Odd Thomas

might be less of a hothead and more cunning than he had appeared to be when he'd stood in the graveyard, flipping us the finger.
        Perhaps he suspected that I was wedging the door shut with my body and that I would snap the lock in place the instant that he tried to shove into the sacristy. Insane as he might be, he would nonetheless have some intuition of his own.
        The Bob Robertson who left his kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, banana peels, and crumbs was too sloppy to be a wise strategist. The Robertson who kept the neat study and maintained the meticulous files in those cabinets of dread was, however, a different man from the one whose living room had featured drifts of sleazy magazines and well-read paperback romances.
        I couldn't know which Bob Robertson might be, at this moment, beyond the door.
        When I glanced at Stormy, she made a gesture that meant either "get on with it" or "up yours."
        Leaning against the door with undiminished purpose, I turned the knob all the way to the left. It squeaked. I would have been amazed if it hadn't.
        I shifted my weight and let the door ease open half an inch… an inch… and all the way.
        If Robertson waited at either entrance to the sacristy, he was outside in the churchyard. Standing in the ruddy reduction of the last red light, he must have looked like something that belonged under a granite headstone.
        Stormy stepped away from her station. Together we quickly returned to the sanctuary from which we had been so eager to flee only two minutes ago.
        The moth danced across the light, and again Christ seemed to twist upon the cross.
        The lingering incense smelled not sweet, as before, but had a new astringency, and the votive flames throbbed with the urgency of arterial aneurysms about to burst.
        Down the ambulatory, past the choir enclosure, through the gate in the communion railing, I half expected Robertson to spring at us from unlikely cover. He had grown into such a menacing figure in my mind that I would not have been surprised if he had dropped upon us from the vaulted ceiling, suddenly having sprouted wings, a furious dark angel with death upon his breath.
        We were in the main aisle when a great crash and shattering of glass shook away the churchly silence behind us. We spun, we looked, but saw no wreckage.
        The sacristy had been windowless, and there'd been no glass in the door to the churchyard. Nevertheless, that chamber, which we'd just left, seemed to be the source of these sounds of destruction. They rose again, louder than before.
        I heard what might have been the vesting bench slamming against the vestment closets, heard wine bottles smashing, heard the silver chalice and other sacred vessels ricocheting off walls and cabinets with a reverberant metallic clatter.
        In our haste to escape, we had left the light on in that room. Now, through the open door, secondhand movement was visible: a farrago of leaping shadows and flares of shimmery light.
        I didn't know what was happening, and I didn't intend to return to the sacristy for a look. Holding Stormy's hand again, I ran with her along the center aisle, the length of the nave, and through a door into the narthex.
        Out of the church, down the steps, we fled into a twilight that had nearly bled to death, had little red left to give, and had begun to pull purple shrouds over the streets of Pico Mundo.
        For a moment I couldn't fit the trembling key in the Mustang's ignition. Stormy urged me to hurry, as if hurrying weren't already my intention, and finally the key mated as it should, and the engine roared to life.
        Leaving a significant offering of rubber in front of St. Bart's, we traveled a block and a half on smoking tires, so fast that we almost seemed to have teleported, before I had the breath to say, "Call the chief."
        She had a cell phone of her own, and she entered Wyatt Porter's home number as I gave it to her. She waited as it rang, said, "Chief, it's Stormy," listened, and said, "Yeah, it does sound like a weather report, doesn't it. Odd needs to speak to you."
        I took the phone and blurted, "Sir, if you send a car to St. Bart's real quick, you might catch that Robertson guy trashing the sacristy, maybe more than the sacristy, maybe the whole church."
        He put me on hold and made a call on another line.
        Three blocks from