Odd Thomas

housewife in too-cute, sailor-suit pajamas would really have the nerve to gut him alive.
        She brandished the knife as she shouted into the phone. "He's inside, he's right here!"
        Past her, on a far counter, smoke poured from a toaster. Some kind of pop-up pastry had failed to pop. It smelled like strawberries and smoldering rubber. The lady was having a bad morning.
        Harlo threw a bar stool at me and ran out of the family room, toward the front of the house.
        Ducking the stool, I said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry about the mess," and I went looking for Penny's killer.
        Behind me, the woman screamed, "Stevie, lock your door! Stevie, lock your door!"
        By the time I reached the foot of the open stairs in the foyer, Harlo had climbed to the landing.
        I saw why he had been drawn upward instead of fleeing the house: At the second floor stood a wide-eyed little boy, about five years old, wearing only undershorts. Holding a blue teddy bear by one of its feet, the kid looked as vulnerable as a puppy stranded in the middle of a busy freeway.
        Prime hostage material.
         "Stevie, lock your door!"
        Dropping the blue bear, the kid bolted for his room.
        Harlo charged up the second flight of stairs.
        Sneezing out the tickle of chlorine and the tang of burning strawberry jam, dripping, squishing, I ascended with somewhat less heroic flair than John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.
        I was more scared than my quarry because I had something to lose, not least of all Stormy Llewellyn and our future together that the fortune-telling machine had seemed to promise. If I encountered a husband with a handgun, he'd shoot me as unhesitatingly as he would Harlo.
        Overhead, a door slammed hard. Stevie had done as his mother instructed.
        If he'd had a pot of boiling lead, in the tradition of Quasimodo, Harlo Landerson would have poured it on me. Instead came a sideboard that evidently had stood in the second-floor hall, opposite the head of the stairs.
        Surprised to discover that I had the agility and the balance of a monkey, albeit a wet monkey, I scrambled off the stairs, onto the railing. The deadfall rocked past step by step, drawers gaping open and snapping shut repeatedly, as if the furniture were possessed by the spirit of a crocodile.
        Off the railing, up the stairs, I reached the second-floor hall as Harlo began to break down the kid's bedroom door.
        Aware that I was coming, he kicked harder. Wood splintered with a dry crack, and the door flew inward.
        Harlo flew with it, as if he'd been sucked out of the hall by an energy vortex.
        Rushing across the threshold, pushing aside the rebounding door, I saw the boy trying to wriggle under the bed. Harlo had seized him by the left foot.
        I snatched a smiling panda-bear lamp off the red nightstand and smashed it over Harlo's head. A ceramic carnage of perky black ears, fractured white face, black paws, and chunks of white belly exploded across the room.
        In a world where biological systems and the laws of physics functioned with the absolute dependability that scientists claim for them, Harlo would have dropped stone-cold unconscious as surely as the lamp shattered. Unfortunately, this isn't such a world.
        As love empowers some frantic mothers to find the superhuman strength to lift overturned cars to free their trapped children, so depravity gave Harlo the will to endure a panda pounding without significant effect. He let go of Stevie and rounded on me.
        Although his eyes lacked elliptical pupils, they reminded me of the eyes of a snake, keen with venomous intent, and though his bared teeth included no hooked or dramatically elongated canines, the rage of a rabid jackal gleamed in his silent snarl.
        This wasn't the person whom I had known in high school so few years ago, not the shy kid who found magic and meaning in the patient restoration of a Pontiac Firebird.
        Here was a diseased and twisted bramble of a soul, thorny and cankerous, which perhaps until recently had been imprisoned in a deep turning of Harlo's mental labyrinth. It had broken down the bars of its cell and climbed up through the castle keep, deposing the man who had been Harlo; and now it ruled.
        Released, Stevie squirmed all the way under his bed, but no bed offered shelter to me, and I had no blankets to pull over my