“Yes!” said Pete without looking away from the lamp. “Your goddamn moths are turning into wasps. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner, this wasp’s as big as my head!”
Angelica was just staring at him, and frowning impatiently. “It’s not that big.”
“It is! Will you hurry!”
“Well, it’s not as big as a normal person’s head.”
“If a normal person comes in here we can check. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner!”
“I’ll get it,” said Kootie. Before stepping into the kitchen, the boy grinned nervously up at Cochran. “Best thing for killing bugs, brake-parts cleaner spray is.”
“I bet,” said Cochran to his receding back. Absently he licked fish broth off his shaking fingers.
Plumtree took Cochran’s other hand and led him away from the confusion, past Spider Joe’s corpse to the far end of the couch; then, while Pete and Angelica went on arguing about the wasp, Plumtree stepped quietly into the entry hall, pulling Cochran along after her.
The wasp must have made a break for it, or else another one had manifested itself, for Cochran heard renewed banging and cursing from the office behind them; but Plumtree calmly used the noise as cover while she drew back the chain in the doorframe slot and pulled the heavy door open.
The cold night air was potent with the briny smell of the wild sea as the two of them sprinted down the walk and across the lamplit asphalt to the corner of Ocean Boulevard; and when they had dashed through a gap in the surging headlights across the lanes of Ocean, Plumtree dragged Cochran around a parking lot to a set of iron stairs that led downward toward the beach sand. The majestic old liner Queen Mary was moored permanently as a hotel now at the Port of Long Beach peninsula a quarter-mile away across the dark harbor water, and her yellow lights glittered on the low waves like a windy lane of incandescent flowers.
Plumtree’s blond hair was blowing around her face as she stepped off the last of the iron stairs onto the sand. “Untamed water,” she said, waving at the sea. “They won’t be able to sense us here, even if they’ve got time to look. Which they don’t. They’re crazy even to think of delaying long enough to bury the poor old buggy man.”
Now that they were below the seaside cliffs, Cochran could see a couple of fires down the beach, a hundred yards or so to the south, and he wondered uneasily who might be sustaining them out here in the middle of this night. Faintly on the breeze he could hear drumming.
“Uh,” he said, shivering, “where to?”
“Frisco,” Plumtree said. “Why the Cliff House?”
“It’s—” he said with a shrug, “—a nice place for breakfast. Tourist spot, good cover.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to figure out why the Cliff House had seemed such an obvious place for them all to reconnoiter. “I don’t know, Cody, it just came to me. It’s right by the ruins of the old Sutro Baths, and that’s a good area to talk, down on the plain among the ruins, right by the water, the untamed water, because you can see anybody coming a long way off; nobody could eavesdrop, and the wind and the sea would even fox a shotgun microphone; and—” He laughed self-consciously. “And on the cliffs of Sutro Heights Park, there used to be rows and rows of Grecian statues. They’re all buried in the park somewhere now. I guess I was thinking they’d be a, a protective influence. All the stone people, to distract attention from us.”
He glanced to the side at her shadowed face, wondering if she would make fun of him, but she was just nodding. “Why did they bury ’em?”
“It was during World War Two,” he said. “The government was afraid they’d draw the attention of Japanese submarines.”
“Sure,” she said absently as they trudged through the loose sand north, away from the fires. “Guy at the periscope sees a bunch of naked white guys standing on the cliffs in the middle of the night—‘This mussa be Flisco, Captain-san!’“
Cody’s crude witticism depressed Cochran, and he hoped Janis would be up again soon. “For this,” he said stiffly, “I think we could call my lawyer, and have him wire us some money. We could rent a car then—”
“And leave a paper trail for Armentrout to follow,” she said, nodding again. “Fuck that noise, as the poet said. I’ll get us a car.”
ARMENTROUT HAD never stayed this late on the ward. The patients had all long since been put to bed, and the lights in the common rooms were dimmed; after the final clang of the door closing behind the last of the staff who would not be staying all night, the silence was whole, and tense—the occasional breathless, yiping scream, or raucous laugh, was a welcome collapse-to-one of the standing wave that seemed to fill all the rooms and corridors when the silence was unbroken.
Armentrout was sitting in one of the upholstered chairs at the re-righted table in the TV lounge. The television screen overhead was an opaque dark green, and he knew that the view of the courtyard behind him was blocked by the two board sheets of plywood that had been bolted over the window through which Cochran and Plumtree had escaped.
The views, the extensions to the outside world, were truncated. The pay phone had stopped its incessant ringing, and he was afraid that if he were to get up and cross to it and lift the receiver, he wouldn’t even hear a dial tone.
Every couple of minutes he slapped his pants pockets, and twice in the last couple of hours he had actually had to dig out his keys and look at them to reassure himself that he could leave this locked ward if he wanted to. So far he was resisting the impulse to try the key in the door; what if it should fail to fit the lock, and none of the nurses or staff admitted to knowing who he was? What if they made him take off his white coat and put on clothes from the boutique closet, and forced him to take some subsistence-pharmer dose of meds, and showed him a bed in one of the rooms and told him it was his? What if it was his? He had been a patient in a place like this, in Wichita, at the age of seventeen. …
Atropine again for Richie. …
The charge nurse had given him a bewildered look when he had burst into the demented ice-cream social, hours ago, wearing his awkward two-figure mannikin appliance. He had mumbled something about it being a tool to reintegrate dissociatives—well, he could stick with that. He might try it on a dissociative sometime!
But he had needed the masking effect of the contraption. Long John Beach had been dangerously preempted during that ice-cream-social bedlam, and Armentrout had needed every masking measure he could put on, what with the god apparently right in here, breaking the place up with an earthquake and freeing inmates from their captivity.
Armentrout rocked his head back to look up at the raw cracks in the ceiling. All at once he stood up, shuddering. His fully charged cellular telephone was a weight in his jacket pocket, but suddenly he couldn’t bear being in the TV lounge any longer. He waved at the night charge nurse through the station window as he hurried past.
Plumtree and Cochran, Armentrout thought as he strode down the dark hall toward his closed office door. Why would the god have freed Cochran too?
Armentrout wondered uneasily if he ought to have paid more attention to the deluded widower. How had the man come to have that ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand? Cochran hadn’t reported having any delusional episodes—or visitations—while he was here; Armentrout would have been alerted by anything like that; but was the dreary fellow more than just psychically sensitive, could he have some link with the god?