Touched by her vulnerability and by the harsh self-judgment that kept her here, I held out a hand to her.
Instead of taking my hand, she bowed her head demurely. After a hesitation, she uncrossed her arms and lowered them to her sides, revealing her breasts—and the two dark bullet holes that marred her cleavage.
Because I doubted that she had any unfinished business in this desolate place, and because her life had evidently been so hard that she would have little reason to love this world too much to leave it, I assumed that her reluctance to move on arose from a fear of what came next, perhaps from a dread of punishment.
“Don’t be afraid,” I told her. “You weren’t a monster in this life, were you? Just lonely, lost, confused, broken—like all of us who pass this way.”
Slowly she raised her head.
“Maybe you were weak and foolish, but many are. So am I.”
She met my eyes again. Her melancholy seemed deeper to me now, as acute as grief but as enduring as sorrow.
“So am I,” I repeated. “But when I die, I will move on, and so should you, without fear.”
She wore her wounds not as she would have worn divine stigmata, but as if they were the devil’s brand, which they were not.
“I’ve no idea what it’s like, but I know a better life awaits you, beyond the miseries you’ve known here, a place where you’ll belong and where you’ll be truly loved.”
From her expression, I knew that the idea of being loved had been for her only a cherished hope that had never been realized in her short unhappy life. Terrible experience, perhaps from the cradle to the sound of the shot that killed her, had left her in a poverty of imagination, unable to envision a world beyond this one, where love was a promise fulfilled.
She raised her arms once more and crossed them over her chest, concealing both her breasts and her wounds.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said again.
Resumed, her smile seemed to be as melancholy as before, but also now enigmatic. I couldn’t tell if what I’d said had been of comfort to her.
Wishing that I were more persuasive in my faith, and wondering why I wasn’t, I got into the front passenger’s seat of the car. I closed the door and slid behind the steering wheel.
I didn’t want to leave her there among the dead palm trees and the corroded Quonset huts, with as little hope as she had physical substance.
Yet the night ticked on, the moon and all the constellations moving across the heavens as relentlessly as hands across the face of a clock. In too few hours, terror would descend on Pico Mundo, unless I could somehow stop it.
As I slowly drove away, I glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. There she stood in the moonlight, the charmed coyotes resting on the ground at her feet, as if she were the goddess Diana between one hunt and another, mistress of the moon and all its creatures, receding, dwindling, but not ready to go home to Olympus.
I drove from the Church of the Whispering Comet back into Pico Mundo, from the company of a gunshot stranger to the bad news about a gunshot friend.
THIRTY-NINE
IF I HAD KNOWN THE NAME OR EVEN THE FACE of the one I should be seeking, I might have tried a session of psychic magnetism, cruising Pico Mundo until my sixth sense brought me in contact with him. The man who had killed Bob Robertson, and who craved to kill others in the coming day, remained nameless and faceless to me, however, and as long as I sought only a phantom, I would be wasting gasoline and time.
The town slept, but not its demons. Bodachs were in the streets, more numerous and more fearsome than packs of coyotes, racing through the night in what seemed to be an ecstasy of anticipation.
I passed houses where these living shadows gathered and swarmed with particular inquisitiveness. At first I tried to remember each of the haunted residences, for I still believed that the people who interested the bodachs were also those who would be murdered between the next dawn and the next sunset.
Although small by comparison to a city, our town is much larger than it once was, with all its new neighborhoods of upscale tract houses, encompassing more than forty thousand souls in a county of half a million. I have met only a tiny fraction of them.
Most of the bodach-infested houses belonged to people I didn’t know. I had no time to meet them all, and no hope of gaining their confidence to the extent that they would take my advice and change their Wednesday plans, as Viola Peabody had done.
I considered stopping at the houses of those who were known to me, to ask them to list every place they expected to be the following afternoon. With luck, I might discover the single destination that would prove common to them all.
None were in my small inner circle of friends. They didn’t know of my supernatural gift, but many regarded me as a sweet eccentric, to one degree or another, and therefore wouldn’t be surprised by either my unscheduled visit or my questions.
By seeking this information in the presence of bodachs, however, I would earn their suspicion. Once alert to me, they would eventually discern my unique nature.
I remembered the six-year-old English boy who had spoken aloud of the bodachs—and had been crushed between a concrete-block wall and a runaway truck. The impact had been so powerful that numerous blocks had shattered into gravel and dust, exposing the ribs of steel rebar around which they had been mortared.
Although the driver, a young man of twenty-eight, had been in perfect health, his autopsy revealed that he suffered a massive, instantly fatal stroke while behind the wheel.
The stroke must have killed him at the precise moment when he crossed the crest of a hill—at the bottom of which stood the English boy. Accident-scene analysis by the police determined that the lateral angle of the slope, in relationship to the cross street below, should have carried the unpiloted truck away from the boy, impacting the wall thirty feet from where it actually came to a deadly stop. Evidently, during part of the descent, the dead body of the driver had been hung up on the steering wheel, countering the angle of the street that should have saved the child.
I know more about the mysteries of the universe than do those of you who cannot see the lingering dead, but I do not understand more than a tiny fraction of the truth of our existence. I have nevertheless reached at least one certain conclusion based on what I know: There are no coincidences.
On the macro scale, I perceive what physicists tell us is true on the micro: Even in chaos, there is order, purpose, and strange meaning that invites—but often thwarts—our investigation and our understanding.
Consequently, I didn’t stop at any of those houses where the bodachs capered, didn’t wake the sleeping to ask my urgent questions. Somewhere a healthy driver and a massive truck needed only a timely cerebral aneurysm and an expedient failure of brakes to bring it across my path in a sudden rush.
Instead, I drove to Chief Porter’s house, trying to decide if I should wake him at the ungodly hour of three o’clock.
Over the years, I had only twice before interrupted his sleep. The first time, I had been wet and muddy, still wearing one of the shackles—and dragging a length of chain—that had bound me to the two corpses with which I had been dumped into Malo Suerte Lake by bad men of sour disposition. The second time that I’d awakened him, there had been a crisis needing his attention.
The current crisis hadn’t quite reached us yet, but it loomed. I thought h
e needed to know that Bob Robertson was not a loner but a conspirator.
The trick would be to deliver this news convincingly but without revealing that I’d found Robertson dead in my bathroom and, breaking numerous laws without compunction, had bundled the cadaver to a less incriminating resting place.
When I turned the corner half a block from the Porter address, I was surprised to see lights on in several houses at that late hour. The chief’s place blazed brighter than any other.
Four police cruisers stood in front of the house. All had been parked hastily, at angles to the curb. The roof-rack beacons of one car still flashed, revolved.
On the front lawn, across which rhythmic splashes of red light chased waves of blue, five officers gathered in conversation. Their posture suggested that they were consoling one another.
I had intended to park across the street from the chief’s house. I would have called his private number only after concocting a story that avoided any mention of my recent exertions as a dead-man’s taxi service.
Instead, with a helpless sinking of the heart, I abandoned the Chevy in the street, beside one of the patrol cars. I switched the headlights off but left the engine running, with the hope that none of the cops would get close enough to see that no keys were in the ignition.
The officers on the lawn were all known to me. They turned to face me as I ran to them.
Sonny Wexler, the tallest and toughest and softest-spoken of the group, extended one brawny arm as if to stop me from rushing past him to the house. “Hold on, stay back here, kid. We’ve got CSI working the place.”
Until now I had not seen Izzy Maldanado on the front porch. He rose from some task that he’d been attending to on his knees, and stretched to get a kink out of his back.
Izzy works for the Maravilla County Sheriff’s Department crime lab, which contracts its services to the Pico Mundo police. When the body of Bob Robertson was eventually found in that Quonset hut, Izzy would most likely be the technician meticulously sifting the scene for evidence.