A glance in the mirror showed him the second Lincoln coming up fast behind him. He could hear the roar of the car’s engine.
“Bad guys,” he said breathlessly. “Fasten your belts—kid, get down somewhere. I’m gonna try to outrun ’em. They want us alive.”
The other Lincoln had somehow looped back, and was now rushing up behind the nearer one, which was swerving to pass Sullivan on the left. Sullivan jerked the wheel that way to cut the car off, and he kept his foot hard on the gas pedal.
A loud, rapid popping began, and the van shuddered and rang and shook as splinters whined around the seats. Sullivan snatched his foot off the gas and stomped the brake; Elizalde tumbled against the dashboard as the front end dropped and the tires screamed, and then as the van slewed and ground to a halt, and rocked back, he slammed it into reverse and gave it full throttle again.
The closer Lincoln had driven up a curb and run over a trash can. Sullivan had to hunch around to watch the other one through the narrow frames of the back windows, for the door mirror had been blown out; the van’s rear end was whipping wildly back and forth as Sullivan fought the wheel, and he heard five or six more shots, but then the second Lincoln too had driven up onto a lawn to get out of Sullivan’s lunatic way, and the van surged back-end foremost right out into the middle of Lucas Avenue.
A hard, smashing impact punched the van, and as Sullivan’s chin clunked the top of the seat back he heard two more crashes a little farther away. The van was stalled, and he clanked it into neutral and cranked at the starter. Feathers were flying around the stove and the bed in the back, where he had last seen the kid. At last the engine caught.
Sullivan threw the shift into Drive again and turned around to face out the starred windshield, and he hit the gas and the van sped away down Lucas with only a diminishing clatter of glass and metal in its wake.
Sullivan drove quickly but with desperate concentration, yanking the wheel back and forth to pass cars, and pushing his way through red lights while looking frantically back and forth and leaning on the horn.
When he was sure that he had at least momentarily lost any pursuit, he took a right turn, and then an immediate left into a service alley behind a row of street-facing stores. There was an empty parking space between two trucks, but his sweaty hands were trembling so badly that he had to back and fill for a full minute before he had got the vehicle into the space and pushed the gearshift lever into park.
“Kid,” Sullivan croaked, too shaky even to turn around, “are you all right?” His mouth was dry and tasted like old pennies.
In the sudden quiet, over the low rumble of the idling engine, he could now hear the boy sobbing; but the boy’s voice strangled the sobs long enough to choke out, “No worse than I was before.”
“ ‘They want us alive,’ ” said Elizalde from where she was crumpled under the dashboard. She climbed back up into the seat and shook glass out of her disordered black hair. “I’m glad you’ve got these guys figured out, you asshole.”
“Are you hit?” Sullivan asked her, his voice pitched too high. “They were shooting at us. Am I hit?” He spread his hands and looked down at himself, then shuffled his feet around to see them. He didn’t see any blood, or feel any particular pain or numbness anywhere.
“No,” said Elizalde after looking herself over. “What do we do now?”
“You—you left your jumpsuit in Solville. Get a jacket of mine from the closet in the back, and a T-shirt or something for the kid. Disguises. I got a baseball cap back there you can tuck your hair up into. You two take a bus back, you’ll look like a mother and son. I’ll drive the van, and—I don’t know, take backstreets or something. I think I’ll be out of trouble once I get on the freeway, but you’d be safer traveling in something besides this van.”
“Why don’t we all take the bus?” asked Elizalde. “Abandon the van?”
“He’d have to abandon the stuff he bought,” said the boy, who was still sniffling, “and a couple of these things aren’t useless rubbish.”
“Thanks, sonny,” said Sullivan, not happy that the kid had been examining his purchases. Then, to Elizalde, he said, “Oh—here.” He unsnapped the fanny-pack belt and pulled it free of his waist. “Have you ever shot a .45?”
“No. I don’t believe in guns.”
“Oh, they do exist, trust me.” He pulled the loop and the zippers sprang open, exposing the grip of the pistol under two straps. “See? Here’s one now.”
“I saw it last night, remember? I meant I don’t like them.”
“Oh, like them,” said Sullivan as he popped the snap on the straps and drew the pistol out of the holster sewed inside the fanny pack. Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, he managed to push the magazine-release button beside the trigger guard, but missed catching the magazine as it slid out of the grip. It clunked on the floorboards and he let it lie there. “I don’t like ’em. I don’t like dental surgery, either, or motorcycle helmets, or prostate examinations.”
He pulled the slide back, and the stubby bullet that had been in the chamber flicked out and bounced off Elizalde’s forehead.
“Ow,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“That’s a Colt,” said the boy, who had shuffled up behind Sullivan’s seat. “Army issue since 1911.”
“Right,” said Sullivan, peripherally beginning to wonder who the hell this boy was.
The slide was locked back, exposing the shiny barrel, and he tripped the slide release and it snapped forward, hooding the barrel again. He held the gun out toward her, grip first and barrel up, and after a long moment she took it.
“It’s unloaded now,” he said, “but of course you always assume it is loaded. Go ahead and shoot it through the floor—hold it with both hands. Jesus, not that way! Your thumbs have got to be around the side; that slide on the top comes back, hard, and if you’ve got your thumb over the back of it that way … well, you’ll have another severed thumb to stick in your shoe.”
She rearranged her hands, then pointed the pistol at the floor. Her finger visibly tightened on the trigger for several seconds—and then there was an abrupt, tiny click as the hammer snapped down.
Elizalde exhaled sharply.
“Nothing to it, hey?” said Sullivan. “Now, it’s got a fair recoil, so get the barrel back down in line with your target before you take your second shot. The gun recocks itself, so all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger again. And again, if you need to. You’ll have seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, eight in all. If you hit a guy with one of ’em, you’ll knock him down for sure.”
She took hold of the slide with her left hand and tried to pull it back as Sullivan had done; she got it halfway back against the compression of the spring, and had to let go.
“Try it again,” said Sullivan, “but instead of pulling the slide back with your left hand, just hold it steady, and push the gun forward with your right.” He was nervous about having the pistol unloaded for so many seconds, but wanted her to have as much sketchy familiarity with it as might be possible.
This time she managed to cock it, and again dry-fired it at the floor.
“Good.” Sullivan retrieved the fallen magazine and slid it up into the grip until it clicked, then jacked a round into the chamber and released the magazine again to tuck into the top of it the bullet that had bounced off Elizalde’s forehead. He slid the magazine into the grip again and clicked the safety up.
“Cocked and locked,” he said, handing it back to her carefully. “This fan-shaped ridged thing behind the trigger is the safety; pop it down, and then all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger. Keep it in the fanny pack, under the jacket, and don’t let the kid play with it.”
Sullivan’s chest felt hollow, and he was sweating with misgivings about this. He could have set up the pistol with the chamber empty, but he wasn’t confident that she’d be able to work the slide in a panicky second; and he could have left the hammer down, along with the safety engaged, but th
at would require that she remember two moves, and have the time for them, in that hypothetical panicky second.
“You still got money?” he asked her.
“Three or four of the twenties, and some ones and some change.”
“Fine. Grab the clothes and scoot.” To his own surprise, his head bobbed forward as if to kiss her; but he caught himself and leaned back.
She blinked. “Right.” To the boy, she said, “Is your name Kootie or Al?”
The boy’s mouth twitched, but finally he said, “Kootie.”
“All right, Kootie, let’s outfit ourselves and then get the hell out of here.”
In the dim living room of Joey Webb’s motel room off Grand Boulevard in Venice, Loretta deLarava sat on the bed and blotted her tears with a silk handkerchief. Obstadt’s man Canov had put her on hold, and she had been sitting here now for ten minutes it seemed like, and the room reeked because Joey Webb, suspicious in an unfamiliar environment, had resumed his old precaution of hiding half-eaten Big Macs and Egg McMuffins behind the furniture.
“Hello, Loretta,” said Obstadt at last. His voice was echoing and weak.
“Neal, I know about it, so don’t even waste a moment with lies. Why are you trying to impede me? You had your people try to kill Sullivan and the Parganas boy an hour ago! You should thank God that they got away. Now I want you to help me find them—and they’d better not be dead!—or I’ll call the police about the incident. I want, immediately, all the information you have—”
Obstadt inhaled loudly, and coughed. “Shut up, Loretta.”
“You can’t tell me to shut up! I can call spirits from the vasty deep—”
“Me too, babe, but do they come when you call? Face it, Loretta, nobody gives the least particle of a rat’s ass about your … magical prowess.”
Over the line she heard a familiar metallic splashing. The man was urinating! He had begun urinating during the conversation! He was going on in his new, labored voice: “You work for me, now, Miss Keith—sorry, Mrs. Sullivan—oh hell, I guess I know you well enough to just call you Kelley, don’t I?”
deLarava just sat perfectly still, her damp handkerchief in front of her eyes.
“I know you’re busy tomorrow,” Obstadt said, “so I’ll drive down and say … ‘Hi!’ … at your ghost shoot on the Queen Mary. I need to quiz you about a problem that can arise in this ghost-eating business. And you’ll tell me everything you know.”
The line went dead. Slowly she lowered the phone back down onto the cradle. Then her hands flew to her temples and pressed inward, helping the rubber bands constrict her skull and keep the pieces of her mind from flying away like a flock of baby chicks when the shadow of the hawk was sweeping the ground.
“The egged van was at the canals yesterday,” remarked Webb, who was sitting cross-legged on top of the TV set.
She dragged her attention away from the stark fact that her false identity had been blown. (If Obstadt talked, and Nicky Bradshaw stepped forward and talked, she could conceivably be arraigned for murder; and, even worse, everyone would see through the deLarava personality to the fragmented fraud that was Kelley Keith; and even if Obstadt told no one, he knew, he could—intolerably—see it.)
“The van,” she said dully; then she blinked. “The egged van, Pete’s van! You didn’t call me? He was here in Venice! What was he doing?”
“Relax, ma’am! He wasn’t here. He must have loaned the van to a friend. This was a curly-haired shorter guy in a fancy coat with breakaway sleeves.”
“Breakaway sleeves …? Oh, Jesus, that was Houdini you saw! It was Sullivan wearing my goddamn Houdini mask!”
“That was Pete Sullivan? This guy didn’t look anything like your pictures of him.” Webb frowned in thought. “Not at first, anyway. He did get taller.”
“Damn it, it was him, trust me. What was he doing?”
“Oh. Oh, chatting up a bird. A-sparkin’ and a-spoonin’, I’m assumin’. Mex gal. She got taller too, after a while. She was trying to reason with a guy who was in love with her, a sulking man hiding in a drainage pipe. But when Neat Pete showed up with his joke dinner jacket and fine white hands, she decided to chat with him instead. They stood in a parking lot that was in a traffic whirlpool, so I couldn’t intuit what they said. Dig this—there was a Venice Farmer’s Market in that very parking lot this morning! I bought various vegetable items. I will cook a ratatouille.”
“Shut up, Joey, I’m trying to think.” Who on earth, she wondered, could this “Mex gal” be? Not just someone he met by chance, if the two of them took the precaution of talking in an eye of traffic. And the mask seems to have covered her too, giving her the appearance of some other person, which undoubtedly would have been Houdini’s wife, Bess! (What a mask!) (May thieving Sukie Sullivan’s ghost be snorted up by a shit-eating rat!) Was Pete in Venice looking for his father’s ghost? Did he find Apie’s ghost? What—
“Ratatouille,” said Webb, “is an eggplant-based vegetable medley. I tried to write MISTER ELEGANT once on a T-shirt, and it was days before I realized that I’d got it wrong, and I’d been walking around labeled MISTER EGGPLANT.”
“Shut up, Joey.” The Parganas kid, she thought, and Pete, and the “Mex gal,” will be running scared now, keeping low; but maybe I can still get a line on Nicky Bradshaw. I’ll have to check my answering machine, see if there have been any Find Spooky calls.
And and and—Obstadt’s coming to the shoot on the Queen Mary tomorrow. He wants to know about some “problem that can arise with this ghost-eating business.” (How vulgar of him to speak plainly about it!) I’ll have to watch for a weakness in him, and be ready to assert myself. There’ll be high voltage, and steep companionways—and the whole damned ocean, right over any rail.
“You don’t seem to be getting ahold of anybody, do you?” Webb said, smiling and shaking his head.
“Joey, shut the fuck up and get out of my stinking face, will you?” She levered her bulk off of the bed and swung herself toward the door of the motel room. “Keep looking for Arthur Patrick Sullivan. He’s got to be here, or be coming ashore in the next twelve hours—you haven’t left this area, and you’d have sensed him if he was awake anywhere within several blocks of here, wouldn’t you?”
“Like American Bandstand.” Webb hopped down from atop the TV set, agile as an old monkey. “He can’t have got past the walls of my awareness,” he said, nodding mechanically. “Unless someone opened the gate to a Trojan horse. A Trojan sea horse, that would be, locally.”
“A Trojan … sea horse.” Her face was suddenly cold, and a moment later, the marrow in her ribs tingled.
“Oh my God that fish, that goddamn fish!” she whispered. “Could Apie have been hiding inside that fish?” I am in control of nothing at all, she thought dazedly.
Webb gave her a look that momentarily seemed lucid. “If so, he’s gone.”
“If so,” she said, pressing her temples again, “he’s in L.A. somewhere.” She was panting, clutching at straws. “He’ll probably try to find Pete.”
“Oh well then,” said Webb with a shrug and a grin. “Find one and you’ve found them both, right? It’s that simple!”
“That simple,” echoed deLarava, still panting. Tears were spilling down her shaking cheeks again, and she blundered out the door.
CHAPTER 38
“What else had you to learn?”
“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—“Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography …”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
SULLIVAN HAD PARKED THE van in the shade under one of the shaggy carob trees at the back of the Solville parking lot, and then he had got out and looked the old vehicle over.
The back end was a wreck. The right rear corner of the body, from the smashed taillights down, was crumpled sharply inward and streaked and flecked with blue paint. Apparently it had been a blue car that had hit them
when he had reversed out onto Lucas. The doors were still folded-looking and flecked with white from having hit Buddy Schenk’s Honda in the Miceli’s lot yesterday, and the bumper, diagonal now, looked like a huge spoon that had been mauled in a garbage disposal.
In addition to all this, he could see four little-finger-sized holes in and around the back doors, ringed with bright metal where the paint had been blown off.
Forcing open the left-side back door, he had found that the little propane refrigerator had stopped two 9-millimeter slugs, and he had disconnected the appliance and laid the beer and Cokes and sandwich supplies out on the grass to carry in to the apartment; the sink cabinet had a hole punched through it and the sink itself was dented; and a solid ricochet off of the chassis of the field frequency modulator he’d just bought had ripped open one of his pillows, the deformed slug ending up shallowly embedded in the low headboard. One of the back-door windows was holed, and the slug had apparently passed through the interior of the van and exited through the windshield; and one perfectly round, deep dent in the back fender might have been put there by a bullet. And of course the driver’s-side mirror was now a half-dozen fragments dangling from some kind of rubber gasket.
These were the extent of the damage, and he shivered with queasy gratitude when he thought of the boy having been crouched on the van floor in the middle of the fusillade, and of Elizalde’s head nearly having been in the way of the one that had punched through the windshield. They had been lucky.
Sullivan had made several trips to the apartment to stack his electronic gear in a corner with Elizalde’s bag of witch fetishes beside it, and put the drinks and the sandwich things into the refrigerator. Finally he had locked the van up and covered the whole vehicle with an unfolded old rust-stained parachute, trying to drape it as neatly as he could in anticipation of Mr. Shadroe’s probable disapproval.