He said, “I was raised by Jesuits, you know. They were fierce disciplinarians. I lived in horror of the Prior and his punishments, so much so that, as a boy, I developed a morbid revulsion from any behavior that might be considered bad. I came to fear my own capacity for evil and error, which developed into a dread of authority that was almost phobic.”
Perhaps it was best that I not ask what capacity for evil the director of Psycho had worried about in himself. But then it turned out to be less than I might have imagined.
“As an adult, I loved to drive, to be behind the wheel with open road ahead. But I so dreaded being stopped by a traffic cop—dreaded it like death, Mr. Thomas—that I hardly ever drove. I left all the driving to Alma or hired drivers even before I could afford to hire them. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing, so that you retreat from many aspects of life, is a terrible error in itself.”
If I’d had a father capable of wisdom and interested in passing it along to a son, this might have been what it would have felt like.
I said, “My girl, Stormy Llewellyn, she was the best person I’ve ever known. She was amazing, sir. She believed that this life is not the first of two but the first of three.”
“Quite the philosopher for a young lady who worked in an ice-cream shop,” he said sincerely, not with a wry edge.
After the scene that I had just witnessed, nothing more could surprise me that night.
I said, “Stormy called this life boot camp. She said we have to persevere through all this world’s obstacles and all the wounds that it inflicts if we want to earn a second life. We’re in training, see. After boot camp, there’s what she called service. Our life of service will be full of tremendous adventure, as if you had rolled all the adventure novels ever written into one.”
“And the third life, Mr. Thomas?”
“She thought that after we finish service, then we receive our eternal life.”
I stopped, withdrew my wallet from a hip pocket, and opened it to the plastic window in which I kept the card. I could read it in the moonlight. In fact, I could have read it in the dark: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
“We got it from a fortune-telling machine in an arcade at a carnival when we were just sixteen.”
“Gypsy Mummy,” he said, naming the machine. “Quite a colorful device. I might have used it in a movie if I’d made a few more.”
I looked up from the card and met his stare. The kindness in his eyes reminded me of my closest friends in Pico Mundo.
An owl hooted nearby, and a more distant owl responded. Two ordinary owls in an ordinary night.
“I believe this card, sir. I trust it totally. I’m sure it’s the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
He smiled and nodded.
“What do you think, sir? I’d really like to know. What do you think about the card?”
“You’re not ready to leave this world yet, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t think it’ll be much longer. It’s all coming around to how it started in Pico Mundo nineteen months ago.”
“What must be will be.”
I smiled. “You sound like Annamaria now.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” he asked, which gave me something to think about.
Putting away my wallet, I said, “Boot camp. Sometimes, sir, the training seems unnecessarily hard.”
“In retrospect, it won’t,” he assured me.
Mr. Hitchcock walked with me all the way to the car. He pointed not to the front door on the starboard side but to the door behind it, which served the long passenger compartment, and the power window purred down.
I leaned into the window and saw the children crammed into the back of the limousine, a couple of them sitting on the floor. None of them appeared to be uncomfortable. They looked tired but awake, wide awake.
They were silent, but they were not afraid. Neither I nor they needed to say anything just then.
Boo was lying on the floor at Verena Stanhope’s feet. The girl gave me two thumbs up.
I withdrew my head, and the window purred shut.
“I’m not sure how we handle it from here,” I said.
“Mrs. Fischer will know exactly.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I began to take off my shoulder holsters. “I guess I’d be surprised if she didn’t.”
He pointed to the moon. Although the night sky appeared to be clear around that sphere, there must have been thin mist or dust at some altitude to diffract its light, for the moon had developed a corona, concentric circles changing color outward from pale blue to purple-red.
“Quite a visual,” he said. “Nicely moody. You could do it as a trick shot, of course, but the real thing is prettier.”
“I still can’t get used to you talking.” I turned my back to him, and he unbuckled the bulletproof vest. “I sure wish we had time to discuss your movies. I have at least a thousand questions.”
“I’m not about movies anymore, Mr. Thomas.”
Turning to him, I said, “Will I be seeing you again, sir?”
“One cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
He put a forefinger to his lips, as if to say
that we must not discuss such things.
As he began to rise off the ground, he said, by way of good-bye, “Oddie.”
“Hitch.”
He didn’t merely ascend straight up, but also moved away from me laterally as he rose into the darkness, fast and then faster, until he vanished behind a remaining patch of clouds.
What a wonderful ham he was.
An owl hooted and another owl returned the call. Two ordinary owls in an extraordinary night, in a world unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable by the living.
Thirty-eight
ALTHOUGH THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TAXING DAY FOR a woman of Mrs. Fischer’s age, she appeared to be fresh and alert as she piloted the Mercedes limousine down from the forested heights toward the flats where cactus and mesquite flourished.
Glancing at me, she said, “How are you, child?”
After a long moment of silence while I considered my condition, I said, “It’s getting easier, and that scares me.”
“You mean the killing.”
The guns, the Kevlar vest, and the utility belt were piled on the floor in front of my seat. My feet straddled all that gear.
“Yes, ma’am. The killing.”
“How many.”
“Five.”
I thought of Jinx. How blue the eye beneath the yellow contact lens. I wondered how much different she would have looked without the Goth makeup and the attitude.
Mrs. Fischer said, “You know what they were—those people. You know what they had done and would have done.”
“Yes, ma’am. And I only did what I had to do. But it was still too easy.”
“Maybe that was because they were such worse people than you’ve had to deal with before.”
“Maybe.”
We reached the flats, passed Jeb’s Trading Post, the clusters of modest houses, and then the sprawling complex of large buildings that might have been warehouses. At the interstate, Mrs. Fischer headed east toward Las Vegas.
Four of the children had been snatched from Vegas, but not the others. “Where are we going, ma’am?”