Forever Odd

comes down on an old board, and a six-inch spike spears your metatarsal arch, penetrating all the way through your instep. No need to cancel your plans and seek out a doctor. You’ll be fine if you just don’t think about that big sharp rusty spike sticking through your foot.
        You’re playing eighteen holes of golf, and your ball goes into the woods. Retrieving it, you’re bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. Don’t bother calling 911 on your cell phone. You can finish the round with aplomb if you simply concentrate on the game and forget all about the annoying snake.
        No matter how many beers you have consumed, I trust that you get my point. Datura was a spike through my foot, a snake with fangs sunk into my hand. Trying not to think about that woman, under these circumstances, was like being in a room with an angry naked sumo wrestler and trying not to think about him .
        At least she had revealed her intentions. Now I knew that she knew about reverse psychic magnetism. She might fall upon me when I least expected it, but I would no longer be entirely surprised when she decapitated me and drank my blood.
        She had stopped shouting.
        I waited tensely, unnerved by the silence.
        Not thinking about her had been easier when she was yammering than when she shut up.
        A rattle and blur of rain on the window. Thunder. A threnody of wind.
        Ozzie Boone, mentor and man of letters, would like that word. Threnody : a dirge, a lamentation, a song for the dead.
        While I played hide-and-seek with a madwoman in a burned-out hotel, Ozzie was probably sitting in his cozy study, sipping thick hot cocoa, nibbling pecan cookies, already writing the first novel in his new series about a detective who is also a pet communicator. Maybe he would title it Threnody for a Hamster .
        This threnody, of course, would be for Robert: full of lead shot and broken, twelve stories below.
        After a while, I checked the luminous face of my wristwatch. I consulted it every few minutes until a quarter of an hour had passed.
        I wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to the corridor. On the other hand, I didn’t have any enthusiasm about staying where I was, either.
        In addition to Kleenex, a bottle of water, and a few other items of no value for a man in my fix, my backpack held the fishing knife.
        The sharpest blade wasn’t a match for a shotgun, assuming she had one, but it was better than attacking her with a packet of Kleenex. I couldn’t carve anyone, not even Datura. Using a firearm is daunting, but it allows you to kill at some distance. Any gun is less intimate than a knife. Killing her intimately, up close and personal, her blood pouring back along the handle of the knife: That required a different Odd Thomas from a parallel dimension, one who was cruder than I and less worried about cleanliness.
        Armed with only my bare hands and attitude, I finally returned to the living room of the suite. No Datura.
        The corridor-where she had recently prowled, shouting-was deserted.
        The shotgun blasts had brought her at a run from the north end of the building. Most likely she had been monitoring those stairs, and had now returned to them.
        I glanced at the south stairs, but if Andre waited anywhere, he waited there. I might have attitude, but Andre had gravitas. And for sure, in a fistfight, he would leave me in the condition of a pack of saltines after he had crushed them to put in his soup.
        She hadn’t known where I was when she had stood here shouting, had not known with certainty that I could hear her. But she had told me the truth about her plan: no search, just patience, counting on a chilling kind of kismet.

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    FORTY-EIGHT
        
        WITH THE STAIRS AND ELEVATOR SHAFT OFF-LIMITS, I had only those resources that the twelfth floor offered.
        I thought of the kilo of gelignite, or whatever they called it these days. A quantity of explosives that could reduce a large house to matchsticks ought to be of some use to a young fellow as desperate as I was.
        Although I’d received no training in the handling of explosives, I had the benefit of paranormal insight. Yes, my gift had gotten me into this mess; but if it didn’t get me in deeper, it might get me out.
        I also had that can-do American spirit, which should never be underestimated.
        According to the history I’ve