Twenty-six
I could run from them. But to what end? I needed the Explorer. The chief had been right when he’d said that things were moving fast. Whatever catastrophe might make Pico Mundo the biggest story of the year, it would unfold within the next several hours, surely before dawn. If I had any hope of discovering what the cult intended and putting a stop to it, I had to be mobile. I couldn’t chase down the truth on foot or by hoping to thumb a ride every time I needed one.
If I had an advantage, it was that people who were drawn to me by reverse psychic magnetism were not aware of what had brought them into my presence. They felt no compulsion to find me, no attracting power. They made excuses to themselves for why they deviated from their plans and set off to places that they had no intention of visiting. Maybe they told themselves that they needed time to think about what they intended to do next. Maybe they convinced themselves that just cruising around would free their minds to consider their options more clearly. Whatever the case, they were always surprised to see me.
Without hesitation, I started toward the gate at the entrance, as if I had no concern about these men’s intentions, as if I assumed that people who drove Mercedes SUVs were all upstanding citizens who wanted only the best for their fellow men, an end to all hunger, and world peace.
They probably didn’t even know who I was. They hadn’t seen me with the Explorer when they had cruised past it in town. Here the Ford was again, yes, and they would be puzzled as to why they had been interested in it earlier and why they should stumble upon it now when they were just cruising around at random, miles from where it had been parked before.
Whether they had tumbled to my identity or not, they would know me when I drew closer to them. The cult had been searching for me, and they surely had old newspaper photographs to go by, if nothing else. By the time I reached the fence, they would recognize me, and they would for a moment be surprised. A moment. Three seconds, four.
For another moment, they would wonder what I was doing out there at that hour, if I knew about the nearby dam and the C-4, and if I might have told anyone what I knew. Two seconds, three.
For another moment, they would look at each other, consulting on a course of action with or without words. They would want to kill me, yes, but they might also want to capture me, so that they could first torture me into revealing anything I knew about Edie Fischer and her organization, which was as secret as theirs and opposed to them at every turn. Four seconds, five.
Those three moments gave me a fearfully narrow path to survival. In fact, it wasn’t even a path, but a tightrope, a high wire across which I had to run, not walk.
I pretended no suspicion, calling out, “Hello,” as I approached them through the darkness. Pretending the kind of inebriation that can be detected not so much by the drunk’s slurred words as by his too-loud and too-hearty speech, pretending also that I assumed they were park employees, I said, “Needed a damn toilet! Why’d you lock up, God’s sake? Had to bust out a window, ’cause you locked it up!”
I couldn’t shoot at them through a chain-link fence with any hope of scoring a hit. I had to climb it before they drew on me.
As I came out of the darkness into the backwash of their SUV’s headlights, I faked a stumble and cursed and ducked my head to hide my face. I believe I started climbing the chain-link before they realized who I was. I reached the top by the time they were getting to the end of the second of those three moments.
Instead of coming down the other side of the gate, I froze at the top, drew the Glock from my shoulder rig, thought for an instant it was going to snag on the powder-blue sport coat, and as they went for their weapons too late, I fired down on them. The first round took one of them in the gut, and he began to scream, his gun slipping out of his grip even as he drew it. The second round took the other man point-blank in the face, blowing out the back of his skull, and he was no doubt dead before he hit the ground.
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.