Forever Odd

  In less than a minute, following a few turns that felt right, she brought me to a stop. She let go of my left hand and touched my right, in which I held the flashlight.

  Switching it on, I saw that we had gone through the gallery of shops and that we were at the end of a hallway, at the door to the north stairs. My guide, indeed, was Maryann, appropriately dressed as an Indian princess.

  Seconds were important, but I could not leave her without an attempt to right Datura’s wrongs.

  “The darkness loose in this world damaged your sisters. The fault isn’t yours. Eventually when they leave here, don’t you want to be there for them on…the other side?”

  She met my gaze. Her gray eyes were lovely.

  “Go home, Maryann Morris. There’s love waiting for you, if only you’ll go to it.”

  She glanced back the way that we had come, then looked at me worriedly.

  “When you get there, ask for my Stormy. You won’t be sorry you did. If Stormy’s right and the next life is service, there’s nobody better to have great adventures with than her.”

  She backed away from me.

  “Go home,” I whispered.

  She turned and walked away.

  “Let go. Go home. Leave life—and live.”

  As she faded, she looked over her shoulder, and smiled, and then she was not in the hallway anymore.

  This time, I believe, she passed through the veil.

  I tore open the staircase door, plunged through, and climbed like a sonofabitch.

  THIRTY-NINE

  CLEO-MAY CANDLES, COMPELLING ME TO love and obey the charming young woman who consorted with Gestapo ghosts, splashed the walls red, splashed them yellow.

  Nevertheless, in the storm-swallowed day, Room 1203 swarmed with as much darkness as light. A draft with the disposition of a nervous little dog had gotten in from somewhere, chasing its tail this way and that, so each ripple of radiance spawned an undulant shadow; a dark billow chased each tremulous bright wave.

  The shotgun lay on the floor by the window, where Andre had left it. The weapon was heavier than I expected. As soon as I picked it up, I almost put it down.

  This was not one of the long shotguns you might use for hunting wild turkeys or wildebeest, or whatever you hunt with long shotguns. This was a short-barreled, pistol-grip model good for home defense or for holding up a liquor store.

  Police use weapons like this, as well. Two years ago, Wyatt Porter and I had been in a tight situation involving three operators of an illegal crystal-meth lab and their pet crocodile, during which I might have wound up with one less leg, and possibly no testicles, if the chief hadn’t made good use of a pistol-grip 12-gauge pretty much like this one.

  Although I had never fired such a gun—in fact had only once previously in my life used any kind of firearm at all—I had seen the chief use one. Of course this is no different from saying that watching all of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies will make you a master marksman and an expert in ethical police procedure.

  If I left the gun here, the needy boys would use it on me. If I was backed into a corner by those behemoths and didn’t at least try to use the shotgun on them, I would be committing suicide, considering that what they ate for breakfast probably weighed more than I did.

  So I burst into the room, ran to the shotgun, snatched it off the floor, grimaced at the lethal feel of it, warned myself that I was too young for adult diapers, and stood by the window, quickly examining it in the twitchy dazzle of a series of lightning bolts. Pump action. Three-round magazine tube. Another round in the breech. Yes, it had a trigger.

  I felt I could use it in a crisis, though I must admit much of my confidence came from the fact that I had recently paid my health-insurance premium.

  I scanned the floor, the table, the window sill, but didn’t see any additional ammunition.

  From the table, I grabbed the remote control, careful not to press the black button.

  Figuring that the Buzz-cut brouhaha might be winding down about now, I had just a few minutes before Datura and her boys got through the post-poltergeist confusion and back on their game.

  I blew precious seconds stepping into the bathroom to see if she had done a thorough job on Terri’s satellite phone. I found it dented but not in pieces, so I shoved it in a pocket.

  Beside the sink was a box of shotgun ammo. I jammed four shells into my pockets.

  Out of the room, into the hall, I glanced in the direction of the north stairs, then sprinted the other way, to Room 1242.

  Probably because Datura didn’t want Danny to have any victory or money, she hadn’t provided him with any candles in red and yellow glass holders. Now that armies of black clouds had stormed the entire sky, his room was a sooty-smelling pit brightened only fitfully by nature’s war light, filled with a rapid patter that brought to mind an image of a horde of running rats.

  “Odd,” he whispered when I came through the door, “thank God. I was sure you were dead.”

  Switching on the flashlight, handing it to him to hold, matching his whisper, I said, “Why didn’t you tell me what a lunatic she is.”

  “Do you ever listen to me? I told you she was crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease!”

  “Yeah. Which is as much of an understatement as saying Hitler was a painter who dabbled in politics.”

  The running-rat patter proved to be rain slanting into the room through one of the three window panes that were broken, rattling against a jumble of furniture.

  I leaned the shotgun against the wall and showed him the remote control, which he recognized.

  “Is she dead?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “What about Doom and Gloom?”

  I didn’t have to ask who they might be. “One of them took a hit, but I don’t think it did him serious damage.”

  “So they’ll be coming?”

  “As sure as taxes.”

  “We gotta split.”

  “Splitting,” I assured him, and almost pressed the white button on the remote.

  At the penultimate instant, thumb poised, I asked myself who had told me that the black button would detonate the explosives and the white would disarm them.

  Datura.

  FORTY

  DATURA, WHO HOBNOBBED WITH THE GRAY Pigs of Haiti and observed seamstresses being sacrificed and cannibalized, had told me that the black button detonated, that the white disarmed.

  In my experience, she had not proved herself to be a reliable source of dependable fact and unvarnished truth.

  More to the point, the ever-helpful madwoman had volunteered this information when I had asked if the remote on the table might be the one that controlled the bomb. I couldn’t think of any reason why she would have done so.

  Wait. Correction. I could after all think of one reason, which was Machiavellian and cruel.

  If by some wild chance I ever got my hands on the remote, she wanted to program me to blow up Danny instead of save him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Gimme the flashlight.”

  I went around behind his chair, crouched, and studied the bomb. In the time since I had first seen this device, my subconscious had been able to mull over the tangle of colorful wiring—and had come up with zip.

  This does not necessarily reflect badly on my subconscious. At the same time, it had been presented with other important tasks—such as listing all the diseases I might have contracted when Datura spat wine in my face.

  As previously, I tried to jump-start my sixth sense by tracing the wires with one fingertip. After 3.75 seconds I admitted this was a desperation tactic with no hope of getting me anything but killed.

  “Odd?”

  “Still here. Hey, Danny, let’s play a word-association game.”

  “Now?”

  “We could be dead later, then when would we play it? Humor me. It’ll help me think this through. I’ll say something, and you tell me the first thing that
comes into your mind.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “Here we go: black and white.”

  “Piano keys.”

  “Try again. Black and white.”

  “Night and day.”

  “Black and white.”

  “Salt and pepper.”

  “Black and white.”

  “Good and evil.”

  I said, “Good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No. That’s the next word for association: good.”

  “Grief.”

  “Good,” I repeated.

  “Bye.”

  “Good.”

  “God.”

  I said, “Evil.”

  “Datura,” he said at once.

  “Truth.”

  “Good.”

  I sprang “Datura” on him again.

  At once he said, “Liar.”

  “Our intuition brings us to the same conclusion,” I told him.

  “What conclusion?”

  “White detonates,” I said, putting my thumb lightly on the black button.

  Being Odd Thomas is frequently interesting but nowhere near as much fun as being Harry Potter. If I were Harry, with a pinch of this and a smidgin of that and a muttered incantation, I would have tossed together a don’t-explode-in-my-face charm, and everything would have turned out just fine.

  Instead, I pushed the black button, and everything seemed to turn out just fine.

  “What happened?” Danny asked.

  “Didn’t you hear the boom? Listen close—you still might.”

  I hooked my fingers through the wires, tightened my hand into a fist, and ripped that colorful mare’s-nest out of the device.

  The small version of a carpenter’s level tipped on its side, and the bubble slipped into the blast zone.

  “I’m not dead,” Danny said.

  “Me neither.”

  I went to the furniture that had been stacked haphazardly by the earthquake and retrieved my backpack from the crevice in which I had tucked it less than an hour ago.

  From the backpack, I withdrew the fishing knife and cut the last of the duct tape that bound Danny to the chair.

  The kilo of explosives fell to the floor with a thud no louder than would have been produced by a brick of modeling clay. Boom-plastic can be detonated only by an electrical charge.

  As Danny got up from the chair, I dropped the knife into the backpack. I switched off the flashlight and clipped it to my belt once more.

  Freed of the obligation to puzzle out the meaning of the bomb wires, my subconscious was counting off the elapsing seconds since I had fled the casino, and being a total nag about the situation: Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  FORTY-ONE

  AS THOUGH WAR HAD BROKEN OUT BETWEEN Heaven and Earth, another extended barrage of lightning blasted the desert, making pools of glass in the sand somewhere. Thunder cracked so hard that my teeth vibrated as if I were absorbing chords from the massive speakers at a death-metal concert, and bustling rat battalions of rain blew in through the broken window.

  Looking at the tempest, Danny blurted, “Holy crap.”

  I said, “Some irresponsible bastard killed a blacksnake and hung it in a tree.”

  “Blacksnake?”

  After handing my backpack to him and grabbing the shotgun, I stepped onto the threshold of the open door and checked the corridor. The furies had not yet arrived.

  Close behind me, Danny said, “My legs are on fire after the walk out from Pico Mundo, and my hip’s like full of knives. I don’t know how long I’ll hold up.”

  “We aren’t going far. Once we get across the rope bridge and through the room of a thousand spears, it’s a piece of cake. Just be as fast as you can.”

  He couldn’t be fast. His usual rolling gait was emphasized as his right leg repeatedly buckled under him, and though he had never been a complainer, he hissed in pain with nearly every step.

  Had I planned to take him directly out of the Panamint, we would not have gotten far before the harpy and the ogres caught up with us and dragged us down.

  I led him north along the hall to the elevator alcove and was relieved when we ducked out of sight into it.

  Although I hated to put down the shotgun, though I wished I’d had time to have it biologically attached to my right arm and wired directly into my central nervous system, I leaned it against the wall.

  As I began to pry at the lift doors that I had scoped out earlier, Danny whispered, “What—you’re going to pitch me down a shaft so it looks like an accident, then my Martian-brain-eating-centipede card will be all yours?”

  Doors open, I risked a quick sweep of the flashlight to show him the empty cab. “No light, heat, or running water, but no Datura, either.”

  “We’re going to hide here?”

  “You are going to hide here,” I said. “I’m going to distract and mislead.”

  “They’ll find me in twelve seconds.”

  “No, they won’t stop to think that the doors could’ve been pried open. And they won’t expect us to try to hide this close to where they were keeping you.”

  “Because it’s stupid.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And they won’t expect us to be stupid.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Why don’t we both hide in there?”

  “Because that would be stupid.”

  “Both eggs in one basket.”

  I said, “You’re getting a feel for this, compadre.”

  In my backpack were three additional half-liter bottles of water. I kept one and passed the others to him.

  Squinting in the dim light, he said, “Evian.”

  “If you’d like to think so.”

  I gave both of the coconut-raisin power bars to him. “You could last three or four days if you had to.”

  “You’ll be back before then.”

  “If I can elude them for a few hours, they’ll think the plan is to buy you time to get away at your pace. They’ll start to sweat that you’re bringing the cops, and they’ll blow this place.”

  He accepted from me several foil-wrapped packets. “What are these?”

  “Moist towelettes. If I don’t come back, I’m dead. Wait two days to be sure it’s safe. Then pry open the doors and get yourself out to the interstate.”

  He entered the elevator, gingerly tested its stability. “What about—how do I pee?”

  “In the empty water bottles.”

  “You think of everything.”

  “Yeah, but then I won’t reuse them. Be dead quiet, Danny. Because if you’re not quiet, you’re dead.”

  “You’ve saved my life, Odd.”

  “Not yet.”

  I gave him one of my two flashlights and advised him not to use it in the elevator. Light might leak out. He needed to save it for the stairwells in the event that he had to leave by himself.

  As I pushed shut the doors, closing him in, Danny said, “I’ve decided I don’t wish I were you, after all.”

  “I didn’t know identity theft had ever crossed your mind.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered through the narrowing gap. “I’m so damn sorry.”

  “Friends forever,” I told him, which was a thing we said for a while when we were ten or eleven. “Friends forever.”

  FORTY-TWO

  PAST ROOM 1242 WITH ITS UNEXPLODED bomb, from the main corridor to the secondary, wearing the backpack, toting the shotgun, I schemed to survive. The desire to ensure that Datura rotted in prison had given me a stronger will to live than I’d had in six months.

  I expected that they would split up and return to the twelfth floor by the north and south staircases, to cut me off before I could shepherd Danny out. If I could descend just two or three stories, to the tenth or ninth level, and let them pass by me, I might be able to slip back onto the stairs behind them and race all the way down, out, and away—to return in but an hour or two with the police.

  When I had first walked into Room 120
3 and had spoken to Datura as she’d stood at the window, she had known without having to ask that I must have gotten around the staircases by using an elevator shaft. No other route could have brought me to the twelfth floor.

  Consequently, although they would know that I couldn’t get Danny down by that route, they would at least listen at the shafts now and then for sounds of movement. I couldn’t use that trick again.

  Arriving at the entry to the south stairs, I found the door half open. I eased through, onto the landing.

  Not a sound rose from lower flights. I crept down step to step—four, five—and paused to listen. The silence held.

  The alien smell, musk-mushrooms-meat, eddied no thicker here than it had earlier, perhaps thinner, but no less off-putting.

  The flesh on the nape of my neck did the crawly thing that it does so well. Some people say this is God’s warning that the devil is near, but I’ve noticed I also experience it when someone serves me Brussels sprouts.

  Whatever the precise source of the odor, it must have arisen from the toxic stew left over from the fire, which was why I’d never encountered it prior to the Panamint. It was a product of a singular event, but it wasn’t otherworldly. Any scientist could have analyzed it, tracked down its origin, and provided me with a molecular recipe.

  I had never encountered a supernatural entity that signaled its presence with this smell. People smell, not ghosts. Yet the nape of my neck continued to do its thing even in the absence of Brussels sprouts.

  Impatiently counseling myself that nothing threatening crouched in the stairwell, I quickly went down another step in the dark, and another, loath to use my flashlight and thereby reveal my presence in case Datura or one of her horses was somewhere below me.

  I reached the midfloor landing, descended two more steps—and saw a pale glow blossom on the wall at the eleventh level.

  Someone coming up. He could be only a floor or two below me, because light didn’t travel well around 180-degree turns.

  I considered racing ahead in the hope that I could reach the eleventh floor and spring rabbit-quick out of the stairwell before the climber turned onto a new flight and saw me. But that door might be corroded shut and incapable of being opened. Or might shriek like a banshee on rusted hinges.