I felt as though I were holding hands with death, all right—my death.
With the pistol in my lap, I picked up the phone and punched in Chief Porter’s private cell number, not his police-department line. The keys seemed to be growing smaller, as if this were a phone Alice had gotten from a hookah-smoking caterpillar, but I entered the seven digits correctly on the first try, and pressed SEND.
Karla Porter answered on the third ring. She said that she was still in the ICU waiting room. She’d been allowed to see the chief on three occasions, for five-minute visits.
“He was awake the last time, but very weak. He knew who I was. He smiled for me. But he’s not able to talk much, and not coherently. They’re keeping him semisedated to facilitate healing. I don’t think he’ll be really talking much before tomorrow.”
“But he’s going to be all right?” I asked.
“That’s what they say. And I’m beginning to believe it.”
“I love him,” I said, and heard my voice break.
“He knows that, Oddie. He loves you, too. You’re a son to him.”
“Tell him.”
“I will.”
“I’ll call,” I promised.
I pressed END and dropped the phone on the passenger’s seat.
The chief could not help me. No one could help me. No sad, dead prostitute to quell the killing frenzy of this coyote. Just me.
Intuition told me not to take the pistol. I slid it under the seat again.
When I switched off the engine and got out of the car, the fiery sun was both a hammer and an anvil, forging the world between itself and its reflection.
Psychic magnetism works whether I’m rolling on wheels or afoot. I was drawn to the delivery ramp. I went down into the coolness of the subterranean loading docks.
WITH A LOW CEILING AND ENDLESS GRAY concrete, the mall-employee underground parking garage and loading dock had the bleak and ominous atmosphere of an ancient tomb deep under Egyptian sands, the tomb of a hated pharaoh whose subjects had buried him on the cheap, without glittering gold vessels or ornamentation of any kind.
The elevated dock ran the length of the immense structure, and big trucks were backed up to it at various points. At the department store, two semis at a time could bypass the dock and pull directly into an enormous receiving room.
This place clattered and hummed with activity as the truck crews off-loaded late-arriving sales merchandise and the harried stockroom employees prepped it for delivery to the sales floors after the close of business.
I passed among racks, carts, carousels, bins, boxes, and drums of merchandise, everything from women’s party dresses to culinary gadgets to sporting goods. Perfume, swimwear, gourmet chocolates.
Nobody challenged my right to be there, and when I plucked a hardwood baseball bat out of a drum full of them, no one ordered me to put it back.
Another drum contained hollow aluminum bats. They weren’t what I wanted. I preferred a bat with heft. I required a certain balance to the instrument. You can better break an arm with a wooden club, more easily shatter a knee.
Maybe I would need the baseball bat, maybe I wouldn’t. The fact that it was there—and that PMS brought me to it—seemed to suggest that if I didn’t avail myself of it, then I would later regret my decision.
The only extracurricular activity I went out for in high school was baseball. As I wrote earlier, I had the best stats on the team, even though I could only play home games.
I’m not out of practice, either. The Pico Mundo Grille has a team. We play other businesses and civic organizations; we whup ass, year after year.
Repeatedly, loaded forklifts and electric carts announced their approach with soft beeps and musical toots. I stepped out of their way but kept moving, though I had no idea where I was going.
In my mind’s eye: Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm. Find the bastard.
A pair of extra-wide double doors swung into a corridor with a bare concrete floor and painted concrete walls. I hesitated, looked right, turned left.
My stomach churned. I needed antacids.
I needed a bigger bat, a bulletproof vest, and backup, too, but I didn’t have them, either. I just kept moving.
Doors led to rooms off the right side of the corridor. Most were labeled. BATHROOMS. SHIPPING OFFICE. MAINTENANCE OFFICE.
Seeking Simon Varner. Sweet face. Prince of Darkness. Feel the pull of him, drawing me forward.
I passed two men, a woman, another man. We smiled and nodded. None of them seemed to wonder where the game was, what the score might be, whose team I was on.
Soon I came to a door marked SECURITY, I stopped. This didn’t feel right ... and yet it did.
When PMS works, I usually know that I’ve arrived. This time I felt that I’d arrived. I can’t explain the difference, but it was real.
I put my hand on the knob but hesitated.
In my mind, I heard Lysette Rains as she’d spoken to me at the chief’s recent barbecue: I was just a nail technician, and now I’m a certified nail artist.
For the life of me—and it really might be for the life of me, considering that I was about to plunge into a fire of one kind or another—I didn’t know why I should recall Lysette at this juncture.
Her voice haunted me again: It takes a while to realize what a lonely world it is, and when you do ... then the future looks kinda scary.
I took my hand off the knob.
I stepped to one side of the door.
Iron-shod hooves on hard-baked ground could have made no louder thunder than the internal booming of my galloping heart.
My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said Batter up, I didn’t argue that I wasn’t ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.
The door opened, and a guy stepped boldly into the corridor. He was dressed in black boots, a lightweight black jumpsuit with hood, a black ski mask, and black gloves.
He carried an assault rifle so big and wicked that it looked as unreal as the weaponry in an early Schwarzenegger movie. From a utility belt hung eight or ten spare magazines.
He looked to his left when he came out of the security room. I stood to his right, but he sensed me at once and in midstep turned his head toward me.
Never one who liked to bunt, I swung hard, high above the strike zone, and hit him in the face.
I would have been surprised if he hadn’t gone down cold. I was not surprised.
The corridor was deserted. No one had seen. For the moment.
I needed to handle this as anonymously as possible, to avoid questions later if the chief remained unable to run interference for me.
After rolling the baseball bat into the security room and sliding the assault rifle after it, I grabbed the gunman by the jumpsuit and dragged him in there, too, out of the hallway, and shut the door.
Among overturned office chairs and spilled mugs of coffee, three unarmed security guards lay dead in this bunker. Apparently they had been killed with a silencer-fitted pistol, because the shots had not attracted attention. They looked surprised.
The