44
THE RED DAWN CAME, THE SUN LIKE AN executioner’s blade slicing up from the dark horizon.
Elsewhere in Pico Mundo, a would-be mass murderer might have been looking at this sunrise while inserting cartridges in spare magazines for his assault rifle.
I parked in the driveway and turned off the engine. I could wait no longer to learn if the shooter who popped Bob Robertson had also murdered Rosalia Sanchez. Yet two or three minutes passed before I found sufficient courage to get out of the car.
The night birds had fallen silent. Usually active at first light, the morning crows had not yet appeared.
Climbing the back-porch steps, I saw that the screen door was closed but that the door stood open. The kitchen lights were off.
I peered through the screen. Rosalia sat at the table, her hands folded around a coffee mug. She appeared to be alive.
Appearances can be deceiving. Her dead body might be awaiting discovery in another room, and this might be her earthbound spirit with its hands around the mug that she had left when she’d gone to answer the killer’s knock on her door the previous evening.
I could not smell freshly brewed coffee.
Always before, when she waited for me to arrive to tell her that she was visible, the lights had been on. I had never seen her sitting in the dark like this.
Rosalia looked up and smiled as I entered the kitchen.
I stared at her, afraid to speak, for fear that she was a lingering spirit and could not answer.
“Good morning, Odd Thomas.”
Dread blew out of me with my pent-up breath. “You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive. I know I’m a long way down the road from the young girl I used to be, but I don’t look dead, I hope.”
“I meant—visible. You’re visible.”
“Yes, I know. The two policemen told me, so I didn’t have to wait for you this morning.”
“Policemen?”
“It was good knowing early. I turned out the lights and just enjoyed sitting here, watching the dawn develop.” She raised her mug. “Would you like some apple juice, Odd Thomas?”
“No thank you, ma’am. Did you say two policemen?”
“They were nice boys.”
“When was this?”
“Not forty minutes ago. They were worried about you.”
“Worried—why?”
“They said someone reported hearing a gunshot come from your apartment. Isn’t that ridiculous, Odd Thomas? I told them I hadn’t heard anything.”
I was sure that the call reporting the shot had been made anonymously, because the caller had likely been Robertson’s killer.
Mrs. Sanchez said, “I asked them what on earth you’d be shooting at in your apartment. I told them you don’t have mice.” She raised her mug to take a sip of apple juice, but then said, “You don’t have mice, do you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“They wanted to look anyway. They were concerned about you. Nice boys. Careful to wipe their feet. They didn’t touch a thing.”
“You mean you showed them my apartment?”
After swallowing some apple juice, she said, “Well, they were policemen, and they were so worried about you, and they felt much better when they didn’t find that you’d shot your foot or something.”
I was glad I’d moved Robertson’s body immediately upon finding it in my bathroom.
“Odd Thomas, you never came around last night to get the cookies I baked for you. Chocolate chip with walnuts. Your favorite.”
A plate, heaped with cookies, covered with plastic wrap, stood on the table.
“Thank you, ma’am. Your cookies are the best.” I picked up the plate. “I was wondering ... do you think I could borrow your car for a little while?”
“But didn’t you just drive up in it?”
My blush was redder than the spreading dawn beyond the windows. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, you’ve already borrowed it,” she said without the slightest trace of irony. “No need to ask twice.”
I retrieved the keys from a pegboard by the refrigerator. “Thank you, Mrs. Sanchez. You’re too good to me.”
“You’re a sweet boy, Odd Thomas. You remind me so much of my nephew Marco. Come September, he’ll have been invisible three years.”
Marco, with the rest of his family, had been aboard one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center.
She said, “I keep thinking he’ll turn visible again any day, but it’s been so long now ... Don’t you ever go invisible, Odd Thomas.”
She breaks my heart sometimes. “I won’t,” I assured her.
When I bent down and kissed her brow, she put a hand to my head, holding my face to hers. “Promise me you won’t.”
“I promise, ma’am. I swear to God.”
WHEN I PARKED IN FRONT OF STORMY’S apartment house, the undercover PD van was no longer across the street.
Obviously, when the police detail had been in place, it hadn’t been providing security for her. As I’d suspected, they had been keeping a watch with the hope that Robertson would come looking for me. When I’d shown up at Chief Porter’s house, after the shooting, they realized that I was no longer with Stormy, and evidently they pulled up stakes.
Robertson was embarked upon an endless sleep, watched over by the ghost of a young prostitute, but his murderer and former kill buddy remained at large. This second psychopath would have no reason to make a special target of Stormy; besides, she had her 9-mm pistol and the hard-nosed will to use it.
Yet into my mind came the image of Robertson’s chest wound, and I could not turn away from it or close my eyes to it as I had done in my bathroom. Worse, my imagination transferred the mortal hole from the dead man’s livid flesh to Stormy, and I thought also of the young woman who saved me from the coyotes, arms crossed modestly over her breasts and wounds.
On the front walkway, I broke into a run. Slammed up the stairs. Crashed across the porch. Threw open the door with the leaded glass.
I fumbled the key, dropped it, bent and snatched it from the air as it bounced off the hardwood floor, and let myself into her apartment.
From the living room, I saw Stormy in the kitchen, and I went to her side.
She stood at the cutting board, beside the sink, using a small grapefruit knife to section the prime Florida fruit. A small pile of extracted seeds glistened on the wood.
“What’re you wired about?” she asked as she finished her task and set aside the knife.
“I thought you were dead.”
“Since I’m not, do you want some breakfast?”
I almost told her that someone had shot the chief.
Instead, I said, “If I did drugs, I’d love an amphetamine omelet with three pots of black coffee. I didn’t get much sleep. I need to stay awake, clarify my thinking.”
“I’ve got chocolate-covered doughnuts.”
“That’s a