The resort to name-dropping was a little mortifying. But nearly everyone in Pico Mundo respected and admired the chief. Some people incorrectly thought of me as a hero, but my supposed heroics were old news. I figured that Lauren was more likely to go to extremes to help Chief Porter than she was to help a fry cook who was, let’s face it, eccentric to the point of geekiness.
“Fast means fast. Yeah, I hear you,” she said, as she went around to the driver’s door. “I use the Expedition a lot more than any of the others. I can make it smoke.”
I got into the passenger seat and closed the door. I drew the Glock from the shoulder rig under my sport coat and put it in my lap before engaging the safety harness. Then I picked it up, held it.
As she raised the big garage door with a remote, Lauren looked at the pistol, looked at me. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know.”
In the backseat, the twins were saying, “Good boy, good puppy, brave puppy.”
Lauren started the engine. Popped the handbrake. Reversed out into the night. She turned the wheel hard, brought the Expedition around, shifted into drive, and powered away from the garage without taking the time to put down the door.
Forty-eight
Lauren Ainsworth might have made a pretty darn good NASCAR racer. Considering the extent to which she combined speed with caution, maybe it would be better to compare her to an ambulance driver. I knew the Expedition would have plenty of power, but I worried about its higher center of gravity, which could be a problem with any SUV. If she cornered too fast on a road not banked quite like it ought to be, we had a higher chance of rolling than we would have had with the BMW. We hadn’t gone a mile before I stopped fretting about that, because she was in complete control, the Expedition a glove and she the hand within it.
Never taking her eyes off the highway, she said, “Who’s blowing things up, what’s happening at the fairground that you have to be there yesterday?”
“I need to think, Lauren. Sorry, but I need to think. I’ve got this brain-buster thing to figure out.”
“You figure,” she said. “Don’t pay any mind to me.”
The first thing I thought about was the woman cultist, how she had looked in the study, after she’d thrown aside the useless rifle. Her face had been wrenched with anger and hatred. And yet she had reminded me of the drifting corpses in the dream, whose faces had been contorted in expressions of terror. Later, when she manifested in the hallway and went poltergeist, her hatred and rage had been still worse, demonic—and yet again I had thought of the drowners in the dream.
I remembered the last scene of that watery nightmare. The corpse of a little girl, maybe seven years old. Blond hair billowing around her head as the currents brought her alongside me. Her protruding, bloodshot eyes had rolled and focused on me. A froth of gas bubbles burst from her open mouth. And with them came a word: Contumax.
With that, I had exploded out of the dream, sitting straight up in bed, flailing at the sheets, heart racing. I had been terrified not merely by the vision of a drowned Pico Mundo, but also—and perhaps primarily—by that blond child who’d spoken the first word of the cult’s two-word greeting. Contumax. Potestas. Her expression hadn’t been one of extreme fright, had it? No. On reconsideration, her eyes had bulged and rolled like those of a maddened beast, and her expression had been one of white-hot rage, beyond rage, fury. But a child that young wouldn’t be a member of the cult. She had frightened me awake, but she hadn’t been what she appeared to be, hadn’t been a threat, had been instead a victim.
I thought of Connie, sister to Ethan, the young woman who had painted me as a harlequin at Face It. Raven hair and celadon eyes. She had been in the dream, too, a drowned corpse drifting in the eerie light of the submerged town. I went to the cauldron of memory and tried to conjure that part of the dream in my mind’s eye. The scene emerged: Connie’s face but not as she was in life, as she had been in the dream of death. Either I had misremembered her expression when I woke from the nightmare, or I was misremembering it now, for this time I saw not choking terror in her face but extreme rage. And more than rage. Savage intent. Hatred. Agony, too. And anguish. And fear, yes, but the fear wasn’t dominant, as I’d previously recalled; it was only one element in an extraordinary mien of twisted and tortured emotions.
We had reached a more populated portion of Pico Mundo, and when Lauren turned a corner, traffic clogged the way ahead. At once she hung a U-turn, arcing back into the intersection from which we had just come, eliciting a Gershwin symphony of shrill horn blasts as indignant drivers gave her the what-for. She swung into a street that led in a direction we didn’t want to go, turned right into an alleyway that paralleled the jammed street and did go the direction we wanted.
She said, “How crazy do I have to be? What’s at stake, Oddie? Tell me what’s at stake.”
“Everything,” I said, somewhat surprised to hear such certainty in my voice. “Everything’s at stake. Thousands of lives, the whole town, maybe more than that, maybe much more.”
She glanced at me, shocked. “Thousands?”
“Tens of thousands,” I said, speaking intuitively now, better understanding the dream.
She said, “Worse than the mall … back then.”
“Much worse. Immeasurably worse.”
The alley was narrow. Businesses backed up to it, some of them restaurants that were still open and busy at that hour. If an unwary kitchen staffer threw open a door and took a few quick steps into the alleyway, we might not be able to stop in time if we were going too fast.
She pressed down on the accelerator and at the same time began to pound the horn incessantly, warning off anyone who might be about to step in our way. The tires stuttered over cobblestones as old as any pavement in Pico Mundo, and we flashed past hulking Dumpsters with little room for error.
Trying to tune out the blaring horn, the racing engine, the periodic shriek of brakes, I returned to the brain-buster mystery that I needed to solve. If the faces of all the drowned people in the dream had not been fixed in expressions of terror … If fear and agony and anguish, although present, were lesser elements, and if their faces were frozen instead in screams of rage, contorted by hatred, were they the victims of violence or the perpetrators of it? Or could they somehow be both the victims and perpetrators?
As I’d told Chief Porter, certain of my prophetic dreams could be taken literally, but others were figurative. The meaning of them needed to be deciphered from symbolic imagery. And though I could make delicious fluffy pancakes every time I mixed the batter, I was not as reliably able to interpret my dreams.
Sometimes I wondered if I had everything backward, my life and purpose and meaning all backward. Maybe the best thing I had to offer was fry cookery of a high order, and maybe my paranormal abilities were nothing more than the equivalent of a talent for farting on command, better repressed than indulged. I, no less than anyone, was capable of self-delusion, of pride that led me to embrace a grander image of myself than was the truth.
If the people of Pico Mundo were destined to become both victims and perpetrators of violence, if I’d mistaken their expressions of rage-hatred-agony-anguish for terror, then perhaps I was wrong to think that the image of a flood should be taken literally, no matter how real it had seemed. Maybe the dam wouldn’t be blown. Maybe there would be no tsunami from any source. But then what did the water mean?
“We’re here,” Lauren Ainsworth declared, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, across from the main entrance to the Maravilla County Fairgrounds.
My watch read 10:39, and I said, “You made incredible time, ma’am. I owe you one.”
I holstered the Glock.
When I looked up, I saw that Lauren, who had been a rock until now, had stopped repressing her emotions. Tears streamed down her face. She leaned over the console, put an arm around my shoulders, and pulled me toward her until her forehead and mine met. “You don’t owe me one, Oddie. I owe you everythi
ng. You saved our lives.”
Because I still didn’t know what horror was coming, she and the girls might yet be dead before the night was done. “Get the girls to your sister’s house in the heights, ma’am. Maybe it’ll be safer in the heights.”
She kissed my cheek and let me go, but then the twins wanted to kiss me on the cheek, too. Also in tears, Veronica leaned forward from the back and then Victoria, weeping as well, but that wasn’t the end of the good-byes.
Muggs scrambled off the backseat. Standing with his hind feet on the floor, he pawed forward between the front seats and came face-to-face with me. I would have been fine with a dog kiss, as long as it was on the cheek; but Muggs had something else in mind. His eyes met mine, and he grew very still, his gaze penetrating, his demeanor solemn. As when I had met Lou Donatella, the dwarf in a bear suit, I thought, This is A Moment, stay with it. Also as when I’d met that little person, I had no idea what I meant by A Moment.
Muggs and I remained eye-to-eye just long enough for the girls and their mother to recognize the strangeness of this final good-bye, if that’s what it was. Then the dog shook his head, flapping his floppy ears, and terminated our moment with a sneeze.
“Got to go,” I said, and threw open the passenger door.
Forty-nine
At this late hour, three of the ticket booths at the fairground were closed, leaving only the fourth and fifth. As previously, I went to ticket booth number four. The plump woman with long ringlets of auburn hair remained on duty. She was reading a paperback book, and when she put it aside to take my money, I saw that it was The Last Good Bite by P. Oswald Boone, my friend and mentor, which wasn’t surprising, considering that he had sold more than a hundred million copies of his mysteries and that his fans were legion. Handing me an admission ticket, the cashier said, “Smart of you to come back. You should never have left before the big drawing. Got to be here to win. You’re the one tonight, honey. You’re the one tonight.”
The midway was more crowded than I had ever seen it, the recent explosions having been too distant for the sound to penetrate the ceaseless whiz-bang and ballyhoo of the carnival. People waited in line at every ride, stood two-deep at the game booths, swarmed the concourse. I dodged and juked and slipped through the throng, using so many excuse-mes that I was glad they didn’t cost anything.
The first people I saw when I arrived at the Face It tent were three lovely black girls in their late teens and early twenties, so similar that they must be sisters, two of them standing, one of them in the chair where Connie’s mother worked on her face with a brush and sponge. The seated girl was being painted to match her sisters, and they were the bird women from my dream of the amaranth. In the dream, I had been lying on my back, clutching an urn full of ashes, and these three pretty girls with white-and-gold feathered faces had been standing close, looking down at me, as had been Blossom Rosedale and Terri Stambaugh, who was an Elvis fan of the first rank as well as my friend and boss from the Pico Mundo Grille.
Chief Porter stood on the farther side of the tent, talking to Connie. The artist saw me first and said, “You washed off your face.”
“Yes, ma’am. I liked it so much I would have worn it for days, except when I left the fairground for a while, it kind of freaked out people.”
“Want me to paint you again?”
“Thank you, no. I need to talk to the chief here.”
She looked at my left hand. “Are you all right?”
I realized the wound had opened. Blood slowly soaked through the thickness of gauze I had taped over it.
“Nothing serious,” I assured her. “Just an accident with a stapler.”
“I wish my brother was here,” Connie said. “You need an Ethan on your side.”
Evidently, she didn’t buy the stapler story. To give the chief and me privacy, she went to her mother’s station to watch as the third bird woman’s face was completed to perfection.
I expect that Wyatt Porter could maintain his cool through a volcanic eruption, although on this occasion he appeared undeniably harried. With his bloodhound jowls and his bagged, heavy-lidded eyes, he made people think of their favorite uncle. If you were perceptive, however, you saw a little bit of a Robert Mitchum look to him, and you knew that the avuncular face disguised a whip-smart no-nonsense hard-assed officer of the law. Now he had more of a Mitchum look than ever, as if anyone gave him the slightest reason to bust their chops, he would keep on punching even after he’d broken all his knuckles.
He said, “I told you ten or twelve thousand on the fairground, but now we have the gate count, and it’s over fifteen thousand. Six of my guys plus nine state police are walking the midway, looking for something suspicious, all in plainclothes so they won’t spook these crazy bastards into pushing the button early. Fifteen guys in a crowd of fifteen thousand, with no idea what ‘suspicious’ looks like in this case.”
“Earlier, on the phone, sir, you said Wolfgang bought a couple of concessions. Maybe that’s where it’ll all go down.”
Chief Porter shook his head. “That would be too easy. According to Lionel Sombra, Wolfgang—his real name was Woodrow Creel—hired longtime carnies to work his places, people that have been with Sombra Brothers in one role or another for fifteen, twenty years and more. Anyway, using the murder investigation as an excuse, about two hours ago, we closed both concessions for the night, sent the workers away. Left my guys, Taylor Pipes and Nick Korker, guarding both locations. It didn’t seem to alarm these cultists, didn’t cause them to pull the trigger.” He indicated my bandaged hand, which I held down at my side, letting it drip. “That doesn’t look good, son.”
“Looks bad, but it doesn’t hurt,” I lied.
As Chief Porter watched fairgoers streaming past the open front of the Face It tent, a sea of humanity in its infinite variety, he said, “Doesn’t seem right that these lunatics should look like anyone else. Can’t you do your magnetism thing and draw a couple of them to you?”
“Don’t have a name. Don’t have a face. Don’t have anything to focus on, sir. What about the other two who were executed in that motor home, Jonathan and Selene? Do you know anything about them?”
“Real names were Jeremy and Sibyl von Witzleben. Husband and wife. Both of them doctors of some kind.”
The hundred different tunes issuing from attractions up and down the long midway had usually before seemed more festive than not, even if the many braided melodies were to the ear what a line of prose would be to the eye of a dyslexic reader. But now the music began to slide slowly into a sour disharmony.
“Those two,” the chief continued, “had more stamps in their passports than a coyote has fleas. Spent most of last year down in Venezuela, which is a sewer these days. Food shortages, toilet-paper rationing, runaway inflation, death squads. Who in his right mind would want to spend a year there?”
“Doctors of what?”
“We’re researching that. I’m waiting for a call.”
We were standing near the front of the tent, and as we looked out at the midway, the razzle-dazzle of carnival lights seemed to be brighter and more frantic than before. The blinkers blinked faster. The pulsers pulsed faster. Waves of color chased one another faster, faster through the various fiber-optic designs.
Indicating the people on the concourse, the chief sounded as if frustration was about to make him scream. “Point me to one of these hateful bastards, Oddie. You see things I can’t. You always have. See something for me. I really need you to see something for me, son.”
My mind was still awash with the flood dream that evidently wasn’t about a flood, the coyotes that had been something more than coyotes, the sandpiper that had flown from Tim’s hand and vanished from our perspective only to come into view to people farther up the beach, the safe house that had appeared to be so Victorian but had been woven through with hidden high-tech defenses, the angelic face of the cult girl in Lauren’s house and the vicious face of the same girl gone poltergeist.…
&n
bsp; As the chief’s cell phone rang and he answered it, I tried to sweep clean the junk shop that was my mind, and began to study the people on the concourse, mere feet away. He was right. I had always seen things he couldn’t, things that no one else could see. Why not here, why not now, when it mattered so very much and so urgently?
He had several short questions for his caller and was terminating the call just as I saw two men ambling by as if they had never known a care in their entire lives, eating ice-cream bars dipped in chocolate and served on sticks, chatting and laughing and enjoying the flash and bustle of the carnival. They were in their twenties. Looked like surfer dudes from out of town. Blond and tanned and fit. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts. One of them had a red-and-black tattoo that began at his wrist and wound up his right arm, where it disappeared under the sleeve of his T-shirt. It was not an ordinary tattoo of a dragon or a snake or a mermaid, but a series of hieroglyphics, a statement of some kind, maybe a scrap of satanic prayer or a defiant pledge spelled in the singular symbols of the same pictographic language that I had seen on the coven’s estate in Nevada, that had been painted on the tailgate of the Cadillac Escalade that tried to run me down during my motorcycle trip to Pico Mundo.
“Sir,” I said, and by my tone alerted him. “See the surfer guys eating ice cream? The one with the tattoo, he’s one of them. Which means the guy with him must be one of them, too.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Looking away from the cultists lest they notice his interest and take flight, Chief Porter unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt. It was the size of a cell phone. He pressed SEND and held it down while he talked. To the fifteen plainclothes officers walking the midway, he said, “Contact. Outside the Face It tent.” He described the two men. “Converge if you’re nearby.”
One designated respondent said, “Ten-four,” to confirm that the message had been received.