“Flop,” said Cochran, thinking in poker terms now, and remembering that she had used the word several times before this. “That’s what the three communal cards are called, in Hold-’Em: the flop. You hope they make some good hand, combined with your two personal down-cards. Sometimes you just pass even if you’ve got ace-king down, if the flop is all the wrong suit, ‘cause somebody’s surely got two of the flop’s suit, for a flush.”
“When it’s…real life…you can’t pass,” she said grimly, “it’s like you’re the perpetual Big Blind, gotta make the bet whether you want to or not.”
Cochran remembered Janis telling him, just a few moments ago, that he must find it “scary” not to be able to turn a bad situation over to another personality; and he laughed softly with dawning comprehension. “You girls are like a…squad, a relay-team, at the big Poker Table of Life, though, aren’t you? If a flop comes that’s no good to Cody’s hole-cards janis or Tiffany or somebody will be holding two different cards, ones that’ll make a flush or a full boat or something. And so the girl with the playable cards steps in.”
“It still calls for some hard bluffing sometimes. But so far they haven’t dealt us a flop one of us couldn’t play.”
Cochran tilted up his beer to get the last swallow, and sleepily wondered whether to bother opening another. And he thought again about Janis’s remark: Wont it bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?
“Must be convenient, though,” he said now, “nevertheless. ‘Somebody yelling at me? I got a headache? I’ll split, and be back when it’s been taken care of.’”
Plumtree’s vodka bottle was on the seat between them, and he impulsively picked it up and unscrewed the cap. “I—I had to go identify my wife’s run-over pregnant body,” he said, suddenly speaking loudly, “in the morgue. She was pregnant. We bought stuff for the kid-to-be—the stuff’s in that house now, that I’m gonna be breaking a window to get into in a few hours—a crib, goddammit, teddy-bear wallpaper. And Nina and I had adjoining plots, in a cemetery there, we picked out a spot we liked and paid for it—but I had to have her cremated and take her ashes to France, so I’ll be buried there alone.” He gulped a mouthful of the warm, scorching liquor and burningly exhaled through his nose. “I haven’t had the option of going away during any of this. I’ve got to pay for what I take, sometimes as much as all I’ve got. I’ve got to, like most people, I’ve got to take the wounds and then just keep playing, wounded, shoving all my chips out with one hand while I—hold my burst guts in with the other.” The fumes in his nose were making his eyes water. “My hole cards are two dead people, and the, the flop I’m facing is—is those three merciless ladies in Greek mythology who measure out life and fucking cut it off.”
“Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropine,” said Plumtree blandly, watching the road. “Let’s play a game—I’ll name a paper product, and you guess what it is.”
Cochran’s heart was hammering, and his mouth was dry and hot in spite of the vodka, but he didn’t go on shouting. “What?” he said, his voice cracking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why don’t you take a nap, then, champ? It might sober you up, and I’ll be ready to be spelled off, come dawn.” She glanced at him and smiled. “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”
“…Maybe I will.” His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him deflated. Slowly he screwed the cap back on the bottle. “You want some of this?”
“I’m fine for now. Leave it on the seat there, in case of emergencies.”
Cochran stretched his feet out and leaned his head against the cool, damp window glass. “You did that trick just now, didn’t you?” he said emptily, closing his eyes. “What I said made you mad, and you threw the anger over onto me. I—I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Though as I recall, he thought, everything I said was true.
“Go to sleep. You can say anything you want, and yeah; if it pisses me off I’ll just throw it back at you. ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.’ All I care about is looking out for Number One.” She laughed softly. “I’m just trying to figure out who that is.”
Cochran’s last thought before he went to sleep or passed out was that her remarks about his interval with Tiffany must not, after all, have represented real anger.
“MAD AS a March herring,” observed Kootie, agreeing with Mavranos’s assessment of Janis Cordelia Plumtree. They were sitting in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, barrelling along at a steady seventy miles per hour north on the 101 out past Oxnard, with the surf a rippling line far away in the darkness on their left. Mavranos’s view of the right lane was partly blocked by a new Buddha-like stone statue on the dashboard, but he was getting used to that.
“That would be the technical term, yes,” said Angelica Sullivan from the back seat, where she was loading a stack of extended-round .45 ACP magazines—pressing each Eldorado Starfire hollow-point bullet down against the spring pressure with the forefinger of her left hand while she tucked the next into the cleared top of the magazine with the fingers of her right.
Mavranos could see her working in the rear-view mirror. She must have loaded a dozen of those illegal twelve-round magazines by now, he thought. Even with her .45 Marlin carbine, handily built to take the same size magazine, that’s a whole lot of back-up ammo.
She looked up, and in the mirror he could see a glint of highway light reflect from her eye. “You think I’m over-preparing?” she asked.
Mavranos shrugged. “Better than under.”
Pete Sullivan lifted three of the loaded magazines and tucked them into the canvas knapsack at his side. “And these bullets have each got a drop of a rust-based omiero soup in the tip,” he said, “—my pacifist Houdini hands have been capable of that much work, at least—so these’ll stop a ghost as readily as a live human.”
“Good thing,” said Mavranos, watching the traffic ahead and wondering what sort of vehicle Plumtree and Cochran might be driving in. “For the Plumtree woman you’d want both functions. I know, Angelica, you already said her murderer father’s actually not a ghost—but I swear there’s a ghost in that blond head too.” He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re gonna need gas again, next chance—maybe switch in one of the fresh batteries too.”
“We should have taken one of the Solville cars,” said Pete Sullivan; saying it in fact for about the sixth time since they’d buried Spider Joe in the parking lot behind the Solville buildings.
“We need this truck,” said Kootie.
“Why exactly?” asked Pete.
“It’s—” Kootie sighed, and Mavranos caught the boy’s brief, frail grin out of the corner of his eye. “Because when I sensed it coming north to us, Sunday before last, I sensed it as a cup, a chalice. And when Arky takes it to town, it always comes back full of as much food as we’re needing—all this last week and a half, there’s been enough tortillas and bananas and fishes and ground beef and cheese and beer and all, when we unload it, for all the people who’ve been coming over, even though we don’t know in advance how many there’ll be.”
“And it turns red during Holy Week, or any local equivalents,” said Mavranos. “And,” he added ruefully, “so many ghosts are drawn to it and sucked into the air cleaner and burned up in the carburetor that their cast-off charges screw up the electrical system.”