Odd Thomas

why?" I asked.
        "It's got negative energy. Bad mojo. It'll bring wickedness down on you."
        I wondered which school of nursing she had attended.
        "I'll throw it in the trash," I promised.
        The freckles on her face seemed to have grown brighter, burning like sprinkles of cayenne pepper. "Don't throw it away here."
        "All right," I said, "I won't."
        "Not anywhere in the hospital," she said. "Take a drive out in the desert, where there's nobody around, drive fast, throw it out the window, let the wind take it."
        "That sounds like a good plan."
        Her hands were dry and sanitized. Her frown had evaporated along with the alcohol gel. She smiled. "I hope I've been of some help."
        "You've been great."
        I took the meditation card out of the hospital, into the waning night, but not for a drive in the desert.
        

CHAPTER 43
        
        THE STUDIOS OF KPMC RADIO, VOICE OF THE Maravilla Valley, are on Main Street, in the heart of Pico Mundo, in a three-story brick Georgian townhouse, between two Victorian edifices housing the law offices of Knacker & Hisscus and the Good Day Bakery.
        In this last hour of darkness, lights were on in the kitchen of the bakery. When I got out of the car, the street smelled of bread fresh from the oven, cinnamon buns, and lemon strudel.
        No bodachs were in sight.
        The lower floors of KPMC house the business offices. Broadcast studios are on the third level.
        Stan "Spanky" Lufmunder was the engineer on duty. Harry Beamis, who managed to survive in the radio business without a nickname, was the producer of "All Night with Shamus Cocobolo."
        I made faces at them through the triple-insulated view window between the third-floor hall and their electronic aerie.
        After conveying by hand gestures that I should copulate with myself, they gave me the OK sign, and I continued along the hall to the door to the broadcast booth.
        From the speaker in the hallway, at low volume, issued "String of Pearls," by the immortal Glenn Miller, the platter that Shamus was currently spinning on the air.
        The music actually originated from a CD, but on his show, Shamus uses the slang of the 1930s and '40s.
        Harry Beamis alerted him, so when I entered the booth, Shamus took off his headphones, tuned up the on-air feed just enough to stay on track with it, looked up from his stool, and said, "Hey, Wizard, welcome to my Pico Mundo."
        To Shamus, I am the Wizard of Odd, or Wizard for short.
        He said, "Why don't you smell like peach shampoo?"
        "The only soap I had was unscented Neutrogena."
        He frowned. "It's not over between you and the goddess, is it?"
        "It's only just begun," I assured him.
        "Glad to hear it."
        The foam-cone walls mellowed our voices, smoothed rough edges.
        The lenses of his dark glasses were the blue of old Milk of Magnesia bottles. His skin was so black that it, too, seemed to have a blue tint.
        I reached in front of him and put down the meditation card, snapping it sharply against the countertop to intrigue him.
        He played cool, didn't pick it up right away. "I plan to come by the Grille after the show, chow down on a heart-stopping pile of fried shaved ham, shoestring onions, and biscuits in gravy."
        As I circled the microphone island, sat on a stool opposite him, and pushed the other mike aside on its flexible arm, I said, "I won't be cooking this morning. Got the day off."
        "What do you do on a day off - go out there and moon around at the tire store?"
        "I thought I might go bowling."
        "You're one wild party animal, Wizard. I don't know how your lady keeps up with you."
        The Miller tune wrapped. Shamus leaned into the mike and let ad-libbed patter dance off his tongue, cuing back-to-back cuts of Benny Goodman's "One O'clock Jump" and Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train."
        I like to listen to Shamus on the air and off. He has a voice that makes Barry White and James Earl Jones sound like carnival barkers with strep throat. To radio people, he's the Velvet Tongue.
        From 1:00 a.m. to 6:00, every day but Sunday, Shamus spins what he calls "the music that won the big war," and recounts tales of the night life of that long-ago age.
        The other nineteen hours of the day, KPMC eschews music in favor of talk radio.