“So,” said Angelica, spreading her hands, “what do we do?”
“What are you asking me for?” Mavranos snapped. “All I can think of is for us to go to this crazy cemetery temple on the peninsula, in the wrong gear and without even our TV-star intercessor, and hope we can catch up to ourselves.” He darted a glance around the room. “Where’d Kootie go?”
“He’s right outside,” said Angelica. “He waved his hand in front of his face like he wanted fresh air, and he stepped out.” She hurried to the door, calling, “Kootie?”
She leaned around the doorjamb to look, and then she had lunged outside, and Cochran heard her voice from out on the railed walkway: “A note!” she yelled. “Shit—‘Cant be with you for this—sorry—’ Pete, he’s run away!”
KOOTIE HAD already tiptoed down the stairs and sprinted across the dark parking lot the Lombard Street sidewalk, and was now hurrying to a cab that had pulled in the curb after he had, without much confidence, waved to it. He levered open the back door and scrambled in. Better than hiding behind a Dumpster somewhere, he thought nervously, and I can afford this now, thanks to Miss Plumtree. He hiked up the seat to stuff Diana’s baby blanket into his hip pocket.
The cab driver was an elderly black man who stared at him dubiously over his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”
“Yes,” panted Kootie. “Drive off, will you?”
“I don’t like hurry.” As if to prove the point, he cocked his head to listen to a Idispatch on his radio. ‘And I don’t like driving people who turn out to not have any money,” he went on finally. “Where did you want to go?”
Kootie bared his teeth in impatience and tried to remember the name of any place in San Francisco. “Chinatown,” he said.
“You better give me ten dollars up front, kid—I’ll give you the change when we get there.”
Hurriedly Kootie dug out of his pocket the money Plumtree had just given him, and he held the bills up to the window to be able to see the denominations by the glow of the nearest streetlight. He peeled off two fives and thrust them over the top of the front seat to the driver.
At last the driver shifted the car into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Kootie pressed his lips together and blinked back frightened tears, but he didn’t look out the back window.
ANGELICA TRUDGED back up the stairs from the parking lot. Many of the motel rooms had their lights on after the earthquake, and the doorway at which Mavranos stood wasn’t the only one that had been opened.
“No sign of him,” she told Mavranos when she had stepped inside and closed the door. “There was a taxi driving away—he might have been in it, or not, and I couldn’t see what company it was anyway.” She gave Plumtree a look that was too exhausted to be angry. “Thanks for giving him getaway money.”
Plumtree narrowed her eyes, then visibly relaxed and just pursed her lips. “He was going anyway—read the rest of the note!—and if the money did let him take a cab, you should be glad he’s not walking, in this neighborhood at this hour.”
“Gimme the note.”
Pete Sullivan wordlessly passed to Angelica the piece of Star Motel stationery that had been weighted down with a motel glass on the walkway outside the room, and Angelica forced her tired and blurring eyes to focus on the clumsy ballpoint-ink letters:
MOM & DAD & EVERYBODY—I CANT BE WITH YOU FOR THIS. I’M SORRY. I KNOW ID HAVE TO DO THE BLOOD DRIKING—HOPE YOU CAN READ THIS, I DON’T TURN ON THE LIGHT—JESUS I HOPE TV STAYS OFF—I’D HAVE TO DRINK THE BLOD, & I CANT DO IT AGAIN: LET SOMEBODY HAVE ME—& ME BE OUT OF MY HEAD. EDISON IN 92, NEVER AGAIN, ID GO CRAZY. I HAVE NOT TAKEN THE TRUCK. I DO HAVE A KEY TO THIS ROOM BUT I’LL BE BACK AFTER, I’VE GOT MONEY, ENUFF. I LOVE YOU DONT BE MAD KOOTIE
Angelica looked up at Mavranos. “I’ve got to stay here.”
Mavranos started to speak, but Pete Sullivan overrode him. “No, Angie,” he said loudly. “We’ve got to go through with this thing, this morning. We’ve got Plumtree, and we’ve got the dead king—and we need a bruja. And Kootie knows where we’ll be, he heard Arky describe the place—if he wants to find us, that’s where he’ll go, not here.”
“Just what I was gonna say myself,” growled Mavranos.
Plumtree had sat down on the bathroom-side bed, and was untwisting the coat-hanger wire from around her ankle. “You don’t mind if I get rid of the house-arrest hardware now, do you? Me, I’m glad the kid’s out of it.”
She tossed the wired beer cans aside and straightened up, then looked around and chuckled softly. “Do you all realize what we’ve done to this room? Burnt the rug and now stomped old pizza crusts into it, blasted the bed, poured beer in the TV—at least Janis made it to the toilet to puke last night. There’s even a lot of shed black dog hair on the beds! I’m glad it’s no credit card of mine this is on.” For a moment her face looked very young and lost, and Angelica thought of the little girl who had been hospitalized because the sun had fallen out of the sky onto her. “Get your Wild Turkey bottle and let’s go,” Plumtree whispered. “And please God I still be here by lunchtime, and Crane be alive again.”
“All of us still alive at lunchtime,” said Mavranos, nodding somberly. “Amen.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans,
Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs,
And all to have the noble duke alive.
—William Shakespeare,
Henry VI, Part II
THE pavement of the yacht club’s empty parking lot was wet with sea spray and pre-dawn fog, and the low overcast looked likely to drop actual rain soon. The clouds were moving across the sky from the direction of the Golden Gate Bridge, but the eastern horizon was still open sky—a glowing pearl-white, making black silhouettes of the long piers at Fort Mason a mile away.
In spite of the dim light, Angelica Sullivan was wearing mirror sunglasses—Standard precaution, she had told Cochran curtly when she and Plumtree had climbed out of Cochran’s Ford Granada; the mirror surface throws ghosts back onto themselves, prevents ‘em from being able to fasten on your gaze. Don’t you look squarely at anything.
Cochran remembered the half-dozen little girl ghosts he had glimpsed on the roof of Strubie the Clown’s house in Los Angeles, and how Plumtree had yelled at him for looking at them. Right, he thought. I won’t look at anything.
Driving the Granada with Cochran and Plumtree and Angelica in it, Pete had followed Mavranos’s red truck up Divisadero to Marina and Yacht Road, and the two vehicles were now parked side by side in the otherwise empty lot. Beyond the curb and a short descending slope of tumbled wet boulders, the gray sea of the San Francisco Bay looked as rolling and wild as open ocean.
On a shoulder strap under her tan raincoat Angelica was carrying a compact black Marlin .45 carbine, its folding stock swivelled forward to lie locked against the left side of the trigger guard; and as she stepped away from the Granada she pulled back the rifle’s slide-lever and let it snap back, chambering a live round. The extended base of a twelve-round magazine stuck out from the magazine-well, and back in the motel room Cochran had seen her stuff a couple of extra magazines in the pocket of her jeans and a couple more in the raincoat’s left pocket.