Deeply Odd. Dean Koontz
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is part of my sixth sense.
The day was mild, the breeze mellow, but the area immediately around the truck was colder than could be explained by eucalyptus shade alone. When I put the palm of one hand against the sidewall of the trailer, it felt as though the driver had pulled off the road to wait out a blinding snow squall at high elevation.
This wasn’t what truckers called a reefer, which hauled frozen food. No refrigeration unit was mounted on the front wall of the trailer, behind the tractor.
I stood on the step beside the fuel tank to peer through a side window of the cab. Leather seats, wood panels and trim, an angled middle console with CD player and GPS, and a roomy sleeping box behind the cockpit provided a cozy environment.
From the overhead citizens-band radio with the drop-down microphone hung a string of red beads onto which were threaded five white skulls the size of plums. They appeared to have been carved by hand, perhaps from bone.
People decorated the driver’s compartments of their vehicles with all manner of items. Miniature skulls no more proved this driver dangerous than a dangling figurine of the Little Mermaid would have proved him to be an innocent dreamer.
Nevertheless, I went around to the back of the rig to study the rear doors of the trailer. Maybe I needed a key, maybe not.
Before I could ascertain how the long latch bolts worked, a low silky voice asked, “Do you like my truck, dirtbag?”
He stood about six feet two, which gave him a few inches on me. Although he looked perhaps thirty-five, his spiky hair was white, as were his eyebrows. He had Nordic features and a melanoma-doesn’t-scare-me tanning-booth glow. His eyes were the precise blue of the water in a toilet bowl equipped with one of those sanitizers—and just as appealing.
Ever hopeful that even a situation that seemed fraught with the potential for violence might turn out to be an occasion for mutual understanding and camaraderie, I pretended not to have heard the dirtbag part.
I said, “Yes, sir, she’s a beauty.”
“You want to know what I’m hauling? Curious, are you?”
“No, sir. Not me. Just an admirer of trucks.”
His teeth were so unnaturally white that I felt in danger of sustaining a radiation burn from his smile.
“Are you a believer?” he asked.
In the circumstances, the question seemed so loaded that any too-specific answer might offend. “Well, sir, I guess we all believe in one thing or another.”
He looked as though he believed in rhinestone-cowboy clothing. His custom, pointy-toed black boots were inlaid with patterns of white snakeskin. Black jeans with scarlet stitching along the hems, inseams, and pockets. Red silk shirt with black stitching. A black bolo tie with what might have been a carved-bone slide in the form of a serpent’s head and matching bone aglets. His black sports coat featured scarlet lapels and collar peppered with sequins.
“If you’re a believer,” he said, “how many steps are there in the stairway to Heaven?”
“Well, sir, I’m no theologian. Just a fry-cook out of work.”
“There are just two steps in the stairway to Heaven, dirtbag. The first step is touching my truck. The second is not explaining yourself to my satisfaction.”
“Sir, the truth is, she’s a beauty and I’ve always wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”
“You never wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”
“I will admit that’s a stretch, but she is a beauty.”
The .45 Sig Sauer with silencer appeared in his hand the way a dove appears in the hand of a good magician, as if it materialized out of thin air. Worse, the pistol was aimed point-blank at my crotch, which wouldn’t have worried me so much if it had been a dove.
“How would you like to be a eunuch, never be troubled again by performance anxiety?”
He fried me with his bright smile, and I was like an over-easy egg on the griddle, waiting for the spatula.
“I wouldn’t much like that, sir.”
The line of eucalyptus trees largely screened us from passing traffic in the street. People came and went from the supermarket parking lot, but they were all much closer to the building than to us. They weren’t interested in a couple of truckers, and the cowboy’s body prevented them from seeing the gun.
“You think I won’t do it right here in the open. But you’d be surprised what people don’t see. They won’t hear the shot. You’ll drop before you get the breath to scream. The instant you drop, I’ll stomp your throat, crush your windpipe. Then I’ll handle you like you were a drunk, prop you against one of those trees, like you’re a hobo sleeping off a bender. Nobody wants to check out a piss-drunk hobo. And I guarantee, no one will remember me. No one will have seen me.”
I recognized sincerity in his toilet-water eyes, and I knew that, as crazy as it sounded, he might flush me out of this world.
Being as I’m a low-key guy and as ordinary-looking as any other unemployed fry-cook, considering also how genuinely terrified I must have looked, he didn’t expect me to seize his wrist in both of my hands. I forced the muzzle of the Sig Sauer away from my dangly things, farther down between my legs.
He squeezed off a shot, which made less noise than did the slug ricocheting off the pavement near my left foot.
Maybe I couldn’t have twisted his wrist hard enough to make him drop the weapon, but something extraordinary happened. When I touched him, even as the bullet left the sound suppressor with a soft thup, the parking lot went away, and for a few seconds a vision in my mind’s eye swelled outward to encircle me.
I seemed to be standing in a moonless night, before a stainless-steel platform on steel legs, a round stage, lit by the leaping flames of four torches fixed to tall poles. On the stage, in straight-backed chairs, sat three children: a boy of about eight, a girl of perhaps six, and an older girl who might have been ten. Something was wrong with them. They sat wide-eyed but slack-mouthed, their hands limp in their laps. Emotionless. Drugged. A white-haired man in a blood-red suit, black shirt, and black mask ascended to the stage on steel steps. He was carrying a flamethrower. He torched the children.
The vision burst like a bubble, reality returned, and the cowboy and I staggered backward from each other, the pistol on the pavement between us. His stunned expression and a wildness in his eyes told me two things: First, he’d seen the same vision that I had seen; second, he was the masked man in the red suit, and he already intended at some future date to set helpless children afire in an insane act of homicidal performance art.
I had just experienced my first portent of the future that did not come in the form of a prophetic dream.
He went for the dropped pistol, but I was able to kick it under the eighteen-wheeler even as his fingers were an inch from the prize.
As if from a forearm sheath, a knife slid into his right hand, and a thin six-inch blade sprang out of the yellow handle.
I dislike guns, but I’m no fan of knives, and I carry neither. I turned away from him and ran across the parking lot, toward the market, where he wouldn’t dare slash at me in front of witnesses.
Suddenly the entire world seemed to have turned hostile, as if the spirit of ultimate darkness had arrived to rule, his hour come round at last. Even my morning shadow, following as I ran westward, seemed to have ill intentions, as if it would catch me, drag me down.
When I glanced back, the cowboy trucker wasn’t coming after me. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I slowed to a fast walk, so as not to draw attention to myself, and when the automatic door slid aside, I went into the coolness of the market.
If I had been in Pico Mundo, my hometown, I would have known what to do. The chief of police there, Wyatt Porter, understood me and believed in me. On my say-so, he would have detained