Odd Thomas

apologies."
        "What happened to your forehead?"
        "A fork."
        "A fork?"
        "Yes, sir. I wish I'd been eating with a spoon."
        "You stabbed yourself with a fork?"
        "It flipped."
        "Flipped?"
        "The fork."
        "A flipped fork?"
        "It flicked my forehead."
        Pausing in the counting of my change, he gave me a narrow look.
        "That's right," I said, "A flipped fork flicked my forehead."
        He decided not to have any further involvement with me. He gave me my change, bagged the items, and returned to the sports pages.
        In the men's room at the service station next door, I washed my bloody face, cleaned the wound, treated it with Bactine, and applied a compress of paper towels. The punctures and scratches were shallow, and the bleeding soon stopped.
        This wasn't the first time - nor the last - that I wished my supernatural gift included the power to heal.
        Band-Aid applied, I returned to the Chevy. Sitting behind the wheel, engine running, air-conditioning vents aimed at my face, I chugged cold Pepsi.
        Only bad news on my wristwatch - 10:48.
        My muscles ached. My eyes were sore. I felt tired, weak. Maybe my wits hadn't shifted into low gear, as they seemed to have, but I didn't like my chances if I had to go one-on-one with Robertson's kill buddy, who must have enjoyed a better night's sleep than I had.
        I'd taken two caffeine tablets no more than an hour ago, so I couldn't justify swilling down two more. Besides, already the acid in my stomach had soured into a corrosive strength sufficient to etch steel, and I had grown simultaneously exhausted and jumpy, which is not a condition conducive to survival.
        Although I had no person - no name, no description - as a focus for my psychic magnetism, I drove at random through Pico Mundo, hoping to be brought to a place of enlightenment.
        The brilliant Mojave day burned at white-hot ferocity. The air itself seemed to be on fire, as if the sun - by speed of light, less than eight and a half minutes from Earth - had gone nova eight minutes ago, giving us nothing more than this dazzling glare as a short warning of our impending bright death.
        Each flare and flicker of light flashing off the windshield seemed to score my eyes. I hadn't brought my sunglasses. The searing glare soon spawned a headache that made a fork in the brow seem like a tickle by comparison.
        Turning aimlessly from street to street, trusting intuition to guide me, I found myself in Shady Ranch, one of the newer residential developments on the Pico Mundo hills that a decade ago were home to nothing more dangerous than rattlesnakes. Now people lived here, and perhaps one of them was a sociopathic monster plotting mass murder in upper-middle-class suburban comfort.
        Shady Ranch had never been a ranch of any kind; it wasn't one now, unless you counted houses as a crop. As for shade, these hills enjoyed less of it than most neighborhoods in the heart of town because the trees were far from maturity.
        I parked in my father's driveway but didn't at once switch off the engine. I needed time to gather my nerve for this encounter.
        Like those who lived in it, this Mediterranean-style house had little character. Below the red-tile roof, ornament-free planes of beige stucco and glass met at unsurprising angles arrived at less by architectural genius than by the dictates of lot size and shape.
        Leaning closer to a dashboard vent, I closed my eyes against the rush of chilled air. Ghost lights drifted across the backs of my eyelids, retinal memories of the desert glare, strangely soothing for a moment - until the wound in Robertson's chest rose from deeper memory.
        I switched off the engine, got out of the car, went to the house, and rang my father's doorbell.
        At this hour in the morning, he was likely to be home. He had never worked a day in his life and seldom rose before nine or ten o'clock.
        My father answered, surprised to see me. "Odd, you didn't call to say you were coming."
        "No," I agreed. "Didn't call."
        My father is forty-five, a handsome man with thick hair still more black than silver. He has a lean athletic body of which he is proud to the point of vanity.
        Barefoot, he wore only khaki shorts slung low across his hips. His tan had been assiduously cultivated with oils,