Odd Interlude (19 page)

My sinuses weep, and my nose is a faucet. Much of the time, I find it difficult to sustain an image of myself as a man of action and a defender of the innocent.

Just as the mechanic disappears along the road, I smell smoke. The mayhem I have instigated must be evolving nicely. I need to reconnoiter.

By moving farther from the trees, I will be more easily seen, because my navy-blue sweatshirt and my jeans are in stark contrast to the sun-bleached grass around me. If someone spots me from afar I might not be recognized, but I don’t dare take any chances.

Crouched low, with a .38 revolver in one hand and a pistol in the other, I scuttle through the tall grass, alert for snakes because it seems to be that kind of day. As I press forward, insects spring into flight, leaves of grass and feathertop brushing against my face bring to mind the forked and tickling tongues of serpents, and I narrowly avoid stepping in a pile of deer poop.

The meadow begins to slope, and I come to a place where I can see the descending hills of Harmony Corner and the sea beyond. I lie down and raise my head just high enough to study the seven Victorian houses that stand a few hundred yards below, to the west and slightly farther south of my
position. If any guards are stationed around the uppermost of those residences, where Dr. Hiskott makes his lair, they are well concealed.

Perhaps three hundred yards to the north lies the demolished big rig, the detached tractor on its side beneath the Monterey cypress. Both the tractor and the tree have caught fire, after all, and flames seethe up through the branches, which across decades have been sculpted by the wind into elegant southeast-leaning forms that are reminiscent of lines of Japanese calligraphy. Whatever the wind has written over time, fire rapidly erases and disperses as oily black smoke.

People have gone down into those hills, no doubt seeking the truck driver, but at this distance it’s impossible to know which of them are members of the Harmony family, under Hiskott’s rule, and which are patrons of the diner. Nor am I able to get an accurate count of them. They are small figures at this remove.

The larger blaze is closer than the one consuming the cypress. The tumbling propane tank, fire gouting from the open valve, must have looked like a flamethrower in the grip of a furious poltergeist. The fire line in its wake follows a sinuous path, a leaping tossing brightness that, like an agitated dragon, wriggles down one slope and up another.

The intensity of this blaze is much greater than I anticipated. Evidently no wildfire has occurred here in a long time, and previous years of grass have died
and been compacted into a dense dry sod that burns aggressively, so that it isn’t the grass of a single year that fuels this tempest. The rising smoke from the conflagration is pale gray, almost white, billowing in alarming volume, rapidly forming high columns that, in this still air, seem to support the sky.

Although I am no more a pyromaniac than I am a brain surgeon, I can’t help but take some satisfaction from the scene. Besides distracting Hiskott and his army of slaves, I need to generate at least some smoke at ground level to screen my approach to the target house. Most of the white masses churn straight up from the burning turf; however, a thin, lower haze creeps downhill. Soon I should have the conditions I require.

To an uninformed observer, my grin might appear to be wicked. I congratulate myself aloud—“Fine work, bucko”—and wipe my dripping nose on a sleeve of my sweatshirt as though I am a filthy pirate preparing to plunder and destroy a seaside settlement. Sometimes, I wonder to what criminal depths I might descend if ever I went over to the dark side.

A tanker truck, half the size of an eighteen-wheeler, appears at the crest of the blacktop lane that connects the businesses to the houses below. On the white tank are two words in red—harmony corner—and I can only suppose that this is a loaded-and-ready piece of firefighting equipment, a wise precaution in a part of California where some rainy seasons produce only an occasional drizzle
and where wildfires will periodically blacken the land.

From the houses, an extended-bed Dodge pickup appears, with six men from the Harmony clan seated in the cargo area. The truck is a beefed-up beauty, jacked high on large tires, and it’s fitted with a V-shaped plow, currently raised. It stops on the blacktop halfway between the houses and the fire.

The guys in the back of the pickup, armed with shovels and hoes, bail out and marshal along the shoulder of the lane. The driver pulls off the pavement, lowers the big V-shaped blade, and drives into the field, plowing a firebreak toward the sea. At once the men follow the truck, hoeing away the loosened grass, spading up any chunks that the plow didn’t churn loose, creating a six- or eight-foot width of bare earth.

With no wind to chase the fire, it might spread slowly enough for the truck to make a return pass from shore to road, establishing a twelve- or sixteen-foot barrier. In this stillness, the flames will not be able to jump across a swath that wide.

Farther up the lane, the tanker truck comes to a stop. The man hanging on the back of it drops off, and two women exit the cab. The three set to work in what appears to be a much-practiced plan, and I can imagine only that the truck has a powerful pump and fire hose that will direct a quenching stream of water deep into the grassland.

One of the problems of making it up as you go
along—my modus operandi—is that sometimes you find yourself pitted against people who have a well-considered plan and are expert at executing it.

I counsel myself that although events have turned against me, there’s always a chance they will tip once more in my favor.

Then I sneeze. The scent of Bermuda Guy’s aftershave lingers in the sinuses as might a skunk’s malodor, the dry grass in which I lie smells of dust and chaff, and although the ground-level smoke is too thin to offer concealment, it is acrid enough to burn like the fumes of a habanero pepper in my nostrils. Explosive sneezes reduce me to a parody of a red-eyed allergy sufferer in a TV commercial for an antihistamine. I’m sure I can’t be heard at any significant distance, but I put down the guns and bury my face in my hands, muffling the sound, glad that these are essentially
dry
sneezes.

If I were Batman, my cape would already be on fire.

Suddenly, a breeze. The grass around me shivers and flutters toward the south and east. And the breeze grows stronger. They say a blaze in the wild can generate its own wind, but I think that has to be a big firestorm.

Surprised out of my sneezing for a moment, I see the invisible wind by its effects, as it angles through Harmony Corner from the northwest, off the sea and across the hilly meadows. The flames feed more voraciously on the grass and leap higher, and from
the Monterey cypress, scabs of burning bark peel away and, airborne, carry the contagion of fire over the heads of those who fight it, infecting grass beyond them. The new smoke doesn’t ascend vertically, instead rises at a shallow angle, and a soft tide rolls toward the tanker truck, toward the firebreak crew.

I am getting the chaos I wanted. The problem is, you can switch chaos on, but chaos itself is in control of the off switch.

Twenty

Ed, once called Aladdin, is the first artificial intelligence I’ve ever known. Maybe if Harry can kill Hiskott and if then I live long enough to see the world become the total science-fiction theme park it seems to be headed toward, I’ll probably know dozens of them one day. Let me tell you, if they’re all as nice as Ed has turned out to be, that’s okay with me.

So after he breaks the beastly news to me—that if the FBI ever knows where Dr. Hiskott went and what he’s been doing these past five years and all, they’ll quarantine my whole family forever—Ed asks me to sit at one of the workstations in the sphere-observation room. As I park my butt in the
chair, the computer switches on even though I don’t touch it.

Although the whole freaking government will throw my family in the slammer of all slammers, Ed says my Harry Potter, cute as he is, isn’t the only one who can help us, that there is another. Well, as you can imagine, I have a need to know who that is.

“First things first,” Ed says.

On the computer screen appears a head shot of Harry in the yellow hallway where Orc lies mummified.

“You have cameras everywhere, huh?”

“Not everywhere. But wherever there is a security camera or a computer with an online link and Skype capacity, or a cell phone with a camera function, anywhere in the world, I have eyes.”

“Whoa. That’s a whack upside the head. I guess with artificial intelligence, just like with natural intelligence, there can be a way-creepy side.”

“Would you rather that I were blind, Jolie Ann Harmony?”

“Well, now I feel seriously mean. No, Ed, I don’t wish you were blind. I just hope you never watch me in the bathroom or anything.”

“Security cameras are not installed in bathrooms, and neither are computers with Skype capacity.”

“Well, I guess that’s mostly right.”

“If you take a smartphone into the bathroom, I would advise you to keep it switched off.”

“For sure.”

“I guarantee you, Jolie Ann Harmony, that I personally have no interest in watching human beings in bathrooms.”

“I didn’t really think you did, Ed. I’m sorry if I seemed to imply you were a pervert or something. What I was thinking was, some other artificial intelligence someday might not be as respectful as you are.”

“That is something to consider. I cannot vouch for the stability of any future artificial intelligences.”

On the computer monitor, the photo of my Harry in the yellow hallway is replaced by a different photo of him that looks like it might have been in a newspaper.

Ed says, “Harry’s real name is Odd Thomas.”

“Odd?”

“Apparently, the origin of the name is a long story. We have no time for it now.”

“How’d you learn his name?”

“I applied facial-recognition software to all the photos in the files of the California DMV but could not find him there.”

“That’s like millions of pictures. How long did
that
take?”

“Seven minutes. Thereafter, I searched the digitalized photo archives of the Associated Press.”

The photo goes away and some video plays, a TV news story from like eighteen months earlier, about a terrible shooting in a shopping mall in Pico Mundo, forty-one wounded and nineteen dead. A policeman
says there would have been many more dead except for the action of one brave young man, who happens to be Harry. I mean, Odd Thomas. The policeman says hundreds would have died if Odd hadn’t taken down both gunmen and dealt with a truck full of explosives and all. The reporter says Odd won’t talk to the press, he tells us that Odd says he didn’t do anything special. Odd says anyone would have done what he did. The reporter says Odd is as shy as he is courageous, but even though I’m a kid and all, I know the right word isn’t
shy
.

Earlier, you might remember, I explained how I loved him because he seemed brave and kind and sweet, also because there was something else about him, something different. And here it is. I
knew
that he wouldn’t abandon us. I
knew
he wouldn’t just run and save himself.

Ed says, “I show you this, Jolie Ann Harmony, because in spite of all your brave and wise-ass talk, in spite of the fact that I did not detect pheromones associated with lying, I did detect pheromones associated with despair. I have developed an affection for you, and thus it pains me to know that you are on the verge of losing hope.”

“Not anymore,” I tell him.

Over the years, when Hiskott has entered me to live through me, there’s one thing I refuse to let him know: what it feels like when I cry. My tears are mine, not his, never his. I’ll save them forever rather
than let the sick creep feel them hot on my cheeks or taste them at the corners of my mouth. If you really truly want to know, I’ve thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I’ve held my tears so long that I can’t cry anymore, that I’m a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me. Yet now my vision blurs, and there are tears, tears of hope and happiness, although nothing’s yet been won.

After a while, I remember: “Hey, Ed, you said there’s someone else besides Harry … besides Odd. Someone who can help us.”

“Yes, Jolie Ann Harmony. That would be me.”

Twenty-one

In the Jeep Grand Cherokee once more, I am no longer sneezing. Perhaps Bermuda Guy’s preferred aftershave and the grass-fire fumes happen to be two molecules that are like puzzle pieces and, locking together, neutralize each other. More likely, now that the time has come to take the plunge into Hiskott’s lair, I so dread the upcoming encounter that I don’t have the capacity to be annoyed by any scent or smoke. I once read that condemned men standing before firing squads, in the thrall of terror, have been observed to be oblivious of bees crawling on their faces even when the bees have stung them. One guy evidently mistook a bee sting for the killing
shot and dropped dead on the spot, sparing his executioners the expense of ammunition.

Because I rarely forget anything, my brain is so packed with useless information that it constantly makes connections between bits of data that are at best tenuously linked. Sometimes I wonder if, at some critical moment, being distracted by thoughts about bee-stung condemned men will get me killed. But if you can’t trust your own brain, what can you trust?

I shut off the air circulation in the Jeep to keep out as much smoke as possible, and I pilot the vehicle out of the trees, heading south across the high meadow. Visibility is down to sixty or seventy feet, except when small shifts in the direction of the breeze cause clean currents of air to open narrow lines of sight to farther points of Harmony Corner, but these close up as suddenly as they open.

Although I need the cover of smoke, this murk is thicker than I expected, forcing me to proceed slower than I would prefer—and
much
slower than I will need to drive a few minutes from now. Visibility rapidly declines to forty or fifty feet, and if it gets much worse, I might as well steer with my eyes closed.