Odd Hours

FORTY-ONE

ALTHOUGH I HAD STOPPED THE ENGINES BEFORE impact, I assumed a fire might still break out, even though diesel fuel does not burn as readily as gasoline.

The question about whether thermonuclear weapons might detonate from a hard knock had happily been answered in the negative. Fire, if it erupted, was not likely to faze the cast-steel jackets in which the shaped plutonium appeared to have been encased; therefore, I was not concerned about the release of radioactive material.

Finally able to let go of the helm, I retrieved the satchel containing the bomb triggers.

Earlier, when so much had remained to be done to convey the nukes to a place from which they could not easily be spirited away, I had been too frantic to notice how heavy the bag was. Handling the first of the triggers, I had estimated its weight at four or five pounds. That extrapolated to a maximum combined weight of twenty pounds, but the satchel was at least half again as heavy as that.

James Bond, especially as played by Daniel Craig, would have snatched up the satchel as if it contained politicians’ promises. Smiling insouciantly, he would have dashed off with the triggers at a pace qualifying him as a marathon runner in the Olympics.

Bond, of course, has the advantage of being fortified with a diet largely consisting of martinis. I drink nothing stronger than red wine, and not much of that.

Muttering something derogatory about bomb designers’ tendency to make everything bigger and heavier than it probably had to be, about their blithe disregard for the need to conserve precious resources, I carried the leather bag off the bridge. I closed the door behind me and held fast to it for a moment, getting my bearings.

The tugboat listed to port, and the deck sloped down toward the stern because the bow had climbed onto the beach. Although the wet deck had not been a serious challenge when we had been at sea, this degree of incline promised to provide me with entertainment.

Slipping, as they say, like a pig on ice, I crossed the canted deck to the railing and looked down. Wondering why a pig would ever be on ice, I saw dark ground under the eddying fog.

I hefted the satchel over the railing and let it drop. All the triggers were wrapped in double-walled felt bags, as if they had been purchased in an upscale store like Tiffany; consequently, they did not clank rudely upon impact.

Because the boat listed in this direction, I had to climb out onto the railing as well as scramble over it. When I landed beside the satchel, on solid ground, I promised myself that my seagoing days were over.

In the past, I had lied to myself about such things. For the moment, however, I was willing to disregard those previous false promises, perfidious as they might have been, and to take joy in my commitment to a landlubber’s life.

I considered heading directly inland, through Hecate’s Canyon, where coyotes prowled and where the buried bodies of at least two murdered girls-victims of the art teacher, Arliss Clerebold-had never been found.

Nope.

Instead, I picked up the satchel and, leaning to the right as though I remained on a listing deck, I stepped within sight of the breaking surf and followed it north, which was to my right as I faced the Pacific. In this white wilderness, the water line was the only reliable guide available to me.

According to the GPS sea map on the tugboat bridge, the cove had a crescent beach that curved between the steep slopes that formed the terminus of the canyon. At the northwest end of the cove, the beach continued north along the coast all the way past town to the harbor.

That turn, from cove to coastal shore, could be underwater at high tide. Fortunately, this was not high tide, and at a brisk walk I reached the main beach in two or three minutes.

A bluff diminished northward for the next quarter of a mile or more. I followed it until it petered out, and then headed inland until I came to Magic Beach’s quaint concrete boardwalk, on which I continued north.

I was tired. The events of the night justified my weariness. I felt that it would be within my rights to lie down for a nice sleep on the boardwalk, and to hell with the in-line skaters whose early-morning speedfest would be presented with one more obstacle in addition to the usual old men with canes and little old ladies with walkers.

Weariness alone did not explain my increasing difficulty with the leather satchel. Weary or not, the farther you carry any heavy burden, the heavier it seems, but neither did that truth solve the puzzle of the rapidly escalating weight. I had been lugging the bag for less than ten minutes, and already it felt twice as heavy as when I had dropped it over the tugboat railing.

With caution, I approached Hutch Hutchison’s house from the alleyway. Although I did not have to worry that Utgard Rolf might be waiting inside for me, and although I figured Hoss Shackett must be busy elsewhere, tearing his hair out and contemplating an extreme identity change that would include gender alteration, the pair of redheaded gunmen might have time on their hands and the patience to wait here like trap-door spiders.

After letting myself through the gate beside the garage, I had to carry the satchel with both hands. By then it felt as though it contained the grand piano that Laurel and Hardy had never been able to get up those narrow stairs.

I put it down on the brick patio, next to the wrought-iron chair on which earlier I had draped my sand-caked jeans and socks. I had to roll my shoulders and stretch my arms to relieve the strain that had knotted my muscles.

I stepped back from the house, to a corner of the garage, where I flipped open the cell phone given to me by Birdie Hopkins. I called the Cottage of the Happy Monster. Annamaria answered on the third ring.

“It’s me,” I said. “Where’s Blossom?”

“Making popcorn. She’s the dearest person.”

“I knew you’d like her.”

“She will be with me always,” Annamaria said, which seemed to me an odd way to say that she would never forget Blossom Rosedale.

“I’ll be coming for you soon,” I said. “Within the hour. We’ll have to leave town, if that’s all right with you.”

“What will be will be.”

“Here we go again.”

“You’re my protector, and I’m your charge. We do as you think best.”

I did not know why I felt now a greater weight upon me than when in my sole possession, aboard the death boat, had been four nuclear bombs and their triggers.

When I found myself with no reply, she said, “You’re always free to retract your pledge, Odd Thomas.”

In memory, I saw her in the light of the oil lamp: Will you die for me?

I had said yes, and had taken the offered bell.

“No,” I said. “I’m with you. Wherever this is leading. Until the end of it. We’re leaving town. I’ll be there within the hour.”

I closed the phone and slipped it in a pocket of my jeans.

Although Ozzie Boone’s tutelage and the writing of these four manuscripts have given me some facility with language, I don’t have the words to describe the strange feeling that overcame me then.

Of all the things I am, a killer is one of them. Not a murderer, but still a killer. And a fool. The only child of a mad mother and a narcissistic father. A failed hero. A confused boy. A troubled man. A guy who makes his life up as he goes along. A seeker who cannot find his way.

No one should entrust someone like me with a treasure. Whether Annamaria herself was the treasure, or her child, or neither of them, but instead some mysterious thing yet to be revealed, I knew that she believed she had a treasure that required protection. Her judgment in the matter had a conviction that convinced me.

In spite of an acute awareness of my inadequacies, I intuited that, for all my faults, this was my duty and my honor. What I felt then, by Hutch’s garage, that I cannot describe is a nameless emotion below humility, a deference immeasurably greater than what the meek feel in the shadow of the mighty, what a sparrow might feel if Nature charged him with carrying on his small wings all the living things of a dying Earth to a new world.

And I did not know why I felt all this, because I did not know to what I had committed. Or perhaps I knew in my heart, but kept the knowledge from myself, preferring to proceed in ignorance, for fear the truth would paralyze me, petrify me as solidly as eons of time can petrify living wood into hardest stone.