The fist was punched back out of sight by the recoil, and the pop was loud nough to set her ears ringing and deafen her to the roaring of her panting breath and he hard scuff of her sneaker soles on the pavement.
LONG JOHN Beach tried to hold on to the seat-back with his phantom left hand bur when Armentrout stood on the brake the psychic limb snapped like taffy and his head smacked the windshield; still, he was able to peer out the open driver’s-side window as the doctor frantically contorted his own arm to get the little gun extended outside the stopped, rocking car.
Even in the passenger seat on the far side of the console, Long John Beach was only a couple of yards from the boy who was lying on his back among the pink geraniums…and in the instant before the gun flared and cracked back against the doorframe, their eyes met, and Long John Beach and the boy recognized each other.
The rangy man in denim who had shoved the boy out of the car’s path was on his feet, and he lunged at the car and slammed a tanned fist against the windshield hard enough to flash silvery cracks across it. Then he was reaching in through the open window and had grabbed a handful of the doctor’s white hair—
But wailing Armentrout stamped on the gas pedal, and though his head was yanked violently back, the car had slewed out into the lanes of Lombard Street; horns were honking but there were no audible collisions, and in a moment Armentrout had wrestled the wheel into line and was steering the car fast down the eastbound left lane.
“That was the boy,” Armentrout was whispering rapidly, “I know that was the boy! He was older, but the face was the same as the one in the picture.”
“That was Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Long John Beach.
Peripherally he could see Armentrout glance at him, but Long John had seized on an old memory, and had no attention to spare for the doctor. The sight of the boy in the flowers had reminded him of some old event.
He nearly never remembered anything of his life before Halloween of 1992, when he had been found on the shore rocks beside the permanently moored Queen Mary in Long Beach. When the police and paramedics had found him he had had a ruptured spleen and a collapsed lung, with “pulmonary hemorrhages”—as well as a set of handcuffs dangling from his bloody right wrist. He had spent weeks in a hospital, at first with a chest tube inserted between his fifth and sixth ribs. Apparently he had been in the lagoon around the old ship when an underwater explosion had occurred. The doctors had speculated that he must have been exhaling in the instant of the blast, and curled up into a ball, and that that was why he hadn’t been killed; another man in the water had been killed…and must have lost at least his shoe and all the skin off his left foot, for…for somebody had previously handcuffed Long John Beach’s wrist to the man’s ankle!
But Long John Beach had been going by another name, then—another makeshift name based on a city he had found himself in.
Like a whisper the old name came to him: Sherman Oaks.
He had been hunting for Koot Hoomie Parganas in that long-ago season, and so had the man who had died in the underwater explosion…and so had a fat woman who had been some kind of movie producer. Each of them had wanted to get hold of the Parganas boy, and kill him, and inhale the powerful ghost that the boy contained—the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.
Sherman Oaks had failed, and of course the man who’d died in the explosion had failed. Perhaps the fat lady had succeeded in inhaling Edison.
No—she couldn’t have, because that would have involved killing the boy, and Long John Beach had just seen the boy a minute ago, alive.
The boy’s face, when the haunted brown eyes had locked on to Long John Beach’s gaze just now, had been pale and gaunt, and openmouthed with surprise and apprehension—but the sick wrinkles around the eyes spoke of some imminent punishment feared but expected, even accepted. The expression was one of fearful guilt, Long John Beach thought.
The boy’s face had been younger when Beach had first seen it, but it had worn that same look of pathetically anticipating and deserving punishment.
The Parganas boy had apparently run away from home one night in October of ‘92, directly after stealing the Edison ghost from whatever shielded hiding place his parents had kept the thing in. Long John Beach—Sherman Oaks, rather—had tracked the ghost’s intense field to the boy’s Beverly Hills home, and he had duct-taped the boy’s mother and father into chairs and tortured them to find out where the ghost had gone. But they hadn’t known where, and he had wound up killing them in a fury of hungry impatience, finally even gouging out their sightless eyes.
And then later that night the boy had come back home, repentant and sorry, visibly ready to take his punishment for having run away and stolen whatever glass container had held the ghost.
It had been Sherman Oaks, not his parents, who had awaited him; but the boy had eluded Oaks, and had run out of the house…right through the room in which sat his dead mother and father.
And then a few days later Sherman Oaks had succeeded in briefly capturing the boy, in a van in the back of a moving truck—and after terrifying him nearly to madness Oaks had tried to kill him, and had in fact managed to stab him in the side with a hunting knife.
Long John Beach had never, since Halloween of ‘92, had much awareness of himself as a distinct person. The Edison ghost had lashed out at him somehow and broken something in his mind, so that he’d been left with nothing but the useless ability to channel stray ghosts, as inertly and promiscuously as a tree harbors birds. But now, in this swerving, speeding car, that tortured boy in the flowers back there was connected to his self. The boy’s evident unhappiness was not—Long John Beach flexed the hoardings of his mind to be sure, and it was true—was not separable from the admittedly dim and decayed entity that was Long John Beach’s own self.
He knew that as Sherman Oaks, and probably as other personalities before that one, he had killed people; and he remembered that in those old days he had been addicted to inhaling ghosts, consuming them rather than just channelling them, strengthening his own soul by eating those poor dissolving “smokes”—but suddenly it was Koot Hoomie Parganas, whom he had not even killed, that was an intolerable weight on his frail mind.
There was no new sound in the humming BMW, and Long John Beach saw nothing but the drab motels of western Lombard Street through the windshield, but he was suddenly aware of a change.
A personality that wasn’t a ghost, and might not even have been human, lifted him like a wave under a foundering ship; cautiously, still clinging to the prickly husk that was his identity, he nevertheless let the new person partway into his mind.
All at once he was speaking. “I always have a dog,” Long John Beach found himself saying. “For now he barks all night at the end of his tether. Chancy measures at the bowsprit of the million-dollar hot-air balloon, what you might call an exaltation of barks if you had to spit-shine a wingtip hanging upside down by one ankle.” He was laughing excitedly now. “Just imagine! Shouting out of your liver and lights to hand-deliver these parables—pair-o’-bulls!—to the momma’s boy who wants to put the salmon in the freezer.”
“You and your dog.” Armentrout was blinking rapidly at the traffic ahead, and breathing through his mouth. “It doesn’t matter now,” he whispered. “It’s all cashed out, I killed the boy back there.”