I visit from time to time, and they know that I am interested in the tire life.

The owner of Tire World is Mr. Joseph Mangione. He is the father of Anthony Mangione, who was a friend of mine in high school.

Anthony attends UCLA. He hopes to have a career in medicine.

Mr. Mangione is proud that his boy will be a doctor, but he is disappointed, as well, that Anthony has no interest in the family business. He would welcome me to the payroll and would no doubt treat me as a surrogate son.

Here, tires are available for cars, SUVs, trucks, motorcycles. The sizes and degrees of quality are many; but once the inventory is memorized, no stress would be a.s.sociated with any job at Tire World.

That Tuesday, I had no intention of resigning my spatula at the Pico Mundo Grille anytime soon, although short-order cooking can be stressful when the tables are full, tickets are backed up on the order rail, and your head is buzzing with diner lingo. On those days that also feature an unusual number of encounters with the dead, in addition to a bustling breakfast and lunch trade, my stomach sours and I know that I am courting not merely burnout but also early-onset gastrointestinal reflux disease.

At times like that, the tire life seems to be a refuge almost as serene as a monastery.

However, even Mr. Mangione's rubber-scented corner of paradise was haunted. One ghost stubbornly inhabited the showroom.

Tom Jedd, a well-regarded local stonemason, had died eight months previous. His car careened off Panorama Road after midnight, broke through rotted guardrails, tumbled down a rocky hundred-foot embankment, and sank in Malo Suerte Lake.

Three fishermen had been in a boat, sixty yards offsh.o.r.e, when Tom went swimming in his PT Cruiser. They called the cops on a cell phone, but emergency-rescue services arrived too late to save him.

Tom's left arm had been severed in the crash. The county coroner declared himself undecided as to whether Tom had bled to death or drowned first.

Since then, the poor guy had been moping around Tire World. I didn't know why. His accident had not been caused by a defective tire.

He'd been drinking at a roadhouse called Country Cousin. The autopsy cited a blood-alcohol level of 1.18, well over the legal limit. He either lost control of the vehicle due to inebriation or he fell asleep at the wheel.

Each time I visited the showroom to stroll the aisles and mull a career change, Tom realized that I saw him, and he acknowledged me with a look or a nod. Once he even winked at me, conspiratorially.

He had not, however, made any attempt to communicate either his purpose or his needs. He was a reticent ghost.

Some days I wish more of them were like him.

He had died in a parrot-patterned Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and white sneakers worn without socks. He always appeared in those clothes when he roamed Tire World.

Sometimes he was dry, but at other times he appeared to be soaked, as if he'd just walked out of Malo Suerte Lake. Usually he had both arms, but occasionally his left arm was missing.

You can tell a lot about a dead person's state of mind by the condition in which he manifests. When dry, Tom Jedd seemed to be resigned to his fate if not fully at peace with it. When wet, he looked angry or distressed, or sullen.

On this occasion, he was dry. His hair had been combed. He appeared to be relaxed.

Tom had both arms this time, but the left wasn't attached to his shoulder. He carried his left arm in his right hand, casually, as though it were a golf club, gripping it by the biceps.

This grotesque behavior did not include gore. Fortunately, I had never seen him b.l.o.o.d.y, perhaps because he was squeamish or because he remained in denial that he had bled to death.

Twice, when he knew that I was looking, he used his severed arm as a back scratcher. He clawed between his shoulder blades with the stiff fingers of that detached limb.

As a rule, ghosts are serious about their condition and solemn in their demeanor. They belong on the Other Side but are stuck here, for whatever reasons, and they are impatient to move on.

Once in a while, however, I encounter a spirit with his sense of humor intact. For my amus.e.m.e.nt, Tom even conspired to pick his nose with the forefinger of his severed arm.

I prefer ghosts to be somber. There's something about a walking dead man trying to get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked - as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves.

If Tom Jedd had been in less of a jokey mood, I might have lingered longer at Tire World. His shtick disturbed me, as did his twinkly-eyed smile.

As I walked to Terri's Mustang, Tom stood at a showroom window, vigorously and clownishly waving good-bye with his severed arm.

I drove across sun-scorched acres of parking lot and found a s.p.a.ce for the Mustang near the main entrance to the mall, where workmen were hanging a banner announcing the big annual summer sale that would run Wednesday through Sunday.

Inside this cavernous retail mecca, most of the stores appeared to be only moderately busy, but the Burke & Bailey's ice-cream parlor drew a crowd.

Stormy Llewellyn has worked at Burke & Bailey's since she was sixteen. At twenty, she's the manager. Her plan is to own a shop of her own by the time she's twenty-four.

If she had gone into astronaut training after high school, she would have a lemonade stand on the moon by now.

According to her, she's not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her.

She says she's talking about mental mental stimulation. stimulation.

I tell her that, in case she hasn't noticed, I do have a brain.

She says there's definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big big head is still open to debate. head is still open to debate.

"Why do you think I sometimes call you Pooh?" she once asked.

"Because I'm cuddly?"

"Because Pooh's head is full of stuffin'."

Our life together isn't always a New Wave Abbott & Costello routine. Sometimes she's Rocky and I'm Bullwinkle.

I went to the counter in Burke & Bailey's and said, "I need something hot and sweet."

"We specialize in cold," Stormy said. "Go sit out there in the promenade and be good. I'll bring you something."

Although busy, the parlor offered a few empty tables; however, Stormy prefers not to chat on the premises. She is an object of fascination for some of the other employees, and she doesn't want to give them fuel for gossip.

I understand precisely how they feel about her. She's an object of fascination for me, too.

Therefore I stepped out of Burke & Bailey's, into the public promenade, and sat with the fish.

Retail sales and theater have joined forces in America: Movies are full of product placements, and malls are designed with drama in mind. At one end of Green Moon Mall, a forty-foot waterfall tumbled down a cliff of man-made rocks. From the falls, a stream coursed the length of the building, over a series of diminishing rapids.

At the end of a compulsive-shopping spree, if you realized that you had bankrupted yourself in Nordstroms, you could fling yourself into this water feature and drown.

Outside Burke & Bailey's, the stream ended in a tropical pond surrounded by palm trees and lush ferns. Great care had been taken to make this vignette look real. Faint recorded bird calls echoed hauntingly through the greenery.

Except for the lack of enormous insects, suffocating humidity, malaria victims groaning in death throes, poisonous vipers as thick as mosquitoes, and rabid jungle cats madly devouring their own feet, you would have sworn you were in the Amazon rainforest.

In the pond swam brightly colored koi. Many were large enough to serve as a hearty dinner. According to the mall publicity, some of these exotic fish were valued as high as four thousand dollars each; tasty or not, they weren't within everyone's grocery budget.

I sat on a bench with my back to the koi, unimpressed by their flashy fins and precious scales.

In five minutes, Stormy came out of Burke & Bailey's with two cones of ice cream. I enjoyed watching her walk toward me.

Her uniform included pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. With her Mediterranean complexion, jet-black hair, and mysterious dark eyes, she looked like a sultry espionage agent who had gone undercover as a hospital candy striper.

Sensing my thoughts, as usual, she sat beside me on the bench and said, "When I have my own shop, the employees won't have to wear stupid uniforms."

"I think you look adorable."

"I look like a goth Gidget."

Stormy gave one of the cones to me, and for a minute or two we sat in silence, watching shoppers stroll past, enjoying our ice cream.

"Under the hamburger and bacon grease," she said, "I can still smell the peach shampoo."

"I'm an olfactory delight."

"Maybe one day when I have my own shop, we can work together and smell the same."

"The ice-cream business doesn't move me. I love to fry."

"I guess it's true," she said.

"What?"

"Opposites attract."

"Is this the new flavor came in last week?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Cherry chocolate coconut chunk?"

"Coconut cherry chocolate chunk," she corrected. "You've got to get the proper adjective in front of chunk chunk or you're screwed." or you're screwed."

"I didn't realize the grammar of the ice-cream industry was so rigid."

"Describe it your way, and some weasel customers will eat the whole thing and then ask for their money back because there weren't chunks of coconut in it. And don't ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable."

"As you were coming toward me, I thought you looked sultry."

"The smart thing for you would be to stay away from adjectives altogether."

"Good ice cream," I said. "Is this the first taste you've had?"

"Everyone's been raving about it. But I didn't want to rush the experience."

"Delayed gratification."

"Yeah, it makes everything sweeter."

"Wait too long, and what was sweet and creamy can turn sour."

"Move over Socrates. Odd Thomas takes the podium."

I know when the thin ice under me has begun to crack. I changed the subject. "Sitting with my back to all those koi creeps me out."

"You think they're up to something?" she asked.

"They're too flashy for fish. I don't trust them."

She glanced over her shoulder, at the pond, then turned her attention once more to the ice cream. "They're just fornicating."

"How can you tell?"

"The only thing fish ever do is eat, excrete, and fornicate."

"The good life."

"They excrete in the same water where they eat, and they eat in the s.e.m.e.n-clouded water where they fornicate. Fish are disgusting."

"I never thought so until now," I said.

"How'd you get out here?"

"Terri's Mustang."

"You been missing me?"

"Always. But I'm looking for someone." I told her about Fungus Man. "This is where my instinct brought me."

When someone isn't where I expect to find him, neither at home nor at work, then sometimes I cruise around on my bicycle or in a borrowed car, turning randomly from street to street. Usually in less than half an hour, I cross paths with the one I seek. I need a face or a name for focus, but then I'm better than a bloodhound.

This is a talent for which I have no name. Stormy calls it "psychic magnetism."

"And here he comes now," I said, referring to Fungus Man, who ambled along the promenade, following the descending rapids toward the tropical koi pond.

Stormy didn't have to ask me to point the guy out to her. Among the other shoppers, he was as obvious as a duck in a dog parade.

Although I had nearly finished the ice cream without being chilled, I shivered at the sight of this strange man. He trod the travertine promenade, but my teeth chattered as if he had just walked across my grave.

CHAPTER 8.