Free Saint Odd by Dean Koontz Page B

then the exclamation point was replaced by a photograph of my smiling face. He nodded, satisfied. After switching the phone off, he returned it to me.
    “You understand, son, it don’t transmit your location when you use it, like all them other dang phones do. And it don’t identify the owner. Any call you got to make or text message you got to send, or any web surfin’ you got to do while you’re on this here property—or off it, for that matter—you use only this one phone.”
    “It’s the only one I have, sir. Mrs. Fischer gave it to me.”
    “The head honcho herself. All right, then. I’m told you travel light as a mayfly, but you must have yourself some luggage.”
    “Yes, sir.” From the compartment in which I’d stowed the jacket, I retrieved a zippered leather kit that contained my electric razor and toiletries, and from the other saddlebag on the Big Dog, I took a matching soft-sided overnight bag that contained a pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, spare underwear, socks. “Somehow they learned what I’d be riding. We had a little confrontation a few hours back. The bike is hot.”
    “So then we’ll shred her and melt her down.”
    When I realized he was serious, I said, “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
    “Not when you’re dealin’ with them folks.”
    I looked at the beautiful Big Dog. “Sad.”
    “Let me help with that,” Mr. Bullock said, and took the bag from me. “Nothin’ I hate worse than bein’ useless.” As I closed the lid of the saddlebag, he said, “So I’m given to understand you don’t have yourself a suitable gun.”
    “Neither suitable nor unsuitable, sir.”
    His eyes were blue, and when he narrowed them, they seemed to grow brighter, as if his squint compressed the color in them. “How come you rode through all that dangerous habitat of schemin’ men and all that wasteland crawlin’ with snakes and beasts, and you with no dang gun?”
    “I don’t like guns, Mr. Bullock.”
    “You don’t need to like one to know you got to have it. I don’t like gettin’ a colonoscopy every five years, but I grit my teeth and drop my drawers and get it done just the same.”
    “I’ve never had a colonoscopy, either.”
    “Well, you’re not of an age to need one. That there’s a joyful experience you got to earn by livin’ to my age. Anyways, around this here safe house, everyone’s got to have themselves a firearm, not just to keep in a drawer, but to carry at all times. Once we get you settled in, I’ll fix you up with the very thing you need. You had yourself some breakfast yet?”
    “More than some, sir. Just need a bed. I didn’t sleep last night.”
    “Then bring yourself on in the house and meet Maybelle. She’s my missus. You’ll like her. Everybody does. She’s a peach. We haven’t enjoyed a bit of company since that astronaut had to hide out here while we worked up a convincin’ new identity for him. Maybelle’s starved for better company than me.”

Thirteen
    Maybelle Bullock was a pretty lady of about fifty, trim and blond. She reminded me of that long-ago actress Donna Reed, the way Miss Reed had looked in
It’s a Wonderful Life
. When we entered from the back porch, Maybelle was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling fresh peaches, wearing a housedress of the kind that few women wore in recent years, with saddle shoes and white socks.
    She didn’t at first favor me with a smile, but her handshake was firm and her manner welcoming. Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.
    To her husband, she said, “He’s not fully smooth and blue, but he sure is close to it.”
    “I figured you’d see him that way,” said Deacon Bullock.
    “Don’t you?”
    “I’d be a fool to argue it.”
    In the seventh volume of these memoirs (this is the eighth), I have written about the mysterious organization into which I had been welcomed by Edie Fischer, who will appear before