Saint Odd (7 page)

Somehow the driver of the Escalade, who had tried to run me down the night before, had known that I would be traveling on the state route, straddling a Big Dog Bulldog Bagger; therefore, it
made sense that the other cultists also might be looking for the bike. I didn’t have a master-of-disguise kit and didn’t intend to prowl Pico Mundo incognito; however, calling attention to myself didn’t make sense, either. Later that morning, I would need to ditch the Big Dog and find other transportation, but first I had an appointment to keep and no other wheels to get there.

After stowing the pillowcase and tools in one of the saddlebags, I put on my helmet and goggles. I pulled away from the curb and headed toward the coyote. It backed off but wasn’t intimidated. As I drove past the beast, it followed me with a yellow-eyed stare of predatory calculation, sharp teeth revealed in a sneer of contempt.

Formed by the construction of a dam, Malo Suerte Lake was immediately east of Pico Mundo, a large deep body of water with a marina and sandy beaches along the north shore. Associated with one of those beaches, a grassy park offered picnic areas shaded by phoenix palms and by the spreading branches of massive live oaks.

The park had long been popular in warm weather, which was most of the year in Maravilla County, but as it offered no campground, I had never before seen anyone there laying out a picnic breakfast less than an hour after dawn. Ozzie Boone had draped a white cloth over one of the concrete-slab picnic tables designed and anchored to foil thieves. On the cloth he had arranged several chafing dishes warmed by Sterno.

I drove past him, past the Cadillac that had been customized to accommodate his bulk and weight, and parked the Big Dog out of sight behind an oak. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, since he had picked me up at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey in the Sierra Nevada, where I had for a while lived in the guesthouse, hoping to
find peace and quiet among the monks, finding instead a kind of darkness new to me.

As a writer, Ozzie served as my mentor. As a man, he had long been a surrogate father, which I had often needed. My real father had no idea how to fill that role. He’d never shown any desire to do so.

“Dear Odd,” he said, enfolding me in a bear hug, “the last time I saw you, I feared you’d lost weight, and now I’m certain of it. You’re a shadow of your former self.”

“No, sir. I still weigh the same. Maybe I appear smaller to you because you’ve gotten still larger.”

“I am a svelte four hundred thirty-five pounds, and if I can stick to my diet, I hope to be four hundred fifty by September.”

“I worry about you,” I said.

“Yes, you are quite the worrier for one of such tender years. But if obesity were the worst that any of us had to worry about, the world would be an idyllic place. You’ve probably noticed that it isn’t.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve noticed.”

In a bucket of ice were a carton of orange juice and two of chocolate milk. He had also brought two large thermoses of coffee. He offered those beverages to me, and at my request he poured coffee, black.

The mug was large and thick, emblazoned with the words
PICO MUNDO GRILLE
and the logo of that diner, where I had once worked. I figured that the mug might be intended not only as a welcome-back gesture but also as a subtle suggestion that I return to my old job and put down roots and cease roaming in search of what only home could offer.

When I looked up, I saw that he had been watching me as
I stared at the mug. He said, “This
is
where you belong, Oddie. With those who love you most.”

“Sir, you’ve not only gained weight since I saw you last, you’ve also become psychic.”

“One doesn’t need to be psychic to read your mind, Oddie. In spite of all your complications, you are wonderfully transparent.”

“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“As it was intended.” He picked up a tall glass of chocolate milk, savoring two long swallows before putting it down and dabbing at his faux mustache with a paper napkin. “When you called, you were as mysterious as a character in one of my novels. You were so discreet, you might as well have been talking in code. Why couldn’t we have breakfast in my kitchen?”

“I didn’t want to endanger you, sir. Are you sure you weren’t followed here?”

He sighed. “If I had been followed here, dear boy, I wouldn’t
be
here. What trouble has found you this time?”

“The same trouble, sir. Cultists like those who shot up the mall back then.”

Ozzie writes noir fiction, and in spite of his rotundity, he thinks of himself as someone who can be a tough guy when the need arises. He does indeed have impressive forearms and considerable courage. But unshed tears rose in his eyes when I mentioned the mall shooting, because he wasn’t only my surrogate father; to some extent, he had also fulfilled that role for Stormy, who had been orphaned as a child.

“They’ve come in from out of town,” I continued. “They want to make what happened here two summers ago seem like nothing.”

“In a sense, it was nothing,” Ozzie said, tears still standing in
his eyes. “Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it’s something.”

The coffee had cooled just enough that I could sip it. “Sir, I don’t know how many of them are here to do this thing. I don’t know their faces, and I only know three first names. I’m afraid it’s happening sooner than later, too fast for me to get a handle on it.”

He finished the glass of chocolate milk and put it down on the white tablecloth and placed the heels of his plump hands over his eyes, rubbing gently, as though he hadn’t slept in a long time and was weary, but of course he was blotting the tears and pressing them back.

I said, “I had a set-to with others of their cult over in Nevada not long ago, and it didn’t end well for them. They’d like to kill me, and I can’t pretend there wouldn’t be an up side to that, but I’d rather stop them first.”

Lowering his hands from his face, Ozzie said, “Anything happens to you, there’s no up side, son. Not for me. There’s only so much eating a man can do to keep the world at bay before he loses all taste for food.”

Rarely am I at a loss for words, but I didn’t know what to say to that. I covered my speechlessness with a few sips of coffee.

Ozzie reached for the open carton of milk wedged in the bucket of ice, but then decided not to pour any more for himself just yet.

He said, “I imagine that through all your adventures, you still held fast to it.”

I knew what he meant. “Yes, sir.” I put down the mug, took out my wallet, and produced the card from the fortune-telling machine.

His hand trembled as he held the little pasteboard prediction.
He appeared to read it more than once, as though hoping the simple statement might be modified before his eyes.
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
. But of course the words did not change. Considering the source of the promise and the importance of it, I was confident that it would not be broken and in fact that it would be kept sooner than later—as long as I did not fail to do what I had been called home to accomplish.

As I took the card from him and returned it to my wallet, I said, “Whatever happens next, what most concerns me is that none of my friends should die because of me. If I let that happen … I won’t have earned what I’ve been promised.”

We turned together toward the sound of a car on the lane that wound through the park. A police cruiser approached and pulled off the pavement to stop half on the graveled shoulder and half on the grass, in the oak shadows, behind Ozzie’s Cadillac.

Wyatt Porter, chief of police in Pico Mundo, got out of the car, closed the door, and for a moment stood looking at us across the roof of the vehicle. I had been fortunate enough to have two surrogate fathers when I’d lived in Pico Mundo, and they were both joining me for breakfast in the park. I hadn’t seen the chief since I’d left town about nine months earlier. The last thing he’d said to me was, “I don’t know what we’ll do without you, son.” What we had both done was keep on keeping on, which is all any of us can do. He looked good for a man who had once been shot in the chest and left for dead, and I was happier than I can say to see how well he appeared to be.

He rounded the car and came to us. I found myself smiling, but the chief did not smile. He nodded at Ozzie, and then he stopped in front of me and said, “Do you believe in dreams, Oddie?”

The chief—and very few others—knew about my paranormal
talents. He and I had worked together on a number of cases over the years, though he had always concealed my contributions and spared me from being made a media sensation.

“Dreams?” I said. “Some are just the mind playing games with itself, and they’re not to be taken seriously. But I don’t think that’s the kind you mean.”

“I had this same one three times in the past week, before you called, and I’m not given to reruns of dreams.”

As if to forestall what Chief Porter would say next, Ozzie asked him if he wanted juice or milk, or coffee.

Instead of answering that question, the chief said to me, “Three times before you called, I dreamed you were coming home.”

“And here I am.”

He shook his head. With basset eyes and bloodhound jowls, the chief’s face was proof of gravity’s effect. He looked as solemn as time itself when he said, “What I dreamed is that you came home in a coffin.”

The five chafing dishes contained scrambled eggs with black olives and cilantro, ham layered with sautéed onion slices, home fries, seasoned and buttered rice that smelled like popcorn, and in the last one, tamales stuffed with shredded beef and cheese. A bowl of strawberries rested in a larger bowl of cracked ice, and beside the fruit stood a bowl of brown sugar with a serving spoon. Butter and jellies had been provided, too, and a basket of rolls, some sweet and cinnamony, some plain.

At the linen-mantled table, we sat together on concrete benches, on thick cushions upholstered in vinyl and supplied by our immense and immensely hospitable host. Ozzie sat at the very end of the slab, while Wyatt Porter and I sat across from each other. We ate and talked. At first, all the conversation was about amusing incidents in the history of Pico Mundo, moments we had shared; though humor marked those memories, they were also colored lightly by melancholy.

I felt there was something sacred about that breakfast; but at the time, I could not have explained what I meant. The air was
dry and warm, with the faintest breeze to keep it fresh, and scattered through the oaken shade, across the ground and the table and the three of us, glimmered treasures minted by the sun, coins of golden light, and in the trees song sparrows and western meadowlarks trilled, but it wasn’t the place and its atmosphere that hallowed the moment. Neither was it the sumptuous meal nor the memories that we shared, nor the fact that we were at last in one another’s company again. All of those things contributed to the mood, but the heart of the moment, the truest reason that it felt so pure to me and seemed to have special meaning, remained elusive. Indeed, it would continue to elude me the entire time I spent in Pico Mundo.

When we got around to talking about why I had returned to town, the mood darkened.

The chief said, “We’ve been up against their kind before, this same madness, and we took losses, but we’re still here.”

Ozzie shook his head, and his extra chins trembled. “We can’t endure more losses like those at Green Moon Mall. This is a town with spirit, but if it takes too many hits to the heart, it’ll never be the same. Any town can die without actually drying up and blowing away. It can be as dead as a ghost town even with people still living in it.”

Gazing into his mug as if he were a Gypsy and as if coffee could be read like the remnants of tea, the chief said, “They won’t make a fool of me like the others did.”

“Wyatt Porter, you were never a fool,” Ozzie declared in a tone of voice that did not invite debate. “Every man is outfoxed sooner or later, about one thing or another. If criminals were never cunning enough to deceive the authorities, every cop’s job would be
nothing but make-work, and nobody would want to read my crime novels.”

I said, “Whatever they’re planning, they intend it to be the biggest news of the year. And they’re not just wannabe satanists like those the summer before last. These fruitcakes who nearly put an end to me in Nevada are members of a cult first founded back in 1580 in Oxford, England.”

“Fanatics with a long heritage of lunacy,” Ozzie noted, “tend to be formidable. Their zeal is frenzied, but over generations they have learned to control and focus it.”

“They’re formidable,” I assured him. “They’re devoted to the demon Meridian, and though that sounds loopy, they’re serious. It’s not just fanboy stuff with them, not just freaky costumes, spooky altars with black candles, ritual sex and ritual murder. They don’t just celebrate evil, they work hard to bring more of it into the world, to bring upon the world a tidal wave of horror that’ll wash hope out of it forever.”

Evidently Chief Porter had lost his appetite, because he stared at the unfinished cinnamon roll on his plate as if it were a rotting fish. “Why can’t the bad guys be satisfied with just robbing a bank or sticking up a liquor store?”

“You have plenty of that kind of thing to deal with, sir. Think of this as just a little variety.”

He shook his head. “No, year by year, there’s less of the your-money-or-your-life kind of thing, less grab-the-purse-and-run, less normal crime. Guys who once broke the speed limit by ten or fifteen miles an hour—I’m talking ordinary Joes here, not drug runners or coyotes transporting illegal aliens—these days some of the idiots do ninety in a forty zone. When you try to pull them
over, they make a run for it, though running makes no sense, ’cause we’ve got their license-plate number. They think they’re stunt drivers, masters of evasion, and then they take out a schoolgirl in a crosswalk or an entire family in a van.”

The direction of our conversation hadn’t affected Ozzie’s appetite. As he lavished butter on a cinnamon roll, he said, “Perhaps it’s the YouTube effect. These police chases rack up a lot of views. Everyone wants a taste of fame.”