Saint Odd: An Odd Thomas Novel by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance, General
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-13T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty-nine

Driving back to town, I repeatedly checked my rearview mirror. Apparently I had no tail.

I didn’t drive directly to the safe house or cruise past it. I concluded that would be suicide. I wasn’t ready to die, not until I had stopped—or had done my best to stop—whatever catastrophe might be planned for Pico Mundo.

I knew my hometown well, even here in its rural outskirts. In an area of horse farms and ranchettes and undeveloped land, I pulled off the two-lane blacktop and parked among a stand of cottonwoods, far enough from the road that the headlights of passing vehicles wouldn’t reveal the Explorer.

After switching off the engine, I called Deke Bullock again, and as before, he didn’t answer. Which most likely meant he was dead. Maybelle Bullock had probably been killed, too.

Perhaps the safe house had been discovered and invaded, its caretakers murdered, because of the astronaut who had seen something shocking in space and had been running for his life ever since, or because of some other hapless fugitive who had been given shelter there for a while. Maybe. But I was convinced that the responsibility lay with me, that unknowingly I’d led someone to it when I arrived that morning on the Big Dog bike.

Maybelle had made my favorite peach pie. She had hugged me and kissed my cheek before I’d left. She and Deacon had been so sweet together, bantering about whether they’d endured five or, instead, six bad days in twenty-eight years of marriage. My anger might serve me well in the hours ahead, but it came with a gray despair that I had to resist.

If the Bullocks were dead, there could be no good reason for me to return to the house—and no wisdom in doing so. If my only purpose was to confirm their deaths, I would most likely ensure my own.

Supposing they were not dead, however, I had an obligation to assist them. Perhaps they were under siege and needed reinforcements. Or one of them, wounded and left for dead, might still be saved.

Our world was a battleground on which good and evil clashed, and many of the combatants on the dark side were known to everyone. Terrorists, dictators, politicians who were merchants of lies and hate, crooked businessmen in league with them, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupted policemen, embezzlers, street thugs, rapists, and their ilk waged part of the war, and their actions were what made the evening news so colorful and depressing.

But those fighting in that dark army had their secret schemes, too, intentions and desires and goals that would make their public villainy seem almost innocent by comparison. They were assisted by other politicians who concealed their hatred and envy, by judges who secretly had no respect for the law, by clergymen who in private worshipped nothing but money or the tender bodies of children, by celebrities who trumpeted their concern for the common man while in their off-screen lives assiduously hobnobbing with and advancing the interests of the elite of elites.

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