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Bern Eckles, a former Pico Mundo cop, had also been a member of a satanic cult and, with others, he had planned the shootings at the Green Moon Mall—plus a bombing that never happened. He was serving a life sentence in prison.
“Eckles doesn’t know what things.”
“Cripes, Jim. Kind of extreme, don’t you think?”
“What is?” Jim asked.
“This … this what we did here, just because this idiot Eckles doesn’t know what.”
“No, see, Eckles has tried to figure what happened back then when their attack on the mall went wrong.”
“But you said he doesn’t know what happened.”
“He’s got a theory. It only makes sense to him if the guy who took them down has some real mojo.”
“What mojo?”
Jim said, “Eckles thinks all kinds of mojo.”
“Maybe Eckles has shit for brains.”
“No, Bob, he’s a smart guy.”
“So smart he’s behind bars for life.”
“Because the freak has mojo.”
“What freak?” Bob asked.
“Eckles calls him a freak.”
Although I look as ordinary as the next guy, I suspected that the freak under discussion was me.
Bob said, “We’re the ones with mojo.”
“Contumax.”
“Potestas.”
“Heil Hitler,” I murmured from my listening post just inside the bathroom.
“We’ve got the dark mojo,” Jim said. “Maybe the freak has the other kind.”
“Well, I don’t like hearing that.”
“I don’t like saying it. But he sure had something in Nevada, didn’t he? And who’s dead out there in the desert—our guys or the freak? Eckles is right. Some kind of mojo.”
“Eckles have anything specific or just more blather?”
Jim said, “For one thing, maybe once this freak has met you or touched you or even just seen you, he has a way of tracking you no matter where you are.”
“Tracking? Like he’s a damn Tonto or something?”
“Tracking by mojo.”
“Yeah, so?”
Jim said, “If he tracked Wolfgang’s crew, they might lead him to us.”
“Why not send them away, let him track them out to Florida or wherever the hell?”
“He’d probably know they were misleading him.”
“Probably? All this because probably?”
“He’d stay here in Pico Mundo,” Jim insisted. “Once he saw them, they should have killed hi
m. They tried, but they couldn’t. Anyway, there’s no time to play games with him. It’s happening.”
With a note of wonder in his voice, Bob said, “It really is, isn’t it?”
“It sure is. It’s happening.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Bob said, “What kind of world is it going to be after it happens?”
Jim didn’t need to mull over his answer. He said at once, “Ours. It’s going to be our world, brother.”
“Contumax.”
“Potestas.”
“Lunatics,” I murmured.
Footsteps. A door opened. It closed. Silence.
When I felt certain that I was alone, I stepped out of the bathroom, pistol in hand, and moved forward through the motor home.
In the lounge were two dead men and one dead woman.
Twenty-one
When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world’s mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life.
I would not miss the indifference in the face of suffering, the hatred, the violence, the cruelty, the lust for power that so many people brought to the pageant of humanity.
In the lounge—or living room—of the motor home, the two men and the woman had been made to kneel side by side in front of a sofa. Each had been shot, execution style, in the back of the head and slumped facedown into the hideous discharge from their exit wounds.
The murders must have occurred before I entered the vehicle, perhaps only moments before, and the guns must have been fitted with sound suppressors.
