Last Call: Expiration Date Part 44

They were already dead, Kootie thought-but he knew what the woman must mean. The morning air was sharply chilly in his curly, sweat-damp hair, but the breeze was still scented with the night's jasmine, and he felt ready to deal with this particular crisis. "Show me, Johanna," he said gently.

"Over by the trash cans and Mr. Pete's van." She was plodding heavily back the way she had come, her bathrobe flapping around the legs of her burst spandex tights. Over her shoulder she said, "I gave them some new gravel last night-could that have poisoned them?"

Kootie remembered his dreamed vision of the woman in the vineyard with the b.l.o.o.d.y, ivy-wrapped staff, and as he followed Johanna around the corner into the slantingly sunlit parking lot, he said, "What killed them was nothing that happened around here."

He trudged after her across the broken checkerboard of asphalt and concrete, and when he had stepped around the back end of the parachute-shrouded van he stopped beside her.

The beasties were obviously dead now. Three of them were sprawled on the pavement and in the ice plant here, their gnarled old hands poking limply out of the thrift-store s.h.i.+rt cuffs, their mouths gaping among the patchy gray post-mortem whiskers, their eyes flat and sheenless behind the scavenged spectacles.

Kootie shook his head and clumsily ran the still-numb fingers of his left hand through his curly black hair. "Terrific," he said. "What are we going to do with them?"

Johanna sniffed. "We should give them a burial."

"These people died a long time ago, Johanna," Kootie said, "and these aren't their bodies. These aren't anyone's bodies. The coroner would go nuts if he got hold of these. I doubt if they've got any more internal organs than a sea-slug's got ... and I always thought their skeletons must be arranged pretty freehand, from the way they walk. Walked. I doubt they've even got fingerprints."

Johanna sighed. "I'm glad I got them the Mikasa gla.s.s candies at Christmas."

"They did like those," Kootie agreed absently. Her late common-law husband had got into the habit of feeding the shambling derelicts, and for the last three Christmases Johanna had bought decorative gla.s.s treats for the things, in his memory. They couldn't eat organic stuff because it would just rot inside their token bellies, but they had still liked to gobble down things that looked like food.

"Good G.o.d," came a man's voice from behind Kootie; and then a woman said, softly, "What would they die of?"

Kootie turned to his adopted parents with a rueful smile. "Top of the morning. I was hoping I'd be able to get a tarp over 'em before you guys got up, so I could break it to you over coffee."

His adopted mother glanced at him, and then stared at his side. "Kootie," she said, her contralto voice suddenly sharp with alarm, "you're bleeding. Worse than usual, I mean."

Kootie had already felt the hot wetness over his ribs. "I know, Angelica," he said to her. To his adopted father he said, "Pete, let's get these necrotic dudes stashed in your van for now. Then I think we'd better go to Johanna's office to ... confer. I believe this is going to be a busy day. A busy year."

He nearly always just called them "Mom" and "Dad"-this use of their first names put a stop to further discussion out here, and they both nodded. Angelica said, "I'll get coffee cooking," and strode back toward the building. Pete Sullivan rubbed his chin and said, "Let's use a blanket from inside the van to lift them in. I don't want to have to touch their 'skin.' "

Angelica Sullivan's maiden name had been Elizalde, and she had the lean face and high cheekbones of a figure in an El Greco painting; her long, straight hair was as black as Kootie's unruly mane, but after she put four coffee cups of water into the microwave in Johanna's kitchen, and got the restaurant-surplus coffee urn loaded and turned on, she tied her hair back in a hasty ponytail and hurried into the manager's office.

A television set was humming on the cluttered desk, but its screen was black, and the only light in the long room was the yellow glow that filtered in through the dusty, vine-blocked windows high in one wall. A worn couch, sat against the opposite wall, and she stepped lithely up onto it to reach the bookshelves above it.

She selected several volumes from the shelves, dropping them onto the couch cus.h.i.+ons by her feet, and took down too a nicotine-darkened stuffed toy pig; then she hopped down, sniffed the air sharply, and hurried back into the little kitchen-but the coffee was not burning.

A sudden hard knock at the door made her jump, and when she whirled toward the door she saw Kootie's face peering in at her through the screened door-window; and then the boy opened the door and stepped in, followed by Johanna and Pete.

"You're not on bar-time, Mom," said Kootie, panting. "You jumped after I knocked on the door; and Dad jumped after I flicked cold hose-water on his neck."

Pete's graying hair was wet, and he nodded. "Not much after."

Johanna was staring at Kootie without comprehension, so he told her, "Bar-time is when you react to things an instant before they actually happen, like you're vibrating in the now notch and hanging over the sides a little. It's ... 'sympathetically induced resonation,' it means somebody's paying psychic attention to you, watching you magically." He looked at Pete and Angelica. "I've been on bar-time since I woke up. When Johanna found the beasties, I jumped a second before she yelled, and when we went back to the apartment to wash our hands just now, I reached for the phone an instant before it started ringing."

Kootie led the three of them out of the kitchen into Pete's long dim office.

"It was one of your clients on the phone," Pete told Angelica, "Mrs. Perez. She says her grandparents' ghosts are gone from the iron pots you put them in; the pots aren't even magnetic anymore, she says. Oh, and I noticed that your voodoo whosis is gone from the cabinet by our front door-the little cement guy with cowrie sh.e.l.ls for his eyes and mouth."

"The Eleggua figure?" said Angelica, collapsing onto the couch. "He's-what, he's the Lord of the Crossroads, what can it mean that he's gone? He must have weighed thirty pounds! Solid concrete! I didn't forget to propitiate him last week-did I, Kootie?"

Kootie shook his head somberly. "You spit rum all over him, and I put the beef jerky and the Pez dispenser in his cabinet myself."

Pete was sniffing the stale office air. "Why does everywhere smell like burning coffee this morning?"

"Kootie," said Angelica, "what's going on here today?"

Kootie had hiked himself up to sit on the desk next to the buzzing black-screened television set, and he pulled his s.h.i.+rt up out of his pants-the bandage taped to his side was blotted with red, and even as they looked at it a line of blood trickled down to his belt. "And my left hand's numb," he said, flexing his fingers, "and I had to rest twice, carrying the dead beasties, because I've got no strength in my legs."

He looked up at his adopted mother. "We're in the middle of winter," he went on, in a tense but flat voice. "This is the season when I sometimes dream that I can ... sense the American West Coast. This morning-" He paused to c.o.c.k his head: "-still, in fact-I've got that sense while I'm awake. What I dreamed of was a crazy woman running through a vineyard, waving a b.l.o.o.d.y wand with ivy vines wrapped around it and a pinecone stuck on the end of it." He pulled his s.h.i.+rt back down and tucked it in messily. "Some balance of power has s.h.i.+fted drastically somewhere-and somebody is paying attention to me; somebody's going to be coming here. And I don't think the Solville foxing measures are going to fool this person."

"n.o.body can see through them!" said Johanna loyally. Her late husband, Solomon "Sol" Shadroe, had bought the apartment building in 1974 because its architecture confused psychic tracking, and he had spent nearly twenty years adding rooms and wings onto the structure, and re-routing the water and electrical systems, and putting up dozens of extraneous old TV antennas with carob seed-pods and false teeth and old radio parts hung from them, to intensify the effect; the result was an eccentric stack and scatter of buildings and sheds and garages and conduit, and even now, more than two years after the old man's death, the tenants still called the rambling old compound Solville.

Pete Sullivan was the manager and handyman for the place now, and he had dutifully kept up the idiosyncratic construction and maintenance programs; now his lean, tanned face was twisted in a squinting smile of apprehension. "So what is it that you sense, son?"

"There's a-" Kootie said uncertainly, his unfocused gaze moving across the ceiling. "I can almost see it-a chariot-or a ... a gold cup? Maybe it's a tarot card from the Cups suit, paired with the Chariot card from the Major Arcana?-coming here." He gave Johanna a mirthless smile. "I think it could find me, even here, and somebody might be riding in it, or carrying it."

Angelica was nodding angrily. "This is the thing, isn't it, Kootie, that was all along going to happen? The reason why we never moved away from here?"

"Why we stopped running," ventured Pete. "Why we've been ... standing our little ground."

"Why Kootie is an iyawo," said Johanna, sighing and nodding in the kitchen doorway. "Why this place was first built, from the earthquake wreck of that ghost house. And the-"

"Kootie is not an iyawo," Angelica interrupted, p.r.o.nouncing the feminine Yoruba noun as if it were an obscenity. "He hasn't undergone the kariocha initiation. Tell her, Pete."

Kootie looked at his adopted father and smiled. "Yeah," he said softly, "tell her, Dad."

Pete Sullivan pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket and cleared his throat. "Uh, 'it's not a river in Egypt,' " he told his wife, quoting a bit of pop-psychology jargon that he knew she hated.

She laughed, though with obvious reluctance. "I know it's not. The Nile, denial-I know the difference. How is this denial, what I'm saying? Kariocha is a very specific ritual-shave the head, cut the scalp, get three specially initiated drummers to play the consecrated bata drums!-and it just has not been done with Kootie."

"Not to the letter of the law," said Pete, shaking out a cigarette and flipping it over the backs of his fingers; "but in the ... spirit?" He snapped a wooden match and inhaled smoke, then squeezed the lit match in his fist, which was empty when he opened it again. "Come on, Angie! All the formalities aside, basically a kariocha initiation is putting a thing like an alive-and-kicking ghost inside of somebody's head, right? Call it a 'ghost' or call it an 'orisha.' It makes the person who hosts it ... what, different. So-well, you tell me what state Kootie was in when we found him two years ago. I suppose he's not still an omo, since the orisha left his head, voluntarily ... but it did happen to the boy."

"I saw him when he was montado," agreed Johanna, "possessed, in this very kitchen, with that yerba buena y tequila telephone. He had great ashe, the boy's orisha did, great luck and power, to make a telephone out of mint and tequila and a pencil sharpener, and then call up dead people on it." She looked across at the boy and smiled sadly. "You're not a virgin in the head anymore, are you, Kootie?"

"More truth than poetry in that, Johanna," Kootie agreed, hopping down from the desk. "Yeah, Mom, this does feel like it." His voice was unsteady, but he managed to look confident as he waved his blood-spotted hand in a gesture that took in the whole building and grounds. "It's why we're here, why I'm what I am." He smiled wanly and added, "It's why your Mexican wizard made you give a nasty name to this witchery shop you run here. And this is the best place for us to be standing when it meets us. Solville can't hide us, but it's a fortified position. We can ... receive them, whoever they might be, give them an audience."

Angelica was sitting on the couch, flipping through the pages of her battered copy of Kardec's Selected Prayers. Among the other books she had tossed onto the couch were Reichenbach's Letters on Od and Magnetism, and a spiral-bound notebook with a version of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida hand-copied into it, and a paperback copy of Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga's Cunjuro del Tobaco.

"How far away are they?" she snapped, without looking up. "Like, are they coming from Los Angeles? New York? Tibet? Mars?"

"The ... thing is ... on the coast," said Kootie with a visible s.h.i.+ver. "Sssouth? Yes, south of here, and coming north, like up the 5 Freeway or Pacific Coast Highway."

CHAPTER 2.

Our doctors say this is no month to bleed -William Shakespeare, Richard II THE CAGED CLOCK HIGH on the green-painted wall indicated exactly eleven, and most of the patients were already filing out the door to the yard for their fifteen-minute smoking break, following the nurse who carried the Bic lighter, and Dr. Armentrout was glad to leave the television lounge in the care of the weekend charge nurse. The big, sunny room, with its inst.i.tutional couches and wall-mounted TV sets, looked as though it should smell of floor wax and furniture polish, but in fact the air was always redolent with low-rent cooking smells; today he could still detect the garlic-and-oil reek of last night's lasagna.

The common telephone was ringing behind him as he puffed down the hallway to his office; each of the patients apparently a.s.sumed that any call must be for someone else, and so no one ever seemed to answer the d.a.m.ned thing. Armentrout certainly wasn't going to answer it; he was cautiously elated that he hadn't got his usual terrible dawn wake-up call at home today-the phone had rung at his bedside as always, but for once there had been, blessedly, only vacuous silence at the other end-and for d.a.m.n sure he wasn't going to pick up any ringing telephones that he didn't have to answer. Resolutely ignoring the diminis.h.i.+ng noise, Armentrout peeked through the wire-reinforced gla.s.s of the narrow window in his office door before turning the key in the first of the two locks, though it was nearly impossible that a patient could have sneaked inside; and he saw no one, and of course when he had turned the key in the second lock and the red light in the lockplate came on and he pulled the door open, the little room was empty. On the weekends the intern with whom he shared the office didn't come in, and Armentrout saw patients alone.

He preferred that.

He lowered his substantial bulk into his desk chair and picked up the file of admission notes on the newest patient, with whom he had an appointment in less than a quarter of an hour. She was an obese teenager with a dismal Global a.s.sessment Score of 20, diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, Manic. Today he would give her a gla.s.s of water with four milligrams of yellow benzodiazepine powder dissolved into it; instantly soluble and completely tasteless, the drug would not only calm her down and make her suggestible but also block the neurotransmissions that permitted memorization-she would remember nothing of today's session.

A teenager! he thought as he absently kneaded the crotch of his baggy slacks. Obese! Manic! Well, she'll be going home in a few days, totally cured and with no manic episodes in her future; and I will have had a good time and added some depth-of-field and at least a few minutes to my lifespan. Everybody will be better off.

With his free hand he brushed some patient's frightful crayon drawings away from the rank of instant-dial b.u.t.tons alongside the telephone. When the girl arrived he would lift the receiver and punch the b.u.t.ton to ring the telephone in the conference room, where he had left good old reliable Long John Beach jiggling and mumbling in a chair by the phone-though it was possible that Armentrout wouldn't need Long John Beach's help anymore, if this morning's reprieve from the hideous wake-up call was a sign of the times, a magical gift of this new year.

The ringing of this telephone, the one on his desk, snapped him out of his optimistic reverie; and under his spray-stiffened white hair his forehead was suddenly chilly with a dew of sweat. Slowly, his lips silently forming the words no, please, no, he reached out and lifted the receiver.

"Dr. Armentrout," he said slowly, hardly expelling any breath.

"Doc," came a tinny voice out of the earpiece, "this is Taylor Hamilton? Desk sergeant at the San Marcos County Sheriff's branch? I'm calling from a pay phone in the back hall."

Armentrout's chin sagged into his jowls with relief, and then he was smiling with fresh excitement as he picked up a pen. For the past several years he had been alerting police officers and paramedics and psych techs all over southern California to watch for certain kinds of 51-50, which was police code for involuntary-seventy-two-hour-hold psychiatric cases.

"Taylor Hamilton," noted Armentrout, consciously keeping the eagerness out of his voice as he wrote down the man's name on a Post-it slip. "Got it. You've got a good one?"

"This lady seems like just what the doctor ordered," said Hamilton with a nervous laugh. "I bet you anything that she turns out to have gone AWOL from your place yesterday."

Armentrout had already pulled down an escape-report form from the shelf over the desk, and he now wrote 12/31/94 in the date box.

"I'll bet you," Hamilton went on, "one thousand dollars that she's a runaway of yours."

Armentrout lifted the pen from the paper. "That's a lot of money," he said dubiously. A thousand dollars! And he hated it when his informants made the arrangement sound so nakedly mercenary. "What makes you think she's ... one of mine?"

"Well, she called nine-one-one saying that she'd just half an hour earlier killed a guy in a field above the beach in Leucadia this morning, like right at dawn, stabbed him with a speargun spear, if you can believe that-but when the officers had her take them to where it supposedly happened and show them, there was no body or blood at all, and no spear; in fact they reported that the field was full of blooming flowers and grapevines and it was obvious n.o.body had walked across it for at least the last twenty-four hours. She told them it was a king that she killed there, a king called the Flying Nun-that's solid ding talk, isn't it? The officers are convinced that her story is pure hallucination. She hasn't stopped crying since she called nine-one-one, and her nose won't stop bleeding, and she says some guy rearranged her teeth, though she doesn't show any bruises or cuts. And listen, when they first tried to drive her back here, for questioning?-the black-and-white wouldn't start, they needed a jump; and when we've been talking to her in here the lights keep dimming and my hearing aid doesn't work."

Armentrout was frowning thoughtfully. The electromagnetic disturbances indicated one of the dissociative disorders-psychogenic amnesia, fugue states, depersonalization. These were the tastiest maladies he could cure ... short of curing somebody of their very life, of course, which was ethically problematic and in any case contributed too heavily to the- He s.h.i.+ed away from the memory of the morning telephone calls.

But a thousand dollars! This Hamilton fellow was a greedy pig. This wasn't really supposed to be about money.

"I don't," Armentrout began- But she did go crazy on this morning, he thought. She might very well have been reacting to the same thing, whatever it might be, that saved me from my intolerable wake-up call. These poor suffering psychos are often psychic, and a dissociative, having distanced herself from the ground state of her core personality, might be able to sense a wider spectrum of magical effects. By examining her I might be able to figure out what the h.e.l.l has happened. I should call around, in fact, and tell all my sentries to watch especially for a psychosis that was triggered this morning.

"-see any reason not to pay you a thousand dollars for her," he finished, nevertheless still frowning at the price. "Can I safely fax you the AWOL report?"

"Do it in ... exactly ten minutes, okay? I can make sure n.o.body else is near the machine, and then as soon as your fax has cooled off I'll smudge the date and pretend to find it on yesterday's spike."

Armentrout glanced at his watch and then bent over the police-report form again. "Name and description?"

"Janis Cordelia Plumtree," said Hamilton. "She has a valid driver's license, and I Xeroxed it. Ready? DOB 9/20/67 ..."

Armentrout began neatly filling in the boxes on the escape-report form. This morning a manic teenager on benzodiazepine, and, soon, a dissociative who was strong enough to interfere with both AC and DC ... and who might also provide a clue to why Armentrout had been, at least for this morning, freed from the attention of all the resentful ghosts and ghost fragments!

This was already shaping up to be a fine year, though it was only eleven hours old.

When he finally hung up the telephone he looked at his watch again. He had five minutes before he should send the fax or expect the bipolar girl to be brought in.

He got his feet firmly under the chair and stood up with a grunt, then crossed to the long couch that couldn't be seen through the door window, and lifted off of the cus.h.i.+ons a stack of files and a box of plastic Lego bricks. Clearing the field, he thought with some antic.i.p.ation, for the cultivation of the bipolar girl's cure. The plowing and seeding of her recovery. And it would be a real cure, as decisive as surgery-not the dreary, needlessly guilt-raising patchwork of psychotherapy. Armentrout saw no value in anyone dredging up old guilts and resentments, ever.

Finally he unlocked the top drawer of the filing cabinet and rolled it partway out. Inside were only two things, two purple velvet boxes.

One box contained a battered but polished .45-caliber derringer for which he had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year and a half ago, its two stubby barrels chambered to take .410 shot sh.e.l.ls as well as Colt .45 rounds; some spiritualist medium had found the blocky little gun on Ninth Street in downtown Las Vegas in 1948, and there was doc.u.mentation to suggest that the gun had been used to castrate a powerful French occultist there; and Armentrout knew that a woman had killed herself with it in Delaware in October of 1992, shortly before he had acquired it. Probably it had inflicted injuries on other people at other times. The tiny gun was alleged, with some authority, to be able to shoot straight through magical protections that would deflect a bullet shot from a mundane gun: the French occultist had been heavily warded, but the person who had shot him had been his wife and the mother of his children, and so she had been inside his guard and able to wound him-and the gun had thus definitively shared in her privileged position, and was now reputedly capable of shooting the equivalent of supernatural-Teflon rounds.

Armentrout had never fired it, and certainly he wouldn't be needing it for the bipolar teenager.

The other velvet box he lifted out of the file drawer.

He carried it to the low coffee table carefully. Inside the box were twenty cards from a tarot deck that had been painted in Ma.r.s.eilles in 1933. Armentrout had paid a San Francis...o...b..okseller four hundred thousand dollars for the cards in 1990. Twenty cards was less than a third of the complete tarot deck, and the powerful Death and The Tower cards were not among this partial set-but these twenty cards were from one of the fabulously rare Lombardy Zeroth decks, painted by a now-disbanded secret guild of damagingly initiated artists, and the images on the cards were almost intolerably evocative of the raw Jungian archetypes.

Armentrout had used the contents of this box on many occasions-he had awakened catatonics simply by holding the Judgment card in front of their gla.s.sy eyes, realigned the minds of undifferentiated schizophrenics with a searing exposure of The Moon, settled the most conflicted borderlines with the briefest palmed flash of The Hanged Man; and on a couple of occasions he had induced real, disorganized schizophrenia by showing a merely neurotic patient the Fool card.

For the bipolar girl today he would try first the Temperance card, the winged maiden pouring water from one jug to another.

And he would avoid looking squarely at any of the cards himself. When he had first got the deck he had forced himself to scrutinize the picture on each card-enduring the sea-bottom explosions they seemed to set off in his mind, clenching his fists as alien images arrowed up to his conscious levels like deep-water monsters bursting up into the air.

The experience had, if anything, only diminished his personal ident.i.ty, and so he had not been in danger of attracting the notice of his ... of any Midwest ghost ... but locally he had been a clamorous maelstrom in the psychic water table, and for the next three days his phone had rung at all hours with southern California ghosts clamoring on the line, and after a few weeks he had noticed that his hair was growing out completely white.

And like a lock of unruly hair, he thought now as he picked up the escape-report form and turned his chair toward the fax machine, this teenage girl's mania will be drawn out tight by the urgent attraction of the image on the card, and I will snip that bit off of her- -and swallow it into myself.

She was at the door; he took the telephone receiver off the cradle, pushed the instant-dial b.u.t.ton, and then stood up ponderously to let her in.

In the Long Beach apartment building known as Solville, Angelica Sullivan had been having a busy morning; she wanted to hover protectively over Kootie, but she had found that there were other demands on her time.

Over the rental-office door that faced the alley, she had last year hung up-reluctantly, for the business name had not been of her choosing-a sign that read TESTCULOS DEL LEN-BOTNICA Y CONSULTORIO. And it seemed that every client who had ever consulted her here had come blundering up to that rental-office door today, or at least called on the telephone; they were mostly Hispanic and black, dishwashers and motel maids and gardeners, on their lunch breaks or off work or out of work, and nearly all of them were jabbering with grat.i.tude at having been abruptly relieved, at about dawn, of the various afflictions that had led them to seek out Angelica's help in the first place. Most mentioned having been awakened by an earthquake, though the radio news station that Angelica had turned on hadn't yet mentioned one.

Many of her people had felt that this deliverance needed to be formalized with ritual thanks, and so, with help from Kootie and Pete and Johanna, Angelica had harriedly tried to comply. In her role as a curandera she had got pots of mint tea brewing, and served it in every vessel in the place that would do for a cup, and Johanna had even dug out some of her late husband's old coffee cups, still red-stained from the cinnamon tea that Sol Shadroe had favored; as a maja, Angelica had lit all the veladores, the candles in the gla.s.s tumblers with decals of saints stuck to the outsides; as a huesera she had got sweaty ma.s.saging newly painless backs and shoulder joints; and out in the parking lot, to perform a ritual limpia cleansing, six men in their undershorts were now crowded into a child's inflatable pool that Kootie had filled with honey and bananas and water from the hose.

Cures of impotence, constipation, drug craving, and every other malady appeared to have been bestowed wholesale as the sun had come up, and in spite of Angelica's repeated protests that she had done nothing to accomplish any of it, the desk in Pete's office was now heaped with coins; whatever amount the pile of money added up to, it would be divisible by forty-nine, for forty-nine cents was the only price Angelica was permitted by the spirit world to charge for her magical services.

A few of her clients, like the one who had called Pete first thing in the morning, were unhappy to find that the spirits of their dead relatives were gone from the iron containers-truck brake drums, hibachis, Dutch ovens-in which they had dwelt since Angelica had corralled and confined them, one by laborious one over the last two and a half years; the candies left out for these spirits last night had apparently not been touched, and the rooster-blood-painted wind chimes that hung from the containers had rung no morning greeting today. Angelica could only tell these people that their relatives had finally become comfortable with the notion of moving on to Heaven. That explanation went down well enough.

Others with the same kind of problem were not so easily mollified. Frantic santeros from as far away as Albuquerque had telephoned to ask if Angelica, too, had found that her orisha stones had lost all their ashe, all their vitality-she could only confirm it bewilderedly, and tell them in addition about the total disappearance of the cement Eleggua figure that she had kept by her front door; and as the sunlight-shadows in the kitchen had touched their farthest reach across the worn yellow linoleum and begun to ebb back, Angelica began to get the first news of gang warfare in the alleys of Los Angeles and Santa Ana, skirmishes ignited by the absence today of the palo gangas that served as supernatural bodyguards to the heroin and crack cocaine dealers.

"Were those ghosts too?" asked Pete as he carried a stockpot full of small change into the kitchen and heard Angelica acknowledging the latest such bulletin.

"The gangas?" said Angelica as she hung up the phone for the hundredth time and brushed back stray strands of her sweaty black hair. "Sure. The paleros get some human remains into a cauldron, and it's their slave as long as it stays under their control. That thing that was ha.s.sling us in '92 was one, that thing that laughed all the time and talked in rhyming Spanish."

"The canvas bag full of hair," said Pete, nodding, "with the Raiders cap stapled on the top." He grunted as he hoisted the pot up and dumped the coins in a glittering waterfall into the oil drum he'd dragged in an hour ago, which was now already a third full of coins. "I call it a good day, when things like that are banished."

The kitchen, and the office and even the parking lot now, smelled of mint and beer and sweat and burning candle-wicks, but under it all was still the aroma of burning coffee. Angelica sniffed and shook her head doubtfully; she opened her mouth to say something, but a white-haired old grandmother bustled into the kitchen just then, reverently holding out a quarter and two dimes and four pennies in the palm of her hand.

"Gracias, Seora Soollivan," the old woman said, pus.h.i.+ng the coins toward Angelica.