The roar of a nearer engine followed by the shrill squealing of brakes startled me backward. The superstretch Mercedes limo ran down Mr. Hitchcock and slid to a smoking-rubber stop in front of me.
He couldn’t have been roadkill, of course, because he lacked material substance. He was just gone.
Through the open window in the driver’s door, Mrs. Edie Fischer said, “Hurry, child, or we might lose him.”
In the distance, the red-and-black rig disappeared into the underpass beneath the highway.
I darted around the car, climbed in the front passenger seat, pulled my door shut, and glanced through the open privacy panel into the passenger compartment. “Where is he?”
Of course Mrs. Fischer didn’t know that I was looking for Mr. Hitchcock, who I thought must have entered the limousine through the undercarriage.
Perched on her booster pillow, barely able to see over the steering wheel, piloting the immense car around the service islands, she said, “You called him a flamboyant rhinestone cowboy, but I saw him, and there’s no honest honky-tonk in that man. He’s flam with none of the buoyant. All deceit, lies, trickery. Planning murder, is he? Child, you need to take him down.”
“I knocked him flat with apples—Red Delicious, Granny Smiths—but even as much as I hate guns, I probably need one.”
Indicating the purse on the seat between us, she said, “Take the pistol I showed you earlier.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Sweetie, that gun’s even harder to trace than apples.”
I didn’t feel that it was proper to open her purse, even though she invited me to do so. Besides, I didn’t have an immediate use for the weapon. For the time being, we were only following my enemy. I wasn’t going to shoot out his tires or leap from the speeding limo to the driver’s door of the truck. I’m not Tom Cruise. I’m not even Angelina Jolie.
Entering one of the exit lanes, Mrs. Fischer accelerated toward the underpass. “Belt up,” she advised.
By this point, I knew her well enough to take such advice without hesitation.
Coming out of the underpass, ascending the curved on-ramp to the Coast Highway, she rapidly accelerated, as if the laws of physics did not apply to her. If we’d been in an SUV or an ordinary car, we might have demonstrated the power of centrifugal force, might have rolled off the roadway at the apex of the arc. The limo was heavy, however, with a low center of gravity, and we rocketed to the top of the ramp at launch speed.
Contemptuous of the yield sign, Mrs. Fischer pressed great blasts of sound from the car horn as a warning to any motorists who might be approaching from behind her in the right-hand lane. The limo shot onto the highway, whistling south toward the targeted ProStar+.
“Take it easy,” I warned. “We don’t want to catch him.”
“But you said he’s going to murder three people. He has to be stopped.”
“We’ll stop him, but not yet. We need to see where he’s going, what he’s up to. He’s not in this alone. That reminds me, did you see another guy come out of the truck stop with him?”
“No. He was alone. So this is a conspiracy?” She lingered on the last word, as though the sound of it enchanted her.
“I don’t know what it is. This other guy—he’s wearing jeans and a black-leather jacket. Lizard-lid eyes, stocky, looks like he was into one of those martial arts where he broke cement blocks with his face but sometimes the block won.”
“This is more delicious by the moment.” She grinned broadly, and her adorable dimples were so deep that faeries might have lived in them. Having eased up on the accelerator, she said, “So we’ll just stay far back and keep the truck in sight—is that it?”
Relying on my psychic magnetism, we wouldn’t even have to keep the ProStar+ in sight, but I didn’t want to explain to her that I was like Miss Jane Marple with paranormal abilities.
“Yes, ma’am. Just keep it in sight. Nothing bad is going to happen right away. He doesn’t have the children yet.”
I realized my mistake even as I spoke.
She understood the significance of what I said. Her smile faded, her dimples withered. Her voice grew so tough that she sounded as if she might be Clint Eastwood’s hard-bitten sister. “That’s who he’s going to kill—three children?”
Reluctantly, I said, “Yes, ma’am, I believe so. Two girls—one maybe six years old, the other ten. And a boy of about eight.”
“Evil is always drawn to the innocent,” she declared with the precise note of contempt and disgust that, if she were Mr. Eastwood and if this were a Western, would have been punctuated with a stream of tobacco juice well aimed at a spittoon. “How do you know he’s going to kill children?”
“I’d rather not say, ma’am.”
“Call me Edie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’d rather that you did say.”
“What if first you tell me what it means to be smoothed out and fully blue?”
After a silence, she said, “I’ll tell you when I tell you, but this isn’t the when.”
“That works for me, too, ma’am.”
Squinting at the distant eighteen-wheeler as though she might vaporize it with her stare, Mrs. Fischer said, “If I catch the freak laying a hand on a child, I’ll feed his testicles to coyotes while he watches.”
She didn’t look quite so adorable at the moment. She looked like a mean Muppet hot for vengeance.
Eight
IN THE TIGHTLY CLUSTERED SUBURBS JUST NORTH OF Los Angeles, the ProStar+ turned away from any hope of the sea, and we followed. Soon Highway 101 became State Route 134, the widest river of concrete that I had yet seen, which offered passage through the metropolitan sprawl to stark and lonely mountains in the east.
I was born in quiet Pico Mundo, where prairie surrendered to desert long before my time, and I lived there for more than twenty years. But the memory of my loss was too much with me in Pico Mundo. Although I knew that Stormy Llewellyn would not have hesitated to cross over to the Other Side, I woke many mornings with the hope that her lingering spirit would come to me, that I might see her again, and I went to bed at night to dream of the reunion that the day had not produced.
When at last I ventured out into the world, seeking peace that I could no longer find in my hometown, I went only as far as St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, on the California side of the Sierra Nevada, high in the mountains, where I stayed as a lay resident in the monks’ guesthouse for half a year. My adventures since leaving the monastery had taken me to the town of Magic Beach, to a roadside enterprise called Harmony Corner, to a strange private estate in Montecito, but only now, for the first time in my life, into the outer precincts of a major city.
Maybe I am by nature too lacking in sophistication to appreciate or adapt to life among teeming multitudes. The sight of one community after another flowing together without discernible borders, the vast valley and the serried hillsides encrusted with miles upon miles of houses and low-rise buildings, here and there clusters of high-rises: It oppressed me, and though we were traveling through it all at great speed—past exits for Burbank and Glendale and Eagle Rock—I felt enchained, claustrophobic.
The volume of traffic increased by the minute. Afraid of losing our quarry, Mrs. Fischer wanted to close the gap between us and the truck.
I insisted that we remain at such a distance that we could just barely see the eighteen-wheeler. “You said he’s all deceit, lies, and trickery, and that’s true. But he’s also … I don’t know. Intuitive. Strangely intuitive. If we aren’t extremely careful, he’ll become aware of us.”
She glanced at me, her face that of a wizened pixie but her eyes as analytic as the lasers of some facial-recognition scanner that could read volumes of information even in the blandest expression that I might turn upon her. “And if we lose him, Oddie?”
“We’ll find him again.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
Rather than meet that blue stare a mom
ent longer, I shifted my gaze to the habitations of humanity that, in their plenitude, raised an inexplicable but nonetheless terrible foreboding in my heart.
When I didn’t reply to her question, she answered it for me. “Maybe you’re so sure of finding him again because you’re ‘strangely intuitive’ yourself.”
I didn’t respond because her words were not just words; they were also bait. She had her secrets and I had mine, and for the time being, we would keep them to ourselves.
The clear sky, under which I had left Annamaria back at the cottage, remained clear here to the north of the city. But ominous palisades of dark clouds rose in the south and appeared to be falling toward us in a slow-motion avalanche. A wind had come out of the south, as well, shuddering the trees. The high-soaring, graceful flocks of birds seen previously were gone, replaced by quick pairs and lone individuals that flew fast and low, darting as if from one temporary roost to another in search of the safest haven in which to ride out a coming storm.
“What happened to your disguise?” Mrs. Fischer asked.
“Disguise?”
“Oscar’s lovely plaid cap.”
“I don’t know. I must have left it somewhere. I’m sorry.”
“And the sunglasses?”
“They broke when—” I almost said when the cowboy shot me in the throat, but caught myself. “They just broke.”
She clucked her tongue. “Not good. Now there’s just the chin beard and the choice of mustaches.”
“I’m done with disguises, ma’am. They won’t fool this guy.”
Across the wide highway, through the valley, over the tiered foothills, and up the rough slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, vast ragged shadows suddenly flew northward, although the clear sky revealed no cause for them. In all my troubled life, I had never seen anything like these swift shades, as if aircraft as large as football fields—and larger—passed low overhead in jet-speed squadrons.
I almost exclaimed about them, but then I realized that Mrs. Fischer was unaware of this spectacle. She leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting to keep the distant ProStar+ in sight among other eighteen-wheelers that might at any moment change lanes and screen her from it. Even if focused intently on the truck, she would have been aware of the racing shadows if she had been capable of seeing them. Evidently, they weren’t real shadows but perhaps were instead portents of some threat, visible only to me.
The many densely populated communities encircling us were more oppressive than ever, huddled, hivelike. In the stroboscopic flicker of light, the impossible shadows seemed not only to race over the landscape but also to flail at it, and the buildings and all the artifacts of mankind appeared to twitch and shiver much as the trees shuddered in the rising wind.
For me and for a moment, present and future became one, the latter floating on the former, sensed more than seen, presenting itself as feelings and metaphors rather than as a detailed vision of what was to come in the days and years ahead. Claustrophobia wound around me, tighter and tighter, as if it were grave cloth and I were being mummified. For all that great cities had to offer, they were nonetheless mazes of streets. Mazes could thwart and trap. Broad, open freeways offered freedom only until clogged with traffic—or barricaded. Any neighborhood, rich or poor, was potentially a ghetto, every ghetto easily converted to a prison, every prison a potential death camp. To both sides of the highway, the residences and offices and retail outlets seemed at one moment to be burnt-out and boarded-up, but an instant later they appeared to be bunkers and battlements arrayed not against a common enemy but each against the other in a war of all versus all. Now I felt the shadows that flailed the land, as though they were accompanied by shock waves, and the flickers of sunlight were almost bright enough to blind. In addition to the broad freeway along which vehicles raced at high speed, I was also aware of these same concrete arteries in a state of sclerosis, perhaps hours or weeks or years from now, commuters halted bumper-to-bumper. As insubstantial as figments of a dream yet terrifying, an angry mob invaded my vague premonition, a faceless horde bringing grim detail to the vision, metastasizing along the lanes of stalled cars and trucks, smashing windows, tearing open doors, dragging motorists and passengers onto the pavement, blades glinting, guns firing, boots stomping terrified faces. Blood.
I might have lost consciousness for a few seconds, because when I opened my eyes, the landscape was no longer darkened by fast-moving and inexplicable shadows. The surrounding communities were neither in ruins nor fortified against conflict, traffic sped along the freeway, and Mrs. Fischer sounded worried when she said, “Oddie, what’s wrong? Do you hear me? Oddie?”
“Yes, ma’am, I hear you.”
The images from the premonition faded, but I still had a sense of being in the path of malevolent, implacable forces. That wasn’t an unusual feeling for me, but this time the threat felt imminent.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Fischer asked.
“Sort of. Yeah. I’m fine. Just a little thing there for a moment. What’s up?”
“I think we’ve lost him.” She drove as fast as ever, switching lanes with bravado, passing between a pair of eighteen-wheelers that bracketed us like cliffs, searching for the one that got away. “There were suddenly so many trucks and I thought I still had a lock on him, but then I realized it was a different rig.”
State Route 134 had become Interstate 210. The highway signs promised exits for Azusa and Covina.
The dark clouds massed in the south were dramatically closer than before, and I suspected that I had been unconscious for minutes rather than seconds.
“Ma’am, you better get all the way over to the right. Take the next exit.”
“Do you know where he’s gone? How can you know where he’s gone?”
“I have a hunch.”
Working the car toward the right lane, Mrs. Fischer said, “A hunch? A hunch isn’t worth spit.”
“Well, this one is, ma’am. It’s worth spit and then some.”
“Your hunches usually pay off, do they?”
“I learn by going where I have to go,” I said, determined not to explain psychic magnetism.
She didn’t slow down much for the exit ramp.
I said, “Left at the bottom.”
Because no traffic approached on the intersecting surface street, she didn’t obey the stop sign.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “how did you know he would be at that truck stop earlier?”
As we went through an underpass beneath the freeway, we politely pretended not to see the obscene spray-painted graffiti, which was colorful but, as usual, unimaginative. I suspect that those who see equal merit in graffiti and the work of Rembrandt might be wrong.
I said, “Trucker at a truck stop. It seemed logical.”
“That’s all it was? Just logic?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re dancing around the truth, child. You told me it was only all right to lie to evil.”
“And you said you might be evil.”
“Might be. I didn’t say I was.”
“Please turn left in two blocks, ma’am.”
“Fact is, I’m not evil.”
The effect of the premonition had diminished enough to allow me to smile. “First you said you might be evil, now you say you’re not. I better tread carefully with you.”
We passed through a once prosperous retail area where a third of the businesses were gone, many of them restaurants, and the remaining shops and services had a tattered look that suggested they were week-to-week enterprises. Some days lately, it seemed that everything was a week-to-week enterprise, including the country and the world.
A traffic signal turned green to accommodate us, and I said, “After the intersection, pull to the curb.”
Mrs. Fischer braked to a stop in front of a thrift shop operated by the Salvation Army.
I said, “I’ll be going the rest of the way alone, on foot.”
“Is that really wise?”
/> “I’m not sure anything I do is wise, ma’am, but I’ve stayed alive a lot longer than I ever expected.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’m grateful that you came along, and I’m thankful for your help. But I don’t want you to be hurt because of me. You need to get on with your life while I get on with trying to understand mine.”
After her many years of living, perhaps even from her childhood, Mrs. Fischer’s eyes were the sky reflected in the sea, eternity mirrored in the everlasting waters. Even if she had not given voice to the next thing that she said, meeting her gaze, I would have known that the secrets to which she often alluded were real and profound and no less strange than my own. She said, “Something big is coming, Oddie. Something so very big that the world will change. I know you feel it, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long have you felt it?”
“Almost all my life. But more so lately.”
“Much more so lately,” she agreed. “Child, do you know where truly great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?”
I said, “Faith.”
“And love,” she said. “Faith is a kind of love, you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave.”
I thought of Stormy and how the loss of her had tempered my steel. “Yes.”
“Heath and I never had children. I believe that I wasn’t given any children because I needed to save all that love for a time late in my life when I would need it to give me courage.”
Suddenly the rising wind rose faster, buffeted the limousine, and conjured a dust devil full of leaves and litter that whirled up from the gutter and followed a drunkard’s path down the center of the street.
She said, “You see, many years ago, three times I had the same vivid dream about a motherless, fatherless boy who was nevertheless not an orphan. Are you without a mother and father, Oddie?”
“They’re still alive, ma’am, but they were never a mother and father to me. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”
“When I saw you standing beside the Coast Highway, I recognized you from the dream, though you are not a boy any longer.”