“Yes.”
“And it’s still okay? They didn’t drop it on its head or anything?”
Cochran smiled. “It’s still apparently inhabitable, Janis.”
“Good. I did help kill him, and I do owe him his life back, but…I’d just as soon get to keep my own life afterward, not let him just have me…even though that’s what I deserve.” She shivered visibly and, after another fearful glance at the close top of the wall, leaned against Cochran. “Of all things,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t want what I deserve.”
“None of us wants that,” he agreed quietly.
He draped his left arm around her shoulders, and he wondered if she might be mixing up the death of Scott Crane, for which she had been to some extent responsible, with the death of her father. A question for Angelica to wrestle with, he thought; though in fact Angelica, and now janis, don’t believe janis’s father died at all. Somehow.
Her shoulder was pressing into his ribs the tape cassette he’d taken from the telephone answering machine in his house a couple of hours ago, and he shifted his position—not to relieve the jabbing, but to keep the cassette in his pocket from possibly being broken.
WHEN HE had punched in his kitchen-door window with an empty wine bottle that had been standing on his back porch, he had heard his wife’s voice speaking inside the house—“…and we’ll get back to you as quickly as posseebl’…”—and even though his mind had instantly registered the fact that the voice was coming from an electronic speaker, his spine had tingled with shock, and his hands had been clumsy as he had unlatched the chain and pushed the door open.
Whoever had called had not stayed on the line to leave any message.
He had gone to the telephone answering machine and popped the cassette out of it, without letting himself think about why he was taking it; and then he had gone to her sewing room to find a sample of Nina’s handwriting. Cody had followed him, and in a surprisingly humble tone had asked if she might “borrow” some of Nina’s clothes. Cochran had curtly assented, and as Cody had gone through Nina’s closet and dresser, he had pulled out the drawers of her desk. And while Cody carried away underwear and jeans and blouses and a couple of jumpsuits and sweaters, Cochran took from one of the desk drawers an old French-language Catholic missal, on one page of which Nina had written a lot of presumably important dates, including their wedding day; several snapshots, with Nina’s inked notes on the back, were tucked in between the missal’s pages, and he tamped them in firmly before tucking the book into his jacket pocket. And from the bedroom he had retrieved the gun and half a dozen twenty-dollar bills and Nina’s wallet.
Cochran had driven the stolen Torino out into the back yard and parked it between the garage and the greenhouse, and then draped a car cover over it.
He and Plumtree had driven the rest of the way up the 280 to San Francisco in Cochran’s 79 Ford Granada. Getting off the freeway onto Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then driving past the lawns of the San Francisco Golf Club and Larsen Park, had made him think of his many bygone trips to the city in this car with Nina sitting beside him, and he had been glad that the car had no tape player, for he might not have been able to resist the temptation to play Nina’s phone-machine greeting over and over again.
Alio—you ’ave reached Sid and Nina, and we are not able to come to ze phone right now…
FROM FAR away up the amphitheater slope, someone was whistling a slow, sad melody. Cochran recognized it—it was the theme music from the movie A Clockwork Orange. And that had been some old classical piece, a dirge for the death of some monarch….
Cochran straightened up, still holding the black rubber Pachmayr grip of the revolver, and he peeked over the top of the crumbling wall.
Arky Mavranos was plodding down the path from the road above, with Kootie hopping and scrambling along behind him. The two of them looked like a father and son out for a morning stroll, the father whistling meditatively—but Mavranos’s right hand was inside his denim jacket, and even at this distance Cochran could see the man’s eyes scanning back and forth under the bill of the battered blue Greek fisherman’s cap.
“They’re here,” Cochran told Plumtree. He lifted the revolver and clicked the barrel twice against a stone that protruded from the top of the wall.
The sound carried just fine in the foggy stillness; Mavranos’s gaze darted to the structure in which Cochran stood, and he nodded and turned to speak to Kootie.
“We’ll negotiate with them,” Cochran said quietly to Plumtree. “They’d like to have you in captivity, but we’ll make it clear that’s not an option. We can get a motel room, and have him give us a phone number where we can reach them. Go on meeting like this, on neutral ground.”
“My aims don’t conflict with theirs,” she said bleakly. “If you’ll come with me, I don’t mind being in captivity, for the…duration of this. All of us are here, their friend is dead, because of what I did, what I let happen. Mea maxima culpa. I’m just ashamed to meet them.”
It’s not entirely why I’m here, Cochran thought, aware of the angularities of the cassette and the French missal in his pockets. “Well—let me do the talking, okay?”
“What?”
“I said, let me do the talking.”
“Oh, blow me.” She looked, around at the roofless stone walls. “What are we paying for this room?”
Cochran bared his teeth. “We’re in San Francisco, Cody, and Mavranos and the Kootie kid are walking up. I’ve got a gun, and so does Mavranos, but if you don’t do anything stupid here we won’t have to all shoot each other, okay?”
“Was it him that was shooting at us before? I guess I dove for cover.”
“No, that wasn’t him, I don’t know who that was.” Cochran peered again over the wall. Mavranos was close enough now to be eyeing the stone structure for a place to step up. “I don’t think it was him.” To Mavranos, he called, “I’ve got a gun.”
“So does everybody this morning, seems like,” Mavranos said. He used both hands to climb up onto the exposed foundation ledge a few yards to Cochran’s left, and Cochran noted the deepened lines around the man’s eyes and down his gaunt cheeks. “We got shot at, on the road up there, as we were driving up to that restaurant—maybe you heard it. Semi-auto, definitely, because of how fast the shots came; looks like nine-millimeter, from the holes. We drove on past the restaurant, eluded em with some magical shit and some return fire in the numbered streets east of here and parked in an alley off Geary, and Kootie and took a cab back here.” He noticed Plumtree crouched below him on the inner side of the wall, and touched the bill of his cap. “Mornin’, Miss Plumtree.”
“Was the king’s body hurt?” she asked.
“It—yeah, it was shot in the thigh.” He rubbed one brown hand across his face, leaving a streak of mud down his jaw. “Live blood was leaking out, till we bandaged it tight. I mean, it was purple venous blood, but it turned bright red in the air. Got oxygenated, according to Angelica. It’s a good sign, that the blood is still vital. Not so good that he’s got a bullet in his leg now.”
Cochran glanced down at Kootie, who was still standing on the mud-flat. The boy’s face under the tangled black curls was tired and expressionless.
“Who was it that shot at you?” Cochran asked.
“Local jacks,” spoke up Kootie. “Boys who would be king. The world’s been twelve days without a king, and it’s getting impatient. If we wait long enough, the trees will be trying to destroy Crane’s body. The rocks will be.”