Dean Koontz: Odd Thomas

Inside the stores, beyond the shot-out windows, people dared to raise their heads.

We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. Gypsy Mummy is never wrong.

Trembling, sweating, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands, half sick with an expectation of unbearable loss, I started toward Burke amp; Bailey's.

People had risen to their feet from the ruination in the ice-cream shop. Some began to make their way cautiously across the broken glass, returning to the promenade.

I didn't see Stormy among them. She might have fled back to the storeroom, to her office, when the shooting started.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the need to move, move, move. I turned away from Burke amp; Bailey's and took several steps toward the department store at the south end of the mall. I stopped, confused. For a moment, I thought I must be in denial, that I was trying to run from what I might find in the ice-cream shop.

No. I felt the subtle but unmistakable pull. Psychic magnetism. Drawing me. I'd assumed that I had finished the job. Evidently not.

THIS DEPARTMENT STORE STYLED ITSELF MORE UPSCALE than the one in which Viola had bought the Rollerblades. The crap they sold here was of a more refined quality than the crap they sold in the store at the north end of the mall

I passed through a perfume and makeup department with beveled-glass cabinets and glamorous displays that not so subtly implied the merchandise was as valuable as diamonds.

The jewelry department dazzled with black granite, stainless steel, and Starfire glass, as if it offered not common diamonds but baubles from God's own collection.

Although the gunfire had fallen silent, shoppers and employees still sheltered behind counters, behind marble-clad columns. They dared to peek at me as I strode among them, but many flinched and ducked out of sight again.

Even though I didn't have a gun, I must have appeared to be dangerous. Or maybe I only seemed to be in a state of shock. They weren't taking any chances. I didn't blame them for hiding from me.

Still crying, blotting my eyes with my hands, I was also talking aloud to myself. I couldn't stop talking to myself, and I wasn't even saying anything coherent.

I didn't know where psychic magnetism might be taking me next, didn't know if Stormy was alive or dead in Burke amp; Bailey's. I wanted to go back to find her, but I continued to be drawn urgently forward by my demanding gift. My body language was marked by tics, twitches, hesitations, and sudden rushes of new purpose. I must have looked not just spastic but psychotic.

Sweet-faced, sleepy-eyed Simon Varner didn't have such a sweet face anymore, or sleepy eyes. Dead in front of Burke amp; Bailey's.

So maybe I was tracking something related to Varner. I couldn't guess what that might be. This compulsion to keep moving without a dearly defined quarry was new to me.

Among racks of cocktail dresses, silk blouses, silk jackets, handbags, I hurried at last to a door marked employees only. Beyond lay a storeroom. Directly across from the door by which I entered, another led to a concrete stairwell.

The layout was familiar from the department store at the north end of the mall. The stairs led down to a corridor where I passed employee-only elevators and came to oversize swinging doors marked receiving.

This room reflected a thriving enterprise, though it didn't quite equal the size of the one at the north-end store. Merchandise on racks and carts awaited processing, prepping, and transfer to stockrooms and sales floors.

Numerous employees were present, but work appeared to have come to a halt. Most had gathered around a sobbing woman, and others were crossing the room toward her. Down here where no shots could have been heard, news of the horror in the mall had now arrived.

Only one truck stood in the receiving room: not a full semi, about an eighteen-footer, with no company name on the cab doors or the sides of the trailer. I moved toward it .

A burly guy with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache braced me as I reached the vehicle. 'Are you with this truck?"

Without responding, I pulled open the driver's door and climbed into the cab. The keys weren't in the ignition.

"Where's your driver," he asked.

When I popped open the glove box, I found it empty. Not even the registration or proof of insurance required by California law.

"I'm the shift foreman here," the burly guy said. 'Are you deaf or just difficult?"

Nothing on the seats. No trash container on the floor. No scrap of discarded candy wrapper. No air freshener or decorative geegaw hanging from the mirror.

This didn't have the feel of a truck that anyone drove for a living or in which anyone spent a significant amount of his day.

When I got out from behind the steering wheel, the foreman said, "Where's your driver? He didn't leave me a manifest, and the box is locked."

I went around to the back of the truck, which featured a roll-up door on the cargo trailer. A key lock in the base bar of the door secured it to a channel in the truck bed.

"I've got other shipments due," he said. "I can't let this just sit here."

"Do you have a power drill?" I asked.

"What're you going to do?"

"Drill out the lock."

"You're not the guy drove this in here. Are you his crew?"

"Police," I lied. "Off duty."

He was dubious.

Pointing to the sobbing woman around whom so many workers had now gathered, I said, "You hear what she's been saying?"

"I was on my way over there when I saw you."

"Two maniacs with machine guns shot up the mall."

His face drained of color so dramatically that even his blond mustache seemed to whiten.

"You hear they shot Chief Porter last night?" I asked. "That was prep for this."

With rapidly growing dread, I studied the ceiling of the immense receiving room. Three floors of the department store were stacked on top of it, supported by its massive columns.

Scared people were hiding from the gunmen up there. Hundreds and hundreds of people.

"Maybe," I said, "the bastards came here with something even worse than machine guns."

"Oh, shit. I'll get a drill." He sprinted for it.

After placing both hands flat against the roll-up door on the cargo box for a moment, I then leaned my forehead against it.

I don't know what I expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing unusual. Psychic magnetism still pulled me, however. What I wanted wasn't the truck but what was in the truck.

The foreman returned with the drill and tossed me a pair of safety goggles. Electrical outlets were recessed in the concrete floor at convenient intervals across the receiving room. He plugged the drill into the nearest of these, and the cord provided more than sufficient play.

The tool had heft. I liked the industrial look of the bit. The motor shrieked with satisfying power.

When I bored into the key channel, shavings of metal clicked off my goggles, stung my face. The bit itself deteriorated, but punched through the lock in mere seconds.

As I dropped the drill and stripped off the goggles, someone shouted from a distance. "Hey! Leave that alone!"

Along the elevated loading dock-no one. Then I saw him. Outside the receiving room, twenty feet beyond the foot of the long truck ramp.

"That's the driver," the foreman told me.

He was a stranger. He must have been watching, perhaps through binoculars, from out in the employee garage, past the three lanes that served the loading docks.

Seizing the two grips, I shoved up the door. Well-oiled and efficiently counterweighted, the panel rose smoothly and quickly out of the way.

The truck was packed with what appeared to be hundreds of kilos of plastic explosive.