Brother Odd

As an offering, he produced three cigarettes of whatever he was smoking, and these were accepted.
        With solemn satisfaction, the three heads smoked in silence. After tossing the butts in the campfire, the creature departed, allowing Tommy to keep his head.
        Two words might explain Tommy's story: peyote buttons.
        The following day, however, after resuming his hike, Tommy came across the headless corpse of another hiker. The driver's license in the guy's wallet identified him as Curtis Hobart.
        Nearby was a severed head, but it was the one that had been on the center neck between the coyotes. It looked nothing like Curtis Hobart in the driver's-license photo.
        Using his satellite phone, Tommy Cloudwalker called the sheriff. Shimmering like mirages in the spring heat, the authorities arrived both overland and by helicopter.
        Later, the coroner declared that the head and the body did not belong together. They never located Curtis Hobart's head, and no body was ever found to go with the discarded head that had been dropped on the sand near Hobart's corpse.
        As I hurried after Boo, along the passageway toward the cooling tower, I did not know why Tommy's unlikely story should rise out of my memory swamp at this time. It didn't seem germane to my current situation.
        Later, all would clarify. Even on those occasions when I am as dumb as a duck run down by a truck, my busy subconscious is laboring overtime to save my butt.
        Boo went to the cooling tower, and after unlocking the fire door with my universal key, I followed him inside, where the fluorescent lights were on.
        We were at the bottom of the structure. It looked like a movie set through which James Bond would pursue a villain who had steel teeth and wore a double-barreled 12-gauge hat.
        A pair of thirty-foot-high sheet-metal towers rose above us. They were linked by horizontal ducts, accessed at different levels by a series of red catwalks.
        Inside the towers and perhaps in some of the smaller ducts, things were turning with loud thrumming and whisking noises, perhaps huge fan blades. Driven air hissed like peevish cats and whistled like catcalls.
        The walls were lined with at least forty large gray metal boxes, similar to junction boxes, except that each featured a large ON/OFF lever and two signal lights, one red and one green. Only green lights glowed at the moment.
        All green. A-OK. Good to go. Hunky-dory.
        The machinery offered numerous places where someone could hide; and the noise would make even the most lumbering assailant difficult to hear until he was on top of me; but I chose to take the green lights as a good omen.
        Had I been aboard the Titanic, I would have been standing on the listing deck, leaning against a railing, gazing at a falling star and wishing for a puppy for Christmas even as the band played "Nearer My God to Thee."
        Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I've been through, by now I should have lost one leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am.
        Both Boo and psychic magnetism had drawn me here, and when I proceeded warily into the big room, I discovered the attractant.
        Between two more banks of gray metal boxes, on a clear section of wall, hung Brother Timothy.

CHAPTER 31
        
        BROTHER TIM'S SHOD FEET DANGLED EIGHTEEN inches off the floor. Six feet above him at its apex, a 180 degree arc of thirteen peculiar white pegs had been driven into the concrete wall. From these pegs stretched white fibrous bands, like inch-wide lengths of cloth, by which he was suspended.
        One of the thirteen lines ended in his mussed hair. Two others terminated in the rolled-down hood bunched at the back of his neck, and the remaining ten disappeared into small rents in the shoulders, sleeves, and flanks of his tunic.
        The manner in which those lines had been fixed to him remained at every point concealed.
        With his head hung forward, with his arms spread out and angled up from his body, the intention to mock the crucifixion could not have been clearer.
        Although lacking visible wounds, he appeared to be dead. Famous for his blush, he was now whiter than pale, gray under the eyes. His slack facial muscles