Odd Thomas

was an isolated property; no one should have been near enough to have his curiosity pricked by the grumbling engine. If other intruders were already on the grounds, however, the noise would mask the sound of their movements.
        I couldn't deal with two things at once. Getting the corpse out of sight took precedence over dealing with the coyotes.
        By the time I returned, maybe the predators would have gone, led away by the scent of rabbits or other easy game.
        I dragged the wrapped cadaver across the threshold, into the Quonset hut, and then closed the door securely behind me.
        A hallway along one side of the building served a bath and four rooms. Each room had been the workplace of a prostitute.
        My flashlight revealed dust, spider webs, two empty beer bottles, a litter of dead bees…
        After all these years, the air was still thinly laced with the faded bouquet of scented candles, incense, perfume, fragrant oils. Underlying this faint but sweet melange was a fainter, acrid smell that might have been the stale urine of animals that had come and gone.
        The furniture had been trucked away long ago. In two rooms, mirrors on the ceiling suggested where the beds had been positioned. The walls were painted hot-pink.
        Each room featured two portholes. Most of the glass had been shot out by kids with air guns.
        In the fourth room, both small windows were intact. Here, none of the larger carrion eaters could get at the corpse.
        One of the securing shoelaces had snapped. An end of the shroud sagged loose, and Robertson's left foot became exposed.
        I considered taking both laces and the sheet. They were possible connections to me, though they were such common brands, sold in so many stores, that they alone would not convict me.
        As I bent to the task, into my mind came an image of the wound in Robertson's chest. And in memory I heard my mother's voice: You want to pull the trigger for me? You want to pull the trigger?
        I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.
        Casting from my mind the image of Robertson's wound was not as easy. That wet hole pulsed in memory as though his dead heart were beating under it.
        In my bathroom, when I'd opened his shirt to check for lividity and had seen the entrance wound in his empurpled flesh, something had compelled me to look more closely. Disgusted by my own morbid impulse and, indeed, frightened by it, afraid that my fascination proved I'd been twisted by my mother in ways I hadn't realized, I had resisted looking closer and had at once turned away, rebuttoned his shirt.
        Now, on one knee beside Robertson, fumbling with the knots in the remaining shoelace that secured the shroud, I tried to close the memory of that shirt over the memory of the oozing wound, but still it throbbed in my mind's eye.
        In the bloating cadaver, gas swizzled up a series of chuckles culminating in what sounded like a sigh from the lips of the dead man, there behind his cotton veil.
        Unable to spend another second with the corpse, I shot to my feet, fled the hot-pink room with my flashlight, and was halfway along the hall before I realized that I had left the door open. I went back and closed it, further protecting the body from the desert's larger scavengers.
        I used the tail of my T-shirt to wipe the door handles to all the rooms that I had investigated. Then, scuffing my feet through the prints I'd left earlier, I smeared the thick dust on the floor with the hope that I could avoid leaving clear shoe-tread impressions.
        When I opened the outer door, my flashlight beam struck flares of eyeshine from three coyotes that waited between me and the idling Chevy.
        

CHAPTER 37
        
        WITH THEIR SINEWY LEGS, LEAN FLANKS, AND narrow muzzles, coyotes appear to be designed for speed and savage assault, and yet even as they face you down with a predatory gleam in their eyes, they have some of the appeal of dogs. Prairie wolves, some people call them, and although they lack most of the charm of wolves, they do have a puppylike quality because their feet are too big for their bodies and their ears are too big for their heads.
        These three beasts appeared more quizzical than threatening - if you failed to read the right message in their