“Kootie’s…sensory apparatus works better up here,” said Mavranos. Plumtree had stood up to be able to see over the top of the wall, and he squinted belligerently at her. “You still up for the restoration-to-life stunt, girl?”
Plumtree gave him an empty look.
And down on the around Kootie stenned back, his face suddenly paler, and he glared at Plumtree. “Don’t,” he said, almost spitting, “ever…do that to me again” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Just because neither of us is a virgin, psychically, doesn’t make both of us…sluts.”
Cochran glanced at Plumtree. She was looking down now, and she said, “Well, you just tell your fucking pal—oh, hell, I’m sorry, kid! But Mavranos just now asked me—with a straight face!—if I wasn’t a coward and a liar and a cheat, on top of being a, a murderer. Murderess. Are you still up for it, girlie!’ After I came to you people.”
“And then ran out,” added Mavranos stonily.
Cochran caught on that Cody had thrown her anger to Kootie—who had instantly known where it had come from! “If she was really trying to ‘run out,”‘ Cochran said to Mavranos reasonably, “we wouldn’t have come here to meet you, would we? Let’s not waste time. What do we do next, now that we’re in San Francisco?” How, he thought, does a restoration-to-life work?
Mavranos reached into one of the outer pockets of his denim jacket, and Cochran tightened his grip on his own gun—but what Mavranos pulled out was a can of Coors, which he popped open one-handed. “Okay. Angelica says we gotta call up that black lady that talked to us on the phone, the one who was brushing her hair on the TV. She’s our intercessor, though Angelica doesn’t totally trust her, doesn’t want her taking over. And Angelica brought along a lot of…beacons and landing lights, for Dionysus’s remote attention as well as Crane’s souclass="underline" those two silver dollars Spider Joe brought, and a gold Dunhill lighter that some hired assassin gave Crane one time—Angelica says the guy was a representative of Death, so it’s a significant gift—and a bunch of myrtle-bush branches from the back garden. What other stuff we may need we’ll—”
Plumtree interrupted him with a sharp, startled laugh—she was staring over the edge of the wall in the direction of the north cliff—and then she shivered and closed her eyes; Cochran glanced where she’d been looking, and his eyes widened in surprise to see a powerfully built naked man standing on the mud a couple of hundred feet away, facing them, with shoulder-length brown hair and a curly reddish beard that fell over his chest.
And Cochran’s rib-cage went cold, for he recognized the man. “That’s our taxi driver!” he exclaimed. “The guy that drove us to Solville!”
“That’s Scott Crane,” said Mavranos hoarsely. “Or his ghost.”
“Catch him in a bottle,” said Kootie.
Cochran stifled a nervous laugh at the foolishness of the boy’s unconsidered remark—but then the naked man turned away, toward the cliff, and suddenly the distance and perspective were problematic. The man seemed to be smaller, tiny, as if he were some kind of elf standing on the rim of the wall a yard in front of Cochran’s face, and a moment later he seemed to be immensely far away, and huge; and when he moved—away, presumably, for his form appeared to shrink—he shifted without any apparent contact with the ground. For one instant he to jump from side to side like a figure in patchy animation—and Cochran grabbed one of the shoulder-height stone crossbeams, viscerally certain that the figure had been holding still and that it had been the whole world that had jumped.
Cochran’s straining eyes focussed by default on the cliff face, and he noticed that a deep shadow at the base of it was the mouth of a cave; and when the naked figure flickered away out of sight it seemed to disappear into the shadowed opening.
Mavranos was sprinting away around the coping of a sunken mud lagoon, toward the cliff and the cave.
“It’s just his ghost,” yelled Kootie, starting after him.
“It’s the ghost of my friend!” Mavranos shouted back.
Cochran shoved his revolver into his belt, then crouched to climb back out through the crusted-stone window hole. “Come on,” he gasped at Plumtree, “we should go along.”
She wailed softly as she followed him out. Then, “He drove our taxi?” she said as she hopped down after him from the foundation ledge to the mud. “He must have known who I was I held a fucking spear to his baby boy’s throat!” Even though she was Cody, she took his hand as the two of them trotted after Mavranos and Kootie. “If it comes to facing him, I think it’ll have to be Valorie. She’s the one who plays intolerable flops.”
THE CAVE opened into a roughly straight tunnel, high enough for a person to walk upright in. The passage appeared to be natural, floored with wet gravel and bumpy with stone outcroppings on the rounded walls and ceiling, though Cochran could dimly see a metal railing installed along part of the seaward wall, halfway down the shadowed tunnel. By the time Cochran and Plumtree had come scuffing and panting into the broad entrance, Kootie was a dark silhouette far down the length of the tunnel and Mavranos stood in chalky daylight out beyond the far side, perhaps thirty yards distant. Reflected gray sky glittered in agitated puddles that filled low spots of the floor, and the moist breeze from the vitreous corridor was heavy with the old-pier smell of tide pools.
“Come on,” Cochran said, tugging Plumtree’s cold hand as he stepped into the darkness.
“Take Valorie,” she said tightly, “I hate caves.”
Cochran thought about the dead-eyed woman Plumtree had been right after the hollow knocking of the gunshots, and he shuddered at the prospect of walking through this dim, wet tunnel with her. “I’d rather have you along, Cody,” he said, “actually.”
She shrugged irritably and stepped forward, her sneakers crunching in the wet gravel. “I’m here at the moment.”
The mushy rattle of their shoes on the yielding humped floor echoed from the stone walls, but Cochran could hear too the hissing rise and gutter of contained surf—and when he and Plumtree had trudged to where the metal railing stood against the seaward wall, he saw that two jagged holes opened out from floor level to the outer air, where waves could be seen foaming up over rocks that glittered in the gray daylight outside.
A seething bath, he thought, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
Up ahead, Kootie too was out in the leaden light now, and Mavranos’s voice came reverberating down the tunneclass="underline" “Get your girlfriend out here.”
“Come on, girlfriend,” Cochran said.
She yanked her hand free of his, and hurried past him so that he had to splash along after her.
“Wait for moron Tiffany, asshole,” she called back to him.
He touched the lump in his jacket that was the cassette tape from the telephone answering machine. Tiffany, he thought, or someone else.
THERE WAS only a wide ledge under the open sky at the other end of the tunnel, and no way to go farther without climbing over wet, tilted boulders.
Cochran blinked around in the relative glare when he was standing out there beside Kootie and Mavranos and Plumtree, and he pointed at the tan boulder nearest to them, across a narrow gap that had sea water sloshing in it. “That one looks like George Washington,” he said, inanely. It did, though—the broad face turned out to sea in profile, the nose and the jawline and even the edge of the wig, were all rendered in weather-broken stone.