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“Yes, sir. I’ve got a wristwatch. Their names are James Morton Sterling and Robert Foster Cokeberry.”
“Jim and Bob.”
“The two and only.”
“Let me get a pen. There. Okay. Repeat their names.”
I repeated them. “They both have Nevada driver’s licenses.”
“Are you okay, Oddie?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m okay.”
“Because you don’t sound okay.”
“Not a scratch,” I assured him.
After a silence, because he knew me well, he said, “Not all wounds are the bleeding kind.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve got their driver’s licenses, Chief. I’m going to the dam now, so I’ll leave them with Sonny and Billy.”
“By the way, I talked to Mr. Donatella.”
“Who?”
“Lou Donatella, you know, in the bear suit. Though he wasn’t wearing it by the time I got to him. He and Ollie were drinking coffee, eating brown-sugar pavlovas. They’re delicious. Have you ever had one?”
“No, sir. I don’t even know what a pavlova is.”
“They’re delicious is what they are. Lou made them himself. He’s a nice little guy. He gave me some useful stuff about this Wolfgang Schmidt.”
Ahead on the left loomed a sign rimmed with pentagons of highly reflective plastic: MALO SUERTE DAM.
“Schmidt claimed to come from a carnie family when he bought out one of the concessionaires, but Lou says the guy was no more a carnie than Mozart was a carnie. Lou’s into classical music.”
“I’m turning on to the service road to the dam, sir. I’ll call you back in a little while.”
“What do you expect to find there, son?”
“I don’t know. I’m just … drawn to it.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Call me when you get a chance. I’ll be here. This is looking like an all-nighter.”
“No, sir. My hunch is … this thing is going to blow before midnight.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said.
I thought, Let’s hope I’m wrong.
Twenty-seven
The service road led through land so parched that you wouldn’t expect to find a dam and a large body of water at the end of it. To both sides, my headlights showed bare earth, scatterings of stones, an occasional bristle of nameless weeds, no mesquite, no cactus.
Far to the south, along the horizon, heat lightning pulsed through the clouds, smooth radiant waves rather than jagged spears. Forty or fifty miles away, perhaps a downpour washed the desert. Rain didn’t always travel as far as heat lightning could be seen, and Pico Mundo might not receive a drop all night.
The breast of the dam didn’t in scale match that engineering wonder Boulder Dam, over in Nevada. Pico Mundians prided themselves on being “the smallest town of forty thousand anywhere in the world.” That slogan, created by the chamber of commerce, meant to convey to tourists that we were big enough to offer a wide range of activities and accommodations, and that nevertheless we remained simple people with homespun wisdom, down-home manners, and a tradition of welcoming strangers as we would our own kin. You could go to Boulder, Nevada, and do your boating on Lake Mead, behind the ostentatiously massive breastworks of their dam, if you didn’t mind the greedy casinos, all owned by humongous corporations, luring you to nearby Vegas, trying every minute of the day to get their hands in your pockets. Or you could come to Pico Mundo and enjoy boating on Malo Suerte Lake, behind a dam that was practical and human in scale, nothing like that Hitlerian structure across the border, only one hundred and two feet across and thirty-eight feet from crest to sill.
Our dam had no hydroelectric powerhouse, because it had been constructed with the modest intention of creating a pristine lake for recreational use and, in times of drought, a lake that could also serve as a source of water for a few major Maravilla County reservoirs downstream from it. There were sluice gates toward the north end of the dam and a squat concrete outlet-control structure about twenty feet square. The building looked like a miniature fortress, with a crenellated parapet around its flat roof and windows hardly larger than arrow loops.
When I braked to a stop a
t the end of the service road, Sonny Wexler and Billy Mundy were standing by their squad car. One of them held a shotgun. The other had what might have been a fully automatic carbine, like maybe an Uzi, which indicated the seriousness with which they took the threat.
They must have had a way to operate the headlights remotely, because as I approached, the high beams from their black-and-white nearly blinded me. The officers eased behind the squad car—one near the rear, the other at the front—using it as cover, leveling their weapons, as if they thought Dr. Evil had just arrived on the first step of a crusade for world domination.
I switched off my headlights, put down the side window, and leaned my head out, so they could see who had come calling. They knew I was close with the chief. In fact, after the business at Green Moon Mall a couple of years earlier, they were among the officers who had insisted that I be given a citation for bravery, which was now packed away with Stormy’s belongings in a room in Ozzie Boone’s house.
Shotgun at the ready, Sonny Wexler, big and tough and as soft-spoken as a monk, with forearms as thick as a sumo wrestler’s calves, cautiously approached the Explorer. He stayed wide of it, so that Billy could have a clear shot if someone in addition to me came out of the vehicle. “You alone in there, Odd?”
Haunted by the shootings at the park, I worried that my voice or a recurrence of the shakes would give them reason to wonder about me, but when I spoke, I sounded normal, which may not speak well of me.
“Yes, sir, I am. I’m alone.”
“The chief said you were back.”
“Good. ’Cause I am. I’m back.”
“It’s good to have you back,” he said, but he didn’t lower the shotgun.
“It’s good to be back,” I assured him.
“You know what’s happening?”
“I do, sir. I put the chief on to it.”
“Why don’t you get out,” Sonny said, “and walk around your vehicle, open all the doors and the tailgate, so I can see straight through.”
