He must have told his murderous friend that I had prowled his rooms. His kill buddy might then have decided that he himself was at risk if his association with Robertson became known.
Or because of my nosing around, Robertson might have grown nervous about their plans for August 15. He might have wanted to postpone the slaughter that they had been prepared to commit.
Perhaps his psychotic friend had been too excited to accept a delay. Having for so long contemplated this delicious violence, he now had a hunger for it, a need.
I turned away from Rosalia’s house.
If I went in there and discovered that she had been murdered as a consequence of my actions, I doubted that I would have the will to deal with Robertson’s body. At the very thought of discovering her corpse—Odd Thomas, can you see me? Odd Thomas, am I still visible?—I felt a loosening occur in the hinges of my reason, and I knew that I was at risk of coming apart emotionally if not psychologically.
Viola Peabody and her daughters were depending on me.
Unknown numbers of people currently destined to die in Pico Mundo before the next sunset might be saved if I could stay out of jail, if I could learn the place and the time of the planned atrocity.
As if magic suddenly overruled physics, the moonlight seemed to acquire weight. I felt the burden of that lunar radiance with every step that I took to the back of the garage, where the corpse waited in its white wrapping.
The rear door of the garage was unlocked. That interior darkness smelled of tire rubber, motor oil, old grease, and a raw-wood aroma baked from the exposed rafters by the summer heat. I set my shopping bag inside.
Grimly aware that the day had taken both a mental and a physical toll from me, I dragged the body across the threshold and closed the door. Only then did I fumble for the light switch.
This detached garage contained two stalls, plus a home workshop where a third car might otherwise have been parked. Currently one stall was empty, and Rosalia’s Chevy stood in the space nearest the house.
When I tried the car trunk, I found it locked.
The thought of loading the corpse in the rear seat and driving with it behind my back disturbed me.
In my twenty years, I have seen many strange things. One of the more bizarre was the ghost of President Lyndon Johnson disembarking from a Greyhound at the Pico Mundo bus terminal. He arrived from Portland, Oregon, by way of San Francisco and Sacramento, only to board at once an outbound Greyhound destined for Phoenix, Tucson, and points in Texas. Because he had died in a hospital, he wore pajamas, no slippers, and he looked forlorn. When he realized that I could see him, he glared angrily, then pulled down his pajamas and mooned me.
I have never seen a corpse restored to life, however, nor have I encountered any corpse animated by evil sorcery. Yet the thought of turning my back on Robertson’s cadaver and chauffeuring it to a lonely corner of Pico Mundo filled me with dread.
On the other hand, I couldn’t prop him, fully wrapped, on the front passenger’s seat and drive around with what appeared to be a 250-pound doobie.
Getting the corpse into the back of the Chevy taxed both my strength and my stomach. In his cocoon, Robertson felt loose, soft…ripe.
Repeatedly, the vivid memory of the ragged, wet bullet hole in his chest rose in my mind: the flabby and livid flesh around it, the dark custardy ooze that had drooled from it. I had not peered closely at the wound, had quickly glanced away, yet that image kept rising like a dark sun in my mind.
By the time I loaded the corpse in the car and closed the back door, sweat streamed from me as though some giant had wrung me out like a washcloth. That’s how I felt, too.
Outside, at two o’clock in the morning, the temperature had fallen to a brisk eighty-five. Here in the windowless garage, the climate was ten degrees more desperate.
Blinking the perspiration out of my eyes, I fumbled under the dashboard and found the wires that I needed. Shocking myself only once, I got the engine started.
Through all of this, the dead man on the backseat did not stir.
I turned out the garage light and put my plastic shopping bag on the passenger’s seat. I got behind the wheel and used the remote control to raise the garage door.
Blotting my face on a handful of Kleenex plucked from the box in the console, I realized that I hadn’t given a thought about where to unload my cargo. Neither the town dump nor a Goodwill Industries collection box seemed like a good idea.
If Robertson were found too soon, Chief Porter would have hard questions for me that might interfere with my attempts to deflect whatever horror was soon to descend on Pico Mundo. Ideally, the body would lie quietly decomposing for at least twenty-four hours before someone found it and had a new love for Jesus scared into him.
Then I thought of the perfect hiding place: the Church of the Whispering Comet Topless Bar, Adult Bookstore, and Burger Heaven.
THIRTY-SIX
THE CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET HAD been erected more than twenty years ago, off the state highway and a few hundred yards past the town limits of Pico Mundo, on a tract of desert scrub.
Even when it had been a house of unusual worship, it had not resembled a church. Here in the clear and starry night, the main building—a two-hundred-foot-long, sixty-foot-wide, semicylindrical, corrugated-metal Quonset hut with porthole windows—looked like a spaceship, minus its nose cone, half buried in the earth.
Nestled among dead and dying trees, more than half concealed by a mottling camouflage of shadows and pale moonlight, smaller Quonsets ringed the perimeter of the property. These had been barracks for the true believers.
The founder of the church, Caesar Zedd Jr., preached that he received whispered messages, mostly in dreams but also sometimes when awake, from alien intelligences aboard a spacecraft traveling toward Earth inside a comet. These aliens claimed to be the gods who had created human beings and all species on the planet.
Most people in Pico Mundo had assumed that the services at the Church of the Whispering Comet would one day culminate in a communion with poisoned Kool-Aid and hundreds of deaths. Instead, the sincerity of Zedd’s religious faith came under question when he and his entire clergy were indicted and convicted of operating the largest Ecstasy production-and-distribution ring in the world.
After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc.—the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States—intimidated Maravilla County into giving it a business license. They remade the property into a cheesy, sex-theme amusement park, converting the original church sign to neon and extending it to read CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET TOPLESS BAR, ADULT BOOKSTORE, AND BURGER HEAVEN.
Rumor has it that the burgers and fries were excellent and that the promise of free soft-drink refills was generously honored. Yet this establishment never succeeded in winning over the family-dining crowd or the upscale professional couples who are so essential to any restaurant operation.
The enterprise, known locally as the Whispering Burger, turned a handsome profit even after covering its food-service losses. The topless bar, the bookstore (which stocked no books, but offered thousands of videotapes), and the whorehouse (not mentioned in the original business-license application) brought oceans of money to this desert oasis.
Although the corporation’s lawyers, courageous defenders of the Constitution, managed to keep the doors open through ten convictions for operation of a prostitution ring, the Whispering Burger imploded following the gunning down of three prostitutes by a naked customer strung out on PCP and excessive doses of Viagra.
In lieu of unpaid taxes and fines, the property had fallen into the hands of the county. During the past five years, cessation of all maintenance and the relentless repossession efforts of the desert had reduced a once-proud house of alien gods to rust and ruin.
The church grounds had been landscaped as a tropical paradise, with lush lawns, seve
ral varieties of palm trees, ferns, bamboo, and flowering vines. Without daily watering, the brief rainy season in the desert wasn’t sufficient to preserve this Eden.
Having switched off my headlights when I turned in from the state highway, I drove through the shaggy moonshadows cast by dead palm trees. The cracked and potholed blacktop driveway led to the back of the main building, and then farther to the arc of smaller Quonset huts.
I was reluctant to leave the car with the engine running, but I wanted to be able to make a quick getaway. Without keys, I could not start the engine quickly enough in a crisis.
With the flashlight I’d packed in my shopping bag, I set out to find a suitable place to stash an inconvenient corpse.
The Mojave had recovered its breath again. A lazy exhalation blew out of the east, smelling of dry brush, hot sand, and the strange life of the desert.
Each of the ten Quonset huts used as barracks by the church had housed sixty cult members in the cramped fashion of opium-den bunks. When the church was replaced by a bordello with burgers, a few of these structures were gutted, partitioned, and redecorated to serve as cozy cribs for the hookers who delivered what the topless dancers in the bar only promised.
In the years since the property had been abandoned, morbidly curious people had explored and vandalized the main building and all the barracks. Doors had been broken open. Some had fallen off their corroded hinges.
At the third barracks that I inspected, the spring latch on the door still worked well enough to hold it closed.