Odd Thomas Read Online Free Page A

junction of walls and sat on the floor with his legs splayed in front of him, hiding behind his hands as though they were a mask of invisibility that would allow him to escape the attention of justice.
    The sirens reached a peak of volume half a block away, and then subsided from squeal to growl to waning groan in front of the house.
    The day had dawned less than an hour ago, and I had spent every minute of the morning living up to my name.

THREE
    THE DEAD DON’T TALK. I DON’T KNOW WHY.
    Harlo Landerson had been taken away by the authorities. In his wallet they had found two Polaroids of Penny Kallisto. In the first, she was naked and alive. In the second, she was dead.
    Stevie was downstairs, in his mother’s arms.
    Wyatt Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department, had asked me to wait in Stevie’s room. I sat on the edge of the boy’s unmade bed.
    I had not been alone long when Penny Kallisto walked through a wall and sat beside me. The ligature marks were gone from her neck. She looked as though she had never been strangled, had never died.
    As before, she remained mute.
    I tend to believe in the traditional architecture of life and the afterlife. This world is a journey of discovery and purification. The next world consists of two destinations: One is a palace for the spirit and an endless kingdom of wonder, while the other is cold and dark and unthinkable.
    Call me simple-minded. Others do.
    Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the end of our days here, and that if we come up to muster, we will be conscripted into an army of souls engaged in some great mission in the next world. Those who fail the test simply cease to exist.
    In short, Stormy sees this life as boot camp. She calls the next life “service.”
    I sure hope she’s wrong, because one of the implications of her cosmology is that the many terrors we know here are an inoculation against worse in the world to come.
    Stormy says that whatever’s expected of us in the next life will be worth enduring, partly for the sheer adventure of it but primarily because the reward for service comes in our third life.
    Personally, I’d prefer to receive my reward one life sooner than she foresees.
    Stormy, however, is into delayed gratification. If on Monday she thirsts for a root-beer float, she’ll wait until Tuesday or Wednesday to treat herself to one. She insists that the wait makes the float taste better.
    My point of view is this: If you like root-beer floats so much, have one on Monday, another on Tuesday, and a third on Wednesday.
    According to Stormy, if I live by this philosophy too long, I’m going to be one of those eight-hundred-pound men who, when they fall ill, must be extracted from their homes by construction crews and cranes.
    “If you want to suffer the humiliation of being hauled to the hospital on a flatbed truck,” she once said, “don’t expect me to sit on your great bloated gut like Jiminy Cricket on the brow of the whale, singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’”
    I’m reasonably sure that in Disney’s
Pinocchio,
Jiminy Cricket never sits on the brow of the whale. In fact I’m not convinced that he himself encounters the whale.
    If I were to make this observation to Stormy, however, she would favor me with one of those wry looks that means
Are you hopelessly stupid or just being pissy?
This is a look to be avoided if not dreaded.
    As I waited there on the edge of the boy’s bed, even thinking about Stormy couldn’t lift my spirits. Indeed, if the grinning images of Scooby-Doo, imprinted on the sheets, didn’t cheer me, perhaps nothing could.
    I kept thinking about Harlo losing his mother at six, about how his life might have been a memorial to her, about how instead he had shamed her memory.
    And I thought about