Last Call: Expiration Date Part 13

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. Bra.s.sy 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.

"Perdn," said Elizalde, as light-headed as if she'd just bolted a stiff drink on her empty stomach, "estoy buscando por Senora Rocha?"

"Ahora me llamo Senora 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.

"S. 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.

"Excsame?" she called. This was ridiculous. Her heart was thudding in her rib cage like fists. .h.i.tting a punching bag, and her mouth was dry and tasted of metal. h.e.l.lo-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 Da 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. .h.i.t 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 antic.i.p.ation of savage pursuit, but n.o.body 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 wife-beater T-shirts.

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 c.r.a.p 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 sc.r.a.ped, 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 Ona.s.sis 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-gla.s.s vase had been knocked over on one table, spilling a sheaf of dried flowers. My quinceniera 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 acc.u.mulation of the crumbled sh.e.l.ls 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 n.o.body 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 hat 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 mimicry at all, but natural.

CHAPTER 20.

"Don't keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!"

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l?

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, st.i.tched into a coa.r.s.e 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 prep.u.b.escent 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 h.e.l.l 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 ghost's 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 middleaged 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sing 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 p.u.b.erty 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 a.s.similated 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 a.s.sociation: 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? G.o.d 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 compa.s.s bobbing around in its gla.s.s dome.

But right now the compa.s.s 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 b.u.t.t-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.

G.o.d 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 "n.o.ble 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 gla.s.s brick hidden in the Dante statue, for sure.

n.o.ble gas my a.s.s, he thought defiantly as he blinked away tears. You old ... s.h.i.thead! What were you doing in that test tube inside the gla.s.s 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.u.m wouldn't follow him anymore, not after the b.u.m stumbled across the- After the b.u.m 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 ...