Odd Thomas

motherless if not for me. The next day she returned with the girls. As it turned out, Nicolina's love of pink had to do with her enthusiasm for Burke amp; Bailey's ice cream; Stormy's uniform had always enchanted her.

Little Ozzie visited without Terrible Chester. When I teased him about the yellow pants and the Hawaiian shirt that he'd worn to the ICU, he denied that he would ever 'costume' himself in that fashion because such 'flamboyant togs' would inevitably make him look even bigger than he was. He did, he said, have some vanity. As it turned out, Stormy had made up this colorful story to give me a smile in the ICU when I badly needed one.

My father brought Britney with him, full of plans to represent my story for books, movies, television, and product placements. I sent him away unsatisfied.

My mother did not visit.

Rosalia Sanchez, Bertie Orbic, Helen Arches, Poke Barnet, Shamus Cocobolo, Lysette Rains, the Takuda family, so many others…

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died.

Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished.

What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?

Local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies had studied the quantity of plastic explosives in the truck and estimated that it would have brought down the entire department store plus a not insignificant portion of the south side of the mall.

Estimates are that between five hundred and a thousand would have been killed if the bomb had detonated.

Bern Eckles had been stopped before he killed more than the three security guards, but he'd been carrying enough ammunition to cut down scores of shoppers.

At night in my hotel-style hospital room, Stormy stretched out on the bed and held my hand. When I woke from nightmares, she pulled me against her, cradled me in her arms while I wept. She whispered reassurances to me; she gave me hope.

Sunday afternoon, Karla brought the chief in a wheelchair. He understood perfectly well that I would never want to talk to the media, let alone entertain offers for books, movies, and television miniseries. He had thought of many ways to foil them. He is a great man, the chief, even if he did break that Barney the dinosaur chair.

Although Bern Eckles refused interrogation, the investigation into the conspiracy had proceeded rapidly, thanks to the fact that a man named Kevin Gosset, having been run down by a forklift, was talking his hateful head off.

Gosset, Eckles, and Varner had been bent a long time. At the age of fourteen, they developed an interest in satanism. Maybe it was a game for a while. Quickly it grew serious.

On a mutual dare, they killed for the first time when they were fifteen.

They enjoyed it. And satanism justified it. Gosset called it 'just another way of believing.'

When they were sixteen, they pledged to their god that they would go into law enforcement because it would give them excellent cover and because one of the requirements of a devout satanist is to undermine the trusted institutions of society whenever possible.

Eckles and Varner eventually became cops, but Gosset became a schoolteacher. Corrupting the young was important work, too.

The three childhood pals had met Bob Robertson sixteen months previously through a satanic cult from which they cautiously sought out others with their interests. The cult had proved to be a gaggle of wannabes playing at goth games, but Robertson had interested them because of his mother's wealth.

Their first intention had been to kill him and his mother for whatever valuables might be in their house-but when they discovered that Robertson was eager to bankroll what he called nasty news, they formed a partnership with him. They murdered his mother, made it appear that she'd died and been all but entirely consumed in an accidental fire-and gave Robertson her ears as a souvenir.

Indeed, the contents of the Rubbermaid containers in Robertson's freezer had come from the collections of Eckles, Varner, and Gosset. Robertson himself had never had the guts to waste anyone, but because of his generosity, they wanted to make him feel like a genuine part of their family.

With Robertson's money behind them, they were full of big plans. Gosset didn't recall who first proposed targeting a town and turning it into Hell on Earth with a series of well-planned horrors, with the cold intention of ultimately destroying it entirely. They checked out numerous communities and decided that Pico Mundo was ideal, neither too large to be beyond ruination nor too small to be uninteresting.

Green Moon Mall was their first target. They intended to murder the chief and parlay the mall disaster-and a list of other complex and Machiavellian moves-into firm control of the police department. Thereafter, the steady destruction of the town would be their sport and their form of worship.

Bob Robertson moved into Camp's End because the neighborhood offered him a low profile. Besides, he wanted to manage his money wisely, to ensure that he could buy as much fun as possible.

By the time Chief Porter got around to telling me and Stormy how he was going to protect me and help me to keep the secret of my sixth sense, his face had grown haggard, and I imagine I looked worse. Through Karla, I'd gotten word to him about Robertson's body out there at the Church of the Whispering Comet, so he'd been able to work that bizarre detail into his cover story. He'd always done well by me in the past, but this Porter-spun narrative left me in stunned admiration.

Stormy said it was a work of genius. Clearly, the chief had not been spending all his time recuperating.

SIXTY-FIVE

MY WOUNDS PROVED TO BE NOT AS BAD AS I HAD FEARED in the ICU, and the doctor discharged me from County General the following Wednesday, one week to the day after the events at the mall.

To foil the media, they had been told that I'd be in the hospital another day. Chief Porter conspired to have me and Stormy conveyed secretly in the department's beige undercover van, the same one from which Eckles had watched Stormy's apartment that night.

If Eckles had seen me leaving, he would have arranged to have me caught in my apartment with the body of Bob Robertson. When I had slipped out the back, he had figured that I must be staying the night with my girl, and eventually he had given up the stakeout.

Leaving the hospital, I had no desire to return to my apartment above Mrs. Sanchez's garage. I'd never be able to use the bathroom there without remembering Robertson's corpse.

The chief and Karla didn't think it was wise to go to Stormy's place, either, because the reporters knew about her, too. Neither Stormy nor I was of a mind to accept the Porters' hospitality. We wanted to be alone, just us, at last. Reluctantly, they delivered us to her place through the alley.

Although we were besieged by the media, the next few days were bliss. They rang the doorbell, they knocked, but we didn't respond. They gathered in the street, a regular circus, and a few times we peeked at these vultures through the curtains, but we never revealed ourselves. We had each other, and that was enough to hold off not merely reporters but armies.

We ate food that wasn't healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much.

We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed.