I didn’t wait to see the more modest flames that would build now in the wake of the blast. Turning east again, pulling the goggles over my eyes, I sprinted toward Blue Sky Ranch.
Forty-one
To the right of the driveway were acres of meadows secured by ranch fencing infilled with fine wire mesh. The same aquifer that made possible the almond orchard provided sweet grass and clover for the breed-worthy horses that, during the day, could sometimes be seen grazing there.
Blue Sky Ranch had been for two generations one of the three or four most successful quarter-horse breeding operations anywhere in California and the Southwest. As a secondary business, they bred and trained horses for sulky racing. Bing Torbold and his wife had built the ranch and the business. His son, Bing Jr., upheld the family traditions and brought even greater glory to the storied Torbold stables. When Bing Jr. fell ill and his son, Carter Torbold, took over a decade sooner than anticipated, the slide to bankruptcy began. Carter gambled. Not on horses. In Vegas. The casinos called his kind “whales,” because of their fat bankrolls. Carter loved to gamble, but he had neither the discipline of a professional poker player nor any luck at all.
The valuable breeding stock was sold off to an operation in Arizona. Without the legendary Torbold horses to breed new champions, the property and buildings were worth less than they might have been had the bloodline been still an asset of the ranch.
Fourteen years ago, when they were twenty-five, Dave and Lauren Ainsworth had bought the ranch at a distressed price. They had modest capital, a deep knowledge of horses, a willingness to work hard, and the wisdom to know that delayed gratification was often the secret to success. In ten years, they built a business and a winning bloodline that Bing Torbold would have admired. Then Dave got cancer and was gone in six months. Lauren had been running the place ever since, doing the work of two and raising her twins, Veronica and Victoria, by all accounts succeeding at both tasks. She and Dave had brought the girls to the Pico Mundo Grille occasionally, and often they had sat at the counter to watch me perform with spatulas, whisk, pot fork, and draining spoon, which could be an entertaining juggling act, especially if I hammed it up for the kids.
As the driveway turned to the right, the residence came into view: a two-story Kentucky-style manor house, white with black trim. The place was smaller than it appeared to be, because the generous veranda that wrapped three sides created the illusion of grandness.
Most of the windows were bright, and the veranda lamps were aglow. The goggles magnified the light into a consuming green flare, and I pushed them onto my forehead again.
I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch. How long? Five minutes. Four? Maybe just three?
Lauren was standing in the side yard with her daughters, gazing west toward the colossal flames surging from the gasoline storage tank and the less dramatic fire at, possibly, a distant church. Their yellow Labrador retriever, Muggs, stood with them, alert. I called to them and identified myself as I hurried off the driveway onto the front lawn. The girls, almost twelve years old and marked by the easy ardency of that age, squealed with excitement and ran toward me, and Muggs came galloping after them. They hadn’t seen me in nearly two years, but the events of this night so astonished them and inflamed their imagination that the suddenness of my arrival seemed ordinary by comparison.
“Mr. Thomas! What’re all the fires?”
“Mr. Thomas! Did you hear the booms?”
“They were crazy loud!”
“We were watching TV!”
“The whole house shook!”
“BOOM! BOOM!”
“Muggs went Scooby Doo on us!”
“He hid under the kitchen table!”
Muggs wove among us, his tail beating against our legs, panting and grinning, having overcome his terror, now filled with the girls’ enthusiasm.
They were lovely girls, with their mother’s blond hair and their father’s gray eyes. They would turn heads when they were grown, just as their mother had turned heads—and still did.
Lauren joined us near the veranda where it cornered from the front yard to the side yard. She had none of the girls’ giddiness, and she shushed them. She was serious, and when she saw the combat rifle that I carried and then met my eyes, anxiety took possession of her face.
“Trust me,” I said.
“Of course.”
“You have a gun?”
“A pistol.”
“Get it. Fast. Take the girls to the stables. Hide there.”
She sprinted for the porch steps.
I called after her, “Leave all the house lights on.”
Veronica and Victoria remained with me. They were still excited but now also anxious.
“What’s wrong, Mr. Thomas?”
“What’s happening?”
“Are we going to be okay?”
“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Does Muggs bark much?”
Veronica said, “He hardly ever barks.”
“He grumbles sometimes,” Victoria said. “Sometimes he farts loud.”
“Hardly ever.”
Veronica said, “But when he does, it’s a window-rattler.”
“In the stable,” I warned them, “make sure he doesn’t bark.”
Veronica held the agitated dog by the collar.
Both girls looked toward the fires, and Victoria said, “Is someone gonna bomb us?”
I’m not sure how I knew which of them was Veronica, which Victoria, but I knew. “No one’s going to bomb you, but you need to be brave.”
“We can be,” Veronica said.
“We have been,” Victoria said.
Veronica said, “We had to be. Since we lost Daddy.”
Their mother hurried out of the house, closed the door behind her, and descended the porch steps. She carried a pistol and a flashlight.
I said, “Hide as best you can. Then don’t use the flashlight until I come for you.”
“All right.”
I thought I heard, faintly, an approaching engine.
When I glanced back at the colonnades of oaks that canopied the driveway, I saw no telltale headlights.
Nevertheless, I said, “Go. Go, go, go!”
The three of them and the Labrador hurried past the house, east toward the stables and the training track.
Trusting Lauren to follow my instructions, I retreated from the well-lighted house to the darkness along the perimeter of the lawn. I took up a position behind shrubbery, from which I could watch the driveway.
I thought I knew how the cultists intended to get the job done. They wouldn’t drive right up to the house, wouldn’t want the engine noise to announce their arrival. Besides, they’d block the driveway with their vehicle, so that no visitor could get past it. One man to stay with the car. The others—four, five, whatever—would arrive on foot. Two for the front door. Two or three for the back, to prevent Lauren and her daughters from fleeing that way. All of them with combat rifles. Kick in the front door. Maybe fire a burst into the ceiling to intimidate. Blue Sky Ranch was semi-isolated. Anyone who heard the gunfire at a distance wouldn’t be able to pinpoint its origin. The invaders would move fast through the house, find Lauren and the girls. Herd them to one room. Gang-rape them within sight of one another. Humiliating them was an important element of the ritual sacrifice. Humiliate, terrify, demean, diminish, bring to despair. If this church had a community-outreach program, it would be symbolized on their stationery not as an open hand, but as a fist. There might be black candles on whatever makeshift altar they used. Tannis-root paste and a fungus called devil’s pepper that those being sacrificed were forced to swallow. Most likely a quick ceremony. A couple of Hail Satans. A sip of blood. This was a busy night for the Cult of Meridian. From the rapes, they would go directly to the ceremonial knife. None of the usual preliminary torture and disfigurement. Just the killing cut. Three times.
A cold, controlled fury had gripped me, greater than any anger I had experienced before. I felt as if t
here were two Odds in the same skin—the fry cook who had written poetry for the girl he loved and wept at movies like Terms of Endearment, but also the ruthless killer who could shoot men in the back. The darker Odd Thomas thought his violence must be righteous, in the service of good, for the protection of the innocent. But the other Odd wondered if the claim of righteous purpose, exerted so often in these past two years, was always true—or if it might be overused. There were nights when consideration of that issue would not allow sleep. In spite of all the doubt, my fury didn’t abate.
On my knees behind the shrubbery, monitoring the driveway, I didn’t like what I smelled. The offender wasn’t the foliage with its tiny white flowers, which provided a green-leaf scent and a faint sweet fragrance similar to jasmine. The odor was mine, and it seemed to me that only part of it could be a consequence of all the sweating that I’d done and the chemicals in the gray snowflake ashes that had dissolved and stuck to my hair and jacket. Maybe part of it was the malodor of a deeper corruption.
If I progressed from being a righteous man to being a scourge, my destiny might not match Gypsy Mummy’s prediction. Scourges assumed authority they had not been granted. They made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in greater numbers than were absolutely necessary to save themselves and the innocents who needed their protection. Scourges transgressed against social and sacred order. In Hamlet, the prince lacked the clarity of heart and the courage to be a minister of Truth, as he should have been, but he sure was a bang-up scourge, inflicting upon his kingdom more killing than necessary. Scourges themselves are always scourged. The prince did not survive the play. Moses scourged three thousand people—and did not live to see the promised land.
Crickets and toads had been singing in the nearby meadow that began where the mown lawn ended. They stopped abruptly, as if they had all forgotten their songs.
Forty-two
Since kneeling behind the shrubbery, I had avoided looking to the left, toward the Ainsworth house, or to the right, where flames from the gasoline fire unfurled like the flags of Hell. My eyes were somewhat dark-adapted once more.
Out there in the night, where the driveway turned from east to south and proceeded toward the residence, dark figures appeared. The brightly lighted residence no doubt compelled them to remove their night-vision goggles.
They were clustered together. Difficult to count. Closely grouped, they made one target. Tempting. But even if they remained in tight formation until they reached the front porch, I couldn’t be sure of dropping them all. My weapon might not be set on burst-fire. I wouldn’t know until I squeezed the trigger. I was too far away to stand up and pick them off one by one. They would scatter, and I would have lost the advantage of surprise. Besides, I didn’t have sniper skills. I was a close-up killer.
I held my position until I was able to count them. Four. They ordered themselves into pairs as they came toward the house, which suggested that my idea of how they would do the job must be on the money.
The line of shrubs, defining the end of the lawn, grew waist-high, with a two-foot gap between each bush. I rose into a crouch and hurried toward the back of the house, not fully concealed. My powder-blue sport coat was definitely not the new black. I was better dressed for a prom than for secret ops. I counted on darkness. And the likelihood that they would be focused on the house rather than on shrubbery sixty feet to the west of it. Anyway, in about three seconds, I had put the house between me and them.
Nobody shouted or shot at me.
The back of the residence was as I remembered it. The veranda didn’t wrap to this fourth side of the structure. A large flagstone patio instead. A round table with a big adjustable umbrella and six chairs. Two lounges for sunning, a small table between them. At the end of the patio farthest from the house stood an outdoor culinary center: large built-in barbecue, four gas burners under a steel cover, double sink, under-the-counter refrigerator, storage space.
I sprinted behind that open-air kitchen and crouched there, the combat rifle in both hands and ready.
From what Carl had said to Emory back at the fence between the orchard and Blue Sky Ranch, the cult had secretly photographed Lauren and the twins, perhaps at a distance, with a telephoto lens.
You seen the pictures—them two girls, their mother.
When they reconnoitered the area, considering possible targets for the C-4, they had found the Ainsworths, too, and had most likely decided at once to put Lauren and the girls on their itinerary for a little sex, savagery, and satanic ceremony between demolition jobs. They would have scoped out the property; they would know what to find on the back patio. They wouldn’t have to snoop around the outdoor kitchen in the dark, wondering what it might be.
In spite of their soft-soled shoes, I heard them arrive. One of them bumped against a piece of patio furniture, and the other hissed his disapproval.
With caution, I eased up from a crouch, just until I could see over the hood of the barbecue. The two cultists were facing away from me, intent on the back door, silhouetted against the light from the kitchen windows.
From the farther end of the house came a hard crash and the sound of shattering glass as the other two creeps kicked open the front door. No turning back now. Neither for them nor for me.
Forty-three
The doubt and the twinge of regret never came between the idea and the reality, when the decision to kill was reversible. At the moment between the motion and the act, I had the capacity only for fear and for a wild delight in my commitment to this hazardous deed. No, there was one thing more. I felt as well a terrible pride in my cunning, in my boldness.
From behind the patio culinary center, I rose to full height. The recoil proved to be not as bad as I expected. The weapon was set on burst-fire, after all, but the burst seemed to be three shots per trigger pull, which didn’t produce quite the vicious spray of bullets that I envisioned. Nevertheless, the man on the left went down at once, and I targeted the second cultist.
His reactions were fine-tuned. He squeezed off two bursts as he swung toward me, though he had no chance of scoring a hit in the turn. He hoped to make me duck and thereby gain for himself a fateful second. I didn’t duck, but returned two bursts for two, nailing his left side. He lost strength in his arms, so that his third and final volley went low, shattering through the ceramic-tile front of the outdoor kitchen, through the plywood or pressboard underneath, its energy spent in the guts of the under-the-counter refrigerator. I let off a last burst, and he was finished with his adventure at Blue Sky Ranch.
The racket had been louder than gunfire alone. If I was right about each pull of the trigger releasing three quick rounds, I had expended twelve. Perhaps fewer than half of those had been stopped by the two cultists. Others had split the wood siding on the back of the house and shattered windows and damaged the well-lighted kitchen that I could see through the missing panes of glass.
All of this had happened the instant after the two cultists at the front of the house had kicked open the door, alerting them that something had gone terribly wrong with their plan. They would either bail out or they would stay the course; and if the latter, they could no longer be taken by surprise, as the first two had been.
Unless I moved fast.
And had a little luck.
These people weren’t Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, weren’t trained by the best professional warriors in the world, weren’t seasoned by a real war in which they had encountered an enemy who fought back. They lacked the honor of SEALs and Rangers, lacked ideals that stiffened the spine in times of peril. They were fanatics, driven by emotion rather than reason. Their commitment was to destruction instead of to the preservation of what was good, and this commitment made them feel dangerous, therefore powerful and superior. Being dangerous, however, wasn’t the same as being powerful and certainly didn’t support a claim to superiority. Like all barbarians, they were vulnerable to panic and confusion when the destruction they wished to wreak was visited instead upon them. r />
Even a fry cook in a powder-blue sport coat, who was unable to figure out the true and hidden nature of the world in spite of having been given plenty of hints, even I might triumph over them.
As the second cultist fell, he slammed his head against the edge of a patio table, incurring a superfluous final wound. By the time he kissed the flagstones, I was already running back the way I had come. This time I didn’t rely on the cover of shrubbery, but stayed close to the house.
Most if not all of the downstairs lights were on, and as I passed each window, I scanned the room beyond. At the last one, I found what I wanted. The door-busting pair had moved out of the foyer but had gotten no farther than the living room, where the gunfire at the back of the house had surprised them and brought them to a brief halt. One of them started moving toward the archway that led to the hall.
I spent the eighteen rounds remaining in the magazine, and then dodged to the left of the window, standing with my back pressed to the house. I fumbled a spare magazine out of a sport-coat pocket, slapped it into the rifle.
As I looked up from that task, I saw headlights on the driveway, between the flanking oaks. But the cult’s vehicle wasn’t approaching. Backup wasn’t on the way. The driver reversed as fast as he dared toward the county road. All the gunfire must have made him reconsider what duty required of him.
When I leaned to the shattered window and eased my head past the jamb, I saw a dead man lying in the living room. He must have removed his ski mask and goggles before entering the house. Shaved head. Face turned toward me. Mouth open. Eyes open. His expression wasn’t one of pain or fear. He appeared to be puzzled.
There was no sign of the fourth cult member.
I didn’t want to enter the house. I had nowhere else to go.
Forty-four
Proceeding with caution and proceeding slowly are sometimes two different things. In certain circumstances, momentum could be more important than caution, though it was never wise to dispense with wariness. I went up the steps and crossed the porch fast, cleared the open door in the usual fashion, and entered the foyer.