The pack now numbered four, and the fourth had stolen up on me from the back of the Chevy. It stood between me and the open door.

Sensing movement to my right, I snapped my attention to the threesome again. During my brief distraction, they had slunk closer to me.

Moonlight silvered a ribbon of drool that slipped from the lips of the pack leader.

To my left, the fourth coyote's low growl grew louder, rivaling the grumble of the car. It was a living engine of death, idling right now but ready to shift into high gear, and at the periphery of my vision, I saw it creep toward me.

CHAPTER 38.

THE DOOR OF THE QUONSET HUT LAY A DAUNTING distance behind me. Before I reached it, the pack leader would be on my back, its teeth in my neck, and the others would be tearing at my legs, dragging me down.

In my hand, the broken beer bottle felt fragile, a woefully inadequate weapon, good for nothing more than slashing my own throat.

Judging by a sudden overwhelming pressure in my bladder, these predators would be getting marinated meat by the time they took a bite of me- -but then the nasty customer to my left chewed up his growl and let out a submissive mewl.

The fearsome trio to the right of me, as one, traded menace for perplexity. They rose from their stalking posture, stood quite erect, ears p.r.i.c.ked and cupped forward.

The change in the coyotes' demeanor, so abrupt and inexplicable, imparted to the moment a quality of enchantment, as though a guardian angel had cast a rapture of mercy over these creatures, granting me a reprieve from evisceration.

I stood stiff and stupefied, afraid that by moving I would break the spell. Then I realized that the coyotes' attention had shifted to something behind me.

Warily turning my head, I discovered that my guardian was a pretty but too thin young woman with tousled blond hair and delicate features. She stood behind and to the left of me, barefoot, naked but for a pair of skimpy, lace-trimmed panties, slender arms crossed over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Her smooth pale skin seemed luminous in the moonlight. Beryl-blue eyes, l.u.s.trous pools, were windows to a melancholy so profound that I knew at once she belonged to the community of the restless dead.

The lone coyote on my left settled to the ground, all hungers forgotten, the fight gone out of it. The beast regarded her in the manner of a dog waiting for a word of affection from its adored master.

To my right, the first three coyotes were not as humbled as the fourth, but they, too, were transfixed by this vision. Although they hadn't exerted themselves, they panted, and they licked their lips incessantly - two signs of nervous stress in any canine. As the woman stepped past me and toward the Chevy, they shied from her, not in a fearful way but as if in deference.

When she reached the car, she turned to me. Her smile was an inverted crescent of sadness.

I stooped to put the broken bottle quietly on the ground, then rose with new respect for the perceptions and priorities of coyotes, which seemed to give greater importance to the experience of wonder than to the demands of appet.i.te.

At the car, I closed the back door on the pa.s.senger's side, opened the front door.

The woman regarded me solemnly now, as though she was as deeply moved by being seen, years after her death, as I was moved by seeing her in this purgatory of her own creation.

As lovely as a rose half bloomed and still containing promise, she appeared to have been not much more than eighteen when she died, too young to have sentenced herself for so long to the chains of this world, to such an extended lonely suffering.

She must have been one of the three prost.i.tutes who were shot by an unbalanced man five years earlier, in the event that had closed Whispering Burger forever. Her chosen work should have hardened her; but she seemed to be a tender and timid spirit. but she seemed to be a tender and timid spirit.

Touched by her vulnerability and by the harsh self-judgment that kept her here, I held out a hand to her.

Instead of taking my hand, she bowed her head demurely. After a hesitation, she uncrossed her arms and lowered them to her sides, revealing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s - and the two dark bullet holes that marred her cleavage.

Because I doubted that she had any unfinished business in this desolate place, and because her life had evidently been so hard that she would have little reason to love this world too much to leave it, I a.s.sumed that her reluctance to move on arose from a fear of what came next, perhaps from a dread of punishment.

"Don't be afraid," I told her. "You weren't a monster in this life, were you? Just lonely, lost, confused, broken - like all of us who pa.s.s this way."

Slowly she raised her head.

"Maybe you were weak and foolish, but many are. So am I."

She met my eyes again. Her melancholy seemed deeper to me now, as acute as grief but as enduring as sorrow.

"So am I," I repeated. "But when I die, I will move on, and so should you, without fear."

She wore her wounds not as she would have worn divine stigmata, but as if they were the devil's brand, which they were not.

"I've no idea what it's like, but I know a better life awaits you, beyond the miseries you've known here, a place where you'll belong and where you'll be truly loved."

From her expression, I knew that the idea of being loved had been for her only a cherished hope that had never been realized in her short unhappy life. Terrible experience, perhaps from the cradle to the sound of the shot that killed her, had left her in a poverty of imagination, unable to envision a world beyond this one, where love was a promise fulfilled.

She raised her arms once more and crossed them over her chest, concealing both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her wounds.

"Don't be afraid," I said again.

Resumed, her smile seemed to be as melancholy as before, but also now enigmatic. I couldn't tell if what I'd said had been of comfort to her.

Wishing that I were more persuasive in my faith, and wondering why I wasn't, I got into the front pa.s.senger's seat of the car. I closed the door and slid behind the steering wheel.

I didn't want to leave her there among the dead palm trees and the corroded Quonset huts, with as little hope as she had physical substance.

Yet the night ticked on, the moon and all the constellations moving across the heavens as relentlessly as hands across the face of a clock. In too few hours, terror would descend on Pico Mundo, unless I could somehow stop it.

As I slowly drove away, I glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. There she stood in the moonlight, the charmed coyotes resting on the ground at her feet, as if she were the G.o.ddess Diana between one hunt and another, mistress of the moon and all its creatures, receding, dwindling, but not ready to go home to Olympus.

I drove from the Church of the Whispering Comet back into Pico Mundo, from the company of a gunshot stranger to the bad news about a gunshot friend.

CHAPTER 39.

IF I HAD KNOWN THE NAME OR EVEN THE FACE of the one I should be seeking, I might have tried a session of psychic magnetism, cruising Pico Mundo until my sixth sense brought me in contact with him. The man who had killed Bob Robertson, and who craved to kill others in the coming day, remained nameless and faceless to me, however, and as long as I sought only a phantom, I would be wasting gasoline and time.

The town slept, but not its demons. Bodachs were in the streets, more numerous and more fearsome than packs of coyotes, racing through the night in what seemed to be an ecstasy of antic.i.p.ation.

I pa.s.sed houses where these living shadows gathered and swarmed with particular inquisitiveness. At first I tried to remember each of the haunted residences, for I still believed that the people who interested the bodachs were also those who would be murdered between the next dawn and the next sunset.

Although small by comparison to a city, our town is much larger than it once was, with all its new neighborhoods of upscale tract houses, encompa.s.sing more than forty thousand souls in a county of half a million. I have met only a tiny fraction of them.

Most of the bodach-infested houses belonged to people I didn't know. I had no time to meet them all, and no hope of gaining their confidence to the extent that they would take my advice and change their Wednesday plans, as Viola Peabody had done.

I considered stopping at the houses of those who were known to me, to ask them to list every place they expected to be the following afternoon. With luck, I might discover the single destination that would prove common to them all.

None were in my small inner circle of friends. They didn't know of my supernatural gift, but many regarded me as a sweet eccentric, to one degree or another, and therefore wouldn't be surprised by either my unscheduled visit or my questions.

By seeking this information in the presence of bodachs, however, I would earn their suspicion. Once alert to me, they would eventually discern my unique nature.

I remembered the six-year-old English boy who had spoken aloud of the bodachs - and had been crushed between a concrete-block wall and a runaway truck. The impact had been so powerful that numerous blocks had shattered into gravel and dust, exposing the ribs of steel rebar around which they had been mortared.

Although the driver, a young man of twenty-eight, had been in perfect health, his autopsy revealed that he suffered a ma.s.sive, instantly fatal stroke while behind the wheel.

The stroke must have killed him at the precise moment when he crossed the crest of a hill - at the bottom of which stood the English boy. Accident-scene a.n.a.lysis by the police determined that the lateral angle of the slope, in relationship to the cross street below, should have carried the unpiloted truck away from the boy, impacting the wall thirty feet from where it actually came to a deadly stop. Evidently, during part of the descent, the dead body of the driver had been hung up on the steering wheel, countering the angle of the street that should have saved the child.

I know more about the mysteries of the universe than do those of you who cannot see the lingering dead, but I do not understand more than a tiny fraction of the truth of our existence. I have nevertheless reached at least one certain conclusion based on what I know: There are no coincidences.

On the macro scale, I perceive what physicists tell us is true on the micro: Even in chaos, there is order, purpose, and strange meaning that invites - but often thwarts - our investigation and our understanding.

Consequently, I didn't stop at any of those houses where the bodachs capered, didn't wake the sleeping to ask my urgent questions. Somewhere a healthy driver and a ma.s.sive truck needed only a timely cerebral aneurysm and an expedient failure of brakes to bring it across my path in a sudden rush.

Instead, I drove to Chief Porter's house, trying to decide if I should wake him at the unG.o.dly hour of three o'clock.

Over the years, I had only twice before interrupted his sleep. The first time, I had been wet and muddy, still wearing one of the shackles - and dragging a length of chain - that had bound me to the two corpses with which I had been dumped into Malo Suerte Lake by bad men of sour disposition. The second time that I'd awakened him, there had been a crisis needing his attention.

The current crisis hadn't quite reached us yet, but it loomed. I thought he needed to know that Bob Robertson was not a loner but a conspirator.

The trick would be to deliver this news convincingly but without revealing that I'd found Robertson dead in my bathroom and, breaking numerous laws without compunction, had bundled the cadaver to a less incriminating resting place.

When I turned the corner half a block from the Porter address, I was surprised to see lights on in several houses at that late hour. The chief's place blazed brighter than any other.

Four police cruisers stood in front of the house. All had been parked hastily, at angles to the curb. The roof-rack beacons of one car still flashed, revolved.

On the front lawn, across which rhythmic splashes of red light chased waves of blue, five officers gathered in conversation. Their posture suggested that they were consoling one another.

I had intended to park across the street from the chief's house. I would have called his private number only after concocting a story that avoided any mention of my recent exertions as a dead-man's taxi service.

Instead, with a helpless sinking of the heart, I abandoned the Chevy in the street, beside one of the patrol cars. I switched the headlights off but left the engine running, with the hope that none of the cops would get close enough to see that no keys were in the ignition.

The officers on the lawn were all known to me. They turned to face me as I ran to them.

Sonny Wexler, the tallest and toughest and softest-spoken of the group, extended one brawny arm as if to stop me from rushing past him to the house. "Hold on, stay back here, kid. We've got CSI working the place."

Until now I had not seen Izzy Maldanado on the front porch. He rose from some task that he'd been attending to on his knees, and stretched to get a kink out of his back.

Izzy works for the Maravilla County Sheriff's Department crime lab, which contracts its services to the Pico Mundo police. When the body of Bob Robertson was eventually found in that Quonset hut, Izzy would most likely be the technician meticulously sifting the scene for evidence.

Although I desperately wanted to know what had happened here, I couldn't speak. I couldn't swallow. Some gluey ma.s.s seemed to be obstructing my throat.

Trying unsuccessfully to choke down that phantom wad, which I knew to be only a choking emotion, I thought of Gunther Ulstein, a much-loved music teacher and director of the Pico Mundo High School band, who had experienced occasional difficulty swallowing. Over several weeks, the condition rapidly grew worse. Before he had it diagnosed, cancer of the esophagus spread all the way into his larynx.

Because he couldn't swallow, his weight plummeted. Doctors treated him first with radiation, intending subsequently to remove his entire esophagus and to fashion a new one from a length of his colon. Radiation therapy failed him. He died before surgery.

Thin and withered-looking, as he had been in his final days, Gunny Ulstein can usually be found in a rocking chair on the front porch of the house that he built himself. His wife of thirty years, Mary, still lives there.

During his last few weeks of life, he had lost his ability to speak. He'd had so much that he wanted to say to Mary - how she had always brought out the best in him, how he loved her - but he couldn't write down his feelings with the subtlety and the range of emotion that he could have expressed in speech. He lingers now, regretting what he failed to say, futilely hoping that as a ghost he will find a way to speak to her.

A muting cancer seemed almost to be a blessing if it would have kept me from asking Sonny Wexler, "What happened?"

"I thought you must've heard," he said. "I thought that's why you came. The chief's been shot."

Jesus Bustamante, another officer, said angrily, "Almost an hour ago now, some pusbag sonofab.i.t.c.h plugged the chief three times in the chest on his own front porch."

My stomach turned over, over, over, almost in time with the revolving beacons on the nearby cruiser, and the phantom obstruction in my esophagus became real when a bitter gorge rose into the back of my throat.

I must have paled, must have wobbled on suddenly loose knees, for Jesus put an arm against my back to support me, and Sonny Wexler said quickly, "Easy, kid, easy, the chief's alive. He's bad off, but he's alive, he's a fighter."

"The doctors are working on him right now," said Billy Munday, whose port-wine birthmark, over a third of his face, seemed to glow strangely in the night, lending him the aura of a painted shaman with warnings and portents and evils imminent to report. "He's going to be all right. He's got to be. I mean, what would happen without him?"

"He's a fighter," Sonny repeated.

"Which hospital?" I asked.

"County General."

I ran to the car that I'd left in the street.

CHAPTER 40.

THESE DAYS, MOST NEW HOSPITALS IN SOUTHERN California resemble medium-rent retail outlets selling discount carpet or business supplies in bulk. The bland architecture doesn't inspire confidence that healing can occur within those walls.