red letters warned AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Here I discovered the unspooled ribbon of my sixth sense. Touching the chain-link gate, I felt certain that Danny had gone this way.

A lock would be no impediment to a determined fugitive like Simon Makepeace, whose criminal skills had been enhanced by years of prison learning.

Beyond the fence, in the center of the lot, stood a ten-foot-square slump-stone building with a concrete barrel-tile roof. The two plank doors on the front of this structure were no doubt also locked, but the hardware looked ancient.

If Danny had been forced through this gate and through those doors, as I sensed he had been, Simon had not chosen this route on impulse. This had been part of his plan.

Or perhaps he had intended to retreat here only if things went badly at Dr. Jessup’s place. Because of my timely arrival at the radiologist’s house and because of Chief Porter’s decision to block both highways, they had come here.

After parking in the Blue Moon lot, Simon had not put Danny in another vehicle. They had instead gone through this gate, through those doors, and down into a world below Pico Mundo, a world that I knew existed but that I had never visited.

My first impulse was to reach Chief Porter and to share what I intuited.

Turning away from the fence, I felt restrained by a subsequent intuition: Danny’s situation was so tenuous that a traditional search party, pursuing them into the depths, would likely be the death of him.

Furthermore, I sensed that while his situation might be grave, he was not in imminent danger. In this particular chase, speed wasn’t as important as stealth, and the pursuit would be successful only if I remained acutely observant of every detail the trail provided.

I had no way of knowing any of this to be true. I felt it in a half-assed precognitive way that is far more than a hunch but far short of an unequivocal vision.

Why I see the dead but cannot hear from them, why I can seek with psychic magnetism and sometimes find, but only sometimes, why I sense the looming threat but not its details, I do not know. Perhaps nothing in this broken world can be pure or of a piece, unfractured. Or perhaps I haven’t learned to harness all the power I possess.

One of my most bitter regrets from the previous August is that in the rush and tumble of events, I had at times relied on reason when gut feelings would have served me better.

Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin—but in this world a long fall will always end in a hard impact.

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and the irrational. In the past, my tendency has been to err on the side of logic, at the expense of faith—faith in myself and in the Source of my gift.

If I failed Danny, as I believed that I had failed others the previous August, I would surely come to despise myself. In failure, I would resent having been given the gift that defines me. If my destiny can be fulfilled only through the use of my sixth sense, too great a loss of self-respect and self-confidence would lead me to another fate different from the one that I desire, making a lie of the fortune-machine card that is framed above my bed.

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