Odd Hours (21 page)

FORTY-THREE

THE SATCHEL CONTAINING THE FOUR BOMB TRIGGERS had grown so heavy that I needed all my strength and determination to carry it into the garage and stow it in the trunk of the Mercedes.

I zipped open the bag and, in the trunk light, found that it contained nothing more than I had put into it aboard the tugboat.

Relying on my psychic magnetism both to guide me through the fog without a major collision and to lead me to a pay phone, I drove away from Hutch’s place.

In these streets that seemed as mystic as they were misted, Hoss Shackett perhaps traveled in desperation and rage, either hoping to resuscitate the plan to incinerate four cities or preparing to flee justice, or seeking the monkey in the mechanism, the cause of his current misfortune.

The monkey, who had a highly active imagination, could not help worrying about the chief, because in his monkey heart he knew, just
knew,
that any encounter would not be with Hoss Shackett the Nice but with the Hoss Shackett who ate little kittens and picked his teeth with their bones.

The downside of psychic magnetism is that it occasionally leads me to a person whom I wish to avoid. This is because every effort that I make to block him from my thoughts is defeated by my constant worry that I will come face to face with him. And even if I succeed in pushing him from my conscious mind, the treacherous subconscious continues to fret about him. Then the object of my dread is either drawn to me—reverse psychic magnetism—or I to him, and often at just the wrong moment.

Therefore, to the exclusion of all else, I concentrated on finding a pay phone as I piloted the Mercedes. Pay phone, pay phone, pay phone.

Since cell phones have become ubiquitous, public pay phones have become more difficult to find. Someday the telephone will be a small voice-activated chip embedded just behind the jawbone and under the ear, and then cell phones will be as outmoded as the coin-operated variety that they have gradually but steadily replaced.

Those commentators who explain our world to us and who tell us how we should feel about it will call the embedded phone “progress.” And when someone from the government wishes to speak with you, they will always know where to reach you and, because of your implant’s transponder signature, where to find you.

This will go a long way toward encouraging the New Civility and toward discouraging the endless quarreling and tiresome debate that characterize our current society, which to so many impatient citizens seems old and tired. All that has been will be blown away, and you may be frightened sometimes by all the changes, but those who have the perspective and the ability to shape societal consensus are as sure as they have ever been about anything that, in the end, you will like your new world and feel that it is a paradise on earth, so just shut up already.

In the blinded night, wondering if eventually my fate would be much like Samson’s, whose eyes had been put out and who had been imprisoned in Gaza, I arrived by psychic magnetism and Mercedes in the parking lot of a convenience store, outside of which stood a pay phone.

Because I did not want these calls to be traced back to Birdie Hopkins’s cell, which would be big trouble for her, I went into the store, bought a bottle of aspirin and a Pepsi, and got change for the public phone.

After taking two aspirin, I tasked the information operator with finding me the numbers of the nearest FBI and Homeland Security field offices.

I called the FBI in Santa Cruz and told them about the nuclear weapons aboard the seagoing tugboat beached at the mouth of Hecate’s Canyon. I suggested that they immediately contact the Coast Guard to confirm that such a vessel had indeed run aground, and I warned them that Chief Hoss Shackett was among the people who had conspired to import those bombs.

The agent with whom I spoke was initially patient in the way that he would have been when listening to an earnest citizen discuss the necessity of all Earthlings wearing aluminum-foil skullcaps to prevent extraterrestrials from reading our thoughts.

As the telling details of my story accumulated, however, he became more involved. Then riveted. When the time arrived for me to hang up, he brought to bear all the tricks of psychology that a good agent knows, intent on keeping me on the line, teasing from me some detail that would lead to my identification, and convincing me that the bureau was prepared to reward me with a monument in Washington, my face on a postage stamp, and seventy-two virgins provided
this side
of Paradise.

I hung up and, in the fashion that I had divined my way to a pay phone, I proceeded to the church served by Reverend Charles Moran, who would never know that I had prevented him from killing his wife and committing suicide this very night.

The rectory was separated from the church by a courtyard in which gnarled and spiky abstract sculptures, apparently representing eternal truths, scared the crap out of me more than once as they loomed abruptly out of the fog.

I went around to the back of the church, to the corner occupied by the sacristy. The door was locked.

Assuming that the good reverend and his wife were enjoying the deep sleep of the sinless devout, I used the butt of Valonia’s pistol to break one pane in a sacristy window. I reached through, found the latch, and slipped inside.

I switched on my flashlight and oriented myself. Then I went through an open door into the sanctuary.

Turning on the church lights would unnecessarily risk drawing unwanted attention, which in this instance was any attention of any kind from anyone.

Besides, in this small way, I was reducing my carbon footprint. Although, having prevented the detonation of four nuclear weapons, I suppose that I had earned enough carbon credits to live the rest of my life high on the hog if I wished.

Above the altar, the abstract sculpture of Big Bird or the Lord, or whatever, did not look down at me accusingly, because it had no eyes.

I descended the altar platform, went through the chancel gate, and proceeded to the third pew, where I had left my ID and that belonging to Sam Whittle.

Although I had no use for Flashlight Guy’s wallet, my own would come in handy in the event that I was stopped by the highway patrol while behind the wheel of Hutch’s Mercedes and needed to produce a driver’s license. I found mine, shoved it in my hip pocket, and left Whittle’s wallet where it was.

As I returned to the center aisle, the lights came on.

In the sanctuary, just this side of the sacristy door, stood Chief Hoss Shackett.

FORTY-FOUR

CHIEF HOSS SHACKETT DID NOT LOOK WELL. IN the interrogation-room disturbance, he had suffered an abrasion on his forehead, one black eye, and a contusion that had darkened the left side of his face. His nose had once been as straight and proud as every sadistic fascist facilitator of terrorism would like his nose to be; now it resembled a mutant pink zucchini. His stiff brush-cut hair appeared to have wilted.

Someone, I assumed, must have found my wallet in the hymnal holder and figured that I would return for it.

Dispelling that notion, the chief said, “Lime. Harry Lime.” He did not seem to have discovered that my name was Odd Thomas.

Tucking the flashlight under my belt, I said, “Good evening, Chief. You’re looking well.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, except that before the question mark he inserted an epithet that was disgusting but not inventive.

“I was hoping,” I said, “that you had another Almond Joy. I’ve regretted not accepting your offer of half the one you ate.”

He took two steps away from the sacristy door, limping to favor his left leg, but then he halted, as if he didn’t want to get too close to me. We were about forty feet apart.

“What’s happened to the tugboat?” he asked.

“Is this a riddle, sir?”

“What have you done with them?”

“The? Them? Is it one or two tugboats?”

“This time, smartass, I am not going to play amnesia with you.”

“Do you have amnesia, sir?”

His right arm had been hanging slack at his side, and I had assumed that it had been injured in his disastrous encounter with Mr. Sinatra.

Now he raised the arm, revealing a fearsome gun in his hand. The firearm appeared to be so large that the weight of it might fracture his wrist, and it wobbled slightly in his grip. A silencer had been screwed to the end of the barrel.

I drew the small pistol that I had confiscated on the bridge of the tugboat. At that distance, I would have to have been a crack shot to hit him with such an intimate weapon.

“I need those nukes,” the chief said. “I need them, I need them right now.”

“I don’t want to be an enabler, sir. I’d rather get you into a twelve-step program to help you break this addiction.”

“Don’t push me, kid. I have nothing to lose.”

“Oh, Chief, don’t undersell yourself. You’ve still got a lot to lose. Your arrogance, your self-importance, your greed, that insane gleam of historic destiny in your eye—”

When he fired a round, the only sound issuing from his pistol was a whispery
wathup,
rather like Elmer Fudd in one of those old Looney Tunes, lisping
What’s up?

Although I believed that he intended to wound or kill me, the round went well wide of its target, cracking into one of the pews six feet to my left. Perhaps the injuries to his face had blurred his vision.

If Hutch had thought it took chutzpah for me to try playing Harry Lime, he should have seen me attempting to convince the chief that I was Superman: “Put the gun down, Shackett. I don’t want to have to damage the church with my telekinetic power, but if you give me no other choice, I’ll take you out like I did earlier tonight.”

He was so impressed that he carefully aimed at me and squeezed off another shot.

I did not juke, in part because Superman would never do so; therefore, a feint would disprove my claim to telekinesis. Besides, the chief’s aim was so bad that I feared I might lean into the slug instead of away from it.

Another pew spat up a shower of splinters.

“I’m giving you one last chance to put down the gun,” I declared with the confidence of an invincible man in blue tights and red cape.

“I don’t know what happened in that room,” Hoss Shackett said, squinting at me as he tried to line up his third shot. “But if you had the power to do all that crazy stuff, you would have had the power to get yourself out of the leg iron. You didn’t, you had to wait for me to unlock it.”

An invincible man might have issued a gentle pitying laugh at such shallow reasoning, but I could not pull that off without a year or two of acting classes. Instead, I said, “Any child could see the flaw in your logic.”

His third round slammed into a center-aisle column behind me and six inches to my right.

As he aimed again, the chief said, “Any child, you think? So bring him to me, and I’ll kill the little bastard after I’m done with you.”

When he squeezed the trigger, no
wathup
ensued. He tried again and then lowered the weapon. He reached to his gun belt to get more ammunition.

I sprinted to the chancel railing, leaped across it, and ran onto the altar platform. From a distance of twelve or fifteen feet, I emptied the magazine of my girly gun into his abdomen and chest.

The pistol proved to be nicely balanced, with little recoil, and I prevented the muzzle from pulling up on the target. Maybe three or four shots missed, wide to one side or the other, but five or six tore into his torso; I saw them hit.

The impact of the slugs staggered Hoss Shackett back against the wall, and his body spasmed with each strike. Yet he did not go down.

He grunted in pain, but I was counting on a scream and a dying gurgle.

Exhibiting a riveting theatricality with which I would not have credited him, the chief ripped open the front of his uniform shirt to reveal the flattened slugs, like puddles of lead, adhering to his bulletproof Kevlar vest.

The six rounds had winded but not wounded him.

This was so unfair.

If I had known that he was wearing Kevlar, I would have aimed for his head. I had gone for his torso because it was a much bigger target. A head is an easy thing to miss, especially at a distance of fifteen feet, when the shooter is a person with an intense dislike of guns, in a situation of extreme stress, firing a Tinkertoy pistol designed for use in close quarters.

The chief had found another loaded magazine. He ejected the depleted one from his weapon.

I dropped my pathetic gun, retreated at a run, leaped across the chancel railing, pleased that I didn’t catch a foot on it and plant my face in the floor. I sprinted along the aisle toward the narthex.

For an instant, I considered throwing hymnals at him, but as I had an ear for sacred music—especially Gregorian chants and gospel songs—and a respect for books, I restrained myself.

The front door, through which the golden retriever and I had come a few hours ago, had been locked for the night. Only a key would open it.

Two other doors led out of the narthex, but considering the church as I remembered it from outside, the exit to my left could have taken me only to the bell tower, which would have been a vertical dead end.

As I glanced back into the nave, Chief Hoss Shackett opened the gate in the chancel railing and limped out of the sanctuary, into the center aisle. He looked like Captain Ahab in a mad frenzy of white-whale obsession.

I took the only exit available to me, switched on lights, and discovered that I was in an enclosed flagstone walkway linking the church to an annex of some kind.

Taped to the walls were charming drawings executed by children of various ages, all featuring a smiling bearded man in white robes, who I assumed, because of his halo, must be Jesus. The Son of God, inadequately but earnestly rendered, was engaged in all manner of tasks that I did not recall being recounted in Scripture.

Jesus with hands upraised, transforming a rain of bombs into flowers. Jesus smiling but shaking his finger at a pregnant woman about to drink a bottle of beer. Jesus saving a stranded polar bear from an ice floe. Jesus turning a flamethrower on stacks of crates labeled
CIGARETTES
.

At the end of the walkway, beside a drawing of Jesus apparently using his miraculous powers to turn an obese boy’s prized collection of cakes and pies into packages of tofu, another door opened onto a corridor that served classrooms used for Sunday school and other activities.

When I came to an intersecting hall, I saw what seemed to be an exterior door at the farther end, and I made for it with all the haste of Jesus chasing from the temple those people who worked for companies that manufactured clothing made from polyester and other unnatural fabrics.

Although the exit was locked, it featured a thumb-turn for the deadbolt. Through the French window in the top of the door, the cold curdled fog was brightened by an exterior stoop light that had come on with the hallway fluorescents, and it appeared welcoming compared to the Hoss-stalked realm behind me. As I was about to disengage the lock, however, a coyote stood on its hind legs, put its forepaws on the door, and peered at me through one of the four panes of glass.