I had high hopes of a violent encounter with a satisfactory conclusion.
THIRTY
THE MOJAVE HAD STOPPED BREATHING. THE dead lungs of the desert no longer exhaled the lazy breeze that had accompanied Stormy and me on our walk to her apartment.
By streets and alleyways, along a footpath bisecting a vacant lot, through a drainage culvert dry for months, and then to streets again, I made my way home at a brisk pace.
Bodachs were abroad.
First I saw them at a distance, a dozen or more, racing on all fours. When they passed through dark places, they were discernible only as a tumult of shadows, but street-lights and gatepost lamps revealed them for what they were. Their lithe motion and menacing posture brought to mind panthers in pursuit of prey.
A two-story Georgian house on Hampton Way was a bodach magnet. As I passed, staying to the far side of the street, I saw twenty or thirty inky forms, some arriving and others departing by cracks in window frames and chinks in door jambs.
Under the porch light, one of them thrashed and writhed as if in the throes of madness. Then it funneled itself through the keyhole in the front door.
Two others, exiting the residence, strained themselves through the screen that covered an attic vent. As comfortable on vertical surfaces as any spider, they crawled down the wall of the house to the porch roof, crossed the roof, and sprang to the front lawn.
This was the home of the Takuda family, Ken and Micali, and their three children. No lights brightened any windows. The Takudas were asleep, unaware that a swarm of malevolent spirits, quieter than cockroaches, crawled through their rooms and observed them in their dreaming.
I could only assume that one of the Takudas—or all of them—were destined to die this very day, in whatever violent incident had drawn the bodachs to Pico Mundo in great numbers.
Experience had taught me that these spirits often gathered at the site of forthcoming horror, as at the Buena Vista Nursing Home before the earthquake. In this case, however, I didn’t believe that the Takudas would perish in their home any more than I expected that Viola and her daughters would die in their picturesque bungalow.
The bodachs were not concentrated in one place this time. They were all over town, and from their unusually wide disbursement and their behavior, I deduced that they were visiting the potential victims prior to gathering at the place where the bloodshed would occur. Call this the pregame show.
I hurried away from the Takuda house and didn’t glance back, concerned that the slightest attention I paid to these creatures would alert them to the fact that I could see them.
On Eucalyptus Way, other bodachs had invaded the home of Morris and Rachel Melman.
Since Morrie had retired as the superintendent of the Pico Mundo School District, he’d stopped resisting his circadian rhythms and had embraced the fact that he was a night lover by nature. He spent these quiet hours in the pursuit of various hobbies and interests. While Rachel slept in the dark upstairs, warm light brightened the lower floor.
The distinctive shadowy shapes of bodachs in their erect but hunch-shouldered posture were visible at every ground-floor window. They appeared to be in ceaseless, agitated movement through those rooms, as though the scent of impending death stirred in them a violent and delirious excitement.
To one degree or another, this silent frenzy marked their behavior wherever I had seen them since walking to work less than twenty-four hours ago. The intensity of their malignant ecstasy fueled my dread.
In this infested night, I found myself glancing warily at the sky, half expecting to see bodachs swarming across the stars. The moon wasn’t veiled by spirit wings, however, and the stars blazed unobstructed from Andromeda to Vulpecula.
Because they have no apparent mass, the bodachs should not be affected by gravity. Yet I have never seen them fly. Although supernatural, they seem to be bound by many, though not all, of the laws of physics.
When I reached Marigold Lane, I was relieved that the street on which I lived appeared to be free of these beasts.
I passed the spot where I had stopped Harlo Landerson in his Pontiac Firebird 400. How easily, by comparison, the day had begun.
With her killer named and prevented from assaulting other girls, Penny Kallisto had made her peace with this world and moved on. This success gave me hope that I might prevent or minimize the pending carnage that had drawn legions of bodachs to our town.
No lights glowed at Rosalia Sanchez’s house. She is always early to bed, for she rises in advance of the dawn, eager to hear if she remains visible.
I didn’t approach her garage by the driveway. I crossed the side lawn from one oak tree to the next, stealthily scouting the territory.
When I determined that neither Robertson nor any other enemy had stationed himself in the yard, I circled the garage. Although I didn’t find anyone lying in wait, I flushed a frightened rabbit from a lush bed of liriope, and when it shot past me, I achieved a personal best in the vertical-jump-and-gasp event.
Climbing the exterior stairs to my apartment, I watched the windows above, alert for the telltale movement of a blind.
The teeth of the key chattered faintly across the pin-tumblers in the lock. I turned the bolt and opened the door.
When I switched on the light, I saw the gun before anything else. A pistol.
With Chief Porter as my friend, with Stormy as my fianceé, I would know the difference between a pistol and a revolver even if my mother hadn’t instructed me in various fine points of firearms on numerous harrowing occasions.
The pistol had not merely been dropped on the floor but appeared to have been arranged as surely as a diamond necklace on a jeweler’s black-velvet display board, positioned to catch the lamplight in such a way that its contours had an almost erotic quality. Whoever left it there had hoped to entice me to pick it up.
THIRTY-ONE
MY SALVAGE-YARD FURNITURE (TOO SCARRED and tacky to meet the standards of the thrift shops that sold to Stormy), my paperback books neatly arranged on shelves made of stacked bricks and boards, my framed posters of Quasimodo as played by Charles Laughton and Hamlet as played by Mel Gibson and ET from the movie of the same name (three fictional characters with whom I identify for different reasons), the cardboard Elvis perpetually smiling…
From the open doorway in which I stood, everything appeared to be as it had been when I’d left for work Tuesday morning.
The door had been locked and bore no signs of a forced entry. Circling the building, I had noticed no broken windows.
Now I was torn between leaving the door open to facilitate a hasty exit and locking it to prevent anyone from entering at my back. After too long a hesitation, I quietly closed the door and engaged the deadbolt.
Except for the occasional chirr-and-coo of a night bird that filtered through two screened windows I’d left open for ventilation, the hush was so profound that a drop of water, in the kitchenette, fell from faucet to sink pan with a plonk that quivered my eardrums.
Certain that I was meant to pick up the gun, easily resisting its allure, I stepped over the weapon.
One of the benefits of living in a single room—the armchair a few steps from the bed, the bed a few steps from the refrigerator—is that the search for an intruder takes less than a minute. Your blood pressure hasn’t the time to rise to stroke-inducing levels when you need only look behind the sofa and in a single closet to clear all possible hiding places.
Only the bathroom remained to be searched.
That door was closed. I had left it open.
After a shower, I always leave it open because the bathroom has a single small window, hardly more than a porthole, and an exhaust fan that makes all the noise of—but stirs less air than—a drum set hammered by a heavy-metal musician. If I didn’t leave the door open, the bath would be ruled by aggressive mutant molds with a taste for human flesh, and I would be forced henceforth to bathe in the kitchen sink.
Unclipping the phone from my belt, I
considered calling the police to report an intruder.
If officers arrived and found no one in the bathroom, I would look foolish. And scenarios occurred to me in which I might appear worse than merely foolish.
I glanced at the gun on the floor. If it had been placed with careful calculation, with the intent that I should pick it up, why did someone want me to have possession of it?
After putting the phone on the breakfast counter, I stepped to one side of the bathroom door and listened intently. The only sounds were the periodic song of the night bird and, after a long pause, the plonk of another water drop in the kitchen sink.
The knob turned without resistance. The door opened inward.
Someone had left a light on.
I am diligent about conserving electricity. The cost may be only pennies, but a short-order cook who hopes to marry cannot afford to leave lights burning or music playing for the pleasure of the spiders and spirits that might visit his quarters in his absence.
With the door open wide, the small bathroom would offer nowhere for an intruder to hide except in the bathtub, behind the closed shower curtain.
I always close the curtain after taking a shower, because if I left it drawn to one side, it would not dry properly in that poorly vented space. Mildew would at once set up housekeeping in the damp folds.
Since I’d left Tuesday morning, someone had pulled the curtain aside. That person or another was at this moment facedown in the bathtub.
He appeared to have fallen into the tub or to have been tumbled there as a dead weight. No living person would lie in such an awkward position, face pressed to the drain, his right arm twisted behind his body at a torturous angle that suggested a dislocated shoulder or even a torn rotator cuff.
The fingers of the exposed, pale hand were curled into a rigid claw. They did not twitch; neither did they tremble.
Along the far rim of the tub, a thin smear of blood had dried on the porcelain.
When blood is spilled in quantity, you can smell it: This is not a foul odor when fresh, but subtle and crisp and terrifying. I couldn’t detect the faintest scent of it here.
A glistening spill of liquid soap on the tile counter around the sink and thick soap scum in the bowl suggested that the killer had washed his hands vigorously after the deed, perhaps to scrub away blood or traces of incriminating gunpowder.
After drying, he had tossed the hand towel into the tub. It covered the back of the victim’s head.
Without conscious intent, I had backed out of the bathroom. I stood just beyond the open door.
My heart played an inappropriate rhythm for the melody of the night bird.
I glanced toward the gun on the carpet, just inside the front door. My instinctive reluctance to touch the weapon had proven to be wise, although I still didn’t grasp the full meaning of what had transpired here.
My cell phone lay on the breakfast counter, and the apartment phone was on the nightstand beside my bed. I considered those whom I should call and those I could call. None of my options appealed to me.
To better understand the situation, I needed to see the face of the corpse.
I returned to the bathroom. I bent over the tub. Avoiding the hooked and twisted fingers, I clutched handfuls of his clothing and, with some struggle, wrestled the dead man onto his side, and then onto his back.
The towel slid off his face.
Still a washed-out gray but devoid now of their characteristic eerie amusement, Bob Robertson’s eyes were more sharply focused in death than in life. His gaze fixed intently on a distant vision, as though in the final instant of existence, he had glimpsed something more startling and far more terrifying than just the face of his killer.
THIRTY-TWO
FOR A MOMENT I EXPECTED FUNGUS MAN TO blink, to grin, to grab me and drag me into the tub with him, to savage me with those teeth that had served him so well during his gluttony at the counter in the Pico Mundo Grille.
His unexpected death left me with no immediate monster, with my plan derailed and my purpose in doubt. I had assumed that he was the maniacal gunman who shot the murdered people in my recurring dream, not merely another victim. With Robertson dead, this labyrinth had no Minotaur for me to track down and slay.
He had been shot once in the chest at such close range that the muzzle of the gun might have been pressed against him. His shirt bore the gray-brown flare of a scorch mark.
Because the heart had stopped functioning in an instant, little blood had escaped the body.
Again I retreated from the bathroom.
I almost pulled the door shut. Then I had the strange notion that behind the closed door, in spite of his torn heart, Robertson would rise quietly from the tub and stand in wait, taking me by surprise when I returned.
He was stone dead, and I knew that he was dead, and yet such irrational worries tied knots in my nerves.
Leaving the bathroom door open, I stepped to the kitchen sink and washed my hands. After drying them on paper towels, I almost washed them again.
Although I had touched only Robertson’s clothes, I imagined that my hands smelled of death.
Lifting the receiver from the wall phone, I unintentionally rattled it against the cradle, almost dropped it. My hands were shaking.
I listened to the dial tone.
I knew Chief Porter’s number. I didn’t need to look it up.
Finally I racked the phone again without entering a single digit on the keypad.
Circumstances had altered my cozy relationship with the chief. A dead man awaited discovery in my apartment. The gun that had killed him was here, as well.
Earlier I had reported an unsettling encounter with the victim at St. Bartholomew’s. And the chief knew that I had illegally entered Robertson’s house on Tuesday afternoon and had thereby given the man reason to confront me.
If this pistol was registered to Robertson, the most obvious assumption on the part of the police would be that he had come here to demand to know what I’d been doing in his house and perhaps to threaten me. They would assume that we had argued, that the argument had led to a struggle, and that I had shot him with his own gun in self-defense.
They wouldn’t charge me with murder or with manslaughter. They probably wouldn’t even take me into custody for questioning.
If the pistol wasn’t registered to Robertson, however, I’d be as stuck as a rat on a glue-board trap.
Wyatt Porter knew me too well to believe that I could kill a man in cold blood, when my life was not at risk. As the chief, he set the policies for the department and made important procedural decisions, but he wasn’t the only cop on the force. Others would not be so quick to declare me innocent under questionable circumstances, and if for no reason but appearances, the chief might have to park me in a cell for a day, until he could find a way to resolve matters in my favor.
In jail, I would be safe from whatever bloody catastrophe might be descending on Pico Mundo, but I would be in no position to use my gift to prevent the tragedy. I couldn’t escort Viola Peabody and her daughters from their house to the safer refuge of her sister’s home. I couldn’t find a way to induce the Takuda family to change their Wednesday plans.
I had hoped to follow the bodachs to the site of the impending crime as Wednesday morning gave way to afternoon, when this event seemed destined to occur. Those malevolent spirits would gather in advance of the bloodshed, perhaps giving me enough time to change the fates of all those who were unwittingly approaching their deaths at that as yet unknown place.
Odysseus in chains, however, cannot lead the way back to Ithaca.
I include this literary allusion solely because I know Little Ozzie will be amused that I would have the audacity to compare myself to that great hero of the Trojan War.
“Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think that you can bear to give it,” he instructed before I began to write, “because you won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope
.”
My promise to obey this instruction has become more difficult to fulfill as my story progresses relentlessly toward the hour of the gun. The light recedes from me, and the darkness gathers. To please my massive, six-fingered muse, I must resort to tricks like the Odysseus bit.
Having determined that I couldn’t turn to Chief Porter for help in these circumstances, I switched off all the lights except the one in the bathroom. I couldn’t bear to be entirely in the dark with the corpse, for I sensed that, even though dead, he still had surprises in store for me.
In the gloom, I quickly found my way through the cluttered room with as much confidence as if I had been born sightless and raised here since birth. At one of the front windows, I twisted the control rod to open the Levolor.
To the right, I could see the moonlit stairs framed in slices by the slats of the blind. No one was ascending toward my door.
Directly ahead lay the street, but because of the intervening oaks, I didn’t have an unobstructed view. Nevertheless, between the branches I could see enough of Marigold Lane to be certain that no suspicious vehicles had parked at the curb since my arrival.
Judging by the evidence, I wasn’t under observation, but I felt certain that whoever had whacked Bob Robertson would be back. When they knew that I had come home and discovered the cadaver, they would either pop me, too, and make the double murder look like murder-suicide, or more likely place an anonymous call to the police and land me in the cell that I was determined to avoid.
I knew a set-up when I saw one.
THIRTY-THREE
AFTER CLOSING THE LEVOLOR AT THE WINDOW, leaving the lights off, I went to the bureau, which was near the bed. In this one room, everything could be found near the bed, including the sofa and the microwave.
In the bottom drawer of the bureau I kept my only spare set of bed linens. Under the pillowcases, I found the neatly pressed and folded top sheet.
Although without a doubt the situation warranted the sacrifice of good bedclothes, I regretted having to give up that sheet. Well-made cotton bedding is not cheap, and I am mildly allergic to many of the synthetic fabrics commonly used for such items.