Dean Koontz - Odd Thomas

The chief's sister, Eileen Newfield, sat in a corner, red-eyed from crying, compulsively twisting an embroidered handkerchief in her hands.

Beside her sat Jake Hulquist, murmuring reassurances. He was the chief's best friend. They had joined the force the same year.

Jake was out of uniform, wearing khakis and an untucked T-shirt. The laces in his athletic shoes were untied. His hair bristled in weird twists and spikes, as if he hadn't taken the time to comb it after he'd gotten the call.

Karla looked like she always does: fresh, beautiful, and self-possessed.

Her eyes were clear; she hadn't been crying. She was a cop's wife first, a woman second; she wouldn't give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was fighting with him in spirit.

The moment I stepped through the open doorway, Karla came to me, hugged me. and said, "This blows, doesn't it, Oddie? Isn't that what young people your age would say about a situation like this?"

"It blows," I agreed. "Totally."

Sensitive to Eileen's fragile emotional condition, Karla led me into the hallway, where we could talk. "He got a call on his private night line, just before two o'clock in the morning."

"From who?"

"I don't know. The ringing only half woke me. He told me to go back to sleep, everything was fine."

"How many people have the night line?"

"Not many He didn't go to the closet to dress. He left the bedroom in his pajamas, so I figured he wasn't going out, it was some problem he could handle from home, and I went back to sleep… until the gunshots woke me."

"When was that?"

"Not ten minutes after the call. Apparently he opened the front door for someone he was expecting-"

"Someone he knew."

"-and he was shot four times."

"Four? I heard three to the chest."

"Three to the chest," she confirmed, "and one to the head."

At the news of a head shot, I almost needed to slide down the wall and sit on the floor again.

Seeing how hard this information hit me, Karla quickly said, "No brain damage. The head shot was the least destructive of the four." She found a tremulous but genuine smile. "He'll make a joke out of that, don't you think?"

"He probably already has."

"I can hear him saying if you want to blow out Wyatt Porter's brains, you've got to shoot him in the ass."

"That's him, all right," I agreed.

"They think it was meant to be the coup de grace, after he was already down, but maybe the shooter lost his nerve or got distracted. The bullet only grazed Wyatt's scalp."

I was in denial: "Nobody would want to kill him."

Karla said, "By the time I dialed nine-one-one and managed to get downstairs with my pistol, the shooter was gone."

I pictured her coming fearlessly down the stairs with the gun in both hands, to the front door, ready to trade bullets with the man who had shot her husband. A lioness. Like Stormy.

"Wyatt was down, already unconscious when I found him."

Along the corridor, from the direction of the elevators, came a surgical nurse dressed in green scrubs. She had a please-don't-shoot-the-messenger expression.

THE SURGICAL NURSE, JENNA SPINELLI, HAD BEEN ONE year ahead of me in high school. Her calm gray eyes were flecked with blue, and her hands were made to play piano concertos.

The news that she brought was not as grim as I feared, not as good as I would have liked. The chief's vital signs were stable but not robust. He'd lost his spleen, but he could live without that. One lung had been punctured, but not beyond repair, and none of his vital organs had been irreparably damaged.

Complex vascular repairs were required, and the physician in charge of the surgical team estimated that the chief would be in the OR another hour and a half to two hours.

"We're pretty sure he'll come through surgery good enough," Jenna said. "Then the challenge will be to prevent postoperative complications."

Karla went into the ICU waiting room to share this report with the chief's sister and Jake Hulquist.

Alone in the hallway with Jenna, I said, "Have you swung both hammers, or are you holding one back?"

"It's just the way I said, Oddie. We don't soften bad news for the spouse. We tell it straight and all at once."

"This blows."

"Like a hurricane," she agreed. "You're close to him, I know."

"Yeah."

"I think he's eventually going to make it," Jenna said. "Not just out of surgery but all the way home on his own two feet."

"But no guarantees."

"When is there ever? He's a mess inside. But he's not half as bad as we thought he'd be when we first put him on the table, before we opened him up. It's a thousand to one odds that anyone can survive three chest wounds. He's incredibly lucky."

"If that's luck, he better never go to Vegas."

With a fingertip, she pulled down one of my lower eyelids and examined the bloodshot scenery: "You look wrecked, Oddie."

"It's been a long day. You know-breakfast starts early at the Grille."

"I was in with two friends the other day You cooked our lunch."

"Really? Sometimes things are so frantic at the griddle, I don't get a chance to look around, see who's there."

"You've got a talent."

"Thanks," I said. "That's sweet. ”

"I hear your dad's selling the moon."

"Yeah, but it's not a great place for a vacation home. No air."

"You're nothing at all like your dad."

"Who would want to be?"

"Most guys."

"I think you're wrong about that."

"You know what? You ought to give cooking classes."

"Mostly what I do is fry."

"I'd still sign up."

"It's not exactly healthy cuisine," I said.

"We've all got to die of something. You still with Bronwen?"

"Stormy. Yeah. It's like destiny."

"How do you know?"

"We have matching birthmarks."

"You mean the one she got tattooed to match yours?"

"Tattooed? No. It's real enough. We're getting married."

"Oh. I didn't hear about that."

"It's breaking news."

"Wait'll the girls find out," Jenna said.

"What girls?"

"All of them."

This conversation wasn't always making perfect sense to me, so I said, "Listen, I'm walking grime, I need a bath, but I don't want to leave the hospital till Chief Porter comes out of surgery safe like you say. Is there anywhere here I can get a shower?"

"Let me talk to the head nurse on this floor. We should be able to find you a place."

"I've got a change of clothes in the car," I said.

"Go get them. Then ask at the nurses' station. I'll have arranged everything."

As she started to turn away, I said, "Jenna, did you take piano lessons?"

"Did I ever. Years of them. But why would you ask?"

"Your hands are so beautiful. I bet you play like a dream."

She gave me a long look that I couldn't interpret: mysteries in those blue-flecked gray eyes.

Then she said, "This wedding thing is true?"

"Saturday," I assured her, full of pride that Stormy would have me.

"If I could leave town, we'd have gone to Vegas and been married by dawn."

"Some people are way lucky," Jenna Spinelli said. "Even luckier than Chief Porter still sucking wind after three chest wounds."

Assuming that she meant I was fortunate to have won Stormy, I said, 'After the mother-father mess I was handed, fate owed me big."

Jenna had that inscrutable look down perfect. "Call me if you decide to give cooking lessons, after all. I'll bet you really know how to whisk."

Puzzled, I said, "Whisk? Well, sure, but that's mainly just for scrambled eggs. With pancakes and waffles, you've got to fold the batter, and otherwise almost everything is fry, fry, fry."

She smiled, shook her head, and walked away, leaving me with that perplexity I'd sometimes felt when, as the player with the best stats on our high-school baseball team, I had been served up what appeared to be a perfect strike-zone slow pitch and yet had swung above it, not even kissing the ball.