Odd Thomas Read Free Page B

burned in the courthouse fire of 1954, when a man named Mel Gibson protested the seizure of his property for nonpayment of taxes. Mr. Gibson’s protest took the form of self-immolation.
    He wasn’t related to the Australian actor with the same name who would decades later become a movie star. Indeed, by all reports, he was neither talented nor physically attractive.
    Now, because I hadn’t been burdened on this occasion by a pair of men too dead to swim for themselves, I reached the edge of the pool in a few swift strokes. I levered myself out of the water.
    Having arrived at the sliding door, Harlo Landerson found it locked.
    The pajamaed woman had disappeared.
    As I scrambled to my feet and started to move, Harlo backed away from the door far enough to get momentum. Then he ran at it, leading with his left shoulder, his head tucked down.
    I winced in expectation of gouting blood, severed limbs, a head guillotined by a blade of glass.
    Of course the safety pane shattered into cascades of tiny, gummy pieces. Harlo crashed into the house with all his limbs intact and his head still attached to his neck.
    Glass crunched and clinked under my shoes when I entered in his wake. I smelled something burning.
    We were in a family room. All the furniture was oriented toward a big-screen TV as large as a pair of refrigerators.
    The gigantic head of the female host of the
Today
show was terrifying in such magnified detail. In these dimensions, her perky smile had the warmth of a barracuda’s grin. Her twinkly eyes, here the size of lemons, seemed to glitter maniacally.
    In this open floor plan, the family room flowed into the kitchen with only a breakfast bar intervening.
    The woman had chosen to make a stand in the kitchen. She gripped a telephone in one hand and a butcher knife in the other.
    Harlo stood at the threshold between rooms, trying to decide if a twentysomething housewife in too-cute, sailor-suit pajamas would really have the nerve to gut him alive.
    She brandished the knife as she shouted into the phone. “He’s inside, he’s right
here!
”
    Past her, on a far counter, smoke poured from a toaster. Some kind of pop-up pastry had failed to pop. It smelled like strawberries and smoldering rubber. The lady was having a bad morning.
    Harlo threw a bar stool at me and ran out of the family room, toward the front of the house.
    Ducking the stool, I said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry about the mess,” and I went looking for Penny’s killer.
    Behind me, the woman screamed,
“Stevie, lock your door! Stevie, lock your door!”
    By the time I reached the foot of the open stairs in the foyer, Harlo had climbed to the landing.
    I saw why he had been drawn upward instead of fleeing the house: At the second floor stood a wide-eyed little boy, about five years old, wearing only undershorts. Holding a blue teddy bear by one of its feet, the kid looked as vulnerable as a puppy stranded in the middle of a busy freeway.
    Prime hostage material.
    “Stevie, lock your door!”
    Dropping the blue bear, the kid bolted for his room.
    Harlo charged up the second flight of stairs.
    Sneezing out the tickle of chlorine and the tang of burning strawberry jam, dripping, squishing, I ascended with somewhat less heroic flair than John Wayne in
Sands of Iwo Jima
.
    I was more scared than my quarry because
I
had something to lose, not least of all Stormy Llewellyn and our future together that the fortune-telling machine had seemed to promise. If I encountered a husband with a handgun, he’d shoot me as unhesitatingly as he would Harlo.
    Overhead, a door slammed hard. Stevie had done as his mother instructed.
    If he’d had a pot of boiling lead, in the tradition of Quasimodo, Harlo Landerson would have poured it on me. Instead came a sideboard that evidently had stood in the second-floor hall, opposite the head of the stairs.
    Surprised to discover that I had the agility and the balance of a monkey, albeit a wet monkey, I scrambled off the stairs, onto