Page 26 (1/2)

If Robertson were found too soon, Chief Porter would have hard questions for ht interfere with my attempts to deflect whatever horror was soon to descend on Pico Mundo Ideally, the body would lie quietly deco for at least twenty-four hours be­fore someone found it and had a new love for Jesus scared into hi place: the Church of the Whispering Coer Heaven

THIRTY-SIX

THE CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET HAD BEEN erected hway and a few hundred yards past the town limits of Pico Mundo, on a tract of desert scrub

Even when it had been a house of unusual worship, it had not reseht, the , sixty-foot-wide, seated-metal Quonset hut with porthole s - looked like a spaceship,dead and dying trees, e of shadows and pale ed the perimeter of the property These had been bar­racks for the true believers

The founder of the church, Caesar Zedd Jr, preached that he re­ceived whispered es, mostly in dreaences aboard a spacecraft traveling toward Earth inside a coods who had created hus and all species on the planet

Most people in Pico Mundo had assu Comet would one day culminate in a com­munion with poisoned Kool-Aid and hundreds of deaths Instead, the sincerity of Zedd’s religious faith cay were indicted and convicted of operating the largest Ecstasy production-and-distribution ring in the world

After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Aest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet pn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States - inti it a business license They remade the property into a cheesy, sex-then to neon and extending it to read CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET TOPLESS

BAR, ADULT BOOKSTORE, AND BURGER HEAVEN

Ruers and fries were excellent and that the proenerously honored Yet this es­tablish crowd or the upscale professional couples who are so essential to any restau­rant operation

The enterprise, known locally as the Whispering Burger, turned a handso its food-service losses The topless bar, the bookstore (which stocked no books, but offered thousands of videotapes), and the whorehouse (not ht oceans of h the corporation’s lawyers, courageous defenders of the Constitution, h ten convic­tions for operation of a prostitution ring, the Whispering Burger i down of three prostitutes by a naed custora

In lieu of unpaid taxes and fines, the property had fallen into the

hands of the county During the past five years, cessation of all main­tenance and the relentless repossession efforts of the desert had re­duced a once-proud house of alien gods to rust and ruin

The church grounds had been landscaped as a tropical paradise, with lush lawns, several varieties of pal vines Without daily watering, the brief rainy season in the desert wasn’t sufficient to preserve this Eden

Having switched off hway, I drove through the shaggy moonshadows cast by dead palm trees The cracked and potholed blacktop driveway led to the back of the , and then farther to the arc of smaller Quonset huts

I was reluctant to leave the car with the engine running, but I wanted to be able to ine quickly enough in a crisis

With the flashlight I’d packed in , I set out to find a suitable place to stash an inconvenient corpse

The Mojave had recovered its breath again A lazy exhalation blew out of the east, se life of the desert

Each of the ten Quonset huts used as barracks by the church had housed sixty cult members in the cramped fashion of opium-den bunks When the church was replaced by a bordello with burgers, a few of these structures were gutted, partitioned, and redecorated to serve as cozy cribs for the hookers who delivered what the topless dancers in the bar only promised

In the years since the property had been abandoned, morbidly curi­ous people had explored and vandalized theand all the barracks Doors had been broken open Soes

At the third barracks that I inspected, the spring latch on the door still worked well enough to hold it closed

I didn’t want to leave the corpse in a space to which coyotes could easily gain access Robertson had been a ardless of what he , I couldn’t consign his reht befall her if she dropped dead in a poker game with hardhearted players

Maybe coyotes weren’t carrion eaters Maybe they would eat only meat they killed

The desert, however, teemed with more life than could be seen at casual inspection Much of it would be pleased to dine on a carcass as fleshy as Robertson’s

After pulling the Chevy as dose to the chosen building as possi­ble - about ten feet from the door - I required a minute to summon the nerve to deal with the corpse I cheo antacid tablets

During the drive from town, Bob Robertson had not once asked, Are we there yet? Nevertheless, and against all reason, I didn’t trust hi hi hielatinous body quivered inside the bedsheet shroud, I felt as if I were handling a bag full of live snakes

After I dragged hied open with the flashlight, I paused to wipe the sweat froround, twenty or thirty feet away, they watched ht and focused the bea I had feared: a coyote that had co the abandoned buildings Big, sinewy, rough-hewn, sharp of brow and jaw, it was less wicked by nature than are s, but at that ates of Hell

The flashlight didn’t frighten it off, which suggested that it had be-