Cochran stared into Cody’s frightened, squinting eyes—and admitted to himself that in these last eight nightmare days this rough-edged young woman had become, for better or worse, a part of his life. The jumpy infatuation he had initially felt for Janis was gone, but at this moment he couldn’t imagine a life for himself that didn’t abrasively and surprisingly include Janis Cordelia Plumtree.
“I think,” he said with a weary grin, “we’re partners, by now.”
“Shake on it.”
He shook her cold hand.
“Let’s hit the road,” she said.
“Okay. But let’s have lunch first.” He smiled. “And then you can help me get rid of a stolen car in my back yard, when we get there.”
“I can deal with that,” she said. “I hadn’t forgotten it.”
Thutmose didn’t look up from his bowl when Cochran and Plumtree returned to the booth. The waitress was just taking orders for food, and Cochran quickly asked for carp in wine while Plumtree frowned over the menu and grumpily settled for stuffed mussels.
BY THE time the food arrived, Cochran had finished both his beers and ordered two more. The fish tasted like pier pilings and the wine sauce was featureless acid and he hadn’t realized the dish would have raisins in it.
All the people in the bar were still talking in whispers, and after his fourth beer Cochran noticed that the whispering was in counterpoint unison—a fast, shaking chant that took in the bang-and-rattle of the bar dice as punctuation. The exhausted-looking men and women were all jerkily walking back and forth and between each other, and after staring in befuddled puzzlement for a few moments Cochran saw that their spastic restlessness was a dance. The dancers didn’t appear to be enjoying it, perhaps weren’t even doing it voluntarily. Beneath the rapid shaking whispers and the noise of the dice there was a deep, slow rolling, like a millwheel.
Plumtree leaned toward him. “Let’s hit the road,” she whispered. “And…to a-void complications…let’s just walk out without saying anything:’
It was easy enough to slide out of the booth again and walk away across the gritty floor—in the booth behind them Angelica was clearly avoiding her own appalling recent memories by talking consolingly to Mavranos, and Pete Sullivan was waving his empty glass and trying to catch the waitress’s eye—and soon Cochran and Plumtree had made their ducking, sidestepping way, helplessly participating in a few shuffling steps of the joyless group dance, to the front door.
Outside, in the fresh wet-greenery-and-topsoil breeze from Golden Gate Park, the sun had broken through the morning’s overcast and glittered in the raindrops that still speckled the brown Granada and the blue Suburban. Oddly, there were no other vehicles in the lot.
As Cochran opened the Granada’s passenger-side door for Plumtree, she paused by the back end of the truck to peer in through the dusty glass. Cochran had carefully avoided looking at that window at all, not wanting to see the tumbled, broken skeleton of Scott Crane.
Now Plumtree shuddered visibly, and stepped back to catch her balance; but a moment later she again stepped up to the back of the truck and looked in.
And again she staggered, and it was a blank look she gave him as she finally shuffled forward and got into the Granada.
“You okay?” he said as he got in himself and started the engine.
“Fine,” she said. “Don’t talk. On the way to—on the way—stop for some cigarettes and booze. Mores regular, and Southern Comfort.”
Cochran had said “Okay,” before remembering that she had asked him not to talk. He nodded; and, because he was drunk it was easy for him to think only about how he would get from here over to Mission Street, which would take him south to the 280, seven miles down which he would find South Daly City—right across the highway from the little transplanted-cemetery town of Colma—and his empty, empty house.
NEITHER OF them spoke at all as Cochran steered the old car down the straight, narrow lanes over South San Francisco and then looped west past San Bruno Mountain, with its highway-side Pace Vineyards Tasting Room billboards; and even with a wordless stop while he ducked into a strip-mall liquor store, it was only twenty minutes after leaving the Loser’s Bar parking lot that he pulled into his own driveway and switched off the car motor.
Plumtree had her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder as they trudged up the walkway to the front door; and when he had unlocked the door and led her in, then handed her the liquor-store bag and locked the door again behind them, it seemed only natural that they should both shuffle into the bedroom. The bureau drawers were still pulled out and disordered from their hasty visit five days earlier.
Plumtree twisted the cap off the bottle of Southern Comfort and poured several big splashes of the aromatic liqueur into the glass on the bedside table, and drained it in one swallow Then as she unbuttoned her blouse with one hand she touched his lips with the forefinger of the other. “No talk,” she whispered.
Cochran nodded, and sat down on the bed to take off his muddy shoes.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
I would not deprive Col. Haraszthy of a moiety of the credit due him as the first among the first grape culturists of this state, but an investigation of the subject forces the conclusion, that the glory of having introduced [the Zinfandel grape] into the state is not among the laurels he won…To who is the honor of its introduction due? To an enterprising pioneer merchant of San Francisco, the late Captain F. W. Macondray, who raised the first Zinfandel wine grown in California in a grapery at his residence, on the corner of Stockton and Washington streets, San Francisco.
—Robert A. Thompson,
San Francisco Evening Bulletin,
May 1885
WITH no key to the motel room, Angelica and Pete and Mavranos just sat in the blue truck for an hour in the Star Motel parking lot. Mavranos hadn’t eaten anything at the Loser’s Bar, and at one point he got out and trudged across the street to get a tuna sandwich, but he came back to the truck to eat it, and when he had tossed the wrappers onto the floorboards there was still no sign of Cochran and Plumtree, nor of Kootie. Every five minutes or so one of them would impatiently get out and climb the stairs to knock at the room door, but there was never an answer.
They had driven back up here in a roundabout route that had taken them through the green lawns of the Presidio, with Pete at the wheel and Angelica watching behind to be sure they weren’t followed. Cochran and Plumtree had sneaked out of the bar and driven away with Angelica’s carbine still under the front seat of their car, but she still had her .45 handgun, and Mavranos’s .38 was on the truck seat now, under an unfolded Triple-A map.
Angelica’s flesh quivered under the .45 that was now tucked into her belt.
The full-throated bang, and after the blue-white muzzle flash faded from her retinas she saw one less motorcycle headlight in the dawn dimness behind the racing Granada…and then she had steadied the jumping rifle sights on another headlight…
“What’s two times twelve, Arky?” she asked quickly.
Mavranos sighed and wiped the steamy inside surface of the windshield. “Twenty-four, Angelica.”
“It’s your mentation that’s waxing and waning, Angie,” said Pete irritably from the back seat. “You were saving our lives. If my stupid hands could hold a gun, it would have been me shooting out of the car window.”