FORTY-FIVE

DELIBERATELY, NOT WITH THE QUICK REFLEXES OF violent intent, Robert turned toward me.

The inscrutable semaphore of the storm no longer brightened his face, but silhouetted him. The sky, one great galleon with a thousand black sails, signaled, signaled, as if to regain his attention, and thunder boomed.

Averted from the lightning, his eyes no longer shone a moonish white. Nevertheless… though his features were deeply shadowed, his gaze still seemed vaguely phosphorescent, as milky as that of a man blinded by cataracts.

Although I could not see him well enough to be certain, I felt that his eyes were turned back in his head, no color revealed. This might have been a shiver of imagination born of the chill that had seized me.

Having assumed the stance that I recalled Chief Porter taking, I brought the shotgun to bear on him, aiming low because the kick might pull the muzzle higher.

Regardless of the condition of Robert's eyes, whether they were as white as hard-boiled eggs or the sullen bloodshot beryl-blue they had been earlier, I felt sure that he was not merely aware of my presence but that he could see me.

Yet his demeanor and his slump-shouldered posture suggested that the sight of me failed to shift him into psycho-killer gear. If not confused, he appeared to be at least distracted, and weary.

I began to think that he had not come in search of me, but had wandered in here either for another purpose or without any purpose. Having found me inadvertently, he stood as if in resentment of the need to resolve the confrontation.

Curiouser and curiouser: He let out a long sigh of exhaustion, with a thin plaintive edge that seemed to express a sense of being harassed.

As far as I could recall, these were the first sounds that I had heard issue from his lips: a sigh, a plaint.

His inexplicable malaise and my disinclination to use the shotgun in the absence of a clear threat to my life had brought us to a bizarre impasse that, just two minutes ago, I could never have imagined.

A sudden sweat greased my brow. The situation was not tenable. Something had to give.

His arms hung at his sides. Lambent storm light licked the shape of a pistol or a revolver in his right hand.

When he first turned from the window, Robert could have whipped toward me, squeezing off shots, dropping and rolling as he fired to avoid the 12-gauge. I had no doubt that he was a practiced killer who knew the right moves. His chances of killing me would have been much better than my odds of wounding him.

The gun hung like an anchor at the end of his arm as he took two steps toward me, not in a threatening manner, but almost as though he wished to beseech me for something. These were heavy draft-horse steps that comported with the title, cheval, that Datura had given him.

I worried that Andre would come through the door next, with all the irresistible power of the locomotive of which he had initially reminded me.

Robert might then shake off his indecision-or whatever mood caused his inaction. The two could cut me down in a cross fire.

But I was not capable of blasting away at a man who didn't at this moment seem inclined to shoot me.

Although he'd drawn closer, I could see his dissolute face no more clearly than before. Still I had the unnerving impression that his eyes were frosted panes.

From him came another sound, which at first I thought must be a mumbled question. But when it came again, it seemed more like a stifled cough.

At last the hand with the gun came up from his side.

My impression was that he raised the weapon not with lethal purpose, but unconsciously, almost as though he had forgotten that he held it. Given what I knew of him-his devotion to Datura, his taste for blood, his evident participation in the brutal murder of Dr. Jessup-I couldn't wait for a clearer indication of his intent.

The recoil rocked me. He took the buckshot like the truck he was, and did not drop his handgun, and I pumped a round into the chamber and fired again, and the glass doors behind him dissolved because I must have pulled high or wide, so I pumped and fired a third time, and he staggered backward through the gap where the sliding doors had been.

Although he had still not dropped his weapon, he had not used it, either, and I doubted that a fourth shot was necessary. At least two of the first three rounds had hit him square and hard.

But I rushed toward him, hot to be done with this, almost as if the gun controlled me and wanted to be fully spent. The fourth round blew him off the balcony.

Only as I stepped to the shattered doors did I see what rain and perspective had previously concealed from me. The outermost third of the balcony must have broken away in the earthquake five years ago, taking with it the railing.

If any life had remained in him after three hits out of four rounds, a twelve-story fall would have taken it.

FORTY-SIX

KILLING ROBERT LEFT ME WEAK IN THE KNEES AND light in the head, but it did not nauseate me as I had half expected that it would. He was, after all, Cheval Robert, not a good husband or a kind father, or a pillar of his community.

Furthermore, I had the feeling that he had wanted me to do what I had done. He seemed to have embraced death as if it was a mercy.

As I backed away from the balcony doors and a sudden squall of rain that burst through them, I heard Datura screaming from some distant point of the twelfth floor. Her voice swelled like a siren as she approached at a run.

If I sprinted for the stairs, I would surely be caught in the hall before I reached them. She and Andre would be armed; and it defied reason to suppose that they would be afflicted with Robert's indecision.

I traded the living room of the suite for the bedroom to the right of the entry door. This place was darker than the previous room because the windows were smaller and because the rotting draperies had not fallen off their rods.

I didn't expect to find a hiding place. I just needed to buy time to reload.

Mindful of the shotgun fire that had drawn their attention, they would enter the living room cautiously. Most likely they would first lay down a volley of suppressing fire.

By the time one of them dared to explore this adjoining room, I would be ready for them. Or as ready as I would ever be. I had only four more shells, not an arsenal.

If luck was on my side, they didn't know where Robert's part of the search had led him-if he had been searching. They couldn't pinpoint, by the sound alone, precisely from where the shots had come.

Should they decide to search all the rooms along the secondary hallway, an opportunity might yet arise for me to get off the twelfth floor.

Much closer now, but not from within the suite, perhaps from the intersection of corridors, Datura shouted my name. She wasn't calling me out for a milkshake at the local soda fountain, but she sounded more excited than pissed.

The shotgun barrel, breech, and receiver were warm from the recent firing.

Leaning against a wall, shuddering as I remembered Robert plunging backward off the balcony, I plucked the first of the spare rounds from a pocket of my jeans. I fumbled in the shadows, clumsy at the unfamiliar task, trying to insert the shell into the breech.

"Can you hear me, Odd Thomas?" Datura shouted. "Can you hear me, boyfriend?"

The breech continued to defeat me, would not take the shell, and my hands began to shake, making the task more difficult.

"Was that shit what it seemed to be?" she shouted. "Was that a poltergeist, boyfriend?"

The standoff with Robert had prickled my face with sweat. The sound of Datura's voice turned the sweat to ice.