Odd Thomas

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

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

Soon I came to a door marked security. I stopped. This didn't feel right… and yet it did.

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

I put my hand on the knob but hesitated.

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

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

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

I took my hand off the knob.

I stepped to one side of the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIFTY-NINE

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, I disabled two security-room phones and quickly used their cords to bind his hands behind his back and to shackle his ankles. I yanked the knots tight and didn't worry unduly about inhibiting his circulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan had most likely been to go on a shooting spree in the department store and then, as the police arrived, to find a private place to strip out of the jumpsuit and the ski mask. Abandoning the