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Their mouths cracked wider, however, and they regarded me with malevolent grins.
Again echoing Annamaria’s admonition to that other pack, I said, “The rest of the world is yours … but not this place at this moment.”
Back in the day, I hadn’t understood what she had meant by those words. Now I thought perhaps I did.
Far to the south, pulses of heat lightning billowed deep within the heavy clouds, again too distant for the associated thunder to reach us.
Although their backs were to the southern sky, and though the celestial flare was too faint to cast even a wan reflection upon our immediate surroundings, the three coyotes shivered, as if aware of the storm light and affected by it.
“I am not yours. You will leave now.”
They didn’t depart, didn’t move so much as an inch, but neither did they growl.
The coyotes in Magic Beach had not at once obeyed Annamaria. They had been stubborn, or maybe whatever wished to use them had been stubborn.
And so I repeated, “You will leave now.”
The predatory trio looked around as though confused, as though unsure how they had gotten where they were. Their hackles smoothed, and although they nervously licked their chops, they no longer bared their fearsome teeth. Ears pricked, regarding me not with hostility or hunger, only with curiosity, they warily backed away.
“Leave now,” I repeated.
They turned and slunk off the crest of the dam, toward the darkness out of which they had appeared.
When they paused in the pale light of the narrow shadowland that separated the brightness of the dam crest from the blackest night, I watched them watching me, and I knew they were now only what they appeared to be: coyotes or prairie wolves, whichever you preferred. Briefly, some vicious twisted spirit had entered them and had overridden their fear of me. But for all its malice, it was a weak entity that obeyed a simple order to leave once its presence had been recognized and resisted.
The coyotes moved away into the blinding dark, gone as if they’d never existed. I felt again the mysterious nature of the world, its deeply layered and profound strangeness.
I wondered at my inability, until now, to understand what Annamaria had recognized in the coyotes in Magic Beach and why she had felt that she could command them to leave us alone. Considering that I saw the spirits of the lingering dead and bodachs—whatever they might be—it troubled me that I had not realized she could perhaps see other entities unknown to me, such as spirits that were not and never had been human, that sprang from origins even darker than the worst specimens of humanity.
I’d long known Annamaria possessed some power of her own, that she had well-guarded secrets. She, too, was more than she appeared to be. I had come to believe that her powers, whatever their nature, were greater than mine. But now I was chagrined to realize that I had failed to grasp how we were at least in one way alike: Some things visible to us were invisible to the vast majority of human beings, even if perhaps each of us saw different things from what the other perceived.
At the railing once more, I peered toward the farther reaches of Malo Suerte Lake, which were cast in such perfect blackness that I couldn’t discern either those waters or anything of the shore that embraced them. When I turned my attention down to the water lapping against the dam, I couldn’t see it, either, not really see it, for it was black, as well, and I could know that it slopped against the tainter gates below me only because reflections of the crest lights undulated upon its surface.
Standing there, I was overcome by the certainty that, since returning home to Pico Mundo, I had failed to see much more than just the malicious entity that had sought to use the three coyotes against me. A monstrous act of terrorism would soon be perpetrated. The truth of it, the approximate place and the general nature of the threat, had been revealed to me in a prophetic dream; or if they had not been fully revealed, they had at least been strongly suggested.
Yes, I could see what others could not, but seeing wasn’t the same as understanding. I had been given perceptions that Sherlock Holmes would have envied; but I didn’t have Sherlockian wit to make the most of what I saw. With fewer clues than I possessed, Holmes routinely puzzled his way to the mystery’s solution, with little or no violence. In spite of my hatred of violence, I more often than not had to bludgeon and shoot my way to a resolution.
When last Pico Mundo was threatened, I had put the pieces together a few minutes too late, saving some potential victims, but not nineteen. And not her.
I looked at my wristwatch. Nine o’clock. Not only minutes were slipping through my fingers, but also the lives of those I might fail to save.
When I returned from the dam, Sonny Wexler said, “Anything?”
“You must’ve thought of a boat, sir. An electric boat?”
Billy Mundy shook his head. “It couldn’t get close enough. A hundred yards out from the dam, there’s a loose-woven net of steel cables shore to shore. Starts about two feet above the high-water line and goes almost all the way to the bottom.”
“One-inch-diameter cable,” Sonny added. “You’d need acetylene torches and a few hours to get through it—and either night or day, you’d draw a lot of attention to yourself.”
“The net’s to keep recreational boats and jet skis from getting too near the dam,” Billy explained. “If a swimmer was in the water when tainter gates were opened, he might be pulled in and over the spillway. Or dragged under by a current and drowned.”
“Can the net be raised and lowered mechanically?” I asked.
“Sure. From the outlet-control building. But no one’s getting in there as long as we’re guarding the place.”
Sonny Wexler said, “And the chief’s sending backup. Two more guys will be here soon.”
I knew why Chief Porter made that decision, and I was reminded of Jim’s and Bob’s driver’s licenses. I fished the plastic rectangles from a jacket pocket and handed them to Sonny.
“I told the chief I’d give you these. They’re conspirators in all this. Very bad guys.”
As he and his partner examined the licenses, Billy Mundy said, “Memorable faces. We’ll know ’em if we see ’em.”
“You won’t be seeing them,” I said. “Those are just for you to give to the chief.”
Sonny frowned. “We won’t be seeing them? How’d you get their licenses, anyway?”
I said only, “The chief knows all about it, sir.”
Their stares were of the kind that make the most law-abiding citizens feel as if there’s a crime to which they should confess.
I didn’t look away from them, met the eyes of one and then the eyes of the other. They didn’t look away from me, either.
Peripherally, I was aware of heat lightning to the south, as if an alien spa
ceship or a colossal creature of light passed through the shrouding clouds along the horizon, but the storm wasn’t here, wasn’t now.
At last Sonny tucked the licenses in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “I thought you came home just to come home, but I guess there’s more to it than that.”
“Well, sir, I’m sure glad to be home, it’s where I belong, but there’s always more to everything than there seems to be.”
“That’s as true as it gets,” said Billy Mundy.
Sonny put one of his enormous hands on my shoulder. “You be careful out there, Odd.”
“Yes, sir. I want to be.”
I drove the Explorer all the way along the service road to the state highway before the connection occurred to me. It wasn’t one I wanted to make, but I knew immediately that it was right.
For the time during which they had stalked me, the coyotes at the dam had been more than they appeared to be. Some dark spirit had taken possession of them.
Earlier in the day, shortly after dawn, when I’d encountered the coyote on the street where I’d parked the Big Dog motorcycle, it must have been more than it appeared to be, as well.
And at the safe house, when I’d come downstairs to the kitchen for dinner, Deacon Bullock had at that moment entered through the back door, carrying a shotgun. His wife, Maybelle, had said to him, Seein’ as you’re alive, must’ve been a false alarm like you thought.
Dang coyote, Deke had said. Slinkin’ around, maybe hopin’ for one of the chickens we don’t even raise, set off a motion detector.
Indicating the sunlight at the windows, she had said, Early for one of their kind bein’ on the hunt.
It was a bonier specimen than usual, he’d replied, maybe too hungry to wait out the sun.
That coyote, like the others in my day, must have been more than it appeared to be.
The four who had been the only members of the cult that shot up Green Moon Mall—Eckles, Varner, Gosset, Robertson—had been pretend satanists, men with a taste for murder, cruel sadists who dressed up their barbarism with occult nonsense that had nothing to do with real devil worship.
