Free Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever by Dean Koontz Page B

she was up to something with all those funeral details.
    She met my eyes but spoke loud enough to be sure that my other passenger heard her. “Maybe he doesn’t want to leave this world because so many people loved him here,” she said again, but then she added, “
or
…or maybe he’s embarrassed by how his life spun out of control, and he’s afraid to cross over and face those fans who adored him but saw how he spiraled down in the end. It can be tough to be idolized by millions and even tougher if you can’t live up to the image they have of you.”
    I wasn’t surprised by her bluntness. She was, after all, Stormy Llewellyn.
Llewellyn
is a variant of
Leo,
which comes from the Greek
leon,
meaning “lion” and implying abundant strength of character and will and physique, all of which applied to her. And you know what
stormy
means. Although not surprised, I did feel some sympathy for Mr. Presley, and I said, “That was a little hard.”
    “Tough love,” she said.
    And of course what she’d told him was at least as much love as it was tough. He had died in 1977. Rare is the spirit who lingers here so long after death. He needed to understand and accept the reason that he had not yet moved on; and whatever words were required to bring him to his senses, even if tough, would be a kindness.
    Instead of responding to what Stormy said, Mr. Presley did a little mime routine, first boring vigorously in his nose with one finger, then pretending to reel from his nostril a few yards of snot.
    “How’s he taking it?” Stormy asked.
    “Immaturely.”
    Mr. Presley rolled the imaginary snot into a wad the size of a baseball and threw it at me.
    A horn honked behind us. The light had changed. Nevertheless, I delayed long enough to pretend to catch the hideous but nonexistent ball of mucus and throw it over my shoulder, back at him, before I accelerated across the intersection.
    “What was that about?” Stormy asked.
    “Snotball.”
    “Again?”
    “He always was a big child at heart.”
    You might think that the presence of the lingering dead would make of my life a solemn if not even sorrowful affair, grim and dark and shot through with fear. It
is
at times grim and dark and shot through with fear—when it’s not silly, amusing, and shot through with foolishness.
    We had traveled a few miles and were in that area where Maricopa Lane passed from suburban neighborhoods into a semirural landscape, when a man with a meat cleaver embedded in his neck came out of nowhere and dashed in front of the car. Even if I had been driving the Batmobile, with its ability to stop on a dime and give six cents in change, I couldn’t have avoided hitting the guy. Anyway, braking didn’t matter, which I knew because of Stormy’s failure to cry out in alarm. I drove through the spirit as he pointed at me. With the nimble grace of the lingering dead, he passed through the front of the car, boarding the vehicle at fifty miles per hour, folded to a sitting position, and settled into the backseat, beside Mr. Presley, the laws of physics no longer applicable to him.
    As I slowed and pulled to the shoulder of the road, Stormy said, “What’s up?”
    “A dead guy just came aboard.”
    “What dead guy?”
    “I don’t know. Never saw him before. Covered in blood, meat cleaver in his neck, looks a little excited.”
    “Maybe he’s an Elvis fan.”
    I parked along the side of the road and turned in my seat to confront our new passenger. He appeared to be about forty. Shaved head. Blue eyes. No beard. No tattoos. He wore khakis and a red-and-white checkered shirt that looked as though it had been made from the tablecloth in an Italian restaurant, but the stains all over it weren’t spaghetti sauce.
    “Tell me,” Stormy said, because she couldn’t see the new guy any more than she could see Mr. Presley.
    “Well,” I said, “his partially severed head wobbles like a bobblehead doll with a horizontal-motion feature. His eyes are so wide