Forever Odd

crisscrossing lengths of imitation bamboo that supported the densely thatched roof of plastic palm fronds, and as I hurried past, they flapped and shrilled to warn me off.
        By the time I rounded the pool and reached the back entrance to the hotel, I’d had a chance to draw a lesson from the unseen birds. Broken, burned, abandoned, wind-worn, sand-scoured, even if more structurally sound than not, the Panamint Resort and Spa no longer merited even a single star in the Michelin Guide; but it might have become the home to various desert fauna that found the place more hospitable than their usual holes in the ground.
        In addition to the threat posed by the mystery woman and her two murderous male friends, I would need to be alert for predators that had no mobile phones.
        The sliding glass doors at the back of the hotel, shattered in the quake, had been replaced with sheets of plywood to deny easy access to the morbidly curious. Stapled to these panels were plastic sleeves holding notices of the vigorous civil actions that would be taken against anyone caught on the premises.
        The screws that held one of the sheets of plywood in place had been removed, and the panel had been laid aside. Judging by the sand and scraps of weeds that had drifted over the panel, it had not been taken down as recently as the past twenty-four hours, but weeks or months ago.
        For two years or so after the destruction of the resort, the tribe had paid for a roving security patrol 24/7. As the suits and counter-suits proliferated and the likelihood grew that the property might be surrendered to creditors-much to the creditors’ horror-the patrols had become an expense it no longer made sense to incur.
        With the hotel open before me, with a breeze churning itself into a wind at my back, with a storm coming and Danny at risk, I nevertheless hesitated to cross the threshold. I am not as fragile as Danny Jessup, neither physically nor emotionally, yet everyone has a breaking point.
        I delayed not because of the people or the other living menaces that lurked in the ruined resort. I was given pause, instead, by the thought of the lingering dead who might still haunt its soot-stained spaces.

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    TWENTY-THREE
        
        INSIDE THE REAR DOORS OF THE HOTEL LAY WHAT might have been a secondary lobby illuminated only by ashen light that sifted through the gap in the plywood barrier.
        My shadow before me, a gray ghost, was visible from its legs to its neck. Its head became one with the murk, as though it were cast by a decapitated man.
        I switched on a flashlight and swept the walls. The fire itself had not raged here, but smoke stains mottled everything.
        At first the presence of furniture-sofas, armchairs-surprised me, as it seemed they should have been salvaged. Then I realized that their grungy condition resulted not simply from smoke and from five years of abandonment, but also from having been saturated by fire hoses, which had left their stuffing sodden and their frames badly warped.
        Even five years after the tragedy, the air smelled of char, of scorched metal, of melted plastics, of fried insulation. Underlying that miasma were other smells less astringent but also less pleasing, which perhaps were best left unanalyzed.
        Footprints patterned the carpet of soot, ashes, dust, and sand. Danny’s unique tracks were not among them.
        On closer inspection, I saw that none of the tread patterns of the shoes appeared crisp. They had been smoothed by drafts, softened by later siftings of ashes and dust.
        These prints had been made weeks if not months ago. My quarry had not entered by this route.
        A set or perhaps two sets of paw prints looked fresh. Maybe the Panamints of a hundred years ago-close to nature and unfamiliar with the roulette wheel-could have read these impressions at a glance.
        With nothing of the tracker in my heritage and nothing in my fry-cook training applicable to the problem, I had to rely not on knowledge but on imagination to summon a creature to fit those tracks. My mind leapt directly to an image of a saber-toothed tiger, though that species had been extinct over ten thousand years.
        In the unlikely event that a single immortal saber-tooth had survived millennia beyond all others of his species, I supposed I could escape intact from a confrontation. After all, I had thus far survived