You're playing eighteen holes of golf, and your ball goes into the woods. Retrieving it, you're bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. Don't bother calling 911 on your cell phone. You can finish the round with aplomb if you simply concentrate on the game and forget all about the annoying snake.

No matter how many beers you have consumed, I trust that you get my point. Datura was a spike through my foot, a snake with fangs sunk into my hand. Trying not to think about that woman, under these circumstances, was like being in a room with an angry naked sumo wrestler and trying not to think about him.

At least she had revealed her intentions. Now I knew that she knew about reverse psychic magnetism. She might fall upon me when I least expected it, but I would no longer be entirely surprised when she decapitated me and drank my blood.

She had stopped shouting.

I waited tensely, unnerved by the silence.

Not thinking about her had been easier when she was yammering than when she shut up.

A rattle and blur of rain on the window. Thunder. A threnody of wind.

Ozzie Boone, mentor and man of letters, would like that word. Threnody: a dirge, a lamentation, a song for the dead.

While I played hide-and-seek with a madwoman in a burned-out hotel, Ozzie was probably sitting in his cozy study, sipping thick hot cocoa, nibbling pecan cookies, already writing the first novel in his new series about a detective who is also a pet communicator. Maybe he would title it Threnody for a Hamster.

This threnody, of course, would be for Robert: full of lead shot and broken, twelve stories below.

After a while, I checked the luminous face of my wristwatch. I consulted it every few minutes until a quarter of an hour had passed.

I wasn't enthusiastic about returning to the corridor. On the other hand, I didn't have any enthusiasm about staying where I was, either.

In addition to Kleenex, a bottle of water, and a few other items of no value for a man in my fix, my backpack held the fishing knife.

The sharpest blade wasn't a match for a shotgun, assuming she had one, but it was better than attacking her with a packet of Kleenex. I couldn't carve anyone, not even Datura. Using a firearm is daunting, but it allows you to kill at some distance. Any gun is less intimate than a knife. Killing her intimately, up close and personal, her blood pouring back along the handle of the knife: That required a different Odd Thomas from a parallel dimension, one who was cruder than I and less worried about cleanliness.

Armed with only my bare hands and attitude, I finally returned to the living room of the suite. No Datura.

The corridor-where she had recently prowled, shouting-was deserted.

The shotgun blasts had brought her at a run from the north end of the building. Most likely she had been monitoring those stairs, and had now returned to them.

I glanced at the south stairs, but if Andre waited anywhere, he waited there. I might have attitude, but Andre had gravitas. And for sure, in a fistfight, he would leave me in the condition of a pack of saltines after he had crushed them to put in his soup.

She hadn't known where I was when she had stood here shouting, had not known with certainty that I could hear her. But she had told me the truth about her plan: no search, just patience, counting on a chilling kind of kismet.

FORTY-EIGHT

WITH THE STAIRS AND ELEVATOR SHAFT OFF-LIMITS, I had only those resources that the twelfth floor offered.

I thought of the kilo of gelignite, or whatever they called it these days. A quantity of explosives that could reduce a large house to matchsticks ought to be of some use to a young fellow as desperate as I was.

Although I'd received no training in the handling of explosives, I had the benefit of paranormal insight. Yes, my gift had gotten me into this mess; but if it didn't get me in deeper, it might get me out.

I also had that can-do American spirit, which should never be underestimated.

According to the history I've learned from movies, Alexander Graham Bell, fiddling around with some cans and wire, invented the telephone, with the help of his assistant Watson, who was also an associate of Sherlock Holmes, and achieved great success after enduring the scorn and naysaying of lesser men for ninety minutes.

Weathering the scorn and naysaying of a remarkably similar set of lesser men, Thomas Edison, another great American, invented the electric lightbulb, the phonograph, the first sound movie camera, and the alkaline battery, among a slew of other things, also in ninety minutes, and looked like Spencer Tracy.

When he was my age, Tom Edison looked like Mickey Rooney, had invented a number of clever devices, and already exhibited the self-confidence to ignore the negativism of the naysayers. Edison, Mickey Rooney, and I were all Americans, so there was reason to believe that by studying the components of the now dismantled bomb, I might tinker together a useful weapon.

Besides, I didn't see any other prospects.

After slinking along the main corridor and slipping into Room 1242, where Danny had been held captive, I switched on my flashlight and discovered that Datura had taken away the package of explosives. Maybe she didn't want it to fall into my hands or maybe she had a use for it, or perhaps she just wanted it for sentimental reasons.

I didn't see any healthy purpose in dwelling on what use she might have for a bomb, so I switched off my light and moved to the window. By the pallid lamp of the fading day, I examined Terri's phone, which Datura had hammered against the bathroom counter.

When I flipped the phone open, the screen brightened. I would have been heartened if it had presented a logo, a recognizable image, or data of some kind. Instead, there was only a meaningless blue-and-yellow mottle.

I keyed in seven digits, Chief Porter's mobile number, but they did not appear on the screen. I pressed send and listened. Nothing.

Had I lived a century earlier, I might have fiddled with scraps of this and that until, in the can-do spirit, I jury-rigged a nifty communications device, but things were more complicated these days. Even Edison could not have, on the spot, tinkered up a new microchip brain board.

Disappointed by Room 1242, I returned to the corridor. Much less daylight penetrated from the rooms with open doors than had been the case even half an hour earlier. The hallways would go dark at least an hour before dusk actually arrived.

Although plagued by the creepy feeling of being watched, though visibility was so poor that I couldn't dismiss these heebie-jeebies as groundless, I avoided using the flashlight while in the corridor. Andre and Datura had guns; the light would make of me an easy target.

Inside each room that I explored, once I closed the door behind me, I felt safe enough to resort to the flashlight. I had searched some of these spaces previously, when I'd been looking for a hidey-hole in which to stash Danny. I had not found in them what I wanted then; and I didn't find what I needed now.

Deep down, in that coziest corner of the heart, where a belief in miracles abides even in the darkest hours, I expected to stumble upon some long-dead hotel guest's suitcase in which would be packed a loaded pistol. Although a handgun would have been acceptable, I preferred to discover a freight elevator isolated from the bank of public lifts, or a roomy dumbwaiter leading to the kitchen on the ground floor.

Eventually I discovered a service closet about ten feet deep and fourteen wide. Cleaning supplies, bars of guest soap, and spare lightbulbs stocked the shelves. Vacuum sweepers, buckets, and mops were tumbled on the floor.

The sprinkler system that had failed elsewhere appeared to have overperformed here, or perhaps a water line had burst. Part of the ceiling had collapsed; and swags of Sheetrock, obviously once waterlogged, drooped into the room around the edges of the void.