Brother Odd

in a library."
        "Was your mother a librarian?"
        "No," he said. "She was an assassin."
        "An assassin."
        "That is correct."
        "Do you mean assassin figuratively or literally, sir?"
        "Both, Mr. Thomas. When driving behind me, please remain at a safe distance. Even with four-wheel drive and chains, there is some danger of sliding."
        "I feel like I've been sliding all day. I'll be careful, sir."
        "If you do start to slide, turn the wheel into the direction of the slide. Do not try to pull out of it. And use the brakes gently." He walked to the other SUV and opened the driver's door.
        Before he climbed behind the wheel, I said, "Sir, lock your doors. And if you see anything unusual in the storm, don't get out of the truck to have a closer look at it. Keep driving."
        "Unusual? Such as?"
        "Oh, you know, anything unusual. Say like a snowman with three heads or someone who looks like she might be my Aunt Cymry"
        Romanovich could peel an apple with his stare.
        With a little good-luck wave, I got into my truck, and after a moment, he got into his.
        After he drove around me to the foot of the ramp, I pulled in behind him.
        He used his remote opener, and at the top of the incline, the big door began to roll up.
        Beyond the garage lay a chaos of bleak light, shrieking wind, and a perpetual avalanche of falling snow.

CHAPTER 35
        
        IN FRONT OF ME, RODION ROMANOVICH DROVE out of the garage into hammers of wind and shatters of snow, and I switched on my headlamps. The drowned daylight required them in this feathered rain.
        Even as those beams brought sparkle to the dull white curtains of snow, Elvis materialized in the passenger seat as though I had switched him on, as well.
        He was dressed in his navy-frogman scuba suit from Easy Come, Easy Go, possibly because he thought I needed a laugh.
        The black neoprene hood fitted tightly to his head, covering his hair, his ears, and his forehead to the eyebrows. With his face thus isolated, the sensuous quality of his features was weirdly enhanced, but not to good effect. He looked not like a navy frogman but rather like a sweet little bow-lipped Kewpie doll that some pervert had dressed in a bondage costume.
        "Oh, man, that movie," I said. "With that one, you gave new meaning to the word ridiculous."
        He laughed soundlessly, pretended to shoot me with a spear gun, and phased from the scuba suit into the Arabian costume he had worn in Harum Scarum.
        "You're right," I agreed, "that one was even worse."
        When making his music, he had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scripts for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.
        I drove out of the garage, stopped, and thumbed the remote to put down the door behind me.
        Using the rearview mirror, I watched until the door had closed entirely, prepared to shift into reverse and run down any fugitive from a nightmare that tried to enter the garage.
        Apparently calculating the correct path of the driveway by a logical analysis of the topography, Romanovich plowed without error north-by-northwest, exposing blacktop as he ascended in a gentle curve.
        Some of the scooped-away snow spilled back onto the pavement in his wake. I lowered my plow until it barely skimmed the blacktop, and cleaned up after him. I remained at the requested safe distance, both out of respect for his experience and because I didn't want him to report me to his mother, the assassin.
        Wind skirled as though a dozen Scottish funerals were under way. Concussive blasts rocked the SUV, and I was grateful that it was an extended model with a lower point of gravity, further anchored by the heavy plow.
        The snow was so dry and the blow so relentlessly scolding that nothing stuck to the windshield. I didn't turn on the wipers.
        Scanning the slope ahead, left and right, checking the mirrors, I expected to see one or more of the bone beasts out for a lark in the blizzard. The white torrents foiled vision almost as effectively as a sandstorm in the Mojave, but the stark geometric lines of the creatures, by contrast, ought to draw the eye in this comparatively soft sweep of