Last Call: Expiration Date Part 11

They stopped at the Temple Street curb. "Well," said Raffle, squinting around at the wide, clean streets, "you gotta antic.i.p.ate. 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 k.n.o.bby 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."

"d.a.m.n Ford," said Kootie helplessly.

"We can get a Cadillac," said Raffle. "h.e.l.l, 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 d.a.m.n 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 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 gla.s.s faade 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 gla.s.s test tube.

Anyone could eat him now, inhale him, inspire the essence of him. In his tiny gla.s.s confinement he had been taken to Detroit, and then eventually back out to California, and this prep.u.b.escent boy had inhaled him; the boy wasn't mature enough to digest him, unmake him and violate him and put his disa.s.sembled 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 pa.s.senger 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 h.e.l.l 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.i.t.c.hes."

Raffle remembered the boy having said something like Kill you and eat me, and for this one tw.a.n.ging, 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 b.u.m, and they'd seen the b.u.m 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.kson 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.

d.i.c.kson had set up a white screen on one wall, while Al had started up the big wood-and-bra.s.s 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 soggily 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 coa.r.s.e 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 further 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 enc.u.mbrance 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 18.

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 gra.s.sy 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 bowlegged across the gra.s.s, 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 h.e.l.l!" 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 sungla.s.ses 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 sungla.s.ses 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 few 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 ma.s.sive 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 doc.u.mentary.

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 h.e.l.l, 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 a.s.sistant, 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 h.e.l.l," 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. G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned thing.