Last Call: Expiration Date Part 30

Over the line she heard a familiar metallic splas.h.i.+ng. The man was urinating! He had begun urinating during the conversation! He was going on in his new, labored voice: "You work for me, now, Miss Keith-sorry, Mrs. Sullivan-oh h.e.l.l, I guess I know you well enough to just call you Kelley, don't I?"

deLarava just sat perfectly still, her damp handkerchief in front of her eyes.

"I know you're busy tomorrow," Obstadt said, "so I'll drive down and say ... 'Hi!' ... at your ghost shoot on the Queen Mary. I need to quiz you about a problem that can arise in this ghost-eating business. And you'll tell me everything you know."

The line went dead. Slowly she lowered the phone back down onto the cradle. Then her hands flew to her temples and pressed inward, helping the rubber bands constrict her skull and keep the pieces of her mind from flying away like a flock of baby chicks when the shadow of the hawk was sweeping the ground.

"The egged van was at the ca.n.a.ls yesterday," remarked Webb, who was sitting cross-legged on top of the TV set.

She dragged her attention away from the stark fact that her false ident.i.ty had been blown. (If Obstadt talked, and Nicky Bradshaw stepped forward and talked, she could conceivably be arraigned for murder; and, even worse, everyone would see through the deLarava personality to the fragmented fraud that was Kelley Keith; and even if Obstadt told no one, he knew, he could-intolerably-see it.) "The van," she said dully; then she blinked. "The egged van, Pete's van! You didn't call me? He was here in Venice! What was he doing?"

"Relax, ma'am! He wasn't here. He must have loaned the van to a friend. This was a curly-haired shorter guy in a fancy coat with breakaway sleeves."

"Breakaway sleeves ...? Oh, Jesus, that was Houdini you saw! It was Sullivan wearing my G.o.dd.a.m.n Houdini mask!"

"That was Pete Sullivan? This guy didn't look anything like your pictures of him." Webb frowned in thought. "Not at first, anyway. He did get taller."

"d.a.m.n it, it was him, trust me. What was he doing?"

"Oh. Oh, chatting up a bird. A-sparkin' and a-spoonin', I'm a.s.sumin'. Mex gal. She got taller too, after a while. She was trying to reason with a guy who was in love with her, a sulking man hiding in a drainage pipe. But when Neat Pete showed up with his joke dinner jacket and fine white hands, she decided to chat with him instead. They stood in a parking lot that was in a traffic whirlpool, so I couldn't intuit what they said. Dig this-there was a Venice Farmer's Market in that very parking lot this morning! I bought various vegetable items. I will cook a ratatouille."

"Shut up, Joey, I'm trying to think." Who on earth, she wondered, could this "Mex gal" be? Not just someone he met by chance, if the two of them took the precaution of talking in an eye of traffic. And the mask seems to have covered her too, giving her the appearance of some other person, which undoubtedly would have been Houdini's wife, Bess! (What a mask!) (May thieving Sukie Sullivan's ghost be snorted up by a s.h.i.+t-eating rat!) Was Pete in Venice looking for his father's ghost? Did he find Apie's ghost? What- "Ratatouille," said Webb, "is an eggplant-based vegetable medley. I tried to write MISTER ELEGANT once on a T-s.h.i.+rt, and it was days before I realized that I'd got it wrong, and I'd been walking around labeled MISTER EGGPLANT."

"Shut up, Joey." The Parganas kid, she thought, and Pete, and the "Mex gal," will be running scared now, keeping low; but maybe I can still get a line on Nicky Bradshaw. I'll have to check my answering machine, see if there have been any Find Spooky calls.

And and and-Obstadt's coming to the shoot on the Queen Mary tomorrow. He wants to know about some "problem that can arise with this ghost-eating business." (How vulgar of him to speak plainly about it!) I'll have to watch for a weakness in him, and be ready to a.s.sert myself. There'll be high voltage, and steep companionways-and the whole d.a.m.ned ocean, right over any rail.

"You don't seem to be getting ahold of anybody, do you?" Webb said, smiling and shaking his head.

"Joey, shut the f.u.c.k up and get out of my stinking face, will you?" She levered her bulk off of the bed and swung herself toward the door of the motel room. "Keep looking for Arthur Patrick Sullivan. He's got to be here, or be coming ash.o.r.e in the next twelve hours-you haven't left this area, and you'd have sensed him if he was awake anywhere within several blocks of here, wouldn't you?"

"Like American Bandstand." Webb hopped down from atop the TV set, agile as an old monkey. "He can't have got past the walls of my awareness," he said, nodding mechanically. "Unless someone opened the gate to a Trojan horse. A Trojan sea horse, that would be, locally."

"A Trojan ... sea horse." Her face was suddenly cold, and a moment later, the marrow in her ribs tingled.

"Oh my G.o.d that fish, that G.o.dd.a.m.n fis.h.!.+" she whispered. "Could Apie have been hiding inside that fish?" I am in control of nothing at all, she thought dazedly.

Webb gave her a look that momentarily seemed lucid. "If so, he's gone."

"If so," she said, pressing her temples again, "he's in L.A. somewhere." She was panting, clutching at straws. "He'll probably try to find Pete."

"Oh well then," said Webb with a shrug and a grin. "Find one and you've found them both, right? It's that simple!"

"That simple," echoed deLarava, still panting. Tears were spilling down her shaking cheeks again, and she blundered out the door.

CHAPTER 38.

"What else had you to learn?"

"Well, there was Mystery," the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,-"Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography ..."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland SULLIVAN HAD PARKED THE van in the shade under one of the s.h.a.ggy carob trees at the back of the Solville parking lot, and then he had got out and looked the old vehicle over.

The back end was a wreck. The right rear corner of the body, from the smashed taillights down, was crumpled sharply inward and streaked and flecked with blue paint. Apparently it had been a blue car that had hit them when he had reversed out onto Lucas. The doors were still folded-looking and flecked with white from having hit Buddy Schenk's Honda in the Miceli's lot yesterday, and the b.u.mper, diagonal now, looked like a huge spoon that had been mauled in a garbage disposal.

In addition to all this, he could see four little-finger-sized holes in and around the back doors, ringed with bright metal where the paint had been blown off.

Forcing open the left-side back door, he had found that the little propane refrigerator had stopped two 9-millimeter slugs, and he had disconnected the appliance and laid the beer and c.o.kes and sandwich supplies out on the gra.s.s to carry in to the apartment; the sink cabinet had a hole punched through it and the sink itself was dented; and a solid ricochet off of the cha.s.sis of the field frequency modulator he'd just bought had ripped open one of his pillows, the deformed slug ending up shallowly embedded in the low headboard. One of the back-door windows was holed, and the slug had apparently pa.s.sed through the interior of the van and exited through the winds.h.i.+eld; and one perfectly round, deep dent in the back fender might have been put there by a bullet. And of course the driver's-side mirror was now a half-dozen fragments dangling from some kind of rubber gasket.

These were the extent of the damage, and he s.h.i.+vered with queasy grat.i.tude when he thought of the boy having been crouched on the van floor in the middle of the fusillade, and of Elizalde's head nearly having been in the way of the one that had punched through the winds.h.i.+eld. They had been lucky.

Sullivan had made several trips to the apartment to stack his electronic gear in a corner with Elizalde's bag of witch fetishes beside it, and put the drinks and the sandwich things into the refrigerator. Finally he had locked the van up and covered the whole vehicle with an unfolded old rust-stained parachute, trying to drape it as neatly as he could in antic.i.p.ation of Mr. Shadroe's probable disapproval.

Now he was sitting on a yellow fire hydrant out by the curb across Twenty-first Place, holding one of Houdini's plaster hands and watching the corner of Ocean Boulevard. There was a bus stop at Cherry, just around the corner. Clouds like chunks of broken concrete were s.h.i.+fting across the sky, and the tone of his thoughts changed with the alternating light and shade.

In shadow: They've been caught, Houdini's thumb can't deflect the attention the boy was drawing; they're being tortured, disloyal Angelica is leading bad guys here, I should be farther away from the building so I can hide when I see the terrible Lincolns turn onto Twenty-first Place.

In sunlight: Buses take forever, what with transfers and all, and Angelica is a G.o.dsend, how nice to have such challenging and intelligent company if you've got to be in a mess like this, even if this seance attempt doesn't work; and even the kid, Shake Booty or whatever his name is, is probably going to turn out to be interesting.

It's been an hour just since I came to sit out here, he thought finally-and then he heard a deliberate scuffing on the sidewalk behind him.

His first thought as he hopped off the hydrant and turned around was that he didn't have his gun-but it was Elizalde and the boy who were walking toward him from the cul-de-sac at the seaward end of Twenty-first. The boy was carrying a big white bag with KFC in red on the side of it.

"You stopped for food?" Sullivan demanded, glancing around even as he stepped forward; he had meant it to sound angry, but he found that he was laughing, and he hugged Elizalde. She returned the hug at first, but then pulled away.

"Sorry," he said, stepping back himself.

"It's not you," she said. "Just use your left arm."

He clasped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to himself, her head under his chin.

When they turned to walk across the street to the old apartment building, she nodded toward the white plaster hand that Sullivan was holding in his right hand. "I just don't like strangers' hands on me," she said.

"I don't like people with the wrong number of hands," said the boy.

Sullivan looked dubiously at the boy, and then at the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag the boy was carrying, and he tried to think of some pun about finger-lickin' good; he couldn't, and made do with saying, "Let's get in out of the rain," though of course it wasn't raining.

When they had got inside the apartment and dead-bolted the door and propped the Houdini hands against it, the boy set the bag on the painted wooden floor and said, "Has either of you two got any medical experience?"

"I'm a doctor," said Elizalde cautiously. "A real one, an M.D."

"Excellent." The boy shrugged carefully out of his torn denim jacket and began stiffly pulling his filthy polo s.h.i.+rt off over his head.

Sullivan raised his eyebrows and glanced at Elizalde. Under the s.h.i.+rt, against his skin, the boy was wearing some kind of belt made of wire cables, with a glowing light at the front.

"What are your names?" came his voice from inside the s.h.i.+rt.

Sullivan was grinning and frowning at the same time. "Peter Sullivan, Your Honor," he said, sitting down in the corner beside his boxes. He had opened all the windows when he had carried the things in here earlier, but the heat was still turned on full, and the air above about shoulder height was willingly hot.

"Angelica Elizalde."

"This kid is-I'm called Koot Hoomie Parganas." The boy had got the s.h.i.+rt off, and Sullivan could see a bloodstained bandage taped over his ribs on the right side, just above the grotesque belt. "A man cut us with a knife yesterday afternoon. We treated it with high-proof rum, and it doesn't seem to be infected, but the bleeding won't quite stop."

Elizalde knelt in front of him and pulled back the edge of the bandage-the boy's mouth tightened, but he stood still.

"Well," said Elizalde in a voice that sounded irritated, even embarra.s.sed, "you ought to have had some st.i.tches. Too late now, you'll have a dueling scar. But it looks clean enough. We should use something besides liquor to prevent infection, though."

"Well, fix it right," Koot Hoomie said. "This is a good little fellow, my boy is, and he's been put through a lot."

" 'Fix it right,' " echoed Elizalde, still on her knees beside the boy. She sighed. "Fix it right." After a pause she shot a hostile glance at Sullivan, and then said, "Peter, would you fetch me a-d.a.m.n it, an unbroken egg from my grocery bag?"

Wordlessly Sullivan leaned over from where he was sitting and hooked the bag closer to himself, dug around among the herb packets and oil bottles until he found the opened carton of eggs, and lifted one out. He got to his hands and knees to hand it across to her, then sat back down.

"Thank you. Lie down on the floor, please, Kootie."

Kootie sat down on the wooden floor and then gingerly stretched out on his back. "Should I take off the belt?"

"What's it for?" asked Sullivan quietly.

"Degaussing," said Elizalde.

"No," said Sullivan. "Leave it on."

Elizalde leaned over the boy and rolled the egg gently over his stomach, around the wound and over the bandage, and in a soft voice she recited, "Sana, sana, cola de rana, tira un pedito para ahora y maana." She spoke the words with fastidious precision, like a society hostess picking up fouled ashtrays.

Sullivan s.h.i.+fted uneasily and pushed away the bullet-dented field frequency modulator so that he could lean back against the wall. "You're sure this isn't a job for an emergency room?"

Elizalde gave him an opaque stare. "La cura es peor que la enfermedad-the cure would be worse than the injury, he wouldn't be safe half an hour in any kind of public hospital. Kootie is staying with us. Donde comen dos, comen tres."

Sullivan was able to work out that that one meant something like "Three can live as cheaply as two." He thought it was a bad idea, but he shrugged and struggled to his feet, up into the hot air layer, and walked into the open kitchen.

"There you go, Kootie," he heard Elizalde say. "You can get up now. We'll bury the egg outside, after the sun goes down."

Elizalde and the boy were both standing again, and Kootie was experimentally stretching his right arm and wincing.

"Voodoo," said the boy gruffly. "As useless as the hodgepodge of old radio parts Petey bought."

Sullivan turned away to open the refrigerator. "Kootie," he said, pulling a Coors Light out of the depleted twelve-pack carton, "I notice that you refer to yourself in the first person singular, the third person, and the first person plural. Is there a-" He popped the tab and took a deep sip of the beer, raising his eyebrows at the boy over the top of the can. "-reason for that?"

"That's beer, isn't it?" said Kootie, pressing his side and wincing. "Which costs a dollar a can? Aren't you going to offer any to the lady and me?"

"Angelica," said Sullivan, "would you like a beer?"

"Just a c.o.ke, please," she said.

"A c.o.ke for you too, sonny," Sullivan told Kootie, turning back toward the refrigerator. "You're too young for beer."

"I'll start to answer your question," said Kootie sternly, "by telling you that one of us is eighty-four years old."

Sullivan had put down his beer and taken out two cans of c.o.ke. "Well it's not me, and it's not you, and I doubt if it's Angelica. Anyway, you can't divvy it up among people socialistically that way. You gotta acc.u.mulate the age yourself."

Kootie slapped his bare chest and grinned at him. "I meant one of us. First person plural."

A knock sounded at the door then, and all three of them jumped. Sullivan had dropped the cans and spun toward the door, but he looked back toward Elizalde when he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 being chambered. An ejected bullet clicked off the wall, for she hadn't needed to c.o.c.k it, but it was ready to fire and her thumbs were out of the way of the slide.

He sidled to the window, ready to drop to the floor to give her a clear field of fire, and pushed down one slat of the Venetian blinds.

And he sighed, sagging with relief. "It's just the landlord," he whispered, for the window beyond the blinds was open. He wondered if Shadroe had heard the gun being chambered.

Elizalde engaged the safety before shoving the gun back into the f.a.n.n.y-pack holster and zipping it shut.

Sullivan unbolted the door and pulled it open. Gray-haired old Shadroe pushed his way inside even as Sullivan was saying, "Sorry, I'm having some friends over right now-"

"I'm a friend," Shadroe said grimly. He was wearing no s.h.i.+rt, and his vast suntanned belly overhung his stovepipe-legged shorts. His squinty eyes took in Elizalde and Kootie, and then fixed on Sullivan. "Your name's Peter Sullivan," he said, slowly, as if he meant to help Sullivan learn the syllables by heart. "It was on the ... rental agreement."

"Yes."

"It's a common enough name-" Shadroe paused to inhale. "Wouldn't you have thought so yourself?"

"Yes ...?" said Sullivan, mystified.

"Well, not today. I'm your G.o.dbrother."

Sullivan wondered how far away the nearest liquor store might be. "I suppose so, Mr. Shadroe, but you and I are going to have to discuss G.o.d and brotherhood later, okay? Right now I'm-"

Shadroe pointed one grimy finger at the also-s.h.i.+rtless Kootie. "It's him, isn't it? My pigs were-starting to smoke. I had to pull the batteries out of 'em-and I sent my honey pie to my boat-to take the batteries out of the pigs aboard there. Burn the boat down, otherwise." He turned an angrily earnest gaze on Sullivan. "I want you all," he said. "To come to my office, and see. What your boy has done to my television set."

Sullivan was shaking his head, exhaustion and impatience propelling him toward something like panic. Shadroe reeked of cinnamon again, and his upper lip was dusted with brown powder, as if he'd been snorting Nestle's Quik, and Sullivan wondered if the crazy old man would even hear anything he might say.

"The boy hasn't been out of this room," Sullivan said loudly and with exaggerated patience. "Whatever's wrong with your TV-"

"Is it 'G.o.dbrother'?" Shadroe interrupted. "What I mean is, your father." Sullivan coughed in disgust and tried to think of the words to convince Shadroe that Sullivan was not his son, but the old man raised his hand for silence. "Was my G.o.dfather," he went on, completing his sentence. "My real name is Nicholas Bradshaw. Loretta deLarava is after my. a.s.s."

Sullivan realized that he had been almost writhing with insulted impatience, and that he was now absolutely still. "Oh," he said into the silence of the room. "Really?" He studied the old man's battered, pouchy face, and with a chill realized that this could very well be Nicholas Bradshaw. "Jesus. Uh ... how've you been?"

"Not so good," said Bradshaw heavily. "I died in 1975."

The statement rocked Sullivan, who had not even been completely convinced that the man was dead, and in any case had only been supposing that he'd been dead for a year or two at the most.

"Amanita phalloides mushrooms," Bradshaw said, "in a salad I ate. You have bad abdominal seizures twelve ... hours after you eat it. Phalloidin, one of the several poisons. In the mushrooms. And then you feel fine for a week or two. deLarava called me during the week. Couldn't help gloating. It was too late by then-for me to do anything. Alpha-amanitine already at work. So I got all my money in cash, and hid it. And then I got very drunk, on my boat. Very drunk. Tore up six telephones, ate the magnets-to keep my ghost in. And I climbed into the refrigerator." His stressful breathing was filling the hot living room with the smell of cinnamon and old garbage. "A week later, I climbed out-dead, but still up and walking."