Dean Koontz: Odd Thomas

Eckles and Varner were the newest officers on the Pico Mundo Police Department. They had applied and signed up only a month or two apart.

Smart money would take the proposition that they had known each other before they arrived in Pico Mundo. Varner had been hired first and had paved the way for Eckles.

Robertson had moved to Pico Mundo from San Diego and purchased the house in Camp's End ahead of his two collaborators. If my memory could be trusted, Varner had previously been a police officer in the San Diego area if not in the city itself.

I didn't know in what jurisdiction Bern Eckles served before he had signed up with the PMPD. Greater San Diego would be a better bet than Juneau, Alaska.

The three of them had targeted Pico Mundo for reasons impossible to guess. They had planned long and carefully.

When I had gone to the barbecue, suggesting that a background profile on Bob Robertson might be a good idea, the chief had enlisted Eckles's assistance. At that instant, Robertson had been marked for death.

Indeed, he must have been murdered within half an hour. No doubt Eckles had telephoned Varner from the chief's house, and Varner had pulled the trigger on their mutual friend. Perhaps Simon Varner and Robertson had been together when Varner got Eckles's call.

With Eckles securely tied, I unzipped the front of his jumpsuit far enough to confirm that under it he wore his police uniform.

He had come into the security room in his blues and badge. The guards would have greeted him without suspicion.

Evidently he'd carried the assault rifle and the jumpsuit in a suitcase. A two-suiter lay open and empty on the floor. Samsonite.

The plan had most likely been to go on a shooting spree in the department store and then, as the police arrived, to find a private place to strip out of the jumpsuit and the ski mask. Abandoning the assault rifle, Eckles could mingle with his fellow officers as though responding to the same call that they had received.

The why of it wasn't as easy to understand as the how .

Some people said that God talked to them. Others heard the devil whispering in their heads. Maybe one of these guys thought Satan had told him to shoot up Green Moon Mall.

Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.

Simon Varner remained on the loose. Maybe he and Eckles had not come to the mall alone. I had no idea how many might be in a coven.

Using one of the working phones, I called 911, reported three murders, and without answering any questions, put the phone down, leaving it off the hook. The police would come, and a SWAT team. Three minutes, four. Maybe five.

That wouldn't be fast enough. Varner would be blasting away at shoppers before they arrived.

The baseball bat hadn't cracked. Good wood.

As effective as the bat had been with Eckles, I couldn't expect to be lucky enough to surprise Varner in the same way. Regardless of my fear of guns, I needed a better weapon than a Louisville Slugger.

On a counter in front of the security monitors lay the pistol that Eckles had used to kill the guards. On inspection, I found that four rounds remained in the ten-shot magazine.

As much as I wanted to avoid looking at them, the dead men on the floor commanded my attention. I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.

I unscrewed the silencer, tossed it aside. Pulled my T-shirt our of my jeans. Tucked the pistol under my waistband.

Without success, I tried not to think of my mother with the gun under her chin, against her breast. I tried not to remember what the muzzle of that pistol had felt like when she pressed it against my eye and told me to look for the brass of the bullet at the bottom of that narrow bore of darkness.

The T-shirt hid the weapon but not perfectly. Shoppers would be too preoccupied finding bargains and salesclerks would be too busy serving shoppers to notice the bulge.

Cautiously, I opened the door barely wide enough to slip out of the security room, and closed it behind me. A man was walking away from me, in the direction I needed to go, and I followed him, wishing that he would hurry .

He turned right, through the swinging doors to the receiving room, and I ran past elevators reserved for company employees to a door labeled stairs. I took them two at a time.

Somewhere ahead, Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm.

At the first floor of the department store, I left the stairs and pushed through a door into a stockroom.

A pretty redhead was busy pulling small boxes off the packed shelves. She said, "Hey," in a friendly way.

"Hey," I said back at her, and I went out of the stockroom onto the sales floor.

The sporting-goods department. Bustling. Men, a few women, a lot of teenagers. The kids were checking out Rollerblades, skateboards.

Beyond the sporting goods were aisles of athletic shoes. Beyond the shoes, men's sportswear.

People, people everywhere. Too many people too tightly bunched. An almost festive atmosphere. So vulnerable.

If I hadn't waylaid him as he came out of the security room, Bern Eckles would have killed ten or twenty by now. Thirty.

Simon Varner. Big guy. Beefy arms. Prince of Darkness. Simon Varner.

Reliably guided by my supernatural gift as any bat is guided by echolocation, I crossed the first floor of the department store, heading toward the exit to the mall promenade.

I didn't expect to see another gunman here. Eckles and Varner would have chosen widely separated killing fields, the better to sow terror and chaos. Besides, they would want to avoid accidentally straying into each other's fire patterns.

Ten steps short of the promenade exit, I saw Viola Peabody, who was supposed to be at her sister's house on Maricopa Lane.

THE BIRTHDAY GIRL, LEVANNA, AND HER PINK-INFATUATED little sister, Nicolina, were not at their mother's side. I scanned the crowd of shoppers, but didn't see the girls.

When I hurried to Viola and seized her by the shoulder from behind, she reacted with a start and dropped her shopping bag.

"What're you doing here?" I demanded.

"Odd! You scared the salt off my crackers."

"Where are the girls?"

"With Sharlene."

"Why aren't you with them?"

Picking up the shopping bag, she said, "Hadn't done birthday shopping yet. Got to have a gift. Came here just quick for these Roller-blades."

"Your dream," I reminded her urgently. "This is your dream ."

Her eyes widened. "But I'm just in and out quick, and I'm not at the movies."

"It's not going to be at the theater. It's happening here ."

For an instant her breath caught in her throat as terror cocked the hammers of her heart.

"Get out of here," I said. "Get out of here now ."

She exhaled explosively, looked wildly around as if any shopper might be a killer, or all of them, and she started toward the exit to the promenade.

"No!" I pulled her close to me. People were looking at us. What did it matter? "It's not safe that way."

"Where?" she asked.

I turned her around. "Go to the back of this floor, through the athletic shoes, through sporting goods. There's a stockroom not far from where you bought Rollerblades. Go to the stockroom. Hide there."

She started away, stopped, looked at me. 'Aren't you coming?"

"No."

"Where are you going?"

"Into it."

"Don't," she pleaded.

"Go now!"

As she moved toward the back of the department store, I hurried out into the mall promenade.