Saint Odd (20 page)

Cautioning myself that a trap can sometimes spring unexpectedly and catch not the prey but instead the one who set it, I went to the stairs and climbed warily, silently. I glanced back now and then, prepared to discover that I was looking down the barrel of a gun, but I remained alone.

At the top of the stairs, I looked along a hallway with large paintings on the walls between doorways, of which there were four on each side. No dead guys were tumbled across any of the thresholds.

The first door on the left stood half open, and a lamp glowed in there, but I couldn’t see the entire space, just the foot of a bed and a dresser and a small armchair in a corner. I cleared the doorway and discovered the room unoccupied.

There were an attached bath and a closet, but I didn’t want to investigate them. A hit team didn’t enter a house to hide in closets and behind bathroom doors. An assault required speed and continuous movement—even if, as seemed to be the case here, it started to go wrong.

In the hall again, on my right, the first door stood open wide. Another bedroom. A third large man, dressed like the two downstairs, lying on his back, leaked enough to require that the carpet be replaced. The uniformity of their dress began to seem like stage clothes, costumes, as though they must be members of a weird punk band, musicians who moonlighted as killers.

I won’t go on about how my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Been there, described that.

Because there were no shattered mirrors or bullet holes in the walls, no visible damage from any misspent rounds, it appeared that none of the assassins had gotten off a shot. But such incompetence seemed unlikely. I thought I must be missing something, the kind of missed something that would get me shot in the head.

Nevertheless, I moved silently along the hall, toward the second door on the right. A large painting of mountains towering above a lake and splashed through with spectacular light, maybe a print of something by Albert Bierstadt, abruptly disappeared soundlessly up into the wall as if on pneumatic tracks, leaving only the ornate frame. Where the painting had been was now an opening into the room toward which I had been headed. Standing there, aiming a silencer-equipped pistol at my face, Mr. Bullock managed to check himself before he blew me away. He raised his eyebrows and whispered,
“Get in here!”

As the painting slid quietly back into place, I stepped to the door, went into another bedroom, and found that Maybelle Bullock was alive, too. She eased the door almost shut, and her husband put a finger to his lips.

I saw that a different painting, perhaps a print of another Bierstadt, hung here, directly behind the one in the hall, and it evidently retracted simultaneously with the other.

Mrs. Bullock held a device I’d never seen before, about the same width as a cell phone and twice as long. A screen occupied the top half, and two rows of buttons were positioned under it. Nothing on the screen but a field of cool blue. She swung it away from the wall that this room shared with the hallway, toward the wall between this room and the next room, as a fairy godmother
might gesture with a magic wand and leave the air sparkling in its wake.

On the blue screen, a red form shaped itself out of pixels. Not anything identifiable. Just a shimmering horizontal mass on a field of blue. It twinkled, constantly adjusting around the edges. My guess: We were watching the heat signature of assassin number four as he moved cautiously through the room adjacent to this one.

As Maybelle moved her hand slowly, from right to left, keeping the red form in the center of the blue screen, tracking it, Deacon stepped to a large painting hung to the left of the bed. This one looked as if it might be a print of something by John Singer Sargent. Deacon aimed the gun at the painting, as if he were an art critic with violent tendencies. His wife pressed a button on the device she held. The artwork vanished up into the wall, leaving only the frame, in which a fourth assassin stood no more than three feet from the muzzle of Mr. Bullock’s pistol. Mr. Bullock fired twice, point-blank, and the hit man dropped out of sight, as if he had stepped through a trap door.

I started to speak, but Mr. Bullock frowned and put a finger to his lips again. Then he put the same finger to his right ear and pressed on something that resembled a hearing aid. I hadn’t noticed it before. A wire ran behind his ear and down his side to an object about the size of a walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt. He listened for half a minute, pulled the microphone from his ear, and said, “House says no more damn fools inside or out.”

“Who’s House?” I asked, assuming it was a name.

“This here house, son.”

Mrs. Bullock said, “House computer, Oddie. It’s got itself eyes and ears everywhere.”

“Weight sensors, heat sensors, a whole gaggle of sensors,” her husband added.

“So you knew when I got here?”

“We knew,” Mrs. Bullock said, “but we was too busy stayin’ alive to check video and see who you was.”

“Had to figure you for another of them bastards,” Mr. Bullock said. “Sorry if maybe I just about killed you dead.”

“That’s all right, sir.”

“Call me Deke, why don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

While we waited for the clean-up crew, Maybelle Bullock insisted that we have coffee spiked with Bailey’s. We took it in mugs, in the dining room rather than the kitchen, because the dead man lying half in the dining room hadn’t soiled himself while dying, as had the dead man lying half in the kitchen. The air smelled nicer in the dining room. The Bullocks sat side by side, frequently exchanging little smiles that I presumed to be expressions of approval about how each had performed in the crisis. I sat across the table from them.

Mrs. Bullock said, “Well, Oddie, we didn’t figure you’d be back till late.”

“I put a few things together and realized the safe house was going to be attacked. I’m sorry I brought them down on you.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, shush, wasn’t nothin’ you did or even you bein’ here that caused this darn foolishness.”

“This here kind of squabble happens once’t in a while,” her husband assured me.

“Squabble?”

“Tussle, scrap, whatever you feel like callin’ it.”

“Every now and then,” said Maybelle, “their kind gets a bead on one of our safe houses, so they show up all full of mayhem.”

“An operation like this here tonight,” Mr. Bullock said, “takes these bastards some plannin’. For sure they been on to us some weeks now, long before you come around.”

Maybelle said, “Maybe it was ’cause of the astronaut they got on the scent of this lovely place.”

“Or that cute-as-a-button ballerina girl,” said Mr. Bullock.

His wife grimaced and shook her head. “Oh, they wanted that dear girl so bad, a thousand of their kind would’ve slit their own throats if maybe it would gain ’em just a thin chance to slit hers.”

“Do these squabbles always end like this?” I asked.

“Gracious, no,” Maybelle said. She smiled at her husband and then looked at me again. “Was it that easy, then this war would be done before it ever did start.”

“Sometimes, it’s our folks end up dead as dirt.” Deacon winked at his wife. “But not here and now.”

“Not here and now,” she said.

Mentally, I was wobbling a little from thinking about the scope of the secret conflict that all of this implied. “I didn’t realize the cult was so big.”

“Them cultists that want to sink their teeth in you, dear? Why, they aren’t big at all. Them and others like ’em wasn’t the ones would’ve killed our astronaut had they got their hands on him.”

“Or that little ballerina,” her husband said.

“Or that Army lieutenant, he won the big medal.”

“Or that comedian, years ago, we had to fake his death and do him a new face.”

“It’s not one cult,” Maybelle said, “it’s a way of thinkin’.”

Mr. Bullock agreed. “Thinkin’,
What is it I want, and how can I take it from someone that has it.
”

“Thinkin’,
Who is it I hate or envy most, and how can they be got rid of,
” Maybelle said.

“Thinkin’,
Can’t be me made a mess of my life, must be your fault, so you’re gonna pay.
”

“A way of thinking,” I said. “But it’s a way that an awful lot of people think.”

“But not anywheres near the most of ’em,” Maybelle said. “Not the most, and that’s one reason why doin’ what we do is worth doin’.”

“I hope you’re right, ma’am.”

“Call me Maybelle.”

“Yes, ma’am. What happens to you now?”

“Me and Deke? We move on wherever.”

“Wherever?”

“Wherever Edie Fischer thinks best. Most often some far place from where we was last.”

“So the clean-up crew you mentioned deals with the dead bodies?”

“Well, it’s partly what keeps ’em busy.”

“What happens to this house?”

Mr. Bullock said, “Clean-up crew tears all the tricks out, puts things back like they was before us, makes it normal as normal ever can be, so it’ll get sold. No safe house never can be a safe house again once’t the bastards know about it.”

Mrs. Bullock finished her spiked coffee and smiled. “We been here three interestin’ years, made some fine memories. But it does a person good to move on from time to time, keeps you fresh.”

Mr. Bullock reached into his shirt pocket. “I hate how it vibrates like a squirmin’ lizard.” He produced a cell phone, put it to his ear, said “yeah” three times, “dang” once, and “no” twice before he terminated the call.

His wife asked, “Clean-up?”

“Yep. Them boys got a job and a half this time around. They’ll be pullin’ in the driveway in about two minutes.”

I said, “They got here really fast.”

“This team is mostly close, a lot of the time just over in Vegas. Got themselves more cleanin’ up to do there than here.”

Looking at my watch, I said, “Did they teleport or something?”

“We had us three false alarms today,” he said.

“One just before dinner,” I remembered.

“Right after that, I called out to Vegas for clean-up, told ’em there’s likely to be one mess or t’other.”

“How did you know the alarms weren’t false?”

“One false alarm in a day,” Maybelle said, “might be nothin’ but truly false. More than one, well, then you got to figure they’re all as real as my own teeth.”

“You’ve got beautiful teeth, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Oddie. I always say everythin’ worthwhile starts with a nice smile.”

Mr. Bullock got up from his chair. “Boss lady’s right behind the crew.”

I rose to my feet. “You mean Mrs. Fischer?”

“About six o’clock, she come in town from the coast with them three friends of yours.”

That would be Annamaria, Tim, and Blossom Rosedale, the Happy Monster.

“Edie holed up somewhere safe with ’em,” Mr. Bullock said.
“We don’t got to know where. Don’t want to know. She’s come here just herself now, with the clean-up crew, so she can chat with you, son.”

The three of us stepped onto the front porch as a forty-foot box truck and a paneled van appeared out of the dark colonnades of velvet ash. Neither vehicle sported a company name. They swept past the house to park in the backyard.

A black superstretch Mercedes limousine with tinted windows followed close behind the paneled van and stopped in the driveway, near the front porch. The driver doused the headlights.

Mr. Bullock said, “Edie wants to see you in the car, son. The biggest dang snoops in the world, with all their evil electronic ears, won’t never hear but even a word of what’s said in that limo. Get in the front, ’cause she’s drivin’ herself.”

The night before my return to Pico Mundo. The sea. The shore. The cottage. Annamaria and the boy, Tim, asleep in their rooms. And I in mine. The bedsheets damp with sweat
.

The nightmare of chaos and cacophony
.

In a place without detail, where luminous smears of red and blue and gold and white and green whirled and pulsed, swooped toward me and soared as if they were shapeless birds of light. A place of harsh sound, music too shrill and tortured to be called music, voices that spoke what I knew to be English but could not understand, screams and panicked shouting. There had been faces all around me, swelling and receding and swelling again, but now there were only parts of faces, eyes looming out of the blur of light, a mouth wide and howling, a nose with cavernous nostrils, a rouged cheek, and an ear with a silver loop dangling from the lobe
.

At my side, supporting me as if I were drunk, Blossom Rosedale maneuvered me through the bedlam as I clutched an urn to my chest. Chief Wyatt Porter had appeared out of the tumult, calling my name. He had pointed his pistol at me, and the muzzle had
grown until it was as large as the mouth of a cannon. He had fired the gun, and with the crack of the shot, he had disappeared into the pandemonium once more. Blossom led me onward
.

As scenes in dreams often transition one into the other without logic, I found myself lying on my back on a hard surface, holding fast to the urn, the mysterious urn that held the ashes of countless dead. All the strident noise had faded, the music without harmony and the shrill voices and the screams. The kaleidoscopic play of light in smears of brilliant color had given way to a warm golden glow and a soft surrounding grayness
.

Standing around me, three lovely women with white-and-gold feathered faces regarded me with solemn brown eyes. They had noses and mouths, not beaks. Although I tried desperately to hold on to the urn, strong hands took it from me, and I lacked the strength to resist. I could see that the bird women were speaking, whether to one another or to me, but I couldn’t hear what they said. Another face appeared, the beautiful fire-scarred and broken face of Miss Blossom Rosedale. Beside Blossom materialized Terri Stambaugh, the woman who owned the Pico Mundo Grille, who had given me a job when I was sixteen and helped me to master my natural talent as a hash-slinger, refining me into a griddle master
.

I tried to speak to Blossom and to Terri, but I had no voice. I could neither hear nor be heard. The spirits of the lingering dead can’t talk, but they can hear; therefore, my current deafness proved that I was not dead
.