Odd Thomas

problem. Certain kinds of weirdness can be hip, but screwed-upness never is."
        "Exactly."
        "It wasn't gentlemanly of me to deny you your weirdness."
        "Apology accepted."
        We cruised for a while, using the car as a dowser uses his rod to seek water, until I found myself pulling into the parking lot of Green Moon Lanes. This is a bowling alley half a mile from the mall where earlier in the day I had visited Stormy at the icecream shop.
        She knows about the recurring dream that has disturbed my sleep once or twice a month for the past three years. It features dead bowling-alley employees: gut-shot, limbs shattered, faces hideously disfigured not by a few bullets but by barrages.
        "He's here?" Stormy asked.
        "I don't know."
        "Is it coming true now, tonight - the dream?"
        "I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe."
        The fish tacos were swimming the acidic currents of my stomach, churning a bitter backwash into my throat.
        My palms were damp. And cold. I blotted them on my jeans.
        I almost wanted to drive back to Stormy's place and get her gun.
        

CHAPTER 22
        
        THE BOWLING-CENTER PARKING LOT WAS TWO-thirds full. I circled, searching for Robertson's Explorer, but I couldn't find it.
        Finally I parked and switched off the engine.
        Stormy opened the passenger's door, and I said, "Wait."
        "Don't make me call you Mulder," she warned.
        Staring at the green and blue neon letters that spelled out Green Moon Lanes, I hoped to get a sense of whether the slaughter I had foreseen was imminent or still some distance in the future. The neon failed to speak to my sixth sense.
        The architect for the bowling center had designed it with a responsible awareness of the expense involved in air-conditioning a large building in the Mojave. The squat structure, which featured low ceilings inside, thwarted heat transfer by using a minimum of glass. Pale beige stucco walls reflected the sun during the day and cooled quickly with the coming of night.
        In the past this building had not seemed ominous; its character impressed me only because of the efficiency of design, for it had the clean lines and the plain facade of most modern buildings in the desert. Now it reminded me of a munitions bunker, and I sensed that a tremendous explosion might soon occur within its walls. Munitions bunker, crematorium, tomb…
        "The employees here wear black slacks and blue cotton shirts with white collars," I told Stormy.
        "So?"
        "In my dream, the victims all wear tan slacks and green polo shirts."
        Still in her seat but with one leg out of the Mustang, one foot on the blacktop, she said, "Then this isn't the place. There's some other reason you cruised here. It's safe to go inside, see if we can figure out why we're here."
        "Over at Fiesta Bowl," I said, referring to the only other bowling center in Pico Mundo and surrounding environs, "they wear gray slacks and black shirts with their names stitched in white on the breast pockets."
        "Then your dream must be about something that's going to happen outside Pico Mundo."
        "That's never been the case before."
        I have lived my entire life in the relative peace of Pico Mundo and the territory immediately encircling it. I have not even seen the farther reaches of Maravilla County, of which our town is the county seat.
        If I were to live to be eighty, which is unlikely and which is a prospect that I view with despondency if not despair, I might one day venture into the open countryside and even as far as one of the smaller towns in the county. But perhaps not.
        I don't desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home - and my sanity depends upon it.
        In a city the size of Los Angeles, with so many people crammed atop one another, violence occurs daily, hourly. The number of bloody encounters in a single year might be greater than those in the entire history of Pico Mundo.
        The aggressive whirl of Los Angeles traffic produces death as surely as a bakery produces muffins. Earthquakes, apartment-house fires, terrorist incidents…
        I can only imagine how many lingering dead people haunt the streets of that metropolis or any other. In such a place, with so many of the deceased turning to me for justice