He dragged Plumtree out onto the pavement after him, and he was fumbling in his pants pocket for the Granada’s keys. Pete had followed him out and had opened the truck’s front passenger door, but Angelica was arguing with Mavranos and wouldn’t get out.
“I’ll shoot ahead while you drive,” she was yelling. “Pete, go get in the Ford! Arky, drive us out of herel”
Over the stadium-roar of the rain Cochran heard several hard bangs, and the truck’s long right rear window became an opaque spiderweb in the moment before it fell out onto the asphalt in a million tiny pieces.
He saw Mavranos lunge up and across the front seat, blocking Angelica from the gunfire; “Angelica,” Mavranos was yelling, “get down, get back to—”
Five more fast bangs hammered at the truck, and Angelica tumbled backward out of the truck and sat down hard on the puddled pavement. As Pete Sullivan ran toward her, Cochran spun away, toward the Granada. He frog-marched Plumtree around to the passenger side, opened the door, and shoved her into the back seat; then he ran around the front and got in behind the wheel and started the engine.
Angelica was on her feet, and Pete was hurrying her to the passenger side of the Granada. They got in, and Cochran shifted the engine into gear.
“Don’t go!” Angelica was yelling in his ear as he stepped on the gas, “Drive into them, Arky’s been shot, we’ve got to get him—”
“He’s driving,” Cochran told her. He took his eyes off the advancing pavement ahead for just long enough to give her a quick up-and-down glance, but he didn’t see any obvious blood on her rain-soaked jeans and blouse. Apparently she had not been hit.
Ahead of them the truck had surged around and roared forward, and with an audible slam a motorcycle headlight beam whirled up across the dark sky as the truck rocked right over the fallen machine and rider; Cochran swerved his lower-slung car around the body and the spinning, broken motorcycle, and then he tromped on the accelerator to keep up with the racing truck as it sped out of the parking lot. Dead seagulls thumped under the tires.
The motorcycles were behind them now, their headlights slashing the walls of rain as they turned around, and Angelica was lying across Pete’s lap to hold the carbine outside of the car, its black plastic stock wedged against the still-open passenger door.
She pulled the trigger five times—the concussions of the shots were stunning physical blows inside the confined cab of the car, and the flashes of hard yellow muzzle-flare made it impossible to see anything more than the truck’s taillights in the dimness ahead, but the headlights behind didn’t seem to be gaining on them, so Cochran just bit his lip and hummed shrilly and kept squinting through the rain-blurred windshield.
Over the ringing in his ears and the roaring of the engine, he became aware that Plumtree was shouting in a quacking voice in the back seat. “You can’t kill him with bullets,” he dimly heard her say. “Even when his Lever Blank acolytes threw him off a building in Soma, he didn’t die. He is the Anti-Christ.”
“Oh hell,” he whispered. Who to call up, he thought—not Janis nor Cody, there’s no point in breaking the bad news to them yet. “Valorie!” he shouted.
At least it shut her up. Angelica had pulled the door closed and folded the stock of her carbine, but now she had popped out the old magazine and rammed a new one in—hardball rounds, Cochran guessed—and had rolled down the window and was sitting on Pete’s knees with her head and shoulders, and the rifle, out the window.
She fired six measured, presumably aimed shots—the explosions rang the car roof, but were much less assaulting than the previous five had been—and then she hiked herself back inside and rolled the window back up. Cochran glanced at the rear-view mirror and couldn’t see any headlights back there.
“Arky’s shot,” Angelica said breathlessly. “He got shot in the head.”
Cochran nodded at the truck ahead of them, which had just caught the tail end of a green light and turned left onto Marina Boulevard. “He’s driving fine.” Cochran sped up and honked his car horn to catch the yellow light and stay behind the truck; the tires squealed on the slick asphalt but didn’t lose traction.
Angelica rubbed her fist on the steamy inside surface of the windshield and peered out through the glass. “I don’t see him, though—do you see his head at all, if he’s driving?”
Cochran tried to see details of the truck in the moments when the windshield wipers had swept aside the blobs and streams of rain. “No,” he admitted finally, “but he might be sitting real low.” With the feedback-like ringing in his abused eardrums he had no idea how loud he might be talking.
“But—” he went on shakily, in a louder voice. Hadn’t Pete or Angelica noticed? “But the truck is blue, now.”
“It’s—?” Angelica stared expressionlessly at the boxy truck bobbing in the Ian ahead of them. Even in the dim gray light, the truck’s color was unmistakably a dusty navy blue. “And it’s—that’s him, that’s the same truck, we haven’t taken our eve off it.” She sat back between Pete and Cochran, looking all at once small and young behind the wet black metal of the gun in her arms. “The local Holy Week is over, that means—and nobody rose from the dead. We really did fail here today.”
Plumtree wailed in the back seat, and for a moment Cochran thought the mother personality was still on; then she spoke, in the flat cadence of Valorie: “What would you have me be, an I be not a woman? Manhood is called foolery, where it stands against a falling fabric. And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gun-stones”
For a moment no one spoke; then, “I reckon Kootie was right,” said. Pete. “I guess the receiver had to be somebody of the same sex.”
Cochran’s right shoe sole squeaked back and forth between the brake and the gas pedal, and the engine roared and slacked, roared and slacked, as he swerved from one to another of the eastbound lanes to keep the speeding truck in sight ahead of them, and the word sex hung in the steamy air.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
THOUGH he couldn’t see her in the shadowy alley ahead of him, Kootie sensed that the woman in the hooded white raincoat had found the other mouth of this interminable unroofed passage, and was picking her way down the rain-slicked cobblestones toward him, patient as a shadow.
Even if there had not been wooden crates full of cabbage heads and big green onions stacked against the ancient brick walls, the alley would have been too narrow-for any car to drive down it; and the scalloped eaves of the pagoda-style roofs were four or five stories overhead, and Kootie was certain that even on clear days the sunlight had never at any season slanted all the way down to these wet paving stones, k which had probably not been dry of rain water and vegetable juices and spit and strange liquors since the pavement was laid—and Kootie giddily thought that must have been before the 1906 earthquake.
If that earthquake ever even happened, he thought, here.