Sweet-faced, sleepy-eyed Simon Varner didn’t have such a sweet face anymore, or sleepy eyes. Dead in front of Burke Bailey’s.
So maybe I was tracking something related to Varner. I couldn’t guess what that might be. This compulsion to keep moving without a clearly defined quarry was new to me.
Among racks of cocktail dresses, silk blouses, silk jackets, handbags, I hurried at last to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Beyond lay a storeroom. Directly across from the door by which I entered, another led to a concrete stairwell.
The layout was familiar from the department store at the north end of the mall. The stairs led down to a corridor where I passed employee-only elevators and came to oversize swinging doors marked RECEIVING.
This room reflected a thriving enterprise, though it didn’t quite equal the size of the one at the north-end store. Merchandise on racks and carts awaited processing, prepping, and transfer to stockrooms and sales floors.
Numerous employees were present, but work appeared to have come to a halt. Most had gathered around a sobbing woman, and others were crossing the room toward her. Down here where no shots could have been heard, news of the horror in the mall had now arrived.
Only one truck stood in the receiving room: not a full semi, about an eighteen-footer, with no company name on the cab doors or the sides of the trailer. I moved toward it.
A burly guy with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache braced me as I reached the vehicle. “Are you with this truck?”
Without responding, I pulled open the driver’s door and climbed into the cab. The keys weren’t in the ignition.
“Where’s your driver,” he asked.
When I popped open the glove box, I found it empty. Not even the registration or proof of insurance required by California law.
“I’m the shift foreman here,” the burly guy said. “Are you deaf or just difficult?”
Nothing on the seats. No trash container on the floor. No scrap of discarded candy wrapper. No air freshener or decorative geegaw hanging from the mirror.
This didn’t have the feel of a truck that anyone drove for a living or in which anyone spent a significant amount of his day.
When I got out from behind the steering wheel, the foreman said, “Where’s your driver? He didn’t leave me a manifest, and the box is locked.”
I went around to the back of the truck, which featured a roll-up door on the cargo trailer. A key lock in the base bar of the door secured it to a channel in the truck bed.
“I’ve got other shipments due,” he said. “I can’t let this just sit here.”
“Do you have a power drill?” I asked.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Drill out the lock.”
“You’re not the guy drove this in here. Are you his crew?”
“Police,” I lied. “Off duty.”
He was dubious.
Pointing to the sobbing woman around whom so many workers had now gathered, I said, “You hear what she’s been saying?”
“I was on my way over there when I saw you.”
“Two maniacs with machine guns shot up the mall.”
His face drained of color so dramatically that even his blond mustache seemed to whiten.
“You hear they shot Chief Porter last night?” I asked. “That was prep for this.”
With rapidly growing dread, I studied the ceiling of the immense receiving room. Three floors of the department store were stacked on top of it, supported by its massive columns.
Scared people were hiding from the gunmen up there. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
“Maybe,” I said, “the bastards came here with something even worse than machine guns.”
“Oh, shit. I’ll get a drill.” He sprinted for it.
After placing both hands flat against the roll-up door on the cargo box for a moment, I then leaned my forehead against it.
I don’t know what I expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing unusual. Psychic magnetism still pulled me, however. What I wanted wasn’t the truck but what was in the truck.
The foreman returned with the drill and tossed me a pair of safety goggles. Electrical outlets were recessed in the concrete floor at convenient intervals across the receiving room. He plugged the drill into the nearest of these, and the cord provided more than sufficient play.
The tool had heft. I liked the industrial look of the bit. The motor shrieked with satisfying power.
When I bored into the key channel, shavings of metal clicked off my goggles, stung my face. The bit itself deteriorated, but punched through the lock in mere seconds.
As I dropped the drill and stripped off the goggles, someone shouted from a distance. “Hey! Leave that alone!”
Along the elevated loading dock—no one. Then I saw him. Outside the receiving room, twenty feet beyond the foot of the long truck ramp.
“That’s the driver,” the foreman told me.
He was a stranger. He must have been watching, perhaps through binoculars, from out in the employee garage, past the three lanes that served the loading docks.
Seizing the two grips, I shoved up the door. Well-oiled and efficiently counterweighted, the panel rose smoothly and quickly out of the way.
The truck was packed with what appeared to be hundreds of kilos of plastic explosive.
A gun cracked twice, one slug cried off the truck frame, people in the receiving room screamed, and the foreman ran.
I glanced back. The driver hadn’t come any closer to the foot of the ramp. He had a pistol, maybe not the best weapon for such a long shot.
On the truck bed in front of the explosives were a mechanical kitchen timer, two copper-top batteries, curious bits and pieces that I didn’t recognize, and a nest of wires. Two of the wires ended in copper jacks that were plugged into that gray wall of death.
With a shrill kiss of metal on metal, a third shot ricocheted off the truck.
I heard the foreman fire up a nearby forklift.
The coven hadn’t rigged the cargo to explode when the door was opened because they had set it on such a short countdown that they didn’t think anyone could get at it fast enough to disable it. The timer had a thirty-minute dial, and the ticking indicator hand was three minutes from zero.
Click: two minutes.
The fourth shot hit me in the back. I didn’t at once feel pain, only the jolting impact, which drove me against the truck, my face inches from the timer.
Maybe it was the fifth shot, maybe the sixth, that slapped into one of the bricks of plastic explosive with a flat, wet sound.
A bullet wouldn’t trigger it. Only an electrical charge.
The two detonation wires were set six or eight inches apart. Was one positive and the other negative? Or was one just a backup in case the first wire failed to carry the detonating pulse? I didn’t know if I had to yank out just one or both.
Maybe it was the sixth shot, maybe the seventh, that again tore into my back. This time pain hammered me, plenty of it, excruciating.
As I sagged from the brutal impact of the bullet, I seized both wires, and as I fell backward, I jerked them out of the explosives, pulling the timer and the batteries and the entire detonator package with me.
Turning as I fell, I hit the floor on my side, facing the truck ramp. The shooter had ascended farther to get a better shot.
Though he could have finished me with one additional round, he turned away and sprinted down the ramp.
The foreman roared past me and descended the ramp in a forklift, somewhat protected from gunfire by the raised cargo tines and their armature.
I didn’t believe that the shooter had fled from the forklift. He wanted to get out of there because he couldn’t quite see what I had done to the detonator. He intended to escape the underground docks and the garage, and get as far away as luck allowed.
Worried people hurried to me.
The kitchen timer still functioned. It lay on the floor, inches from my face. Click: one minute.
Already my pain was subsiding; however, I was cold. Surprisingly cold. The underground loading docks and the receiving room relied on passive cooling, no air conditioning, yet I was positively chilly.
People were kneeling beside me, talking to me. They seemed to be speaking a host of foreign languages because I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Funny—to be so cold in the Mojave.
I never heard the kitchen timer click to zero.
SIXTY-THREE
STORMY LLEWELLYN AND I HAD MOVED ON FROM boot camp to our second of three lives. We were having great adventures together in the next world.
Most were lovely romantic journeys to exotic misty places, with amusing incidents full of eccentric characters, including Mr. Indiana Jones, who would not admit that he was really Harrison Ford, and Luke Skywalker, and even my Aunt Cymry, who greatly resembled Jabba the Hutt but was wonderfully nice, and Elvis, of course.
Other experiences were stranger, darker, full of thunder and the smell of blood and slinking packs of bodachs with whom my mother sometimes ran on all fours.
From time to time I would be aware of God and His angels looking down upon me from the sky of this new world. They had huge, looming faces that were a cool, pleasant shade of green—occasionally white—though they had no features other than their eyes. With no mouths or noses, they should have been frightening, but they projected love and caring, and I always tried to smile at them before they dissolved back into the clouds.
Eventually I regained enough clarity of mind to realize that I had come through surgery and was in a hospital bed in a cubicle in the intensive-care unit at County General.
I had not been promoted from boot camp, after all.
God and the angels had been doctors and nurses behind their masks. Cymry, wherever she might be, probably didn’t resemble Jabba the Hutt in the least.
When a nurse entered my cubicle in response to changes in the telemetry data from my heart monitor, she said, “Look who’s awake. Do you know your name?”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me what it is?”
I didn’t realize how weak I was until I tried to respond. My voice sounded thin and thready. “Odd Thomas.”
As she fussed over me and told me that I was some kind of hero and assured me that I would be fine, I said, “Stormy,” in a broken whisper.
I had been afraid to pronounce her name. Afraid of what terrible news I might be bringing down on myself. The name is so lovely to me, however, that immediately I liked the feel of it on my tongue once I had the nerve to speak it.
The nurse seemed to think that I’d complained of a sore throat, and as she suggested that I might be allowed to let a chip or two of ice melt in my mouth, I shook my head as adamantly as I could and said, “Stormy. I want to see Stormy Llewellyn.”
My heart raced. I could hear the soft and rapid beep-beep-beep from the heart monitor.
The nurse brought a doctor to examine me. He appeared to be awestruck in my presence, a reaction to which no fry cook in the world is accustomed and with which none could be comfortable.
He used that word hero too much, and in my wheezy way, I asked him not to use it again.
I felt crushingly tired. I didn’t want to fall asleep before I’d seen Stormy. I asked them to bring her to me.
Their lack of an immediate response to my request scared me again. When my heart thumped hard, my wounds throbbed in sympathy, in spite of any painkillers I was receiving.
They were worried that even a five-minute visit would put too much strain on me, but I pleaded, and they let her come into the ICU.
At the sight of her, I cried.
She cried, too. Those black Egyptian eyes.
I was too weak to reach out to her. She slipped a hand through the bed rail, pressed it atop mine. I found the strength to curl my fingers into hers, a love knot.
For hours, she had been sitting out in the ICU waiting room in the Burke Bailey’s uniform that she dislikes so much. Pink shoes, white socks, pink skirt, pink-and-white blouse.
I told her that this must be the most cheerful outfit ever seen in the ICU waiting room, and she informed me that Little Ozzie was out there right now, sitting on two chairs, wearing yellow pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Viola was out there, too. And Terri Stambaugh.
When I asked her why she wasn’t wearing her perky pink cap, she put a hand to her head in surprise, for the first time realizing that she didn’t have it. Lost in the chaos at the mall.
I closed my eyes and wept not with joy but with bitterness. Her hand tightened on mine, and she gave me the strength to sleep and to risk my dreams of demons.
Later she returned for another five-minute visit, and when she said that we would need to postpone the wedding, I pushed to remain on schedule for Saturday. After what had happened, the city would surely cut all red tape, and if Stormy’s uncle wouldn’t bend church rules to marry us in a hospital room, there was always a judge.
I had hoped that our wedding day would be followed at once by our first night together. The marriage, however, had always been more important to me than the consummation of it—now more than ever. We have a long lifetime to get naked together.
Earlier she had kissed my hand. Now she leaned over the railing to kiss my lips. She is my strength. She is my destiny.
With no real sense of time, I slept on and off.
My next visitor, Karla Porter, arrived after a nurse had raised my bed and allowed me a few sips of water. Karla hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, on the brow, and we tried not to cry, but we did.
I had never seen Karla cry. She is tough. She needs to be. Now she seemed devastated.
I worried that the chief had taken a turn for the worse, but she said that wasn’t it.
She brought the excellent news that the chief would be moved out of the ICU first thing in the morning. He was expected to make a full recovery.
After the horror at the Green Moon Mall, however, none of us will ever be as we had been. Pico Mundo, too, is forever changed.
Relieved to know the chief would be okay, I didn’t think to ask anyone about my wounds. Stormy Llewellyn was alive; the promise of Gypsy Mummy would be fulfilled. Nothing else mattered.
SIXTY-FOUR
FRIDAY MORNING, JUST ONE DAY AFTER CHIEF Porter escaped the ICU, the doctor issued orders for me to be transferred to a private room.
They gave me one of their swanky accommodations decorated like a hotel suite. The same one in which they had let me take a shower when I’d been sitting vigil for the chief.
When I expressed concern about the cost and reminded them that I was a fry cook, the director of County General personally assured me that they would excuse all charges in excess of what the insurance company would be willing to pay.
This hero thing disturbed me, and I didn’t want to use it to get any special treatment. Nevertheless, I graciously accepted their generosity because, while Stormy could only visit me in an ordinary hospital room, she could actually move right in here and be with me twenty-four hours a day.
The police department posted a guard in the corridor outside my room. No one posed any threat to me. The purpose was to keep the news media at bay.
Events at the Green Moon Mall had, I was told, made headlines worldwide. I didn’t want to see a newspaper. I refused to turn on the TV.
Reliving it in nightmares was enough. Too much.
Under the circumstances, the Saturday wedding finally proved to be impractical. Reporters knew of our plans and would be all over the courthouse. That and other problems proved insurmountable, and we postponed for a month.
Friday and Saturday, friends poured in with flowers and gifts.
How I loved seeing Terri Stambaugh. My mentor, my lifeline when I’d been sixteen and determined to live on my own. Without her, I would have had no job and nowhere to go.
Viola Peabody came without her daughters, insisting that they would have been motherless if not for me. The next day she returne
d with the girls. As it turned out, Nicolina’s love of pink had to do with her enthusiasm for Burke Bailey’s ice cream; Stormy’s uniform had always enchanted her.
Little Ozzie visited without Terrible Chester. When I teased him about the yellow pants and the Hawaiian shirt that he’d worn to the ICU, he denied that he would ever “costume” himself in that fashion because such “flamboyant togs” would inevitably make him look even bigger than he was. He did, he said, have some vanity. As it turned out, Stormy had made up this colorful story to give me a smile in the ICU when I badly needed one.
My father brought Britney with him, full of plans to represent my story for books, movies, television, and product placements. I sent him away unsatisfied.
My mother did not visit.
Rosalia Sanchez, Bertie Orbic, Helen Arches, Poke Barnet, Shamus Cocobolo, Lysette Rains, the Takuda family, so many others…
From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died.
Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished.
What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?
Local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies had studied the quantity of plastic explosives in the truck and estimated that it would have brought down the entire department store plus a not insignificant portion of the south side of the mall.
Estimates are that between five hundred and a thousand would have been killed if the bomb had detonated.
Bern Eckles had been stopped before he killed more than the three security guards, but he’d been carrying enough ammunition to cut down scores of shoppers.
At night in my hotel-style hospital room, Stormy stretched out on the bed and held my hand. When I woke from nightmares, she pulled me against her, cradled me in her arms while I wept. She whispered reassurances to me; she gave me hope.
Sunday afternoon, Karla brought the chief in a wheelchair. He understood perfectly well that I would never want to talk to the media, let alone entertain offers for books, movies, and television miniseries. He had thought of many ways to foil them. He is a great man, the chief, even if he did break that Barney the dinosaur chair.