Forever Odd

a little cool. So I told her I had a friend who could see ghosts.”
        I closed my eyes.
        “I didn’t use your name at first, and at first she didn’t really believe me. But the stories I told her about you were so detailed and so unusual, she began to realize they were true.”
        The bomb at the mall had been a truck packed with hundreds of kilos of explosives. The detonator had been a crude device.
        “Our talks got to be so much fun. Then the sweetest thing. It seemed so sweet. She started calling me on her own time. It didn’t cost me anything anymore.”
        I opened my eyes and gazed at the package on the back of Danny’s chair. This was a lot more sophisticated than the truck bomb at the mall. It was meant to challenge me.
        “We didn’t always get around to talking about you,” Danny said. “I realize now, she was clever. She didn’t want to be obvious.”
        Careful not to disturb the carpenter’s level, I traced a coiled red wire with one finger, and then a straighter yellow wire. Then green.
        “But after a while,” Danny continued, “I didn’t have any more to tell her about you… except the thing at the mall last year. That was such a big story nationwide, all over the newspapers and TV so then she knew your name.”
        Black wire, blue wire, white wire, red again… Neither the sight of them nor the feel of them against my fingertip engaged my sixth sense.
        “I’m so sorry, Odd. So damn sorry. I sold you out.”
        I said, “Not for money. For love. That’s different.”
        “I don’t love her.”
        “All right. Not love. For the hope of love.”
        Frustrated by the indecipherable wiring of the bomb, I went around to the front of the chair.
        Danny rubbed his right wrist, around which the duct tape had been drawn so tight that it had left angry red impressions in his skin.
        “For the hope of love,” I repeated. “What friend wouldn’t cut you a little slack in a case like that?”
        Tears welled in his eyes.
        “Listen,” I said, “you and I weren’t meant to have our tickets punched in a cheesy casino resort. If fate says we’ve got to croak in a hotel, then we’ll rent a suite someplace that rates five stars. You okay?”
        He nodded.
        Tucking my backpack in among the earthquake-pitched furniture where it was unlikely to be found, I said, “I know why they brought you here, of all places. If she thinks somehow I can conjure spirits, she figures a bunch of them have to be hanging around this joint. But why through the flood-control tunnels?”
        “She’s beyond psychotic, Odd. It never came across on the phone, or maybe I didn’t want to hear it when I was… romancing her. Damn. That’s pathetic. Anyway, she’s a weird kind of crazy, delusional but not stupid, a real hard-nosed nutty bitch. She wanted to bring me to the Panamint by an unusual route, something that would be a serious test of your psychic magnetism, prove to her it was real. And there’s something else going on with her…”
        His hesitation told me that this something else would not be a cheerful revelation, such as that Datura had taken up gospel singing or that she had baked my favorite cake.
        “She wants you to show her ghosts. She thinks you can summon them, make them speak. I never told her anything like that, it’s just what she insists on believing. But she wants something else, too. I don’t know why…” He thought about it, shook his head. “But I get the feeling she wants to kill you.”
        “I seem to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Danny, last night in the alley behind the Blue Moon Cafe-someone fired a shotgun.”
        “One of her guys. The one you found dead.”
        “Who was he shooting at?”
        “Me. They were careless for a moment as we were getting out of the van. I tried to make a break for the street. The shotgun was a warning to stop.”
        He wiped his eyes with one hand. Three of the fingers, once having been broken, were larger than they should have been and misshapen by excess bone.
        “I shouldn’t have stopped,” he said. “I should’ve kept running. All they could have done was shoot me in the back. Then we wouldn’t be here.”
        I went to him and poked the yellow lightning bolt on the front of his black T-shirt. “No more of that. You keep swimming in that direction, soon you’ll find yourself drowning in self-pity. That