Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5. Dean Koontz

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СКАЧАТЬ offered Stormy more peach brandy. “He’s going to go gunning for people, you said?”

      Stormy doesn’t drink heavily, but she accepted another round. “Your fry cook’s recurring dream is finally coming true.”

      Now Terri looked alarmed. “The dead bowling-alley employees?”

      “Plus maybe a lot of people in a movie theater,” Stormy said, and then she tossed back her peach brandy in one swallow.

      “Does this also have something to do with Viola’s dream?” Terri asked me.

      “It’s too long a story for now,” I told her. “It’s late. I’m whipped.”

      “It has everything to do with her dream,” Stormy told Terri.

      “I need some sleep,” I pleaded. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, Terri, after it’s all over.”

      When I pushed my chair back, intending to get up, Stormy seized my arm and held me at the table. “And now I find out Elvis Presley himself has warned Oddie that he’s going to die tomorrow.”

      I objected. “He did no such thing. He just patted me on the arm and then later, before he got out of the car, he squeezed my hand.”

      “Squeezed your hand?” Stormy asked in a tone implying that such a gesture could be interpreted only as an expression of the darkest foreboding.

      “It’s no big deal. All he did was just clasp my right hand in both of his and squeeze it twice—”

      “Twice!”

      “—and he gave me that look again.”

      “That look of pity?” Stormy demanded.

      Terri picked up the bottle and offered to pour for Stormy.

      I put my hand over the glass. “We’ve both had enough.”

      Grabbing my right hand and holding it in both of hers as Elvis had done, Stormy said insistently, “What he was trying to tell you, Mr. Macho Psychic Batman Wannabe, is that his mother died on August fourteenth, and he died on August sixteenth, and you’re going to die on August fifteenth—the three of you like a hat trick of death—if you don’t watch your ass.”

      “That isn’t what he was trying to tell me,” I disagreed.

      “What—you think he was just hitting on you?”

      “He doesn’t have a romantic life anymore. He’s dead.”

      “Anyway,” Terri said, “Elvis wasn’t gay.”

      “I didn’t claim he was gay. Stormy made the inference.”

      “I’d bet the Grille,” Terri said, “and my left butt cheek that he wasn’t gay.”

      I groaned. “This is the craziest conversation I’ve ever had.”

      Terri demurred: “Gimme a break—I’ve had a hundred conversations with you a lot crazier than this.”

      “Me too,” Stormy agreed. “Odd Thomas, you’re a fountain of crazy conversations.”

      “A geyser,” Terri suggested.

      “It’s not me, it’s just my life,” I reminded them.

      “You better stay out of this,” Terri worried. “Let Wyatt Porter handle it.”

      “I am going to let him handle it. I’m not a cop, you know. I don’t pack a gun. All I can do is advise him.”

      “Don’t even advise this time,” Stormy said. “Just this one time, stay out of it. Go to Vegas with me. Now.”

      I wanted to please her. Pleasing her pleases me, and then the birds sing sweeter than usual and the bees make better honey and the world is a place of rejoicing—or so it seems from my perspective.

      What I wanted to do and the right thing to do were not one and the same. So I said, “The problem is that I was put here for this work, and if I walk away from the job, it will only follow me, one way or another.”

      I picked up my glass. I’d forgotten it was empty. I put it down again.

      “When I’ve got a specific target, my psychic magnetism works in two directions. I can cruise at random and find who I need to find ... in this case Robertson ... or he’ll be drawn to me if he wants to be, sometimes even if he doesn’t. And in the second case, I have less control and I’m more likely to be ... unpleasantly surprised.”

      “That’s just a theory,” Stormy said.

      “It’s nothing I can prove, but it’s true. It’s something I know in my gut.”

      “I’ve always figured you don’t think with your head,” Stormy said, her tone changing from one of insistent—and almost angry—persuasion to one of resignation and affection.

      Terri said to me, “If I were your mother, I’d box your ears.”

      “If you were my mother, I wouldn’t be here.”

      These were the two most important women in the world to me; I loved each of them in a different way, and declining to do what they wanted, even in the interest of doing the right thing, was difficult.

      The candlelight burnished their faces to the same golden glow, and they regarded me with an identical anxiety, as though by virtue of their female intuition they knew things that I could not perceive even with my sixth sense.

      From the CD player, Elvis crooned, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

      I consulted my wristwatch. “It’s August fifteenth.”

      When I tried to get to my feet, Stormy didn’t restrain me as she had done previously. She, too, rose from her chair.

      I said, “Terri, I guess you’ll have to cover for me on the first shift—or get Poke to come in if he’s willing.”

      “What—you can’t cook and save the world at the same time?”

      “Not unless you want the bacon burnt. Sorry to give you such short notice.”

      Terri accompanied us to the door. She hugged Stormy, then me. She boxed one of my ears. “You be here day after tomorrow, on time, at the griddle, flippin’ those cakes, or I’m going to demote you to fountain jockey.”

       CHAPTER 29

      ACCORDING TO THE BIG DIGITAL SIGN AT the Bank of America, the temperature had fallen to a comparatively chilly ninety degrees here on the side of midnight when broomsticks are licensed to fly.

      A lazy breeze stirred through town, repeatedly dying and rising again, as though СКАЧАТЬ