Saint Odd (17 page)

The belly-shot man lay on his back, clutching his abdomen with both hands, so racked by pain that he squirmed like a broken bug. The terror and agony that twisted his face were ghastly, and yet when I approached him, he begged for his life, which would be for him only more terror and greater agony. Instead of granting his plea, I shot him twice again, and he fell silent.

A voice behind me said, “Murderer.” When I pivoted to confront a new threat, no one was there but the dead man whom I had shot in the face. I waited, but if he had spoken,
he did not speak again.

Although rock-steady to that point, I began to tremble so badly that I feared accidentally firing another round, and I holstered the pistol. I shook as if with palsy, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands, whether to put them in my pockets or smooth back my hair with them or tuck them into my armpits to press the tremors out of them, and so I stood there making meaningless gestures, gagging on each breath I tried to take.

In the cause of saving children and other innocents, I had killed before. I had even shot women, three of them, two who tried to shoot me and one who would have cut me to ribbons given half a chance. Killing was never easy. Regardless of the viciousness and palpable evil of the target, killing was never easy. But this time the necessity had shaken and distressed me more violently than ever.

These men didn’t deserve the slightest measure of pity. They had ruthlessly executed Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene. They surely had killed many others, perhaps including some of the children that the cult was so fond of sacrificing on their bloodstained altars.

Their particular deaths were not what rocked me so profoundly. I was shaken instead by the
cumulative
killing that I had done, as if I’d committed the act often enough that, here tonight, I crossed some moral boundary beyond which I would be forever changed, some boundary that I could not retreat behind and find again the person I had once been.

No matter what I had become, I could not say
enough of this
, could not walk away from the fight. That choice was forbidden to me, as it had been most of my life. Something big and bad would happen to Pico Mundo if the cult wasn’t stopped. My horror, guilt, and sorrow mattered not at all when compared to the deaths
of thousands that I had foreseen. This task would not be lifted from me, and to refuse it would be to refuse the desired destiny that I’d been promised: Stormy.

I had to get out of there before someone drove by and saw the carnage. Because of the threat to the dam, a patrol car might cruise along that lonely road, in which case my friendship with Wyatt Porter and even my unwanted reputation as a hero would not guarantee me the freedom of movement that I must have for the rest of the night.

First I needed their wallets. No. I didn’t need them. I wanted them. Not for the money. To prove something to myself.

I stepped carefully, grateful for the Mercedes’s headlights, loath to step on a fragment of skull bone, a twist of hair and flesh, a spattering of brains.

Behind the wheel of the Explorer, I searched the pockets of my jeans for the keys, then my jacket pockets, panicking, wondering if I had dropped them somewhere between there and the public restrooms in the park. In the last pocket, my fingers closed on the coiled plastic ring, and then on the key itself.

I hung a U-turn and drove west. A mile from the park entrance, I pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

The two billfolds I had taken lay on the passenger seat. My hands still trembled as I went through one wallet and then the other, searching for ID.

This is a world where tragic mistakes are common. The white Mercedes SUV might not have been the same one that I’d seen earlier. Perhaps the men whom I’d shot would prove to be not who I thought they were. I had killed them without hearing a word of what they had to say, without asking a question of them. They had pulled their guns only after I’d drawn mine. Maybe
they had licenses to carry concealed weapons, which I did not, and maybe they were authorities of some kind, with legitimate reasons to ask me what I had been doing in the park when it was closed for the night.

Both men possessed current Nevada driver’s licenses. James Morton Sterling. Robert Foster Cokeberry. Jim and Bob.

My relief wasn’t as complete as I might have anticipated. They were indeed the men I suspected they were; but if I had not made a tragic mistake back at the park gate, I might well make one the next time.

Headlights appeared in the distance, and a vehicle approached from the west.

I drove onto the state route once more, and a moment later, a Dodge pickup swept past me in the eastbound lane.

In a minute or so, the dead men would be found.

In California, hardened criminals were often turned loose after serving a mere fraction of their sentences, because prison crowding was considered cruel and unusual punishment. But if you drove while talking on a handheld phone, you would be shown no mercy. I risked the pitiless brute force of the law by calling Chief Porter without pulling off the highway.

“Sir, you’re going to get a call soon about a white Mercedes SUV and two dead men at the gate to Malo Suerte Park.”

“It’s not been half an hour since we last talked.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got a wristwatch. Their names are James Morton Sterling and Robert Foster Cokeberry.”

“Jim and Bob.”

“The two and only.”

“Let me get a pen. There. Okay. Repeat their names.”

I repeated them. “They both have Nevada driver’s licenses.”

“Are you okay, Oddie?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’m okay.”

“Because you don’t sound okay.”

“Not a scratch,” I assured him.

After a silence, because he knew me well, he said, “Not all wounds are the bleeding kind.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve got their driver’s licenses, Chief. I’m going to the dam now, so I’ll leave them with Sonny and Billy.”

“By the way, I talked to Mr. Donatella.”

“Who?”

“Lou Donatella, you know, in the bear suit. Though he wasn’t wearing it by the time I got to him. He and Ollie were drinking coffee, eating brown-sugar pavlovas. They’re delicious. Have you ever had one?”

“No, sir. I don’t even know what a pavlova is.”

“They’re delicious is what they are. Lou made them himself. He’s a nice little guy. He gave me some useful stuff about this Wolfgang Schmidt.”

Ahead on the left loomed a sign rimmed with pentagons of highly reflective plastic:
MALO SUERTE DAM
.

“Schmidt claimed to come from a carnie family when he bought out one of the concessionaires, but Lou says the guy was no more a carnie than Mozart was a carnie. Lou’s into classical music.”

“I’m turning on to the service road to the dam, sir. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

“What do you expect to find there, son?”

“I don’t know. I’m just … drawn to it.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Call me when you get a chance. I’ll be here. This is looking like an all-nighter.”

“No, sir. My hunch is … this thing is going to blow before midnight.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said.

I thought,
Let’s hope I’m wrong
.

The service road led through land so parched that you wouldn’t expect to find a dam and a large body of water at the end of it. To both sides, my headlights showed bare earth, scatterings of stones, an occasional bristle of nameless weeds, no mesquite, no cactus.

Far to the south, along the horizon, heat lightning pulsed through the clouds, smooth radiant waves rather than jagged spears. Forty or fifty miles away, perhaps a downpour washed the desert. Rain didn’t always travel as far as heat lightning could be seen, and Pico Mundo might not receive a drop all night.

The breast of the dam didn’t in scale match that engineering wonder Boulder Dam, over in Nevada. Pico Mundians prided themselves on being “the smallest town of forty thousand anywhere in the world.” That slogan, created by the chamber of commerce, meant to convey to tourists that we were big enough to offer a wide range of activities and accommodations, and that nevertheless we remained simple people with homespun wisdom, down-home manners, and a tradition of welcoming strangers as we would our own kin. You could go to Boulder, Nevada, and do
your boating on Lake Mead, behind the ostentatiously massive breastworks of
their
dam, if you didn’t mind the greedy casinos, all owned by humongous corporations, luring you to nearby Vegas, trying every minute of the day to get their hands in your pockets. Or you could come to Pico Mundo and enjoy boating on Malo Suerte Lake, behind a dam that was practical and human in scale, nothing like that Hitlerian structure across the border, only one hundred and two feet across and thirty-eight feet from crest to sill.

Our dam had no hydroelectric powerhouse, because it had been constructed with the modest intention of creating a pristine lake for recreational use and, in times of drought, a lake that could also serve as a source of water for a few major Maravilla County reservoirs downstream from it. There were sluice gates toward the north end of the dam and a squat concrete outlet-control structure about twenty feet square. The building looked like a miniature fortress, with a crenellated parapet around its flat roof and windows hardly larger than arrow loops.

When I braked to a stop at the end of the service road, Sonny Wexler and Billy Mundy were standing by their squad car. One of them held a shotgun. The other had what might have been a fully automatic carbine, like maybe an Uzi, which indicated the seriousness with which they took the threat.

They must have had a way to operate the headlights remotely, because as I approached, the high beams from their black-and-white nearly blinded me. The officers eased behind the squad car—one near the rear, the other at the front—using it as cover, leveling their weapons, as if they thought Dr. Evil had just arrived on the first step of a crusade for world domination.

I switched off my headlights, put down the side window, and
leaned my head out, so they could see who had come calling. They knew I was close with the chief. In fact, after the business at Green Moon Mall a couple of years earlier, they were among the officers who had insisted that I be given a citation for bravery, which was now packed away with Stormy’s belongings in a room in Ozzie Boone’s house.

Shotgun at the ready, Sonny Wexler, big and tough and as soft-spoken as a monk, with forearms as thick as a sumo wrestler’s calves, cautiously approached the Explorer. He stayed wide of it, so that Billy could have a clear shot if someone in addition to me came out of the vehicle. “You alone in there, Odd?”

Haunted by the shootings at the park, I worried that my voice or a recurrence of the shakes would give them reason to wonder about me, but when I spoke, I sounded normal, which may not speak well of me.

“Yes, sir, I am. I’m alone.”

“The chief said you were back.”

“Good. ’Cause I am. I’m back.”

“It’s good to have you back,” he said, but he didn’t lower the shotgun.

“It’s good to be back,” I assured him.

“You know what’s happening?”

“I do, sir. I put the chief on to it.”

“Why don’t you get out,” Sonny said, “and walk around your vehicle, open all the doors and the tailgate, so I can see straight through.”

“All right, sir.” I got out of the driver’s door.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Odd.”

“I understand, sir.”

“I trust you like a brother.”

“That’s good to hear, sir.”

“It’s just you might have come here under duress.”

“No problem,” I said, opening the back door on the driver’s side.

“It’s not every night of the week somebody wants to blow up the dam.”

I said, “Boring old Pico Mundo,” as I raised the tailgate.

After I opened all the doors and after Sonny circled the Ford, looking straight through it from every angle, I closed up what I had opened.

Tension reduced, the three of us gathered by the back of their cruiser as they remoted the headlights off. Billy Mundy wasn’t a titan like Sonny Wexler, but he had a few inches and thirty pounds of muscle on me. Standing with them, I felt like Lou the bear with two Ollies.

The lights were on for the length of the single-lane road that crossed the crest of the dam, and a series of spotlights lit the breast from the top. It really looked pathetic compared to Boulder Dam.

More heat lightning throbbed through the clouds far to the south, too far away for the trailing thunder to reach us, and for some reason the sight of it made me shudder.

“You hear about the C-4?” Sonny asked.

“Yeah.”

“That is major wicked stuff, ruinous. Who would want to do this?”

“People who know Bern Eckles.”

That surprised them. They had been on the force with him, and he was an embarrassment to them. Billy said, “Eckles, that sonofabitch, he’s away for life.”

“You could say these people go to the same church.”

Sonny shook his head. “Wackos. The world is full of wackos these days. All these wackos, it’s not going to end well.”

“Nothing like this ever happens with Baptists,” Billy said.

“Or even with Presbyterians,” Sonny said. “What can we do for you, Odd? What brought you all the way out here?”

That was an excellent question. I wished I had an answer. “The chief just asked if I’d come to the dam and, you know, sort of have a look around, you know, maybe walk across the service road there on the crest, just in general kind of see whatever there is to see, if there’s anything at all, which probably there isn’t, but it won’t hurt to give it a try.”

I sounded so lame, rambling toward incoherence, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d wanted to test my blood-alcohol level.

Maybe the only good thing about people thinking you were a hero once long ago is that they treat you seriously no matter how idiotic you might sound. Sonny and Billy nodded solemnly as I babbled, hearing more sense in my speech than I put into it.

“Sure,” Sonny Wexler said. “That’s a good idea. Go on out there and have a look.”