windowpanes in the upper half of the door. Peaceful, the woods. And still.
When I returned to the living room with the bottle of Cabernet, half the cheese had disappeared from the canape plate, and Little Ozzie was still ensconced in his commodious chair, where he himself had once said that he looked as cozy as the Toad King on his throne. “Dear Odd, I was beginning to think you’d stepped through a wardrobe into Narnia.”
I told him about Robertson.
“You mean,” Ozzie said, “that he was here, in my house?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said as I refilled his wineglass.
“Doing what?”
“Probably standing in the hall, just beyond that archway, listening to us talk.”
“That’s damn bold.”
Setting the bottle on a coaster beside his glass, striving hard to repress the palsy of fear that would have trembled my hands, I said, “No more bold than I was when I slipped into his house to poke through his drawers.”
“I suppose not. But then you’re on the side of the gods, and this bastard sounds like a giant albino cockroach on a day pass from Hell.”
Terrible Chester had moved from the windowsill to my chair. He raised his head to challenge me for possession of the seat. His eyes are as green as those of a scheming demon.
“If I were you,” Ozzie advised, “I would sit elsewhere.” He indicated the bottle of wine. “Won’t you have a second glass?”
“Haven’t quite finished my first,” I said, “and I’ve really got to be going. Stormy Llewellyn, dinner—all of that. But don’t get up.”
“Don’t tell me not to get up,” he grumped as he began the process of disengaging his bulk from armchair cushions that, like the hungry jaws of an exotic flesh-eating plant, had closed with considerable suction around his thighs and buttocks.
“Sir, it’s really not necessary.”
“Don’t tell me what’s necessary, you presumptuous pup. What’s necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might seem.”
Sometimes when he gets up after having been seated for a while, his complexion reddens with the effort, and at other times he goes sheet-white. I’m frightened to think that such a simple thing as rising from a chair should tax him so much.
Fortunately, his face neither flushed nor paled this time. Perhaps fortified by the wine and burdened by only half a plate of cheese, he was on his feet markedly faster than a desert tortoise extracting itself from a dry slough of treacherous sand.
“Now that you’re up,” I said, “I think you should lock the door behind me. And keep all the doors locked till this thing is resolved. Don’t answer the bell unless you can see who rang it.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Ozzie declared. “My well-padded vital organs are hard to reach with either blade or bullet. And I know a few things about self-defense.”
“He’s dangerous, sir. He might have controlled himself so far, but when he cracks, he’ll be so vicious that he’ll make the evening news from Paris to Japan. I’m scared of him.”
Ozzie dismissed my concern with a wave of his six-fingered hand. “Unlike you, I’ve got a gun. More than one.”
“Start keeping them handy. I’m so sorry to have drawn him here.”
“Nonsense. He was just something stuck to your shoe that you didn’t know was there.”
Each time that I leave this house after a visit, Ozzie hugs me as a father hugs a beloved son, as neither of us was ever hugged by his father.
And every time, I am surprised that he seems so fragile in spite of his formidable bulk. It’s as if I can feel a shockingly thin Ozzie within the mantles of fat, an Ozzie who is being steadily crushed by the layers that life has troweled upon him.
Standing at the open front door, he said, “Give Stormy a kiss for me.”
“I will.”
“And bring her around to bear witness to my beautiful exploded cow and the villainy it represents.”
“She’ll be appalled. She’ll need wine. We’ll bring a bottle.”
“No need. I have a full cellar.”
I waited on the porch until he closed the door and until I heard the deadbolt being engaged.
As I negotiated the cow-strewn front walk and then rounded the Mustang to the driver’s door, I surveyed the quiet street. Neither Robertson nor his dusty Ford Explorer was to be seen.
In the car, when I switched on the engine, I suddenly expected to be blown up like the Holstein. I was too jumpy.
I followed a twisty route from Jack Flats to St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in the historical district, giving a tail plenty of opportunities to reveal himself. All the traffic behind me seemed to be innocent of the intent to pursue. Yet I felt watched.
PICO MUNDO IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER TOWN. The recent construction of a five-story apartment building made longtime residents dizzy with an unwanted sense of metropolitan crowding and led to editorials in the Maravilla County Times that used phrases like “high-rise blight,” and worried about a future of “heartless canyons of bleak design, in which people are reduced to the status of drones in a hive, and into which the sun never fully reaches.”
The Mojave sun is not a timid little Boston sun or even a don’t-worry-be-happy Caribbean sun. The Mojave sun is a fierce, aggressive beast that isn’t going to be intimidated by the shadows of five-story apartment buildings.
Counting its tower and the spire that sits atop the tower, St. Bartholomew’s Church is by far the tallest structure in Pico Mundo. Sometimes at twilight, under the barrel-tile roofs, the white stucco walls glow like the panes in a storm lantern.
With half an hour remaining before sunset on this Tuesday in August, the western sky blazed orange, steadily deepening toward red, as though the sun were wounded and bleeding in its retreat. The white walls of the church took color from the heavens, and appeared to be full of holy fire.
Stormy waited for me in front of St. Bart’s. She sat on the top step, beside a picnic hamper.
She had traded her pink-and-white Burke & Bailey’s uniform for sandals, white slacks, and a turquoise blouse. She had been cute then; she was ravishing now.
With her raven hair and jet-black eyes, she might have been the bride of a pharaoh, swept forward in time from ancient Egypt. In her eyes are mysteries to rival those of the Sphinx and those of all the pyramids that ever were or ever will be excavated from the sands of the Sahara.
As if reading my mind, she said, “You left your hormone spigot running. Crank it shut, griddle boy. This is a church.”
I snatched up the picnic hamper and, as she rose to her feet, I kissed her on the cheek.
“On the other hand, that was a little too chaste,” she said.
“Because that was a kiss from Little Ozzie.”
“He’s sweet. I heard they blew up his cow.”
“It’s a slaughterhouse, plastic Holstein splattered everywhere you look.”
“What’s next—hit squads shooting lawn gnomes to pieces?”
“The world is mad,” I agreed.
We entered St. Bart’s through the main door. The narthex is a softly lighted and welcoming space, paneled in cherry wood stained dark with ruby highlights.