The bomb at the mall had been a truck packed with hundreds of kilos of explosives. The detonator had been a crude device.

"Our talks got to be so much fun. Then the sweetest thing. It seemed so sweet. She started calling me on her own time. It didn't cost me anything anymore."

I opened my eyes and gazed at the package on the back of Danny's chair. This was a lot more sophisticated than the truck bomb at the mall. It was meant to challenge me.

"We didn't always get around to talking about you," Danny said. "I realize now, she was clever. She didn't want to be obvious."

Careful not to disturb the carpenter's level, I traced a coiled red wire with one finger, and then a straighter yellow wire. Then green.

"But after a while," Danny continued, "I didn't have any more to tell her about you… except the thing at the mall last year. That was such a big story nationwide, all over the newspapers and TV so then she knew your name."

Black wire, blue wire, white wire, red again… Neither the sight of them nor the feel of them against my fingertip engaged my sixth sense.

"I'm so sorry, Odd. So damn sorry. I sold you out."

I said, "Not for money. For love. That's different."

"I don't love her."

“All right. Not love. For the hope of love."

Frustrated by the indecipherable wiring of the bomb, I went around to the front of the chair.

Danny rubbed his right wrist, around which the duct tape had been drawn so tight that it had left angry red impressions in his skin.

"For the hope of love," I repeated. "What friend wouldn't cut you a little slack in a case like that?"

Tears welled in his eyes.

"Listen," I said, "you and I weren't meant to have our tickets punched in a cheesy casino resort. If fate says we've got to croak in a hotel, then we'll rent a suite someplace that rates five stars. You okay?"

He nodded.

Tucking my backpack in among the earthquake-pitched furniture where it was unlikely to be found, I said, "I know why they brought you here, of all places. If she thinks somehow I can conjure spirits, she figures a bunch of them have to be hanging around this joint. But why through the flood-control tunnels?"

"She's beyond psychotic, Odd. It never came across on the phone, or maybe I didn't want to hear it when I was… romancing her. Damn. That's pathetic. Anyway, she's a weird kind of crazy, delusional but not stupid, a real hard-nosed nutty bitch. She wanted to bring me to the Panamint by an unusual route, something that would be a serious test of your psychic magnetism, prove to her it was real. And there's something else going on with her……"

His hesitation told me that this something else would not be a cheerful revelation, such as that Datura had taken up gospel singing or that she had baked my favorite cake.

"She wants you to show her ghosts. She thinks you can summon them, make them speak. I never told her anything like that, it's just what she insists on believing. But she wants something else, too. I don't know why…" He thought about it, shook his head. "But I get the feeling she wants to kill you."

"I seem to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Danny, last night in the alley behind the Blue Moon Cafe-someone fired a shotgun."

"One of her guys. The one you found dead."

"Who was he shooting at?"

"Me. They were careless for a moment as we were getting out of the van. I tried to make a break for the street. The shotgun was a warning to stop."

He wiped his eyes with one hand. Three of the fingers, once having been broken, were larger than they should have been and misshapen by excess bone.

"I shouldn't have stopped," he said. "I should've kept running. All they could have done was shoot me in the back. Then we wouldn't be here."

I went to him and poked the yellow lightning bolt on the front of his black T-shirt. "No more of that. You keep swimming in that direction, soon you'll find yourself drowning in self-pity. That isn't you, Danny."

Shaking his head, he said, "What a mess." "Self-pity isn't you, and it never has been. We're a couple of tough little virgin geeks, and don't you forget it."

He couldn't suppress a smile, though it was tremulous and came with a fresh welling of tears. "I still have my Martian-brain-eating-centipede card."

“Are we sentimental fools, or what?"

"That crack about Demi Moore was funny," he said.

"I know. Listen, I'm going out there to have a look around. After I'm gone, you might think you can just tip over your chair and set off the bomb."

His evasive eyes revealed that self-sacrifice had indeed crossed his mind.

"You might think blowing yourself into pâté would get me off the hook, then I'd call Wyatt Porter for help, but you'd be way wrong," I assured him. "I'd feel more obligated than ever to get all three of them myself. I wouldn't leave this place until I did. You understand that, Danny?"

"What a mess."

"Besides, you've got to live for your dad. Don't you think so?"

He sighed, nodded. "Yeah."

"You've got to live for your dad. That's your job now."

Danny said, "He's a good man."

Picking up the flashlight, I said, "If Datura checks on you before I get back, she'll see your arms and legs have been freed. That's all right. Just tell her I'm here."

"What're you going to do now?"

I shrugged. "You know me. I make it up as I go along."

THIRTY

STEPPING OUT OF ROOM 1242 AND PULLING THE DOOR shut behind me, I glanced left and right along the corridor. Still deserted. Silent.

Datura.

That sounded like a name not given but instead chosen. She had been born Mary or Heather, or something equally common, and she had taken Datura later. It was an exotic word with some meaning that she was amused to apply to herself.

I visualized my mind as a pool of dark water in moonlight, her name as a leaf. I imagined the leaf settling upon the water, floating for a moment. Saturated, the leaf sank. Currents moved it around the pool, deeper, deeper.

Datura.

In seconds, I felt drawn north toward-and beyond-the elevator alcove in which I had arrived earlier by way of the shaft ladder. If the woman waited on this floor, she was in a room distant from 1242.

Perhaps she didn't keep Danny with her because she, too, had sensed in him a potential for self-destruction that gave her second thoughts about having strapped him to a bomb that he could choose to detonate.

Although I could have allowed myself to be drawn to Datura right away, I wasn't urgently compelled to locate her. She was Medusa, with a voice-instead of eyes-that could turn men to stone, but for the moment I was content to be a man of weary, aching, and fallible flesh.

Ideally, I would find some way to disable Datura and the two men with her-and gain possession of the remote control that could trigger the explosives. When they were no longer a threat, I could call Chief Porter.

My chances of overpowering three dangerous people, especially if all of them had guns, were not much better than the odds that the dead gamblers in the burned-out casino could win their lives back with a roll of the fire-yellowed dice.

Other than ignoring my convincing premonition that calling in the police would be the certain death of Danny, the only alternative to disabling the kidnappers was to disable the bomb. I had less desire to fiddle with that complex detonator than I had to French-kiss a rattlesnake.

Nevertheless, I had to prepare for the possibility that events would lead me inevitably to precisely that fiddling. And if I freed Danny, we would still have to get out of the Panamint.

Not agile to begin with, exhausted by the trek from Pico Mundo, he would not be able to move fast. On a good day, in peak form, my brittle-boned friend was not surefooted enough to dare to rush down a flight of stairs.