Earthquake Weather

  The telephone on his desk rang, making him jump in his chair, and in the instant before he realized that the vibration in his ribs was just his cellular phone ringing too, he thought he was having some sort of cardiac arrest.

  “Yes?” he said into the receiver when he had fumbled it up to his ear. Not long-distance, he thought fervently, please. Let it just finally be the cop.

  And, thankfully, it was the cop.

  “Doctor?” came the man’s voice. “Officer Hamilton here. Sorry it’s so late, I called as quick as I could after I got off work. Got a pencil? I’ve got the location of the place where your Appleseed girl said she killed the Flying Nun king.”

  Armentrout shakily wrote down an address on Neptune Avenue in Leucadia. “And did you come up with anything about Neal Obstadt’s death two years ago?”

  “More or less. Something damn peculiar was going on that week, and the L.A. cops are still trying to figure it out. Obstadt’s body was found in the water off the ocean side of the Queen Mary after some kind of bomb went off in the water there, on October 31 of ’92, though no traces of any kind of explosive chemicals were found in the water, and no bomb fragments at all were recovered; he was blown to pieces, but they found a small-caliber bullet in his guts too. And the body of a film producer named Loretta deLarava was found up on one of the tourist decks with a .45 slug in her heart. She was filming some kind of TV special there, and we questioned a lot of her employees. Apparently deLarava had brought six people aboard at gunpoint, as handcuffed prisoners. One was that one-armed amnesiac nut you took charge of, who still had a pair of cuffs hanging from his wrist when they found him half-dead on the shore of the lagoon. And I’ve got the names of the other five, if you want ’em.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Okay. Nicholas Bradshaw—he was the actor who played Spooky the ghost in that old TV show, ‘Ghost of a Chance,’ which was cancelled in 1960; a lawyer named J. Francis Strube, who spoke to detectives only through a lawyer of his own and basically had nothing useful to say; an itinerant electrical engineer named Peter Sullivan, whose twin sister had killed herself in Delaware five days previous; a lady psychiatrist who’s been wanted on manslaughter charges since November of 1990, named Angelica Anthem Elizalde; and an eleven-year-old kid named Koot Hoomie Parganas, whose parents were torture-murdered the same night Sullivan’s twin sister killed herself. All these people got free of their handcuffs, as if one of ’em had a key or was an escape artist.”

  Hamilton sighed over the line. “Bradshaw and Sullivan and Elizalde and the Parganas kid haven’t been found since,” he went on, “even though they’re seriously wanted for at least questioning. DeLarava was offering a big reward for the fugitive Parganas boy, and the boy apparently called nine-one-one on the evening of the 27th, but the call was interrupted, and I think he’s probably dead; and the Elizalde woman apparently shot at a woman in the Westlake area on the 28th. And then after Halloween the LAPD was deluged with calls about all this—from psychics! Unhelpful.”

  Elizalde! thought Armentrout with a stir of remembered admiration. What a deluded pioneer that woman was! And a dark, long-legged beauty, too—I used to see her a lot when she was on the staff at the County Hospital in Huntington Park in ’88 and ’89.

  But the mention of one-armed Long John Beach had reminded him that the crazy old man was presently in “three-points” in the Quiet Room, and that if he was going to have to take Beach out of the hospital, it would be far easier with just the night staff to get past.

  “So, have there been,” Armentrout asked, knowing that this was his main question, and not at all sure what answer he wished for, “any of the peculiarities I asked about, going on at the Leucadia address, or near it?” Do I get to go home now and catch a few hours of sleep, and visit the Neptune Avenue place at my leisure and alone, he thought—or must I rush off there now, bringing all my cumbrous psychic-defense impedimenta along?

  “Well,” said Hamilton, “nobody’s reported any ‘sudden growth of vegetation’ to the cops … nor the opposite … but they wouldn’t hardly, would they?”

  “I suppose not,” said Armentrout with a smile, beginning to relax and think of his bed.

  “But there’ve been a whole lot of calls about crazy teenagers driving through the neighborhood honking their horns and shooting off firecrackers—guns too, we’ve found ejected shells on the street. And either them or some other crowd of teenagers has been dancing on the beach at all hours, real noisy. You did mention ‘other disturbances.’ And,” Hamilton added, chuckling through a yawn, “you didn’t ask about this, but two separate people have called the Union Tribune to announce that Elvis Presley is going to be coming to town to stay with them for a few weeks. Oh, and you know the way evangelists are always saying the world’s about to end? Well, a nut Bible church on the 101 there, one of the charismatic-hysterical types that rent space in failed laundromats, has announced that the world already ended, on New Year’s Day. We’re all living in some kind of delusional Purgatory right now, they say.”

  While the man had been talking, Armentrout had abandoned all thought of going home to bed, and was now wearily planning how he would get Long John Beach and the two-figure appliance out of the clinic past the security guards.

  “These … teenagers,” Armentrout said, just to be sure, “are they … dressed nice? Seem to have money?”

  “Not in particular. But hey, their cars all look like solid gold! They drive anything at all, Volkswagens, beat old Fords, Hondas, see—but a whole lot of them are painted metallic gold, and they’ve got wreaths of flowers hung over the license plates; even on the back plates, which is a violation. The neighborhood residents say it’d look like a parade if they weren’t tearing through so fast. The kids on the beach, it’s hard to tell—get this, they bring big pots of white clay, and smear themselves up with it for their dancing. Can’t even tell what race they are, I gather.”

  Armentrout sighed. “Thank you, Officer Hamilton. I think that will be all.”

  “Okay, Doc. Say, how’s your crazy girl working out? Was her name Fig-leaf? I hope she was worth the money.”

  Armentrout thought of telling Hamilton that the woman had escaped, then discarded the idea. I don’t really want the cops in on this now, he thought. “Miss Figleaf has been a valuable addition to our team,” he said vaguely.

  “Softball league, sounds like. Well, if you use electric scoreboards, nobody’ll know when you lose—right?—with her playing for you.”

  Armentrout agreed absently and hung up the phone. “And if the referee’s got a pacemaker, he’d better not declare her out,” he said softly, to no one but the Siamese-twin manikins leaning against the couch.

  Well, she really did kill the king, he thought, our Miss Plumtree, our Miss Figleaf … who certainly held tight to her fig leaf while she was here. And a new king is apparently in readiness. Those people expecting Elvis sense it—the undying King is coming here!—and the gangs of teenagers are clearly some kind of spontaneous embodiment of the Maruts who are mentioned in the Rig-Veda: noisy, armed youths from a culture so primitive that dance served the purpose of devout prayer, who—helpfully in this instance, while the king is temporarily out of the picture—aggressively embody fertility; and they’re assuming too the role of the Cretan Kouretes, who hid the vulnerable infant Zeus from his murderous father Kronos by performing their Sword Dance around the baby, and masked his crying with the noise of their clashing weapons.

  It’s in Leucadia that I’ll get a line on the new king, Armentrout thought, whoever it turns out to be. I wonder if dawn is close enough yet for Venus to be shining like a star in the eastern sky.

  The telephone rang again. Armentrout assumed Hamilton had forgotten some detail, and he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  And then his lungs seemed to freeze—because over the phone he was hearing once again, for the first time in eleven days, the familiar phantom bar sounds, laughter and clinking glass and moronic jabbering. Then a well-r
emembered voice came on the line—loud, as the very fresh ones always were: “Doctor?” whined the teenaged bipolar girl who had killed herself last week. “I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?”

  He hung up the phone without saying anything. There was no use talking to ghosts anyway, and he didn’t want to give the thing the confirmation of having found him.

  But she had found him, and no doubt would again. Hers was the first local death for which he’d been responsible since the mysterious and apparently one-shot amnesty that had been granted at dawn on New Year’s Day. How long could it possibly, reasonably be before he would need to send more people—or even just idiot mumbling fragments of people, which would clump together—to that uncorporeal bar?

  As he stood up and crossed to the file cabinet to fetch out the two purple velvet boxes and the unrefrigerated blood sample from Plumtree, he was mentally rehearsing his imminent departure from the clinic. I can avoid some carrying-hassle by strapping the two-figure appliance right onto Long John Beach, he thought; he’s already established as crazy.

  I’ll write him a pass, say we’re going on a field trip … to early-morning mass at some Catholic church. I’ll tell the guards that the old man thinks he’s the Three Wise Men, overdue at Bethlehem.

  CHAPTER 12

  My father hath a power; inquire of him,

  And learn to make a body of a limb.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Richard II

  “WATCH FOR A MOBIL station,” said Plumtree, leaning back in the driver’s seat and squinting through cigarette smoke at the onrushing dark pavement of Highway 101.

  Cochran nodded and peered through a wiped-clean patch of the steamy windshield, though there was nothing at the moment to see but the endless ellipsis of reflective orange lane-marker dots and the perilously close nighttime fog hanging on the road shoulder. They were north of Oxnard, out of L.A. County, and had just driven past the exit for something called Lost Hills Road. Why would anyone take that exit? Plumtree had wondered aloud. If hills get lost out there, they’d certainly lose you.

  “The Jenkins woman’s not gonna be cancelling her credit cards till ten,” Plumtree went on now, “at the earliest. Hell, the way she was knocking back the margaritas, she probably won’t get up before noon.”

  Jenkins had proven to be the name of the woman whose purse Plumtree had stolen at the Mount Sabu bar. After searching the Belmont Shore area for an older-model car, and then finding and quickly hot-wiring a ’69 Ford Torino that had been parked off Redondo Avenue, Plumtree had used the Jenkins woman’s Visa card in an all-night Ralph’s market to buy a carton of cigarettes and a dozen cans of soup and a can opener and a fistful of Slim Jim packages and two twelve-packs of Coors and two bottles of Listerine and three 750-milliliter bottles of Popov vodka. A vodka bottle was opened now, wedged between her thighs and occasionally rattled by the bumps on the steering wheel when she changed lanes.

  One of the lane changes was a sharp enough swerve to press Cochran against the passenger-side door and make him drop his cigarette, and Plumtree only remembered to click on the turn signal after she was in the left lane and yanking the car back straight. The vodka bottle had rattled like a mariachi band’s percussion gourd. “You want me to drive?” Cochran asked, fumbling on the floor for his cigarette.

  “You’re drunk,” said Plumtree. “And don’t … point out to me … that I’m drinking. Alcohol makes me a better driver, keeps me alert. We need an alert driver, for this fog.”

  Cochran sat back in the passenger seat and hoped she was right. Certainly he wasn’t sober … and at least they both had their seat belts on. He didn’t want to have to stop and get out of the car, anyway—the car had a heater, and Plumtree had blessedly turned it up to full blast.

  Past her silhouetted head he could faintly see the line of the surf glowing gray as it silently rose and fell out past the State Beach, under stars haloed by the incoming fog so that they looked like the stars in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

  “I wonder if the dead king’s crowd has even got started yet,” he said.

  “All the dead king’s horses and all the dead king’s men …” Plumtree said softly.

  Couldn’t put Scott Crane together again, Cochran mentally finished the rhyme.

  “I think—” Plumtree began; then she went on quickly, “this car runs pretty smooth, doesn’t it? I’d like to have done a compression check before we took off on an eight-hour drive, but I don’t hear any bad lifters or rocker arms.”

  Cochran bent over to reach into the bag between his feet, and he tore open the top of one of the beer cartons and lifted a can out. “What do you think?” he asked casually as he popped the top and took a leisurely sip.

  “You may as well start working on those,” said Plumtree with a nod, “they’ll only warm up, sitting down there by the heater vent.” She hiked up the vodka bottle and took a hearty gulp. “I think I turned those moths into wasps.”

  The lights and exit ramps of Ventura had swept past now, but Cochran hadn’t noticed a Mobil sign. Oh well, he thought, Santa Barbara is coming up fast, and—he peered at the lighted dashboard—we’re only a little under a quarter tank. “Really?” he said, his voice quiet but not skeptical. “Good enough so they could actually sting?”

  “Well, I don’t know if they could really sting. And it would be Valorie that did it, not actually this here me. But I think it was because that Mavranos guy asked you about the mark on your hand, and I—we—didn’t want him to find out about it. Is that a birthmark?”

  “I—told Janis about it,” Cochran whispered hoarsely after another gulped sip.

  “She and I don’t speak to each other much.”

  Cochran sighed. “In 1961, when I was seven, I thought I saw a face, a whiskery little old head, in an old Zinfandel stump that was being pruned back for the winter, and, without thinking, I shoved my hand out to stop the shears from cutting the old man’s head off.” The steady green glow of the instrument-panel dials was a cozy contrast to the night and the fog and the rushing lane markers outside, and he took another sip of the cold beer, secure in the knowledge that there were twenty-three more full cans between his ankles. The coal of his cigarette glowed as he inhaled on it, and a moment later exhaled smoke curled against the windshield.

  “Actually,” he said slowly, then paused; “I think it’s old rust or bark dust, under the skin. Like a powder-burn. Anyway, it’s not a birthmark.”

  Plumtree nodded and had another couple of swallows from the vodka bottle. “Actually what?” she asked.

  Her question forced a short, awkward laugh out of Cochran. It made him dizzy to realize that he was teetering on the brink of telling this Plumtree woman—this one!—a secret he had kept for thirty-three years; and to realize too that, in the warm nest-like secrecy of this anonymous car flying along in the middle of cold dark nowhere, he wanted to; so he choked down a big impulsive mouthful of beer and used the sudden dizziness to get himself over the hump.

  He spoke rapidly: “Actually—as I remember it, anyway, maybe I’m confusing it with dreams I had later—the shears cut right through my hand, cut it most of the way off. No kidding—there was blood squirting everywhere, and the vineyard worker with the shears was in shock, looking like … like his face was carved out of bone, with a big bullet-hole for a mouth.” He tilted up the can to finish the beer in three deep gulps. “Then, about one full second later, there was an almighty bang—a, a crash like you dropped a Sherman tank from thirty thousand feet onto the roof of the Astrodome—and when I could think again, maybe another second or two later, my hand was fine, whole, not a scratch, and not a drop of blood anywhere—my hand didn’t even have this mark on it yet; that was there when I woke up one morning about exactly a year later—but the old vine was standing there in full, bushy, impossible summertime bloom.” Jerkily he leaned forward again to put the empty can onto the floor mat and tug another can free of the carton.

  “Mobil station,” he said bri
skly when he had straightened up again and looked out through the windshield. “Next exit, it looks like,” he added, nodding and squinting like a navigator. He popped the can open, but just held it. “And,” he went on gently, shaking his head, “it had ripe grape bunches hanging all over it, but also … pomegranates, and figs, and I don’t know what all else. This was in the dead of winter.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then glanced at Plumtree with a wry smile. “You’d better let me deal with pumping the gas, and paying for it. You’re gonna reek of liquor.”

  “That’s Santa Barbara,” Plumtree said, switching on the turn-signal indicator and scuffing her tennis shoe from the gas pedal to the brake. “After this we turn inland at Gaviota. The fog’ll be worse then. Vodka doesn’t have half the smell that beer’s got; You probably stink like an old bar towel. What did the guy with the shears do, the vineyard worker?”

  “He got very damn drunk.”

  Plumtree nodded as she steered off the highway and rattled across an intersection on a green light. “That shows respect.”

  The left-side tires bounced up over the curb when she swung the big old Ford into the white-lit Mobil station, but she managed to park it next to one of the pumps. Cochran had dropped his cigarette again, but he just stomped it out on the floorboards. Before he could remark on the way she’d handled the driveway, she said, “I gotta disconnect the coil to turn this off. That’s good, though—a modern car, with the ignition in the steering column, I’d have had to bust it out, and cops look for that, in parking lots, and then … they wait for whoever to come back to the car. Who’s driving it.”