Expiration Date

Father got a lot of amusement out of lighting firecrackers, throwing them at our bare feet and making us dance when they exploded. He had it all his way one Fourth. After that we ganged up and made him take off his own shoes and stockings and do his dancing on the lawn while we three lighted firecrackers at his feet.

—Charles Edison,

The New York Times,

September 26, 1926

CHAPTER TWELVE

“And what does it live on?”

“Weak tea with cream in it”

A new difficulty came into Alice’s head.

“Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But that must happen very often” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

THE sky was still pale with dawn when Solomon Shadroe turned his old gray Chevy Nova left from Ocean Boulevard onto Twenty-First Place and immediately turned left again into the parking lot of his apartment building. From long practice he was able to do the maneuver smoothly, in spite of the car’s rear end swinging out wide. The locator pins holding the rear axle to the springs had broken off long ago, and so the rear axle was no longer parallel to the front one; when driving straight ahead down a straight lane, the car was always at an angle to the center line, like a planing blade moving along a level board.

The three-story building dated from the 1920s, and had once been a hospital. The rooms were mismatched in size, and over the years he had cut out new windows and doors, laid two new floors across the elevator shaft to make three closets, and hung new partitions or torn old ones out, so no styles matched and no hallway and few rooms had the same flooring from one end to the other; but rents were low, and the place was shaded with big old untrimmed palm and carob trees, and the peeling stucco front was largely covered with purple-flowering bougainvillea. Any tenants that stayed long, and he had some who had been here for a decade or more, were the sort that would generally do their own repairs; the old-timers called the place Solville, and seemed to take obscure pride in having weathered countless roof leaks, power failures, and stern inspections by the city.

Shadroe parked on his customary patch of oil-stained dirt, clambered out of the old car, and limped ponderously to his office, pausing to crouch and pick up the newspaper in front of the door.

Inside, he turned on the old black-and-white TV set. While it warmed up he listened to the birds in the trees outside his office window—the mockingbirds seemed to be shrilling cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, and the doves were softly saying Curaçao, Curaçao, Curacço.

Curaçao was some orange-flavored liqueur, he believed. He couldn’t recall ever having drunk any, and it probably wouldn’t complement a cheeseburger, but for a moment he envied all the people who had the option of choosing that breakfast, and who would be able to taste it.

He sighed, picked up a cellophane bag, and shook half-a-dozen Eat-’Em-&-Weep balls—red-hot cinnamon jawbreaker candies—into a coffeepot, filled it with water from the faucet he had piped in last year, and put it on a hot plate to brew; then he lowered his considerable bulk into his easy chair and unfolded the newspaper.

The front section he read cursorily—Ross Perot was back in the presidential race, claiming that he had only dropped out three months ago because Bush’s people were supposedly planning to wreck his daughter’s wedding; “Electrified Rail Lines Would Energize Edison’s Profits”; a Bel-Air couple named Parganas had been found tortured and killed in their home, and police were searching for their son, whose name Shadroe didn’t bother to puzzle out but seemed to be something like Patootie, poor kid; country singer Roger Miller had died at fifty-six—that was too bad, Shadroe had met him a few times in the sixties, and he’d seemed like a nice guy. He was about to toss it and pick up the Metro section when he noticed something in a little box on the front page:

FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM

Attention Baby-Boomers! It worked for Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and Gilligan’s Island, didn’t it?

Plans are afoot for another reunion show!

Led by independent television producer Loretta deLarava, fans of the situation comedy Ghost of a Chance, which ran from 1955 to 1960 on CBS, are searching for the only elusive—and, some would say, the only indispensable—actor from the old show. They’ve been unable to locate Nicky Bradshaw, who played Spooky, the teenage ghost whose madcap antics kept the dull-witted Johnson family hopping. In the thirty-two years since the show’s cancellation, the “Spooky” character has taken a place in pop mythology comparable to “Eddie Haskell” (Ken Osmond, Leave it to Beaver), “Aunt Bee” (Frances Bavier, The Andy Griffith Show), and “Hop Sing” (Victor Sen Yung, Bonanza).

Bradshaw, godson to the late filmmaker Arthur Patrick Sullivan, had been a child actor before Ghost of a Chance propelled him into millions of American living rooms, but he left showbiz in the mid 1960s to become an attorney. He disappeared in 1975, apparently under the cloud of some minor legal infractions on which he was due to be arraigned.

The police have had no luck in locating Bradshaw, but deLarava is certain that Spooky’s many fans can succeed where the law can’t! DeLarava wants to assure Bradshaw that most of the charges (all having to do with receiving stolen goods—for shame, Spooky!) have been dropped, and that his salary for doing the Ghost of a Chance Reunion Show will easily offset all lingering penalties. And—she adds with a twinkle in her eye—who knows? This reunion show just might develop into a whole new series!

There was also the telephone number of a Find Spooky hotline.

Solomon Shadroe put down the front section of the paper and, with a steady hand, poured some of his Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea into a coffee cup. The dissolved candies gave the stuff the bright red color of transmission fluid. After a long sip he chewed up a couple of fresh ones out of the bag. The jawbreakers, and the tea he brewed from them, were all he had eaten and drunk for seventeen years. He never turned on the light when he went to the bathroom here, nor in the head on his boat.

Heavy footsteps clumped overhead, letting him know that Johanna was up. He reached across the table for his long-handled broom and, squinting upward to find an undented section of the plaster, thumped the end of the broom against the ceiling. Faintly he heard her yell some acknowledgment.

He put the broom down and fished a little flat can of Goudie Scottish snuff out of a pile of receipts on the desk. He twisted the cap until the holes in the rim were lined up, then shook some of the brown powder onto the back of his hand and effortfully snorted it up his nose. He couldn’t smell or taste the stuff anymore, of course, but it was still a comforting habit.

He glanced at the three stuffed pigs he had set up on the empty bookshelves in here. They weren't burping right now, at least.

Can she find me, he thought. I live on water…but she lives right over there on the Queen Mary. I make Johanna do all the shopping, and anyway deLarava wouldn’t be likely to recognize me these days. And she’d have a hard time tracking me—when I do drive, my car always points off to the left of wherever I’m really going. Still, I’d better take some measures. It would be hard at my age and in my condition to find another slip for the boat, and it’d probably be impossible ever again to get out to the Hollywood Cemetery and visit the old man’s grave—though even now I don’t dare sweep the dust and leaves off the marker.

When the knock came at the door he clomped his uninjured foot twice on the floor, and Johanna let herself in.

Shadroe inhaled. “Draw me a bath, sweetie,” he said levelly, “and put ice in it.” Again he drew air into his lungs. “Today I gotta start re-wiring the units, and then I think I’ll re-pipe the downstairs ones so the water’s going north instead of south.” His voice had gone reedy, and he paused to take in more air. “If I can find the ladder, I think I’ll rearrange all the TV antennas later in the week.”

Johanna brushed back her long black hair. “What for you wanna do that, lover?” The seams of her orange leotards had burst at the hips, and she scratched at a bulge of tattooed skin. “After the painting men the other month—your tenants are gonna go crazy.”

“Tell ’em…tell ’em November rent’s on me. They’ve put up with worse.” Gasp. “As to why—look at this.” He bent down with a grunt and picked up the front section of the paper. “Here,” he whispered, pointing out the article. “I need to change the hydraulic and electromagnetic…” Gasp. “…fingerprint of this place again.”

She read it slowly, moving her lips. “Oh, baby!” she finally said in dismay. She crossed to his chair and knelt and hugged him. He patted her hair three times and then let his hand drop. “Why can’t she forget about you?”

“I’m the only one,” he said patiently, “who knows who she is.”

“Couldn’t you…blackmail her? Say you’ve put the eddivence in a box in a bank, and if you die the noosepapers will get it?”

“—I suppose,” said Shadroe, staring at the dark TV screen. It was set on CBS, channel 2, with the brightness turned all the way down to blessedly featureless black. “But nobody thought it was…murder, even at the time.” He yawned so widely that pink tears ran down his gray cheeks. “What I should do,” he went on, “is go to her office when she’s there”—he paused to inhale again—“and then take a nap in the waiting room.”

“Oh, baby, no! All those innocent people!”

Too exhausted to speak anymore, Shadroe just waved his hand dismissingly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry. “

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

IF you follow the Long Beach Freeway south from the 405, the old woman thought, you’re behind L.A.’s scenes. To your left is a scattered line of bowing tan grasshoppers that are oil-well pumping units, with the machined-straight Los Angeles River beyond, and to your right, train tracks parallel you across a narrow expanse of scrub-brush dirt. High-voltage cables are strung from the points of big steel asterisks atop the power poles, and the fenced-in yards beyond the tracks are crowded with unmoored boxcars. It’s all just supply, with no dressing-up. Even when the freeway breaks up and you’re on Harbor Scenic Drive, the lanes are scary with roaring trucks pulling big semitrailers, and the horizon to your right is clawed with the skeletal towers of the quayside cranes. The air smells of crude oil, though by now you can probably see the ocean.

Loretta deLarava sighed and wondered, not for the first time, what the stark logo on the cranes stood for—ITS was stenciled in giant black letters on each of them, easily readable across the water from where she stood high up on the Promenade Deck of the Queen Mary.

Its? she thought. What’s? Will it be coming back for its branded children one of these days? She imagined some foghorn call throbbing in from the sea, and the cranes all ponderously lifting their cagelike arms in obedient worship.

She gripped the rail of the open deck and looked straight down. A hundred feet below her, the narrow channel between the Queen Mary and the concrete dock was bridged by mooring lines and electric cables and orange hoses wide enough for a kid to crawl through. Down there to her left the dock crowded right up against the black cliff of the hull, and the morning shift was unloading boxes from trucks. Faintly, over the shouts of the seagulls, she could hear the men’s impatient voices, not far enough away below.

The mechanics of supply and waste disposal, she thought. Always there, if you look.

She turned away from the southward view and looked along the worn teak deck, and she took another bite of the half pound of walnut fudge she’d just bought. In a few hours the deck would be crowded with tourists, all wearing shorts even in October, with their noisy kids, stumbling around dripping ice cream on the deck and gaping at the glassed-in displays of the first-class staterooms and wondering what the bidets were for. They wouldn’t recognize elegance, she thought, if it walked up and bit them in the ass.

During World War II the Queen Mary had been a troopship, and the first-class swimming pool had been drained and stacked with bunks, all the way up to the arched ceiling. Before that, in the thirties, the ceiling had been lined with mother-of-pearl, so that guests seemed to be swimming under a magically glittering sky; but the top shelf of soldiers had picked it all away, and now the ceiling was just white tile.

She tried to imagine the ship crowded with men in army uniforms, and trestle tables and folding chairs jamming the pillared first-class dining room under the tall mural of the Atlantic, on which two little crystal ships day by day were supposed to trace the paths of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. The crystal ships had probably been stopped in those days, with around-the-clock shifts of soldiers inattentively eating Spam below.

The unconsidered life, she thought as she took another bite of the fudge, is not worth living. And in spite of herself she wondered if the soldiers would have considered her.

The tourists didn’t. The tourists didn’t know that she lived aboard, on B Deck, in one of the nicest staterooms; they just thought she was another of themselves, fatter than most. And sometimes older.

Such tourists as might be around on this upcoming Saturday would at least see her in a position of some importance, when she would be directing the filming of her Ship of Ghosts feature aboard the ship.

Her scalp itched, and she scratched carefully over her ear.

It was time to be starting for the studio. She wrapped up the end of the fudge-brick in the waxed paper it had been served on, tucked it into her big canvas purse, and started walking toward the elevators. She had of course been careful to leave the door of her stateroom not-quite-closed, so that a push would open it, and today there was a big, diamond-studded 18-carat gold bangle on the bedside table, right where the light from the porthole would show it off. Attractive to a thief, and too heavy for a ghost. And the doors of the Lexus in the parking lot were unlocked, with the key in the ignition. Maybe today she would wind up having to rent a car to drive to work in—there was an Avis counter in the lobby area of the ship.

ON HALLOWEEN of 1967 the Queen Mary had made her last departure from England; and for these past twenty-five years the world’s grandest ocean liner had been moored at the Port of Los Angeles in Long Beach, a hotel and tourist attraction now. The Cunard line had sold her to the city for 3.2 million dollars, and had insisted that the boilers be removed so that the ship could never again sail under her own power.

Under another name Loretta deLarava had sailed aboard her in 1958, and had once danced with Robert Mitchum in the exclusive Verandah Grill at the stern, where you never ordered from the menu; the head waiter, Colin Kitching, would find you at lunch and ask what you’d like for dinner, and you could order anything you could think of, and they’d have it ready by eight.

The Verandah Grill now served hamburgers and Cokes and beer, and anybody on earth could get in. The tables and benches now were contoured sheets of vinyl-covered particleboard, and the floor was hard black rubber, with a herringbone pattern of bumps on it so people wouldn’t slip on the french fries.

HER LEXUS had not been stolen; and unfortunately the car telephone beeped at her while she was still on the Long Beach Freeway, within sight of the usual litter of old pickup trucks parked in the dirt by the river to her right and the usual half-dozen men on the banks with their fishing poles. DeLarava sometimes fished off the stern of the Queen Mary, late at night, and ate raw the big opal-eye perch and sea bass she occasionally hauled all the way up the side of the ship, but it never seemed to help. And these weary old men fishing in the poisoned Los Angeles River just seemed to mock her efforts.

She was soon crying as she held the telephone receiver to her ear, though her face as she stared through the windshield at the cars ahead of her was effortfully expressionless. More wrinkles she didn’t need. She could only speak haltingly as she steered with her left hand.

“Are you still there?” buzzed the voice from the phone.

“I’m here, Neal.” Why did the best vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles have to have that name?

“So they’re going to meet us for lunch at Nowhere at one,” he went on. “Table for Obstadt, okay? They like the Queen Mary ghost show; be ready to defend this reunion-show concept, though, the ‘Ghost of a Chance’ thing, I don’t think they view it as feasible yet.” There was a click on the line. “You’ve got another call, Loretta—that’s all I had. See you at Nowhere, at one.”

“Right.” The line clicked on Obstadt’s end. DeLarava sniffed hard and blinked, then pushed a button on the back of the phone. “Hello?”

Over the background static of a portable telephone, she heard a steady echoing splashing. Whoever was calling her was doing so while urinating!

“Hi,” came a voice, “is this Loretta deLarava?”

“Who is this?”

“Ms. deLarava? This is Ayres out in Venice Beach, and I don’t know if this one is worth your time, but—”

“Are you pissing as you speak to me, Mr. Ayres?”

The noise abruptly stuttered to a stop. “No,” Ayres said breathlessly. “No, of course not. Of course not.”

“Good. What did you want to speak to me about?”

“Um. Oh, yeah—this may not be the kind of thing you told me to watch for, but a big goddamn fish just washed up on the beach this morning. It’s about twenty feet long, apparently dead, and nobody can figure out what the hell kind of fish it is. And a bunch of lobsters and crabs crawled up out of the ocean at about the same time—they’re still running around, some of ‘em have got into the shops and the tennis courts. People are freaked.”

DeLarava’s heart was pounding, and all thought of Ayres’s discourtesy was forgotten. That would have to be him, causing that, she thought. Coming back out of the ocean these…thirty-three years later. Of course this new damned smoke would finally be the beacon that would lead him ashore. And if Pete Sullivan is in town, that would also have helped draw him out.

“Thanks, Bernie,” she croaked. She hung up the phone and began signaling for a lane change. She hadn’t needed to ask where at Venice Beach.

She would have to call the studio and have them send a news crew to Venice, and then scoot south on the 405 to pick up Joey Webb at his creepy Signal Hill apartment. Good thing he never went anywhere.

She wasn’t ready for this. Here was the old man coming out of the sea already—and Halloween was only three days off. It would definitely have to be this year, this Halloween. Would Joey do, would he be mask enough, all by himself? He’d probably be okay today, when she’d just be trying to see where the old man went, but what might happen on Saturday? Damn Sukie Sullivan anyway. Paranoid lush.

DeLarava’s scalp was itching again, under the rubber band that encircled it under her brushed-over hair, and when she scratched, the rubber band slipped upward and jumped to the top of her head, where it sat slackly holding her hair up in an effect that she knew from past experience looked like a miniature thatched hut. She couldn’t pull the rubber band back down into place before she got off the freeway—it took two hands, and she would want to fix her hair too.

She had started wearing a rubber band around her scalp when she turned forty (in 1966!), as a measure to keep her facial skin pulled taut. It had perhaps never worked very well for that purpose, but she had noticed that the cerebral constriction of it seemed to keep her thoughts aligned, keep her personality from fragmenting into half a dozen frightened little girls. And when old triumphs began (irrationally!) to shake up silty clouds of guilt and shame in her thoughts, a rubber band or two around her skull helped to slow the involuntary tears.

But fresh tears were leaking out of her eyes now. At least I’ve got an excuse to miss the Nowhere lunch, she thought: Alert businesswoman, consummate professional; had to go cover the story of the crabs terrorizing Venice. And maybe my stateroom will be robbed today.

In ‘46, when she’d had her other name and had still been waiting tables in Fort Worth, her little rented house had been broken into. The burglars had emptied her jewelry box onto the bed, and had flung her best clothes onto the floor, and had even left a greasy handprint on her not-yet-paid-off radio—but they had not taken anything at all. Obviously she had had nothing, perhaps had been nothing, worth their attention.

The unconsidered life is not worth living. She had got consideration a number of times since then; she’d been robbed of diamonds, Krugerrands, fine cars—and she had gone to bed with a number of men, especially during her brief period of fame, and had even briefly been …

She shied away from memories of her marriage, and of a starkly sunny summer afternoon at Venice Beach.

But none of it had ever been enough to confirm her.

She knew it was Houdini’s fault.

The southbound 405 was crowded, and she had to slow down to a full stop in the right lane. She sat there expressionlessly leaking tears for a full minute before the cars ahead of her began to move, and only then, too late to fix it, did she remember her disordered hair. She glanced at the driver of a Volkswagen trundling along in the lane to her left, and wondered if he was puzzled by her unusual coif, but he was oblivious of her. That didn’t help at all.

The day after the day after tomorrow would be her seventy-seventh birthday. She had been born on Halloween in Grace Hospital in Detroit at 1:26 in the afternoon, in, apparently, the very instant that the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini was expiring in the same hospital.

And she had been robbed of her birth-ghosts, the psychic shells of herself that had been thrown off in the stress and fright of being born. Those shells should have been instantly reabsorbed, like the virtual photons that electrons are always throwing off and then recapturing…but they had been caught by someone else, and so she had been tumbled out into this busy world with only a fraction of her proper self. The loss had to be connected with Houdini’s death.

DeLarava hit the brake pedal again as taillights flashed red in front of her, and she thought about what Sukie Sullivan had said to her brother Pete on the telephone on Friday night, just before she’d shot her own drunken head off: Go to the place where we hid—a thing, some things, okay? In a garage? It’s what you’re gonna need…And Pete had said, Where you can’t hardly walk for all the palm fronds on the pavement, right? And you’ve got to crawl under low branches? Is it still there? And Sukie had replied, I’ve never moved it.

DeLarava was sure that they’d been talking about Houdini’s mask—the severed thumb and the plaster hands. The loss of them at Kennedy Airport in ‘75 had not been a random, tragic luggage theft after all—the twins had snatched the package, and hidden it from her. That, and the theft of her birth-ghosts, had been the only robberies that had ever hurt her.

A garage, she thought as she signaled for a lane change to the left, with palm fronds on the pavement and low branches around it. That could be nearly any where—and if Pete has recovered the thumb and the hands, there’s no use in me finding the garage now anyway. And if he’s carrying them with him, then he’s masked and I can’t track him.

At least not by psychic means.

But the old man is apparently out of the sea now, or at least emerging. Maybe I can catch him and eat him even without Pete being present as a lure. And though my twin set is broken, I ought to be able to get by, just with the help of Joey Webb. A real bag-full-of-broken-mirror schizophrenic is nearly as good a mask as a pair of twins.

And maybe this…this lobster quadrille will even draw Nicky Bradshaw out of hiding, him being the old man’s godson and all, and the old man having got him his start in show business. Maybe I could have Bradshaw gassed or knocked unconscious. Do people dream, when they’re unconscious? If so, I could probably be on hand to get live footage of one godalmighty fireball in Venice. It’d certainly be a more valuable bit of film to peddle to the networks than this feature on the lobsters and the dead fish.

It might even be possible for me to catch Nicky’s ghost. I wonder how that one would taste, it having been in effect carried in a locket around his neck for seventeen years.

NEAL OBSTADT’S offices were on the roof of the Hopkins Building on the corner of Beverly Glen and Wilshire, ten stories above the Westwood sidewalks and overlooking the tan blocks of the UCLA buildings to the west and the green lawns of the Los Angeles Country Club to the east. The walls of his consulting room were sectional cement slabs paneled with Burmese teak, but there was no roof, just a collapsible vinyl awning that was rolled back this morning to let the chilly breeze flutter the papers on the desk. Obstadt was slouched sideways in his thronelike chair, squinting up at an airliner slanting west across the blue sky.

“Loretta’s a clown,” he said without looking away from the plane. “Trying to eat the ghost of Jonah or somebody out of those fishes she hooks up from that puddle around the Queen Mary.”

The black-bearded man across the desk from him opened his mouth, but Obstadt held up a hand.

“Got to think,” Obstadt said. “I need…what I need is a fresh viewpoint.”

He pulled open a drawer and lifted out of it a thing that looked like a small black fire extinguisher. From his pocket he fished a thumb-sized glass cartridge, and he looked at the label hand-Dremled onto the side: HENRIETTA HEWITT—9-5-92.

“Was last month a good vintage?” he asked absently as he laid the cartridge into a slot in the nozzle at the top of the black cylinder and then twisted a screw at the base of the slot until he heard a muffled hiss inside the cylinder. A plastic tube like a straw stuck out from the top of the nozzle, and he leaned forward over the desk to get his lips around it.

He exhaled through his nose for several seconds, then pressed a button on the side of the nozzle and inhaled deeply.

All at once:

Yellowed curtains flapping in an old wood framed window with peeling white paint, hip and wrist lanced with flaring hot pain against the dusty carpet and the weight of the whole noisy planet crushing her sunken chest; only newspapers for years now on the big leather recliner by the TV, no one will find me, who’ll feed Mee-mow and Moozh; Edna and Sam both moved away, back East, having had weddings of their own, but a string of Christmases before that with smells of pine and roasting turkey, and bright-painted metal toys; and their births, wailing little creatures wet and red-faced after the hours of anxious, joyful, expanding pain—(nothing like this constricting agony that was smashing her out of existence now like a locomotive rolling a fragmenting car in front of it)—and breath-catching nakedness under sweaty sheets in a palm-shaded Pasadena bungalow, a wedding in 1922, drunk, and driving the boxy new Ford around and around the little graveled traffic circle at Wilshire and Western; long hair easier to brush when the air carried the sulfur smell of smudge pots burning in the orange groves in the winter, and a schoolhouse and pet ducks in the fiat farmlands out home in the San Fernando Valley, dolls made of wood and cloth, and smells of cabbage and talcum powder and sour milk; pain and being squeezed and choking and bright light—ejected out into the cold!—and now there was nothing but a little girl falling and falling down a deep black hole, forever.

Obstadt exhaled slowly, aware again of the sun on his bare forearms, the breeze tickling between the coarse gray hairs. He uncrossed his legs and sat up straight, his man’s body still feeling strange to him for a moment or two. And, he thought, I now weigh one three-thousandth of an ounce more than I did a minute ago.

He took a deep breath of the chilly morning air. The memories were fading—an old woman dying of a heart attack, after kids and a long life. He knew that the details would filter into his dreams…along with the details of all the others. Nice not to have a wino or a crackhead for once.

“Loretta’s a clown,” he repeated hoarsely, dragging his attention back across the vicarious decades. “She wins chips in this low-level game, but never cashes ‘em in to move up to a bigger table; though she’d obviously like to, with her Velcro and her vegetarianism.”

He rubbed his fists over his gray crew cut, knuckling his scalp. “Still,” he went on, “some big chips do sometimes slide across her table, and she’s all excited about one now.” He stood up and stretched, flexing his broad shoulders. “I’m going to take it away from her.” He thought of brightly painted toys under Christmas trees. “Children,” he said thoughtfully. “Does Loretta have any, biological or adopted? Find out, and find them if she does. Keep monitoring her calls.” He looked at Canov. “What have you got on Topper?”

“Spooky,” Canov corrected him. “Nicholas Bradshaw. I think the courts still have warrants out on him. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”

“Loretta’s pretty sure he’s not.”

Canov made a tossing gesture with one hand. “Or she’s trying to fake somebody out by pretending she thinks so. He does seem to be reliably dead. We got a broad spectrum of media out to do resonance tests at the houses he lived in, and in his old law office in Seal Beach, and they found no ringing lifelines that worked out to be him. The one that seems to be his thuds dead at around 1975, when he disappeared.”

“What kind of mediums?” Obstadt hated faggoty overprecise language.

Canov shrugged. “Hispanic brujas, a team of psychics from USC, autistic kids, ghost-sniffing dogs, even; a renegade Catholic priest, two Buddhist monks; we fed LSD to some poker players and had them do sixty or seventy hands of seven-stud with a Tarot deck in the law office one night. We had some blind fencers in, and videotaped ’em, watching for spontaneous disengages, but we didn’t see any dowsing effects. And all the EM stuff, TV sets and current and compasses, behave normally.”

“Okay, so he’s dead,” said Obstadt, “and his ghost hasn’t been hanging out at the places you checked. Is it wandering around?”

“Not if he died anywhere locally—it looks like he just dispersed, or was eaten. He published an as-told-to book in 1962, Spooked, but no copy we’ve found in libraries or bookstores or junk stores has any flyspecks on it at all, and we located a dozen copies of his high-school yearbooks, all of them with clean pages where his picture is. His parents were both cremated—Neptune Society—but his godfather’s buried at the Hollywood Cemetery next to Paramount Studios, and we keep scattering dirt on the old man’s marker, but the only time it’s cleaned off is when the maintenance people do it.”

Obstadt nodded. “‘Kay.” He stood up and crossed the carpeted floor to an east-facing window. “And right now go to Venice, will you? Check out this business with the fish and the lobsters.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I should like to buy an egg, please” she said timidly.

“How do you sell them?”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

ONE of them had finally been for real. Maybe.

Angelica Anthem Elizalde stood in the center of the tiny botánica shop and stared resentfully at the morbid items for sale. On one wall were hung a hundred little cellophane bags of dried herbs, along with crude cloth “voodoo dolls” that cost two dollars apiece; on the opposite wall, on shelves, were ranked dozens of little bottles with labels like ABRE CAMINO and LE DE VETE DE AQUI—“Road Opener” oil and “Stay Away Law” oil—and aerosol spray cans labeled ST. MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL and HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROR (“Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. Repeat spraying as necessary”). In the glass case by the cash register were a lot of books with colored pictures of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Devil on the covers—one, called Conjuro del Tobacco, by Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga, was apparently a handbook on how to tell the future by watching the ash on cigars.

She had sat in the bus station on Seventh Street until dawn, and then stashed her canvas bag in a locker and walked east, over the Fourth Street bridge into the old Boyle Heights area of L.A., where she’d grown up after the move from Norco. When the police had brought bloodied Mexicans into Lincoln Heights Receiving Hospital, just a few blocks up Soto here, they’d always just called the area Hollenbeck Division, but Elizalde had liked the words Boyle Heights, and she had always tried to focus on the old Craftsman and Victorian houses on the narrow streets, and not on the bars and liquor stores and ropa usada used clothing stores.

And she had always been somehow personally embarrassed by botánica shops like this one.

The two young women behind the counter were conversing in fast, colloquial Spanish, ignoring Elizalde.

Elizalde frowned, not sure how she felt about being mistaken for an Anglo; but she just blinked around impatiently and gave no indication that she understood what was being said. One of the women assured the other that the tourist would soon get bored and leave; the other resumed the topic of laundry, reminding her friend that Saturday was Halloween and that she had better not leave her clothing out if it rained that night: “La ropa estará mojado en to espiritu, y olada mal por meses”—The clothes will be soaked in ghost-tea, and stink for months.

This is the vein, all right, Elizalde thought dourly. All the creepy stuff that I was brought up to believe was orthodox Roman Catholicism.

She remembered her surprise when a fellow student at UCLA had mentioned being a Roman Catholic. Elizalde had asked him how an intelligent person could really believe, for example, that rolling a raw egg over a child would cure fever—and then she’d been humiliated when he’d assured her that there was nothing like that in Catholic doctrine, and asked her where she had got such an idea.

She had of course chosen to laugh it off as a joke, rather than tell him the truth: that her mother had viewed taking Communion at church, and curing afflictions by rolling eggs over sick people—or by burning cornflowers, or eating papers with incantations scrawled on them—as all part of the same faith.

A plastic lighter and an open pack of Marlboros lay on the glass counter; and Elizalde, reminded by the cigar-ash book of a trick her grandmother used to perform, impulsively laid a dime on the counter and took one of the cigarettes. The women stopped talking and stared at her, but didn’t object when she lit it.

She puffed rapidly, not inhaling, and when she had a half-inch of ash she tapped it off onto the glass and with a fingertip rapidly smeared it into the shape of a six-pointed Star of David. Then she puffed hard at the cigarette for a full half-minute, while the two women on the other side of the counter watched cautiously. Elizalde wiped her right hand hard down the flank of her jeans.

Finally she tapped the long ash into her dry palm; she squeezed it, rubbed it around with her fingers, and pressed her hand down onto the center of the star.

If this was done correctly, with the heel of the hand imprinting a beardlike semicircle and the curled-under fingernails scraping clean spaces that looked like shadowed eye sockets and then jiggling across the ash forehead, the result was a face that was plausibly that of Jesus, identifiable by the beard and a sketchy crown of thorns. Elizalde’s grandmother had reduced grown men to tears with the apparently miraculous image.

Elizalde lifted her hand away—it had worked well enough.

One of the women crossed herself, and the other opened her mouth as if to say something—but then the ash pattern on the glass started to move.

Elizalde had glanced down when the women’s eyes had gone wide and they’d stepped back, and at first she’d thought a draft was messing up her crude picture; but the ash image was re-forming itself. The jagged streaks that had been the crown of thorns became straggly lines like unruly bangs, and the broad smear of beard crowded up and became the jowls of a fat face. The ash around the eye gaps arranged itself in a finely striated pattern, representing baggy wrinkles.

Fleetingly it occurred to Elizalde that her palms were too damp now to do the trick again. The blood was singing in her ears, and she gripped the metal edge of the display case because her sense of balance was gone.

She recognized the face. It was Frank Rocha, one of the patients who had died during that last group-therapy session at Elizalde’s clinic on Halloween night two years ago.

Then the blur of the picture’s mouth coalesced into clarity like solid curds forming in vinegared milk—and the mouth opened, and began moving. It was of course silent, and Elizalde couldn’t read lips, but she convulsively slapped her hand across the ash image, nearly hard enough to break the glass.

Her expression when she looked up at the two women must have been wild for they backed up against the pay telephone on the back wall.

Elizalde dropped the cigarette onto the linoleum floor and ground it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Yo volveré,” she said, “quando usted no está tan ocupado.” I’ll be back when you’re not so busy.

She turned and strode out of the botánica onto the Soto Street sidewalk. The morning air was cold in her open, panting mouth, but she could feel a trickle of sweat run down her left-side ribs.

That really was Frank Rocha’s face, she thought. God!

Her own face was as cold as if she had been caught in some horrifying crime, and she wanted to hide from this street, from this city, from the very sky.

She still had the letter from Frank Rocha in her wallet, in the hip pocket of these very jeans. She wanted to throw it away, throw the whole wallet away, every bit of ID.

One of them was finally for real, she insisted to herself even as she was furiously shaking her head and nearly sprinting away from the incriminating counter in the botánica. That last…séance, two years ago, actually fucking worked. It did! Dr. Alden, drunken old asshole, was right to make me resign. I should have listened to him, listened to the damned nurses, even though they were all wrong in their reasons for criticizing me. I killed those three patients who died in that clinic conference room, and I’m responsible for the ones who were injured, and the ones who are probably still in one or another of the state mental hospitals.

Angelica Elizalde vividly remembered the two times she had been called in to Dr. Alden’s office.

“COME IN,” he had told her when she had walked down the hall to his ostentatiously book-lined cubicle. “Do please close the door, Dr. Elizalde, and sit down.”

Alden had been the chief of the attending staff at the county hospital on Santa Fe in Huntington Park; he was a political appointee with unkempt hair and cigarette-stained fingers, and drunk half the time. Elizalde had been thirty-two years old, a psychiatrist with the title of “Director of Medical Education for Psychiatric Training.” She had been at the county hospital for two years at that time, and in ‘90 was making $65,000 a year.

And she had felt that she earned it. After her internship she had stayed on at the county hospital for genuinely altruistic reasons, not just because it was the path of least resistance—the third-world-like situation provided experience that a more gentrified area couldn’t give her, and she had wanted to help the sort of people who ordinarily wouldn’t have access to psychiatric care.

Alden had reached across his cluttered desk to hand her a folded letter. “The charge nurse charged in here this morning with this,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “You’d better read it.”

The letter from the charge nurse to Alden had been a denunciation of Elizalde and her techniques; it concluded with, “Nurses and staff have lost confidence in Dr. Elizalde and would not feel comfortable carrying out her orders in the future.”

Elizalde had known that every hospital is virtually run by the nurses, and that no chief of staff could afford to displease them; but she had looked up at Alden defiantly. “My patients get better. Ask the nurses themselves how my patients do, compared with those of the other doctors.”

Alden’s mouth was still kinked in a forced smile, but he was frowning now. “No. I don’t need to ask them. You must know as well as I do that your methods have no place in a modern hospital. Voodoo dolls! Ouija boards! And how many of those candles have you got on your shelves in there, the tall ones with…saints, and, and God, and the Virgin Mary painted on them? It’s not helpful to—a white-bearded God, Caucasian, a man, leaning out of the clouds and holding a scepter! And Rastafari paraphernalia, Santeria stuff! Your office smells like a church, and looks like some kind of ignorant Mexican fortune-teller’s tent!”

Abruptly Elizalde wondered if she should have brought along a witness. In an even voice she said, “These methods are no more—”

“Voodoo dolls, Dr. Elizalde! I can’t believe you credit such—”

“I don’t credit them, any more than I credit Rorschach blots as really being pictures of monsters!” She had made herself take a deep breath then. “Really. Listen. By having patients do readings with cards and planchettes I get them to be unself-consciously objective—about themselves, their spouses, parents, children. The readings let me see, without the patients having to tell me, the problems that deeply concern them, traumas that they subconsciously know should be exposed. A lot of people can’t do the abstraction needed to see things in blots, or—or see motivations in situational sketches that look like old storyboards from ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ But if they’ve grown up with these symbols, they—”

“The subject is closed,” Alden said tremulously. “I order you to resume the standard psychiatric routines.”

Elizalde knew what that meant—see each patient for ten minutes at a visit, during which time she would be expected to do nothing more than look at the patient’s chart, ask the patient how he or she was doing, assess the medications and perhaps tweak the prescription a little; nothing more than maintenance, generally by means of Thorazine.

She had left his office without another word, but she had not obeyed him. While the other psychiatrists’ offices had all looked alike—the metal desk, the announcements taped to the walls, the particleboard bookcase, the toys in the corner for patients’ children—Elizalde’s office had gone on looking like a bruja’s den, with the religious veladoro candles on the shelves, pictures of Jesus and Mary and filthy old St. Lazar on the walls, and Ouija boards and crystal balls holding down the papers on the desk. She had even had, and frequently used to good effect, one of those giant black 8-bails, in the little window at the base of which messages like Good Luck and True Love would float to the surface when the thing was turned upside down. A simple “What do you think that’s referring to, for you?”—with any of these admittedly morbid toys—had often unlocked important fears and resentments.

Some of the other members of the psychiatric team had frequently talked about raising “spiritual awareness” in their patients, and had liked to use the blurry jargon of New Age mysticism, but even they found Elizalde’s use of spiritualism vulgar and demeaningly utilitarian—especially since Elizalde insisted that there was not a particle of intrinsic truth behind any sort of spiritualism.

Too, she had not been inclined to come up with the trendy sorts of diagnoses. It had been popular among psychiatrists then to uncover hitherto-unsuspected childhood memories of sexual abuse, just as ten years earlier all the patients had been diagnosed as having “anger” that needed to “be worked through.” Elizalde was sure that guilt and shame were the next emotions that patients would be encouraged to rid themselves of.

She herself thought that guilt and shame were often healthy and appropriate responses to one’s past behavior.

And so she had again been called in to Alden’s office.

This time he had simply asked her to submit her resignation. He assured her that if she did not resign, she’d be “put on the shitlist” with the Peer Review Organization and the National Register of Physicians—suspended from taking any Medicare or Medicaid patients, and thus unhirable at any hospital in the country.

He had given her the rest of the day off to think about it, and she had paced up and down the living room of her Los Feliz house, determined to call “60 Minutes” and the Los Angeles Times; she would expose the county psychiatric system, rout the self-righteous nurses, get Alden’s job. But by the next morning she had realized that she would not be able to win this fight—and at last she had driven to the hospital and mutely handed in her resignation.

Then she had gone into private practice. She found a chiropractor who agreed to let her rent his storefront Alvarado Street office on Tuesdays, and she worked as a secretary for a downtown law firm the rest of the week.

Her Tuesday psychiatric business had been slow at first—two or three patients, sometimes a fifty-minute group “séance”—but good results earned referrals for her from local businesses and even from the county, and within six months she had moved into an office of her own, between a credit dentist and a car-insurance office on Beverly. Soon she’d had to hire a receptionist to help out with correspondence and billing the insurance companies.

Finally, on Halloween night in 1990, she had held the last of her séance sessions. And it had been for real.

ELIZALDE HAD been walking west on the Whittier Boulevard sidewalk for the last several blocks, having fled Soto Street, and now she stopped.

In 1990, Frank Rocha had been living in a little bungalow-style house just north of MacArthur Park. Elizalde had called on him twice, in the determined, I-make-house-calls spirit she’d had at the time, and she thought she could find the place again.

He had had a wife, and…two daughters?

Standing on the sidewalk in the morning sun, Elizalde was snapping her fingers with controlled, fearful excitement. She knew that her two years of aimless wandering around the country had been just postponement; or not postponement but preparation, getting her strength back, for…

For the perilous and almost certainly pointless ordeal of making amends.

Amado Street, it had been. She would be able to find it once she had got to MacArthur Park. She took a deep breath, and then began walking, looking for a bus stop.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“When the sands are all dry he is gay as a lark,

And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:

But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,

His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

SINCE this was in effect breakfast, Pete Sullivan had ordered a Coors Light with his menudo. The beer was finished by the time the waiter carried the bowl of tripe stew to his corner table, so he waved the empty glass at the man.

“Another Coors,” noted the waiter, nodding. From the moment Sullivan had sat down, the man had proudly insisted on speaking English. “That was unleaded, right?” “Right,” said Sullivan. “Right,” he repeated quietly as the waiter walked back to the counter. Unleaded, he thought. That’s the only kind of gasoline they sell now, so people with old vehicles like mine have to dump little jugs of lead substitute into the tank every time they fill up. Probably the term unleaded for light beer will still be in use long after leaded gasoline is forgotten, and everyone will assume that its a corruption of some old beer term. Uhnledden, he thought blurrily. The original light beer, brewed since the Middle Ages in the ancient German village of Bad Fahrting.

There were two or three plastic bottles of shampoo now alongside the bottles of lead substitute in the box under the sink in his van, and he imagined strolling into the men’s gym at City College up on Vermont and pouring the wrong stuff onto his head in the shower. He could claim it was a delousing measure. It probably would work as a delousing measure. But what would he tell the gas-station attendant when he poured shampoo into the gas tank?

The shampoo had been only ninety-nine cents a bottle—logically—at the Arab-run ninety-nine-cent store he’d stopped at on Western. The ubiquitous little L.A. strip malls seemed to be all ninety-nine-cent stores now, as they had seemed to be all Mexican-style barbecue chicken places in the eighties.

TINY NAYLOR’S was gone, and so he had driven on down Sunset past the various coffee shops that he still thought of as the chicken-hawk place, the A.A. and N.A. place, he rock-’n’-roll place, the punk-rock-hell place. God knew what sorts of crowds they attracted now. Ben Frank’s was still by the La Cienega intersection, and he remembered that it had been such a hangout for the long-hair-and-granny-glasses types in the sixties that the casting call ad for the Monkees’ TV show had said, “Ben Frank’s types wanted.”

He had turned south on Highland and then east again on Melrose—and discovered that Melrose Avenue, though still animated, had died. He remembered when Flip, the huge used-clothing store, had burned in ‘83 or ‘84, and had then had an epic fire sale out on the sidewalk—kimonos and tuxedos and fedoras, all selling cheap in the hot sun and the loud rock music. Now there was a Gap clothing store, just like you’d see in any mall. In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.

Once safely past the neighborhood of deLarava’s studio, he had turned south on Western and driven down to Wilshire and followed it farther east, past the marooned Art Deco relics of the Wiltern Building and the Bullocks Wilshire, to Hoover Street; east of Hoover, Wilshire slants through MacArthur Park (Sullivan’s father had always stubbornly gone on calling it Westlake Park, as it had been called before World War II, but today Sullivan sped through to Alvarado without thinking about the old man), and Sullivan recalled that the boulevard would end a mile or so ahead, just past the Harbor Freeway.

Here in this triangle between the Harbor and Hollywood Freeways were the narrow streets and old houses of the area known as the Temple-Beaudry district. Over on the far side of the freeways, on the hill above downtown L.A., the grand Victorian houses of Bunker Hill had stood until thirty years ago. Anonymous office towers stood there now; and on this side Sullivan saw new cleared lots and construction, and he knew that Temple-Beaudry would soon go the same way.

He had got off Wilshire and driven around through the pepper-tree-shaded streets, and had eventually found this place—a tiny Mexican restaurant called Los Tres Jesuses. Presumably it was owned by three guys who each had the common Hispanic first name Jesus—pronounced Hey-soos, and usually, perhaps out of reverence, replaced with the nickname Chui—pronounced Chewy. “The Three Chewies” had sounded to him like a good place to get breakfast.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop, he thought now as he took a sip of his second cold beer. Manny, Moe, and Flapjack. Larry, Moe, and Culero. Sukie had called people culero sometimes—it meant, roughly, coward.

He picked up his spoon and dipped it into the hot menudo. Even the steam from it, sharp with garlic and onion and cilantro, was strengthening; in a few minutes he had eaten it all, chewed up every white rectangle of tripe and mopped up the last of the red, beefy broth with tortillas.

He wiped his forehead with the paper napkin and waved the second emptied bottle of beer at the waiter. He put it down and shook a cigarette out of the pack, and as he struck a match he noticed that the tin ashtray on the table had a crude felt-pen drawing of a skull in the dish of it, with, carefully lettered around the rim, the words L.A. CIGAR TOO TRAGICAL.

It was a palindrome—L.A. cigar both ways, with toot in the middle.

Startled an instant in advance, he dropped the burning match onto the drawn skull, and the ashtray glared for a moment with a silent puff of flame, as if someone had previously poured a film of high-proof brandy into it.

The flame was out instantly, and the faint whiff of…bacon?…was gone as soon as Sullivan caught a trace of it.

Suddenly he was nervous—but a moment later all that happened was that a car alarm started up in the lot behind the bar. Beep…beep…beep…He smiled wryly Que culero, he thought—but his hand was almost twitching with impatience for the third beer.

Then the bartender began clanging a spoon against a glass between the beats of the car horn: beep-clang-beep-clang-beep…

For a moment it was the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore…and with that the memories of his father had caught him.

You couldn’t count on motors, their father had told Sukie and Pete a hundred times, sitting over chili sizes at Ptomaine Tommy’s down on Broadway, or in line for the Cyclone Racer roller coaster way out at the Pike in Long Beach, or just driving the new Studebaker up Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains to Topanga Canyon and back. The camera had to be cranked at a steady speed even when you were crouched on a platform bolted to the front of a car spinning out around a turn, or on a boat in the Bering Sea when it was so cold that the oil in the camera was near to freezing solid. Some guys tried to use the second hand of a watch to keep rolling that foot of film per second, but Karl Brown told me the trick of humming the Anvil Chorus in your head—if you got that tune really tromping, they could swing you on a sling in a high wind from the top of a twenty-story building and you’d still have that crank turning sixteen frames a second as steady as a metronome in somebody’s parlor.

Their father had been Arthur Patrick Sullivan—known as A.P. or “Apie,” apparently because he liked to do feats of strength and had hair growing thickly on the backs of his shoulders—and he had started in the movie business in 1915, working as a cameraman and film technician in Cecil B. DeMille’s barn at Vine and Selma in Hollywood. His bosses in those early days had been DeMille, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish, who was soon to change his name to Goldwyn—but the infant movie business was chaotic, and Apie Sullivan had eventually become a producer and director at 20th Century Fox. For a cresting decade or so he had made feature films with stars like Tyrone Power and Don Ameche and Alice Faye; but it had been obvious to the twins that he had been happiest in the days before sound stages and artificial set lighting. They’d say “We’re losing the light” when the sun would start to set, he had often told the twins, but that was Griffith’s magic hour, that hour when the sun was just over the trees, and the buildings and the actors would be lit from the side with that gold glow.

The 1920s had been their father’s magic hour.

By the time the twins were born, in 1952, the old man had been on his third marriage, had subsided into doing documentaries and freelance editing, and was supplementing his income by buying and selling real estate out in Riverside and Orange County; but he had never moved out of the old Spanish-style house in Brentwood, and he had sometimes hung out at the Hillcrest Country Club with Danny Kaye and George Jessel, and had been proud that he could still occasionally get jobs in show business for the children of various old friends.

The waiter brought the third Coors Light, and Pete took a long sip from the neck of the bottle. Drinking in the morning, he thought.

Beth, as Sukie had been known until college, had always claimed to remember their mother, who died a year after the twins birth. Pete had never believed her.

When the twins were seven, their father had got engaged to be married again. Kelley Keith had been thirty-three years old to their fathers sixty-one, but she was a genuine actress, having had a few supporting roles in films like We’re Not Married and Vampire Over London, and the twins had been impressed with her contemporary career as they had never been with their father’s old movies. And she had been slim and blond with a chipmunk overbite and laugh-crinkled eyes, and Pete had been desperate not to let Beth know that he had fallen in love—he was certain—with their stepmother-to-be.

The four of them had seemed, to the twins at least, to do everything together—wading in the tide pools at Morro Bay to find tiny octopuses and to nervously stick their bare toes into the clustered grasping fingers of sea anemones, hiking through the pine woods around their father’s cabin in Lake Arrowhead, having grand lunches at the giant-hat-shaped Brown Derby on Wilshire….Their father always ordered raw oysters and steak tartare, and kept promising the twins that they’d be getting new brothers and sisters before too long.

The wedding was held in April of 1959, at St. Alban’s Church on Hilgard. Sukie—Elizabeth—had been sulking for weeks and refused to be the flower girl, and in the end it had been Shirley Temple’s little girl, Lori Black, who carried the bouquet of lilacs. The reception was at Chasen’s, and Pete could still remember Andy Devine raucously singing “At the Codfish Ball.”

And then, one afternoon that summer, their father and his new bride had driven out to Venice Beach for a picnic. The twins had not been along for this outing. Their white-haired father had reportedly gone swimming, doing his always-self-consciously-athletic “Australian Crawl” way out past the surf line, and he had apparently gotten a stomach cramp. And he had drowned.

Pete tilted the bottle up for another slug of cold beer.

After their father’s death, Kelley Keith had just disappeared. She had simply packed up all her belongings and moved, and no one had been able to say where to.

Story of my life, Pete Sullivan thought now with no particular bitterness. Later he’d heard a rumor that she had gone to Mexico with a lot of their father’s money. Then he’d heard that she had got in a car crash down there and died.

And so the twins had been put into the first of what was to be a succession of foster homes. And eventually there had been Hollywood High, and City College and no money, and then the jobs with deLarava.

DeLarava probably has the license number of my van, Sullivan thought now as he swirled the last inch of beer in the bottle. Could she somehow have the cops looking for it?

He remembered a joke his father had liked to tell:

What do you make your shoes out of?

Hide.

Hide? Why should I hide?

No, hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!

Well, let her in, I’m not afraid.

I’M AFRAID, Sullivan thought. Yo soy culero.

He had seen a pay telephone on the back wall by the restroom doors, and now he slid a couple of quarters from the scatter of change on the table and stood up. See if you can’t establish a solider home base, he thought as he walked steadily to the phone. Clausewitz’s first piano concerto.

Be there, Steve, he thought as he punched in the remembered number. Don’t have moved.

He heard only one ring before someone picked it up at the other end. “Hello?”

“Hi,” Sullivan said cautiously, “is Steve Lauter there please?”

“This is Steve. Hey, this sounds like Pete Sullivan! Is that you, man?”

“Or an unreasonable facsimile.” Steve had been working at some credit union in the eighties. Sullivan wondered if he was about to leave for work. “Listen, I’m in L.A. for a couple of days, I was thinking we should get together.”

“I can have a case of Classic Coke on the premises when you get here,” said Steve heartily. “Where are you staying?”

“Well,” said Sullivan, grateful that Steve had so readily provided a cue, “I’m sleeping in my van. It’s got a bed in it, and a stove—”

“No, you stay here. I insist. How soon can you be here?”

Sullivan recalled that Steve had been married, and he wanted to shave and shower before showing up at his old friend’s door. “Aren’t you working today?”

“I get Wednesdays off. I was just going to mow the lawn today.”

“Well, I’ve got a couple of errands to run,” Sullivan said, “people to see. This afternoon? I’ll give you a call first. Are you still off Washington and Crenshaw?”

“Naw, man, I moved west of the 405, in Sawtelle where the cops don’t pull you over if you’re in a decent car. Let me give you the address, I’m at—”

“I’ll get it when I call you back,” Sullivan interrupted. “And I’ll watch the speed limits on the way, I don’t think I’m in a decent car.”

“Make it soon, Pete.”

“You bet. I’ll bring some…Michelob, right?”

“It’s Amstel Light these days, but I’ve got plenty.”

“I’ll bring some anyway.”

“Are you drinking now? Old Teet himself?”

“Only when it’s sunny out.”

Steve laughed, a little nervously. “That’s every day, here, boy, you know that. I’ll be by the phone when you call.”

After he had hung up, Sullivan stood beside the phone in the dark hallway. His mouth tasted of menudo and beer, and he wished he hadn’t left his cigarettes out on the table, for there was another call to make. A siren wailed past outside, and he slid his other quarter into the slot. He remembered the studio number too.

After two rings, “Chapel Productions,” said a woman’s voice.

Good Lord, he thought, that’s new. “Could I talk to Loretta deLarava, please. This is Donahue at Raleigh.” He wondered if deLarava still used Raleigh for special postproduction work, and if Donahue was still there.

He had no intention of speaking to deLarava, and was ready to hang up if she came on the line, but the woman said, “Ms. DeLarava is at lunch—no, that’s right, she’s doing a timely in Venice. Might be a while.”

Sullivan’s face was chilly with sweat again, and he glanced at the men’s-room door, measuring the distance to it—but the surge of nausea passed. “Okay,” he said, breathing shallowly, “I’ll try later.”

He juggled the receiver back onto the hook and swayed back to his table. Sitting down, he lifted the bottle and drank the last of the beer.

Order another? he thought. No. Can’t A.O.P. in these narrow old streets, and you sure don’t need a drunk-driving arrest. What the hell is she doing in Venice today! Halloween’s three days off. At worst, this is just a reconnaissance scouting trip for what she’ll be doing then—and maybe something timely really is happening there. He thought about driving out there to see, and discovered that he could not.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.

“That’s just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

SOMETIMES Kootie would be kind to the poor things, putting wooden croutons in the soup so that there would be something they could eat at the dinner table; but today, when he was trying to inoculate his children, he didn’t want the things around, so he was smoking a cigar made of paper and horsehair. It tasted horrible, but at least there were no indistinct forms hunching around the gate.

His children weren’t cooperating—Kootie had got them out on the lawn barefoot, and he was throwing little Chinese firecrackers to make the children dance away from their exploded footprints, but they were crying; and when he set up a pole with coins at the top, his son Tommy couldn’t climb it, and Kootie had to rub rosin on the boy’s knees and shout at him before he managed it.

It hadn’t been easy for Kootie to learn these tricks—he was deaf, and had to bite the telephone receiver in order to hear by bone conduction. Now in the dream he was biting one of the firecrackers, lighting it as if it was one of the awful cigars, and when it went off it jolted him awake.

His warm, furry pillow was awake too—Fred had scrambled up at the noise, and Kootie sat up on the pile of videocasette rewinders in the back seat of Raffle’s car. Outside, bright morning sun lit the tops of old office buildings. Kootie straightened the sunglasses an his nose.

“That roused the sleepyheads,” said Raffle from the driver’s seat. “Backfire, sorry.” He revved the engine, and the whole car shook. “You were both twitching in your sleep,” Raffle went on. Kootie watched the back of his gray head bob in time with the laboring engine. “I always wonder what city dogs dream about. Can’t be chasing rabbits, they’ve never seen a rabbit. Screwing, probably. I always used to want to do it with my wife doggie-style, but I could never get her to come out in the yard.”

Raffle was laughing now as he hefted the bottle of Corona beer he’d bought late last night, and he wedged it under the dashboard and popped off the cap.

Kootie pulled one of the rewinders out from under himself, and as he dug in his pocket for a dime he peered out through the dusty back window and tried to remember what part of LA. they were in now. He saw narrow shops with battered black iron accordion gates across their doors, drifts of litter in the gutters and against the buildings, and ragged black men wrapped in blankets sitting against the grimy brick and stucco walls.

He nervously pulled a dime out of his pocket and remembered that Raffle had called this area “the Nickel”—Fifth Street, skid row, just a block away from the lights and multilingual crowds of Broadway.

Raffle was chugging the warm beer, and Kootie was nauseated by the smell of it first thing in the morning, on top of the smells of Fred and last night’s burritos. He bent over the gray plastic box of the rewinder and began using the dime to twist out the screws in the base of it. By the time Raffle had used the empty bottle as a pipe—needling the stuffy air with the astringent tang of crack cocaine and hot steel wool—and opened the car door to spin it out into the street, Kootie had worked the back off the machine and was trying to jam the blunt dime edge into the screw heads of the electric motor inside.

Raffle glanced back at him before putting the car in gear. “What you been snortin’, Koot me boy?” he asked cheerfully as he steered out away from the curb. “A little crank up the nose to wake you up?”

“Nothing,” said Kootie quickly, thinking of the ghost he’d inhaled at twilight yesterday. The ghost had surely been responsible for his peculiar dreams. Kootie certainly didn’t have any children.

“Huh. Regular speed freak you are.” The engine was popping and coughing, but Raffle was goosing the car forward down the curbside lane, tapping his foot rapidly on the gas pedal. “A speed freak, you leave him alone with a screwdriver and come back and find your stereo all over the apartment in pieces. This crack now, it’s nothin’ for kids, you understand, but it’s harmless compared to speed.” The light was green at Broadway, but he had to wait for pedestrians to wobble past before turning north. “Thing about speed, a guy cooks it up in a secret factory out in Twenty nine Palms or somewhere, in the desert, you know? And if he’s paranoid, which he usually is, with good reason, the paranoia gets in the speed, and when you snort it you wind up feeling what he felt when he was cooking it. You get his personality. They should have those priests make it, up here at St. Vibiana Cathedral on Second Street—spike the stuff with some sanka-titty.”

For a moment Kootie pictured a breast that was heavy with decaf coffee, then realized that Raffle must have meant sanctity. Outside the car, the Broadway sidewalk was already crowded with bums and businessmen of, apparently, every nationality the world had to offer; all of them seemed busy, with concerns that Kootie couldn’t imagine. How long, the boy thought unhappily, can I live out here on the streets like, this?

The narrow ground-floor shops were all shoestores and Asian restaurants and—of all things—travel agencies, but above the restless heads of the crowd stood antique iron lampposts with frosted glass globes, and fire-escape balconies zigzagging up the dignified brick faces of the smog-darkened buildings.

He looked down at the machine in his lap—and suddenly he didn’t know what it was. Without deciding to, he found himself asking, “What does this thing do?”

Raffle glanced into the back seat. “Nothing, anymore, I guess. It’s a video rewinder, was. To rewind movies, so you don’t have to wear out your VCR.”

“Movies?” Kootie stared at the plastic box and tried to imagine reels of cellulose nitrate film small enough to fit inside it. Then, “VCR,” he repeated thoughtfully. Video-something, apparently. Video-cathode-rectifier, video-camera-receiver?

“Where did you grow up, boy?” said Raffle. “It hooks up to your TV set, and you rent movies to watch on it.”

Kootie’s heart was pounding, and he took off his sunglasses and ducked his head to peer out ahead, through the windshield, at the remote glass towers that intersected the yellow sky to the north. “What,” he asked shakily, “has been the greatest invention since—” He caught himself, “—oh, say, in the twentieth century?” he finished.

He could see Raffle scratch the gray stubble on his brown chin. “Oh, I reckon…the thermos.”

Kootie blinked. “The thermos? You mean like thermos bottles?”

“Sure,” said Raffle expansively. “Hot things, it keeps hot. And cold things, them it keeps cold.”

“Well,” said Kootie helplessly, “yes…”

Raffle lifted his hands from the steering wheel for a moment to spread them in mystification. “So how does it know?”

Raffle was laughing again, and when Fred whined and licked his right ear he rolled down the driver’s-side window so the dog could poke his head out from the back seat. Kootie leaned forward and took deep breaths of the chilly diesel-and-fish-oil-scented breeze.

“Where are we headed?” he asked.

“Civic Center, I think, wander around Spring and Grand and all, catch some of the effluent citizens who’re on a break from jury duty or waiting in line for the matinee of Phantom of the Opera. Good guilt either way. And first a stop at the Market up here, get some good fresh tamales to put under the hood for dinner. There’s Chinese too, but it don’t last so good on the manifold.”

“Tamales sound fine,” said Kootie. “Uh…can I buy some firecrackers?”

“Firecrackers?” exclaimed Raffle. “On top of my felonies you want to…purchase illegal explosives?” Kootie had started to stammer an apology, but Raffle went on, “Sure, the boy can have firecrackers. And for breakfast, how about a slice of pepperoni pizza? Let’s have another cup of coffeee,” he sang raucously, “let’s have another pizza pie.”

Kootie smiled uncertainly and nodded as Fred’s tail thumped repeatedly against his cheek. Between two of the thumps he managed to get his sunglasses back on.

THE FIRST part of the morning was heady, nervous fun. Raffle parked the car on Third Street, and with Fred tagging right along they walked in the open front of the Grand Central Market, past the shoeshine stands on the sidewalk to the wide dim interior, where big live fish slapped on butchers’ blocks and gray-haired little old women wolfed noodles from paper bowls with chopsticks and haggled over vegetables the like of which Kootie had never seen before. Raffle handled his party’s purchases, joking in broken Spanish with the Hispanic fellow at the tamale counter and pausing for mumbled exchanges with a couple of overly made-up women who seemed to be just wandering around and whom Kootie took for hostesses.

Back out on the sunny sidewalk, Kootie and Raffle nibbled slices of hot pizza wrapped in waxed paper as they walked back to the car, while Fred trotted alongside carrying the bag of tamales in his mouth. Raffle had tucked a little flat square package into Kootie’s shirt pocket in the market, and when they got to the car and Raffle bent over the hood, Kootie dug the package out and saw the Chinese dragon printed on the wrapper and realized it was his firecrackers. He tucked it into the hip pocket of his jeans.

Firecrackers, he thought bewilderedly. What do I want firecrackers for?

Kootie wondered if his dream was still clinging to him, all morning’ he had been flinching at voices and car horns and the whacks of the butchers’ cleavers in the market, and until Raffle hoisted up the car hood Kootie was blankly staring at the low, sharp-edged cars that blundered incongruously through the lanes on this floor of the echoing valley between the buildings; the cars looked as though they’d been built to fly.

But when the hood had creaked up, Kootie leaned in over the fender and peered at the black engine. He could recognize the radiator, and vaguely the block, but he wondered why there were so many fan belts.

“Gimme the daily bread, Fred,” muttered Raffle to the dog, who relinquished the bag he’d been carrying.

Beside the left wheel well a roll of aluminum foil was tucked in behind some square translucent box that appeared to have green water in it, and Raffle unrolled a yard of foil and wrapped the tamales tightly, then tucked them in under the air filter.

Kootie was delighted with the notion. “Automotive cuisine,” he said. “They should design the engine with a box there, for baking.”

“And hang a string from the radiator cap,” Raffle agreed, “so you could steam ess-cargo.” He patted the crumpled silvery bulge. “Think that’s gonna stay wedged in there?”

Kootie didn’t answer. He had just looked up into an enormous color photograph of his own face, and for a dizzy moment he couldn’t guess the distance or the size of the thing. He blinked and bobbed his head, and then the image fell into its proper scale.

Behind Raffle and way above his head, in a wide metal bracket on the second floor of the building they’d parked in front of, a billboard had been hung its bright and unfaded colors made it stand out from the weathered beer and cigarette signs around it.

The right third of it was a huge color blowup of Kootie’s own fifth-grade school photo. And the words on the billboard were in Spanish, but the meaning was clear:

RECOMPENSA DINERO POR ESTE NINO PERD1DO,

SE LLAMA CUT HUMI

LA ULTIMO VES QUE LO VI LUNES, 26 DE OCTUBRE,

EN BULEVA SUNSET

$20,000 LLAMA (213) JKL KOOT $20,000

NO PREGUNTAS

Kootie began whistling, and he shuffled to the driver s-side door and pulled it open, letting the thumb-button on the handle snap out loudly.

“Want me to drive?” he asked with a broad smile.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Alice thought to herself “I never should try to remember my name in the middle of an accident!…”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

RAFFLE was frowning at him in puzzlement over the top of the hood. “No, Jacko,” he” said, slamming it down. “Nor do I want Fred to drive. Get in on your own side.”

“I can scoot across.” Kootie got in the car and then hiked and dragged himself over the console into the passenger seat, so that Raffle’s attention would be drawn down at him rather than up toward the billboard. Kootie’s face was chilly with sweat, and his T-shirt was wet under the heavy flannel shirt. He was whistling again to hold the older man’s attention, whistling Raffle’s another pizza pie tune because he couldn’t think of anything else; he knew that with his bad ankle he wouldn’t be able to outrun Raffle, if it came to that.

But now Raffle had coaxed the dog into the back seat, and had got in himself and closed the door. “Are all little kids as crazy as you?”

Kootie was glad that his sunglasses were hiding the alarm that must still be shining in his eyes. “I’m not a little kid,” he said, hoping his heartbeat would slow down once the car got moving. “I’m an eighty-four-year-old…midget.”

“Mayor of the Munchkin City,” recited Raffle in a high, solemn voice as he cranked the starter, “in the county of the land of Oz.” The engine caught, and the car shook.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” quacked Kootie.

Raffle clanked the car into gear, nosed it forward, and steered it north again on Broadway. Kootie ruffled Fred’s fur and stole a glance back at the receding white rectangle that was the billboard, and he wondered who was offering the $20,000 “recompensa” One last quote from The Wizard of Oz occurred to him. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” he told Fred softly and self-consciously.

In the next two blocks they crossed over an invisible thermocline border, from hot, colorful third-world agitation into an area of tall, clean gray buildings, and streets with young trees planted along the sidewalks at measured intervals, and new cars and men in dark suits.

They turned left on Beverly and then parked in a broad pay lot off Hope Street. “We’ll make booyah more than the seven bucks it costs to park here,” said Raffle confidently as they piled out of the car and he opened the trunk to get his WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET WITH MOTHERLESS SON sign; “so it’s no problem parking on credick.” (Kootie guessed that Raffle had derived his pronunciation of credit from the way people generally said credit cards.) The whoosh of trucks on the Hollywood Freeway, muffled by the tall hedge of the shoulder at the north end of the lot, was like low random surf on the lee side of a jetty

They had slept in the car last night, and Kootie had noticed that Raffle slept only a few hours between medication runs. He hoped that tonight they might crash for a while in a motel—the sight of the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, standing as imposing as foreign capitol buildings on the wide, elevated, tree-shaded plaza across the intersection of Temple and Hope, reminded him of the Los Angeles he used to live in, and he yearned for the gracious luxury of a shower.

Kootie limped across the asphalt of the parking lot, holding the end of the belt that was Fred’s leash. The dog lunged at a couple of prancing pigeons, and Kootie tried to hop after him but turned his bad ankle and went painfully to his knees on the pavement. For a moment the world went from color to black-and-white.

“You’re just gettin’ beat to bits, Jacko,” said Raffle sympathetically as he helped the boy back up to his feet. “Here, I’ll take Fred.”

Kootie wasn’t crying, though the pain in his ankle was like a razory-high violin note, and he was sure blood must be trickling down his shin under his pants. “Okay,” he managed to gasp, blindly handing Raffle the end of the belt.

As soon as Kootie was able to breathe smoothly he spoke, to show that he was okay.

“What ‘work’ do we do,” he asked, “for food?”

The people who had given them stray one-dollar bills and pocket-warmed handfuls of change yesterday and last night had clearly been just paying an urban toll, but here he could imagine getting a twenty or two, and being given some actual task.

They stopped at the Temple Street curb. “Well,” said Raffle, squinting around at the wide, clean streets, “you gotta anticipate. It’s no good saying ‘I gotta go buy my gardening tools back out of hock’ if the guy turns out to have gardening tools. The basic trick is ‘Gimme forty bucks right now and I’ll be at the address in a couple of hours,’ see? With you along it should be easy. ‘My boy’s sick, I just need thirty bucks to stash him in a motel bed, and then I’ll be right over.’ A cough or two from you, and the guy’s some kind of monster if he don’t cooperate.”

The light changed, and they crossed Temple, Fred tugging eagerly at the leash in Raffle’s knobby fist.

“So we don’t do any actual work at all,” Kootie said, relieved in spite of himself.

“Work is whatever you do that gets you a nice time, Jacko,” Raffle said, and you gotta figure out how to get the most for the least. Food, shelter, drink, dope. Some guys take a lot of R and R in jail, they don’t mind those orange jumpsuits, but that ain’t for me—my outstanding warrants are under different names, every one. In jail, speaking of your video rewinder, they start the movies at eight, but bedtime is nine, so you always miss the end of the movie. Could you live like that? And if you even smoke a cigarette—and one cigarette, in trade, costs you anywhere from four to eight items from the commissary, like soap or candy bars—a guy hiding in the air-conditioning vent or somewhere tells on you, and then on the loudspeaker, “Mayo, report to the front watch, and put out that cigarette.’ You get a write-up, and gotta spend four hours scrubbing the toilets or something. Get two or three write-ups and you get a major—you don’t get your early release date. The good life is this out here.*’

Kootie shrugged bewilderedly. “I’m sold,” he said.

They were stopped now at the Hope Street corner curb, waiting for the east-west light to change, and several men in suits and a woman in a coffee-colored dress had drifted up beside them, chattering about whoever was singing the Phantom role today.

The words I’m sold went on ringing in Kootie’s head as he stared to his right, back north across Temple.

The sky and the houses on the Echo Park hills and the greenery of the Hollywood Freeway shoulder all faded into a blurry two-dimensional frame surrounding the white, white billboard with the black lettering and the livid color photograph.

Kootie was icy cold inside his heavy flannel shirt. His ears were ringing as if with the explosions of the dreamed firecrackers, and he wondered if he would be able to run, able to work his muscles at all. It had not occurred to him that there might be more than one of the billboards—this affront had the disorienting dreamlike intrusiveness of supernatural pursuit.

The billboard was in English here, three blocks north of the first one:

CASH REWARD FOR THIS MISSING BOY:

NAMED KOOT HOOMIE

LAST SEEN MONDAY, OCTOBER THE 26TH,

ON SUNSET BOULEVARD

$20,000 CALL (213) JKL-KOOT $20,000

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Kootie swung his head around to blink up at Raffle.

Raffle was staring at the billboard, and now looked down at Kootie with no expression on his weathered brown face.

The little green figure was glowing now in the screened box below the traffic signal across Hope, and the people beside Kootie stepped out into the crosswalk. Kootie found himself following them, staring at the crude silhouette in the box and hearing Raffle’s step and Fred’s jangling chain coming right along behind him.

“You’d get eight thousand,” said Raffle quietly “After my cut and Fred’s.”

“Damn Ford,” said Kootie helplessly.

“We can get a Cadillac,” said Raffle. “Hell, we can get a Winnebago with two bathrooms.”

“I can’t…go to them,” Kootie said, involuntarily. Why not? he asked himself—I surely can’t live in a damn car forever. Then he heard himself saying, “They’ll eat me and kill you.”

Kootie stepped up the curb, helplessly letting the theater goers hurry on ahead, and turned to face Raffle.

Raffle was frowning in puzzlement. “Eat you?” he said. “And kill me?”

“Not you,” Kootie said, speaking voluntarily now. “He was talking to me—he meant kill me.”

“That’s what he meant, huh?” Now Raffle was grinning and nodding. “I get it, Jacko—you really are crazy. Your nice clothes and nice manners—you’re the escaped schizo kid of some rich people, and they want you back so you can take your Thorazine or lithium, right? I’ll be rescuing you.”

Kootie, entirely himself for the moment, stared at the man and wondered how fit Raffle was. “I can just run, here.” His heart was thumping in his chest.

“You got a bad ankle. I’d catch you.”

“I’ll say I don’t know you, you’re trying to molest me.”

“I’ll point at the billboard.”

Kootie looked past Raffle at the momentarily empty sidewalk and street. “Let’s let these cops decide.”

When Raffle turned around, Kootie hopped up the stairs and broke into a sprint across the broad flat acropolis-like plaza, toward the curved brown wall below the flared white turret of the Mark Taper Forum; a walkway crossed the shallow pool around the building, and he focused on that. The tall glass facade of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was too far away.

Behind him he heard a yelp as Raffle collided with Fred, and then he heard the big man’s shoes scuffling up the steps; but Kootie was running full tilt, ignoring for now the pounding blaze of pain in his ankle, and when he crossed the moat and skidded around the circular brown wall of the Mark Taper Forum he couldn’t hear his pursuers.

Then he could. Fred’s claws were clattering on the smooth concrete and Raffle’s shoes were slapping closer. Kootie was more hopping than running now, and his face was icy with sweat—in a moment they’d catch him, and there was no one around who would help, everybody would want a piece of the $20,000.

Caught. Jagged memories crashed in on him—whipping his horse as he drove home at night past a cemetery while unsold newspapers tumbled in the back of the cart as insubstantial fingers plucked at the pages; crashing through the dark woods at Port Huron, pursued by the ghost of a recently dead steamship captain; fleeing west to California under the “mask” of a total eclipse of the sun in 1878, leaving no trail, sitting uncomfortably on a cushion on the cowcatcher of the racing Union Pacific locomotive, day after day, as it crested the mounting slopes toward the snowy peaks of the Sierras…

And too he remembered expiring in the bedroom of the mansion in Llewellyn Park in October of 1931, breathing out his last breath—into a glass test tube.

Anyone could eat him now, inhale him, inspire the essence of him. In his tiny glass confinement he had been taken to Detroit, and then eventually back out to California, and this prepubescent boy had inhaled him; the boy wasn’t mature enough to digest him, unmake him and violate him and put his disassembled pieces to use for alien goals…but the people pursuing him could, and would.

If they caught him.

At this moment the boy was just a shoved-aside passenger in his young body, and the old man turned on the dog that came bounding around the curve of white wall.

NO MORE than two other people at the worst, thought Raffle, at the very worst, and that’ll still leave sixty-six hundred for me, since dumb Jacko is forfeiting his share, making me run after him like this; I can knock him down and then start yelling Rightful Glory Mayo! Rightful Glory Mayo!—no, no jail names here, use the real name—what the hell is the real name?—and then tell ’em to call 911, this kid’s having a prophylactic fit, swallowing his tongue. I can take off my shoe and stick it in the kid’s mouth so he can’t talk, say it’s a first-aid measure.

Raffle sprinted across the walkway over the shallow pool and skidded around the curved wall of the Mark Taper only a few seconds after Kootie had, and practically on Fred’s tail just as a deep thump buffeted the morning air.

And he clopped to a frozen halt, slapping the wall to push himself back.

The wall was wet with spattered blood that was still hot, and through a fine, turbulent crimson spray he stared at the portly old man, dressed in a black coat and battered black hat, who was gaping at him wide-eyed. Thinking gunshot, Raffle glanced down for Kootie’s body, but saw instead the exploded, bloody dog-skeleton of Fred.

Kootie was nowhere to be seen.

The old man half turned away, and then suddenly, whirled and sprang at Raffle, whipping up one long leg and punching him hard in the ear with the toe of a hairy black shoe; the impact rocked Raffle’s head, and he scuffled dizzily back a couple of steps, catching himself on the pool railing.

The old man’s mouth sprang open, and though more blood spilled out between the uneven teeth, he was able to say, “Let’s see you capture me now, you sons of bitches”

Raffle remembered the boy having said something like Kill you and eat me, and for this one twanging, stretched-out second Raffle was able to believe that this old man had eaten Kootie, and was now ready to kill him, ready to blow him up the way he’d apparently blown up the dog.

And an instant later Raffle had leaped the railing and was running away, splashing through the shallow pool, back toward the steps and the car and the smoggy familiar anonymity of the scratch-and-scuffle life south of the 10 Freeway.

THE FIGURE of the old man walked unsteadily to the stairs on the west side of the elevated plaza. A few of the people in line for Phantom tickets nudged their companions and stared curiously at the shapeless black hat, and at the black coat, which was coming apart at the shoulders as the arms swung at the figure’s sides.

The well-dressed people in line had seen the boy run that way, pursued by the bum, and they’d seen the bum come running back, across the pool and right on past to the stairs, in a fright; but this old man was walking calmly enough, and there hadn’t been any screams or cries for help. And the old man was disappearing down the parking garage stairs now, at a slow, labored pace. Clearly whatever had happened was over now.

THE OLD man had thrown Kootie right out of his own body, into a pitch dark room that Kootie somehow knew was “Room 5 in the laboratory at West Orange.”

The boy was panting quickly and shallowly, with a whimper at the top of each expiration. He wasn’t thinking anything at all, and he could feel a tugging in his eyes as his pupils dilated frantically in the blackness.

As he slowly moved across the wooden floor, sliding his bare feet gently, he passed through static memories that were strung through the stale air like spiderwebs.

There was another boy in this room—no, just the faded ghost of a boy, a five-year-old, who dimly saw this dark room as the bottom of a dark creek in Milan, Ohio. He had drowned a very long time ago, in 1852, while he and his friend Al had been swimming. In the terror of being under the water and unable to get back up to the surface, in the terror of actually sucking water into his lungs, he had jumped—right out of his body!—and clung to his friend on the bank above. And he had gone on clinging to his friend for years, while Al had done things and moved around and eventually grown up into an adult.

Kootie shuffled forward, out of the standing wave that was the boy’s ghost, and he was aware of Al himself now, who as a boy had simply walked home after his friend had disappeared under the water and not come back up; Al had had dinner with his mother and father and eventually gone to bed, without remarking on the incident at the creek—and he had been bewildered when his parents had shaken him awake hours later, demanding to know where he had last seen his friend. Everyone in town, apparently, was out with torches, searching for the boy. Al had patiently explained what had happened at the creek…and had been further bewildered by the horror in the faces of his mother and father; by their shocked incredulity that he would just walk away from his drowning friend.

As far as Al had been concerned, he had carried his friend home.

And in this room, thirty-seven years later, the friend had finally left Al.

Al was forty-two by then, though he had never forgotten the drowning. In this dark, locked room he had been working with Dickson on a secret new project, the Kineto-phonograph, and late on a spring night in 1889 the two of them had tried the thing out. It was supposed to be a masking measure—and actually, as such, it had worked pretty well.

Dickson had set up a white screen on one wall, while Al had started up the big wood-and-brass machine on the other side of the room; as the machine whirred and buzzed, the screen glowed for a moment with blank white light, and then Al’s image appeared—already portly, with the resolute chin set now on a thick neck, the graying hair slicked back from the high, pale forehead—and then the image began to speak.

And the ghost of the drowned boy, confronted with an apparently split host, sprang away from Al and ignited in confusion.

ABRUPTLY KOOTIE was back in his own body and remembered who he was, but he couldn’t see—there was some hot, wet framework all over him. Shuddering violently, he reached up and clawed it off; it tore saggily as he dragged it over his head, but when he had flung it onto the railing of the cement steps he could see that it had been a sort of full-torso mask: the now-collapsed head of an old man with a coarse black-fur coat attached to the neck, and limp white fleshy hands lying askew at the ends of the sleeves, it smelled like a wet dog.

Kootie was shaking violently. The morning breeze in the stairwell was chilly on his face and in his wet hair, and he realized numbly that the slickness on his hands and face was blood, a whole lot of somebody’s blood. Profoundly needing to get away from whatever had happened here, he stumbled farther down the steps into the dim artificial light, unzipping his heavy flannel shirt. His throat was open, but he hadn’t started breathing again yet.

Standing on the concrete floor at the foot of the steps, he pulled off the heavy shirt, which was slick with more of the blood; the nylon lining was clean, though, and he wiped his face thoroughly and rubbed his hair with it. Then he pushed the sticky curls back off his forehead, wiped his hands on the last clean patch of quilted nylon, and flung the sodden bundle away behind him. His backpack had fallen to the concrete floor, but at this moment it was just one more blood-soaked encumbrance to be shed.

The shirt he had on underneath was a thin, short-sleeved polo shirt, but at least it had been shielded from the blood. He scuffed black furry slippers off of his Reeboks, wincing at the sight of the red smears on the white sneakers. Good enough! his mind was screaming. Get out of here!

He ran back up the steps, hopping over the collapsed organic framework, and when he was back up on the pavement he hopped over a low retaining wall, down to the Hope Street sidewalk.

He was walking away fast, with a hop in every stride.

The brief vision of normal life that the Music Center had kindled in him was forgotten—his brain was still recoiling from having been violated by another personality, but his nervous system had turned his steps firmly south, toward hiding places. The shaking of his heartbeat had started his lungs working again, and he was breathing in fast gasps with a nearly inaudible whistling in his lungs.

The old man’s memories were still intolerably ringing in his head, and at every other step he exhaled sharply and shook his head, for along with the immediate clinging smells of dog and blood he could feel in the back of his nose the acrid reek of burned hair.

The little boy’s ghost had exploded in an instantaneous white flash halfway between Al and the movie screen, charring the screen and putting a calamitous halt to the world’s first motion picture, which, ahead of its time, had been a talkie.

A combusty.

Later, Al had explained the bandages over his burns as just the result of a crucible happening to blow up while he’d been near it, but of course the press had played it up.

The New York Times headline for April 21, 1889, had read, EDISON BURNED BUT BUSY.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking “But who has won?”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

EVEN on this Wednesday morning in October the Santa Monica Bay beaches were crowded—with surfers in black and turquoise wet suits paddling out across the unbroken blue of the deep water or skating in across the curling jade-green faces of the waves, and blankets and umbrellas and glossy brown bodies thickly dotting the pale sand, and cars and vans and bicycles glinting in the sun on the black asphalt of the parking lots.

On the mile and a half of narrow grassy park on the bluffs above Palisades Beach Road, just north of the Santa Monica Pier, the villages of tents and old refrigerator boxes had drawn a crowd of tourists to mingle gingerly with the resident homeless people, for there was some kind of spontaneous revival meeting going on throughout the whole stretch of Sleeping-bag Town. Six or eight old women abandoned their aluminum-can-filled shopping carts to hop bow-legged across the grass, growling brrrm-brrrm in imitation of motorcycle engines or howling like police sirens; then all paused at once and, even though they were yards and yards apart and separated by dozens of people, all shouted in unison, “Stop! You’re on a one-way road to Hell!” Ragged old men, evidently caught up in some kind of primitive Eucharistic hysteria, babbled requests that someone take their flesh and eat it; then all at the same instant fell to their knees and began swallowing stones and fistfuls of mud. Several tourists got sick. On the indoor merry-go-round at the Santa Monica Pier, children were crying and protesting that they didn’t like the scary faces in the air.

A mile, to the south, at Ocean Park, surfing was disrupted when nearly a hundred people went clumsily thrashing out into the water, shouting to each other and urgently calling out “Sister Aimee! Sister Aimee!” to some apparently imaginary swimmer in peril.

And south of that, at Venice Beach, several trucks and a skip-loader had been driven around the Pavilion and down onto the sand, where, with police clearing the way, they slowly pushed their way through the crowd that had gathered around the big dead fish.

The thing was clearly dead—it was beginning to smell bad, and the crowd tended to be denser downwind of the fat woman who was feverishly puffing on one clove-scented cigarette after another.

NONE OF the exhibitionist bodybuilders in the little fenced-in workout area had bothered to set down their barbells and get up off the padded benches to go look at the fish. And the girls in Day-Glo sunglasses and neon spandex went on splitting the crowd on Ocean Front Walk as they swept through on in-line skates, and the jugglers and musicians stayed by their money-strewn hats or guitar cases. Attention can be briefly diverted by some kind of freak wonder, thought Canov as he leaned against one of the concrete pillars on the concrete stage, but these people know it’ll eventually swing back to them.

From up on the stage he could see the signs on the storefronts above the heads of the crowd—MICK’S SUBS, PITBULL GYM FITNESS WEAR, CANDY WORLD/MUSCLE BEACH CAFE/HOT DOGS/PIZZA—and blocks away to the north, up by Windward, he could see the ranks of tentlike booths selling towels and sunglasses and hats and T-shirts and temporary tattoos. The direct sunlight was hot up here on the stage, though when he’d sidled over here through patches of shade he’d noticed that the breeze, bravely spicy with the smells of Polish sausage and sunblock, was nevertheless chilly. The LAPD officers ambling in pairs along the sidewalks were wearing blue shorts and T-shirts, but they’d probably been wearing sweats a lew hours ago.

Canov wished he’d had time to change before driving out here, but deLarava had told somebody on the phone that she intended to come straight here herself, and Obstadt had ordered Canov to get to Venice quickly. Now here he was, dressed for the office, and his charcoal suit and black beard probably made him look like some kind of terrorist.

A massive concrete structure on broad pillars overhung the stage on which Canov was standing, and when he’d walked up to the thing and climbed up the high steps, he’d thought it was probably supposed to abstractly represent a man bent over a barbell; and behind it, squatting between it and Ocean Front, was a big gray garage structure that was shaped like a barbell sitting on one of those machines in an automated bowling alley that returned your ball to you. To Canov it all looked like some kind of surreal fascist physical-fitness temple in an old Leni Riefenstal documentary.

He turned his attention back out to the beach. DeLarava’s film crew had begun piling their lights and microphone booms back into their van. Apparently they were about to leave—Canov stood up on tiptoes in his Gucci shoes to make sure.

WHY THE hell, Loretta deLarava thought as she plodded heavily away from the fish, down toward the booming surf, are so many people out on the beach? Did he draw them, as cover?

Her shoes had come unfastened, with sand clogging the patches of Velcro, and she couldn’t refasten them without a comfortable chair to be sitting in. And the white sun, reflecting needles off the sea and an oven glow upward from the sand, was a physical weight—she was sweating under her white linen sheath dress.

She paused and twisted around without moving her feet, blinking when the salty breeze threw a veil of her hair across her face. I should wear the rubber band on top of my hair, she thought. “Come here, Joey,” she called irritably.

Her bent little old assistant, ludicrous here on the beach in his boots and khaki jacket, crab-stepped away from the crowd down to where she was standing on the firmer damp sand. He never sweated.

“You’re on a one-way road to Hell,” he said, in a shrilly mocking imitation of a woman’s voice. “She knew enough,” he went on in his own voice, “to keep radio electricians around to screw. Total-immersion baptism to renounce the devils, and then she made sure to resurface under the spiderweb of radar-foxing moves. Rotor-fax devils,” he droned then, apparently caught in one of his conversational spirals, “Dover-taxed pixels, white cliffs of image too totally turned-on for any signal to show. Too too too, Teet and Toot, tea for two.”

DeLarava sucked on the stub of her cigarette so hard that sparks flew away down the beach, but there was no taste of ghost in the smoke. “What about Teet and Toot? Go on.”

Joey Webb blinked at her. “They were here once, you said.”

Perhaps he was lucid now. “Can you sense them, either of them? Can you sense their father?”

“Me sense a person?” Joey said, his voice unfortunately taking on his skitzy singsong tone again, “Aimee Semple McPherson swam out to sea here, and everybody thought she drowned. Two divers did drown, trying to save her, and she had to carry those ghosts forever, after that.”

DeLarava had wanted Joey Webb to sift news of old Apie Sullivan’s ghost from the turbulent psychic breezes, but he appeared to be hung up on Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who had disappeared in the surf off Ocean Park in 1926; it had been big news at the time, but later the newspapers had discovered that she had just ducked away to spend a couple of weeks in anonymous seclusion with an electrician from her gospel radio station.

DeLarava sighed. Even as a film shoot, today’s expedition had pretty much been a failure. The generator truck from the Teamster’s Union had got stuck in the sand a couple of hundred feet short of the fish, so that cables had had to be run where people were sure to trip over them, and then there had been trouble with the Mole-phase lights, the tic-tac-toe squares of nine 5600-Kelvin lamps that were supposed to provide daylight-colored illumination to fill the shadows on people’s faces; the lights had alternately flared and faded, and finally deLarava had told the cameraman to just shoot the bystanders with their eye sockets and cheek hollows gaping like caverns. God knew what the fish would come out looking like on the film.

Hours ago Animal Control had sent a truck out to haul away the fish, but a bystander claimed that the dead monster was a coelacanth, some sort of living fossil from the Carboniferous Age, uncommon anywhere and never found in the Pacific Ocean. The Department of Fish and Game had arrived after that, and some professors had driven down from UCLA and were still arguing with anyone who planned to even touch the damned thing.

The news story, such as it was, was in the can, and deLarava had sent one of her people back to the studio with it, but she didn’t want to leave the beach without learning whether old Sullivan’s ghost had emerged from the sea yet—and if so, where he was. She wouldn’t dare try to eat him until Saturday, but she could safely catch him in a jar now.

For what must have been the hundredth time, she glanced at her watch, but the compass needle was still jittering unreliably, pointing more or less at the concrete block of handball courts, which was north of her. Before the camera had started rolling she had stumped her way through the crowd around the site, peering constantly at her watch, but each of the six times the needle had pointed away from north it had been indicating some nearby grinning or frowning old lunatic in junk-store clothes—accreted, hardened old ghosts, whose stunted fields wouldn’t even be detectable if they’d step back a yard or two.

Apie Sullivan’s ghost would be indistinguishable from a death-new one, and strong, preserved for all these past thirty-three years in the grounded stasis of the sea. But tracking a new ghost, she thought now as she watched the quivering needle, is like trying to spot a helicopter in a city—you “hear” ’em from all kinds of false directions; they aren’t truly at any “where” yet, and they’re subject to “echoes.”

But I’m not even getting any echoes. And Joey Webb isn’t sensing him, and he would—Joey thinks they’re angels or spirits or something, but he does reliably sense ghosts. Joey would know it if he was here.

And he’s not here.

DeLarava dug in her purse and pulled out her wallet. “Joey,” she said, “are you listening to me? I want you to stay here, rent a room at a motel or something, can you do that?” She slid a sheaf of twenties and hundreds out of the wallet and held it out toward him.

“Which motel?” said old Joey alertly, taking the money. “What name will he be using?”

“He’s not going to stay at a motel, you—” She threw her cigarette away toward the waves, and coughed harshly, tasting clove in the back of her throat. “He’ll be just a little wispy shred, like the cellophane from a cigarette pack, but not reflecting. Track him with a compass—he’ll be dazed, wandering. Buy a jar of orange marmalade, dump out the marmalade but leave some smears in it for him to smell, and if you find him, catch him in it.” She stared at the crazy old man anxiously. “Can you do all this?”

“Oh, do it, sure,” he said with a careless wave. He shoved the bills inside his shirt. “What do you want me to tell him?”

“Don’t talk to him,” deLarava wailed, nearly crying with exhaustion and frustration. “Don’t unscrew the lid after you’ve caught him. Just wrap him in your coat or something and call me, okay?”

“Okay, okay. Sheesh.”

“You won’t let him get past you? He mustn’t get inland of Pacific Avenue, I can’t afford to lose him in the maze of the city.”

Joey stood up straight and squinted at her. “He shall not pass.”

This would have to do. “Call me when you’re checked in,” she said clearly, then turned and began striding heavily up the sand slope, shoving her way between the bystanders.

When she had elbowed her way to the clearing in the center of the crowd, she paused by the thigh-high hulk of the coppery fish and looked down into its big, dulled eye. A living fossil, one of the UCLA professors had called this monstrosity. Hardly a living one, she thought. Though some of us still are.

She was on the north side of the dead thing, and she looked at her watch—but the compass needle pointed away behind her, northward.

She sighed and began pushing her way back out of the crowd. This was a waste of time, she thought. But maybe my billboards will have elicited a call about the Parganas kid. And I parked the Lexus way up on Main here—maybe somebody will have broken into it.

SWEAT HAD run down from Canov’s styled hair into his beard, and he scratched at it before it could work down his neck to his white collar. He was glad to see that deLarava was finally leaving, for a dozen children in swimsuits had climbed up onto the open-air stage that he’d chosen as a lookout post, and they’d started some skipping and singing game.

A big dead fish, Canov thought as he carefully stepped down the cement block stairs to the pavement. What can I tell Obstadt, besides that she hung around and looked at it and filmed it? This one’s bigger than the ones she hooks and hauls up to the Queen Mary deck on dark nights, but she didn’t catch this one, and she surely didn’t eat it. Maybe she’s just interested in fish. And the crabs and lobsters have all been picked up, or managed to return to the sea. I can’t even bring him one, not that Obstadt would have any use for it, being a strict vegetarian.

“Can I buy a smoke off you, man?”

Canov turned away from the beach. A tanned young man who had been standing over by the volleyball nets had walked across the gray pavement to the stage, and now stood with one hand extended and the other digging in the pocket of his cutoff jeans. Canov thought he looked too healthy to be wanting nicotine.

“I haven’t found any,” said Canov. If it was a cigarette the man wanted, this answer ought to disconcert him.

But instead of protesting that he didn’t want a cigarette picked up off the sidewalk, the young man shook his head ruefully. “They’re out today, though, aren’t they?” he said, his voice just loud enough for Canov to hear it over the rap music shouting out of the black portable stereos on the sidelines of the volleyball games. “You can almost smell how they died.”

Canov, never a user of the stuff known as “smokes” and “cigars,” just shrugged. “I can smell that that fish died,” he said inanely.

The young man glanced disinterestedly down toward the crowd by the shore. “Dead fish, yeah. Well, see you.” And he began jogging away barefoot toward the bike path, doubtless searching for some other out-of-place-looking person standing around.

Police had cleared another path through the crowd, and now a pickup truck with a cherry-picker crane in its bed had been driven down onto the sand, and Canov could see men in overalls trying to roll the fish over onto a long board. A big flatbed tow truck was parked nearby, and he wondered idly who had won custody of the creature.

He sighed and began walking over. Obstadt would probably want to know.

THE FISH was to be driven to an oceanography lab at UCLA. When the creature had been covered with a tarpaulin and roped down on the long bed of the tow truck, the driver slowly backed the truck out the way it had come, around the north side of the pavilion; the beep, beep, beep of the reverse-gear horn was drowned out at one point by metallic squealing, as one of the back wheels pinched and then flattened a blue-and-white trash can that had RECYCLE^*RECICLE^*RECYCLE^*RECICLE stenciled endlessly around it, but eventually all four wheels were on pavement again, and the driver muscled the stick shift into first gear and began inching the big laboring old truck toward the Ocean Front curb, as policemen waved dozens of nearly naked people out of the way.

At last the truck reached Windward; and when the traffic thinned, out past Main, it drove up Venice Boulevard to Lincoln, and then turned north, toward the Santa Monica Freeway.

ON THE freeways, there you feel free.

As the truck ascended the on-ramp, grinding with measured punctuation up through the gears, the purple-flowered oleanders along the shoulder waved their leafy branches in a sudden gust; and sunlight flashed in the rushing air where there was no chrome or glass reflecting it, as if the ghosts of dozens of angular old cars accompanied the laboring truck.

In the steamy dimness under the flapping tarpaulin the jaws of the dead coelacanth creaked open, and a shrill faint whistling piped out of the throat as reversed peristalsis drove gases out of the creature’s stomach. The whistling ran up and down the musical scale in a rough approximation of the first nine notes of “Begin the Beguine,” and then a tiny gray translucency wobbled out of the open mouth, past the teeth, like a baby jellyfish moving through clear water.

A puff of smoke that didn’t disperse at its edges, the thing climbed down over the plates of the fish’s lower jaw, clung for a moment to the shaking corrugated aluminum surface of the truck bed, then sprang up into the agitated dimness toward the close tent-roof of the tarpaulin. The wind sluicing along the sides of the dead fish caught the wisp and whirled it back and out under the flapping tarpaulin edge into the open air, where hot, rushing diesel updrafts lifted it above the roaring trucks and cars and vans to spin invisibly in the harsh sunlight.

Traffic behind the flatbed truck slowed then, for suddenly the truck appeared to be throwing off pieces of itself: a glimpsed rushing surface of metal here, a whirling black tire there, glitters of chrome appearing first on one side of the truck and then the other, as if some way-ultraviolet light were illuminating bits of otherwise invisible vehicles secretly sharing the freeway. Then windshields were darkened in a moment of shadow as a long-winged yellow biplane roared past overhead, low over the traffic, with the figure of a man dimly visible standing on the top wing.

After no more than two seconds the plane flickered and disappeared, but before winking out of visibility it had banked on the inland wind, as if headed northeast, toward Hollywood.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to he an old woman—hut then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

BACK in his Olive Street office after court, well in time for a healthful lunch, J. Francis Strube tossed his briefcase onto the long oak credenza and slumped his oversized frame into the padded leather McKie chair behind his desk.

He had an appointment this afternoon, some guy whose wife was divorcing him. The man had sounded almost apologetic on the phone, clearly reluctant to hire an attorney because he hoped his wife would abandon the divorce action and come back to him. Strube would sympathize during this first consultation, let the guy ramble and emote and probably weep; during later sessions Strube could begin to raise his eyebrows over the man’s willingness to let the wife take so much stuff. Strube would interject, Oh, she’ll need it because she’ll be doing a lot of entertaining, eh? delivered in a tone that would make Strube seem like a sympathetically angered friend. Well, if you want to let her have everything…

Eventually Strube could get a man to refuse to part with a vacuum cleaner that he might never have actually used, or possibly ever even seen.

It took more time, but Strube preferred nurturing rapacity in these timid clients to flattering the egos of the villains who just wanted to ditch the old wife and marry the twenty-year-old sex…pot. For the latter sort Strube would have to say, in tones of polite surprise, things like You’re fifty? Good Lord, you don’t look a day over forty. And, How did you put up with this for so long?

Anyway, the timid ones needed attorneys. What they initially wanted, like first-time Driving Under the Influence offenders, was to appear in court in humble proper, not realizing that judges had all been attorneys once, and planned to be again after they retired, and wanted to make of these fools examples of how badly unrepresented people fared.

In a courthouse hallway this morning another attorney had told Strube a riddle.

Question: What do a lawyer and a sperm cell have in common?

Strube pursed his lips and leaned forward to pick up the newspaper that Charlotte had left on the desk. The telephone rang, but Charlotte would get it. Strube made it a point never to answer the phone on spec.

He waited, but the intercom didn’t buzz. That was good, she was fielding whatever it was. He let himself start to read.

He saw that Ross Perot was claiming to have backed out of the presidential race only because of threats from the Bush-campaign people. He smiled. Strube never voted, but he liked to see things shaken up. “Time for a Change!” was a political slogan that always appealed to him. He was about to flip the front page when he noticed the box at the bottom.

FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM

Strube read the story quickly, peripherally aware that his heartbeat was speeding up. When he had finished it, he pushed a button on the intercom.

“Charlotte!” he squeaked. “Get in here and look at this.” No, he thought immediately, she might try to get the credit herself. “Wait, get me—” he began again, but she had already opened his office door and was staring in at him curiously.

She was wearing another of the anonymous dark jacket-and-skirt combinations to which she had been confining herself ever since he’d made a blundering pass at her six months ago. “Look at what?” she asked.

“Perot says Bush was going to wreck his daughter’s wedding,” he said absently, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Did you read about that? Say, get me the telephone number of…” What had been the name of the damned snuff? Ouchie? “Goudie! Goudie Scottish Snuff, uh. Company. G-O-U-D-I-E. It’s in San Francisco.”

“Snuff?”

Strube raised the back of his pudgy hand to his nose and sniffed loudly. “Snuff. Like lords and ladies used to do. Powdered tobacco.”

“Do you want me to call them?”

“No, just get me the number.”

Charlotte nodded, mystified, and walked back out to the reception desk, closing his office door behind her.

If Nicky Bradshaw’s still alive, thought Strube excitedly, he’s gotta still be doing that snuff; and it’s a clue I’ll bet not a lot of people remember. And I’ll bet nobody but me remembers the actual brand name. God knows I ordered it often enough.

Strube stood up and walked quickly across the carpet to the window overlooking Olive, and he stared down at the gleaming multicolored car roofs rippling through the lanes like beetles. Strube had a new BMW himself, but from up here it could look no different from any of the cars below him now. He was a member of Sports Club LA on Sepulveda—he had even got occasional business from his ad in the club’s net- working newsletter—and he was proud of his healthful diet regimen, years having passed since he had last eaten real eggs or bacon or butter or sour cream; and his apartment on Sunset was expensive, but…

Aside from his suits and the sectional furniture and some signed sailing prints on the walls, the apartment was pretty bare—in truth, about half of his worldly goods were in the goddamn credenza here in the office, along with the ceiling fan that he’d never taken out of its box and the routed cherry wood decoupaged J. FRANCIS STRUBE name plaque that a client had handcrafted for him and that he’d been embarrassed to put out on his desk because people might think he represented hippie dopers.

But he could be…the attorney who located Spooky.

Answer: Each of them has one chance in two million of becoming a human being.

Of becoming somebody.

It seemed to him now that, when he was twenty and twenty-one, he had mailed orders to the Goudie Snuff Company as often as he had mailed solicitation letters to the people whose names and addresses had appeared on the thrice-weekly foreclosure lists.

He had worked as a legal secretary for Nicholas Bradshaw in ‘74 and ‘75, in Seal Beach. Bradshaw had handled mostly bankruptcy cases, which often came around to involving divorce and child custody, and young Strube had proved to have a natural knack for the tactics of family breakup.

Strube had planned to go into show-business law—after law school he had let his mousy brown hair grow long and had worn crazy little granny glasses, and he had gone to work for Bradshaw mainly because Bradshaw had once been an actor—but somewhere along the line Bradshaw had developed an aversion to the TV and movie business; and without a contact, an in, access, Strube hadn’t been able to get any of the industry’s law firms to consider taking him on.

Then after Bradshaw had just… up and disappeared…in ‘75, Strube had been left without any job at all. He had hastily gone to work for a divorce and personal-injury attorney, and passed the bar in ‘81. At last in ‘88 had been able to open his own practice…but he was still just disassembling families.

The intercom buzzed, and Strube walked back to his desk and pushed the button. “Yeah, Charlotte.” He wrote down the 415-area number she read to him. At least Goudie was still in business.

Back in ‘74 and ‘75, Bradshaw had kept a box of snuff cans in his desk, and when he had paperwork to do he would open the box and lay out half a dozen cans, like a buffet, and sniff a bit of this one, a couple of snorts of that one, and a chaser of another. He had gone through so much of the stuff that he found it easiest to have his legal secretary order directly from the company.

Strube punched the number into the telephone.

Bradshaw had paid young Strube a generous weekly salary, and never cared what hour Strube came into the office or went home, as long as the work got done, and he had been lavish with bonuses—and, too, he’d always been paranoid, afraid of being findable, always varying his schedule and never divulging, even to Strube, his home address or phone number; wherever he was now, he clearly didn’t want to be found. But…

“Goudie Snuff Company,” chirped a voice from the phone.

“Hi, my name is J. Francis Strube. I’m in Los Angeles and I’m marketing a line of—” What, he thought nervously. “—traditional Scottish products, tartan sweaters and walking sticks and so on, and I’d like to buy a copy of your mailing list.”

ANGELICA ANTHEM Elizalde slumped wearily in the RTD bus seat with her forehead against the cool window, and she watched the shops and old houses of Sixth Street, fogged by her breath on the glass, swing past in the sunlight outside.

She wondered if people still used the word chicana, and she wondered when and where she had stopped being one. The women in the seats around her were happily chatting in Spanish, and twice they had referred to her as “la Angla sonalienta al lado de la ventana”—the sleepy Anglo lady by the window. Elizalde had wanted to smile and, in Spanish, say something back about the long Greyhound ride across the desert yesterday, then had realized that she no longer had the vocabulary.

Elizalde’s mother had always told her that she looked mestizo—European Spanish, rather than indigena. Her face was long and angular and pale, like a saint in an El Greco painting, and in her Oklahoma Levi jeans and her old Graceland sweatshirt she probably did look Anglo. It occurred to her that she probably even spoke with a bit of an Oklahoma accent now.

At one point during the long night at the Greyhound station—waiting for the dawn, not able to afford a taxi and not wanting to walk anywhere on the menacing dark streets—she had washed her face in the ladies’ room, and had stared in the mirror at the vertical grooves in her cheeks and the lines around her eyes. Her face looked older than her thirty-four years, though the rest of her was somehow still as trim and taut as she’d been in her twenties—or even in her teens.

Immature? she wondered now as she watched the old houses sweep past outside the bus window. Say—she smiled nervously—arrested adolescent.

It seemed to her now that there had been something naively Quixotic about her psychiatric career and her stubbornly terminal argument with Dr. Alden. In her private practice, in her own clinic, she had been able to make her own rules—and then had just fled the state and changed her name when the whole arrangement had blown up.

(Almost literally blown up—the fire department had managed to save the building.)

She had never married, nor ever had children. In idly psychoanalyzing herself, she had once decided that her “morbid dread” of pregnancy derived from the time when, at the age of three, she had climbed into an old milk can in the living room in Norco and got stuck—and, to hear her mother describe the event in later years, lost her mind. It was a three-foot-tall, forty-quart metal can that her parents had kept in the corner and tossed spare change into, and when toddler Angelica got stuck inside it, she had apparently had a severe claustrophobic reaction. After her father had failed to pull her out, and had failed to break the can open with a hammer (all of this no doubt compounding little Angelica’s terror), Angelica’s grandmother had been summoned from the house across the street. The old woman, who had luckily done mid-wifing for half a century, ordered Angelica’s father to turn the can upside down, and then had delivered the toddler out of the can as though she were guiding a newborn baby out of the womb, head first and then one shoulder at a time. The afterbirth had been a shower of pennies and nickels and dimes.

Her mother had always told her how, apparently out of regret for having caused so much trouble, baby Angelica must have awakened late that night and gone into the dark living room and gathered up all the spilled coins, separated them out by denomination, and then ranked them in stacks on a table; and her mother had forever insisted, with obviously sincere astonishment and pride, that the baby had even arranged the coins in chronological order of mint date, with the oldest coins on top.

Angelica had never believed that she had got up and moved the coins at all, but even as a child she had known better than to say so to her mother, who would probably have called the grandmother over again to do some distressing kind of homespun exorcism. Perhaps as a child Angelica had known that there were some borders that it was best not to include in one’s maps. If so, she had recently learned it again.

The women in the bus seats around her this morning had no such compunctions. One woman was cautioning the others against leaving the living-room drapes open at night this weekend, and Elizalde at first assumed that it was a precaution against being shot in a drive-by shooting; and it might have been, partly, but after a few moments she understood that it was mainly to keep from calling to oneself the attention of the witches that would surely be flying around in calabazas y bolos fuegos, gourds and fireballs. Another woman said that she would be smoking cornhusk cigarettes every night for the next week or so; and one old grandmother in the very back seat said she’d be going out to Santa Monica on Friday night to feed her “piedra iman” in the sand and seawater. When Angelica Elizalde had been growing up, a piedra iman was a magnet; perhaps the term now meant something else.

Mundane borders too were commonplace with these ladies—secure in the supposed secrecy of the Spanish language, they casually traded adventure stories of how they’d stolen across the California-Mexico border, and a couple of them even discussed holiday plans to travel back and forth across it again to visit relatives in Mazatlan and Guadalajara, and they traded bits of advice for dealing with the coyotes who guided parties north across the broken wasteland of gullies and arroyos into the border cities of the United States.

Altogether they made Elizalde feel…incompetent and unworldly, a frightened fugitive with an out-of-date tourist’s map.

It should, she thought wearily, be the other way around. These women were housemaids, paid stingily in cash under the table, and they lived in the neighborhoods around Rampart and Union and the east end of Wilshire, where the families who were crowded into the shabby apartments did “hot bed” sleeping, in shifts, and Sunday dawns no doubt found these women stirring steaming pots of menudo for their hung-over husbands, who would have towels beside them to mop the sweat off their faces as they ate the spicy stuff. Elizalde had gone to college, and medical school, and had thought she had moved up, out of this world; now she wished she could trade places with any one of these women.

On the south side of the street, a sign over the bay door of a onetime gas station read CARREDIOS, and—in the few seconds it took her to realize that it was just a badly spaced, and misspelled attempt at CAR RADIOS—she read it as carre dios, which would mean something like the god of the course, the god of the run; and she had fleetingly thought of getting off the bus and going in there and lighting a candle.

She would have to be getting off soon anyway. Alvarado was the next stop. She sat up and tugged at the cord over the window, hearing the faint bong from the front of the bus, then got stiffly to her feet. Only a few blocks south of here was the office she had rented on Tuesdays, when she had first gone into private practice. Frank Rocha had been one of her patients even back in those early days, and later he had attended the group “séances” when she had opened her clinic up on Beverly.

She grabbed one of the upright steel poles as the bus squealed to a stop. What on earth, she thought helplessly as she let go and shuffled toward the opened back doors, do I think I’m going to do here? If his widow and kids even still live in that house? Apologize? Offer to…help. What money I’ve got I do need.

The letter in her wallet seemed to be heavy, seemed to be almost pulling her pants down on that side.

Do yardwork? Tune up the car engine?

Madam, she thought, suppressing a hysterical giggle, I accidentally ran over your cat, and I want to replace it.

Fine, but how good are you at catching mice?

She stepped down to the curb. Apologize, I guess. I can at least give her that, I can let her know that her husband’s death has shattered me, that I’m aware that I was responsible for it, that I haven’t been blithely forgetful of it.

As the doors hissed shut and the bus pulled away from the curb in a cloud of diesel smoke, Elizalde looked across the lanes of Sixth Street at the receding green lawn of MacArthur Park. She sighed and turned away, toward a ripped-up construction site where, according to signs on the plywood hoardings, city workers were digging tunnels for the proposed Metro Rail; and she started trudging that way, north up the Alvarado sidewalk.

SHE RECOGNIZED Rocha’s house by the willow tree in the front yard. It must have had deep roots, for its narrow leaves were still green, while the lawn had not only died but gone entirely away, leaving only bare dirt with a couple of bright orange plastic tricycles knocked over on it. The old wood-frame house was painted navy blue now, with a red trim that Elizalde thought looked jarring.

Under these twittery surface impressions her mind was spinning. How on earth could she dare approach Mrs. Rocha?

How could she not? Only two nights ago, when she had weirdly begun reacting to events a second before the events happened, she had finally decided to confront whatever it was that had happened in her clinic on Halloween two years ago; and part of confronting it, as far as she could see, had to be facing the victims of it. Trying to make amends.

But she herself was a victim of it! Walking wounded! How would this ordeal—subjecting herself to this unthinkable meeting—be making amends to Angelica Anthem Elizalde?

Just to…apologize? No one would be better off.

But she was shuffling up the concrete walk toward the front porch. And when she had stepped up to the front door, she rapped on the frame of the screen. Brassy mariachi music was blaring inside.

Peering through the mesh of the screen door, she could see the blue-and-pink flicker of a television reflecting in framed pictures on a living-room wall. The music and the colors both ceased at the same instant.

The gray-haired woman who appeared behind the screen stared at Elizalde for a moment, and then said something fast in Spanish.

“Perdón,” said Elizalde, as light-headed as if she’d just bolted a stiff drink on her empty stomach, “estoy buscando por Señora Rocha?”

“Ahora me llamo Señora Gonzalvez.” Her last name was now Gonzalvez, but this was apparently Frank Rocha’s widow. Elizalde didn’t recognize her, but after all she had seen the woman only once before, three or four years ago. She didn’t recall her hair being gray then.

“Me llamo Elizalde, Angelica Anthem Elizalde. Necesito—”

The woman’s eyes were wide, and she echoed “Elizalde!” slowly, almost reverently.

“Si. Por favor, necesito hablar con usted. Lo siento mucho. Me hace falto…explicar que yo estaba…tratando de hacer—”

“Un momento.” The woman disappeared back into the dimness of the living room, and Elizalde could hear her moving things, a shuffling sound like books being rearranged on a table.

Un momento? Elizalde blinked at the again-vacant rectangle of the screen door. One of us isn’t understanding the other, she thought helplessly. This woman can’t be Frank Rocha’s widow, or else I can’t have made it clear who I am—otherwise, surely, she wouldn’t have just walked away.

“Escúsame?” she called. This was ridiculous. Her heart was thudding in her rib cage like fists hitting a punching bag, and her mouth was dry and tasted of metal. Hello-o, she thought crazily, wondering if she might start giggling. I’m responsible for the death of somebody’s husband around here…!

She curled her fingers around the door handle, and after a moment pulled it open against the resistance of creaking hinges.

On the mantel against the far wall an ofrenda had been set up, an altar, a figured silk scarf laid across a little embroidered cushion with framed photographs set up on it and around it, and two stylized, fancifully painted wooden skulls at either end of the display, like bookends. Preparation for El Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead. On the wall over it was hung a heart-shaped frame, its interior occupied by a gold-colored crucifix and a small clock face. She noted that the time was nearly noon.

She stepped inside, letting the screen door slap closed behind her.

Abruptly startled, she blinked her eyes shut—and a flash of red through her closed eyelids, and then a little mechanical whirring sound, let her know that the woman had taken her picture with an instamatic camera. To add to the ofrenda? wondered Elizalde in bewilderment as she opened her eyes and blinked at the woman’s silhouette. But I’m not dead….

Then her knees and the palms of her hands hit the carpet as a tremendous, stunning bang shook the room, and she was up and spinning and punching the screen door aside as another gunshot bruised her eardrums; she had clenched her eyes shut an instant before the shot, and so the splinters from the struck oak doorframe just stung her eyelids.

She felt one of her sneaker soles slap the porch boards—and then the porch had hit her again, and she was falling, and the dirt of the yard slammed against her hip and elbow as another bang crashed behind her and a plume of white dust sprang up from the sidewalk.

Rolling to her feet, she sprinted slantways across the barren yard and pelted away back south down the Amado Street sidewalk. She had to run in a slapping, flat-footed gait, for her feet kept feeling the impacts with the pavement before they actually occurred.

A one-story travel-agency building, apparently closed, loomed at the corner on her left, and she skidded around its wall tightly enough to have knocked over anyone who might have been walking up on the other side—but the sidewalk, the whole narrow street, was empty.

In an alley-fronting parking lot across the street an old lime-green couch was propped against the back wall of another retail-looking building, and she crossed the street toward it—forcing herself to shuffle along, to stroll, rather than flail and stamp and wheeze as she had been doing.

Her lungs felt seared, and the back of her head tingled in anticipation of savage pursuit, but nobody had yelled or audibly begun running across the asphalt by the time she stepped up the curb and crossed to the couch.

She thought she could hide behind it, crouch in the cool shadow of it, until dark, and then creep away. Her teeth were clenched, and her face was cold with shame. Why did I go there? she was screaming in her head, why did I rip open her old wounds, and mine, and—She remembered the shots, and rolling on the dirt, and running so clumsily, and she opened her eyes wide with the effort of forcing those things out of her attention, concentrating instead on the blue sky behind the shaggy palm trees and the telephone wires and the whirling crows.

Dizzy, she looked down and put her hand on the couch. The couch arm was fibrous and oily under her hand—gristly—but she realized that she had felt the texture of it only when she had actually touched it. The weird anticipation of sensations had apparently stopped when she had been crossing the street.

“Did you leave that here?” piped a close young man’s voice, speaking in English.

Elizalde looked up guiltily. The back door of the building had been standing open, and now a fat white man with a scruffy beard was leaning out of it. He was wearing cutoff jeans, and his belly was stretching a stained example of the sleeveless undershirts she had always thought of as wifebeater undershirts.

She realized that she had forgotten what he had asked her. “I’m sorry?”

He peered up and down the alley. “Did you hear gunshots just now?”

“A truck was backfiring on Amado,” said Elizalde, keeping her voice casual.

The fat man nodded, “So is it yours?”

“The truck?” Her face was suddenly hot, and she knew she was either blushing or pale, for she had almost said, The gun?

“The couch,” he said impatiently. “Did you put it here?”

“Oh,” Elizalde said, “no. I was just looking at it.”

“Somebody dumped it here. We find all kinds of crap back here. People think they can unload any old junk.” He eyed the couch with disfavor. “Probably some big old black lady gave birth on it. And her mother before that. We got better furniture inside, if you got any money.”

Elizalde blinked at him, trickles of disgust beginning to puddle in the scraped, blown-out emptiness of her mind. And where were you born, she thought—on a culture dish in a VD lab, I’d judge. But all she said was, “Furniture?”

“Yeah, secondhand. And books, kitchenware, ropa usada. Had Jackie Onassis in here the other day.”

Elizalde had caught her breath at last, and she could smell beer on him. She nodded and made herself smile as she stepped past him into the store. “Yeah, she was telling me about it.”

Inside were racks of pitiful clothes, bright cheap blouses and sun hats and colorful pants, that seemed still to carry an optimistic whiff, long stale now, of their original purchases at sunny swap meets and canvas-tent beachside stands. And there were shelves of books—hardcover junior-college texts, paperback science fiction and romances—and rows of family-battered Formica and particleboard-and-wood-veneer tables, covered with ceramic ashtrays and wrecked food processors and, somehow, a lot of fondue pots. A white-glass vase had been knocked over on one table, spilling a sheaf of dried flowers. My quinceañera bouquet, she thought as she looked at them. Withered roses, and husks of lilies, and a stiffened spray of forgive-me-nots.

“Begin life anew,” advised the drunk bearded man, who had followed her back inside.

Life a-old, she thought. This was an accumulation of the crumbled shells of lives, collapsed when the owners had become absent, piled here now like broken cast-off snakeskins, some pieces still big enough to show outlines of departed personalities.

Well, Elizalde thought, I’m kind of a broken personality myself. I should hide in here for a while, at least long enough to see if cop sirens go past on the street outside, or angry Rochas or Gonzalvezes come bursting in. If they do, I’ll just drape myself over one of these fine tables and be as inconspicuous as a skeleton hiding in a scrimshaw shop.

But nobody did come in at all, and the traffic outside was uneventful. The sunny October Los Angeles day had apparently swallowed up the gunshots without a ripple and was rolling on. Elizalde bought a Rastafari knitted tarn—red, gold, black, and green—big enough to tuck her long black hair up into, and a tan size-fourteen Harve Benard jumpsuit that had no doubt had an interesting history. Three dollars paid for the whole bundle at the counter by the street door, and the bearded man didn’t even remark on it when Elizalde swept the cap forward over her head and then pulled the jumpsuit on right over her jeans and sweatshirt.

After she had pushed open the door and walked a block back south toward Sixth Street, she realized that she had taken on the humbled, slope-shouldered gait she remembered in many of her patients; and she was pleased at the instinctive mimicry, during the few moments it took her to realize that it was not mimickry at all, but natural.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

HUNCHING and hopping along the walkway that flanked the Ahmanson Theater, moving in and out of the fleeting shade of the strips of decorative roof so narrow and so far overhead that they could serve as shelter only against a preternaturally straight-falling rain, Sherman Oaks followed his missing, pointing arm. The nonexistent arm was so hot that the rest of him felt chilly, as if he were reaching out the door of an air-conditioned bar in Death Valley, out into the harsh sunlight. And he was sniffing vigorously, for the boy Koot Hoomie Parganas had moved through this place not long ago, and he could strongly smell the big ghost that the boy carried.

Run, he read in the impressions still shaking in the air, a long run, fleeing under a masked sun on the front of a train, running…on all fours? With long nails clicking on pavement! What the hell?

His missing arm practically dragged him around the moat that encircled the giant wedding cake of the Mark Taper Forum, and then the stair railing across the pavement ahead of him seemed to be the only focused thing in the landscape; everything else, even the incongruous ragged pile of raw meat by the Taper’s entry doors, was a blur. He was close!

At the top of the stairs he came to a full stop, and then cautiously peered down—and his heart began pounding still harder, for a dead old man was sprawled down there on the blood-smeared concrete stairs.

I should get right out of here, he thought—hop over this deceased old party and continue on the kid’s trail.

But as he shuffled down the steps he realized that the thing on the stairs was not actually a man; it was a limply collapsed dummy, stitched into a coarse black coat of badly woven fur. But the imbecilically distorted face, and the white hands, seemed to be made of flesh—and the spattered and smeared blood looked real. It smelled real.

Oaks paused to crouch over the crumpled shell. He emptied his lungs through his open mouth, hearing the faint outraged stadium roar of all the ghosts he had inhaled over the years; and then he inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils and tilting his head back and swelling his chest.

He caught the flat muskiness of ectoplasm, the protean junk that squirted out of mediums to lend substance to ghosts…but he smelled real flesh, too, and real blood.

Dog flesh, he realized as he sucked up more of the charged air. Dog blood.

No wonder he had caught an impression moments ago of running on all fours! Someone had vaporized a dog to get substance for filling out a figure too big and solid for ectoplasm alone. And a prepubescent kid wouldn’t be able to provide much ectoplasm anyway.

The big ghost had done this, had made this thing. Why? The ghost must have perceived itself to be in some emergency, for this would have been a very stressful move.

Oaks stared down at the flat head of the thing. This would have to be a portrait of the big ghost that the kid was carrying: white hair, a pouchy and wrinkled face…

Who the hell was it? Probably someone famous, certainly someone powerful, to judge by the huge psychic field that his ghost projected. The face, broad and big-chinned and dominant even deflated on the steps here, looked vaguely familiar to Oaks…but from a long time ago. Briefly and uneasily, Oaks wondered how old he himself might be, really; but he pushed the question away and thought about the ghost who had left this thing here.

Whoever it was, he had died at the Parganas house on Loma Vista two nights ago—or at least that’s where and when his spanking-new ghost had appeared, blazing in the psychic sky like a nova—and the Parganas couple had chosen to die horribly rather than tell Oaks anything at all.

Oaks stared at the blood on the steps here, and he remembered following the powerful new ghosts beacon all the way across town to that house in Beverly Hills on Monday night. By the time Oaks had got there the ghost was gone, headed south, but Oaks had stayed to find out who it had been, and who had taken it away, in the hope of avoiding this weary labor of following every step of the thing’s trail. He remembered his useless torturing of the middle-aged man and woman in that garden-type patio off the living room. As soon as he had taped the two of them into the chairs and started questioning them, they had gone into some kind of defensive trance; and Oaks, fearful of being caught there, had got angry and had cut them more and more savagely, and after he had finally cut out their very eyes he had realized that they had died at some point.

After that, still angry, he had set about searching the house. And then the kid had come home—very late, not far short of dawn—and when Oaks had gone into the living room the dead couple’s ghosts had been standing in there! Blinking around stupidly, but as solid as you could ask for, and them only an hour dead at the most!

He should have known right then that the big ghost had come back, and that it was the big ghost’s promiscuous field that had lit up the two silly new ghosts in their wedding clothes. But the trail had been looped right back onto itself at that point, and too grossly powerful for Oaks to comprehend that it had doubled when the kid entered the scene. And anyway, the kid had taken off like an arrow out of a bow; and the boy had run out of the house through that garden patio, which could only have speeded him up still more.

OAKS HOPPED over the bloody mess on the stairs and stepped down to the cement-floored landing—apparently this was a parking level—but after a couple of steps he froze.

His phantom left arm wasn’t pointing anymore; it had flopped nervelessly, and he couldn’t feel anything at all in it. He tried to work the hand—usually when the arm was down by his side he could rasp the fingers against the hairy skin of his thigh, whether or not he happened to be wearing long pants—but the nonexistent fingers sensed nothing now but, perhaps, a faint cool breeze sluicing between them. The trail was gone.

Had the ghost freed itself from the kid and evaporated? That would be bad—Oaks was getting thin, and for the last thirty or forty hours he had been passing up the chance to eat smaller ghosts, in his anxiety not to miss this big feast. Or had the kid somehow all at once attained puberty this morning, enabling him to eat and digest the ghost himself?

Oaks’s face was chilly with alarm—but after a moment he relaxed a little. Whatever had happened here, whatever it was that had provoked the ghost into whipping up this ectoplasmic mannikin…the whole event must have been a terrible shock to the kid, too. In his terror the boy might very well have just clathrated the ghost, convulsively enclosed it within his own psyche but not assimilated it—encysted the thing, shoved it down, walled it up tightly inside himself.

That could happen, Oaks knew; and if it had, the locked-in ghost wouldn’t be detectable from the outside.

Like that one time when Houdini…

The fleeting thought was gone, leaving only an association: Jonah and the whale. Sherman Oaks hurried back up the stairs, stepping carelessly right on the limp face this time, and when he was back up on the pavement he hopped over a retaining wall by the valet-parking driveway and strode away south on the Hope Street sidewalk.

Houdini? Jonah and the whale? God knew what memory had started to surface there—something from the time before he had come into this present continuity-of-consciousness three years ago, in the district of Sherman Oaks, from which he had whimsically taken this present name. Again he wondered, briefly and uneasily, how old he might really be, and when and how he might have lost his left arm.

To his right, across the street, the elevated pools around the Metropolitan Water District building reflected the watery blue sky. Oaks calculated that the time could hardly be even an hour past noon, but the pale sun had already begun to recede, having come as far up above the southern horizon as it cared to in this season. North was behind him, and the thought prompted him to sneak a glance down at the pommel of the survival knife he wore inside his pants.

When he had stolen the knife, its hollow hilt had been full of things like fishhooks and matches. He had replaced that stuff with reliable compact ghost lures—a nickel with a nail welded to the back so that it could be hammered into a wooden floor, where it would confound the patient efforts of ghosts to pick it up, and some pennies stamped with the Lincoln profile smoking a pipe, another surefire ghost-attention holder—but he had valued the screw-on pommel, which had a powerful magnetic compass bobbing around in its glass dome.

But right now the compass was pointing firmly, uselessly, north. And his gone left arm was still sensing nothing at all. The ghost was effectively hidden inside the boy’s mind now—Oaks was sure that that was what had happened—and, at least for as long as the ghost remained concealed, Oaks would have to track Koot Hoomie Parganas without any psychic beacons or Hansel-and-Gretel trails at all. And now, when he found the boy, he would probably have to kill him to get the big ghost out and eat it—and of course eat the boy’s ghost too, as a garnish. A parsley child.

It occurred to Sherman Oaks that he might be smart to get to a telephone—and damn quick.

He walked faster, and then began jogging, hoping that in spite of his stained windbreaker and camouflage pants he looked like someone getting exercise and not like somebody in murderous pursuit.

CLOUDS AS solid and white as sculptured marble were shifting across the blue vault of the sky, south from the San Fernando Valley and down the track of the Hollywood Freeway, graying the woods and lawns of Griffith Park and tarnishing the flat water of the Silverlake Reservoir. Chilly shade swept over the freeway lanes and across the area of wide dirt lots and isolated old Victorian houses west of the Pasadena Freeway, and the squat wild palms shook their shaggy heads in the wind. Pedestrians around Third and Sixth Streets began to move more quickly…though one toiling small figure on the Witmer Street sidewalk didn’t increase its pace.

Kootie was limping worse than ever, but he made himself keep moving. Raffle had been meticulous about divvying up their panhandling income, and Kootie had a pocketful of change as well as forty-six dollars in bills—eventually he would get on a bus, and then get on another, and eventually, ideally, sleep on one, and then tomorrow think of some durable sanctuary (—church, stow away on a ship, hide somewhere on a “big rig eighteen-wheeler” go to the police, hide in a—). But right now he needed the sensation of motion—of ground being covered—that only working his legs and abrading the soles of his shoes could give him.

Kootie had stopped being angry at Raffle, and was instead panicked and dismayed at having lost the only person in Los Angeles, in the world, who’d cared to help him. Kootie was certain that if he hadn’t been such a stupid kid, he could somehow have talked Raffle out of turning him in, and they could right now have been driving to get Raffle’s dope somewhere, happy in the car, with Fred licking their faces. Kootie winced as he stepped down off a high curb, and he wondered what Fred was doing now; probably right this minute Fred was sharing Kootie’s own personal heated-up tamale with Raffle in some safe parking lot.

Kootie’s pelvis and right hip ached, as if he’d recently tried doing one of those Russian crouch-and-kick dances and then finished with a full butt-to-the-floor split—but he was trying not to think about it, for the mysterious muscle strain was a result of whatever had gone on during the time he had been blacked out at the Music Center, when the ghost of the old man had been in control of his body.

God only knew what the old man had done. Fallen awkwardly? Karate-kicked somebody? Kootie would have expected more dignity from Thomas Alva Edison.

There it was, he had thought about it. The ghost had been Edison—as in the SCE logo, painted on the doors of the Halloween-colored black-and-orange trucks, Southern California Edison—the guy that invented the lightbulb. Kootie’s parents had always told him not to play with lightbulbs, that there was a poisonous “noble gas” in them; in school he had found out that they’d been thinking of neon lights, and that neon wasn’t poisonous anyway. But there had been a poison in the glass brick hidden in the Dante statue, for sure.

Noble gas my ass, he thought defiantly as he blinked away tears. You old…shithead! What were you doing in that test tube inside the glass brick anyway?

Duh, he thought, replying for the absent Edison, I dunno.

You got my mom and dad killed! And now everybody wants to kill me too.

Duh. Sorry.

Moron.

Kootie remembered the face on the top of the bloody framework he had pulled off of himself, but a shudder torqued through him, almost making him miss his footing on the cracked sidewalk. It was apparently far too soon to think about that episode, and he found that he had focused his eyes on the stucco walls, bright orange even in the shadow of the clouds, of a ninety-nine cent store on the corner ahead of him. Two pay telephones were perched under metal hoods on a post by the parking-lot curb.

Al, he thought nervously, quoting the old woman who had moaned to him out of the pay-phone receiver on Fairfax this morning, where am I gonna meet you tonight?

Al. Alva. Thomas Alva Edison. And in the hallucination he’d had—

Again he shied away from the memory of being dislocated out of his own body—but he was sure that it had been the Edison ghost that the old woman had been trying to talk to. She had known the name—the nickname!—of the ghost Kootie had been carrying around. To the people who live in the magical alleys of the world, Kootie thought, that ghost must have been sticking out like a sore thumb.

But the ghost was gone now! Kootie had left it torn and deflated on the steps at the—

Involuntarily he exhaled, hard enough to have blown out a whole birthday-cake-full of candles, if one had been here. (Raffle had told him that in these neighborhoods they generally hung paper-skinned figures from trees on kids’ birthdays, and then beat the things with sticks until they split apart, at which point the kids would scramble for the little cellophane-wrapped, hard candies that spilled onto the dirt from the broken paper abdomens.)

The ghost was gone now, that was the important thing. Maybe telephones would work, for .Kootie, now.

He flexed the fingers of his right hand and slowly reached down and dug in his jeans pocket for a quarter. Who would he call?

The police, for sure.

Kootie’s teeth were cold, and he realized that he was smiling. He would call the police, and the one-armed bum wouldn’t follow him anymore, not after the bum stumbled across the—

After the bum came to the end of the ghost’s trail.

And then Kootie would be put in…some kind of home, finally, with showers and bathrooms and beds and food. Eventually he’d be adopted, by some family. He’d be able to see any movies he wanted to see….

His teeth were still cold, but he was sobbing now, to his own horror and astonishment. I want my own family, he thought, I want my own house and my own mom and dad. Maybe they aren’t dead—(in those bloody chairs)—of course they aren’t dead, they were standing in the living room in formal clothes (ignoring me in such, a scary way) and probably they’re the ones that hired the billboards and posted the reward!

He needed to know, he needed to throw himself somewhere now, and he ran to the telephones even though the pain of running wrung whimpers through his clenched teeth.

When he had rolled the quarter into the slot, he punched in 911.

After two rings, a woman’s voice said, calmly, “Nine-one-one operator, is this an emergency?”

“I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Kootie quickly. “My parents were—were robbed and beaten up, real bad, night before last, and there’s billboards with my picture on ’em, and a reward—” Kootie was suddenly dizzy, and he actually had to clutch the receiver tightly to keep from falling. He swung around on the pivot of his good heel until his shoulder hit the phone’s aluminum cowl. When he had straightened up he had a quick impression that someone was behind him, wanting to use the phone, but he looked around and saw no one near him. “—A reward,” he went on, “that’s being offered for me. My mom and dad live on Loma Vista Street in Beverly Hills and there was—”

A man’s voice interrupted him. “Parganas?” the man said alertly.

“Yes.”

“Just a sec. Hey,” the man said away from the phone, “it’s the Parganas kid!” More loudly, he added, “It’s Koot Hoomie!”

The phone at the other end was put down with a clunk on something hard. In the background Kootie could hear a lot of people talking, and a clatter like a cafeteria. He heard glass break, and a voice mumble “Fuck.”

There was a rattling on the line as someone picked up the distant phone. “Koot Hoomie?”

It was his mother’s voice! She was alive! He was sobbing again, but he managed to say, clearly, “Mom, come and get me.”

There was a moment of relative silence, broken only by mumbling and clattering at the other end; then, “Kethoomba!” his mother exclaimed. (Was she drunk? Was everybody drinking there in the dispatcher’s office?) Kootie remembered that Kethoomba was the Tibetan pronunciation of the name of the mahatma his parents had named him after. She had never called Kootie that. “Gelugpa,” she went on, “yellow-hatted monk! Come and get me!”

“Gimme that phone,” said someone in the background. “Master!” came the quavering voice of Kootie’s father. “We’ll be out front!” Quietly, as if speaking off to the side of the receiver, Kootie’s father asked someone, “Where are we?”

“Fock you,” came a thick-voiced reply.

“Dad,” shouted Kootie. “It’s me, Kootie! I need you to come get me! I’m at—” He poked his head out into the breeze and tried to see a street sign. He couldn’t see one up or down the gray street. They trace these calls, ask the dispatcher where I’m calling from. Have ‘em send a cop car here quick.”

“Don’t go outside!” called his father to someone in the noisy room. “Cop cars!” Then, breathily, back into the mouthpiece: “Kootie?”

“Yes, Dad! Are you all drunk? Listen—”

“No, you listen, young man. You broke the Dante—don’ interrupt—you broke the, the Dante, let the light shine out before anything was prepared—well, it’s your son, if you mus’ know—”

Then Kootie’s mother was on the line again. “Kootie! Put the master back on!”

Kootie was crying harder now. Something was terribly wrong. “There’s nobody here but me, Mom. What’s the matter with you? I’m lost, and that guy—there’s bad guys following me—”

“We need the master to pick ‘s up!” his mother interrupted, her voice slurred but loud. “Put ’im on!”

“He’s not here!” wailed Kootie; his ear was wet with wind-driven tears or sweat, and chilly because he was now holding the phone several inches away from his head. “I called. My name is Koot Hoomie, remember? I’m alone!”

“You killed us!” his mother yelled. “You broke the Dante, you couldn’t wait, and then the…forces of darkness!… found us, and killed us! I’m dead, your fathers dead, because you disobeyed us! And now the master hasn’t called! You’re bad, Kootie, you’re ba-a-ad.”

“She’s right, son,” interjected Kootie’s father. “Iss your fault we’re dead and Kethoomba’s off somewhere. Get over here now.”

Kootie couldn’t imagine the room his parents were in—it sounded like some kind of bar—but he was suddenly certain of what they were wearing. The same formal wedding clothes.

In the background there, a little girl was reciting a poem about how some flower beds were too soft…and then a hoarse woman’s voice said, “Tell him to put Al on, will ya?”

Kootie hung up the phone. The wind was colder on this street now, and the sky’s gray glow, made opaque smoke of the windshields on the passing cars.

His quarter clattered into the coin-return slot. Apparently there was no charge on 911 calls.

AND TEN blocks east of Kootie, leaning against bamboo-pattern wallpaper at the back of a steamy Thai takeout restaurant, Sherman Oaks pressed another pay-telephone receiver to his ear.

At the other end of the line, a man answered, recited the number Oaks had called, and said, “What category?”

“I don’t know,” said Oaks, “Missing Persons? It’s about that kid, Koot Hoomie Parganas, the one on the billboards.”

“Koot Hoomie sightings, eh?” Oaks could hear the rippling clicking of a computer keyboard. “You speak English,” the operator noted.

The remark irritated Oaks. Probably he had always spoken English. “‘Most people don’t?”

“Been getting a lot of Kootie calls from illegal immigrants: ‘Tengo el nino, pew no estoy en el pais legalimente.’ Got the kid, but got no green card. Looking for a second party to pick up the reward. There must be fifty curly-haired stray kids locked in garages in L.A. right now. One of ’em might even be the right one, though he hasn’t been turned in yet, or this category would be closed out. Okay, what? You’ve got him, you know where he is? We’ve got a bonded outfit checking all reasonable claims, and a representative can be anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area within ten minutes.”

“What I’ve got,” Oaks said, “is a counter-offer.” He looked around at the other people in the tiny white-lit restaurant—they all seemed to be occupied with their takeout bags and cardboard cartons, and even the obtrusive smells of cilantro and chili peppers seemed to combine with the staccato voices and the sizzle of beef and shrimp on the griddle to provide a screen of privacy for the phone. “You know smoke? Cigar? The Maduro Man?”

“It’s a different category, but I can call it up.”

“Well, I can put up—” Oaks paused to pull his attention away from the bright agitation of the restaurant, and he ran a mental inventory of the three major caches he kept, hidden out there in corners of the dark city; he pictured the dusty boxes of empty-looking but tightly sealed jars and bottles and old crack vials—he even had a matched pair, an elderly matrimonial suicide pact, locked up in the two snap-lid receptacles of a clear plastic contact-lens case. “I can put up a thousand doses of L.A. cigar, in exchange for the kid. Even wholesale that’s a lot more than twenty grand.”

He heard more keyboard clicking. “Yeah, it is.” The man sighed. “Well, for that we’d need a guarantor, somebody we’ve got listed, who can put up forty grand. Counter-offers have to be double, house policy. If we get that, we’ll go ahead and list it under the Parganas heading. But the guarantor would have to do all the other work, like maybe putting a trap on the reward-number phone and being ready to intercept anybody who, you know, might already have the kid and be trying to get the original reward. I don’t have to tell you that hours count in this one. Minutes, even.”

“I know.”

Oaks looked down at the compass in the pommel of his knife—right now it was pointing up in the direction of Dodger Stadium, which was plain old north, but a few minutes ago it had joggled wildly and then, for what must have been nearly a full minute, pointed emphatically west. After that it had wobbled back to north, and he hadn’t seen it deviate from that normal reading since.

During it all, he had felt no heat in his absent arm—but the compass had clearly registered a brief re-emergence of the big ghost; and the ghost had been in the excited state, too, for ghosts didn’t cast the huge magnetic fields when they were in their normal quiescent ground state. It was clathrated in the boy’s psyche, and not dissipated or eaten. Oaks was achingly anxious to get off the phone and resume his jogging pursuit—westward!—but this insurance was worth a minute’s delay.

“So who’s your guarantor?” the man on the phone was asking him. “Or do you have forty grand yourself, to put up instead of your smoke?”

“No, not me. Uh…” The street dealers he ordinarily sold to wouldn’t have this kind of money ready to hand. He would have to go higher up. “You got a Neal Obstadt listed?” Oaks asked. “Under gambling, probably, I think that’s his main business.”

“Yeah, I got Obstadt.” (Clickety-click.) “What do I tell him? Even for him, forty ain’t just lunch money.”

Oaks had heard Obstadt described as a heavy user, a good customer who was generally able to score the best specimens in the dealers’ stocks. “Tell him it’s from the guy named Sherman Oaks, the producer who brought you such hits as—I hope you’re taping this?”

“Always got a loop going.”

“Such hits as Henrietta Hewitt, the old lady who died on September fifth and whose kids were named Edna and Sam.” It was a fairly long shot, but old Henrietta had been the best ghost Oaks had bottled lately, and anyway Obstadt might very well recognize Oaks’s name and reputation. He might not, but the possibility of changing the Parganas listing was definitely worth this delay.

“I’ll play it for him. I imagine he’ll want to tape your voice himself, as your receipt for the money, if he goes for it. Are you at a number?”

“No, I’ll call back in an hour. But if he authorizes it, you can list it on the board right now, can’t you?”

“Yup. As soon as he says okay, it’s on, and the…mere mercenary details are between you and him.”

“Go,” said Oaks, and hung up the phone.

Immediately he wondered if he was making a costly mistake. He could easily get to all of his stashes within a hopping hour or two, but turning it all over to Obstadt’s people would leave Oaks with approximately nothing. He might even have to kill a few street people to make up the full thousand bottled doses. But of course he wouldn’t have to cough up the smoke unless he received the Parganas boy, and the big ghost inside the boy was clearly worth a thousand ordinary bottled dead folk. The nightly fresh catches in his traps would keep Oaks going until he could build up reserve stocks again.

He could feel his missing arm again, but it was just clutching his chest, and it was as uselessly cold as if it were cradling a bag of ice. He actually looked down at his grubby shirtfront, and was remotely surprised not to see the fabric bunched by the clawed fingers. His compass was still pointing north—either the ghost was in the normal catatonic ground state, or was reimprisoned inside the boy’s psyche, or both.

The burning-plastic smells of sizzling shrimp and cilantro helped propel him across the linoleum floor and out onto the Figueroa sidewalk.

Oaks despised the processes of biological ingestion and digestion and elimination, and he generally lived on crackers, and bean soup fingered up cold and solid right out of a can, and water from unguarded hoses and faucets. His real sustenance was his ghosts, snorted up raw and new and vibrant from a hand-lettered palindrome or a pile of scattered coins, or—occasional serendipitous luxuries!—furtively inhaled in hospital corridors or from a body freshly tumbled on the street.

He remembered stalking the halls of County Hospital during the war, when every one of the hundreds of windows had been painted black in case of a Japanese air raid, and the ghosts of newly dead patients were too fearful to dissipate normally, and instead huddled in the corners of the halls, always faintly asking him, as he swept them into his bottles, “Are the fops out there?”… And the maternity ward at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he had often been able to inhale the fresh-cast virtual ghosts thrown off by newborn infants in the stress of birth. …

But it was now getting on to forty-eight hours since he had last “got a life”—which had been before he’d gone to the Parganas house. He hadn’t even bothered to consume the ghosts of Kootie’s parents after he killed them, so confident had he been that the big ghost must still be nearby; he had not wanted to waste the chase-time by pausing to eat those two minor items.

Out on the sidewalk he realized that the day had turned cold, and that the gray light would be diminishing toward evening before too long. Already the zigzag neon sign of a shoe store across the street was glowing yellow against the ash-colored wall. An orange-and-black SCE truck roared past, and he flinched away—from the roaring of it.

Those two minor items. Oaks would have been grateful for one such minor item right now. One lungful of real soul food, to keep away the Bony Express.

For he could feel the unrest of the ghosts he had consumed in the past. When he was forced to fast, they all became agitated, and his exhalations were more and more audibly wheezy with their less and less distant roars, as if they were all riding toward him—the Bony Express!—ever closer, over the midnight black hills of the unmapped borderlands of his mind, toward the lonely middle-of-nowhere campfire that was his consciousness.

His phantom left hand had crawled down his chest and now gripped his abdomen, squeezing so hard that Oaks was wincing as he hurried west along the Sixth Street sidewalk. He thought of making a detour, catching a bus up to—which stash was he nearest to?—the rooftop air-conditioning shed over the hair salon on Bellevue; but the thought of how strongly the compass needle had pointed west only a few minutes ago, and the memory of the collapsed face on the parking garage stairs at the Music Center, made him keep on putting one foot ahead of the other on the westward-leading sidewalk.

Mouth-to-mouth unsuscitation, with Koot Hoomie Parganas’s body still twitching under him in protest at being so newly dead, and the two souls, the boy’s and the big ghost, blasting hotly down Oaks’s windpipe to his starving lungs.

Soon, he thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

“The little fishes of the sea,

They sent an answer hack to me.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

THE sun was under the skirts of the dark clouds now, showing briefly on the western edge of the world before disappearing below the silhouetted hills of Pacific Palisades. Pete Sullivan was sitting by the leaded-glass window of Kendall’s Sport Time Bar, and the long, horizontal rays of sunlight glowed red in the depths of the Guinness stout in the glass on the polished table.

He was waiting for his order of appetizers—fried mozzarella with marinara sauce, and Buffalo chicken wings with celery and blue-cheese dressing—but he had got the stout in the meantime because a teacher at City College had once told him that Guinness contained all the nutrients required to sustain human life. It was thick and brown and rich, though, and he planned to switch to Coors Light as soon as he had emptied this glass and thus fulfilled his health duties. And this bar somehow didn’t have any smoking area at all, so his next cigarette would have to wait until he got back into the van. A healthful evening all around.

Television sets were hung at several places in the darkness under the ceiling beams, but each one seemed to be tuned to a different channel, and the ones with the sound turned up loud weren’t the ones closest to Sullivan. On the nearest screen he watched presidential candidate Bill Clinton moving his lips, while what he heard was whining electrical machinery and mechanical thumping from a farther speaker. Sullivan looked away.

His hands were still sticky from having washed them with Gojo hand-cleaning jelly at the tiny sink in the van. This morning, after driving around to pick up supplies, he had found an unfenced dirt lot east of Alameda, among the windowless plastic-works and foundries by the train tracks and the cement-walled Los Angeles River, and he had done some work on the poor old van.

The sun had still been glaring out of a clear October sky, and he had taken off his shirt and scapular and popped a beer from a fresh twelve-pack before opening the van’s back doors and dragging out his tools.

The tire pressures were low, so he hooked up a little electric air pump to the battery with his jumper cables, and crouched beside each tire in turn, puffing a cigarette and sipping the chilly beer, and watched to make sure the cable clamps didn’t touch each other as the pump wobbled and vibrated on the adobe dirt. Then he crawled under the van and dumped the oil, conscientiously draining the old black stuff into the kind of sealable plastic container that could be taken to an oil-recycling center, though unless someone was watching he intended to leave the container right there in the middle of the field. A new oil filter, new spark plugs, and six quarts of Valvoline 20-50-weight oil finished the job.

L.A. air in the tires, he thought, and fresh oil in the engine. Nothing with any memories of fleeing Arizona—of driving to Houdini’s wrecked old place—of fearfully crossing borders. And he remembered the old notion that after some number of years every cell in a human body had been replaced, every atom, so that the body is just a wave form moving through time, incorporating just for a little while the stuff of each day; only the wave itself, and none of the transient physical bits, makes the whole trip. Even a scar would be no more significant than a wobble still visible in an ocean wave long after the wave had passed the obstruction that caused it, while the water molecules that had actually sustained the impact were left comfortably far behind.

A.O.P., Sullivan thought now as he sipped his cloying Guinness. Accelerate Outta Problems. He had always been uneasy watching people dig in—the newlyweds committing themselves to a mortgage and a roof and plumbing, the brave entrepreneur leasing a building and getting boxes and boxes of letterhead printed up. Sullivan had owned the van for five years now, but he had owned other vehicles before that, and he would own others after the van met whatever its eventual terminal problem would turn out to be; the very books on the shelf over the top bunk were a wave form—paperbacks that were bought new, became bent and ruptured and yellowed, and eventually served as ragged whiskbrooms that went out with the trash they swept up, to be replaced by new paperbacks.

Sullivan had once read some Greek philosopher quoted to the effect that no man can step into the same river twice, because it’s never again the same river, and he’s never again the same man.

Thank God for that, Sullivan thought now as he beckoned to the waitress. On the nearest television screen, in front of some shabby house draped in yellow police-line tape, a concerned-looking newsman was frowning into the camera and opening and closing his mouth, seeming, because another set was turned up loud on a different channel, to be barking like a dog while someone kept saying, “Speak!”

Sullivan looked back down at the table. It was better with just the sound. Today he had set up his portable radio and cassette deck on the van floor, and on the noon news he had heard that some giant prehistoric fish had washed up on the shore at Venice Beach, and that lobsters had crawled out of the ocean and terrified people on the shore.

So there had been a timely at Venice. That was immensely reassuring. DeLarava’s motive in going there had been just for a news story, and nothing to do with… anything else.

You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you wont dissolve.

He cut off the intrusive remembered sentence before he could distinguish the voice that had (long ago) spoken it. Better to dissolve, he thought.

“And could I switch to a Coors Light now,” he said aloud, for the waitress had brought the two steaming plates to his table, and lukewarm stout wasn’t at all the thing for washing down garlic and Tabasco and blue cheese. “In fact,” he added, “could I have two of them.”

One of them to drink in memory of the surely dissolved ghost of Sukie, he thought.

Now that his head was ringing slightly with alcohol, he was comfortably sure that the wave form that had been his sister was safely dispersed and flattened out, and not carrying on past the death of the body that had maintained it. DeLarava only went to Venice today because her job happened to take her there, he told himself, and all the ghosts are laid.

Let it all dissolve. Scarf this hasty late lunch or early dinner, call Steve and go over to his house for a few more beers, and then just get out of L.A. All the old dirty shit is cleaned out of the van’s works, and you’ve surely cleared all the old guilts and uncertainties out of your soul just by coming back here and looking around at the outgrown home town.

Veni, vidi, exii, he thought, quoting another motto of Sukie’s. I came, I saw, I left.

The sound vibrating out of the nearest speaker was some kind of mulitudinous roar like a crowded stadium, but on the nearest screen he could now see a beach, breezy basketball courts, a crowd of people in swimming suits standing and craning their necks…a brightly sunlit scene, not live.

Jarringly, it was Venice Beach—but obviously this was just a recap of the prehistoric fish story. Perhaps this film clip was deLarava’s work. Sullivan’s two beers arrived then, and with one of the chilly glasses clamped in his palm he was able to keep on looking up at the TV screen.

And a deep slug of cold beer helped him hang on to his mood of serenity. I can look at films of Venice Beach now, he thought steadily. All the old ghosts are laid.

As soon as the televised scene was replaced by a view of some new car leaning fast around rural roads, he drained the beer and took the other one with him as he got up—the food could wait—and walked back through the crowded tables to the hallway where the telephones and the rest rooms were.

He dropped a handful of change on the wood floor, retrieved most of it and thumbed a quarter into the pay-phone slot, then punched in the remembered number.

Above belt-level wainscoting the wallpaper was furry red velvet—and it fleetingly occurred to him that in spite of the beamed ceiling and the etched glass partitions around the booths, this place was probably too new for deLarava to find it worthwhile snuffling a straw in these corners.

The phone at the other end was ringing, and then it was picked up. “That you, Pete?” came a gasping voice.

“Sure is. Steve? I’m—”

“Where are you calling from, man?” Away from the phone he snapped, “I’m fine dammit!” to someone.

“Well, I’m in a bar—in Westwood, I think, on Wilshire. A ‘sports bar,’ with TV sets hung all over the place, every one on a different channel. Loud. I can’t wait to get to your place. And I don’t think I’ll be spending the night after all. I gotta get back to Arizona—”

“Okay, listen, I just this second dumped a whole panful of Beans Jaime dip all over myself, and it’s damn hot. I’ve got to get back in the shower. Stay there for another half hour or so, okay?”

“No problem, I’ve got some snacks—”

“Cool. That’s good then. Shit, this stuff is like napalm! How's—I meant to ask, how’s Sukie?”

Sullivan was glad that he had thought to bring a beer with him. After chugging a series of gulps, he gasped, “Fine. No, she’s—well, I think she’s dead.”

“Jesus. You think?” After a pause, Steve said, “I always liked her. Well! Do something sentimental for me? Have a Kahlua and milk for me, in her memory, will you do that? Promise?”

It had been Sukie’s favored breakfast drink. Sullivan nodded dutifully, imagining dumping Kahlua and milk into his stomach on top of the Guinness. He realized that Steve couldn’t hear a nod, and said, “Okay, Steve. So what’s your address? I don’t need directions, I’ve got a Thomas Brothers guide.”

Steve gave him an address on La Grange Avenue, and Sullivan hung up and returned to his table.

The fried mozzarella had cooled off, but the Buffalo wings were still hot, and he dipped them in the marinara sauce as often as in the blue-cheese dressing. When the waitress came by again he ordered two more beers…and a Kahlua and milk, though he resolved to let the drink stand as a gesture rather than drink it.

He got hungrier as he diminished the fresh beers and ate the snacks, and after gnawing at the chicken bones he began chewing up the rehardened mozzarella. Just as he was considering ordering something else, maybe the Nachos Grande, the waitress walked up and told him he had a call at the bar.

He blinked up at her. “I doubt it,” he said. “Who did they ask for?”

“A guy drinking a Kahlua and milk. You haven’t touched it, but I figure you’re who they want.”

That has to be Steve, somehow, Sullivan thought uneasily as he pushed back his chair and weaved his way between the tables to the bar, on which a white telephone sat with the receiver lying next to it. He was reminded of the call he’d got at O’Hara’s, back in Roosevelt, the call from Sukie that had started this pointless—no, this cathartic—odyssey, and after he had nervously picked up the receiver and said “Hello?” he was relieved to find that the voice on the other end was not Sukie’s again. Then he realized that he hadn’t listened to what this woman had said.

“What?”

“I said, is this Pete Sullivan,” she said angrily.

“Yes. Are you somebody at Steve’s house? I—”

“This is Steve’s wife, and I’m at a pay phone. He scalded himself dumping that dip on his leg! And in his hair! Intentionally! To have an excuse to give me a shopping list and get out of the house so I could call you from somewhere where those men wouldn’t hear! Here’s his note for you, his ‘shopping list’; Pete—Call me back and say you cannot make it over to my house, please, Pete. And don’t say on the line where you’re going, and get out of there. Whatever it is, they want you alive. I’ve got a wife and kids. Good luck, hut don’t call me again ever after this next call. That’s his note, okay? This is the third damn sports bar on Wilshire that I’ve called, and now I’ve got to go to some store and buy some more frijoles and Jack cheese and stuff, even though I know we’re not going to be making more Beans Jaime, thank God, just so this shopping trip will look genuine to those men! They’ll leave when you call and tell them you can’t come over, so call. And then just leave us alone!”

“Okay,” he said softly, though she had hung up. The waitress was standing nearby, watching him, so he smiled at her and said, “Can I make a local call?” When she shrugged and nodded, he went on, “And could I have another Coors Light.”

Again he punched in Steve’s number; and again Steve answered it quickly. “Steve,” Sullivan said, “this is Pete. I’m calling from a different bar, I’m up on Hollywood Boulevard now. Listen, man, I just won’t be able to make it by tonight. And, ah, I’m gonna be leaving town—I’ll catch you next trip, okay? Next year some time, probably.”

As he carried his fresh beer back toward his table he wondered, without being able to care very much, if Steve’s regrets had sounded any more sincere to “those men” than they had to Pete.

He was looking down and carefully watching each of his shoes in turn catch his forward-moving weight, for his spine was as tense as if he were walking along the top of a high wall.

He sat down heavily in his chair at last, and, just in case, hid the glass of Kahlua and milk under his tented napkin.

Those would be deLarava’s men, he thought dully.

And I can drink all night long, or run to the van and drive to Alaska, and it won’t change the obvious fact that she is planning, again, to—

He inhaled, drained the beer, and then dizzily exhaled.

—She is again planning to consume my father’s ghost. For some reason she can’t just let him rest in peace.

She went to Venice today because of the fish business, sure, but the fishes must have been acting up because my father’s ghost is coming back out of the sea; right there in Venice, where he drowned thirty-three years ago. Right back where it started from, he sang in his head.

DeLarava would like to have me—alive—as a lure. Not as part of a mask, the way Sukie and I used to work, but, for this one, as a lure.

With a shudder of revulsion, Sullivan remembered how fat and youthful and happy deLarava always was after sucking in some ghost through one of her sparking clove cigarettes.

Presumably one ghost was as good as another…so why was she again going after his father’s? On that Christmas Eve in 1986, Pete and Sukie had both been uneasy with the fact of being physically present in Venice Beach, especially with deLarava, for it had been in the Venice surf that their father had drowned in 1959, when the twins had been seven—but it wasn’t until well after noon, in the instant when Sukie had spilled the contents of the shoebox deLarava had brought along, that he and Sukie had known what ghost was indeed that day’s particular quarry. DeLarava had probably been hoping to consummate the inhalation without the twins even suspecting, but the exposed wallet and key ring had been, horribly and unmistakably, their father’s.

The old man had drowned, and they hadn’t been there. And then Loretta deLarava had tried to eat the old man’s ghost, and—as Pete Sullivan had realized only after having driven far up the featureless Interstate 5 toward San Francisco, and as Sukie must have realized at some point during her own flight—they had fled without taking away the wallet and the keys.

Sullivan held the cold beer glass tightly to keep his hands from shaking, and his face was cold and sweaty. In that instant he completely understood, and completely envied, Sukie’s suicide.

She’d had to do it. How could you hide forever in a bottle?—unless you became transparent yourself. Dissolved (—like Speedy Alka-Seltzer—) so that you were a waveform propagated all the way out beyond any scraps of physical material, even compass needles, that might move in response to the fact of you and thus betray your presence.

(He couldn’t think about the three cans of Hires Root Beer that had also fallen out of the shoebox, one of which had rolled right up to his foot and sprayed a tiny forlorn jet of ancient brown pop across his shoe, but) he knew in the tightening back of his throat that he and his sister had betrayed their father on that day, that chilly winter of 1986 day, by running mindlessly away and leaving the tokens of their father’s ghost in deLarava’s hands.

But I’m still alive, he thought, and I’m back in L.A. I’ve got to save him from her. And I can’t possibly face him.

“—the ghosts of dead family members,” said a placid male voice from one of the television speakers, “but police investigators speculate that the apparently supernatural effects were caused by some electrical or gas-powered apparatus that may have exploded and caught fire, causing the blaze that gutted the psychiatric clinic and killed three of Dr. Elizalde’s patients. Several others still to this day remain hospitalized for psychological trauma sustained during that Halloween tragedy.”

Sullivan looked up at the nearest screen, but saw only football players running across a green field. He pushed his chair back and turned around, and on one of the farther sets saw a blond man in a suit standing behind a news-show podium. As Sullivan watched, the studio set was replaced with a still photo of a slim, dark-haired woman standing with raised eyebrows and an open mouth in a doorway. Her eyes were shut.

That looks like a bar-time snapshot, Sullivan thought as a chill prickled the back of his neck. Whoever this woman is, she seems to have anticipated the flash.

“And today,” the newsman’s voice went on, “nearly two years after that scam-gone-wrong, Dr. Elizalde is reportedly back in Los Angeles. Police say that this morning she went to the Amado Street house of Margarita Gonzalvez, the widow of one of the patients who died in the so-called séance—and drew a handgun and fired four shots! Mrs. Gonzalvez was able to snap this photograph of Elizalde shortly before the discredited psychiatrist allegedly began shooting. Police are investigating reports that Elizalde may subsequently have bought a disguise and stolen a car.”

The scene changed back to the newscaster in the studio, who had now been joined by another blond man in a suit. ‘“Physician, heal thyself,”’ said the newcomer solemnly. “A tragic story of misplaced faith, Tom.”

“Certainly is, Ed,” agreed the grave newscaster. “Though medical authorities now believe that many of the folk remedies dispensed at these curanderias and hierverias can actually be beneficial. It’s the charlatans who prey on credulity, and exaggerate the reasonable claims, who give the whole field a bad name.”

The newsmen were apparently segueing into a topical Halloween-related story about the upcoming Day of the Dead celebrations in the local Hispanic communities, and shortly they switched to film clips of stylized papier-mâché skulls waving on poles, and dancing people wearing black and white face makeup and wreaths of marigolds. Sullivan turned back to his table, frowning at the spooklike figure of the napkin-draped drink. The dead woman’s drink, the suicide’s drink. He wasn’t going to touch it.

Apparently this psychiatrist’s catastrophic “so-called séance” had been big news two years ago. Sullivan never read newspapers, so he hadn’t heard about it.

She held a séance at her psychiatric clinic, he thought; on Halloween, a dangerous night even for a séance that might not have been meant to get real supernatural effects. And something sure enough happened—the surviving patients apparently saw “dead family members,” and then there were fires and explosions or something, and three of her patients died. (Of course the police would assume that the disaster was caused by some kind of goofy “apparatus” blowing up.)

If she is on bar-time, as that photo implies, it’s certainly no wonder—she’s now got ghosts guilt-linked to her, like all of us ghost-sensitives.

Sullivan had gathered from the news story that Dr. Elizalde had fled Los Angeles after the fire and the deaths. Why had she come back now, at another Halloween? Not to shoot at that widow, it seemed to him—if there was shooting, it was probably aimed at Elizalde. Elizalde probably came back here in some idiot attempt to…set things right.

Apologize to all of them, living and dead.

But…

It sounds to me as though she really can raise ghosts, he thought. Whether she’s happy with it or not, it sounds as though she’s a genuine, if accidentally ordained, medium.

She could probably raise the ghost of my father, and I could—insulated from him, at a medium distance, speaking through a screen like a shameful penitent in a confessional—warn him.

His heart was beating faster. Elizalde, he thought. Remember the name.

She’ll be hiding now, but I’ll bet she won’t leave L.A. until after Halloween, until after her Quixotic amends are impossible again. She’ll be hiding, but I’ll bet I can find her.

He smiled bleakly into his empty beer glass.

After all, she’s one of us.

OUTSIDE, IN the westbound left lane of Wilshire Boulevard, a 1960 Cadillac Fleetwood slowed to a stop at the Westwood intersection.

Behind the wheel, Neal Obstadt could see that all the other drivers had their headlights on, so he reached out carefully and switched on his own. He liked to be the last.

A cellular telephone was wedged under his jaw, and in his right hand he held a Druid Circle oatmeal cookie from Trader Joe’s. “You don’t need to be fretting about overcosts, Loretta,” he said absently into the phone. “Your location accountant’s an anal-retentive, and the production reports always balance. You’ve got the insurance and permissions. Worry about something else, if you’ve got to worry.”

Obstadt had had various business dealings with deLarava for years, and he knew that this anxiety was what she called “checking the gates”—a cameraman’s term for a last-minute, finicky checking of the lens for dust or hair. Still, he could hear her sniffling—and she’d been crying on the phone this morning, too—and it occurred to him that this agitation was out of proportion for the modest ghosts-on-the-Queen-Mary shoot she had scheduled for Saturday.

“You having a bad hair day, Loretta?” he asked. “Your big manhunt suffer a setback?” The light turned green, and he accelerated west, toward the elevated arch of the 405.

“What did you have to do with that?” shrilled her voice out of the phone. “He isn’t really leaving the state, is he?”

Obstadt blinked, and smiled as he took a bite of the cookie. “Who, Topper?” he said around the mouthful. “Spooky, I mean—your Nicky Bradshaw. He left the state? I had nothing to do with it, I swear. I never even liked the show.”

“Oh, Bradshaw,” she said, her quick anger deflating. “My…manhunts are doing just fine, thank you. I’ve got one snatch working right now that’s going to be costing me twenty grand.”

“Good for you, kid, the big time at last.” Obstadt glanced at the taped-shut Marlboro carton on the seat beside him. Twenty grand for a washed-up old prehistoric fish? he thought. Or did you give up on the fish? I’m spending forty grand to finance a snatch, buy the access to somebody else’s snatch—but forty grand for a thousand primo smokes is the bargain of a lifetime. Jeez, though, cash!—in a cigarette carton that I’ve got to hand to some guy from the phone exchange, just for rerouting their reward listing of that missing Sockit Hoomie boy! The exchange people are reliable, but who, really, is this Sherman Oaks person? His ass’ll be smoke, if he hoses me on this. “So who is it that slipped through your fingers tonight?” Obstadt said into the phone.

“If everybody minded their own business,” sniffed deLarava, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

Obstadt suspected that her line was a quote from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books. Loretta liked old smokes that had hung around hotel lobbies for decades; Obstadt preferred them fresh. It was the old ones that quoted Alice all the time. Among the solid old bum-smokes on the street, the Alice stuff seemed almost to be scripture.

He was driving between the broad dark lawns of the Veterans Administration grounds now, with the Federal Building to his left and the cemetery to his right.

“Is it that fish?” he asked, taking another bite of the cookie. “Did you get outbid by the fish-market man at Canter’s?” So much for your bid to be the Fisher Queen, he thought—in spite of all your vegetarianism, and your “youth treatments,” and your Velcro instead of buttons and topologically compromising buttonholes.

“What are you eating?” deLarava demanded. “Don’t speak while you’re chewing, you’re getting crumbs in my ear.”

“Through the phone? I doubt it, Loretta.” Obstadt was laughing, and in fact spraying crumbs onto his lap. “It’s probably dead fleas. Don’t you wear a flea collar under your hair?”

“Jesus, it’s sand! Grains of sand! Has he been whispering to me while I napped? But I’ll eat him—”

The line clicked. She had hung up.

He replaced the phone in the console cradle, and his smile unkinked as he drove under the freeway overpass, the cemetery behind him now. You spend all day at the beach, Loretta, he thought, you shouldn’t be surprised to find sand in your ear.

Loretta was crazy, beyond any doubt. But—

Something big had happened two nights ago, at around sundown; he had had to excuse himself from dinner at Rusty’s Hacienda in Glendale and go stand on the sidewalk and just breathe deeply and stare at the pavement, for all the ghosts he’d snorted up over the years were clamoring so riotously in his mind that he couldn’t hear anything else; the Santa Ana wind had strewn the lanes of Western Avenue with palm fronds, and Obstadt had squinted almost fearfully southwest, over the dark hills of Griffith Park, wondering who it was that had so abruptly arrived on the west coast psychscape.

The intensity had faded—but now the street-smokes were all jabbering and eating dirt, and some kind of dinosaur had washed up in Venice, and deLarava couldn’t stop crying.

Loretta’s a down, he had said this morning. She wins chips in this low-level game, hut never cashes ’em in to move up to a bigger table; still, some big chips do sometimes slide across her table; and she’s all excited about one now.

He stomped the gas pedal furiously to the floor, and bared his teeth at the sudden roar of the engine as acceleration weighted him back against the seat.

The fish? he thought; some Jonah inside the fish? The guy that maybe left the state? Nicky Bradshaw?

Who?

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at last she could even make out words …

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

AND way out east at the other end of Wilshire, out where multicolored plastic pennants fluttered along nylon lines strung above used-car lots, where old brownstone apartment buildings still stood on the small grassy hills, their lower walls blazing even in the failing daylight with bright Mexican murals, where neglected laundry flapped on clotheslines in the grassless courtyards of faded apartment complexes built in the 1960s, Kootie stepped up a curb, limped across the sidewalk away from the red glow of a Miller Beer sign in a corner bar window; and rocked to a halt against the bar’s gritty stucco wall.

He was still intermittently talking to himself, and during the walking of these last several blocks he had even begun moving his lips and whispering the dialogue.

“I cant walk anymore,”‘ he panted. “I think I’ve ruined my foot—they’re probably gonna have to just cut it off and put a wooden one on,”

“Duh,” he said thickly then, speaking for the absent ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, which he was certain he had left behind in a mess on the stairs at the Music Center, “well, I got wooden teeth. No, that was George Washington—well, I got a wooden head.”

“I saw your head,” Kootie whispered, his voice shaky even now as he remembered that shocking period of dislocation. “It was made out of old strips of beef fat.” He mouthed the last two words with, it fleetingly occurred to him, as much revulsion as his vegetarian parents would have done. He jumped hastily to the next thought: “I’m gonna go in this bar—no, not to get a cocktail, you stupid old fart!—I’m gonna get somebody to call the cops for me.”

Kootie was still holding the quarter that the pay telephone had given back to him two hours ago. He had been gripping it between his first two fingers and tapping it against the palm of his hand as he had walked. The rhythm of the tapping had been unconsidered and irregular, but now, probably because he had a purpose for the coin again, the tapping was forcefully repetitive.

“I don’ wanna go in the bar,” he said in his dopy-old-Edison voice, and in fact Kootie didn’t want to step in there. The memory was still too fresh of the lunatic phone call with—with what, exactly? The ghosts of his parents? It had been that, or it had been a hallucination. And his parents had seemed to be in a bar.

But if somebody else made the telephone call…

(He found himself picturing carbon; black grains in a tiny cell at first, with a soft iron diaphragm that would alternately compress and release the carbon grains, thus changing their conductivity; but the grains tended to pack, so that after a while the conductivity was stuck at one level…)

If somebody else made the call it might go through, and not just be routed again to that bar from hell.

That call an hour ago had started to get through—Kootie was sure now that the first voice he had heard had really been the 911 operator, for after he had walked away from the pay phone he had seen a police car drive past slowly in the right-hand eastbound lane of what had proved to be Sixth Street. Kootie had wanted to go flag him down, but had found himself hurrying away across the parking lot instead, and pushing open the glass door of a ninety-nine-cent store, where he had then gone to the back aisle and crouched behind a shelf of candles in tall glasses with decals of saints stuck on the outsides.

He must have been afraid, still, of facing the police and deciding which sort of crazy story to tell them.

And then the shop manager had yelled at him, demanded to know what the boy was doing there, and in his feverish embarrassment Kootie had bought a bagful of stuff he hadn’t wanted, just to placate the man: a box of Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, a blister-pack roll of 35-millimeter film, and a Hershey bar with almonds. They were all things displayed right at the checkout counter. The bag was crumpled up now, jammed inside his lightweight shirt.

When he had finally left the store and resumed limping east, away from the fading light, he had pretended that the imaginary ghost of Edison took the blame for Kootie having hidden from the police car. Duh, sorry, he had had the ghost say, but I can’t let the cops catch me—I’ve got library books that have been overdue since 1931!

Now Kootie forced himself to push away from the wall and walk toward the bar’s front door. He was chilly in the smoky evening breeze with just the polo shirt on, and he hoped the bar’s interior would be warm.

(A glass lamp-chimney, blackened with smoke. When the black stuff, which was carbon, was scraped off, it could be pressed into the shape of a little button, and that button could be attached to the metal disk. In another room you could bite the instrument it was connected to, and, through your teeth and the bones of your skull,, hear the clearer, louder tones.)

Kootie pulled open the door with his left hand, for the fingers of his right were still rapidly thumping the quarter into the tight skin of his palm. Tap…tap…tap…tap-tap-tap…tap…tap…tap…

An outward-bursting pressure of warm air ruffled his curly hair—stale air, scented with beer and cigarette smoke and sweaty shirts, and shaking with recorded mariachi guitar and the click and rattle of pool balls breaking across bald green felt. Yellow light shone in the linoleum under his Reeboks’ soles as he shuffled to the nearest of the two empty barstools. The bartender was squinting impassively down at him over a bushy mustache.

“Do you have a telephone?” Kootie asked, grateful that his voice was steady. “I’d like to have someone make a call for me.”

The man just stared. The men on the barstools around him were probably staring too, but Kootie was afraid to look any of them in the face. They’ll recognize me from those billboards, he thought, and turn me in. But isn’t that what I want?

“Teléfono,” he said, and in desperate pantomime he raised his left hand in front of his chin as if holding an empty Coke bottle to blow hoots on, while he held his right hand up beside his head, the fingers extended toward his ear. “Hel-lo?” he said, speaking into the space above his left hand. “Hel-lo-o?”

His left hand was still twitching with the coin, and belatedly he realized that the rhythm it had been beating against his palm was the Morse code for SOS; and at the same time he noticed that he was miming using one of those old candlestick-and-hook telephones, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

SOS? he thought to himself—and then, instinctively and inward, he thought: What is it, what’s wrong?

An instant later he had to grab the padded vinyl seat of the barstool to keep from falling over.

Kootie’s mouth opened, and for several whole seconds a series of wordless but conversational-tone cat warbles yowled and yipped out of his throat; finally, after his forehead was hot and wet with the effort of resisting it and he had inadvertently blown his nose on his chin, he just stopped fighting the phenomenon and let his whole chest and face relax into passivity.

“Duh,” came his voice then, clear at last. “Du-u-h,” it said again, prolonging the syllable, indignantly quoting it. Then he was looking up at the bartender. “Thanks, boys,” said Kootie’s voice, “but never mind. All a mistake, sorry to have wasted your time. Here, have a round of beers on me.” After a pause, Kootie’s voice went on, “Kid, put some money on the bar.”

Catching on that he was being addressed—by his own throat!—Kootie hastily dug into the pocket of his jeans and, without taking out his roll of bills, peeled one off and pulled it out. It was a five; probably not enough for very many beers, but the next bill might be a twenty. He reached up and laid it on the surface of the bar, then ducked his head and wiped his chin on his shoulder.

“Lord, boy, a fiver?” said his mouth. “I bet they don’t get many orangutans in here. Who are these fellas, anyway, son? Mexicans? Tell ’em in Mexican that this was a misunderstanding, and we’re leaving.”

“Uhhh,” said Kootie, testing his own control of his voice. “Lo siento, pew no yo soy aqui. Eso dinero es para cervezas. Salud. Y ahora, adios.”

“Oh,” he heard himself add, “and get matches, will you?”

“Uh, y para mi, fosforos, por favor? Mechas? Como para cigarros?”

After another long several seconds, the bartender reached out and pushed a book of matches forward to the edge of the bar.

Kootie reached up and took it. “Gracias.”

Then he could almost feel a hand grab his collar and yank him away from the bar, toward the door.

(But even with the pressed carbon disk, if you were relying on just the current set up in the wire, there was clarity but no reach; all you had was a little standing system. To fix that, the changing current in the wire had to be just the cue for changes that would be mirrored big-scale in an induction coil Then the signal could be carried just about anywhere.)

“Trolley-car lines,” Kootie heard himself say as he pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold evening again. Standing on the curb, he waited for the headlights of the cars in the eastbound lanes to sweep past, and then he limped out across the asphalt to stand on the double yellow painted lines in the middle of the street. His head bent forward to look at the pavement under his feet. His mouth opened again, and “Find us a set of streetcar lines,” he said.

“There aren’t any,” he answered—hoarsely, for he had forgotten to inhale after the involuntary remark. He took a deep breath and then went on, “There haven’t been streetcars in L.A. for years.”

“Damn. The tracks make a nice house of mirrors.”

Trucks were roaring past only inches from Kootie’s toes, and the glaring headlights against the dark backdrop of the neighborhood made him feel like a dog crouching on the center divider of a freeway; and briefly he wondered how Fred was.

His attention was roughly shoved away from the thought. “After this next juggernaut, go,” said his own voice as he watched the oncoming westbound traffic. “Have they always been this loud?”

“Sure,” Kootie answered as he skipped and hopped across the lanes after a big-wheel pickup had ripplingly growled past.

On the north sidewalk at last, Kootie limped east, his back to the blurred smear of red over the western hills under the clouds. Of course he knew now that he had not lost Edison’s ghost after all, and he suspected that he had known it ever since he had involuntarily hidden from the slow-moving police car two hours ago; but the old man’s ghost was not shoving Kootie out of his body now, and so the boy wasn’t experiencing the soul-vertigo that had so shattered him at the Music Center.

Actually, he was glad that the old man was with him.

“Well now,” said his voice gruffly, “did you get the firecrackers?”

Kootie’s face went cold. Had those firecrackers been important? Surely he had lost them along with everything else that had been in the knapsack or in the pockets of his heavy shirt—but then he slapped the hip pocket of his jeans, and felt the flat square package.

“Yes, sir!”

“Good boy. Haul ’em out and we’ll squelch pursuit.”

Kootie hooked out the package and began peeling off the thin waxed paper. The things were illegal, so he looked around furtively, but the TV repair shop they were stopped in front of was closed, and none of the gleaming car roofs moving past in the street had police light bars. “Why would an orangutan go into a bar?” he asked absently.

“Sounds like a riddle. You know why the skeleton didn’t go to the dance?” Kootie realized that his mouth was smiling.

“No, sir.”

“He had no body to go with. Hardy-har-har. How much is a beer these days?” Kootie’s hands had peeled off the paper, and now his fingers were gently prizing the firecracker fuses apart. Kootie didn’t believe he was doing it himself.

“I don’t know. A dollar.”

“Whoa! I’d make my own. The joke is, you see, an orangutan goes into a bar and orders a beer, and he gives the bartender a five-dollar bill. The bartender figures, shoot, what do orangutans know about money, so he gives the ape a nickel in change. So the creature’s sitting there drinking its beer, kind of moody, and the bartender’s polishing glasses, and after a while the bartender says, just making conversation, you know, ‘We don’t get many orangutans in here.’ And the orangutan says, At four-ninety-five a beer, I’m not surprised.”‘

Kootie’s laugh was short because he was out of breath, but he tried to make it sound sincere.

“Don’t like jokes, hey,” said the Edison ghost grumpily with Kootie’s mouth and throat. “Maybe you think it’s funny having to pay four-ninety-five for a beer. Or whatever you said it was. Maybe you think it’s funny that somebody could be trying for an hour to tell you what you got to do, but your intellectual grippers ain’t capable of grasping any Morse except plain old SOS! Both times I proposed marriage, I did it by tapping in Morse on the girl’s hand, so as not to alert anyone around. Where would we be, if the ladies had thought I was just…testing their reflexes? I knew Morse when I was fifteen! Damn me! How old are you?”

Kootie managed to pronounce the word “Eleven.” Then, momentarily holding on to control of his throat, he went on, defiantly, “How old are you?” What with being unfairly yelled at, on top of exhaustion and everything else, Kootie was, to his humiliation, starting to cry.

“No business of yours, sonny.” Edison sniffed with Kootie’s nose. “But I was a year short of seventy when I bet Henry Ford I could kick a globe off a chandelier in a New York hotel, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Quit that crying! A chandelier on the ceiling! Did it, too. Did you see me kick that guy back there? What the hell have we got here?” Kootie’s hands shook the nest of firecrackers.

“F-fire—” Kootie began, and then Edison finished the word for him: “Firecrackers. That’s right. Good boy. Sorry I was rude—I shouldn’t put on airs, I didn’t get my B.S. until I was well past eighty-four. Eighty-four. Four-ninety-five! Oh well, we’ll make our own, once we’ve got some breathing time. Breathing time. Hah.”

Two black people were striding along the sidewalk toward where Kootie stood, a man in black jeans and a black shirt and a woman wearing what seemed to be a lot of blankets, and Kootie hoped Edison would stop talking until the couple had passed.

But he didn’t. “You like graveyards, son?” Kootie shook his head. “I got no fondness for ‘em either, but you can learn things there.” Air was sucked haltingly into Kootie’s lungs. “From the restless ghosts—in case the bad day comes, in spite of all your precautions, and you’re one yourself.”

The black couple stared at him as they passed, clearly imagining that this was a crazy boy.

“Leave no tracks, that’s the ticket. I did all my early research in a lab on a train. Take your shoes off. Daily train between Port Huron and Detroit; in ’61 I got a job as newsboy on board of it, so I could have a laboratory that couldn’t be located.” He sniffed. “Not easily, anyway. One fellow did find me, even though I was motivating fast on steel rails, but I gave him the slip, sold him my masks instead of myself. Take off your shoes, damn it!”

Kootie had not really stopped crying, and now he sobbed, “Me? Why? It’s cold—” Then he had suddenly bent forward at the waist, and had to put weight on his bad ankle to keep from falling. “Don’t!” He sat down on the concrete and then began defeatedly tugging at the shoelaces. “Okay! Don’t push!” His hand opened, dropping the firecrackers.

Edison inhaled harshly, his breath hitching with sobs, and Kootie’s voice said, brokenly, “Sorry, son. It’s (sniff) important we get this done quick.” Kootie had pulled off both his shoes. The concrete was cold against his butt through his jeans. “Socks too,” wept Edison. “Quit crying, will you? This is…ludicrous.”

Kootie let Edison work his numbing hands, stuffing the socks into the shoes and then tying the laces together and draping the shoes around his neck. He straightened carefully, still sitting, and leaned back against the window of the TV repair shop. He half hoped the window would break, but even with Thomas Edison in his head he didn’t weigh enough.

“Your furt’s hoot,” spoke Edison, interrupting Kootie’s breathing. “Excuse me. Your foot is hurt. I’ll let you get up by yourself. Grab the firecrackers.”

Too tired to give a sarcastic reply, Kootie struggled to his feet, closing his fist on the firecrackers as he got up. Standing again, he shivered in his flimsy shirt…

“Now,” said Edison, “we’re going to run up this street here to our left—we’re going to do that after you start to—no, I’d better do it—after I start dropping lit firecrackers on your feet.”

At that, Kootie began hiccuping, and after a moment he realized that he was actually laughing. “I cant go to the cops,” he said. “I got a one-armed murderer following me around—and a dope fiend cooking me dinner on a car engine, and my parents—and anyway, now Thomas Alva Edison is gonna chase me up a street barefoot throwing illegal explosives at my feet. And I’m eleven years old. But I can’t go to the cops, hunh.”

“I liked that trick of cooking on the engine.” Edison had made Kootie’s hands cup around the matchbook and strike a flame. “I’m saving your life, son,” he said, “and my…my…soul? Something of mine.” He held one of the lit firecrackers until the sparking fuse had nearly disappeared into the tiny cardboard cylinder. Then, “Jump!” he said merrily as he let go of it.

Kootie got his foot away from the thing, but when it went off with a sharp little bang his toes were stung by the exploded shreds of paper.

He opened his mouth to protest, but Edison had lit two more. Kootie’s head jerked as Edison cried, “Run!,” and then Kootie was bounding up the narrower street’s shadowed sidewalk, both feet stinging now.

“Fucking—crazy man!” the boy gasped as another firecracker went off right in front of the toes that had already been peppered.

The next one Edison didn’t let go of; he held it between his fingers, and the rap of its detonation banged Kootie’s fingers as painfully as if he’d hit them with a hammer. “What the damn hell—” Kootie yiped, still leaping and scampering.

“Watch your language, boy! You’ll have the recording angels hopping to their typewriters! Keep a clean mouth!”

“Sorr-eee!”

In the back of his mind, Kootie was aware that Edison’s children had hated this, too, having their footsteps disattached from the ground; for an instant he caught an image of a girl and two boys hopping on a lawn as exploding firecrackers stippled their shins with green fragments of grass, and fleetingly he glimpsed how strenuous it had been to get Tommy Junior to shinny up a pole and grab the coins laid on the top—how Edison had finally had to rub rosin on the inside of the boy’s knees so that he could get traction. It had had to be done, though, the children needed to be insulated every so often, for their own good.

He was hopping awkwardly, and the whoops of his breath burned his throat and nose. At least no one was out on this street at the moment; to his left, beyond a chain-link fence that he grabbed at again and again to keep his balance, dusty old hulks of cars sat in a closed bodywork lot, and the little houses on the opposite side of the street were dark.

One of Kootie’s bouncing shoes had caught him a good clunk under the chin, and his ankle was flaring with pain, when Edison finally let him duck around a Dumpster in an empty parking lot and sit down on a fallen telephone pole to catch his breath. The nearest streetlight had gone out when Kootie had pranced past beneath it, and now as he sat and panted he watched the light’s glow on the nearest cinder-block wall fade through red toward black.

Kootie’s mouth hissed and flapped as he and Edison both tried to use it at once. Kootie rolled his eyes and relaxed, then listened to Edison gasp out, quietly, “If I was your father—I’d wash out your mouth—with soap.”

Kootie had heard the phrase before, but this time he got a clear impression of a father actually doing that to a son, and he shuddered at the picture. Kootie’s own father had not ever punished him physically, always instead discussing each error with him in a “helpful dialogue,” after which the transgression was respected as having contributed to a “learning experience” that would build his “self-esteem.”

“Well, that’s plain bullshit,” Edison went on in a halting whisper, apparently having caught Kootie’s thought. “When I was six years old I burned down my father’s barn—I was trying to…ditch a playmate who’d been following me around for a year or so, of course at that age I didn’t know about tricks like blowing up your footprints with firecrackers!” He wheezed, apparently laughing. “Oh, no! Burned to the ground, my father’s barn did, and my little friend was still no more ditched than my shadow was. What was I saying? Oh—so I burned down the barn, and do you think my father discussed it with me, called it a—what was it?”

“A learning experience,” said Kootie dully. “No, I suppose he didn’t.”

“I’ll say. He invited all the neighbors and their children to come watch, and then he damn well whipped the daylights out of me, right there in the Milan town square!”

Kootie sniffed, and from across all the subsequent years of the old man’s accumulated experiences, a trace of that long-ago boy’s remembered despair and fear and humiliation brushed Kootie’s mind.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Kootie whispered, “Can I put my shoes and socks back on now?”

“Yes, son.” He sighed. “That was for your own good, you know. We’ll do better evasion tricks when we get the time; but the gunpowder cakewalk will probably have foxed your—what was it? one-armed murderer?—for a while. Slow him down, at least.” Kootie’s hand wavered out, palm down and fingers spread, and then just wobbled back to the splintery surface of the wooden pole. “You’re tired, aren’t you? We’ll find some place to sleep, after we’ve taken one or two more precautions. This looks like a big city, we’ll be able to do something. Before all this started up, I had the impression I was in Los Angeles—is that where we are?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kootie. “Not in the best part of it.”

“Better for our purposes, maybe. Let’s move east a couple of blocks here, and keep our eyes open.”

“Which way’s east?”

“Turn right at that light. Need directions, always ask a ghost.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

IN the office on the ground floor of his apartment building, Solomon Shadroe had finally stopped staring at the horizontal white line on the television screen, and had plodded to his desk to resume doing the month’s-end paperwork.

He didn’t like the line being there on the screen at all, but at least it had stopped flaring and wiggling.

At last he pushed his chair back from his desk; he had finished writing the October checks and had then laboriously calculated the balance left in the account. As he stared at the worn blotter it occurred to him that pencil shavings looked like scraps of garlic and onion skins—his desk looked as though someone had been chopping together a battuto.

Garlic and onions—he remembered liking them, though he couldn’t remember anymore what they had tasted like. Something like fresh sweat, he thought as he stood up, and a fast hot pulse.

His cup of Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea was lukewarm, but he drank off the last inch of it, tilting the cup to get the last sticky red drops. He put the cup down on the cover of the old ledger-style checkbook and took a can of Goudie snuff out of the desk drawer.

As he tapped out a pile of the brown powder onto his thumb-knuckle and raised it to his nose, he looked at the high built-in shelf on which sat three of his stuffed pigs. They had been burping away like bad boys during the half-minute when the line on the TV screen had been acting up, but—he looked again to make sure—the line was still motionless, and the pigs were quiet now. Johanna had the radio on, and the only noises in the office were the rolling urgencies of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”

“Too loud?” asked Johanna from the couch where she lay reading a ladies’ magazine.

Shadroe took a deep breath as he inhaled the snuff. “No. Just finished it up. Utility bills eating me alive. Gonna feed the beasties now.” He got to his feet and plodded to the shelves.

“Oh good. Beasties!” she called to the screened window. “Din din din!”

Shadroe pried two white paper plates out of a torn cellophane wrapper and laid them on the coffee table. Onto one he shook a handful of Happy Cat food pellets from a box on a chair. Then he dug a handful of smooth pebbles out of his shirt pocket and spread them on the other plate.

He had taken Johanna to the Orange County fair this summer, and in one of the exhibit halls his attention had been caught by a display called the “Banquet of Rock Foods Collection.” The display had been an eclectic meal laid out on a lace tablecloth: on one plate sat a hamburger, pickles, french fries, olives, and what might have been a slice of pate; on another sat a stack of pancakes with some jagged fragments of butter on top, with a sunny-side-up egg and two slices of underdone bacon alongside. There had been other things too, a narrow roast turkey with ruffled paper socks on the ends of the drumsticks, a thin slice of toast, a boiled egg in an egg cup. The thing was, they were all rocks. Somebody had scoured deserts all over the west to find pieces of rocks that looked like food items.

He had wondered at the time if any raggedy old derelict had ever sat down at the table and tucked a napkin into his outermost grimy shirt. There had been a relish jar, Shadroe recalled, filled with tiny cubes of green glass—a spry old ghost could probably wolf down a spoonful of that before being hauled away.

In the months since, he had been putting out two plates at night—one with cat-food for the possums, as always, and one with delectable looking rocks for the poor hungry old wandering ghosts. The rocks were often gone when he came back from the boat in the morning. In a catalogue recently he had seen a set of Mikasa Parklane crystal candies for a sale price of eighteen bucks, and he meant to get some to dole out during the cold nights around Christmas.

He had once read that Chinese people bury raw eggs in mud, and then dig them up years later and eat them. When he thought about that he was just glad that he couldn’t remember taste, but apparently Loretta deLarava was not so fastidious—she didn’t mind eating things that had long ago lost their freshness.

In his head he made up a lyric for the pounding Springsteen song:

Did your face catch fire once?

Did they use a tire iron to put it out?

It had been in 1962, on the set of Haunted House Party, that he had first met Loretta deLarava.

He’d been trying to make the shift from being a teen TV star to getting young-adult-movie roles, but couldn’t seem to shake the Spooky persona he’d acquired during the five years of “Ghost of a Chance.” (People would keep asking to see him do the Spooky Spin, the dancelike whirl that, on the show, had always preceded his disappearing into thin air.) This was the fourth movie he’d worked in since CBS had canceled the series, and like the first three it had been a low-budget tongue-in-cheek horror picture, filmed at a pace almost as fast as TV work.

The novice production assistant had probably been about thirty years old, though it was hard to be sure—she was already overweight even then, and her jaw and nose were noticeably misshapen even after evident reconstructive surgery. (Did they use a tire iron to put it out?) Her name was deLarava—she claimed that it had originally been two words but had been inadvertently combined into one, like DeMille’s, by a careless ad-copy writer. She had quickly outgrown the modest PA chores—somebody else had had to be found to make the coffee and drive to fetch paper clips and saber-saw blades, for, within days of starting, deLarava was filling out time cards and writing the daily production reports. Her credentials were hazy, but clearly she had had experience on a movie set.

“Sun’s down,” said Shadroe after putting the plates outside and coming back in and closing the door. “Draw me a bath, will you—” He paused to inhale. “—sweetie?”

Johanna put down the magazine and sat up. She glanced at the television screen, but the line was still steady and motionless. “Not ice?”

“Ice,” he said firmly. “A lot of it.” He looked at the TV too, and sighed. Can’t wait till my alma mater actually goes nova, he thought. “Ice every night,” he went on in his labored voice. “Until Halloween’s past. Anybody from the building,” he added. “Should come knocking. Tell ’em I walked to the store, unless. There’s actual blood or fire.”

“‘Sol,’“ said Johanna in a drawling imitation of a tenant they’d had for a while, “I heard a noise?—in the parking lot?—so I shoveled your mailbox full of dirt.’”

The tenant had thought he’d smelled gas from a neighboring apartment, and, unable to reach Shadroe, had in a panic broken out all the windows in his own apartment. In the years since that tenant had left, Shadroe and Johanna had endlessly amplified on the man’s possible responses to emergencies.

“Heh heh,” said Shadroe levelly.

The couch springs twanged as Johanna levered herself up, and then the floorboards creaked as she padded barefoot to the next room; after a few seconds he heard water booming into the big old claw-footed cast-iron bathtub he had installed in there a couple of years ago. He used to take makeshift showers at dawn out behind the garages, holding a lawn sprinkler over his head, but a tenant had seen him one time and complained to the police—even though Shadroe had always been wearing jockey shorts when he did it—and anyhow he had had to stop.

Now he was wondering if even cold baths would work for much, longer. He didn’t speak to people face-on anymore, even if he’d just chewed up an Eat-’Em-&-Weep ball, because of the way they would flinch at his breath; and he knew that his ankle, onto which he had squarely dropped that refrigerator two days ago, couldn’t possibly ever heal. He had wrapped it up tight with an Ace bandage, but it still hurt, and he wondered if he would be around long enough to get so tired of it that he would just saw the whole foot off.

He was only fifty-two years old…or would have been, if he had still had any right to birthdays. At least he wasn’t a ghost.

Loretta deLarava obviously wanted to finish him off now—as she had smashed him seventeen years ago—after having taken aim at him all the way back in ‘62, on the set of Haunted House Party.

She had known who he was—Nicky Bradshaw, star of “Ghost of a Chance,” godson to Apie Sullivan—but he had not realized who she was until that summer night when unseasonable rain had actually put rushing water in the L.A. River bed all the way up by the Fourth Street bridge, and the shooting of some zombie scene had had to be postponed.

Everybody had been sitting around in the big, chilly brick warehouse in which the indoor sets had been built, and deLarava had kept looking at her watch. That was natural enough, since by that time she was practically the second assistant director on the picture, but after a while she had lit up a corncob pipe full of some vanilla-scented tobacco and gone wandering out into the rain. He had heard her whistling old tunes out there, specifically “Stormy Weather,” and when she had come back in she had ditched the pipe and had seemed to be stoned. At the time he had assumed that she’d been hiding the smell of grass or hash under the vanilla….

Though in fact she had seemed wired, as if on cocaine or an amphetamine. As soon as she’d got back inside and shaken back her wet hair she had started talking nonstop in her hoarse, fake British accent—rambling on about her genius-plus IQ, and telling fragments of anecdotes that clearly had no point except to illustrate how competent she was, equal to any challenges and a master of subtle revenge upon anyone who might foolishly dismiss her as unimportant.

The monologue had sat awkwardly with the crew and the youthful actors, all of whom had until then thought pretty highly of her. Bradshaw had been napping in a nest of rags in the costuming room, but the change in the tone of the conversation woke him, and he had wandered sleepily out into the big room.

“I was married once,” deLarava was saying airily. “He was a very powerful figure in…an industry I’m not at liberty to name. He gave me everything I asked far, we had a big estate in Brentwood and a whole fleet of classic cars! But he couldn’t give me the gift I demand of a man—that I be the most important person in his life. His two children…occupied that spot.” (One of the crew wearily asked her what she had done about that, and deLarava simpered.) “We went on a picnic,” she said, “and I fixed potato salad just the way he liked it, with olives and red onions and celery seed, but I used a jar of mayonnaise that had been sitting out opened for a few days. And he had an appointment later that afternoon. Oh yes,” she went on as though someone had asked, “the most important appointment of his life. His precious children pigged down a lot of the potato salad too.”

(“Jesus,” someone muttered. “Did they all die?”

(The question brought deLarava back from the spicy pleasures of the memory.) “Hm? Oh no, they didn’t…die. But for a while they definitely had nothing to think about except when Nurse…Nurse Loretta might find the time to attend to their sickbeds! I can assure you!” Her British accent had been broadening out to sound more Texan, and was practically a drawl when she added, “That time they really were pooped-out puppies.”

At that moment Bradshaw realized who she was. Her appearance had changed drastically in the intervening three years, but when she forgot the hoarseness and the affected accent he knew the voice even an instant before the pooped-out puppies phrase—which he had heard her say a number of times—confirmed it. Then she looked up and saw him, and her eyes widened and then narrowed momentarily as she visibly became aware that she had been recognized.

It’s Kelley Keith, he thought in that first moment of surprise; it’s my godfather’s widow…fat and disfigured now…

Only then did he consider what she had just said. The most important appointment of his life. And he remembered that the autopsy of Arthur Patrick Sullivan had mentioned spoiled potato salad in his stomach as the cause of the cramp that had caused him to drown, out past the surf line on that summer day in Venice in 1959.

BRADSHAW HAD backed away without changing his sleepy expression…but he’d known that she wasn’t fooled. She was aware that he—alone!—had recognized her, and that he alone had understood her oblique and inadvertent admission of murder.

AFTER HAUNTED House Party was in the can, he had finally stopped trying to chase his earlier success in show business. He had enrolled in the UCLA law school, and two years later passed the California bar and moved to Seal Beach to practice real-estate law.

Sometimes during the ensuing decade he had wondered if the advent of Loretta deLarava had scared him away from the movies…and then he had always recalled the artistic merits of Haunted House Party, and had wryly dismissed the suspicion.

He had stayed away from Hollywood, though, and had gradually stopped seeing his friends in the industry; and even so, he was careful to keep his home address and phone number a secret, and to vary the route he took to his office, and to come and go there on no set schedule. He kept a gun in his office and car and bedside table. Superstitiously, he never ate potato salad.

And in fact it wasn’t potato salad that she finally got him with, in 1975. It was a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, and lots of exotic mushrooms.

When Johanna returned to her magazine, Shadroe, who hadn’t called himself Nicholas Bradshaw since his “death” in ’75, took one more look at the static television screen and then stumped into the little room where the tub was, and by the glare of the bare overhead lightbulb he stared with distaste down at the dozens of ice cubes floating in the gray water—like broken glass in a tub of mercury.

The sooner he took his bath and got out, the sooner he could be in his car and driving west on Ocean Boulevard to the marina, where he would climb aboard his boat and spend the long hours of darkness sitting and staring at another TV set switched to CBS with the brightness control turned down just far enough to black out the picture, watching the white line that would certainly be on that screen too, and listening for the burping croaks of his pigs.

Like every other night.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

AT the northwest corner of MacArthur Park, crouched under a pyrocantha bush in the shadow of the statue of General MacArthur, Kootie watched as his fingers opened his bag of purchases from ninety-nine-cent store on Sixth Street. The box of insecticide proved to be MIRACULOUS INSECTICIDE CHALK—MADE IN CHINA, and inside it were two sticks of white chalk with Chinese writing stamped into them. An instruction sheet on flimsy paper was all written in Chinese figures, and Kootie leaned out of the shadow of the statue’s base as his hands held the paper up close to his eyes in the leaf-filtered radiance of a streetlight.

“‘Directions for use…’” he heard his own voice say thoughtfully. Kootie started to interrupt, “You read Chinese—?” but Edison took over again and finished, “…On door, use enclosed chalk to write “Bugs, kill yourselves forthwith.”’”

Then Edison was laughing an old man’s laugh with Kootie’s boy’s voice, and he flipped the paper over. “Kidding,” Edison said. On this side the directions were in English. “The chalk is more effective to use at night,’” Edison read, and Kootie could see that he was reading it correctly this time. “Well, that’s handy, eh? ‘Draw several parallel lines each two to three centimeters apart across the track which the insect used to take…’ I like ‘used to,’ as if the job’s already done. Well,” he said, folding up the instructions, “this will do some good, though it’s a child’s version of a device I set up in the Western Union office in ‘64 in Cincinnati, and later in Boston—a series of plates hooked up to a battery. That was for night work, too—I told everybody it was for rats or roaches or whatever they’d believe, but it was to get some rest from the damn ghosts.”

Kootie caught a brief glimpse of memory: a big dark room in what had once been a downtown Cincinnati restaurant, copper wire connections arcing and popping all night, the harsh smell of the leaky batteries, and morose, transparent ectoplasmic figures huddled in the corners far away from the stinging metal plates.

Kootie’s hands waved. “Get us back out to the sidewalk, will you boy?”

Kootie tucked the bag back into his shirt and then obediently straightened up and walked across the grass and stepped up to the sidewalk. He started to brush dirt off his pants, but found that he was crouching to draw a circle all the way around himself on the concrete with the stick of chalk. His lips twitched, and then Edison used them to say, “I’d better let you do it; spit in the circle. If I try it you’ll do something else at the same moment and we’ll wind up with spit all down our chin.”

Our chin? thought Kootie—but he did spit on the sidewalk before straightening up.

“Very well, your chin,” said Edison. “Now crouch again and let me draw some lines.”

Kootie squatted down, and then watched as his hand drew a maze of lines around the circle: parallel lines, spirals, radii from the circle’s edge—until this section of sidewalk looked, Kootie thought, like the site of some hopscotch Olympics. Cars hissed past in front of him in the street beyond the curb, but the only close sounds were the click-and-scratch of the chalk and his own eager breath.

The chalk was being worn down to a stump as cartoon eyes were added, and more wheels were drawn, and Crosshatch squares were carefully colored in. The production was a couple of yards wide now.

Kootie shivered. It was cold out here, and he didn’t like having his arm stretched out for so long. “Will you be done when that stick of chalk is used up?” he asked hopefully. There had been two sticks of the chalk in the yellow-and-orange box, and he hoped Edison wasn’t going to need the other one as well.

He was about to repeat his question when Edison spoke instead: “What? What is it now?”

“How much of that stuff have you got to draw?”

“Stuff…” Kootie’s head was swung this way and that, and he had the impression that Edison was even more bewildered than he was by the convoluted designs he’d drawn on the sidewalk.

“Did I—” Edison began. He took a deep breath. “Yes. There. That’ll stop any ghosts or ghost hunters who might pick up my trail.”

As Kootie presumed to straighten up, he could feel his recent memories being ransacked. “And,” Edison went on, “it might slow down your… one-armed murderer. Now—how much does a dinner cost around here? Oaffg—Never mind, what I meant was, let’s find some place to eat.” Kootie’s head tilted to look down, and again their gaze swept the lunatic drawing. “After that we can come back here and—see if we’ve caught something to put in your film canister.”

Only now did Kootie realize that his purchases at the ninety-nine-cent store might not have been has own idea; and he wondered why Edison apparently wanted to catch a ghost. But the notion of dinner was compelling.

“I’ve been smelling barbecue for a while,’” he ventured.

“Good lad, I’m not getting anything…olfactory, myself. Lead the way, by all means—it’s never a good idea to turn your back on your nose.”

The thrilling blend of onion and peppers and lemon on the breeze seemed to carry at least the promise of warmth, and Kootie was briskly rubbing his arms above the elbows as he followed the smells across the Park View intersection and around a corner, to a doorway under a red neon sign that read JUMBO’S BURGOO & MOP TROTTER. Even from out on the street Kootie could hear laughter and raised voices from within.

“It’s food,” Edison assured him. “Southern stuff.”

(Again Kootie got a memory flash—Spanish moss hanging from old live oaks along the banks of the Caloosahatchee as he chugged upriver in an old sloop, the winter house in Fort Myers among the towering bamboo and tropical fruit trees, cornmeal-dipped fried catfish served alongside corn on the cob that had crinkly hairpins stuck in the ends for handles…)

“And without any sense of smell I won’t be able to taste any of it,” Edison went on in an aggrieved voice as Kootie pulled open the screen door and stepped into the place. “I’d much rather have stayed deaf instead.”

Redwood picnic tables were lined up on the flagstone floor, with a counter along one side of the room—ORDER at the near end, PICKUP at the other—and in the kitchen beyond that, Kootie could just see the tops of big shiny steel ovens. Framed hand-painted menus swung in the hot air above the counter, and the other three walls, dark old brickwork, were crowded with black-and-white photos that all seemed to be autographed. The cooks and the countermen and all the men and women and children at the tables were black, but for the first time since losing Raffle and Fred, Kootie didn’t feel like an excluded tugitive.

“What can we do for you, little mon?” rumbled a voice above Kootie’s head. Looking up, he saw the broad, red-eyed face of a counterman staring down at him.

“I’m going to have—” began Kootie, from habit wondering what sort of pulses and grains and vegetables they might serve here; then he finished defiantly, “meat!”

“Meat you shall have,” the man said agreeably, nodding. “Of what subcategory and method of preparation?”

“Barbecue pork ribs,” said Edison while Kootie was still trying to read the menu through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, “and the turnip and mustard greens with bacon dumplings—” (“Please,” interjected Kootie breathlessly, just to be polite.) “And a big mug of beer—” (“N-n-no,” Kootie managed to interrupt, “I’m too young, I’ll just have a large Coke!”) “And,” Edison went on—(“Not” said Kootie, who could see what was coming)—a cigar,” finished Edison in defeat, “dammit.”

The black man was frowning and nodding. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Nothing wrong with you.” He was tapping keys on the cash register, which hummed and spat out a receipt. “Seven dollars and a quarter, that comes to.”

Kootie gave the man a ten-dollar bill, keeping his mouth and throat firmly closed against Edison’s outraged grunting.

The man gave him his change. “It’ll be at the far end of the counter there, in just a minute. Do you think you can keep the number twenty-two in mind? Can you remember it even now?”

“Twenty-two,” said Kootie. “Sure. Why?”

“Because that’s the number that one of us up here will call, when your supper is ready for you to pick up. I can’t see why that shouldn’t be satisfactory to everybody concerned, can you?”

“No, sir,” said Kootie. He limped to a table that was occupied only at one end by a couple of old men playing dominoes, and he wondered if he might ever get used to everyone thinking that he was crazy; then he wondered what schemes Edison might come up with for finding a place to sleep tonight, and to make money tomorrow. Remembering the chalk drawing, he hoped the old man’s ghost wasn’t going senile.

When his number was called and he went up to get his tray, his gaze was caught by a polished wooden box on the counter. A metal rod, hinged at the bottom, ran up the front of it, and a piece of paper had been taped to the rod, with L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL hand-lettered vertically on the paper. On the counter in front of the box was a cardboard bowl of peppermints.

Kootie’s gaze was snagged on the lettering. He read it downward, and then upward, and it was the same letters either way. This seemed important, this proof that moving backward could be the same as forward, that the last letter of a sentence could be not only identical to the lead-off capital letter but the very same thing….

He realized that he had been standing here, holding the tray with the steaming plates on it and staring at the vertical words, for at least several seconds. He made himself look away and breathe deeply. “What,” he whispered, “is it?”

“That’s a cigar lighter,” rumbled his throat as he crossed to his table and sat back down. “Well,” he answered, “you didn’t get a cigar, so forget about it.”

Kootie made both of them focus on the food.

The ribs were drenched in a hot sauce that reeked of tomato and onion and cider vinegar, and he gnawed every shred of meat off the bones and was glad of the napkin dispenser on the table. The greens only got nibbled, because Edison couldn’t taste them and Kootie found them strong and rank, but he did eat most of the dumplings.

A mouthful of Coke ran down his chin onto his shirt when Edison opened his mouth to whisper, “My God, it’s fly paper!”

Then Kootie watched his hands untuck his shirt to get at the bag and pull out of it the box of film. The film cartridge itself was dumped out onto the table, and Kootie’s fingers snatched up the empty black plastic canister. Kootie was about to point out that the film was in the yellow metal thing, but Edison hissed, “That fella’s going to light a cigarette!” Sure enough, one of the old men at the table had taken out of his pocket a pack of Kools and was shaking one out.

Kootie’s head snapped forward, and then he couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not when he drooled some Coke into the empty plastic film container.

“Get to the cigar lighter before he does,” Edison whispered. “Go, or I’ll motivate for you, this is too lucky a chance to waste.”

His legs already twitching impatiently, Kootie pushed back the bench, got to his feet and wobbled over to the wooden box on the counter. How does it work? he thought.

Edison whispered, “Don’t work it—act like you just came over here to get a mint.”

Kootie started to say Okay, but had got no further than the “Oke—” when the ceiling lights dimmed and the air was suddenly cold; and he was distantly grateful when he felt his knees lock, for sudden dizziness had made the field of his vision dwindle like a receding movie screen. He thought he sensed someone big standing behind him, but he couldn’t turn around.

‘“Kay,” he managed to whisper.

Kootie watched his own hands. His left hand picked up one of the mints, and he could feel its powdery dry surface, like a big aspirin, even though he wasn’t controlling the fingers—(It’s like the opposite of when your hand’s asleep, he thought)—and his right hand brought up the plastic container to catch the mint deftly when his left hand dropped it. Then his right hand slowly scraped the edge of the container up the metal rod at the front of the cigar-lighter box, as if trying to scratch off the taped-on paper.

Then the ceiling lights brightened again and all three of the cash registers began clicking and buzzing. Edison had capped the little container as quickly as if he had caught a bee in it. “Grab a mint,” he made Kootie whisper. “Grab a whole handful, like you’re just a greedy boy.”

Kootie dizzily obeyed, and walked back to his table when his left fool began to slide in that direction. As he sat down, heavily, he heard one of the countermen demanding to know why all the registers were going through their cash-out cycles.

“Let’s go before they figure it out,” Edison said softly. “Leave a tip?” put in Kootie. “They didn’t bring it to the table,” Edison pointed out impatiently.

As he rode his scissoring legs out of the restaurant, Kootie managed to wave one shaky hand at the counterman.

THE NIGHT outside was colder now, and the headlights of the faceless cars seemed to glow more hotly as they swept past. Edison, forgetful of Kootie’s hurt ankle, was making him hurry, and the result was a bobbing, prancing gait. He had stuffed the plastic container into his front jeans pocket, but his left hand still clutched the mints.

“Did you—” began Kootie, but Edison clamped his teeth shut, then said, “Don’t speak of it. I lit up the whole area—we’ve got to get clear of it.”

Kootie was hurrying west on Wilshire, away from the spot where Edison had drawn the chalk patterns on the park sidewalk by the statue, and he caught a thought that might or might not have been his own: A stupid use for chalk—that was just stupid—a ghost’s idea of a ghost trap. Apparently the “flypaper” on the cigar lighter had been better.

Edison made Kootie glance up at a streetlight as he shuffled past under it, and Kootie understood that the old man was glad to see that the light didn’t go out to mark their passage.

Ionic. From nowhere the word had come into Kootie’s mind, and at first he thought of marble pillars with curled scroll-like tops. (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Doric columns had just a flat brick at the top, and Corinthian ones had lots of carved grapes and leaves.) Then the notion of pillars disappeared and he pictured a clump of little balls, with much tinier balls orbiting rapidly around the clump; when the tiny balls were stripped away, the clump—the nucleus—had a powerful electric charge. If it was moving, it threw electromagnetic waves.

These were not Kootie’s thoughts, and they didn’t feel like Edison’s either. “Ionaco,” Kootie said out loud.

And suddenly the gleam of moonlight shining on the fender of a parked car ahead of them was not just a reflection, but an angular white shape, a thing; and Kootie’s perception of scale was gone—the white shape seemed to be much farther away than the car.

The shape was rotating, growing against the suddenly flat backdrop of the city night, and it was…an open Greek E, a white spider lying sideways, a white hand with fragmenting fingers…

It was moving upward and growing larger, or closer.

It was a side-lit white face, an older man’s lace—with a white ascot knotted under the chin; and as Kootie stared, gaping and disoriented, the lines of a formal old claw hammer coat coalesced out of the shadows under the face, and an unregarded background shadow that might have been a building was now a top hat. Cars on the street were just blurs of darkness, moving past as slowly as moon shadows.

Kootie thought the image was some kind of black-and-white still projection—the light on it didn’t correspond to the direction of the moon or the nearest streetlight—until the white mouth opened and moved, and Kootie heard the words, “I only have one left.” The voice was low, and reverberated as if speaking in a room instead of out here on the street, and the lips didn’t move in synch with the sounds.

The figure still seemed to be some kind of black-and-white hologram.

Neither Kootie nor Edison had kept the boy’s body moving. Halted, Kootie was aware of sweat on his forehead chilly in the night breeze. “One what?” asked Edison wearily.

“Belt.” The ghost, for Kootie was sure that’s what this thing was, opened its coat, and Kootie saw that the figure wore, as a sort of bulky cummerbund, a belt made of bundled wire. A little flashlight bulb glowed over the buckle. “Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents, even now.”

“We don’t need a belt,” Edison said; but, “What does it do?” asked Kootie. It was heady for the boy to realize that, on this night, he would believe nearly any answer the ghost might give.

“Well,” said the ghost in its oddly contained and unsynchronized voice, “it could have cured Bright’s disease and intestinal cancer. But it banishes paralysis and restores lost hair color and stops attacks of homicide. It’s called the I-ON-A-CO, like the boy said. It’s a degaussing device—you can sleep safely, if you’re wearing it.”

“I don’t have fifty-eight dollars,” Kootie said. For the first time since hurrying out of Jumbo’s whatever-it-had-been, he opened his hand. “I’ve got mints, though.”

The ghost came into clearer focus, and a tinge of color touched its white face. “Out of respect for Thomas Alva Edison,” it said, and its words matched its lip movements now, “I’ll take the mints in lieu of the money.”

“He’d rather have had the mints in any case,” said Edison grumpily. “And you never thought that I might want ’em.”

“Is it okay,” said Kootie before Edison could go on, “if I hold a couple out for Mr. Edison?”

“Well…a couple,” allowed the ghost.

Edison again took over Kootie’s tongue. “You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name was—?”

“Call me Gaylord.” Pink-tinged hands appeared in front of the coat, and the two-dimensional fingers managed to unfasten the buckle—but when the ghost tried to pull the belt from around itself, the heavy cables fell through its insubstantial flesh, and clattered on the pavement; one of the hands wobbled forward, though, palm-up, and Kootie poured the mints into the hand, which was able to hold them. Kootie was careful to hold back two of them.

Kootie’s hand slapped to his own face, and his mouth caught the pair of mints and chewed them up furiously. Then, only because it was his own mouth talking, he was able to understand the mumbled words “Pick up your damned belt and let’s go.”

Kootie crouched and took hold of the belt. The heavy metal bands of it were as cold as the night air, not warmed as if someone had been wearing it. As he straightened and swung it around his waist he noticed that it must have weighed five or six pounds, and he wondered how the ghost had managed to carry it.

When he looked around, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk, and that the dark street with its population of rushing cars had regained its depth and noise, and no longer seemed to be a moving picture projected onto a flat screen.

Edison had swallowed the chewed-up mints. “I said let’s go.”

Kootie started forward again, trying to figure out the working of the buckle as he limped along. “This is pretty neat, actually,” he said.

“Poor doomed old things,” said his voice then, softly, and Kootie just listened. “God knows where we are, the real us. Heaven or hell, I suppose, or simply gone—in any case, probably not even aware of these lonely scramblings and idiot ruminations back here.” Kootie’s hand had pulled the capped black plastic film canister out of his pocket, and now shook the thing beside his ear. “I wonder who this poor beggar was. I invented a telephone, once.”

Edison seemed to have paused, and Kootie put in, “I thought that was Alexander Graham Bell.”

“I wasn’t talking about that telephone. Bell!—all he had was Reis’s old magneto telephone, a stone-age circuit with ‘make and break’ contact interruption, good enough for tones but lousy for consonants. Showing off in front of the King of South America or somebody at the Centennial Exhibition in ’76, with his voice not hardly carrying along the wire from one end of a building to the other. He recited Hamlet’s soliloquy—’For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…’ Two years later, with my carbon transmitter and induction coil, I held a loud-and-clear conversation with the Western Union boys across a hundred and seven miles, New York to Philadelphia!” Kootie snorted, to his own startlement. “‘Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists!’ A test phrase, that was, for checking the transmission of sibilant syllables. Think all that was easy? And Bell could hear! He had a very soft job of it.”

Again he held the black container up to Kootie’s ear and shook it; the mint rattled inside. Then he put it back in Kootie’s pocket. “Nymph,” he said softly, apparently to the night sky, “in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

Kootie’s footsteps had turned left, south down a side street, and the high reinforced windows of the buildings were dark. Up ahead on the right was a chain-link fence with some yawning lot beyond it. Kootie was rubbing his arms again in the chill, and he hoped Edison was feeling it too, and realizing that they’d need to find a safe place to sleep before long.

It occurred to him that Edison had not explained the telephone he had invented.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again.

“I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, the last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?”

“You were a little grave,” said Alice.

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

IN the glare of the streetlight at the southeast corner of Park View and Wilshire, glittering flies were darting around in the chilly air like metal shavings at a machine shop. Sherman Oaks waved them away from his face, keeping his mouth closed and breathing whistlingly through squinched nostrils, for the flies were harkening to the multitude-roar of his exhalations, and on this night of all nights he was not going to condescend to consume such trash even accidentally.

He had called the exchange back a couple of hours ago, and the router had told him that Neal Obstadt had agreed to putting up forty grand for the fugitive Parganas boy against Oaks’s pledged thousand doses of smoke.

The lady who had put up the $20,000-reward billboards had been eliminated from the exchange listings, and replaced by Obstadt.

As a receipt, the router had played for Oaks Obstadt’s authorization message: Yeah, tell this Al Segundo or Glen Dale or whoever he is that I’ll fade him—but if he hoses me on the smokes, his own ass is smoke.

Sherman Oaks had irritably got off the phone and resumed his anxious search of the streets around Union and Wilshire—

And then about an hour ago a glance at his knife-pommel compass had shown the needle pointing west so hard that it didn’t wobble at all, and moved only to correct for his own motion.

He had immediately thrashed his imaginary left arm in a furious circle, but the only blinks of heat it felt were weak and distant and fleeting—human lives flickering out uselessly, in deaths that simply tossed the ghosts up to dissolve in the air. Naive psychics were impressed when occasionally they sensed this routine event, but Oaks was only interested in the coagulant ghosts that hung around and got snagged on something.

He hadn’t been able to sense the big one. It must still have been contained in the boy. But at least it was still distinct and unassimilated, and at the moment it was in its excited state, for his compass needle was pointing at it.

He had hurried west—and at Park View Street his compass had gone crazy.

Someone, almost certainly the big ghost working the boy’s hands, had drawn a lunatic ghost lure in chalk on the sidewalk, and had spat in the center of it; and now all the broken-down ghost fragments that inhabited the houseflies around the MacArthur Park lake had swarmed out and were circling the intricate chalk marks as if trying to follow some prescribed hopscotch pattern in their flight. The ones that landed on the chalk lines seemed to be dying.

The flies alone wouldn’t have hampered Oaks too badly, for their charges were very weak even in excited swarms like this; but when he stood on the Park View curb and looked down at the compass at his belt, he saw that the needle was jigging and sweeping back and forth across nearly ninety degrees of the compass face. From at least Sixth Street in the north, to Seventh in the south, the city blocks ahead were waked up. Every ghost in every building was agitated and clamoring. Office workers tomorrow would probably be seeing magnetically induced distortions on the screens of their computer monitors, and if they’d left their purses in their desks they’d find that their automatic teller cards were demagnetized and no longer worked. And even hours from now the offices would still be chilly with the cold spots where the ghosts had drawn up their energies.

The big ghost must have stepped way out, at some point in this neighborhood, and just damn flashed the ghost populace, mooned them. That would energize and urgently draw every spirit lingering nearby. God knew why the big ghost had done it, for it couldn’t eat any ghosts itself.

What, thought Oaks uneasily. You just wanted somebody to chat with? Or did you do it simply to fox my radar this way?

Sherman Oaks felt tense, nearly brittle, and he kept calling to mind the collapsed, hijacked-flesh face he had seen on the steps to the parking level at the Music Center this afternoon. Who the hell was that, who is this big ghost?

The threads of association trailed away back into the blankness that was his life before the awakening of consciousness in the district of Sherman Oaks three years ago.

But he shook his head sharply. Enough idle chatter, he told himself, quit dishing the applesauce. If the compass is temporarily foxed, that only means that you’re back on a limited-to-visual footing. Get your footing moving—you know you’re on the right track, and you know he’s close.

“SO WHAT was the telephone you invented?” Kootie asked tiredly. He had walked down the side street, away from the streaking headlights of Wilshire, and was now staring through a chain-link fence at an enclosed paved yard that was shadowed from the intermittent moonlight by surrounding buildings.

“Well, I had to stop work on it. I found I was able to call people who hadn’t died yet. What do you suppose this is?”

“Hadn’t died?” Suddenly Kootie was uncomfortable with this conversation. “It’s an empty lot.”

“With, for once, no barbed wire on the fence. And it’s got a couple of old cars in there, that look like they’ve been there since Ford first rolled them off the production line. Damn Ford anyway.”

Kootie remembered having said Damn Ford when Raffle had seen the reward-for-this-boy billboard at the Music Center; and he realized that it must have been Edison talking then, and that he had been referring to Henry Ford, rather than to Raffle’s car.

Kootie found that he had curled his fingers through the chain link, and was looking up and down the empty sidewalk.

“What did Ford do to you?” he asked.

He wasn’t really surprised when he began helplessly climbing the fence, but he had certainly not expected the old man to be so agile. “Ow!” Kootie exclaimed breathlessly at one point, “watch the right ankle!—Oh, sorry.” The street was silent except for the rush of cars back on Wilshire and the immediate thrashing clang of the shaken chain-link.

Astride the crossbar at the top, Kootie’s body paused to catch its breath. “When I was dying,” said Edison, “Ford made my son catch my last breath in a test tube for him.” In deference to Kootie’s ankle, he didn’t just jump, but climbed down the other side.

At last unhooking his fingers from the chain-link, Kootie hurried across the cracked pavement of the enclosed lot to the nearest of the abandoned cars. Shaggy night-blooming jasmine bushes overhung the car, and crumpled plastic bags had been shrink-wrapped by Monday’s wind right onto the heavy leafy clusters, like butterflies captured in midnight poses against the fronts of car radiators.

When Kootie was crouched behind the fender, Edison went on in a whisper, “Oh, he meant well—just like he did when he built an exact replica of my Menlo Park lab, for his ‘Light’s Golden Jubilee’ in 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of my incandescent lamp. That must have confused a whole nation of ghosts and ghost trackers—Ford reconstructed the entire lab, even using actual planks from my old buildings, with the old dynamos and half-built stockticker machines on the benches inside, and all the old tools. And he even erected a duplicate of the boardinghouse across the street! And he trucked in genuine red New Jersey clay, for the soil around the buildings! And there was a villain hanging around me in those days, trying to hook out my soul—I fed the fellow a poisoned apple!—and it was against such people that Ford was trying to protect me. Oh, it’s hard to fault the.. the generous, sentimental old fool, even now, now that I’m hiding in an empty lot in Los Angeles in…what year is it?”

“1992,” said Kootie.

“Good…God. I died sixty-one years ago.” Kootie had stopped panting after the exertion of climbing the fence, but now he was breathing hard again. “And I rattled my last breath into a test tube, which my son Charles then stopped up and obediently gave to Henry Ford.” Kootie found himself staring at his hands and shaking his head. “Where did you get it?”

Into the ensuing silence, Kootie said, flatly, “My parents had it. Hidden inside a bust of Dante. They’ve had it forever. Had it.”

“Inside Dante, eh? Just like I’m inside your head now. I guess I’m your built-in Virgil, though I’ve got to admit I don’t really know the neighborhood. I wonder when we get to El Paradisio? Huh. Sounds like a Mexican speakeasy.”

“So Ford was trying to protect you.”

“In his blundering way. Yeah, from ghosts and ghost hunters both—I stood out like a spiritualist bonfire. And—” Kootie’s shoulders shrugged. “It was to honor, me, too. A replica of the great man’s lab, the great man’s actual last breath! He was pleased to see his friends get accolades. He’d have been tickled to death—as it were—to know that I finally got a B.S.” Kootie could feel his pulse thumping faster in his chest. “And not an honorary one, either—it was earned! The faculty examined seventeen portfolios of my research! And this was at Thomas A. Edison State College—if you please!—in Trenton, New Jersey.”

“I…dreamed about that,” said Kootie softly, “Sunday night.” It, the thought of college, was the spur that finally made me put my run-away plan into action, he thought. Which has turned out to have put a lot of other stuff into action, too. “I must have been picking it up from you, you all worked up in the bust in the living room.”

The laugh that came out of his mouth then was embarrassed. “I guess I was excited about it myself. A little. Not that I put any stock in academic honors.” He shrugged again. “The news was all over the party line.”

“Yeah,” said Kootie, “I met some old lady that wanted to talk to you. Probably had a graduation present for you.” Kootie sighed, feeling bad about dead people. “What are you gonna do with the ghost in the film can?”

Kootie could feel that Edison’s mood was down too, and had been for the last several minutes; probably Kootie’s own melancholy was largely induced in his surrounding mind by the suggestion from Edison’s frail, contained ghost.

“The ghost in the film can,” said Edison. “If he hasn’t died in there yet, we could talk to him on my telephone. If we had my telephone with us I could work it. You might be able to as well—you strike me as another boy who’s carrying around some solid guilty link with a dead person or two, hm?”

“I…guess I am.” Kootie was too desolated and exhausted, here in the dark empty lot, to cry.

“There now, son, I don’t mean to stir it up.” Edison had Kootie sit down, leaning back against the car body. The wind was rustling softly in the fronds of a stocky wild palm on the far side of the car, and the only sound on the breeze was the rapid pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic gunfire, comfortably far away.

“My telephone,” Edison said. “I got the ghost-telephone idea when a spiritualist paid Marconi to buy my Lehigh Valley grasshopper telegraph patents for him. It was originally a scheme to make two-way telegraphy possible on a moving train, by an induction current between plates on the train and telegraph wires overhead, with regularly spaced dispatcher stations along the way, hence ‘grasshopper.’ But…they got a lot of random clicking, some bits of which turned out to be…oh, you know, idiot clowning: Shave and a haircut, two bits, and Hey Rube, and the beats of the Lohengrin wedding march and popular songs. Even so, I didn’t figure it out until the spiritualist bought the patents.” He yawned. “Up, son, I’ve got to set up the apparatus for our night’s worth of six signals.”

Kootie didn’t want to do any more work. Why was it always his muscles and joints that took the wear and tear? “What’s a six signal? I bet we don’t need it.”

“Tramp telegraphers have to tap out a signal every hour, all night long. Called a ‘six signal.’ It’s to show that you’re still awake, alert, ready to participate. I used to just hook up a clock to a rotary saw blade, so it sent the signals for me, right on time, while I napped. Up, lad, it won’t take but a few moments.”

Kootie struggled to his feet one more time, and then he took out the chalk and, crouching, drew a big oval all the way around the car, which, he now saw, was a wrecked old Dodge Dart, of God knew what color under the dust of years. This time he drew arrows radiating out from the circumference, and he spit several times outside the wobbly chalk line.

“That’ll make it seem that we’re up and about, in a number of places,” said Edison, “and for the night I can clathrate myself inside your head again—voluntarily this time!—with all hatches battened down. Then we’ll be as damn hard to find as a gray hat in a rock pile.” It seemed to Kootie that this simile had been derived from experience. “And we should sleep, and we should sleep.”

Edison used Kootie’s fingers to probe the car-door lock with a bit of wire he found on the pavement; but after a while he swore and tossed it away and just had Kootie punch in the wind-wing window with a chunk of concrete. Kootie’s arm was just barely long enough for his stretched-out fingers to reach the lock-post button.

Kootie stepped back and opened the door—wincing at the echoing screech of the ancient hinges—and then he leaned inside, breathing shallowly in musty air that somehow nevertheless had a flavor of new houses.

The seats and floor of the car proved to be stacked with dozens of ancient gallon paint cans that someone had once halfheartedly covered with a stiffened drop cloth, and Kootie had to lift some of the cans out and set them down on the pavement just to have room to sit with his legs stretched out. He didn’t know if the old man could feel the aching, stinging fatigue in his shoulders and knees—and in his hip, which pain he now remembered that the old man was responsible for—but Edison didn’t argue when Kootie suggested that this was enough, and that they could sleep sitting up.

Kootie pulled the door closed—slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeal again. The broken wind-wing wasn’t letting in much fresh air, so he wrestled with the door’s crank handle and managed to open the passenger-side window several inches, enough to probably keep the fumes of mummified paint from overcoming him during the night. That done, he bent the old drop cloth snugly around his shoulders and shifted around until he found a position in which he could relax without setting off any big twinges of pain.

The empty lot was unlit, and it was very dark inside the old car.

Sometimes his father had come into Kootie’s room at bedtime and had haltingly and awkwardly tried to talk to the boy. Once, after Kootie had supposedly gone to sleep, he had heard his father, back out in the kitchen with his mother, dejectedly refer to the conversations as “quality time.” Still, it had been comforting, in its way.

“So you fixed up this phone,” he ventured now, speaking quietly in the close shelter.

“Hm? Oh, yes, that I did. Do you remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin? Your parents must have told it to you.”

No. Kootie’s parents had told him all about Rama and Koot Hoomie and Zorro-Aster and Jiddu Krishnamurti (in whose holy-man footsteps he had been intended to follow), and about self-realization and meditation, and the doings of various Egyptian holy men. But at least he had heard about Rumpelstiltskin in school. Thank God for school. “Sure,” he said now, sleepily.

“Well, you remember that the little man didn’t want anybody to know what his name was. That’s important if a person is like you and me—misfortunate enough to be tethered by a stout leash of responsibility to somebody who’s in the ghost world; it’s like we’ve got one loot outside of time, isn’t it, so that we react to noises and jolts just a split instant before they actually happen.”

“You’ve had that happen too,” said Kootie faintly, slumping farther down in the warming seat.

“Ever since I watched a playmate drown in a creek when I was five, son. So have a lot of unhappy people. And that.. antenna we carry around makes us stand out to ghosts. They’re drawn to us, and without meaning any harm they can attach themselves to us and sympathetically induce the collapse of our time lines—kill us, like a parasite that kills its host.

“People like you and me, if we manage to live long, have generally had a wanderjahr, a time of wandering around untraceably, often luckily giving a fake name and fake birth date, while we get the time to figure out what the hell’s going on. I was a plug telegrapher when I was sixteen, that’s like an apprentice, and for years I rode trains all over this country, because there was always ready work for any class of telegrapher during the Civil War. Blavatsky was doing her wander-time around then too: Europe, Mexico, Tibet. What you learn, if you’re lucky, is that you need a mask if you’re going to deal up close with ghosts. You can’t let them get a handle on you, not anything. Real name and real birth date, especially. Those are solid handles.”

Edison blew a chuckle out of Kootie’s mouth. “One time in the early seventies I had to go to City Hall in Newark to pay real-estate taxes—last day, big fine if I didn’t—and the fellow behind the desk was one of the big solidified ghosts, who had managed the no doubt difficult task of scraping together enough alertness to hold a county job, and he asked me what my name was. Hah! I had to pretend I couldn’t remember! And pay the fine! My own name! Everybody in line thought I was an imbecile.”

Kootie yawned so widely that tears ran down his cheeks, and it interrupted Edison’s monologue. “So who did you call that was still alive?” he asked. “That must be embarrassing—‘Hi, George, what are you doing there? Did you just this morning die or something?”‘

Breath whickered out of his nostrils as Edison laughed softly. “That’s just about exactly how it went. In 1921 I had got the spirit phone working: it required summoning back the ghost of my dead playmate—by then I had managed to cauterize the bit of him that had been stuck to me, sort of the way I’m stuck to you right now—and energizing him in a strong electromagnetic field. He was still my antenna. And then his augmented charge was amplified dramatically with an induction coil, and then, he was…the operator.

“I was trying to call a man named William Sawyer, who had died forty years earlier; Sawyer was an electrical inventor who claimed to have come up with the electric lamp before I did, and wanted me to buy him out. I told him to go to hell, I just left him in the dust, and then he came around to my place when I was giving an exhibition, right after Christmas in, it must have been, ‘79. Sawyer came drunk, yelling and shouting that it was all fake, and he broke a vacuum pump and stole eight of the electric lamps, which I didn’t have a lot of in those days. In the years after that, I had some opportunities to help him—and I didn’t do it. I hadn’t forgotten the theft and the vandalism, you see, and whenever I was asked about him I made sure to drip—I mean, made sure to drop—some unflattering statements about him. He turned into a drunk, and wound up killing a man, and he died before he could go to prison. So, forty years later, I was trying to get him on the phone to…” Kootie’s hands lifted.

“…Apologize?”

After a few seconds of silence, Edison said, softly, “Yep.” He exhaled. “But you get a crowd on that line, it’s a party line, and everybody wants to talk. When they heard who was calling, somebody picked up, and I found myself talking to a mathematician who I had fired the day before! I was flabbergasted, and I said something like, ‘Lord, Tom, did you kill yourself today?’ All he wanted to do was recite poems to me, so I hung up and went round to his house. It developed that he had had a nervous breakdown, but had not in fact died. So I hired him back. But I had learned that people can sometimes throw ghosts in moments of high stress, and those ghosts can sometimes wander away just exactly the same as though the people had died. They are the same.”

“So…you quit work on the phone because of that?”

Suddenly agitated, Edison said, “Those aren’t the people, the people you harmed, those ghosts. It’s—like trying to make amends to somebody’s car, after they’ve parked it and walked away. Blavatsky was right when she claimed that the spirits called up by mediums are just animate shells. You can talk to the ghost of your dead uncle Bob, but Uncle Bob himself doesn’t know anything about it. Chesterton said that, I believe.” He shook Kootie’s head. “What you’ve got to do is somehow rehire the sons of bitches.”

Rehire my mom and dad? thought Kootie. “But…they’re dead. What do you do about that?”

For nearly a whole minute there was silence.

Then, quietly, “Don’t look at me, son, I’m one of ‘em myself. Go to sleep now.”

A fleeting impression of a candle being blown out and a door being closed, and then Kootie was alone in his own head again. Before loneliness could creep up on him he closed his eyes, and he was instantly asleep.

BEYOND THE dust-crusted glass of the car’s windows, out on the sidewalk past the end of the lot and the chain-link fence, a silhouette came shuffling along from the direction of Wilshire Boulevard. Only one arm swung as it ambled along, though the torso rocked as though another arm were swinging alongside too. The head was turning to look one way and another, with frequent pauses to glance down at the figure’s waist, but the silhouette registered no change in its pace as if walked on down the sidewalk, past the lot, and disappeared to the south.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

“…I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, frying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs—‘answers to the name of “Dash”: had on a brass collar’—just fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice,’ till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

BY eleven o’clock in the morning, Hollywood Boulevard was a crowded tourist street again, and it was the signs overhead—movie marquees, names of ethnic fast-food restaurants, huge red Coca-Cola logos, and the giant infantry soldier over the army-surplus store—that caught the eye. Bui when Sullivan had driven down the boulevard at dawn, it had been the pavements that he had watched; empty lanes still blocked by last night’s police barricades, litter in the gutters, and solitary junkies and long-night male and female prostitutes shambling wearily toward unimaginable refuges in the gray shadows.

Sullivan turned down Cherokee, parked his van in the lot on the south side of Miceli’s and switched off the engine, and for a few minutes he just sat in the van and smoked a cigarette and sipped at a freshly popped can of beer. Thank God for the propane refrigerator, he thought.

Just because he had parked here didn’t mean he had to eat at Miceli’s. He remembered a Love’s barbecue place on Hollywood Boulevard just a block or two away. He could even restart the van and go eat at Canter’s, or Lawry’s. What he should do, in fact, was get a to-go sandwich somewhere; he had no business blowing his finite money in sit-down restaurants.

It had been here at Miceli’s, on that rainy night in the fall of ‘86, that he had had his last dinner with Judy Nording; the dinner at which she had been so distant and cold, after which he had gone back to the apartment he’d shared with Sukie, and had got drunk and written his ill-fated sonnet.

You’re here to exorcise the ghost, he told himself comfortably as the cold beer uncoiled in his stomach. Prove to yourself that there’s no more power to sting in those old memories—

And then he winced and look a deep swallow of the beer, for he remembered his real ghosts: Sukie, who for years had been so close a companion that the two of them were almost one person, their love for each other so deeply implicit that it could be unspoken, ignored, and finally forgotten; and his father, whose wallet and key ring (and three Hires Root Beer cans) he and Sukie had intolerably left behind when they had mindlessly fled deLarava’s shoot in Venice Beach on Christmas Eve of 1986.

He had spent this morning at City College. He had showered and washed his hair in the cologne-reeking men’s gym, setting his clothes and “scapular” and fanny pack on a bench he could see from the broad tile floor where the showerheads were mounted against the wall, so that he wouldn’t have to rent an authorized padlock for the brief use of a locker, and possibly have to show some ID; and then he had got dressed again and reluctantly walked over to the library.

He’d made his way upstairs to the reference section, a maze of tall shelves full of ranked orange plastic file folders stuffed with newspapers and magazines, and endless sets of leather-bound volumes with titles like Current Digest of the Soviet Press and Regional Studies, and with some help he managed to find the long metal cabinets of drawers where the microfilm was kept.

He’d pried out the boxed spool of the Los Angeles Times from July to December of 1990 and carried it to a projector in one of the reading booths. Once the film was properly threaded and rolling, he sat for several minutes watching July newspaper pages trundle past on the glowing screen—advertisements, comics, and all—until he inadvertently discovered that there was a fast-forward setting on the control knob. At last he found the first of November. (President Bush had “had it” with Saddam Hussein; the governor’s race between Wilson and Feinstein was still too close to call.)

The Elizalde story was at the bottom corner of the front page: THREE DEAD IN CLINIC BLAZE. According to the text, a firebomb had been detonated in Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde’s psychiatric clinic on Beverly Boulevard at 8:40 P.M. on Halloween night. The resulting three-alarm fire brought fifty firefighters, from Los Angeles, Vernon, and Huntington Park, who put the fire out in forty-five minutes. Dr. Elizalde, 32, had suffered second-degree burns while trying to extinguish one of the patients who had caught fire; altogether, three of her patients had died, though only that one had died of burns; and five more were hospitalized with unspecified traumas. Police and the Fire Department were investigating the incident.

Sullivan had fast-forwarded the microfilm to the November 2 issue. The story was still on the front page—now Dr. Elizalde had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several of the survivors of her Wednesday-night group-therapy session had told police that Elizalde had been conducting a séance when the disaster had struck, and that hideous apparitions had materialized in the air; and they claimed that one of the patients, a man named Frank Rocha, had spontaneously burst into flames. Fire investigators noted that Rocha’s body had been incinerated. Police theorized that Elizalde had installed machinery to simulate the appearance of ghosts, and that this machinery had exploded during the fraudulent psychic performance…though they admitted that no traces of any such machinery had been found.

The November 3 issue had moved the story to the front page of the second section, where it eclipsed the “Cotton Club” murder trial, which had apparently been hot news in 1990. Elizalde had raised her $50,000 bail, and then had apparently disappeared.

The descriptions of the Halloween-night séance were fuller now, and more lurid—the surviving patients claimed that ropes of ectoplasm had burst from the bodies of many present, and that spirits of eviscerated babies, and of screaming women and babbling old men, had then formed in the air over their heads; and Frank Rocha had exploded into white-hot flames. It was now revealed that several of the patients who had had to be hospitalized were in fact confined in psychiatric wards with acute psychotic reactions.

In the issue of November 4 it was confirmed that Elizalde had disappeared; police sources commented that until her arraignment they would not issue a bench warrant. Included in the article were quotes from an interview that the L.A. Weekly had done with Elizalde two months previous to what was now being referred to as the Día del Muerte Séance. “I find it effective,” she was quoted as having said, “to use the trappings of the so-called ‘occult’ in eliciting responses from credulous patients. It has no more intrinsic value than the psychiatrist’s cliché couch or the stained-glass windows in a church—it’s simply conducive:’ Police were still speculating that she had decided to enhance the effect by somehow staging dangerous, faked supernatural phenomena.

Sullivan had tucked the microfilm spool back into its box and returned it to the drawer, and then located the cited issue of L.A. Weekly—an actual paper copy, not microfilm—and turned the pages to the interview.

There had been a photograph of Dr. Elizalde in her consulting room, and, looking at it in the library this morning, Sullivan had winced. She was strikingly good-looking, with long black hair and big dark eyes, but she looked more like a gypsy fortune-teller than a psychiatrist: the photographer had caught her smilingly underlit over a glowing crystal ball the size of a melon, and behind her he could see saint-candles and all kinds of primitive little statues on shelves, and a framed print of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The interview itself had not been so bad. He had made notes of some of her statements:

On ghosts: “Well, of course when a person dies, actually that person is gone; a TV set that was used only to view PBS is no different from one that never showed anything but Sunday morning televangelists, once the two sets have been disassembled—they’re both equal in their total absence now. But all of us who are still around have hooks in the memories of these dead people, unresolved resentments and guilts, and these things don’t stop being true, and being motivational, just because the person that caused them is dead, has stopped existing. By having my patients strongly pretend—oh hell, briefly believe—that they can communicate with the dead collaborators in their pasts, I let them forgive, or ask for forgiveness—‘give the pain to God’—and achieve peace. My patients don’t forget the old wrongs endured or committed, but the memories of them stop being actively, cripplingly poisonous. My methods facilitate this by letting the patients literalize the old ghosts. [ans. to quest.:] No, I don’t believe in ghosts at all. I’m a rational materialist atheist. By the charged term ‘God’ I mean objectivity. [ans. to quest.:] My patients are free to. I don’t preach.

On men in her life: “No, I—(laughter) physician heal thyself!—I think I’m still reacting against the machismo image of my father and my brothers. My father drank—I was thirteen when I figured out that his drinking was worst around February and March, when he’d get his vacation pay and his tax refunds—and he’d beat up my mother, and even on the farm out in Norco he always had to have steak and salad and a baked potato and a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, and silverware, while the rest of the family got rice and beans. And my brothers and their friends were…oh, you know, khaki pants, polished black shoes, Pendleton shirts buttoned only at the top button with white T-shirts underneath, hairnets with the gather point in the middle of the forehead like a black spidery caste mark. Tough—all the firstborn boys are Something-Junior, and the fathers always had them out on the front lawn in a boxing ring made with a garden hose, sparring like fighting-cocks. And the boys and girls were supposed to get married and have kids as soon as possible. I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men. Oh—and not to women at all!—let me add. (Laughter.)”

On why the crystal ball (if she’s materialistic): “The stasis of the clarity, the clarity of the stasis—people look deeply for ghosts in pools where the agitation has passed. Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, literally, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface; the sea is the sink of ghosts…that is, in the superstitious mind, mind you. Seriously, patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water. It’s been worth field trips. Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”

In the City College library, Sullivan had leaned back in his plastic chair and imagined the statements of a psychiatrist in some bucolic culture about a thousand years from now, when guns had survived as nothing but inert, storied relics: Because of the legends still adhering to the objects known as “Smith and Wessons,” I find that valuable shocks can be administered by pressing the “muzzle” of one such object against a patient’s temple, and then ritualistically pulling the “trigger.” I have here a specimen that has been perfectly preserved through the millennia…now, watch the patient…

BOOM.

Boom indeed, he thought now two hours later in the Miceli’s parking lot, as he finished his beer and dropped the cigarette butt inside the can. Well she’s learned better. One of her patients must have been a ghost-connected person who acted as a primer, the charge being Halloween night and the hollow-point slug being a whole shitload of actual, angry, idiot ghosts. And the main target seemed to have been one of her patients who had died but hadn’t realized it yet, so that he threw posthumous shock-shells when his lifeline collapsed, igniting his overdue-for-the-grave body. And then two others died of heart attacks or something, and everybody else just plain went crazy.

That must have been some night, Sullivan thought now as he levered open the van’s driver’s-side door and stepped down to the pavement in the chilly morning air. Well, maybe she’s learned better now; here she is back in town, and, unless I miss my guess, the reason she’s come back is to make amends—to a more literal sort of ghost than any she was willing to acknowledge when she gave that interview.

If I can find Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde, he thought, maybe she could be talked into doing another séance. She knows how, and I’ve got Houdini’s mask, which has got to be big enough for both of us to hide behind. We could both deal with our ghosts from behind the mask, like Catholics confessing through the anonymizing screen in a confessional.

As he trudged up the sidewalk beside the brick wall of Miceli’s, he wondered if Elizalde felt differently about the Catholic Church now. Or about drinking.

Or even about men, he thought as he pushed open the door and stepped inside.

SULLIVAN WAS sitting alone at a table down the hall from the entry and just taking a solid sip of Coors when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He choked and blew beer out through his nose—and he dropped the glass, for his right hand had slapped his shirt pocket for the bag with the severed thumb in it and his left hand had darted to the loop on the fanny pack that would open the thing with one yank, exposing the grip of the .45 inside.

“Jesus, dude,” came a startled, anxious voice, and a man stepped widely around from behind him, smiling and showing his hands self-deprecatingly. “Sorry!”

Sullivan recognized him—it was an old college friend named Buddy Schenk. “I spilled my friend’s drink, sorry,” Schenk said, looking over Sullivan’s shoulder. “Could he have another? Uh—and I’ll have one too.” Schenk looked down at Sullivan. “Okay if I sit?”

Sullivan was coughing hard, but could inhale only with strangled, whooping gasps. He waved at the chair across from him and nodded.

“Beer in the morning,” said Schenk awkwardly as he sat down. “You’re getting as bad as your sister. And you’re jumpy! You went off like a rattrap! About gave me a heart attack! What are you so jumpy for?” He had unfolded a paper napkin from the table and was mopping up the foamy beer and pushing aside the curls of broken glass.

Sullivan tried to inhale quietly, and was humiliated to find that he couldn’t. His eyes were watering and his nose stung. “Hi—Buddy,” he managed to choke.

My God, I am nervous, he thought. If I’d known I was so scared of deLarava I would have sat with my back to a wall.

He wished he could smell something besides beer, for suddenly he wanted to seine the garlicky air for the scent of clove cigarettes.

The waiter who had earlier taken Sullivan’s order for a meatball sandwich walked up then, and swept the soaked napkin and the broken glass into a towel.

After the man had walked away, Sullivan said, “Buddy, you asshole,” mostly to test his voice; and he could speak now. “It’s good to see you.”

Sullivan discovered that he meant it. This was his third day back in Los Angeles, and until this moment he had felt more locked out of the bloodstream of the place than the most postcard-oriented tourist. It was a new Los Angeles, not his city anymore—the freeways didn’t work nowadays, Joe Jost’s was gone, Melrose Avenue was ruined, Steve Lauter had moved across the 405 and had guns pointed at his head, and the people Sullivan was most concerned about were dead people.

“Well, it’s good to see you too, man,” Buddy said. The waiter brought two glasses and beer bottles to the table, another Coors for Sullivan and of course a Budweiser for Buddy. “How’s Twat?”

Sullivan smiled uncertainly, not sure if he’d misheard his friend or if the question was some vulgar variation on How’s business? He looked over his shoulder and took a sip of beer carefully. “Hm?”

“Sorry, Toot. We used to call you two Twit and Twat sometimes.”

Sullivan’s momentary cheer was deflating, and he had another gulp of beer. “I never…heard that,” he said.

“Well, you wouldn’t have. Hey, it was all a long time ago, right? College days. We were all kids.” Buddy laughed reminiscently. “Everybody figured Sukie had an incestuous thing for you, was that true?”

“I’m sure I’d have noticed.” Sullivan said it with a blink and a derisive snort, but he found himself gulping some more of the beer. The glass was nearly empty, and he poured into it the rest of the beer in the bottle.

The old shock was still a cold tingling in his ribs. (He had read that the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere on a person was fourteen pounds on every square inch of skin, and he thought he could feel every bit of the weight right now.) Sukie had been like the poor lonely ghosts, hopelessly trying to find that better half.

Old Buddy sure has a winning line of remember-whens, he thought.

“She’s dead,” Sullivan said abruptly, wanting to put a final cold riposte to Buddy’s thoughtless needling before it went any further. “Sukie—Elizabeth—killed herself. Monday night.”

Buddy frowned. “Really? Jesus, I’m sorry, man. What the hell have you—that’s why you’re alone. Were you with her? I’m real sorry.”

Sullivan sighed and looked around at the Pompeii-style murals on the high walls. Why had he come here? “No I wasn’t with her, she was in another state. I’m just in town for…business and pleasure.”

“Sex and danger,” agreed Buddy cheerfully, apparently having got over his dismay at the news of Sukie’s suicide. Sullivan remembered now that for the few months that Buddy had stayed with them in ‘82, he’d always remarked, upon going out in the evening, Off for another night of sex and danger!—and when he’d drag back in later he’d every time shrug and say, No sex. Lotta danger.

“No sex,” Buddy said now, grinning, “lotta danger. Right?”

“That’s it, Buddy.”

“You’re having lunch, right? Lemme join you, it’s on me and we’ll eat ourselves sick, okay? Whatever you ordered already is just the first course. We’ll drink to poor…Sukie. I’m supposed to be meeting a guy at noon, but I’ll call him and put it off till three or so.”

Sullivan was already tired of Buddy Schenk. “I can’t be staying long—”

“Bullshit, you’re staying long enough to eat, no?” Buddy was already pushing back his chair. “Order me a small pepperoni-and-onion pizza, and another beer, when you get your refill, okay?” He was calling the last words over his shoulder, striding away to the hallway where the telephone was.

“Okay,” said Sullivan, alone in the dining room again.

He was agitated by the conversation about Sukie. And the insult to himself! Twit and Twat! And he was sure that he and Sukie hadn’t picked up the Teet and Toot nicknames until…the early eighties, at the earliest. So much for the we were all kids disclaimer. It’s not just thoughtless—why is he jabbing at me this morning?

Sullivan tried to recall when he’d last seen Buddy. Had Sullivan said or done something rude? Sukie might have. Sukie could probably be counted on to have.

His beer was gone, and he looked around for the waiter. A pepperoni-and-onion pizza, he thought, and another Bud and maybe two more Coorses. It’s always been Bud for Buddy.

Even the waiter had known it.

Sullivan’s hands were cold and clumsy, and when he accidentally banged his fingers on the edge of the table they seemed to ring, like a tuning fork.

How had the waiter known it?

Oh hell, Buddy had probably been in here for a while, and this one hadn’t been his first. Or maybe he was a regular, these days. Sullivan breathed deeply and wished he had gone somewhere else for lunch.

Why was Buddy hanging around drinking beer at Miceli’s when he had a noon appointment somewhere? Miceli’s wasn’t the sort of place one ducked into for a quick beer.

Maybe the appointment was for lunch right here at Miceli’s, and Buddy had arrived early to drink up some nerve.

Through the high window overlooking Cherokee, a beam of morning sunlight lanced down onto the tabletop and gleamed on a stray sliver of broken glass.

Sullivan had certainly jumped, when Buddy had tapped him on the shoulder; grabbed not only for the gun but for Houdini’s mummified thumb, too. What had he been afraid of? Well—that deLarava had found him.

Maybe deLarava had found him. Who was Buddy calling?

Jesus, he thought, taking a deep breath. Where’s that waiter? You need a couple of beers bad, boy. Pa-ra-noia strikes deep. You meet one of your old friends in one of your old hangouts…

Both of which deLarava would have been aware of, just as she’d been aware of Steve Lauter. Maybe there was no one I knew at Musso and Frank’s, day before yesterday, just because that was Sukie’s and my personal place. We never went there with anybody else, so deLarava wouldn’t have known to plant an “old friend” informer there.

If Buddy’s here to betray me, he might very well want to pick a fight, to justify it to himself.

Sullivan stood up, walked around the table and sat down in Buddy’s chair, facing the entry.

Are you seriously saying, he asked himself as his fingers tingled and he took quick breaths, that you believe deLarava has planted an old friend at each of your old hangouts? Restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, bookstores? (Do I have that many old friends? Maybe the roster is filled out with strangers who’ve each got a picture of me in their pockets.)

Oh, this really is paranoia, boy—when you start imagining that everybody in the city has nothing in mind but finding you; imagining that you’re the most important little man in Los Angeles.

But I might be, to Loretta deLarava. If she really wants to capture and eat my father’s ghost. And she has money and power, and the paranoid insect-energy to put them to directed use.

O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking, he thought, remembering his flight out of Arizona on Monday night, after Sukie’s call. He had calculated then that it would take less than half an hour for bad guys to get from the nuclear plant to O’Hara’s.

He thought: How quickly can they get here, today?

Warning—you are too close to the vehicle.

Sullivan was out of the chair and walking toward the front door and feeling in his pocket for the keys to the van.

“Pete! Hey, where you going, man?”

Sullivan pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight. Behind him he heard Buddy yell, “Goddammit,” and heard Buddy’s feet pounding on the wooden floor.

Sullivan was running too.

He had the van key between his thumb and forefinger by the time he slammed into the driver’s-side door, and he didn’t let himself look behind him until he had piled inside and twisted the key in the ignition.

Buddy had run to a white Toyota parked two slots away; he had the door open and was scrambling in.

Sullivan jerked the gearshift into reverse and goosed the van out of the parking slot, swinging the rear end toward Buddy’s Toyota; the Toyota backed out too, so Sullivan bared his teeth and just stomped the gas pedal to the floor.

With a jarring metallic bam the van stopped, and Sullivan could hear glass tinkling to the pavement as the back of his head bounced off the padded headrest. Luckily the van hadn’t stalled. He reached forward and clanked the gearshift all the way over into low and tromped on the gas again.

Metal squeaked and popped, and then he was free of the smashed Toyota. He glanced into the driver’s-side mirror as he swung the wheel toward the exit, and he flinched as he saw Buddy step out and throw something; a moment later he heard a crack against his door and saw wet strings and tiny white fragments fly away ahead of him. Then he was rocking down the driveway out onto Cherokee amid screeching rubber and car horns, and wrenching the van around to the left to gun away down the street south, away from Hollywood Boulevard. He slapped the gearshift lever up into Drive.

He caught a green light and turned left again on Selma, and then drove with his left hand while he dug the Bull Durham sack out of his shirt pocket. Feeling like a cowboy rolling a smoke one-handed, he shook the dried thumb into his palm and tossed the sack away, then drove holding the thumb out in front of his face, his knuckles against the windshield. It felt like a segment of a greasy tree branch, but he clung to it gratefully.

Out of the silvery liquid glare of the cold sunlight, a big gold Honda motorcycle was cruising toward him in the oncoming lane; he couldn’t see the rider behind the gleaming windshield and fairing, but the passenger was a rail-thin old woman sitting up high against the sissy bar, her gray hair streaming behind, unconfined by any sort of helmet…and she was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna tied right over her eyes.

Her head was swiveling around, tilted back as though she was trying to smell or hear something. Sullivan inched the thumb across the inside of the windshield to keep it blocking the line from her blindfolded face to his own.

Sweat stung his eyes, and he forced himself not to tromp on the accelerator now; the Honda could outmaneuver him anywhere, even if he got out and ran. (The shadows of wheeling, shouting crows flickered over the lanes.) And it was probably only one of a number of vehicles trolling between Highland and Cahuenga right now.

God, he prayed desperately as a tree and a parking lot trundled past outside his steamy window, let me get clear of this and I swear I’ll learn. I won’t blunder into predictable patterns again, trust me.

The 101 Freeway was only a couple of big blocks ahead, and he ached for the breezy freedom of its wide gray lanes.

Keening behind his clenched teeth, he pulled over to the Selma Avenue curb and put the engine into Park.

He sprang out of the driver’s seat and scrambled into the back, tossing the mattress off the folded-out bed. Buddy would even now be telling them that Sullivan was in a brown Dodge van, but they’d recognize him even sooner if he didn’t have the full mask working. They would already have been given his name, his birth date, too much of what was himself. When he and Sukie had worked together they had been a good pair of mirror images, being twins, and so there had been no solid figure for a ghost or a tracker to focus on; but now he was alone, discrete, quantified, discontinuous. Identifiable.

He had to grip the thumb between his teeth to bend over and lift the plaster hands out of the compartment under the bed, and he was gagging as he hopped forward and slid back into the driver’s seat. He laid one plaster hand on the dashboard and grotesquely stuck the other upright between his legs as he put the van back into gear and carefully pulled out away from the curb.

The Honda had looped back, and now was passing him on the left. The riders hadn’t had time to have talked to Buddy, but the old woman swung her head around to blindly face Sullivan, and peripherally he could see the frown creasing her forehead.

She’s sensing a psychic blur, he thought; a mix of Houdini’s birth and life, and my own. She won’t be catching any echoes of Houdini’s death, because the old magician was masked for that event, and got away clean even though he died on perilous Halloween. She’ll be wondering if I’m a schizophrenic, or on acid—what it is that makes the driver of this vehicle such a psychic sackful of broken mirror. (He even felt a little different—his jacket seemed looser and lighter, though he didn’t dare look down at himself right now.)

He groped through his mind for any remembered prayer—Our Father…? Hail Mary…?—but came up with nothing but a stanza of verse from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books, a bit Sukie had liked to recite:

“The sea was wet as wet could be,

The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud because

No cloud was in the sky:

No birds were flying overhead—

There were no birds to fly.”

The motorcycle drifted past outside his window and pulled in ahead of him; through the close glass of the windshield he could hear the bass drumbeat of the motorcycle’s exhaust pipes, and through the fluttering gray hair he could see the old woman’s jaw twisted back toward him; but he kept a steady, moderate pressure on the gas pedal, though his legs felt like electrified bags of water. Was the driver of one of these cars around him seeing some signal from the old woman? Was he about to be cut off? They wanted him alive, but only so that deLarava could use him as lure for his father’s ghost.

In a hoarse voice he quoted more of the Alice scripture, thinking of Sukie and mentally hearing her remembered recitation of it:

“Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes”

The brake lights flashed on the transom of the gold motorcycle—but its rider leaned the heavy bike around in a U-turn and then accelerated back toward Cherokee, the diminishing roar of its engine rising and falling as the rider clicked rapidly up through the gears. Sullivan’s jacket was heavy and tight again.

He spat the old brown thumb out onto the dashboard and gagged hoarsely, squinting to be able to see ahead through tears of nausea.

He turned left on Wilcox, and then right onto the crowded lanes of eastbound Hollywood Boulevard. Don’t puke on yourself, he thought as he squinted at the cars glinting in the sunlight ahead of him. It looks like you got away this time. Now stay away. Hide. Buddy will have described the van, and might even have got the license number.

The thought of Buddy reminded him of the missile his old friend had thrown at the van as Sullivan had committed hit-and-run. Stopped at a red light, Sullivan now rolled down the driver’s-side window and craned his neck to look at the outside of the door.

A branching pattern of viscous wetness was splattered from the door handle to the front headlight. It was clear stuff mottled with yellow and dotted with angular bits of white, and half a dozen vertical trickles had already run down the fender from the initial horizontal streaking.

Buddy’s missile had been a raw egg.

The schoolboy-prankishness of the gesture was disarming. He egged my van, Sullivan thought; after I smashed the front end of his car! How could he have been colluding with deLarava at one moment and doing something as goofy as this in the next? I must have been wrong—poor Buddy wasn’t guilty of anything but beery tactlessness back there in the restaurant, and then he must really have been calling some business associate when he went to the phone. I should go back, and apologize, and agree to pay for getting his car fixed. This was pure paranoia. Even the people on the motorcycle had probably just been—

No. Sullivan remembered the old woman sitting high up against the sissy bar, blindfolded against visual distractions and sniffing the breeze, and he couldn’t make himself believe that the pair on the Honda had been random passersby.

He kept driving straight ahead.

East of Vine, the street stopped seeming to be Hollywood Boulevard, and was just another Los Angeles street, with office buildings and CD stores and boarded-up theaters, and red-and-yellow-blooming wild lantana bushes crouched in the squares of curbside dirt; but when he glanced out of his open window he saw, a smoky mile to the north against the green Griffith Park hills, the old white HOLLYWOOD sign—and for just a moment, to his still-watering eyes, it had seemed to read HALLOWEEN.

Not for two days yet, he thought, and he spat again to get rid of the taste of Houdini’s thumb. I’ve got about thirty-six hours.

Just past Van Ness he turned right onto the 101 southbound. The freeway was wide open and cars were moving along rapidly for once, and he gunned down the ramp with the gas pedal to the floor so as to be up to speed when he merged into the right lane.

A. O. fucking P., he thought as he took his first deep breath in at least five minutes. On the freeways, there you feel free.

He remembered now, now that he was at long last experiencing it again, the always-downstream rush of driving along open fast-moving freeway lanes. Up here above the surface streets, above them even if the freeway was sluicing through a valley, the real world off to the sides was reduced to a two-dimensional projection of sketchy hills and skyscraper silhouettes, and you dealt with the names of places, spelled out in reflector-studded white on the big green signs that swept past overhead, rather than with the grimy stop-and-go places themselves; even the spidery calligraphy of gang graffiti markers, looping across the signs in defiance of barbed wire and precarious perches and rushing traffic below, were formal symbols of senseless-killing neighborhoods, rather than the neighborhoods themselves.

Other drivers were just glimpsed heads in the gleaming solidity of rushing cars in this world of lanes and connectors; space and time were abridged, and a moment’s inattention could have you blinking at unfamiliar street names in Orange County or Pomona.

Sullivan had to find a place to stay, a place with a garage. After this, he couldn’t keep living in the van out on the streets. And he wanted to be close to deLarava, without putting himself in the way of her possibly stumbling across him.

Just short of the towers of downtown he turned south on the Harbor Freeway, toward Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor…and the Queen Mary.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

“If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: hut it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

FRANCIS Strube’s black leather electric office chair was acting up. It was made by the McKie Company, which was supposed to manufacture the best race-car seats, and he had punched the button on the “comfort console” to pump up the lower-back region, but it had inflated out grossly, to the size of a watermelon, and in order to sit back with his shoulders against the top of the chair he had to push out his chest and belly like a pouter pigeon.

Ludicrous. He leaned forward instead, dividing his attention between the flimsy sheets of fax paper in his hand and the man in the seat across the desk. The Goudie Snuff people—after extorting a thousand dollars out of him!—had printed out their mailing list in some kind of minimalist dot-matrix, and Strube was afraid he’d have to get Charlotte to puzzle it out for him.

‘But,” said the client uncertainly, “would that be best for them?”

Strube looked up at him. What dreary aspect of the man’s divorce case had they been discussing? Damn the chair. He pushed the “deflate” button several times, but the leather-covered swelling behind his kidneys didn’t diminish; if anything, it swelled more. But he put patient concern in his voice as he asked, “Best for whom?”

“Whom we’re talking about, Mr. Strube! Heather and Krystle!”

These, Strube recalled, were the man’s daughters. He remembered now that custody of the children had been the topic at hand.

“Well, of course it would be best for them,” Strube said, indicating by his tone that he was way ahead of the man, and had not lost track of the conversation at all. “Our primary concern is the well-being of Heather and Krystle.” Strube had made a bad impression early on, when, having only read the girls’ names on the information form, he had pronounced the second one to rhyme with gristle rather than Bristol

“But,” went on the father of the girls, waving his hands bewilderedly, “you want me to demand alternating custody of the girls, a week with me and then a week with Debi, and then a week with me again? How would that work? They’d have to pack their clothes and…and toothbrushes and schoolbooks and…don’t even know what all. Every weekend! Would Debi be supposed to feed their goldfish, every other week? They wouldn’t even know what was in the refrigerator half the time. The girls I mean.”

Rather than the goldfish, thought Strube. I follow you. “It’s your right—and it’s to their benefit,” he said soothingly. “For two weeks out of every month they’d be living with you, in a normal, nurturing environment, away from that woman’s influences.” He let his gaze fall back to where the fax sheets lay in a patch of slanting sunlight on the desk. Most of the customers for Goudie snuff were shops, but there were a couple that seemed to be residential addresses. He noticed one on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana, and drew a checkmark beside it. Santa Ana was just an hour away, down in Orange County—that could easily be where Nicky Bradshaw was hiding out these days. Strube reminded himself that he would have to scout all the likely addresses, and actually see Bradshaw at one of them; he wouldn’t get the credit for having found Spooky if he just sent in half a dozen likely addresses.

And here was one in Long Beach. Why did so many people need to have snuff mailed right to their houses?

“That woman’ is my wife,” protested the client.

“For a while,” Strube answered absently. Here was another address, in Southgate. How did somebody in Southgate afford a luxury item like Scottish snuff? “You did come in here for a divorce, you’ll recall.”

“Only because she filed! I didn’t want a divorce! The girls staying a week with me and then a week with her—this is fantastic!”

Strube looked up. “Well, you won’t be paying child support for half the time. Besides, the arrangement won’t last for very long. Your girls will hate it, and it’ll wear Debi down, and then you can press for total custody.” To hell with your girls, he thought; it’ll protract the proceedings, and I’m paid by the hour.

The thought was suddenly depressing, and he remembered yesterday’s riddle about the lawyer and the sperm cell. He realized that he was hunched over the desk like some kind of centipede.

He spread his Nautilus-broadened shoulders inside the Armani jacket, and leaned back, lifting his chin.

And from the back of the McKie chair burst a sharp, yiping fart-sound. A wordless cry escaped his astonished client.

Still sitting up straight, though he could feel the sudden heat in his face, Strube said, “That will be all for today.”

“But—about the division of property—”

“That will be all for today,” Strube repeated. He would press for a Substitution of Attorney tomorrow.

One chance in two million of becoming a human being. He could work with the studios, handle prestige cases for famous clients. Swimming pools—movie stars. He could start by representing Bradshaw.

The client had stood up. “What time…?”

“Miss Meredith will schedule an appointment.” I knew him in ‘74 and ‘75, which was more than ten years after he quit showbiz, Strube thought. I’m likelier to recognize him than any of his old Hollywood crowd is.

He maintained his stiff pose until the man had left the office. Then he let himself slump. He could check the Santa Ana address today.

Maybe even the Long Beach one too.

LORETTA DELARAVA was crying again, and it was taking her forever to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich. She was in a window-side booth in the Promenade Cafe; out through the glass, across the blue water of the Pacific Terrace Harbor she could see the low skyline of Long Beach, with the boat-filled Downtown Long Beach Marina spread like a bristly carpet of confetti around the foot of it.

She preferred to eat in the employees’ cafeteria on C Deck, four decks down, back by the stern; but she couldn’t make herself go there anymore.

When the Queen Mary had been an oceangoing ship, that C Deck auxiliary room had been the men’s crew’s bar, called the Pig and Whistle, and she liked the airy brightness of the present-day cafeteria, with the young men and ladies in the tour-guide uniforms chatting and carrying trays to the white tables, and the absence of obnoxious tourists. But yesterday, and the day before too, when deLarava had gone there, she had found herself in a low dark hall, with dartboards on the walls and long wooden tables and benches crowded with men, some in aprons and some in black ties and formal jackets. The men at the nearest table had looked up from their pint glasses of dark beer and stared at her in wonderment. She hadn’t been able to hear anything over the throbbing, droning vibration that seemed to come up through the floor, and she’d realized that it was the sound of the ship’s propellers three decks directly below her.

It had been the old Pig and Whistle that she’d seen, as it had been in…the sixties? Hell, the thirties?

And late last night she had left her stateroom and followed uncarpeted stairs all the way down to D Deck, and stood by the closed-up crew’s galley by the bow and looked aft down the long, dim service alley, known to the crew in the old days as the Burma Road, that was said to stretch all the way back to the old bedroom service pantry and the hulking machinery of the lift motors by the stern. From far away in that dimness she had heard a lonely clashing and rattling, and when she had nerved herself up to walk some distance along the red-painted metal floor, between widely separated walls that were green up to belt height and beige above, hurrying from one bare bulb hung among the pipes and valves overhead to the next, she had seen tiny figures moving rapidly in one of the far distant patches of yellow light; children in red uniforms with caps—she had peered at them around the edge of a massive steel sliding door, and eventually she had realized that they were the ghosts of bellboys on roller skates, still skating up and down the old Burma Road on long-ago-urgent errands.

She had hurried away, and climbed the stairs back to her stateroom on B Deck, and locked the door and shivered in her bed under the dogged-shut porthole for hours before getting to sleep.

THE SANDWICH was actually very good, with tomato and basil in among the ham and cheese, and she made herself take another bite.

The man sitting across the table from her was holding a pencil poised over the wide white cardboard storyboards. “You okay, Loretta?”

“Sure, Gene,” she mumbled around the food in her mouth. She waved her free hand vaguely. “Stress. Listen, we’ve also got to get a lot of footage of the belowdecks areas—the crew’s quarters, the section up by the bow where the service men were bunked during the war—it’d be a good contrast, you know? To all the glamour of the top decks.”

“Well,” he said, sipping nervously at a Coors Light, “I guess you can edit to a balance in postproduction—but we cleared it with the Disney people for just the engine-room tour and the pool and the staterooms and the salons. There might not be accessible power sources down in the catacombs, and God knows what their routines are—they might tell us it’s too late to set it all up. It’d only be giving them two days’ warning, if you want to get everything in the can Saturday.”

“Well, we can at least do stills down there. A still photographer, and me, and my assistant carrying a portable stereo—that shouldn’t disrupt any employees.”

“You don’t need music to shoot stills, Loretta. And how are you going to use stills?”

DeLarava had looked past him and seen Ayres standing by the cash register. She waved, and said, “I’ve got to talk to this guy, Gene. Do what you can, okay?”

The man stood up, taking the storyboards with him. “Okay. If the PR guy’s in his office I’ll talk to him now, on my way out. I’ll call you and let you know what he says. Tomorrow I’ll be at the studio all day, and I’ll be back here Saturday, early, to make sure they rope off the areas from the tourists. I still don’t see why we had to film on Halloween. A weekday would have been less crowded.”

“Will you not be questioning my decisions, Gene? You gentlemen all work for me.”

Gene left as Ayres walked up, shrugging as they passed each other, and deLarava was crying again; she wanted to scratch her scalp, but didn’t dare, because she had stretched three rubber bands over it this morning. She had felt she had to, after the dream that had somehow left her to wake up crouched over the toilet in the stateroom’s bathroom, whispering to the water in the bowl.

Ayres sat down and promptly drank off the last inch of the Coors Light. “Your old boy Joey Webb is crazy,” he said. “He’s out at all hours on the beach with a metal detector and a jar of orange marmalade, singing that ‘Ed Sullivan’ song from Bye Bye Birdie.”

“Ed Sullivan? The moron. He’s not supposed to be looking for Ed Sullivan.”

“Could I have another of these, please?” said Ayres to a passing waitress. To deLarava he said, quietly, “I found out some things about the Parganas couple.”

“Okay…?”

“Well, they were crazy too. The old man, named Jiddu K. Parganas, was born in 1929. His parents announced that he was the jagadguru, which is apparently like a messiah, okay? The World Teacher. Theosophical stuff. There was a guy he was named for, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was supposed to be it, but he shined the job on in ’28. He got tired of the spirit world, he said, seeing ghosts crowding up the beaches all the time. Great stuff, hm? But our Jiddu, the one born a year later, didn’t work out too well. When he was twenty he got arrested for having burglarized the old house of Henry Ford, who had died two years earlier. The Ford executors hushed it up, but apparently Jiddu got away with a glass test tube. The Ford people hoked up another one to replace it, and nowadays the fake is on display in the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan.”

DeLarava’s heart was pounding, and tears were again leaking out of her eyes. “Fake of…what?”

“It’s supposed to contain Edison’s last breath.”

“Edison?” My God, deLarava thought, no wonder the psychic gain is cranked up so high around here since Monday! No wonder Apie is coming out of the sea, and every ghost in town needs only a sneeze to set it frolicking. I guessed that the Monday-night torture-murder wasn’t a coincidence, and that the kid had run away with someone heavy—but Edison!

“Yeah,” said Ayres blandly, “the guy that invented the lightbulb. Anyway, Jiddu married a rich Indian woman who was also into this spiritual stuff, and they seem to have formed a sort of splinter cult of their own, just the two of them. They bought the house in Beverly Hills, where they were killed Monday night. The police are aware of the place—they’ve had to answer a lot of complaints from the Parganases and their neighbors. A lot of drunks and bums used to come around demanding to talk to somebody named Dante or Don Tay.”

“That would have been the mask,” said deLarava softly. “They kept it in a hollowed-out copy of The Divine Comedy or something.” She waved at Ayres. “Never mind. Go on.”

“Some comedy. Their kid, this Koot Hoomie that you’re looking for, was born in ’81. His teachers say that he was okay, considering that his parents were trying to raise him to be some kind of Hindoo holy man. Have you got any calls?”

“Hundreds,” she said. “People have grabbed every stray kid in L.A. except Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She thought of the boy out there in the alleys and parking lots somewhere, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping all alone under hedges…and last night’s dream came back to her, forcefully.

She was crying again. “I’ve got to get some air,” she said, blundering up out of her chair. “Tell Joey Webb to keep looking—and tell him to keep an eye on the canals.”

THE SEA was too full of imagined ghosts, waked up and opposing her, and the carpeted corridors and long splendid galleries seemed suddenly bristly with hostile ectoplasm accumulated like nicotine stains over the decades, so she fled to the Windsor Salon on R Deck.

She liked the Windsor Salon because it had hanging chandeliers, not the lights-on-columns that stood everywhere else in the ship, big Art Deco mushrooms with glowing mica-shade caps. The Windsor Salon had been built after the Queen Mary had been permanently moored in Long Beach, had in fact been built in the space of one of the now-useless funnels, and so it could afford the luxury of ceiling lights that would have swung and broken if the ship had been out at sea.

No parties of tourists were being shown through the room at the moment, so she collapsed into one of the convention-hotel chairs and buried her face in her hands.

She had dreamed of a group of little girls who were camping out on a dark plain. At first they had played games around the small fire they had kindled up—a make-believe tea party, charades, hopscotch on lines toed across the gray dust—bur then the noises from the darkness beyond the ring of firelight had made them huddle together. Roars and shouts of subhuman fury had echoed from unseen hills, and the drumbeat of racing hooves and the hard flutter of flags had shaken in the cold wind.

Perhaps the girls had gathered together in this always-dark wasteland because they all had the same name—Kelley. They had formed a ring now, holding hands to contain their camp fire and chattering with tearful, nervous, false cheer, until one of the girls noticed that her companions weren’t real—they were all just mirrors set up closely together in the dirt, reflecting back to her own pale, dirt-smeared face.

And her sudden terror made the face change—the nose was turned up, and became fleshier, the skin around the eyes became pouched and coarse, and the chin receded away, leaving the mouth a long, grinning slit. Kelley had known what this was. She was turning into a pig.

Loretta had driven herself up out of the well of sleep then, and discovered that she was kneeling on the tile floor of the little bathroom, crouching over the toilet and calling down, down, down into the dark so that Kelley might find her way back up out of the deep hole she’d fallen into.

THERE WERE no parking lines painted on the weathered checkerboard of cracked concrete and asphalt behind the apartment building, so Sullivan just parked the van in the shade of a big shaggy old carob tree. He dug around among the faded papers on the dashboard until he found Houdini’s thumb, unpleasantly spitty and dusty now, and then he groped below the passenger seat and retrieved the Bull Durham sack and pushed the thumb back into it.

With the sack in his shirt pocket and his gun snugged in under his belt, he pushed open the door and stepped down onto the broken pavement. Green carob pods were scattered under the overhanging tree branches, and he could see the little V-shaped cuts in the pods where early-morning wild parrots had bitten out the seeds.

This would be the sixth apartment building he checked out. When he had come down off the freeway at Seventh Street in Long Beach, he had quickly confirmed his suspicion that motels never had garages, and then he’d driven around randomly through the run-down residential streets west of Pacific and south of Fourth looking for rental signs.

He had stopped and looked at five places already, and, no doubt because of his stated preference for paying in cash, only a couple of the landlords had seemed concerned about his murky, out-of-state, unverifiable references. He thought he would probably take the last one he had looked at, a $700-a-month studio apartment in a shabby complex on Cerritos Avenue, but he had decided to look at a few more before laying out his money.

He was down on Twenty-first Place now, right next to Bluff Park and only half a block from the harbor shore, and he had just decided that any of these beachfront rentals would be too expensive, when he had driven past this rambling old officelike structure. He wouldn’t even have thought it was an apartment building if it hadn’t had an APT FOR RENT sign propped above the row of black metal mailboxes. It looked promisingly low-rent.

Sullivan walked across the pavement now toward the back side of the building, and soon he was scuffing on plain packed dirt. Along the building’s back wall, between two windowless doors, someone had set up a row of bookshelves, on which sat dozens of mismatched pots with dry plants curling out of them, and off to his left plastic chairs sat around a claw-footed iron bathtub that had been made into a table by having a piece of plywood laid over it. He stared at the doors and wondered if he should just knock at one of them.

He jumped; and then, “Who parked all cattywampus?” came a hoarse call from behind him.

Sullivan turned around and saw a fat, bald-headed old man in plastic sandals limping across the asphalt from around the street-side corner of the building. The man wore no shirt at all, and his suntanned belly overhung the wide-legged shorts that flapped around his skinny legs.

“Are you talking about my van?” asked Sullivan.

“Well, if that’s your van,” the old man said weakly; he inhaled and then went on, “then guess I’m talking about it.” Again he rasped air into his lungs. “Ya damn birdbrain”

“I’m here to speak to the manager of these apartments,” Sullivan said stiffly.

“I’m the manager. My name’s Mr. Shadroe.”

Sullivan stared at him. “You are?” He was afraid this might be just some bum making fun of him. “Well, I want to rent an apartment.”

“I don’t need to… rent an apartment.” Shadroe waved at the van. “If that leaks oil, you’ll have to…park it on the street.” The old man’s face was shiny with sweat, but somehow he smelled spicy, like cinnamon.

“It doesn’t leak oil,” Sullivan said. “I’m looking for an apartment in this area; how much is the one you’ve got?”

“You on SDI or some—kinda methadone treatment? I won’t take you if you are, and I—don’t care if it’s legal for me to say so. And I won’t have children here.”

“None of those things,” Sullivan assured him. “And if I decide I want the place I can pay you right now, first and last month’s rent, in cash.”

“That’s illegal, too. The first and last. Gotta call the last months rent a deposit nowadays. But I’ll take it. Six hundred a month, utilities are included….’cause the whole building’s on one bill. That’s twelve hundred, plus a real deposit of…three hundred dollars. Fifteen. Hundred, altogether. Let’s go into my office and I can…give you a receipt and the key.” Talking seemed to be an effort for the man, and Sullivan wondered if he was asthmatic or had emphysema.

Shadroe had already turned away toward one of the two doors and Sullivan stepped after him. ‘I’d,” he said laughing in spite of himself, “I’d like to see the place first.”

Shadroe had fished a huge, bristling key chain from his shorts pocket and was unlocking the door. “It’s got a new refrigerator—in it, I hooked it up myself yesterday. I do all my—own electrical and plumbing. What do you do?”

“Do? Oh, I’m a bartender.” Sullivan had heard that bartenders tended to be reliable tenants.

Shadroe had pushed the door open, and now waved Sullivan toward the dark interior. “That’s honest work, boy,” he said. “You don’t need to be ashamed.”

“Thanks.”

Sullivan followed him into a long, narrow room dimly lit by foliage-blocked windows. A battered couch sat against one of the long walls and a desk stood across from it under the windows; over the couch were rows of bookshelves like the ones outside, empty except for stacks of old People magazines and, on the top shelf, three water-stained pink stuffed toys. A television set was humming faintly on a table, though its screen was black.

Shadroe pulled out the desk chair and sat down heavily. “Here’s a rental agreement,” he said, tugging a sheet of paper out of a stack. “No pets either. What are those shoes? Army-man shoes?”

Sullivan was wearing the standard shoes worn by tramp electricians, black leather with steel-reinforced toes. “Just work shoes,” he said, puzzled. “Good for standing in,” he added, feeling like an idiot.

“They gotta go. I got wood floors, and you’ll be boomin’ around all night—nobody get any sleep—I get complaints about it. Get yourself some Wallabees,” he said with a look, of pained earnestness. “The soles are foam rubber”

The rental agreement was a Xerox copy, and the bottom half of it hadn’t printed clearly. Shadroe began laboriously filling in the missing paragraphs in ink. Sullivan just sat helplessly and watched the old man squint and frown as his spotty brown hand worked the pen heavily across the paper.

The old man’s cinnamon smell was stronger in here, and staler. The room was silent except for the scratching of the pen and the faint hum of the television set, and Sullivan’s hairline was suddenly damp with sweat.

He found himself thinking of the containment areas of nuclear generating plants, where the pressure was kept slightly below normal to keep radioactive dust from escaping; and of computer labs kept under higher-than-normal pressure to keep ordinary dust out. Some pressure was wrong in this dingy office

I don’t want to stay here, he thought. I’m not going to stay here.

“While you’re doing that,” he said unsteadily, “I might go outside and look around at the place.”

“I’ll’ be done here. In a second.”

“No, really, I’ll be right outside.”

Sullivan walked carefully to the door and stepped out into the sunlight, and then he hurried across the patchwork pavement to his van, taking deep breaths of the clean sea air.

That apartment back up on Cerritos looks good, he told himself. (This place is only half a block from the beach, and I could probably see the Queen Mary across the water from the cul-de-sac right beyond the driveway, but) I certainly couldn’t count on getting anything done here, not with this terrible Shadroe guy blundering around.

He unlocked the van door, carefully so as not to touch the drying egg-smear, and climbed in. Mr. Shadroe was probably still sitting back there in the office, carefully writing out the missing paragraphs of the rental agreement; not even breathing as his clumsy fingers worked the pen.

Sullivan pulled the door closed, but paused with the key halfway extended toward the ignition. The man hadn’t been breathing.

Shadroe had inhaled a number of times, in order to talk, but he had not been breathing. Sullivan was suddenly, viscerally sure that that’s what had so upset him in there—he had been standing next to a walking vapor lock, the pressure of a living soul in the vacuum of a dead body.

What are you telling me? he asked himself; that Mr. Shadroe is a dead guy? If so, I should definitely get out of here, fast, before some shock causes him to throw stress-shells, and his overdrawn lifeline collapses and he goes off like a goddamn firebomb, like the patient at Elizalde’s Día del Muerte séance.

Still uncomfortable with the idea, he put the key into the ignition.

Shadroe could be alive, he thought—he could just have been breathing very low, very quietly. Oh yeah? he answered himself immediately. When he inhaled in order to speak, it sounded like somebody dragging a tree branch through a mail slot.

Maybe he’s just one of the old solidified ghosts, a man-shaped pile of animated litter, who drifted down here to be near the ocean, as Elizalde in her interview unaware of how literally she was speaking, noted that the poor old creatures like to do. (“Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface…”) But Shadroe didn’t quite talk crazily enough, and a ghost wouldn’t be able to deal with the paperwork of running an apartment building; collecting rents, paying taxes and license and utility bills.

Okay, so what if he is one of the rare people who can continue to occupy and operate their bodies after they’ve died? What’s it to me?

Sullivan twisted the key, and the engine started right up, without even a touch of his foot on the gas pedal.

I wonder how long he’s been dead, he thought. If his death was recent, like during the last day or so, he probably hasn’t even noticed it himself yet; but if he’s been hanging on for a while, he must have figured out measures to avoid the collapse: he must not ever sleep for example, and I’ll bet he spends a lot of time out on the ocean.

C…patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water It’s been worth field trips.”)

He didn’t want to think, right now, about what Elizalde had said in the interview.

What would that blind witch on the Honda see, he wondered instead, if she were to come around here? With a dead guy up and walking around all over this building and grounds, insulting people’s vehicles and shoes, this whole place must look like a patch of dry rot, psychically.

This place would be good cover.

And the location is perfect for me. And six hundred a month, with utilities included—and a new refrigerator!—is pretty good.

Sullivan sighed, and switched off the engine and got out of the van. When he had walked back across the yard and stepped into the office, Shadroe was still at work on the rental agreement. Sullivan sat down on the couch to wait, stoically enduring the psychically stressed atmosphere.

(“Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”)

“If you’ll take cash right now, he said unsteadily, “I’d like to start moving my stuff in this afternoon.”

“If you right now got the time,” said Shadroe, without looking up. “I right now got the key.”

Sullivan had the time. He was suddenly in no hurry to go find Angelica Anthem Elizalde, for he was pretty sure that he knew where she would be.

At the canals at Venice Beach.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

“I cant go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

SITTING in a bus seat by a sunny window, warmed by the noon glare through the glass and by the oversized fleece-lined denim jacket he had bought at a thrift store on Slauson, Kootie was too sleepy and comfortable to worry. He was sure that the last two days and three nights had aged his face way beyond that picture on the billboards, and, especially with the sunglasses; he was sure he must look like a teenager. The denim jacket even smelled like stale beer.

Keeping his face maturely expressionless, he cocked an eyebrow out the window at the pollo stands and the 1950s-futuristic car washes along Crenshaw Boulevard. He would be transferring at Manchester to catch another RTD bus to the Dockweiler State Beach at Playa del Rey.

The boy had awakened at dawn, his eyes already open and stinging in the ancient paint fumes in the abandoned car, and he had recognized the still drop cloth under his chin, and the split and faded dashboard in front of him; he had clearly remembered breaking the wind-wing window the night before, and opening the door and climbing in.

But he hadn’t recognized the city dimly visible beyond the dusty windshield.

Cables and wires were strung so densely against the sky overhead that for one sleepy moment he had thought he was under some kind of war-surplus submarine-catching net; then he had seen that the wires were higher than he had thought, and separate, strung haphazardly from telegraph poles and bulky insulators on the high roofs of all the old buildings. And even through the grime on the glass he could see that they were old buildings—imposing brick structures with arched windows at the top and jutting cornices.

He knew he’d have to prove himself here, in spite of being virtually broke and so terribly young—here in Boston, his first big city—

Boston?

He reached a hand out from under the drop cloth and opened the door. It squeaked out on its rusty hinges and let in a gust of fresh morning air that smelled distantly of what he knew must be coal smoke and horse manure—and then Kootie was glad he was sitting down, for he was suddenly so dizzy that he grabbed the edge of the seat.

“You’re,” croaked his own voice, “don’t tell me—Kootie.” After a moment he said, voluntarily, “Right.” Then his voice went on, thickly, “I was dreaming. This isn’t Boston, is it? Nor New Jersey yet. It’s…Los Angeles.” His eyes closed and his hands came up and rubbed his eye sockets. “Sorry,” said his voice as his right hand sprang away from the painful swelling around his right eye.

When he looked around again, it was typical backstreet Los Angeles that he saw and smelled around him: low stuccoed buildings and palm trees, and the smells of diesel exhaust and gardenias; above a three-story building a couple of blocks away, crows were diving over the condenser fans of a big rooftop air-conditioner shed and then lofting up on the hot air drafts, over and over again. Only a few wires drooped overhead from the telephone poles.

The night air had been cold, and Kootie’s nose was stuffed—after he sniffed, his jammed-up sinuses emitted an almost ultrasonic wheee, like the flash attachment on a camera recharging.

“All this running around is doing you no good at all, son,” Edison had croaked then. “And I’m not getting any fresher out here. To hell with New Jersey. Let’s get to the sea. I’ll be able to just go into the seawater, safely, and be gone; and you’ll be free of me, free to go be a normal boy.”

Kootie had not said anything then, as he climbed stiffly out of the car, stretched as well as he could with the heavy I-ON-A-CO cable belt constricting his waist, and limped toward the lot fence; but he thought the old Edison ghost could probably tell that Kootie didn’t want to lose him.

“WHERE WILL I go?” asked Kootie softly now as he clambered painfully down the steps of the bus exit and hopped to the Manchester sidewalk. I’ll need money.”

All at once, into the muted early-afternoon air, “You’re young!” shouted Edison with Kootie’s shrill voice. “You’re still alive! You can send and receive as fast as any of them!” Kootie was hobbling away from the bus stop as quickly as he could, not looking at any of the faces around him, his own face burning with embarrassed horror and all feelings of maturity completely blown away.

He caught a breath and choked out, “Shut up!”—but Edison used the rest of the breath to yell, “Skedaddle to the Boston office of Western Union! I’ve got to get to New Jersey anyway, to pick up my diploma!” Kootie was sweating now in the chilly breeze, and he had clenched his teeth against his own squawking voice, but Edison kept yelling anyway: “The usual job! Napping during night work, with the ghost repellers popping and the gizmo sending your sixing signals on the hour!”

Kootie tried to shout Be quiet! but Edison was trying to say something more, and the resulting scream was something like “Baklava!” (which was a kind of pastry Kootie’s parents had sometimes brought home for him).

Kootie was just crying and running blindly in despair now, blundering against pedestrians and light poles, and he wasn’t aware of slapping footsteps behind him until a pair of hands clasped his shoulders and yanked him back to a stop.

“Kid,” said a man’s concerned voice, “what’s the matter? Was somebody bothering you? Where do you live? My wife and I can drive you home.”

Kootie turned into the man’s arms and sobbed against a wool sweater. “The beach,” he hiccuped; “the police—I don’t know where I’ve got to go. I’m lost, mister.” Blessedly Edison seemed to have withdrawn.

“Well, you’re okay now, I promise. I hopped out of our car at the light when I saw you running—my wife is driving around the block. Let’s go back and catch her at the corner, away from all these people here.”

Kootie was happy to do as the man said. Several of the people behind him on the corner were laughing, and somebody called out a filthy suggestion about what he should do once he had skedaddled to New Jersey and picked up his “dipshit diploma.” It horrified Kootie to think that adults could be the same as kids; and now even Edison was drunk or had gone crazy or something.

As he walked along quickly beside the man who had stopped him, Kootie looked up at his rescuer. The man had short blond hair and round, wire-rim glasses, and he looked tanned and fit, as if he played tennis. He still had one hand on Kootie’s right shoulder, and Kootie reached up and clasped the man’s wrist.

“Here she is, kid,” the man said kindly as a shiny new teal-blue minivan came nosing up to the Manchester curb. “Are you hungry? We can stop for a bite to eat if you like.”

The passenger door had swung open, and a dark-haired young woman in shorts had one knee up and was leaning across the seat and smiling uncertainly. “Well, hi there, kiddo,” she said as Kootie let go of the man’s wrist and hurried to the minivan.

“Hi, ma’am,” Kootie said, pausing humbly on the curb. “Your husband said you could give me a ride.”

She laughed. “Hop in then.”

Kootie hiked himself up, and then climbed around the console to crouch behind the passenger seat as the man got in and closed the door. The interior of the minivan smelled like a new pair of dress shoes straight out of the Buster Brown box.

“Let’s head toward the 405, Eleanor,” the man said, “just to get moving. And if you see a Denny’s—did you want something to eat, uh, young man?” The minivan started forward, and Kootie sat down on the blue-carpeted floor.

“My name’s Koot Hoomie,” he said breathlessly, having decided to trust these people. “I’m called Kootie. Yes, please, about eating—but some kind of takeout would be better. I get screaming fits sometimes. You saw. It’s not like I’m crazy, or anything.” He tried to remember the name of the ailment that made some people yell terrible things, but couldn’t. All he could think of was Failure to Thrive, which an infant cousin of his had reportedly died of. Kootie probably had that too. “It’s that syndrome,” he finished lamely.

“Tourette’s, probably,” the man said. “I’m Bill Fussel, and this is my wife, Eleanor Have you had any sleep, Kootie? There are blankets back there.”

“No thanks,” said Kootie absently, “I slept in an old car last night.” Get to the beach he thought; let crazy Edison jump into the sea, and then these nice people can adopt me “Can we go to the beach? Any beach. I want to…wade out in the water, I guess.” He tried to think of a plausible reason for it, and decided that anything he came up with would sound like a kid lie. Then, “My parents died Monday night,” he found himself saying to the back of Mr. Fussel’s head. “In our religion it’s a purifying ritual. We’re Hindus.”

He had no idea whether it had been Edison or himself that had said it, nor if any of it was true. I suppose we might have been Hindus, he thought. In school I always just put down Protestant

“A beach?” said Mr. Fussel. “I guess we could go out to Hermosa or Redondo. Elly, why don’t we stop somewhere and you can call your mom and let her know we’ll be a little late.”

For a moment no one spoke, and the quiet burr of the engine was the only sound inside the minivan.

“Okay,” said Mrs. Fussel.

“Where does your mom live?” asked Kootie, again not sure it was himself who had spoken.

“Riverside,” said Mrs. Fussel quickly.

“Where in Riverside? I used to live there

“Lamppost and Riverside Drive,” Mrs. Fussel said, and Kootie saw her dart a harried glance at her husband.

Now Kootie knew it was Edison speaking for him, for with no intention at all he found himself saying, “There are no such streets in Riverside.” Kootie didn’t know if there were or not, and certainly Edison didn’t either. Why are you being rude? he thought hard at the Edison ghost in his mind.

“I guess she knows where her mother lives,” Mr. Fussel began in a stern voice, but Kootie was interrupting:

“Very well, name for me any five big streets in Riverside.”

“We don’t go there a lot—” said Mrs. Fussel weakly.

Mr. Fussel turned around in his seat and faced Kootie. He was frowning. “What’s the matter, Kootie? Do you want us to drive you back to that corner and let you out?”

“Yes,” Kootie’s voice said firmly, and then Edison kept Kootie’s jaw clamped shut so that his No! came out as just a prolonged “Nnnnn!”

“That’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Mr. Fussel said.

“Then let me out—dammit!—right—here! Kootie, let me talk! It’s kidnapping if you people keep me in this vehicle!”

Mrs. Fussel spoke up. “Let’s let him out and forget the whole thing.”

“Eleanor, he’s sick, listen to him! It would be the same as murder if we left him out on these streets. It’s our duty to call the police.” The man had got up out of the passenger seat and turned swayingly to face Kootie. “And even if we have to call in the police, we’ll still get the twenty thousand dollars.”

Kootie spun toward the sliding door in the side of the van, but before he could grab the handle the man had lunged at him and whacked him hard in the chest with his open palm, and Kootie jackknifed sideways onto the back seat; he was gasping, trying to suck air into his lungs and get his legs onto the floor so that he could spring toward Mrs. Fussel and perhaps wrench at the steering wheel, but Mr. Fussel gave him a stunning slap across the face and then strapped the seat belt across him, and pulled the strap tight through the buckle, with Kootie’s arms under the woven fabric.

The boy could thrash back and forth, but his arms were pinioned. He was squinting in the new brightness, for the man had knocked his sunglasses off.

“If you,” Kootie gasped, his heart hammering, “let me go—I won’t tell the police—that you hit me—and tied me up.”

Mr. Fussel had to duck his head to stand in the back of the minivan, and now he rocked on his feet and slapped the ceiling to keep his balance. “Drive carefully!” he shouted at his wife. “If a cop pulls us over right now we’re fucked!”

Kootie could hear Mrs. Fussel crying. “Don’t talk like that in front of the boy! I’m pulling over, and you’re going to let him out!”

“Do as she says,” Edison grated, “or I’ll say you gave me the shiner, too. Kept me for days.”

Mr. Fussel was pale. For a moment he looked as though he might hit Kootie again; then he disappeared behind the rear seat and began clanking around among some metal objects. When he reappeared he was peeling a strip oh a silvery roll of duct tape.

A sudden intrusive vision: two stark figures strapped into chairs with duct tape, eye sockets bloody and empty…

Edison was blown aside in Kootie’s mind as the boy screamed with all the force of his aching lungs, clenching his fists and his eyes and whipping his head back and forth, dimly aware of the minivan slewing as the noise battered the carpeted interior—but the strip of tape scraped in between Kootie’s jaws and then more tape was being wound roughly around the back of his head, over his chin, around his bucking head again and over his upper lip.

Kootie was breathing whistlingly, messily, through his nose. He heard tape rip, and then Mr. Fussel was taping Kootie’s elbows and forearms to the seat belt.

Against the tape that his teeth were grinding at, Kootie was grunting and huffing, and after two or three blind, impacted seconds he realized that his lips and tongue were trying to form words; they couldn’t, around the tape, but he could feel what his mouth was trying to say:

Stop it! Stop it! Listen to me, boy! You might die even if you calm down and stay alert watch for a chance to run, but you’ll certainly die if you keep thrashing and screaming like a big baby! Come on, son, be a man!

Kootie let the mania carry him for one more second, howling out of him to swamp Edison’s words in a torrent of unreasoning noise; finally the muffled scream wobbled away to silence, leaving his lungs empty and aching. He raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, held it for a moment, and then let them slump back down—and the panic fell away from him, leaving him almost calm, though the pounding of his heart was visibly twitching his shirt collar.

Kootie was motionless now, but as tense as a flexed fencing foil. He told himself that Edison was right; he had to stay alert. Nobody was going to kill him right here in these people’s minivan; eventually someone would have to cut him free of this seat, and he could pretend to be asleep when they did, and then jump for freedom in the instant that the tape was cut.

He was in control of himself again, coldly and deeply angry at the Fussels and already ashamed at having gone to pieces in front of them.

And so he was surprised when he began weeping. His head jerked down and he was wailing “Hoo-hoo-hoo” behind the tape, on and on, even though he could feel drool moving toward the corner of his distended mouth.

“For…God’s sake, William,” said Mrs. Fussel in a shrill monotone. “Have you gone crazy? You can’t—”

“Pull over,” the man said, blundering back up toward the front of the van. “I’ll drive. This is the kid. El, it’s Koot Hoomie Parganas and he’s obviously an escaped nut! They’ll put him back in restraints as soon as we turn him over to them! I’ll…bite my arm, and say he did it. Or better, we’ll buy a cheap knife, and I’ll cut myself. He’s dangerous, we had to tape him up. And it’s twenty thousand goddamn dollars.”

Kootie kept up his hoo-hooing, and did it louder when Mrs. Fussel turned the wheel to the right to pull over; and then he felt his drooling mouth try to grin around the tape as the three of them were jolted by the right front tire going up over the curb. Edison’s enjoying this, Kootie thought.

Mr. Fussel slapped him across the face—it didn’t sting much this time, through the tape. “Shut up or I’ll run a loop of tape over your nose,” the man whispered.

Edison winked Kootie’s good eye at Mr. Fussel. Kootie hoped Edison knew what he was doing here.

The Fussels found a place to park in a lot somewhere—the windshield faced a close cinder-block wall so that no passersby would see the bound and gagged boy in the back of the minivan—and then Mr. Fussel picked some quarters out of a dish on the console and climbed out, locking the passenger door behind him.

After several seconds of no sound but the quiet burr of the idling engine, Mrs. Fussel turned around in the drivers seat.

“He’s a nice man,” she said. Kootie could almost believe she was talking to herself. “We want to have children ourselves.”

Kootie stared at the floor, afraid Edison would give her a sardonic look.

“Neither of us knows how to deal with…a child with problems,” she went on, “a runaway, a violent runaway. We don’t believe in hitting children. This was like when you have to hit someone who’s drowning, if you want to save them. Can you understand? If you tell the people from the hospital—or wherever it is that you live—if you tell them Bill hit you, we’ll have to tell them why he hit you, won’t we? Trying to bite, and yelling obscenities. That means nasty words,” she explained earnestly.

Kootie forgot not to stare at her.

“Your parents were murdered,” she said.

He nodded expressionlessly.

“Oh, good! That you knew it, I mean, that I wasn’t breaking the news to you. And I guess someone hit you in the eye. You’ve had a bad time, but I want you to realize that today really is the first day of your, of the rest of your—wait, you were living at home, weren’t you? The story in the paper said that. You weren’t in a hospital. Who’s put up this reward for you?”

Kootie widened his eyes at her.

“Relatives?”

Kootie shook his head, slowly.

“You don’t think it was the people that murdered your parents, do you?”

Kootie nodded furiously. “Mm-hmmm,” he grunted.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

Kootie rolled his eyes and then stared hard at her.

Alter a moment her expression of concern wilted into dismay. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Twenty thousand dollars? You were a witness!”

Close enough. Rocking his head back and humming loudly was as close as Kootie could come to conveying congratulations.

She was saying “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” as she got out of the seat and stepped over the console, and then she was prying with her fingernails at the tape edges around his wrists.

The tape wasn’t peeling up at all, and Kootie didn’t waste hope imagining that she’d free him. He wasn’t surprised when keys rattled against the outside of the passenger door and the lock dunked and then Mr. Fussel was leaning in.

“What are you doing, El? Get away from—”

“He’s a witness, Bill! The people that killed his parents are—are the ones you just called! Did you tell them where we are? Let’s get out of here right now!” She hurried back up front to the driver’s seat and grabbed the gearshift lever.

Mr. Fussel gripped her hand. “Where’d you get all that, El? He can’t even talk. These people sounded okay.”

“Then let’s drive somewhere and let Goaty talk to us, and you can call them back if we’re sure it’s all right.”

“Mm-hmm!” put in Kootie as loudly as he could.

“El, they’ll be here in ten minutes. We can talk to them right here, this is a public place, he’ll be safe. It’s his safety I’m concerned with; what if we have an accident driving? We’re both upset—”

“An accident? I won’t have an accident. They can—”

“They’re bringing cash, El! We can’t expect them to be driving all over L.A. with that kind of cash, in these kinds of neighborhoods!”

“You’re worried about them? They killed his—”

The minivan shook as something collided gently but firmly with the rear end, and then there were simultaneous knocks against the driver’s and passenger’s windows. Even from the back seat Kootie could see the blunt metal cylinders of silencers through the glass.

That wasn’t ten minutes, thought Kootie.

A voice spoke quietly from outside. “Roll down the windows right now or we’ll kill you both.”

Both of the Fussels hastily pressed buttons on their armrests, and the windows buzzed down.

“The boy’s in the back seat,” Mr. Fussel said eagerly.

A hand came in through the open window and pushed Mr. Fussel’s head aside, and then a stranger peered in. Behind mirror sunglasses and a drooping mustache, he was nothing more than a pale, narrow face.

“He’s taped in,” the face noted. “Good. You two get out.”

“Sure,” Mr. Fussel said. “Come on, El, get out. You guys are gonna take the van? Fine! We won’t report it stolen until—what, tomorrow? Would that be okay? Is the money in something we can carry inconspicuously?”

The face had withdrawn, but Kootie heard the voice say, “You’ll have no problems with it.”

Mrs. Fussel was sobbing quietly. “Bill, you idiot,” she said, but she opened her door and got out at the same time her husband did.

A fat man in a green turtleneck sweater got in where she had been, and the man with the mirror sunglasses got in on the passenger side. The doors were pulled closed, and the minivan rocked as the obstruction was moved from behind it, and then the fat man had put the engine into reverse and was backing out. He glanced incuriously at Kootie.

“Check the tape on the kid,” he said to his companion.

When the man in the sunglasses stepped into the back of the van, Kootie didn’t make any noises, but tried to catch his eye. The man just tugged at the seat belt, though, and then found the roll of tape and bound Kootie’s ankles together and taped them sideways to the seat leg, without looking at Kootie’s face.

Somehow Kootie was still just tense, no more than if he were one of only a couple of kids left standing at a spelling bee. After the man had returned to the front seat and fastened his seat belt, Kootie wondered what had happened to the Fussels. He supposed that they were dead already, shot behind some Dumpster. It was easy for him to avoid picturing the two of them. He looked at the backs of his captors’ heads and tried to figure out who the two men could be. They didn’t look like associates of the raggedy one-armed man.

Kootie was surprised, and cautiously pleased, with his own coolness in this scary situation…until he realized that it was based on a confidence that Thomas Alva Edison would think of some way to get him out of it; then he remembered that Edison seemed to have gone crazy, and in a few minutes tears of pure fright were rolling warmly along the top edges of the duct tape on Kootie’s cheeks as the minivan rocked through traffic.

They may not mean to kill me, he thought. Certainly not yet. Our destination might be miles from here, and—

He tried to think of any other comforting thoughts.

—And there’ll probably be a lot of traffic lights, he told himself forlornly.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

“I don’t like the look of it at all” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand, if it likes.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

SULLIVAN had driven up the 405 past LAX airport, past one of the government-sanctioned freeway-side murals (this one portraying a lot of gigantic self-righteous-looking joggers that made him think better of the fugitive graffiti taggers with their crude territory markers), and then he followed the empty new sunlit lanes of the 90 freeway out to where it came down and narrowed and became a surface street, Lincoln Boulevard, among new condominium buildings and old used-camper lots.

The plaster hands were on the passenger seat and the Bull Durham sack was in his shirt pocket, above the sun-and-body-heated bulk of his .45 in the canvas fanny pack. He had bought a triple-A map at a gas station and studied it hard, and he had only nerved himself up to come to Venice by vowing to stay entirely out of sight of the ocean.

The canals, thin blue lines on the map, were only half a fingernail inland from the black line that indicated the shore, and it was in the surf off this little stretch of beach that his father had drowned in ’59—and it was from there that he and Sukie had fled in ’86, leaving Loretta deLarava in possession of their father’s wallet and keys and the three cans of…

Nothing looked familiar, for he had been here only that one time, in ’86. He managed to miss North Venice Boulevard, and had to loop back through narrow streets where summer rental houses crowded right up to the curbs, and parked cars left hardly any room for traffic, and then when he came upon North Venice again he saw that it was a one-way street aimed straight out at the now-near ocean; and though he was ready to just put the van in reverse and honk his way backward a couple of blocks, he saw a stretch of empty curb right around the corner of North Venice and Pacific, and he vas able to pull in and park without having to focus past the back bumper of the Volkswagen in the space ahead of him.

He didn’t want to be Peter Sullivan here at all, even if nobody was looking for him—presumably his father’s ghost was in the sea only a block away, and that was enough of a presence to shame him into assuming every shred of disguise possible.

So he tied an old bandanna around the plaster hands and took them with him when he got out and locked the van. The sea breeze had cleared the coastal sky of smog, but it was chilly, and he was glad of his old leather flight jacket.

Two quarters in the parking meter bought him an hour’s worth of time, and he turned his back on the soft boom of the surf and stalked across Pacific with the hands clamped against his ribs and his hands jammed in his pockets. The plaster hands were heavy, but at a 7-Eleven store an hour ago he had bought six lightbulbs and stuffed them into his jacket pockets, and he didn’t want to risk breaking any of them by shifting the awkward bundle under his arm. He stepped carefully up the high curb at the north side of Pacific.

Almost there anyway, he told himself as he peered ahead.

He was in a wide, raised parking lot between the North and South Venice Boulevards, and past the far curb of South, just this side of a windowless gray cement building, he could see a railing paralleling the street, and another that slanted away down, out of sight. There was a gap there between rows of buildings, and it clearly wasn’t a street.

He crossed the parking lot and hobbled stiffly across South Venice, and when he had got to the railing and the top of the descending walkway, he stopped. He had found the westernmost of the canals, and he was relieved to see that it didn’t look familiar at all.

Below him, fifty feet across and stretching straight away to an arched bridge in the middle distance, the water was still, reflecting the eucalyptus and bamboo and lime trees along the banks. The canal walls were yard-high brickworks of slate-gray half-moons below empty sidewalks, and the houses set back from the water looked tranquil in the faintly brassy October sunlight. He could see a broad side-channel in the east bank a block ahead, but this ramp from South Venice led down to the west bank, and apparently the only way to walk along that side-canal would be to go past it on this side, cross the bridge, and then come back.

By the time he had walked halfway down the ramp toward the canal-bank level, he had left behind the gasping sea breeze and all of the sounds of the beach-city traffic, and all he could hear was bees in the bushes and wind chimes and a distant grumbling of ducks.

He had never cared to read up on this particular seaside town, but from things people had said over the years he had gathered that it had been built in the first years of the century as a mock-up of the original Italian Venice; the canals had been more extensive then, and there had even been gliding gondolas poled by gondoliers with Italian accents. The notion hadn’t caught on, though, and the place had fallen into decrepitude, and in the years after World War II it had been a seedy, shacky beatnik colony, with rocking oil pumps between the houses on the banks of the stagnating canals.

He was walking along the sidewalk now, and he’d gone far enough so that he could look down the cross canal. Another footbridge arched over the blue-sky-reflecting water in that direction, framed by tall palm trees, and a solider-looking bridge farther down looked as though it could accommodate cars.

City-planning types had moved to have the canals filled in, but the residents had protested effectively, and the canals were saved. The neat brickwork of the banks was clearly a modern addition, and many of the houses had the stucco anonymity or the custom Tudor look of new buildings, though there were still dozens of the old, comfortably weather-beaten California bungalow-style houses set in among ancient untrimmed palm trees and overhanging shingle roofs.

Two women and a collie were walking toward him along the sidewalk he was on, and though neither of the women looked particularly like the pictures he’d seen of Elizalde; he dug with his free hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of the lightbulbs and the paper 7-Eleven bag.

Sullivan noticed a brown plastic owl on a fence post, and it reminded him that he had seen another one on a roof peak behind him. Ahead, now, he spied still another, swinging on a string from a tree branch. And he could hear several sets of jangling wind chimes—maybe Elizalde was right about ghosts being drawn to places like this, and the residents had set out these things as scarecrows. Scareghosts.

“Afternoon,” he said as he passed the ladies and the dog.

When they were behind him he slid the lightbulb into the bag and crouched over the pavement. He glanced back at the two women, and then swung the bag in an arc onto the cement, popping the bulb.

Both of the women jumped in surprise—right after the noise.

“Excuse me,” he said sheepishly, nodding and waving at them.

He straightened and kept walking, tucking the jingling bag back into his pocket.

The white-painted wooden footbridge was steep, and he paused at the crest to shift the Houdini hands to his left side. He was sweating, and wishing now that he’d left the things in the van.

The water below him was clear, and he could see rocks in it but no fish. There had been fish—

HE WAS halfway up the sidewalk of the branch canal, staring at a bleached steer skull on the wall of an old wooden house (another scareghost!), and he had no recollection of having descended from the bridge or walking this far up.

Aside from the two women he had seen, who had since disappeared, there seemed to be no one out walking along the canals this afternoon. He looked around. Even the houses all seemed to have been evacuated—he hadn’t even seen a cat. (His heart was knocking inside his chest.) The water was too still, the houses by the canal were too low, crouching under the tall legs of the palm trunks, and the silence wasn’t nice anymore—it was the silence of a dark yard when all the crickets suddenly stop chirping at once.

Elizalde wasn’t here, and he didn’t want to meet whatever might be.

Without noticing it he had already passed the footbridge on this canal branch, but the wider bridge was still ahead of him, and as he started toward it he saw a car mount it from the islanded side, pause at the crest, and then nose down the far slope-slowly, for the arch was so steep that the driver couldn’t be able to see the pavement ahead of him.

Just A.O.P., dude, Sullivan thought.

He was clutching the plaster hands with both of his own hands as he walked now, and it was all he could do not to break into a run. He didn’t look back to make sure nothing was crawling out of the canal behind him, because he was sure that if he did, he would have to keep on looking back as he fled this place, would have to walk backward toward the bridge that led away to the normal city channels that were asphalt and not water, and something would manifest itself ahead of him, and then just wait for him to back into it.

His eyebrows itched with sweat, and he was breathing fast and shallow.

This is just a funk, he thought, a fit of nerves. There are other canals here (Are there?) and Elizalde might be on the sidewalk of the next one over, or the one beyond that; she might be stark naked and waving her arms and riding a goddamn unicycle, but you won’t see her because you’re panicking here.

So be it. She couldn’t have helped me anyway. I’ll find some other way to warn my father’s ghost (this trip out here was an idiotic long shot) after I drive out of this damned town and find a place to relax and chug a couple of fast, cold beers.

His right shoulder was brushing against vines and bricks as he strode toward the bridge, and he realized that he was crowding the fences of the houses, avoiding the bank—horrified, in fact, at the thought of falling into the shallow water.

the way all sounds echo like metallic groans underwater

He must have just dropped the plaster hands. He was running, and his unimpeded hands were clenched into fists, pumping the air as his legs pounded under him. From the shoulder of his jacket he heard a snap, and then another, as if stitches were being broken.

At the foot of the bridge he stopped, and let his breathing slow down. This bridge was part of a street, Dell Street, and he could hear cars sighing past on South Venice Boulevard ahead. Even if something audibly swirled the water of the canal now, he felt that he could sprint and be in the middle of the boulevard before his first squirted tears of fright would have had time to hit the pavement.

With a careful, measured tread he walked up the slope of the bridge, and he paused at the crest. Ahead of him on the right side of the street was the grandest yet of the neo-Tudor buildings, a place with gables and stained-glass windows and an inset tower with antique chimney pots on its shingled funnel roof. He was wondering if it might be a restaurant, with a bar and a men’s room, when in the bright stillness he heard something splashing furtively in the water under the bridge.

All he did was exhale all the air out of his lungs, and then rest his hands on the coping of the bridge and look down over the edge.

THERE WAS someone crouched down there, beside a small white fiberglass rowboat that had been drawn up onto the gravel slope beside the bridge abutment; the figure was wearing a tan jumpsuit and a many-colored knitted tarn that concealed the hair, but Sullivan could see by the flexed curve of the hips and the long legs that it was a woman. Blinking and peering more closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t looking at the boat, but at the barred storm drain that the boat was moored to. She was swirling her hand in the water and calling softly through the grating, as if to someone in the tunnel on the other side of the steel bars.

“Frank?” she said. “Frank, don’t hide from me.”

Sullivan’s heart was pounding again, and belatedly he wondered if he had really wanted to find this Elizalde woman.

For that had to be who this was. Still, he silently reached up to his coat pocket (the pocket flap felt rough, like cloth instead of leather) and fished out a lightbulb. Holding it by the threaded metal base, he swung the glass bulb at the stone coping of the bridge.

“Yah!” shouted the woman below, scrambling up and splashing one foot into the water; and the bulb popped against the coping.

She turned a scared glance up at him, and a moment later she had ducked under the bridge, out of his sight.

“Wait!” yelled Sullivan, hurrying down the landward slope of the bridge. “Doctor—” No, he thought, don’t yell her last name out here, that won’t reassure her. “Angelica!”

She had splashed under the bridge and was back up in the sunlight on the bank on the west side, striding away from him, obviously ready to break into a run at any sound of pursuit. A couple of ducks on the bank hurried into the water, out of her way.

“We can help each other!” he called after her, not stepping down from the bridge onto the sidewalk. “Please, you’re trying to get in touch with this Frank guy, and I need to get in touch with my father!” She was still hurrying away, her long legs taking her farther away with every stride. She wouldn’t even look back. “Lady,” Sullivan yelled in despair, “I need your help!”

That at least stopped her, though she still didn’t turn around.

He opened his mouth to say something else, but she spoke first, in a low, hoarse voice that carried perfectly to his ears but would probably have been inaudible ten feet back: “Go away. My help is poison.”

Here I am in Venice Beach, he thought. “Well, so’s mine. Maybe we cancel out.”

When she turned around she was pushing the knitted cap back from her face, and then she rubbed her hand down her forehead and jaw as if she had a headache or was very tired. “You know who I am,” she said. “Don’t say your name here, and don’t say mine again.” She waved him to silence when he opened his mouth, then went on, “You can follow me to the big parking lot, if you like. Don’t get close to me.”

She walked back, past the foot of the bridge, and started up Dell Street, walking next to the slack-rope fence of the white Tudor house Sullivan had thought was a restaurant. When she had passed it and was halfway to the stop sign at South Venice, he started forward from the bottom of the bridge.

After a few steps, he stopped in confusion and looked down at his own legs.

He was wearing…someone else’s pants, somehow. Instead of the blue jeans he had pulled on in the gym at City College this morning, he was wearing formal gray wool trousers. With cuffs. He crouched to touch them, and two more snaps popped loose from the sleeve of his coat, and then the sleeve was disattached, hanging down over his hand. The sleeve was wool too—he slapped dizzily at his sides—the whole garment was, and it was a suit coat. He couldn’t help looking back, to see if his leather jacket might somehow be lying on the bridge behind him. It wasn’t.

He pulled the sleeve off with his other hand. The upper edge was hemmed, with metal snaps sewed on. He gripped the cuff of the other sleeve and tugged, and that sleeve came off too, with a popping of snaps. (He noted that he was now wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, no longer the plaid flannel he remembered.) The coat was convertible, it could be worn with the sleeves long or short.

Why, he wondered, would anyone want a short-sleeved formal coat?

Well, it occurred to him, a magician might. To show that he didn’t have anything up his sleeves. Houdini was a magician, wasn’t he? Maybe I didn’t lose the mask after all—maybe I’m wearing it.

He breathed deeply, and watched the ducks paddling out across the water. He was still nervous, but the sense of imposed isolation, of being the only moving thing on a microscope slide, had moved on past him.

He looked at his hands, and in the middle of this dream-logic afternoon he wasn’t very surprised, or even very scared, to see (though the sight did speed up his heartbeat) that his hands were different. The fingers were thicker, the nails trimmed rather than bitten, and the thumbs were longer. There were a few small scars on the knuckles, but the scars he remembered were gone.

He lifted the hands and ran the fingers through his hair, and immediately his arms tingled with goose bumps: for his hair felt kinky and wiry, not straight and fine as it normally did. But it was falling back into limp strands as he disordered it, and he could now feel again the constriction of creased leather around his elbows.

When he lowered his arms he found himself catching the sudden weight of the plaster hands; he gripped them firmly and slung them safely under his left arm. A lightbulb broke with a muffled pop in the pocket of his leather jacket, but he didn’t need the lightbulbs anymore.

“Um!” he said loudly, to catch Elizalde’s attention. “Hey, lady!”

She stopped and looked back, and his first thought was that she was a much shorter person than he had originally thought. Then he realized that this was a different woman—plumper than Elizalde, and with curly dark hair unconfined by any sort of hat, and wearing a long skirt.

But it had to be Elizalde. “Look at yourself,” he said quickly, for the skirt was already becoming transparent.

The woman looked down at her own legs, which were now again zipped into the tan jumpsuit. And though Sullivan had not blinked nor seen her figure shift at all against the background of pavement and distant buildings, she was taller, as if she had suddenly moved closer.

He hurried up the narrow sunlit street toward her, and she let him get within ten feet of her before she stepped back.

“You saw that?” he asked.

Elizalde’s olive complexion had gone very pale at some point in the last minute. She looked at the lumpy bandanna Sullivan was carrying. “You’re not another damned ghost, are you?” she asked.

“No, I’m as alive as you are. Did you see—”

“Yes,” she interrupted, “both of us. God, I hate this stuff. Let’s not talk until we’ve got the street between us and the canals.”

He followed her as she jaywalked across the one-way inland-bound lanes of South Venice. On the tar side she stepped up the curb but then walked on the dirt between the curb and the sidewalk, toward Pacific Avenue. Sullivan followed her lead, stepping over weed clumps and Taco Bell bags and bottles in brown paper bags. Avoiding marked channels, he thought.

They walked into the parking lot through a gap in the low wall. A red sign on a pole by the exit read WRONG WAY—STOP—SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE; and someone had crookedly stenciled SMOKE under the STOP.

“There’s a canal running under this parking lot,” Sullivan ventured to say when they had walked out onto the broad cement face of it, ringed at a distance by light poles and low apartment buildings and shaggy eucalyptus trees in the chilly afternoon sun.

“I can run in any direction from here,” said Elizalde shortly; “so can you. And anyway, we’re between two oppositely one-way streets, one facing the sea and one away. It should make us hard to fix. And you’ve got a powerful mask, haven’t you? Big enough for two, as we saw.”

“Someone…focused on us back there, didn’t they?” said Sullivan. “And the mask came on full strength. Maybe because there were two of us, our fields overlapping, there beside your…‘stasis of clarity, clarity of stasis.”’

Elizalde was sweating. Her jumpsuit was bulky and lumpy, and he realized, belatedly, that she must be wearing another outfit under it. She stared at him. “That’s something I said, in that interview in L.A. Weekly. Who are you? Quick.”

“I’m Peter Sullivan, I’m an electrical engineer and I used to work in film, which might give you some clues. I’ve been out of town, too, traveling everywhere in the country except California.” He was breathless again. “Hiding from all this, from somebody who died. Well, I told you it was my father, didn’t I? But this Halloween is—is gonna be a heavy one. I’ll tell you frankly, there are people after me; but I’m sure you’re smart enough to know that there’ll be people looking for you too. I think you and I should work together, pool our resources. I’ve got this mask. And I’ve found a safe place to live, a waterfront apartment building that’s in a sort of psychic pea-soup fog.”

She wasn’t looking convinced. Her dark eyes were still narrowed with suspicion and hostility.

“And I know this city real well,” he went on lamely.

Her voice was stiff when she answered him. “I too am familiar with Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles” she said.

I get it, he thought wearily. You’re Mexican, you’ve got a blood-in-the-soil, soil-in-the-blood kinship with the place, and you don’t need a gringo sidekick. Our Lady Queen of the Angels, he thought; and it reminded him of the garbled lyrics of one of Sukie’s Christmas carols: Commander Hold-’Em, bone-dry king of angels.…Death, Sukie had meant, the Grim Reaper. In this kind of crisis, here in L.A., suddenly and very deeply he missed his twin sister, who had gone away with Commander Hold-’Em.

“Lady,” he said, almost hopelessly, “I need a partner. I think you do too.”

She frowned past him at the cars crossing in both directions over on Pacific Avenue…and abruptly he knew that she was going to refuse, politely but firmly, and just go away. Probably she wouldn’t come back here, probably she’d go looking for Frank somewhere else, where Sullivan would never find her.

“Don’t decide right now,” he said hastily, “no, don’t even speak. I’ll speak. I’ll be at Bluff Park in Long Beach tonight at eight. That’s wide open, you can drive by in a cab, in a disguise, and if you don’t like the look of it you can go right on past, can’t you? Or, if you like, you can run away in the meantime, be in San Diego by then, be hiding up a tree somewhere. I’ll be at Bluff Park. At eight. Tonight. Goodbye.”

He turned his back on her and walked quickly away, toward Pacific and his van and, somewhere not too many minutes distant, some dark bar with a men’s room.

O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion, he sang in his head.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in,

With gently smiling jaws!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

BUT I swallowed him, thought Kootie dully for the dozenth time. He was lying awkwardly across the back seat of the van, on his left shoulder, which had gone numb. His whole spine ached every time the van leaned around a corner.

I swallowed him, like the whale swallowed Jonah. (Well, I inhaled him, actually.) But can I throw up the ghost? Cough him out? Or will they really have to cut me open to get it? It’s in my head).

At the Music Center yesterday Edison had said, They’ll kill you and eat me. Was that really what was going to turn out to be true?

The driver had looped a pair of headphones over his bald scalp, and from time to time he spoke into a tiny microphone that stuck out under his chin. The other man had found KLSX on the radio, and his head was jogging to some old rock song from before Kootie’s time.

Kootie was shocked again by their indifference. Were they used to driving little boys off to he killed?

All at once his right elbow was pressed painfully into his ribs against the sudden restraint of the seat belt—the minivan was slowing. Kootie discovered that he couldn’t sit up again, with his feet tied together to the sidepost of the seat. He tried to push himself up, but his left arm was as numb and uselessly limp as if it belonged to someone else.

“Low gear, and slow,” said the man in the passenger seat, “and keep the wheels dead straight.”

“I’ve driven up a ramp before,” said the driver.

A grating clank jarred the minivan. The pressure against Kootie’s ribs and right elbow was abruptly gone, and he was rocked back against the seat—the minivan had moved slowly forward, and the front end was mounting some incline; a ramp, apparently. Kootie couldn’t see the windshield, but the men’s heads were in shadow now, and the interior of the minivan was darker.

“As soon as the front wheels are over the lip, give it a boost, to clear the oil pan—then brake hard as soon as the back wheels are in.”

“I’ve driven up a ramp before.”

The motor gunned briefly and the front end of the minivan dropped, and Kootie was again flung against the taut seat belt.

The driver switched off the engine, ratcheted up the parking brake, and opened the door—it clunked against something, and the metal echoes told Kootie that the van had been driven up into the back of a truck, like the ambulance in Die Hard.

Both of the men climbed out of the Fussels’ van, shuffled to the back of the truck, and then Kootie heard them hop down to some pavement. After that, with an abrupt dimming of the already-shadowy light into complete darkness, he heard some heavily clanging metal things tossed inside and the clattering rumble of the sliding back door being pulled down.

Kootie’s eyes were wide, and his straining to see something in the pitch blackness only made imaginary rainbow pinwheels spin in his vision.

They could have left me a light, he thought. He was clinging to the sense of the words, for his breathing and his heartbeat were very fast, and (even more than starting to thrash and scream with not any particle of control at all) he was afraid he would wet his pants. A flashlight left on, I could have paid for the batteries. The van’s headlights, they could have jumped the van battery later from the truck battery. A fucking Zippo lighter!—left flaming and wedged in the console somewhere.

Usually Kootie was uncomfortable using bad words, but today in this total darkness he clung to it. One fucking Zippo lighter, he thought again. Above the tape, the skin over his cheekbones was cold and stiff with tears.

He waited for Edison to yell at him…but he caught nothing from the old man. Perhaps he had deserted Kootie too. Maybe now these men would let him go, if Edison had gone…? Kid-stuff nonsense.

The truck’s engine started up now—it was louder than the minivan’s had been. Through the padded seat under him Kootie felt the jar as the truck was put into gear, and then the whole mobile room was moving forward, with the minivan rocking inside it.

And a moment later Kootie jumped, for suddenly, silently, there was a dim light in one corner of the truck—outside the minivan, up by the right front bumper, a moving yellow glow. Then he could hear dragging footsteps—heavy, an adult—on the metal floor.

The minivan door was pulled open on that side, and a face leaned in, waveringly lit from below by a flashlight strung to swing around the person’s neck. The glittering little eyes were like spitty sunflower seeds stuck onto the white skin under the eyebrows.

“Let me tell you a parable,” said the voice Kootie remembered. “A man walking down the road saw another man in a field, holding a live pig upside-down over his head under the branches of an apple tree. ‘What are you doing?’ asked the first man. ‘Feeding apples to my pig,’ said the second man. ‘Doesn’t it take a long time, doing it that way?’ asked the first man. And the man in the field said, ‘What’s time to a pig?’”

Kootie’s eyes were wide and he was just moaning into the clotted tape between his jaws. The whole truck seemed to be dropping away into some dark abyss, hopelessly far below the lost sunlit streets of L.A.

Mindlessly, Kootie shouted against the duct tape gag—

“All Help me, Ai!”

SHERMAN OAKS had called the exchange again at 4 P.M., and at last the operator had had something to say besides Nothing yet, dude. The man had given Oaks a telephone number and had suggested that he call it at his earliest possible convenience. Oaks used his last quarter to call the number.

“Where are you?” some man asked as soon as Oaks had identified himself. “We got a van and a truck circling each other down in Inglewood, and if they have to drive around much longer, the man says your tithe goes up to fifteen percent.”

“I’m at Slauson and Central, by the trainyards,” Oaks said.

“Truck’ll be there in…six or seven minutes. It’s an Edison truck, black and orange—”

“What?”

“SCE—what we could get quick. Is that a problem? The truck’s not stolen; the driver’s real Edison, but he’s on the network barter, and he was right in the area where they picked up the van. After we talked to him he just called in Code Seven or something.”

Oaks groped to find a reason for his inordinate dismay, and found one. “I need a big boxy truck, with ramps, that you can drive a car into! I’ve got no use for some damn boom or crane thing—” He was working up genuine outrage now. This was wrong. “I’ll pay no tithe at all for some damn—”

“Jeez, man, this is the kind you want. Edison’s got all kinds of vehicles, not just those repair things.”

“…Oh,” said Oaks, feeling like a cloud chamber in which the vacuum had just been violated, so that rain was condensing inside. “Okay. It’s just that…”

“Sure. Now listen, there’s a gun in the back of the truck, along with the stuff you asked for. The driver insisted that this scenario be set up so it could look like a hijacking if anything goes wrong, okay? Don’t touch the gun, it’s got smeary untraceable fingerprints on it right now.”

“But there is a knife there, too? I need a knife—” I can’t kill the boy with a noisy gun, Oaks thought.

“Your knife’s there too. Try to relax, will you? Get in touch with your Inner Child.” The line went dead, and Oaks hung up.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to hear the shrill voices in the exhalation.

Outer child you mean, he thought—it’s the Inner Old Man I want to…get in touch with.

In an Edison truck! The shudder that accompanied the thought bewildered him.

He bent and with his one hand picked up the cardboard box at his feet, then stepped away from the pay telephone to let one of the impatient crack-cocaine dealers get to it.

The box rattled in his hand. Tithe, he thought bitterly. It’s like taxing waitresses’ tips—the man taking the cut can be trusted to overestimate the actual take. In the box Oaks had packed ten little glass vials, which was supposed to represent a tenth of the garden-fresh ghosts he would collect during the upcoming month. He had brought it along in advance this way to “show humble.”

He had stuck each vial into a condom. Obstadt had probably never seen the raw product before, and he would doubtless imagine that this eccentric packaging was standard in the trade. Nine of the vials were in Ramses condoms, but one was in a Trojan.

Safe sexorcism. The Trojan hearse. Oaks had no intention of paying any more tithe. If Obstadt was still just a dilettante, well, he could take up an interest in fine wines or something; if by this time he was actually riding piggyback on the Maduro Man, though, he would be in the same jam that Oaks had been in in 1929.

(This morning Oaks had begun to remember events from before 1989; and he had concluded that he was a good deal older than he had thought.)

After hurriedly gathering up the thousand smokes and handing them over to one of Obstadt’s men, and then packing up these ten, he had had only four unlabeled ones left to inhale himself: four miserable, vicious, short-lived gang boys, as luck would have it, the sort of bottled lives he ordinarily disdained as pieces-a-shit. They hadn’t done much to hold back the tumultuous army of the Bony Express, clamoring and shouting in Oaks’s head.

In the turbulence, old memories were being shaken free of the riverbed of his mind, and wobbling up to the surface (like the unsavory old corpse that had bobbed up in the Yarra River in Melbourne in 1910, right after the manacled Harry Houdini had been dropped into the river for one of his celebrated escapes; and it had been a natural, if distasteful, mistake to pounce on the ragged old thing, imagining that it was Houdini freshly dead at last).

He remembered living in Los Angeles in the 1920s, when neon lighting was so new and exotic that its ethereal colored glow was mainly used to decorate innovative churches—the “Mighty I AM” cathedral, and Aimee Semple MacPherson’s giant-flying-saucer-shaped Angelus Temple on Glendale Boulevard. Under some other name, Oaks had been a follower of all kinds of spiritualist leaders, even joining William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi “Legion of Silver Shirts”—though when, as required in the Silver Shirts, he had been asked to give the exact date and time of his birth, he had given false ones. Actually, he had not known what his real birth date might be; and so, lest he might give the correct date and time unconsciously, he had been careful to give the published birth figures of a randomly chosen movie star.

(It had been Ramon Novarro, and Oaks had occasionally wondered, though never with remorse, if Novarro’s brutal death in the early hours of Halloween, 1969, might have been a long-delayed consequence of that lie.)

And in 1929 he had somehow inhaled a ghost that had been stored in an opaque container; and the stinking lifeless thing had choked his mind, blocked his psychic gullet, rendered him unable to inhale any more ghosts at all. (He thought of the collapsed face he had seen yesterday on the steps down to the parking level at the Music Center up on Temple.)

Oaks knew that he had got past that catastrophe somehow. (A suicide attempt? Something about his missing arm? The memories were like smoke on a breeze.) Some psychic Heimlich maneuver.

The Edison truck had pulled up then, and a man in bright new blue jeans and a Tabasco T-shirt had opened the passenger-side door and hopped down to the pavement.

“Oaks?” he said. When Oaks nodded, he went on, “Here she is. Driver’ll pull into an alley and let the van aboard, and then you got half an hour of drive-around time. More than that, and your monthly rate increases. What’s in the box?”

Oaks held out the cardboard box on the fingertips of his one hand, like a waiter. “Next month’s payment, in advance.”

The man took it. “Okay, thanks—I’ll see he gets it.”

A new Chrysler had pulled in behind the truck, and the man carried the box to it and got in.

Oaks had looked bleakly at the orange and black and yellow truck—Halloween colors!—then sighed and walked around to the back as the Chrysler drove away. When he’d pulled up the sliding back door, he’d been grudgingly pleased to see the things he’d asked for laid out on the aluminum floor: a flashlight, twine and duct tape, and a Buck hunting knife. In the front right corner he could see the gun the driver had apparently insisted on, a shiny short-barreled revolver. Won’t be needing that, Oaks had thought as he’d grabbed the doorframe, put one foot on the bumper, and boosted himself up.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

EVEN by straining all his muscles, all together or against one piece of restraining tape at a time, Kootie had failed to break or even stretch his bonds; though he could reach his fingers into the pockets of his jeans.

The flashlight swung wildly as the man climbed over the passenger seat and leaned down over Kootie. He reached out slowly with his one arm, closed his fingers in Kootie’s curly hair, and then lifted the boy back up to a sitting position. Then he sat down on the console, facing Kootie, and stared into the boy’s eyes.

Kootie helplessly stared back. The one-armed man’s round, smooth face was lit from beneath by the flashlight, making a snouty protuberance of his nose, and his tiny eyes gleamed.

“No ectoplasm left, hey?” the man said. “No dog-mannikin today?” He smiled. “Your mouth is taped shut. You’ll be having trouble expiring, just through your nose that way. Here.” He leaned forward, and Kootie wasn’t aware that the man had a knife until he felt the narrow cold back of it slide up over the skin of his jaw and across his cheek almost to his ear, with a sound like a zipper opening.

Kootie blew out through his mouth, and the flap of tape swung away from his mouth like a door. He thought of saying something—Thank you? What do you want?—but just breathed deeply through his open mouth.

“My compass needle points north,” the man said. “Your smoke is clathrated. You need to unclamp, open up.”

He lowered his chin, pushing the flashlight to the side, and he held his right hand out so that it was silhouetted against the disk of yellow light high up on the riveted truck wall. Squinting up sideways at the projection, the man wiggled his fingers and said, with playful eagerness, “What would you say to a…rhinoceros?” He bunched the fingers then, and said, “Clowns are always a favorite with little boys.” The thumb now made a loop with the forefinger, while the other fingers stuck out. “Do you know what roosters say? They say cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Kootie realized belatedly that the man was doing some kind of shadow show for him. He blinked in frozen bewilderment.

“Helpful and fun, but not very exciting,” the man concluded, lowering his arm and letting the flashlight swing free so that it underlit his face again. “What could be more exciting for a lonely little angel than a flight up the hill to where the rich people live? Aboard a charming conveyance indeed! I believe I can provide a snapshot of that.”

He stared into Kootie’s eyes again, and hummed and bobbed his round head until the spectacle of it began to blur from sheer monotony. In spite of his rigid breathlessness, Kootie thought he might go to sleep.

All at once the motion of the truck became jerky and clanging and upward, and the seat under him was hard wood. He opened his eyes, and jumped against his restraints.

Cloudy daylight through glass windows lit the interior of a trolley car climbing a steep track up a hill. Kootie’s seat was upright, though, and when he looked around he saw that the trolley car had been built for the slope—the floor, seats, and windows were stepped, a sawtooth pattern on the diagonal chassis. A city skyline out of an old black-and-white photograph hung in the sky outside.

There was a little boy wearing shorts and a corduroy cap sitting in the window seat next to Kootie, and he was staring past Kootie at someone across the aisle. Kootie followed the boy’s gaze, and flinched to see the round-faced man sitting there, still wearing stained old bum clothes but with two arms and two hands now.

“Where is the gentleman you boys came with?” he asked.

The boy beside Kootie spoke. “In heaven; send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him i the other place yourself. But, indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”

“Hamlet to Claudius the man said, nodding. “Showing as a youngster, then, eh? Why not?” He smiled at the boy. “What’s the matter, don’t you like my pan?”

“Not much,” the boy said.

The man chuckled. From under his windbreaker he pulled a pencil that was a foot long and as wide around as a sausage, and with his other hand he pulled out a giant pad of ruled white paper. “At the top of the hill I’ll fill out the adoption papers on both you lads,” he said affectionately.

The boy next to Kootie shook his head firmly. “I have a snapshot myself,” he said.

Then the whole length of the cable car fell to level, silently, the front end down and the back end up, though none of the three passengers were jarred at all. It was just that the seats and floor were all lined up horizontally now, like a normal car. The gray sunlight had abruptly faded to darkness outside the windows, and flames had sprung up in little lamps on the paneled walls.

The car was longer and broader now, chugging along across some invisible nighttime plain. The man with the little eyes was sitting several rows ahead now, and he was wearing a ruffled white shut and a gray cutaway coat. In the aisle next to him stood a tall black man—his clothes were as elegantly cut, but seemed to be made of broad teak-colored leaves stitched together.

From behind Kootie came a boy’s voice: “Newspapers, apples, sandwiches, molasses, peanuts!” Kootie turned around awkwardly in the seat belt that was still taped to his wrists, and saw the boy in the corduroy cap. A big wicker basket was slung over the boy’s arm now, and he was slowly pacing up the length of the car, looking straight at the two men at the far end.

“Where are we?” Kootie whispered when the boy was beside him.

“An hour out of Detroit,” the boy said without looking down, “two hours yet to Port Huron. Sit tight, Kootie. Newspapers, peanuts!” he went on more loudly. There were only the four people in the train car.

The man who now had two arms was staring at the boy. “I remember this!” he said softly. “You were him? Christ, what year was this?”

For a moment the boy with the basket paused, and Kootie sensed surprise on his part too. Then, “Apples, sandwiches, newspapers!” he called, resuming his walk up the aisle. The train car smelled of new shoes fresh out of the box.

The man got to his feet, bracing himself on the back of the seat in front of him against the train’s motion. “Well enough, I’ll blow down your straw barricades. Uh…papers?” he said, smiling and holding out his two arms.

The boy lifted out a pile of newspapers and laid them in the man’s hands. The man turned to the open window and tossed the stack out into the windy blackness outside.

When he straightened up, he said, “Pay this boy, Nicotinus.”

The black man handed the boy some coins.

“Magazines,” the man said then. He took the stack of magazines that the boy lifted out of the basket, and threw them too out the window. “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

Kootie sat on his wooden seat, his wrists moored in the stocks of the anachronistic woven-nylon seat belt, and watched as all the wares in the boy’s basket were dealt with in the same way, item by item, sandwich by bag of peanuts.

Through it all the black man was staring intently at the man who kept repeating, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

When the basket was empty, it too went out the window-in exchange for a handful of clinking coins. The boy put his filled hand into his pocket, then took it out and put his fist to his mouth for just a moment, as if eating one of the coins.

For a moment the boy stood empty-handed, facing away from Kootie, while the train rattled through the night and the glassed-in lamp-flames flared. Then he took off his shoes and coat and hat, and, barefoot, lifted them up and laid them in the man’s hands.

The man’s round face smiled, though his tiny eyes didn’t narrow at all. He turned and pitched the clothes out the window, and then he said, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

The boy held out his hand one more time—and the black man seized it and threw the boy to the wooden floor.

KOOTIE WAS slammed sideways across the back seat of the minivan with a man’s weight on top of him crushing his ribs, and he was choking and gagging on a bulky plastic cylinder that had somehow got into his mouth; the flashlight was jammed between their bodies somewhere, and he could see nothing in the darkness. He knew the man’s face was right above his own because of the harsh hot breaths battering at his right ear and eyelashes.

Something was repeatedly punching him in the side over the steel-cable belt, audibly tearing the denim jacket. He knew it must be the blade of the knife, being stopped by the metal coils of the I-ON-A-CO belt; but the stabs were wild, and he was sure that the next one wouldn’t be another blunted impact but a cold plunge into his guts.

He shoved his tongue against the flat bottom of the plastic cylinder in his mouth, but before he could spit it out to scream and bite, his jaws involuntarily clamped tight around the thing.

At the same moment, No, Kootie! shouted a voice in his head; it was Edison—and the boy train-vendor in the hallucinations had been Edison too. I’ll do this!

At that moment the knife blade grated off of the top edge of the belt cable and the point of it stabbed against the bone of one of his ribs. Kootie sagged in ringing shock.

But an instant later he had inhaled deeply through his whistling nostrils, and then his head was whipped around to lace the man who was killing him, and his lower teeth popped the lid off the plastic cylinder.

And he blew a hard exhalation straight up into the man’s wide-open mouth.

The man drove a knee solidly into Kootie’s stomach, so that Kootie’s long exhalation ended in a sharp, yelping wheeze—but the man had jackknifed off the seat, boomed hard against the sliding door as the flashlight whirled around his tumbling body like a crazy firefly, and then he had bounced onto his belly across the console, kicking his legs in the empty air so that Kootie heard popping tendons rather than impacts. A moment later Kootie cringed to hear him vomiting so hard and loud that the terrified boy thought the man must be splitting open his face, popgunning his eyeballs, his sinus and nose bones cracking out to fall onto the carpeted floorboards.

Kootie’s left hand was gently slapping his ribs, and when his fingers found the knife grip they held on and then carefully pulled the blade out of the hole it had punched in the denim. Kootie winced and whimpered to feel the point pull out of his flesh and the edge violin across the coils of the belt, but he just held still, knowing it was Edison that was working his hand.

Kootie lay half on his side across the seat, and he could feel hot blood roll wet down across his stomach from his cut right rib. He nearly jumped when he felt wet steel slide past his right wrist, and then that hand had twisted and was free, and had “snatched the knife.

At last he spat out the emptied cylinder, and he was sobbing with urgent claustrophobic fright. “Get me out of here, mister!” he whimpered. “Oh, please, mister, get me out of here!”

He was anxious to be just a cooperative passenger in his own body now—gratefully he felt his right hand cut free his left wrist, and then he was sitting up and bending over to cut the tape around his ankles.

The one-armed man had heaved himself forward with each abdomen-abrading retch, and now his feet boomed against the van’s ceiling as he toppled over the console to the floor. “Edison!” he said loudly, grating out the syllables like cinder blocks. ”Wast—thee—agayn?”

Kootie didn’t know whether it was himself or Edison that worked the door handle and pulled back the minivan’s sliding side door. He stepped out, down to the floor of the truck, rocking as if he were aboard a boat, and he groped his way in darkness to the rippling, sectional metal wall that was the truck’s door.

The cut in his side was just a point of tingling chill, but he could feel blood • weighing down the folds of his shirt over his belt, and a hot trickle ran down the inside of his leg.

“Kootie!” he gasped. “Breathe slower! You’re going to make us faint.” Kootie’s mouth snapped shut, and he made himself count four heartbeats for-every inhalation, and four for every exhalation.

Without his volition his right hand went to his side and pressed against the cut. Behind him he heard feet thumping and scraping—inside the minivan, the one-armed man was up.

With his left hand Kootie slapped hurriedly at the ribbed inner surface of the truck’s door until he found a blocky steel lever, and he braced himself on his good foot and heaved the lever upward.

Dazzling sunlight flooded the truck’s interior as the door clattered upward, folding along its track overhead. Without his sunglasses, the day outside seemed terribly bright.

Pavement was rushing past down there beyond the toes of his Reeboks, and he was squinting out at the windshields of oncoming cars; a low office building and a red-roofed Pizza Hut were swinging past off to his left. The people in the cars might be gaping, pointing at him, but their windshields were just blank patches of reflected blue sky.

Kootie glanced behind him, into the dimness of the truck’s interior, and he could see the one-armed man crawling down out of the minivan headfirst, onto the truck floor. Breathe slower! Kootie reminded himself.

“What do I do. Mr. Edison?” Kootie cried, his voice not echoing now but breezing away in the open air.

He sensed no answer; and when he tried to let the ghost take control of his body again, he had to grab the bottom edge of the half-raised door, for his knees had simply buckled and he would have fallen out of the truck.

He had to step back then, for the truck was slowing down.

Kootie freed his bloody hand from his side and waved it broadly at the cars following the truck, mouthing Slow down, I’m getting out! Don’t run over me! and pointing down at the street. He glanced down past his shoes—the street was still moving by awfully fast, and his belly and an instant later his neck quailed like shaken ice water.

You’ll tumble, he thought; even if he slows a lot more than this, you won’t be able to land running fast enough, and you’ll tumble like a Raggedy Andy doll. He imagined his skull socking the pavement, his elbows snapping backward, shinbones split and telescoped…

He couldn’t do it. But if he waited another couple of seconds, the one-armed man would be on him again.

Then, with an abrupt hallucinatory burst of glaring red and blue flashes on his retinas, a gleaming black-and-white police car had surged into the gap between the truck’s bumper and the car behind. A half-second segment of siren shocked his ears, and Kootie swayed backward again as the truck slowed still more, and Kootie saw the front end of the police car dip as it braked to avoid hitting the truck.

And Kootie jumped.

His kneecaps banged the hood of the police car, and his palms and forehead smacked the windshield, cracking it with a muffled creak; in nearly the same instant, with a boom that shook the very air, the windshield crystallized into an opaque white honeycomb as a hole was punched through it next to Kootie’s bloody right hand.

Kootie’s right hip and shoulder hit the windshield then, and the glass gave beneath him like starched white canvas. And another boom rocked the world as a hole was punched through the wrecked webwork of glass near his upraised left knee; the windshield dissolved into a spray of little green cubes, and he was sitting on the dashboard.

He whipped his head around to squint ahead at the truck. The one-armed man’s face was right above the truck-bed floor, and in his one hand wobbled the silver muzzle of a gun. As Kootie stared, a hammer-stroke of glare eclipsed the gun, and he felt a jolt in the police car as the boom of the gunshot rolled over him.

The police car was screeching to a halt now, slewing sideways, but Kootie was able to hang on to the rounded inside edges of the dashboard, and though he was rocked back and forth he was not thrown off; even when the car behind rear-ended the police car with a squeal and bang and tinkle of broken glass, he just lifted his shoulders and dug in with his butt and let his chin roll down and up.

The police car was stopped at last. The orange-and-black Southern California Edison truck was wobbling to the curb against further braking and honking horns from behind, and Kootie scrambled to the fender and hopped down to the asphalt. The pavement under his feet was so steady, and he was so torqued, that he had to take several hopping steps to keep from falling over.

A couple of people had got out of stopped cars and were hurrying up. “Has someone got…change for a telephone call?” Kootie shouted, to his own surprise.

“Here you go, kid,” said a woman absently, handing him a quarter. She was staring past him, at whatever was going on with the police and the one-armed man.

“Thank you,” Kootie said. He was wobbling dizzily as he stepped up the curb, and a man in a business suit called something to him. “Man back there,” Kootie yelled, “bleeding bad. Where’s a telephone?”

The man pointed at a liquor store and said, “Dial nine-one-one!”

Sure, thought Kootie wildly as he wobbled onward through the cold sunlight. Nine-one-one. I’d get to talk to my mom and dad again, drunk as fig beetles by now; Edison could shoot the breeze with the fat lady from the supermarket parking lot. At least I’d get my quarter back.

He glanced back, but the doors of the police car hadn’t opened, and, blinking against the silvery glare of the sunlight, Kootie couldn’t see the one-armed man. He wished he hadn’t lost the sunglasses.

“Where are we going?” he whispered, with timid hope, when he had limped around the corner of the liquor store and was lacing a long alley with Dumpsters and old mattresses shored up against the graffiti-fouled walls.

“Anywhere relatively private,” Edison said, and Kootie exhaled and began sweating with relief—the old man was not only back, but seemed to be sensible again, and would now Lake care of everything. Keep pressing your hand hard against the cut, it’ll slow the bleeding. I need to get a look at this wound, and then we’ll go buy whatever sort of stuff we need to get you repaired. And some liquor. I really don’t think we can get by, here, without some liquor.”

“Shit, no,” said Kootie, stumbling forward down the alley.

His face was cold and sweaty, but he smiled, for Edison apparently wasn’t going to scold him for his language this time.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

“…How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

DIOS te guarde tan linda” said Angelica Elizalde softly into the sea breeze. She had taken off her sneakers in order to wade out in the low, breakwater-tamed surf of Los Angeles Harbor. The lights of the Queen Mary rippled across the dark water, and Elizalde shivered now when she looked at the vast old ship out there by San Pedro.

She had walked down to this narrow stretch of beach from the bus stop at Cherry and Seventh, and she was still putting off the decision of whether or not to meet the Peter Sullivan person up in the parking lot on the bluff. She glanced at her watch and saw that she still had half an hour in which to decide.

She paused and looked back up the shore. A hundred yards west of hen the Mexican women’s fire still fluttered and threw sparks on the breeze. She might just plod back there and talk to them some more. The bruises on her knees and hip were aching in the cold, and it would be nice to sit by the fire, among people who could hear her secrets and not consider her insane.

Elizalde had walked up to the fire when the sun was still a flattened red coal in the molten western sky, and in her exhaustion her Spanish had effortlessly come back to her, so that she was able to return the greetings of the women and make small talk.

She had smiled at the toddler daughter of one, and the woman had touched the girl’s forehead and quickly said, “Dios te guarde tan linda”—God keep you pretty baby. Elizalde had remembered her grandmother doing the same whenever a stranger looked at one of the children. It was to deflect mal ojo, the evil eye. But Elizalde also remembered that it was a routine precaution, and she smiled at the mother too, and crossed herself. Only after the mother had smiled back, and Elizalde had accepted the gestured offer of a seat on the sand beside the fire, had she felt hypocritical.

Veladoros, devotional candles in tall glasses, ringed the fire; and Elizalde soon learned that these women were here waiting for midnight, when, it then being the Friday before El Día de los Muertos, they would bathe their piedras imanes in the seawater.

Elizalde realized that she had not misunderstood the word yesterday—it did mean magnets. Her new friend Dolores untied her handkerchief and showed her her own, a doughnut-sized magnet from a stereo speaker. The best ones, Elizalde had gathered, were the little ones from old telephones—stubby cylinders, no bigger than a dime in cross section, that looked like the smoking “snakes” that her brothers had always lit on Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July.

Witches used the magnets as part of the ritual that transformed them into animals, she learned, but piedras imanes were good things to have around the house to attract good luck and deflect spells. The magnets needed to be fed—by tossing them into dirt or sand so that they became bristly with iron filings—and it was a good idea to immerse them in the sea on this one Friday every year.

As she’d sat there and listened to the gossip and the jokes and the occasional scolding of one of the children for playing too close to the fire, Elizalde had lain back against a blanket over an ice chest, and from time to time had made such answers and remarks as she imagined her grandmother would have.

And she heard stories—about a man in Montebello who had to wear sunglasses all the time, because one night he had left his eyes in a dish of water in his garage and taken a cats eyes to see with while he made a midnight cocaine buy, and returned at dawn to find that the dog had eaten the eyes in the dish, leaving the man stuck with the vertical-pupiled, golden-irised cat’s eyes for the rest of his life (Elizalde had commented that, in fairness, the cat should have been given the dog’s eyes); about how-raw eggs could be used to draw fevers, and how if the levers had been very bad the egg would be hard-cooked afterward; about los duendes, dwarves who had once been angels too slow in trying to follow Lucifer to Hell, and so were locked out of Heaven and Hell both, and, with no longer any place in the universe, just wandered around the world enviously ruining human undertakings.

Elizalde had already heard stories about La Llorona—the Weeping Lady—the ghost of a woman who had thrown her children into a rushing flood to drown, and then repented it, and forever wandered along beaches and riverbanks at night, mourning their deaths and looking for living children to steal in replacement. As a child, Elizalde had heard the story as having occurred in San Juan Capistrano, with the children drowned in the San Juan Creek; but, in the years since, she had also heard it as having occurred in just about every town that had a large Hispanic community, with the children reputedly thrown into every body of water from the Rio Grande to the San Francisco Bay. There was even an Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, who was supposed to have gone weeping through Nahuatl villages and stealing infants from their cradles, leaving stone sacrificial knives where the children had lain.

These women that Elizalde had met tonight told a different version. Aboard the Queen Mary, they whispered, lived a bruja who had somehow lost all her children in the moment of her own birth, and then drowned her husband in the sea; and now she wandered weeping everywhere, night and day, eating los difuntos, ghosts, in an unending attempt to fill the void left by those losses. She had eaten so many that she was now very fat, and they called her La Llorona Atacado, the Stuffed Weeping Lady.

Elizalde wondered what character of folklore she herself might fit the role of. Surely there was the story of a girl baptized once conventionally with water and once with a fertilized egg, who endured a second birth (out of a milk can!) in a shower of coins, and who fled her home to wander along far rivers, in a foredoomed attempt to avoid the ghosts of the poor people who had come to her for help, and whom she had let die.

What would the girl in that story do next, having journeyed all the way back to her home village?

She looked again at her watch. Ten of eight.

She turned her plodding steps across the sand toward the steel stairs that led up the bluff to the parking lot. It was time to meet Peter Sullivan.

SULLIVAN HAD parked the van in a dark corner of the lot, and had walked away from it to smoke a cigarette in the spotlight of yellow glare at the foot of a light pole a couple of hundred feet away. Moths fluttered around the glass of the lamp a dozen feet above his head, flickering and winking in and out of the light like remote, silent meteors.

He had arrived at Bluff Park early, and had made a sandwich in the van with some groceries he’d bought after his flight from Venice; and though there were still three or four cans of beer in the little propane refrigerator, he had been drinking Coke for the last couple of hours. He always felt that Sukie was in a sense somewhere nearby when he was drunk, and anyway he wanted to be alert if the Elizalde psychiatrist actually showed up.

He was watching the cars sweeping past on Ocean Boulevard, and wondering if he shouldn’t just get in the van and head back to Solville—which, he had learned, was the name given by the other tenants to the apartment building he had moved into today.

Now that he was sober again—hungover, possibly—teaming up with this Elizalde woman didn’t seem like such a good idea. If she was unbalanced, which it sounded like she had every right to be, she might just lead deLarava to him. How could he take her to Solville, expose that perfect blind spot to her, when she might be crazy? He remembered his first sight of her in Venice—crouched in the mud below the canal sidewalk—wearing two sets of clothes—talking into a storm drain—!

He took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then patted his jeans pocket for the van keys.

AND ELIZALDE touched his shoulder.

SULLIVAN KNEW that he had felt the touch an instant before it had happened, and he knew it was her; but he stood without turning around, still staring out at the cars passing on Ocean Boulevard, and he exhaled the cigarette smoke in a long, nearly whistling exhalation as a slow snowfall of dead moths spun down through the yellow light to patter almost inaudibly on the asphalt.

He dropped the cigarette among the lifeless little bodies, stepped on it, and then turned to face her, smiling wryly. “Hi,” he said.

She sighed. “Hi. What do we do now?”

“Talk. But not out here where we might draw attention, like we did this afternoon. That’s my van over in that corner.”

“Those…hands are in it?”

“Yeah. If they become my hands again, we’ll know somebody’s looking at us again.”

They began walking across the asphalt away from the light, their swinging fingertips separated by three feet of chilly night air. Enough light reached the boxy old vehicle for it to be clearly visible.

To his own annoyance, Sullivan found himself wishing that he had washed it. “Somebody egged my van,” he said gruffly. “Makes it look like I threw up out the window.”

“While you were going backward real fast,” she agreed, stopping to stare at the dried smear. “When and how did that happen?”

“Today.” He led her around the front of the van to the side doors. “A guy, an old friend of mine, tried to turn me over to a woman who wants to eat my father’s ghost; I think she wants to capture me, use me as a live lure. The old friend threw an egg at me as I was driving out of there.” He unlocked the forward of the two side doors and swung it open. The light was still on inside—the battery could sustain a light or two for a full day without getting too weak to turn the motor over. “Beer and Coke in the little fridge there, if you like.”

Elizalde looked at him intently for a moment, then stepped lithely up into the van.

She leaned one hip on the counter around the sink, and Sullivan noticed to his embarrassment that the bed was still extended, and unmade. I must not really have meant to meet her, he thought defensively.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t anticipating company.” And what is that supposed to mean? he asked himself. He threw her a helpless glance as he climbed up and pulled the door closed.

“You’ve got to wash off the egg,” she said, and for a moment he thought she had meant on your face. Then he realized that she meant the egg on the outside of the driver’s door.

“Is it important?”

“I think it’s a marker,” she said, “and more than a visible marker. Like a magical homing device. Raw eggs have all kinds of uses in magic. I should get out of this van right now, and walk away, mask or no mask. You should too, in a different direction.”

Sullivan sat down on the bed. “I’ve got a place we can go where the psychic static will drown out the egg’s signal. I’m pretty sure. Anyway, there’s certainly a hose at this place, we can wash it off.” She didn’t seem crazy, and he was tired of spinning through his own circular thought-paths over and over again. “I think we should stick together.”

“That’s what Peter Sullivan thinks, huh.” She stepped around him and sat down in the passenger seat, watching him over her shoulder. “Okay, for a while. But let’s at least be a moving target.” She looked forward, out through the windshield, and stiffened.

Sullivan stood up and hurried to the drivers seat with the key.

Outside in the parking lot, several people were standing on the asphalt a few yards away from the front bumper, shifting awkwardly and peering. Sullivan knew that he and Elizalde had been alone in the parking lot a few moments earlier.

“Ghosts,” he said shortly, starting the engine. “Fresh ones, lit up by our overlapping auras.” He switched on the headlights, and the figures covered their pale faces with their lean, translucent hands.

He tapped the horn ring to give them a toot, and the figures began shuffling obediently to the side. One, a little girl, was moving more slowly than the rest, and when he had clanked the engine into gear he had to spin the steering wheel to angle around her.

“Damn little kid,” he said, momentarily short of breath. The way clear at last, he accelerated toward the Ocean Boulevard driveway.

Elizalde pulled the seat belt across her shoulder and clicked the metal tongue of it into the slot by the console. “I saw her as an old woman,” she said quietly.

He shrugged. “I guess each of ‘em is all the ages they ever were. He or she was, I mean. Each one is—”

“I got you. Put on your seat belt.”

“The place is right here,” he said, pushing down the lever to signal for a left turn.

THE FIRST faucet Sullivan found, on the end of a foot-tall pipe standing in weeds at the corner of the Solville lot, just sucked air indefinitely when the tap was opened. He walked across the dark lot to another, ascertained that it worked, and then drove the van over and parked it. He carried a big sponge out to scrub the outside of the driver’s door, and then had to go back inside for a can of Comet, but at last all the chips and strips of dried egg had been sluiced off the van, and he locked it up.

Elizalde carried a beer in from the van to Sullivan’s apartment, and when she popped it open foam dripped on the red-painted wooden floor. The only light in the living room was from flame-shaped white bulbs in a yard-sale chandelier in the corner, and Sullivan berated himself for not having thought to buy a lamp somewhere today. At least there were electrical outlets—Sullivan noticed that Shadroe had put six of them in this room alone.

Sullivan had carried the plaster hands inside, and he laid them against the door as though they were holding it closed.

“This is your safe place?” Elizalde’s voice echoed in the empty room. She twisted the rod on the Venetian blinds over the window until the slats were vertical, then walked to the far wall and ran her long fingers over a patched section where Shadroe had apparently once filled in a doorway. “What makes it safe?”

“The landlord’s dead.” Sullivan leaned against another wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor. “He walks around and talks, and he’s in his original body and he’s not…you know, retarded—he’s not a ghost, it’s still his actual self inside the head he carries around. I believe he’s been dead for quite a while, and therefore he must know it, and be taking steps to keep from departing this…”

“Vale of tears.”

“To use the technical term,” Sullivan agreed. “The place must be a terrible patch of static, psychically. The reason I think he’s aware of his situation is that he’s made it a terrible patch physically, too, a confusing ground-grid. All the original doors and windows seem to have been rearranged, and you can see from outside that the wiring is something out of Rube Goldberg. I can’t wait to start plugging things in.”

“Running water can be a betrayer too.”

“And he’s messed that up. I noticed earlier today that the toilet’s hooked up to the hot water. I could probably make coffee in the tank of it.”

“And have steamed buns in the morning,” she said.

Her smile was slight, but it softened the lean plane of her jaw and warmed her haunted dark eyes.

“Hot cross buns,” added Sullivan lamely. “Speaking of which, do you want to order a pizza or something?”

“You don’t seem to have a phone,” she said, nodding toward an empty jack box at the base of one wall. “And I don’t think we should leave this…compound again tonight. Do you have anything to eat in your van?”

“Makings of a sandwich or two,” he said. “Canned soup. A bag of M&M’s.”

“I’ve missed California cuisine,” she said.

“You were out of town, I gather,” he said cautiously.

“Oklahoma most recently. I took a Greyhound bus back here, got in late Tuesday night. Drove through the Mojave Desert. Did you ever notice that there are a lot of ranches, out in the middle of the desert?”

“I wonder what they raise.”

“Rocks, probably.” She leaned against the wall across from him. “‘Look out, those big rocks can be mean.’ And on cold nights they put gravel in incubators. And, ‘Damn! Last night a fox got in and carried off a bunch of our fattest rocks!’”

“‘Early frost’ll kill all these nice quartzes.’”

She actually laughed, two contralto syllables. “Don’t get excited now,” she said, “but your dead man’s got the heat turned all the way up in here, and not a thermostat in sight.” She unzipped the front of her jumpsuit and pulled down the shoulders, revealing a wrinkled Graceland sweatshirt; and when she pulled the jumpsuit down over her hips and sat down to bunch it down to her ankles, he saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans.

She began untying the laces of her sneakers, and Sullivan made himself look away from her long legs in the tight denim.

“I hope you don’t trust everybody,” he said.

Out of the top of her right sneaker she pulled a little leather cylinder with a white plastic nozzle at the top. It had a key ring at the base of it, and with the ring around her first finger she opened her hand to show it to him. “CN mace,” she said with a chillier smile. “In case the soup is bland. I don’t trust anybody…very far.”

Sullivan discarded the idea of taking offense. “Good.” He straightened his legs out across the floor and hooked a finger through the loop at the corner of the fanny pack that was hanging on his left hip; then, not knowing whether he was being honest with her or showing off, he pulled on the loop—the zippers whirred open as the front of the canvas pack pulled away, exposing the grip of the .45 under the Velcro cross-straps.

Her face was blank, but she echoed, “Good.”

She had taken her shoes and socks off and pulled the jumpsuit free of her ankles and tossed it aside. She stretched her legs, wiggling her toes in the air.

“But,” Sullivan went on. He unsnapped the belt and pulled it from around his waist, and then slid the fanny pack across the floor toward the door. “I’ve decided to trust you”

She stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, but then she spun the leather-sleeved cylinder away. It bumped the heavy pack six feet away from where she sat, and she said softly, “All right. Are we partners, then? Do we shake on it?”

On his hands and knees he crossed the floor to her. They shook hands, and he crawled back to his wall and sat down again.

“Partners,” he said.

“What do you know about ghosts?”

To business, he thought. “People eat them,” he began at random. “They can be drawn out of walls or beds or empty air, made detectable, by playing period music and setting out props like movie posters; when they’re excited that way, magnetic compasses will point to ’em, and the air around tends to get cold because they’ve assumed the energy out of it. They like candy and liquor, though they can’t digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dry twigs and rocks. They—”

“Produce from the Mojave ranches.”

“Amber fields of stone,” he agreed. “They’re frail little wasps of smoke when they’re new, or if they’ve been secluded and undisturbed. Unaroused, unexcited. The way you eat them is to inhale them. But if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff, physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit and what have you—”

“What have you,” she said, politely but with a shudder, “I insist”

“—and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes, and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor. They don’t have new thoughts, and tend to go on and on about old grievances. A lot of the street lunatics you see—maybe most of ’em—are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that. I worked for a woman who stayed young by finding and eating ghosts that had been preserved in the frail state, in old libraries and hotels and restaurants. She lives on water, aboard the Queen Mary—”

“I just heard about her! And she drowned her husband in the sea.”

Sullivan crawled across the floor again and picked up Elizalde’s beer. “I never heard of her having a husband. May I?”

Elizalde had one eyebrow cocked. “Help yourself, partner. I just wanted a sip to cut the dust.”

Sullivan took a deep swallow of the chilly beer. Then he sat down next to her, setting the can down on the floor between them.

“What do you know about séances?” he asked breathlessly. “Summoning specific ghosts?”

She picked up the can and finished the beer before answering him. “I know a turkey can hurt you if he hits you with a wing—you’ve got to have ‘em bagged up tight in a guinea sack. Excuse me. With ghosts, you’d be smart to have some restraints in place, before you call them. They do come when you call, sometimes. Séances are dangerous—sometimes one of them is for real.” She yawned, with another shudder at the end of it, and then she glanced at the two white hands braced against the door. Sullivan was thinking of the ghosts they’d seen in the parking lot a few minutes ago, and he guessed that she was too. “I’m not hungry,” she said in a low voice.

He knew what she was thinking: Let’s not open the door. “Me either,” he said.

“You’ve got your leather jacket for a pillow, and I can ball up my jumpsuit. Let’s go to sleep, and discuss this stuff when the sun’s up, hmm? We can even…leave the light on.”

“Okay.” He stood up and took off the jacket, but then crouched and folded it on the floor just a couple of feet from her, and stretched himself out parallel to the wall.

She had leaned toward the window to pick up the jumpsuit, and then she stared at him for several seconds. The gun and the mace spray were islands out in the middle of the floor.

At last she sighed and stretched out beside him, frowning uncertainly as she set the empty beer can on the floor between them. “You…read the whole interview?” she said as she slowly lowered her head to the bunched-up jumpsuit. She was looking away from him, facing the wall. “The interview of me, in L.A. Weekly!”

Sullivan remembered reading, I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men.

And he remembered Judy Nording, and Sukie, and his sonnet that had wound up so publicly in the trash. I suppose I’ve reacted too, he thought. “Yes,” he said gently.

As he closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep, he thought: Still, Doctor, you did try a couple of sips of beer.