Saint Odd by Dean Koontz

shoulders, and I felt as if I were being sent off on my first date.
    In the kitchen, Mrs. Bullock insisted on hugging me and kissing me on the cheek before I left, a rather different send-off from any that James Bond ever got from his handlers at MI6.
    Outside, in the last hour of light, Deke Bullock used a remote control to open one of the garage doors on the converted stable. I had said that I wanted an inconspicuous set of wheels. Of the two vehicles in that stall, he gave me the keys to a fifteen-year-old Ford Explorer that was dinged, scraped, and in need of being washed.
    “She looks like a worn-out old spavined mare, don’t she? But under the hood, she’s a spirited filly.”
    “I’m just going to ride around town, see what there is to see, feel it out. I don’t expect I’ll have to outrun a hot pursuit.”
    He nodded and patted me on one shoulder. “Let’s hope it don’t come to that. But just when a man expects he’s earned the littlest bit of milk and honey, the world throws a load of horseshit at him.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”
    “Now, say you find yourself comin’ back here after midnight. Then you call the number I give you earlier, so I can get out of bed and open the door for you, instead of shootin’ you dead. Tell me you got the number memorized?”
    “Yes, sir. But I don’t want to disturb you folks.”
    “You couldn’t if you tried, son. The missus don’t sleep at all anymore, and I don’t need but an hour a night.”
    “Because you’re fully smoothed out and blue?” I asked.
    When I’d first met Edie Fischer, she had claimed that she never slept anymore. In time, I had learned that she was telling the truth, though I still didn’t understand
why
she didn’t need sleep or what was meant by “fully smooth and blue.” She promised that understanding would come to me in time. When you’re given a life as bizarre as mine, you tend to be accepting of other people’s strangeness and eccentricities.
    “Maybelle,” he said, “she’s smooth and blue all through, but I got me a ways to go yet. Now, you be careful out there, son. Don’t be expectin’ milk and honey, and maybe then you’ll get yourself some.”
    He watched me drive out of the converted stable and through the tunnel formed by the velvet ashes.
    As I turned right on the state highway and headed into Pico Mundo, I felt not merely that I was coming home after a long time away, but also felt, stronger than ever, that I had a rendezvous with destiny somewhere in those streets, the destiny that had been promised to me by a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy.
    To the east, the sky had turned from blue to bishop’s purple, with the gloss of satin. Like a juggled orange coming slowly down, the westering sun swelled as it settled toward the horizon, soon to be a blood orange.
    West of the historic district, the first neighborhood I cruised was Jack Flats, which fifty years earlier had been called Jack Rabbit Flats. The area had undergone decline when, during citygovernment’s crusade to greatly ramp up the quaintness of the downtown streets, non-quaint enterprises like muffler shops and tire stores and pawn shops were forced to relocate to Jack Flats. More recently, the area had begun to undergo gentrification.
    I can’t say what vibe I was searching for, but I didn’t feel it in Jack Flats. I drove out of there as the swollen sun balanced on the horizon, pouring red light through the town. Stucco walls glowed carnelian and every window glimmered like a jewel. Shadows lay long and black, silhouetted trees were as dark as masses of rising smoke, and the windshields of the passing traffic reflected a fiercely fiery sky, as though every driver must be on a journey to Armageddon.
    If one kind of hell or another would soon come to this town, there should have been at least a bodach or two slinking along the streets, unseen by all but me, seeking out those soon to be dead, to savor the smell of them