After another taste of wine, he opens the book and returns to his reading.

I might have gone mad if you hadn't made me write it. And if I hadn't written it, for sure I would never have had any peace.

Terrible Chester, as glorious as ever, enters from the kitchen and stands staring at me.

If things had worked out, I'd have written about all this with Danny, too, and given you a second ma.n.u.script. You would have liked it less than the first, but maybe a little.

Chester visits with me as never he has before, sits at my feet.

Sir, when they come to tell you about me, please don't eat a whole ham in one night, don't deep-fry a block of cheese.

I reach down to stroke Terrible Chester, and he seems to like my touch.

What you could do for me, sir, is just once write a story of the kind you'd most enjoy writing. If you'll do that for me, I'll have given back the gift that you gave me, and that would make me happy.

I rise from the sofa.

Sir, you're a dear, fat, wise, fat, generous, honorable, caring, wonderfully fat man, and I wouldn't have you any other way.

TERRI STAMBAUGH SITS in her apartment kitchen above the Pico Mundo Grille, drinking strong coffee and paging slowly through an alb.u.m of photographs.

Looking over her shoulder, I see snapshots of her with Kelsey, the husband she lost to cancer.

On her music system, Elvis sings 'I Forgot to Remember to Forget.'

I put my hands on her shoulders. She does not react, of course.

She gave me so much-encouragement, a job at sixteen, the skills of a first-rate fry cook, counsel-and all I gave her in return was my friendship, which doesn't seem enough.

I wish I could spook her with a supernatural moment. Make the hands spin on the Elvis wall clock. Send that ceramic Elvis dancing across the kitchen counter.

Later, when they came to tell her, she would know it had been me, fooling with her, saying good-bye. Then she would know I was all right, and knowing I was all right, she would be all right, too.

But I don't have the anger to be a poltergeist. Not even enough to make the face of Elvis appear in the condensation on her kitchen window.

CHIEF WYATT PORTER and his wife, Karla, are having dinner in their kitchen.

She is a good cook, and he is a good eater. He claims this is what holds their marriage together.

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too d.a.m.n sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.

This is how I like to believe Stormy and I would have been if we could have gotten married and lived together as long as the chief and Karla: so perfect for each other that spaghetti and a salad in the kitchen on a rainy night, just the two of them, is more satisfying and more gladdening to the heart than dinner at the finest restaurant in Paris.

I sit at the table with them, uninvited. I am embarra.s.sed to be eavesdropping on their simple yet enrapturing conversation, but this will be the only time that it ever happens. I will not linger. I will move on.

After a while, his cell phone rings.

'I hope that's Odd,' he says.

She puts down her fork, wipes her hands on a napkin as she says, 'If something's wrong with Oddie, I want to come.'

'h.e.l.lo,' says the chief. 'Bill Burton?'

Bill owns the Blue Moon Cafe.

The chief frowns. 'Yes, Bill. Of course. Odd Thomas? What about him?'

As if with a presentiment, Karla pushes her chair away from the table and gets to her feet.

The chief says, 'We'll be right there.'

Rising from the table as he does, I say, Sir, the dead do talk, after all. But the living don't listen Sir, the dead do talk, after all. But the living don't listen.

SIXTY-ONE.

HERE IS THE CENTRAL MYSTERY: HOW I GOT FROM THE portcullis-style gate in the flood tunnel to the kitchen door of the Blue Moon Cafe, a journey of which I have no slightest recollection.

I do believe that I died. The visits I paid to Ozzie, to Terri, and to the Porters in their kitchen were not figments of a dream.

Later, when I shared my story with them, my description of what each of them was doing when I visited comports perfectly with their separate recollections of their evenings.

Bill Burton says I arrived battered and bedraggled at the back door of his restaurant, asking him to call Chief Porter. By then the rain had stopped, and I was so filthy that he set a chair outside for me and fetched a bottle of beer, which in his opinion, I needed.

I don't recall that part. The first thing that I remember is being in the chair, drinking Heineken, while Bill examined the wound in my chest.

'Shallow,' he said. 'Hardly more than a scratch. The bleeding's stopped on its own.'

'He was dying when he took that swipe at me,' I said. 'There wasn't any force behind it.'

Maybe that was true. Or maybe it was the explanation that I needed to tell myself.

Soon a Pico Mundo Police Department cruiser came along the alley, without siren or flashing lights, and parked behind the cafe.

Chief Porter and Karla got out of the car and came to me.

'I'm sorry you didn't get to finish the spaghetti,' I said.

They exchanged a puzzled look.

'Oddie,' said Karla, 'your ear's torn up. What's all the blood on your T-shirt? Wyatt, he needs an ambulance.'

'I'm all right,' I a.s.sured her. 'I was dead, but someone didn't want me to be, so I'm back.'

To Bill Burton, Wyatt said, 'How many beers has he had?'

'That's the first one here,' Bill said.

'Wyatt,' Karla declared, 'he needs an ambulance.'

'I don't really,' I said. 'But Danny's in bad shape, and we might need a couple paramedics to carry him down all those stairs.'

While Karla brought another chair out of the restaurant, put it next to mine, sat down, and fussed over me, Wyatt used the police-band radio to order an ambulance.

When he returned, I said, 'Sir, you know what's wrong with humanity?'

'Plenty,' he said.

'The greatest gift we were given is our free will, and we keep misusing it.'

'Don't worry yourself about that now,' Karla advised me.

'You know what's wrong with nature,' I asked her, 'with all its poison plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods?'

'You're upsetting yourself, sweetie.'

'When we envied, when we killed for what we envied, we fell. And when we fell, we broke the whole shebang, nature, too.'

A kitchen worker whom I knew, who had worked part time at the Grille, Manuel Nuez, arrived with a fresh beer.

'I don't think he should have that,' Karla worried.

Taking the beer from him, I said, 'Manuel, how're you doing?'

'Looks like better than you.'

'I was just dead for a while, that's all. Manuel, do you know what's wrong with cosmic time, as we know it, which steals everything from us?'

'Isn't it spring forward, fall back'?' Manuel asked, thinking that we were talking about Daylight Savings Time.

'When we fell and broke,' I said, 'we broke nature, too, and when we broke nature, we broke time.'

'Is that from Star Trek Star Trek?' Manuel asked.

'Probably. But it's true.'

'I liked that show. It helped me learn English.'

'You speak it well,' I told him.

'I had a brogue for a while because I got so into Scotty's character,' Manuel said.

'Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever-no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all.'

Chief Porter tried to take the fresh Heineken from me.

I held on to it. 'Sir, do you know what sucks the worst about the human condition?'

Bill Burton said, 'Taxes.'

'It's even worse than that,' I told him.

Manuel said, 'Gasoline costs too much, and low mortgage rates are gone gone.'

'What sucks the worst isthis world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.'

I started to cry. The tears surprised me. I thought I was done with tears for the duration.

Manuel put a hand on my shoulder and said, 'Maybe we can fix it, Odd. You know? Maybe.'

I shook my head. 'No. We're broken. A broken thing can't fix itself.'

'Maybe it can,' Karla said, putting a hand on my other shoulder.

I sat there, just a faucet. All snot and tears. Embarra.s.sed but not enough to get my act together.

'Son,' said Chief Porter, 'it's not your job alone, you know.'

'I know.'

'So the broken world's not all on your shoulders.'

'Lucky for the world.'

The chief crouched beside me. 'I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that at all.'

'Or me,' Karla agreed.

'I'm a mess,' I apologized.

Karla said, 'Me too.'

'I could use a beer,' Manuel said.

'You're working,' Bill Burton reminded him. Then he said, 'Get me one, too.'

To the chief, I said, 'There're two dead at the Panamint and two more in the flood-control tunnel.'

'You just tell me what,' he said, 'and we'll handle it.'