Forever Odd, Page 9

  At the other end of the T, a door opened into a high-ceilinged transition space that housed a steep flight of conventional stairs. They rose twenty feet to a door marked PMDPW.

  I interpreted this to mean Pico Mundo Department of Power and Water. Also stenciled on the steel was 16S-SW-V2453, which meant nothing to me.

  I explored no farther. I had discovered that the subterranean systems of the department of power and water interfaced with the flood-control-project tunnels at least at a few points.

  Why this might eventually be useful information, I didn’t know, but I felt that it would.

  After returning to the drain and discovering that the white-eyed snaky man was not waiting for me, I proceeded east-southeast.

  When another tunnel met this one, the elevated walkway ended. In the powdery sediment below were footprints crossing the intersection to the place where the walkway resumed.

  I dropped two feet to the drain floor and studied the prints in the silt.

  Danny’s tracks were different from the others. His numerous fractures over the years—and the unfortunate distortions in the bones that often accompanied healing in a victim of osteogenesis imperfecta—had left his right leg an inch shorter than his left, and twisted. He hobbled with a roll of the hips and tended to drag his right foot.

  If I was also hunchbacked, he had once said, I’d have a lifelong job in the bell tower at Notre Dame, with good fringe benefits, but as usual, Mother Nature hasn’t played fair with me.

  In keeping with his diminutive stature, his feet were no bigger than those of a ten- or twelve-year-old. In addition, his right was a size larger than his left.

  No one else could have made these tracks.

  When I considered how far they had brought him on foot, I felt sick, angry, and afraid for him.

  He could take short walks—a few blocks, a tour of the mall—without pain, sometimes even without discomfort. But a trek as long as this would be agony for him.

  I had thought Danny had been taken by two men—his biological father, Simon Makepeace, and the nameless snaky man, now deceased. In the powdery silt, however, were three additional sets of footprints.

  Two were the prints of grown men, one with larger feet than the other. The third appeared to have been made by a boy or a woman.

  I tracked them across the confluence of tunnels to the next section of walkway. Thereafter, I again had nothing to follow except my uniquely intense intuition.

  This dry section of the labyrinth lacked even the silken whisper of shallow water flowing unimpeded. This was deeper than a silence; this was a hush.

  I have a light tread; and having proceeded at a measured pace, I was not breathing hard. Even as I walked, I could listen to the tunnel without masking any noises my quarry might make. But no telltale footfalls or voices came to me.

  A couple of times, I halted, closed my eyes to concentrate on listening. I heard only a deep hollow potential for sound, and not a throb or gurgle that wasn’t internal to me.

  The evidence of such profound silence suggested that somewhere ahead, the four had departed the flood tunnels.

  Why would Simon have kidnapped a son he didn’t want and whom he refused to believe he had fathered?

  Answer: If he thought that Danny was the offspring of the man with whom Carol had cuckolded him, Simon might take satisfaction in killing him. He was a sociopath. Neither logic nor ordinary emotions served as a foundation for his actions. Power—and the pleasure he got from exercising it—and survival were his only motivations.

  That answer had satisfied me thus far—but no longer.

  Simon could have murdered Danny in his bedroom. Or if my arrival at the Jessup house had interrupted him, he could have done the job in the van, while the snaky guy drove, and would have had time for torture if that was what he wanted.

  Bringing Danny into this maze and hiking him through miles of tunnels qualified as a form of torture, but it was neither dramatic enough nor physically invasive enough to thrill a homicidal sociopath who liked wet work.

  Simon—and his remaining two companions—had some use for poor Danny that eluded me.

  Neither had they come this way to circumvent the roadblocks, nor the sheriff’s-department aerial patrols. They could have found better places in which to lie low until the blockades were removed.

  With grim expectations, I walked faster now, not because psychic magnetism pulled me more effectively, which it did not, but because at each intersection, I had the confirmation of their footprints in the silt.

  The endless gray walls, the monotony of the patterns of shadow and light thrown by the overhead lamps, the silence: This might have served as Hell for any hopeless sinner whose two greatest fears were solitude and boredom.

  Following the discovery of the first footprints, I hurried along for more than another thirty minutes, not running but walking briskly—and came to the place at which they had exited the maze.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN I TOUCHED THE STAINLESS-STEEL service door in the wall of the tunnel, a psychic hook bit deep, and I felt myself being reeled forward, as if my quarry were the fishermen and I the fish.

  Beyond the door, an L-shaped hallway. At the end of the L, a door. Pushing through the door, I found a vestibule, spiral stairs, and at the top another slump-stone shed with tool rack.

  Although the February day was pleasantly warm, not blistering, the air in here was stuffy. The smell of dry rot settled from the rafters under the sun-baked metal roof.

  Apparently Simon had picked the lock as he had done at the first shed off the alleyway near the Blue Moon Cafe. Leaving, they had closed the door, and it had latched securely behind them.

  With my laminated driver’s license, I could spring a simple latch, but although cheap and flimsy, this model would be impervious to a plastic loid. I retrieved the pair of locking tongs from my backpack.

  I was not concerned about the noise alerting Simon and his crew. They would have passed this way hours ago; and I had every reason to believe that they had kept moving.

  As I was about to apply the tongs to the lock cylinder, Terri’s satellite phone rang, startling me.

  I fumbled it from my pocket and answered on the third ring. “Yeah?”

  “Hi.”

  From that single word, I recognized the smoky-voiced woman who had called while I’d been sitting under the branches of the poisonous brugmansia behind the Ying house, the previous night.

  “You again.”

  “Me.”

  She could have obtained this number only by calling my recharged cell phone and talking to Terri.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “You still think I have the wrong number?”

  “No. Who are you?”

  She said, “You have to ask?”

  “Didn’t I just?”

  “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

  “I don’t know your voice.”

  “So many men know it well.”

  If she wasn’t speaking in riddles, she was at least being obscure, taunting.

  “Have I ever met you?” I asked.

  “No. But can’t you dream me up?”

  “Dream you up?”

  “I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Again?”

  “Still.”

  I thought of the footprints in the silt. One pair had belonged to either a boy or a woman.

  Not sure of the game, I waited.

  She waited, too.

  In most of the rafter junctions, spiders had spun webs. Those architects hung, glossy and black, among the pale carcasses of flies and moths on which they had feasted.

  Finally I said, “What do you want?”

  “Miracles.”

  “By which you mean—what?”

  “Fabulous impossible things.”

  “Why call me?”

  “Who else?”

  “I’m a fry cook.”

  “Astonish me.”

  “I sling hash.”

 
She said, “Icy fingers.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “You want icy fingers?”

  “Up and down my spine.”

  “Get an Eskimo masseuse.”

  “Masseuse?”

  “For the icy fingers.”

  The humorless always need to ask, and she did: “Is that a joke?”

  “Not a great one,” I admitted.

  “You think everything’s funny? Is that the way you are?”

  “Not everything.”

  “Not very much at all, asshole. You laughing now?”

  “No, not now.”

  “You know what I think would be funny?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “What I think would be funny is I take a hammer to the little creep’s arm.”

  Overhead, an eight-legged harpist moved, and silent arpeggios trembled through taut strings of spider silk.

  She said, “Will his bones shatter like glass?”

  I didn’t at once respond. I thought before I spoke, then said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What’re you sorry for?”

  “I’m sorry for offending you with the joke about the Eskimo.”

  “Baby, I don’t offend.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I just get pissed off.”

  “I’m sorry. I mean it.”

  “Don’t be boring,” she said.

  I said, “Please don’t hurt him.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Why should you?”

  “To get what I want,” she said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Miracles.”

  “Maybe it’s me, I’m sure it is, but you aren’t making sense.”

  “Miracles,” she repeated.

  “Tell me what I can do?”

  “Amazements.”

  “What can I do to get him back unhurt?”

  “You disappoint me.”

  “I’m trying to understand.”

  “He’s proud of his face, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Proud? I don’t know.”

  “It’s the only part of him not screwed up.”

  My mouth had gone dry, but not because the shed was hot and layered with dust.

  “He’s got a pretty face,” she said. “For now.”

  She terminated the call.

  Briefly I considered pressing *69 to see if I could ring her back even though she had a block on her caller ID. I did not do it because I suspected this would be a mistake.

  Although her cryptic statements shed no light on her enigmatic agenda, one thing seemed clear. She was accustomed to control, and at the mildest challenge to it, she responded with hostility.

  Having assigned to herself the aggressive role in this, she expected me to be passive. If I star-sixty-nined her, she would no doubt be pissed off.

  She was capable of cruelty. What anger I inspired in her, she might vent on Danny.

  The smell of dry rot. Of dust. Of something dead and desiccated in a shadowy corner.

  I returned the phone to my pocket.

  On a silken thread, a spider descended from its web, lazily turning in the still air, legs trembling.

  NINETEEN

  I RIPPED OUT THE LOCK CYLINDER, SHOVED open the door, and left the spiders to their preying.

  So otherworldly and disturbing had been the flood-control system, so eerie the phone conversation that followed, had I stepped across the threshold into Narnia, I would not have been more than mildly surprised.

  In fact, I found myself beyond the limits of Pico Mundo, but not in a land ruled by magic. On all sides lay desert scrub, rocky and remorseless.

  This shed stood on a concrete pad twice its size. A chain-link fence enclosed the facility.

  I walked the perimeter of this enclosure, studying the rugged landscape, seeking any sign of an observer. The encircling terrain offered no good hiding places.

  When it appeared that retreat to the shed, to avoid gunfire, would not be necessary, I climbed the chain-link gate.

  The stony ground immediately before me took no impressions. Relying on intuition, I headed south.

  The sun had reached its apex. Perhaps five hours of daylight remained before the early winter nightfall.

  To the south and west, the pale sky looked three shades short of the ideal blue, as though it had been faded by millennia of sunshine reflected upon it from the Mojave.

  In contrast, behind me, the northern third of the heavens had been consumed by ravenous masses of threatening clouds. They were dirty, as they had been earlier, but now also bruised.

  Within a hundred yards, I topped a low hill and descended into a swale where the soft soil took prints. Before me again were the tracks of the fugitives and their captive.

  Danny had been dragging his right foot worse here than in the flood tunnels. The evidence of his gait suggested acute pain and desperation.

  Most victims of osteogenesis imperfecta—OI—experience a marked decrease in fractures following puberty. Danny had been one of those.

  Upon reaching adulthood, the most fortunate discover that they are only minimally—if at all—more prone to broken bones than are people without their affliction. They are left with the legacy of bodies distorted by deformed healing and abnormal bone growth, and some of them eventually go deaf from otosclerosis, but otherwise the worst ravages of this genetic disorder are behind them.

  While not ten percent as fragile as he had been as a child, Danny was one of an unfortunate minority of OI adults who must remain cautious. He had not in a long time casually broken a bone, as when he had at the age of six cracked his wrist while snap-dealing Old Maid. But a year ago, in a fall, he had fractured his right radius.

  For a moment I studied the woman’s footprints, wondering who she was, what she was, why.

  I followed the swale about two hundred yards before the tracks departed it. They vanished on a stony slope.

  As I started to climb the hillside, the satellite phone rang.

  She said, “Odd Thomas?”

  “Who else?”

  “I’ve seen your picture,” she said.

  “My ears always photograph bigger than they are.”

  “You have the look,” she said.

  “What look?”

  “Mundunugu.”

  “Is that a word?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “Liar,” she said, but not angrily.

  This was the equivalent of table conversation at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  She said, “You want the little creep?”

  “I want Danny. Alive.”

  “You think you can find him?”

  I said, “I’m trying.”

  “You were so fast, now you’re damn slow.”

  “What do you think you know about me?”

  In a coy voice, she said, “What is there to know, baby?”

  “Not much.”

  “For Danny’s sake, I hope that’s not true.”

  I began to have the queasy if inexplicable feeling that somehow Dr. Jessup had been murdered…because of me.

  “You don’t want to be in trouble this bad,” I said.

  “Nobody can hurt me,” she declared.

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m invincible.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “I have thirty in an amulet.”

  “Thirty what?” I asked.

  “Ti bon ange.”

  I had never heard the term before. “What does that mean?”

  “You know.”

  “Not really.”

  “Liar.”

  When she didn’t hang up but didn’t immediately say anything more, either, I sat on the ground, facing west again.

  Except for an occasional clump of mesquite and a bristle of bunch-grass, the land was ash-gray and acid-yellow
.

  “You still there?” she asked.

  “Where would I go?”

  “So where are you?”

  I traded another question: “Can I speak to Simon?”

  “Simple or says?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Simple Simon or Simon Says?”

  “Simon Makepeace,” I said patiently.

  “You think he’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Loser.”

  “He killed Wilbur Jessup.”

  “You’re half-assed at this,” she said.

  “At what?”

  “Don’t disappoint me.”

  “I thought you said I already had.”

  “Don’t disappoint me anymore.”

  “Or what?” I asked, and immediately wished that I had not.

  “How about this….”

  I waited.

  Finally she said, “How about, you find us by sundown or we break both his legs.”

  “If you want me to find you, just tell me where you are.”

  “What would be the point of that? If you don’t find us by nine o’clock, we also break both his arms.”

  “Don’t do this. He never harmed you. He never harmed anyone.”

  “What’s the first rule?” she asked.

  Remembering our shortest and most cryptic conversation, from the previous night, I said, “I have to come alone.”

  “You bring cops or anyone, we break his pretty face, and then the rest of his life, he’ll be butt ugly from top to bottom.”

  When she hung up, I pressed END.

  Whoever she might be, she was crazy. Okay. I’d dealt with crazy before.

  She was crazy and evil. Nothing new about that, either.

  TWENTY

  I SHRUGGED OUT OF MY BACKPACK AND rummaged in it for an Evian bottle. The water wasn’t cold but tasted delicious.

  The plastic bottle did not actually contain Evian. I had filled it at the tap in my kitchen.

  If you would pay a steep price for bottled water, why wouldn’t you pay even more for a bag of fresh Rocky Mountain air if someday you saw it in the market?

  Although I am not a skinflint, for years I have lived frugally. As a short-order cook with plans to marry, paid a fair but not lavish salary, I had needed to save for our future.

  Now she is gone, and I am alone, and the last thing I need money for is a wedding cake. Yet from long habit, when it comes to spending on myself, I still pinch each penny hard enough to press it into the size of a quarter.