Odd Thomas: Deeply Odd Part 25

Perhaps it was best that I not ask what capacity for evil the director of Psycho had worried about in himself. But then it turned out to be less than I might have imagined.

"As an adult, I loved to drive, to be behind the wheel with open road ahead. But I so dreaded being stopped by a traffic cop-dreaded it like death, Mr. Thomas-that I hardly ever drove. I left all the driving to Alma or hired drivers even before I could afford to hire them. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing, so that you retreat from many aspects of life, is a terrible error in itself."

If I'd had a father capable of wisdom and interested in pa.s.sing it along to a son, this might have been what it would have felt like.

I said, "My girl, Stormy Llewellyn, she was the best person I've ever known. She was amazing, sir. She believed that this life is not the first of two but the first of three."

"Quite the philosopher for a young lady who worked in an ice-cream shop," he said sincerely, not with a wry edge.

After the scene that I had just witnessed, nothing more could surprise me that night.

I said, "Stormy called this life boot camp. She said we have to persevere through all this world's obstacles and all the wounds that it inflicts if we want to earn a second life. We're in training, see. After boot camp, there's what she called service. Our life of service will be full of tremendous adventure, as if you had rolled all the adventure novels ever written into one."

"And the third life, Mr. Thomas?"

"She thought that after we finish service, then we receive our eternal life."

I stopped, withdrew my wallet from a hip pocket, and opened it to the plastic window in which I kept the card. I could read it in the moonlight. In fact, I could have read it in the dark: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

"We got it from a fortune-telling machine in an arcade at a carnival when we were just sixteen."

"Gypsy Mummy," he said, naming the machine. "Quite a colorful device. I might have used it in a movie if I'd made a few more."

I looked up from the card and met his stare. The kindness in his eyes reminded me of my closest friends in Pico Mundo.

An owl hooted nearby, and a more distant owl responded. Two ordinary owls in an ordinary night.

"I believe this card, sir. I trust it totally. I'm sure it's the truest thing I've ever known."

He smiled and nodded.

"What do you think, sir? I'd really like to know. What do you think about the card?"

"You're not ready to leave this world yet, Mr. Thomas."

"I don't think it'll be much longer. It's all coming around to how it started in Pico Mundo nineteen months ago."

"What must be will be."

I smiled. "You sound like Annamaria now."

"And why wouldn't I?" he asked, which gave me something to think about.

Putting away my wallet, I said, "Boot camp. Sometimes, sir, the training seems unnecessarily hard."

"In retrospect, it won't," he a.s.sured me.

Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k walked with me all the way to the car. He pointed not to the front door on the starboard side but to the door behind it, which served the long pa.s.senger compartment, and the power window purred down.

I leaned into the window and saw the children crammed into the back of the limousine, a couple of them sitting on the floor. None of them appeared to be uncomfortable. They looked tired but awake, wide awake.

They were silent, but they were not afraid. Neither I nor they needed to say anything just then.

Boo was lying on the floor at Verena Stanhope's feet. The girl gave me two thumbs up.

I withdrew my head, and the window purred shut.

"I'm not sure how we handle it from here," I said.

"Mrs. Fischer will know exactly."

"Yeah," I said, as I began to take off my shoulder holsters. "I guess I'd be surprised if she didn't."

He pointed to the moon. Although the night sky appeared to be clear around that sphere, there must have been thin mist or dust at some alt.i.tude to diffract its light, for the moon had developed a corona, concentric circles changing color outward from pale blue to purple-red.

"Quite a visual," he said. "Nicely moody. You could do it as a trick shot, of course, but the real thing is prettier."

"I still can't get used to you talking." I turned my back to him, and he unbuckled the bulletproof vest. "I sure wish we had time to discuss your movies. I have at least a thousand questions."

"I'm not about movies anymore, Mr. Thomas."

Turning to him, I said, "Will I be seeing you again, sir?"

"One cannot say."

"Cannot or will not?"

He put a forefinger to his lips, as if to say that we must not discuss such things.

As he began to rise off the ground, he said, by way of good-bye, "Oddie."

"Hitch."

He didn't merely ascend straight up, but also moved away from me laterally as he rose into the darkness, fast and then faster, until he vanished behind a remaining patch of clouds.

What a wonderful ham he was.

An owl hooted and another owl returned the call. Two ordinary owls in an extraordinary night, in a world unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable by the living.

Thirty-eight.

ALTHOUGH THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TAXING DAY FOR a woman of Mrs. Fischer's age, she appeared to be fresh and alert as she piloted the Mercedes limousine down from the forested heights toward the flats where cactus and mesquite flourished.

Glancing at me, she said, "How are you, child?"

After a long moment of silence while I considered my condition, I said, "It's getting easier, and that scares me."

"You mean the killing."

The guns, the Kevlar vest, and the utility belt were piled on the floor in front of my seat. My feet straddled all that gear.

"Yes, ma'am. The killing."

"How many."

"Five."

I thought of Jinx. How blue the eye beneath the yellow contact lens. I wondered how much different she would have looked without the Goth makeup and the att.i.tude.

Mrs. Fischer said, "You know what they were-those people. You know what they had done and would have done."

"Yes, ma'am. And I only did what I had to do. But it was still too easy."

"Maybe that was because they were such worse people than you've had to deal with before."

"Maybe."

We reached the flats, pa.s.sed Jeb's Trading Post, the cl.u.s.ters of modest houses, and then the sprawling complex of large buildings that might have been warehouses. At the interstate, Mrs. Fischer headed east toward Las Vegas.

Four of the children had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from Vegas, but not the others. "Where are we going, ma'am?"

"Exactly where we need to go. You'll see."

After a while, we left the interstate for Las Vegas Boulevard South, where the night was splashed with neon pulsing-rippling-spiraling in different rhythms that somehow all seemed to suggest the thrust and throb of s.e.x, where fountains gushed and waterfalls foamed, where the architecture promised elegance or wild delight, or both, where every nuance of design said that money was bliss and that G.o.dlike power could be bought or at least rented, where marquees announced the royalty of entertainment, where mult.i.tudes surged along the sidewalks, going to or from a show, moving from one casino to another.

I suppose those tourists might have been portraits of gaiety, rejoicing, sweet contentment, and happiness in all its shades. But where I saw those expressions, they seemed to be masks, and often I saw faces shaped by disquiet, misgiving, trepidation, confusion, and doubt, with body language that translated as anxiety and impatience. Perhaps it was my mood, the head collection and other atrocities still so fresh in my mind, but these people seemed like refugees from places that had gone drab and l.u.s.terless for reasons that they could not fully understand. They had come here to find the fun that had been lost elsewhere, fun and brightness and freedom and hope, but they were beginning to suspect, still on some unconscious level, that this hundred-billion-dollar biggest carnival in the history of the world was not an oasis, after all, but just another version of the desert from which they'd fled.

At that moment, there wasn't a party anywhere in the world that I couldn't have brought down in five minutes flat.

Mrs. Fischer drove off the famous Strip, zigzagged from one long, flat street to another, found some hills, and at last pulled into the driveway of a substantial but welcoming house with warm light aglow in all its windows. A friendly couple in their fifties at once came out of the residence to welcome us and to a.s.sist with the children, all of whom were escorted inside. No names were offered, and I was not asked for mine, but they greeted me as if we had long known one another-as was true of everyone I would later encounter here.

I sensed by the way that Boo remained faithfully at Verena's side, he might not be my ghost dog anymore, but might have attached himself to a new companion.

This expansive residence, on two levels, was a place where books were honored, as almost every room contained shelves of them. These people had built a shrine to family and to friends.h.i.+p, with cl.u.s.ters of framed photographs of loved ones on tables and mantels and in wall arrangements. Every s.p.a.ce seemed to be designed for celebration, with numerous carefully considered groupings of furniture, cozy nooks, and window seats to accommodate easy conversation. Although the place was clean and neat and tastefully appointed, you felt that you could put your feet up on anything, as you might in your own home.

I can describe what happened in that house over the next few hours, but I cannot explain it. No experience of my life has been so radiant, other than my time with Stormy in our years together, and yet so mysterious.

We were brought into the living room, where three dogs awaited us: a golden retriever, a Bernese mountain dog, and a Bouvier des Flandres, all of which at once began to circulate, like huge stuffed toys come to life, among the children.

On the kitchen island, on the dining-room table, on a side table in the living room were trays of cookies and little cakes, and the children were offered drinks, though most of them at first declined. They were still stressed, if not in some degree of shock. At least four of these knew that their parents had been killed. And the limousine ride here, to an unknown destination, had provided no decompression.

After perhaps ten minutes, nine children joined our group, not all of them the sons and daughters of our hosts, because the nine seemed to range in age from seven to ten. I will not say that they were all beautiful by the standards of our culture, which is obsessed with models and airbrushed celebrities, but they were beautiful to me, fresh-faced and glowing with good health.

The nine were the most socially adept group of kids that I had ever seen. They were neither hesitant nor forward, and certainly not territorial as most kids are, but spread out at once among our seventeen rescues, welcoming them, asking about them, touching them affectionately in that unselfconscious way that childhood friends of some duration can be with one another.

At first the seventeen were awkward, uncertain, confused, but sooner than I would have thought possible, they were drawn out of their sh.e.l.ls. The twenty-six of them separated into groups of three and four, always with at least one of these new children included, and they wandered off to corners all over the house.

I approached Mrs. Fischer and said, "What's all this? What's happening here?"

"What needs to happen, dear. Just watch. You'll see."

"Who are these other children?"

"Watch and see," she repeated, and pinched my cheek.

I wandered the house, upstairs and down and up again, in a state of wonder as events progressed. Soon our traumatized seventeen were engaged in conversations with the nine and with each other, and now and then I saw tears and trembling and despair that somehow didn't last. I stood listening to many of these conversations, and they all made sense to me and seemed in fact beautiful at the time, but as soon as I walked away from any one of them, I couldn't quite recall what had been said.

The three dogs circulated ceaselessly. Often I came upon one of our seventeen clinging almost desperately to the golden retriever or the Bernese or the Bouvier. Later, their anxious looks and pained expressions had given way to smiles, some tentative but nonetheless smiles.

Cookies appeared in small hands, and mugs of hot chocolate or cold milk, gla.s.ses of Coca-Cola. Conversations became more animated, sometimes almost intense, and though I eavesdropped everywhere, and understood, I at once seemed to forget, as if the things they said were truths and consolations that only a child's mind could retain.

For most of those three hours, I felt as if I were in a dream, though every minute of it was as real as any experience of my life. I ate cookies, traveled continuously through the house, and felt at peace as I had not felt in a long time. I knew that whatever might be happening to our seventeen-guidance or therapy, or something utterly different from either-it was a thing of great goodness.

The most dreamlike moment came at the start of the third hour, when five new adults appeared, though the doorbell had not rung. I wondered at once if they were parents of the nine, not because they particularly resembled those children, but because they shared that glow of health and quiet beauty that so distinguished the youngsters, and they were in their late twenties or thirties, the right age to be the parents. No names were offered, none were asked, and the five newcomers spread out through the house, each sitting down to converse with a group of children.

I remembered no more of these new conversations than I did of the previous ones, but I often found myself smiling. None of these five adults made an effort to speak to me. They changed groups from time to time, as if all of them wanted to be sure to speak with all of our seventeen, and when I pa.s.sed one of them in a room or hallway, I felt the urge to introduce myself, to ask about them. But though I am not by nature shy, I found myself reluctant to intrude. Strangest of all, when I made eye contact with one of them, I looked away, and felt that I shouldn't ask them to see what my eyes had seen, whatever that might mean.

Later in the evening, I noticed that the hieroglyphics had been removed from the brows of the seventeen. I hadn't seen it being done.

As I made that realization, Verena Stanhope came to me to say that the questions she'd had for me had been answered. She thanked me, and I thanked her for being so brave when it counted the most. She took my hand, and on contact I smiled at what I saw of her in the years to come. "You'll have a beautiful life," I told her.

Still later, I found myself sitting on a sofa, my wallet open in my hands to the card from Gypsy Mummy. I didn't know how long I had been sitting there, but when I raised my head, the mysterious five adults and nine children seemed to have gone. Our hosts and Mrs. Fischer were ushering the children from the living room to the foyer.

I asked, "What's happening?"

Mrs. Fischer said, "They're taking the children home."

"Home where?"

"Each to his or her own home-except for the four who lost their parents. Those will be taken to their grandparents."

The husband of our hostess opened the door, and his wife led the three Payton kids down the front walk to a car parked at the curb.

I stepped onto the front porch to watch a young couple, whose car it must have been, as they greeted Jessie, Jasmine, and Jordan, and got them aboard.

As Mrs. Fischer joined me on the porch, I said, "You mean they will be driven back to Barstow."

"Yes, dear. They'll be let off at their front walk and watched until their parents open the door to them."

"Do the parents know they're coming?"