Last Call: Expiration Date Part 4

Sullivan glanced back in distaste, then turned and looked past the old woman at the driveway that curled away down the hill to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Best to leave that way, he thought. I haven't heard any sirens, and it's less important, now, that I not be seen. At least now I've got the G.o.dd.a.m.n things.

"Excuse me," he said, and stepped around the woman.

After a few moments, as he was trudging down the driveway, she called after him, "Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

That was what the Lion had asked Alice, in Through the Looking-Gla.s.s. "It's a fabulous monster!" he called back, quoting what the Unicorn had answered about Alice.

Don't I wish, he thought.

CHAPTER 7.

"I can't help it," said Alice very meekly: "I'm growing."

"You've no right to grow here," said the Doormouse.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland THE VAN SHOOK EVERY time a car drove past it, but after carefully laying the plaster hands and the little bag with the dried thumb in it on the front seat, Sullivan climbed in the back and tossed the sheets and blanket and cushions off the unmade bed. The bed could be disa.s.sembled and partially telescoped to become a U-shaped booth with a little table in the middle, but when it was extended out like this, the boards under the booth-seat cushions could be lifted off, exposing a few cubic feet of unevident s.p.a.ce. He hooked his finger through the hole in the forward board and levered it up out of its frame.

Inside the booth-seat box lay a couple of square, limp-plastic rectangles connected by two foot-and-a-half-long ribbons, and a gray canvas f.a.n.n.y-pack containing his .45 semi-automatic Colt and a couple of spare magazines.

He lifted out the f.a.n.n.y pack and hefted it. He hadn't shot the .45 since an afternoon of target practice in the desert outside Tucson with some of the other tramp electricians a couple of years ago, but he did remember cleaning it afterward, and buying a fresh box of hardball rounds and reloading all three magazines.

The strung-together plastic rectangles were meant to be worn around the neck while traveling, with one rectangle lying on the chest and the other back between the shoulder blades-right now he had about six and a half thousand dollars in hundreds in the one, and his union papers in the other. Sullivan always thought of the pair as his "scapular," because the linked flat wallets looked like one of those front-and-back medallions Catholics wear to keep from going to h.e.l.l. He was always vaguely embarra.s.sed to wear it.

He glanced toward the front of the van, where the three pieces of Houdini's "mask" lay on the pa.s.senger seat.

What would he put away in the seat box, and what would he keep out?

If he was going to drive straight back to Arizona and try to save his job at the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station, he would peel off a couple of hundred dollars to comfortably cover gas and food, and leave the rest of the cash hidden in the seat box here, along with the loaded gun, which was a felony to take across state borders; and the mask would be most effective where it was, out in the open. But if he was going to stay in Los Angeles for a while he'd have to allow for the possibility of being separated from, or even abandoning, the van-he'd want to have the cash and the gun on him, and the mask would have to be hidden from the sort of people who might get into the van and ransack it.

Another car drove past on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and the van rocked on its shocks.

Stay in Los Angeles? he asked himself, startled even to have had the thought. Why would I do that? She works here, Loretta deLarava, and she probably still lives aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach and commutes right up through the middle of the whole city every day.

I'd be crazy to do anything but leave the mask on the front seat and drive ... anywhere. If I'm screwed with the Edison network I can still get electrician work, in Santa Fe or Kansas City or Memphis or any d.a.m.n place. I could be a plain old handyman in any city in the whole country, doing low-profile electric, as well as cement work and drywall and carpentry and plumbing. An independent small-time contractor, getting paid under the table most of the time and fabricating expenses to show to the IRS on the jobs where I'd have to accept checks.

And if I scoot out of here right now, I might not even be screwed with Edison.

Sukie's nonsense Christmas carols were still droning in the back of his head, and he found himself thinking about the last time he'd seen her, at the shoot at Venice Beach on Christmas Eve in '86. He had somehow not ever been to Venice before-he was certain-and of course he had not been there since.

But on that overcast winter morning he had recognized the place. Driving around in one of deLarava's vans, he had several times found himself knowing what he would see when he rounded the next corner: a gray old clapboard house with flowers growing in a window box, the traffic circle, the row of chipped Corinthian pillars lining Windward Avenue.

On this Christmas Eve of '86, big red plastic lanterns and garlands of fake pine boughs had been strung around the tops of the pillars and along the traffic-signal cables overhead, and the sidewalks had been crowded with last-minute Christmas shoppers and children, and dogs on leashes, and there had seemed to be a car in every curbside parking slot-but the pavements in his flickering memory had been empty and stark white under a harsh summer sun, and in his memory the shadows in the gaping windows and behind the bone-white colonnades were impenetrably black, all as silent and still as a streetscape in some particularly ominous De Chirico painting.

Under an overcast sky the real, winter ocean had been gray, with streaks of foam on the faces of the waves, but luckily deLarava had not wanted to actually go out onto the sand. Sukie was already drunk and wearing sungla.s.ses, and Pete had been shaking as he set up the lights along the sidewalk.

They'd been supposed to be doing a short subject on the bodybuilders who apparently spent all their days lifting weights in the little fenced-in yard by the pavilion at the bottom of Windward Avenue, but deLarava's props had been old-a rented 1957 Buick, a Gigi movie poster to hang in a shop window-and she had had something else, too, that she'd carried in a s...o...b..x.

(Sullivan was shaking now, holding the scapular and the gun.

(Idaho, he thought desperately, up in the Pelouse area where they grow lentils instead of potatoes. It'll be snowing soon now, and people always need electrical work done when it gets real cold. Or, what the h.e.l.l, all the way out to the East Coast, way out to Sag Harbor at the far end of Long Island-there was a lot of repair work of all sorts to be done during the off season, and you could hardly get farther away from Los Angeles.) But helplessly he found himself remembering the moment on that chilly morning when deLarava had put down the s...o...b..x on a truck fender, and Sukie had found an opportunity to peek inside it-and then had screamed and flung it away from her onto the sidewalk.

Pete had already spun around in sudden fright, and he'd expected to see something like a dead rat, or even a mummified baby, roll out of the box; but what had come spilling out of the box, tumbling across the looping electrical cables on the beachfront sidewalk, had been a well-remembered brown leather wallet and ring of keys and, somehow worst of all, three cans of Hires Root Beer. One of the cans rolled up against Pete's shoes, spraying a tiny jet of brown foam.

He and Sukie had simply fled then, mindlessly, running away up Windward Avenue. He had eventually stopped, winded, at a gas station somewhere up on Washington Boulevard, and had taken a cab to their apartment, and then driven his car to his bank, where he had cashed out his savings account. To this day he didn't know or care where Sukie had run to. Pete had been in Oregon by the next afternoon. Sukie had eventually tracked him down through union records, and they had talked on the phone a few times, but they'd never knowingly been in the same state at the same time again.

And now deLarava apparently wanted them back again. Sukie had obviously believed that the old woman intended to try the Venice "exorcism" again, with Pete and Sukie again present-voluntarily or not.

Sullivan tried to think of some other explanation. Maybe deLarava didn't want the twins back, hadn't thought about them in years, and Sukie's car had simply been hit by some random drunk, and the sudden onset of bar-time was caused by something that had nothing to do with deLarava; or deLarava might indeed want the twins back, but just to do the sort of work they'd done for her before, nothing to do with Venice; or she did want to do the Venice one again, but wouldn't be able to, now, because Sukie had killed herself. The old lady would be unable to do it unless she got a new pair of twins.

He bared his teeth and exhaled sharply. She might try to do it again, with some other pair of twins. Probably on Halloween, four days from now. Halloween was even better than Christmas, probably, for her purpose.

Well, he thought, in any case, I'm out of it. It has nothing to do with (-a Hires Root Beer can rolling against his foot, wasting itself spraying a thin needle of foam out onto the sandy sidewalk-) me.

For five full minutes, while cars roared past outside the van, he just crouched over the open underseat box.

Finally, with trembling fingers, he unb.u.t.toned his shirt and draped the ribbons of the scapular over his head and onto his shoulders. After he had reb.u.t.toned the shirt he flipped the black web belt of the f.a.n.n.y pack around his waist and snapped the buckle shut. Then he straightened up to go fetch the plaster hands so that he could put them away and rea.s.semble the bed. The thumb in the Bull Durham sack he could carry in his shirt pocket.

CHAPTER 8.

"How are you getting on?" said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland KOOTIE AWOKE INSTANTLY WHEN he heard someone scramble over the wooden fence downstairs, but he didn't move, only opened his eyes. The scuffed planks of the balcony floor were warm under his unbruised cheek; by the shadow of the big old banana tree he judged the time to be about four in the afternoon.

He had found this enclosed courtyard at about noon; somewhere south of Olympic he'd picked his way down an alley between a pair of gray two-story stucco-fronted buildings that had no doubt housed businesses once but were featureless now, with their windows painted over; a wooden fence in the back of one of the buildings was missing a board, leaving a gap big enough for Kootie to sc.r.a.pe through.

Towering green schefflera and banana and avocado trees shaded the yard he had found himself in, and he'd decided that the building might once have been apartments-this hidden side was green-painted clapboard with decoratively framed doors and windows, and wooden steps leading up to a long, roofed balcony. Someone had stored a dozen big Coca-Cola vending machines back here, but Kootie didn't think anyone would be coming back for them soon. He doubted that anyone had looked in on this little yard since about 1970. It was a relief to be able to take the adult-size sungla.s.ses off his nose and tuck them into his pocket.

He had climbed the rickety old stairs to the balcony, and then had just lain down and gone to sleep, without even taking off his knapsack. And he had slept deeply-but when he awoke he remembered everything that had happened to him during the last twenty hours.

He could hear the faint scuff of the person downstairs walking across the little yard now, but there was another sound that he couldn't identify: a recurrent raspy hiss, as though the person were pausing here and there to slowly rub two sheets of coa.r.s.e paper together.

For several seconds Kootie just lay on the boards of the balcony and listened. Probably, he told himself, this person down in the yard won't climb the steps to this balcony. A grown-up would worry that the stairs might break under his weight. Probably he'll go away soon.

Kootie lifted his head and looked down over the balcony edge-and swallowed his instinctive shout of horror, and made himself keep breathing slowly.

In the yard, hunched and bent-kneed, the ragged man in camouflage pants was moving slowly across the stepping-stones, his single arm swinging like the clumped legs of a hovering wasp. The baseball cap kept Kootie from seeing the man's face, but he knew it was the round, pale, whiskered face with the little eyes that didn't seem to have sockets behind them to sit in.

Kootie's ears were ringing shrilly.

This was the man who had tried to grab him in the living room of Kootie's house last night-Hey, kid, come here. This was almost certainly the man who had murdered Kootie's parents. And now he was here.

The rasping sound the man was making, Kootie realized now, was sniffing-long, whistling inhalations. He was carefully seining the air with his nose as he made his slow way across the yard; and every few seconds he would jerk heavily, as if an invisible cord tied around his chest were being tugged.

Kootie ducked back out of sight, his heart knocking fast. He's been following me, Kootie thought. Or following the gla.s.s brick. What does the thing do, leave a trail in the air, like tire tracks in mud?

He is going to come up the stairs.

Then Kootie twitched, startled, and an instant later the b.u.m began talking. "You came in here through the fence," said the b.u.m in a high, clear voice, "and you didn't leave by that means. And I don't think you have a key to any of these doors, and I don't think you can fly." He laughed softly. "Therefore you're still here."

Kootie looked toward the far end of the balcony; it ended at a railing just past the farthest door, with no other set of stairs.

I can jump, he thought tensely. I can climb over the railing and hang from as low a place as I can hold on to, and then drop. Scramble out of the yard through the fence before this guy can even get back down the stairs, and then just run until ... until I get to the ocean, or the Sierras, or until I drop dead.

"Let me tell you a parable," said the man below, still audibly shuffling across the leafy yard. "Once upon a time a man killed another man, and then he was ... sorry, and wanted to be forgiven. So he went to the dead man's grave, and dug him up, and when he opened the casket he saw that the man inside it was himself, smiling at the joke.

"Hah!"

The balcony shook as a muscular hand grabbed the vertical rail-post in front of Kootie's eyes, and two shod feet loudly scuffled for traction on the planks, inches from Kootie's own feet; and the round face had poked up above the balcony floor and the b.u.m's little black eyes were staring straight into Kootie's.

Kootie had rolled back against the wall, but now couldn't move, or breathe, or think.

The inches-away mouth opened among the patchy whiskers, opened very wide, and out of it grated a million-voice roar like a stadium when a player hits a home run.

Then Kootie had kicked himself up and was running for the far end of the balcony, but behind him he heard the fast booming scuffle of the man scrambling up onto the planks, and before Kootie reached the rail his head was rocked as the b.u.m s.n.a.t.c.hed at his curly hair.

Kootie sprang, slapped the balcony rail with the sole of his left Reebok, and was airborne.

Banana leaves were whipping his face, and he tried to grab a branch but only managed to skin his palm and go into a spinning fall. His knapsack and the base of his spine hit the hard dirt in almost the same instant that his feet did, and his head was full of the coppery taste of pennies as he scrambled on all fours, unable to work his lungs, toward the fence.

By the time he reached the alley he could at least wring awful whooping and gagging sounds out of his chest, and could even get up onto his feet, and he hopped and hunched and sobbed his way to the street sidewalk.

A pickup truck with its bed full of lawnmowers and fat burlap sacks was groaning past in the slow lane, and Kootie forced his numbed and shaking legs to run-and after a few pounding seconds he managed to collide with the truck's tailgate, his knees on the b.u.mper and his arms wrapped around the two upright metal tubes of a power-mower handle. At least his feet were off the ground.

But the truck's old brakes were squealing now, and Kootie was being pushed against the tailgate as the battered vehicle ground to a halt. He used the momentum to help him climb into the truck bed, and then, kneeling on a burlap sack that reeked of gasoline and the stale-beer smell of old cut gra.s.s, he waved urgently at the rearview mirror. "Go," Kootie croaked, "start up, go!"

Through the dusty rear window he could see that the Mexican driver had put his elbow up on the back of the seat and was looking back at him. He was waving too, and mouthing something, no doubt ordering Kootie to get out of the truck.

Kootie looked back, toward the alley, and saw the one-armed b.u.m stride out from between the two gray buildings into the bra.s.sy late-afternoon sunlight, smiling broadly straight at him.

Kootie sprang over the burlap sacks and banged his fist on the truck's back window, and he managed to scream: "Go! Vaya! Ahora! Es el diablo!"

The driver might not have heard him, but Kootie could see that the man was looking past Kootie now, at the advancing b.u.m; then the driver had turned back to the wheel and the truck lurched forward, swerving into the left lane and picking up some speed.

Kootie peered behind them through the swaying fence of lawnmower handles and weed whips. The b.u.m had slowed to a strolling pace on the receding sidewalk, and waved at Kootie just before the intervening cars and trucks hid him from view.

Kootie sat back against a spare tire, hoping the driver would not stop for at least several blocks. When he stretched out his legs his right ankle gave him a momentary twinge of pain; he tugged up the cuff and saw that it was already visibly thicker than the left ankle.

The ankle felt hot, too, but his stomach was suddenly icy with alarm. Am I gonna be limping for a while? he thought. How fast can I limp?

Five minutes later the driver of the pickup truck turned in to a Chevron station. He opened the driver's-side door and got out, and as he unscrewed the truck's gas cap he nodded to Kootie and then jerked his head sideways, obviously indicating that this was as far as he meant to take his young pa.s.senger.

Kootie nodded humbly and climbed over the tailgate. His right ankle took his weight well enough, but had flared with pain when he'd rotated it in climbing down.

"Uh, thanks for the ride," Kootie said. He fished the sungla.s.ses out of his pocket and pushed them onto his nose.

"S," said the man, unhooking the gas-pump nozzle and clanking up the lever. "Buena suerte." He began pumping gas into the tank.

Kootie knew that those Spanish words meant good luck. The sunlight was slanting straight down the east-west lanes of the street, and the shadows of the cars were lengthening.

Kootie was more upset about what he had to do now than he was by his injured ankle. "Uh," the boy said quickly, "lo siento, pero ... tiene usted algunas cambio? Yo tengo hambre, y no tengo una casa." Kootie wished he had paid more attention in Spanish cla.s.s; what he had tried to say was, I'm sorry, but do you have any change? I'm hungry and I don't have a house.

His face was cold, and he had no idea whether he was blushing or had gone pale.

The man stared at him expressionlessly, leaning against the gas nozzle's accordioned black rubber sleeve and squeezing the big aluminum trigger. Kootie could faintly hear gasoline sloshing in the filler pipe, though the air smelled of fried rice and sesame oil from a Chinese restaurant across the street. Eventually the gas pump clicked off, and the man hung up the nozzle and stumped away to the cashier to pay. Kootie just stood miserably by the back b.u.mper of the truck.

When the man came back he handed Kootie a five-dollar bill. "Buena suerte", he said again, turning away and getting back into his truck.

"Thanks," said Kootie. "Gracias." He looked back to the west, and as the truck clattered into gear behind him and rocked back out onto the street, Kootie stood on the oil-stained concrete and wondered where the one-armed b.u.m was right now. Somewhere to the west, for sure.

Kootie started walking eastward down the sidewalk. His ankle didn't hurt if he kept his right heel off the ground and walked tiptoe.

Sleep, he thought dazedly-where? There's no way I can go to sleep, stop moving. He'll catch up. Maybe I could sleep on a train-"hop a freight."

Right.

Can I hide?

Most of the buildings in L.A. were low-three stories or shorter-and he looked around at the rooftops. Every one of them seemed to have a smaller house on top, in behind the old insulators and chimneys.

He's only got one arm, Kootie thought; maybe I can climb somewhere that he can't get to.

Right. With my sprained ankle?

Kootie was walking fairly briskly, and it seemed to him that he was just barely keeping ahead of panic.

He had pa.s.sed many empty lots. He could describe the typical one now-fenced in with chain-link, with a few s.h.a.ggy palm trees and a derelict car, and lines of weeds tracing lightning-bolt patterns across the old asphalt. Maybe he could get into a lot, and be ready to wake up and run when he heard the one-armed b.u.m climbing the fence.

At the intersection ahead of him a man in an old denim jacket was standing on the sidewalk with a dog beside him. The dog was some kind of black German-shepherd mix, and the man was holding a white cardboard sign. When Kootie limped up beside them the dog began wagging its tail, and Kootie stooped to catch his breath and pat the dog on the head.

"Bueno perro," Kootie told the man. He could now see that the hand-lettered sign read, in big black letters, WILL WORK FOR FOOD-HOMELESS VIETNAM VET.

"S," the man said. "Uh ... como se dice ... perro is dog, right?"