Here Stormy lives, and where she lives, I flourish.

Above her bed, behind gla.s.s, in a frame, is the card from the fortune-telling machine: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

Four years ago, on the midway of the county fair, a gaudy contrivance called Gypsy Mummy had waited in a shadowy back corner of an arcade tent filled with unusual games and macabre attractions.

The machine had resembled an old-fashioned phone booth and had stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were entirely enclosed. The upper four feet featured gla.s.s on three sides.

In the gla.s.s portion sat a dwarfish female figure attired in a Gypsy costume complete with garish jewelry and colorful headscarf. Her gnarled, bony, withered hands rested on her thighs, and the green of her fingernails looked less like polish than like mold.

A plaque at her feet claimed that this was the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf. In 18th-century Europe, she had been renowned for the accuracy of her prognostications and foretellings.

The mottled skin of her face stretched tight over the skull. The eyelids were st.i.tched shut with black thread, as were her lips.

Most likely this was not the art of Death working in the medium of flesh, as claimed, but instead the product of an artist who had been clever with plaster, paper, and latex.

As Stormy and I arrived at Gypsy Mummy, another couple fed a quarter to the machine. The woman leaned toward a round grill in the gla.s.s and asked her question aloud: "Gypsy Mummy tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?"

The man, evidently Johnny, pushed the ANSWER b.u.t.ton, and a card slid into a bra.s.s tray. He read it aloud: "A cold wind blows, and each night seems to last a thousand years."

Neither Johnny nor his bride-to-be regarded this as an answer to their question, so they tried again. He read the second card: "The fool leaps from the cliff, but the winter lake below is frozen."

The woman, believing that Gypsy Mummy had misheard the question, repeated it: "Will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?"

Johnny read the third card: "The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit."

And the fourth: "A stone can provide no nourishment, nor will sand slake your thirst."

With irrational persistence, the couple spent four more quarters in pursuit of an answer. They began bickering on receipt of the fifth card. By the time Johnny read number eight, the cold wind predicted by the first fortune was blowing at gale-force between them.

After Johnny and his love departed, Stormy and I took our turn with Gypsy Mummy. A single coin produced for us the a.s.surance that we were destined to be together forever.

When Stormy tells this story, she claims that after granting to us what the other couple had wanted, the mummified dwarf winked.

I didn't see this wink. I don't understand how a sewn-shut eye could perform such a trick and yet fail to pop a single st.i.tch. The image of a winking mummy resonates with me nonetheless.

Now, as I waited under the Gypsy Mummy's framed card, Stormy came to bed. She wore plain white cotton panties and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt.

All the models in the Victoria's Secret catalogue, in thongs and skimpy teddies and peekaboo bras, collectively possess a fraction of the erotic allure of Stormy in schoolgirl briefs and Spongebob top.

Lying on her side, cuddling against me, she put her head upon my chest to listen to my heart. She got an earful.

She often likes to be held in this way until she falls asleep. I am the boatman she trusts to row her into restful dreams.

After a silence, she said, "If you want me I'm ready now."

I am no saint. I have used my driver's license to trespa.s.s in homes to which I've not been invited. I answer violence with violence and never turn the other cheek. I have had enough impure thoughts to destroy the ozone layer. I have often spoken ill of my mother.

Yet when Stormy offered herself to me, I thought of the orphaned girl, then known to the world as Bronwen, alone and afraid at the age of seven, adopted and given safe harbor, only to discover that her new father wanted not a daughter but a s.e.x toy. Her confusion, her fear, her humiliation, her shame were too easy for me to imagine.

I thought also of Penny Kallisto and the seash.e.l.l that she had handed to me. From the glossy pink throat of that sh.e.l.l had come the voice of a monster speaking the language of demented l.u.s.t.

Though I didn't confuse my clean pa.s.sion with Harlo Landerson's sick desire and savage selfishness, I could not purge from memory his rough breathing and b.e.s.t.i.a.l grunts. "Sat.u.r.day is almost here," I told Stormy. "You've taught me the beauty of antic.i.p.ation."

"What if Sat.u.r.day never comes?"

"We'll have this Sat.u.r.day and thousands more," I a.s.sured her.

"I need you," she said.

"Is that something new?"

"G.o.d, no."

"It's not new for me, either."

I held her. She listened to my heart. Her hair feathered like a raven's wing against her face, and my spirits soared.

Soon she murmured to someone she seemed pleased to see in her sleep. The boatman had done his job, and Stormy drifted on dreams.

I eased off the bed without waking her, drew the top sheet and thin blanket over her shoulders, and switched the bedside lamp to its lowest setting. She doesn't like to wake in darkness.

After slipping into my shoes, I kissed her forehead and left her with the 9-mm pistol on her nightstand.

I turned out the lights elsewhere in the apartment, stepped into the public hall, and locked her door with a key she'd given to me.

The front door of the apartment house featured a large oval of leaded gla.s.s. The beveled edges of the mosaic pieces presented a fragmented and distorted view of the porch.

I put one eye to a flat piece of gla.s.s to see things more clearly. An unmarked police van stood at the curb across the street.

Law-enforcement in Pico Mundo involves few clandestine operations. The police department owns only two unmarked units.

The average citizen wouldn't recognize either vehicle. Because of the a.s.sistance that I've provided to the chief on numerous cases, I have ridden in and am familiar with both.

Of the white van's identifying features, the stubby shortwave antenna spiking from the roof at the back was the clincher.

I had not asked the chief to grant protection to Stormy; she would have been angry at the implication that she couldn't take care of herself. She has her pistol, her certificate of graduation from a self-defense course, and her pride.

The danger to her, if any, would seem to exist only when I was with her. Bob Robertson had no beef with anyone but me.

This chain of logic brought me to the realization that Chief Porter might be providing protection not to Stormy but to me.

More likely, it wasn't protection but surveillance. Robertson had tracked me to Little Ozzie's place and had found me again later at St. Bart's. The chief might be keeping a watch on me in the hope that Robertson would sniff out my trail once more, whereupon he could be taken into custody for questioning about the vandalism at the church.

I understood his thinking, but I resented being used as bait without first being asked politely if I minded having a hook in my a.s.s.

Besides, in the course of meeting the responsibilities of my supernatural gift, I sometimes resort to tactics frowned upon by the police. The chief knows this. Being subjected to police surveillance and protection would inhibit me and, if I acted in my usual impulsive fashion, would make Chief Porter's position even more difficult.

Instead of leaving by the main entrance, I walked to the end of the public hall and departed by the back door. A small moonlit yard led to a four-car garage, and a gate beside the garage opened into an alleyway.

The officer in the van thought that he was running surveillance on me, but now he served as Stormy's guardian. And she couldn't get angry with me because I had never asked that she be provided with protection.

I was tired but not ready to sleep. I went home anyway.

Maybe Robertson would be waiting for me and would try to kill me. Maybe I would survive, subdue him, call the chief, and thereby put an end to this.

I had high hopes of a violent encounter with a satisfactory conclusion.

CHAPTER 30.

THE MOJAVE HAD STOPPED BREATHING. THE dead lungs of the desert no longer exhaled the lazy breeze that had accompanied Stormy and me on our walk to her apartment.

By streets and alleyways, along a footpath bisecting a vacant lot, through a drainage culvert dry for months, and then to streets again, I made my way home at a brisk pace.

Bodachs were abroad.

First I saw them at a distance, a dozen or more, racing on all fours. When they pa.s.sed through dark places, they were discernible only as a tumult of shadows, but streetlights and gatepost lamps revealed them for what they were. Their lithe motion and menacing posture brought to mind panthers in pursuit of prey.

A two-story Georgian house on Hampton Way was a bodach magnet. As I pa.s.sed, staying to the far side of the street, I saw twenty or thirty inky forms, some arriving and others departing by cracks in window frames and c.h.i.n.ks in door jambs.

Under the porch light, one of them thrashed and writhed as if in the throes of madness. Then it funneled itself through the keyhole in the front door.

Two others, exiting the residence, strained themselves through the screen that covered an attic vent. As comfortable on vertical surfaces as any spider, they crawled down the wall of the house to the porch roof, crossed the roof, and sprang to the front lawn.

This was the home of the Takuda family, Ken and Micali, and their three children. No lights brightened any windows. The Takudas were asleep, unaware that a swarm of malevolent spirits, quieter than c.o.c.kroaches, crawled through their rooms and observed them in their dreaming.

I could only a.s.sume that one of the Takudas - or all of them - were destined to die this very day, in whatever violent incident had drawn the bodachs to Pico Mundo in great numbers.

Experience had taught me that these spirits often gathered at the site of forthcoming horror, as at the Buena Vista Nursing Home before the earthquake. In this case, however, I didn't believe that the Takudas would perish in their home any more than I expected that Viola and her daughters would die in their picturesque bungalow.

The bodachs were not concentrated in one place this time. They were all over town, and from their unusually wide disburs.e.m.e.nt and their behavior, I deduced that they were visiting the potential victims prior to gathering at the place where the bloodshed would occur. Call this the pregame show.

I hurried away from the Takuda house and didn't glance back, concerned that the slightest attention I paid to these creatures would alert them to the fact that I could see them.

On Eucalyptus Way, other bodachs had invaded the home of Morris and Rachel Melman.

Since Morrie had retired as the superintendent of the Pico Mundo School District, he'd stopped resisting his circadian rhythms and had embraced the fact that he was a night lover by nature. He spent these quiet hours in the pursuit of various hobbies and interests. While Rachel slept in the dark upstairs, warm light brightened the lower floor.

The distinctive shadowy shapes of bodachs in their erect but hunch-shouldered posture were visible at every ground-floor window. They appeared to be in ceaseless, agitated movement through those rooms, as though the scent of impending death stirred in them a violent and delirious excitement.

To one degree or another, this silent frenzy marked their behavior wherever I had seen them since walking to work less than twenty-four hours ago. The intensity of their malignant ecstasy fueled my dread.

In this infested night, I found myself glancing warily at the sky, half expecting to see bodachs swarming across the stars. The moon wasn't veiled by spirit wings, however, and the stars blazed un.o.bstructed from Andromeda to Vulpecula.

Because they have no apparent ma.s.s, the bodachs should not be affected by gravity. Yet I have never seen them fly. Although supernatural, they seem to be bound by many, though not all, of the laws of physics.

When I reached Marigold Lane, I was relieved that the street on which I lived appeared to be free of these beasts.

I pa.s.sed the spot where I had stopped Harlo Landerson in his Pontiac Firebird 400. How easily, by comparison, the day had begun.

With her killer named and prevented from a.s.saulting other girls, Penny Kallisto had made her peace with this world and moved on. This success gave me hope that I might prevent or minimize the pending carnage that had drawn legions of bodachs to our town.

No lights glowed at Rosalia Sanchez's house. She is always early to bed, for she rises in advance of the dawn, eager to hear if she remains visible.

I didn't approach her garage by the driveway. I crossed the side lawn from one oak tree to the next, stealthily scouting the territory.

When I determined that neither Robertson nor any other enemy had stationed himself in the yard, I circled the garage. Although I didn't find anyone lying in wait, I flushed a frightened rabbit from a lush bed of liriope, and when it shot past me, I achieved a personal best in the vertical-jump-and-gasp event.

Climbing the exterior stairs to my apartment, I watched the windows above, alert for the telltale movement of a blind.

The teeth of the key chattered faintly across the pin-tumblers in the lock. I turned the bolt and opened the door.

When I switched on the light, I saw the gun before anything else. A pistol.

With Chief Porter as my friend, with Stormy as my fiancee, I would know the difference between a pistol and a revolver even if my mother hadn't instructed me in various fine points of firearms on numerous harrowing occasions.

The pistol had not merely been dropped on the floor but appeared to have been arranged as surely as a diamond necklace on a jeweler's black-velvet display board, positioned to catch the lamplight in such a way that its contours had an almost erotic quality. Whoever left it there had hoped to entice me to pick it up.

CHAPTER 31.

MY SALVAGE-YARD FURNITURE (TOO SCARRED and tacky to meet the standards of the thrift shops that sold to Stormy), my paperback books neatly arranged on shelves made of stacked bricks and boards, my framed posters of Quasimodo as played by Charles Laughton and Hamlet as played by Mel Gibson and ET from the movie of the same name (three fictional characters with whom I identify for different reasons), the cardboard Elvis perpetually smiling From the open doorway in which I stood, everything appeared to be as it had been when I'd left for work Tuesday morning.

The door had been locked and bore no signs of a forced entry. Circling the building, I had noticed no broken windows.

Now I was torn between leaving the door open to facilitate a hasty exit and locking it to prevent anyone from entering at my back. After too long a hesitation, I quietly closed the door and engaged the deadbolt.

Except for the occasional chirr-and-coo of a night bird that filtered through two screened windows I'd left open for ventilation, the hush was so profound that a drop of water, in the kitchenette, fell from faucet to sink pan with a plonk plonk that quivered my eardrums. that quivered my eardrums.

Certain that I was meant to pick up the gun, easily resisting its allure, I stepped over the weapon.