His right hand had dug in the kinky hair over his ear and pulled free something that felt like a hairpin; and his fingers now worked carefully as they straightened the bit of wire. He knew that they were working more slowly and carefully because one finger was now missing.
He managed to nudge Elizalde in the back of her ribs with his left elbow, hoping the gesture conveyed, Hold still!
Then the fingers had deftly poked the wire into the receiver slot of the left cuff, between the close cowl and the knurled outer side of the swing arm, and, without letting go of the wire, his fingers had gripped the sides of the cuff and compressed it painfully tighter—and a moment later the swing arm had sprung back out, and his left wrist was freed. His left hand took the wire then, and, with all of its fingers to work with, freed his right wrist even more quickly.
He pushed Elizalde back and braced his feet. Now his hands thrust up past his head, scraping his elbows against the claustrophobically close metal walls, and pressed strongly upward against the metal lid—and twisted. The forceful torque released a catch, and then he was turning the whole lid and the upper edge of the cylinder, bracing his feet against the floor. He straightened his legs, and he was lifting the lid off of them, pushing it up with his hands, which were out in rushing cold air to the wrists—and only then did Sullivan realize that he and Elizalde had been upright rather than lying horizontally.
And then up abruptly became down, and both of them were falling headfirst out of the narrow can while air bubbles clunked and rattled past them; Sullivan’s shoulders jammed in the narrower neck for a moment, but the water and a lot of loose metal disks coursing past him pushed him free—
And he fell through sunlit air and splashed heavily into shallow water, twisting his neck and shoulder against a muddy bottom and catching Elizalde’s knee hard in the small of his back.
When he struggled up to a sitting position the water was rocking around his chest and his eyes were blinking in the golden light of late afternoon. He was leaning back against vertical stone, wheezing and panting, and through the sopping tangles of his hair he could see two branching tree trunks standing up from the shadowed brown water a couple of yards away from where he sat, and, a couple of yards beyond them, a low cement coping and a hedge; a few of the top leaves shone golden green in the last rays of sunlight.
His hands were spasmodically clawing in the silty mud under him, trying to find a tree root to grip in case the world was going to turn upside down again.
Elizalde sat up in the water beside him and held on to his shoulder while she coughed out muddy water and whoopingly sucked air into her lungs. Her mud-matted hair was long again, and the lean, tired face was her own. When he could see that she would be able to breathe, Sullivan cautiously leaned his head back and looked up. He was sitting against a square marble pillar that supported a marble crosspiece far overhead. He and Elizalde were apparently in the south corner of the lake, in the tail-end lagoon behind the marble walls of the Douglas Fairbanks monument. The world was holding still, and he began to relax, muscle by muscle. There was a twisting itch in his ear then, and he nearly thrust his finger into it; but the buzzing voice said, “You’ve got to get to the Paramount wall—but first grope around in the water and get Houdini's hands”
“Okay, Dad.”
Sullivan pushed away from the pillar and slowly waded on his knees out across the pool, his face bent so closely over the water that his harsh breaths blew rings onto the surface, and he swept his hands through the velvety silt. Elizalde was just breathing hoarsely and watching him.
Faintly he could hear a rapid creak of metal and quacking laughter, but the sounds were distant and not drawing closer.
The silt was thick with pennies and nickels and dimes, but he tossed them aside—Elizalde inhaled sharply when she saw the first handful of them—and at last he found the plaster hand with the missing finger and silently handed it to her, and then a few moments later he found the other.
“Up this far slope to the service road,” he whispered to Elizalde, “and then turn right and hug the wall all the way back west. The car is—”
“You were in there, with me,” interrupted Elizalde tensely, “right? The can was full of salt water this time, wasn’t it?”
Sullivan sucked the elastic cuff of his leather jacket; and he thought that it still tasted of salt. “I don’t know if it really happened or not,” he said, “but I was in there with you.’
In Sullivan’s ear the voice resonated again: “At the end there, that was Houdini's famous escape from the padlocked milk can. Big news in the teens and twenties.”
Sullivan helped Elizalde stand up in the yielding mud, and then he waded to the coping, stepped up onto it, and threw one leg over the hedge. “My dad says that was Houdini’s famous escape from the milk can,” he said, quietly.
“This time it was ours,” Elizalde said, reaching up from the water for Sullivan to give her a boost. “Happy birthday.”
NICHOLAS BRADSHAW had shambled slowly out across the shadow-streaked parking lot to Pete Sullivan’s shrouded van, and by the back bumper he crouched to pick up the little magnet they’d taken out of the telephone. Before turning his steps toward one of the garages, he put the magnet in his mouth.
I wonder, he thought stolidly, if you’re held entirely accountable for sins you commit after you’re dead. Kids before the age of reason aren’t considered capable of knowing right from wrong, so if a five-year-old kills a playmate, he’s not blamed. Or not much. He’s just a little kid, after all. So what about adults past the age of… expiration? We’re just dead guys, after all.
He thought of the “beasties,” the solid ghosts who wandered up from the beach in the evenings and hung around outside his office door, waiting for Bradshaw to set out paper plates with smooth pebbles on them. The poor old creatures could be vindictive—they sometimes pulled license plates off parked cars, and once or twice had got into incomprehensible squabbles among themselves and left broken-off fingers and noses to be swept up in the morning along with the usual litter of rocks and beer cans—but it would be folly to assign blame to them. “Wicked” was too concrete an adjective to be supported by the frail nouns that they were.
He tugged open the creaking garage door, and dug out a folded tarpaulin and a big paint tray from behind the dusty frame of a ‘55 Chevy. He carried them outside and pulled the door back down.
When he had lugged everything across the lot and up into the office, Kootie was still snoring heavily in the Naugahyde chair by the desk.
Bradshaw dropped his burdens and stumped into the kitchen and shook a steak knife free of the litter in one of the cabinet drawers.
He would work without thinking—he would spread the tarpaulin out across the rug and lay the paint tray in the middle of it; then he would lift Kootie out of the chair…
But he himself was not one of those mindless solid ghosts. He couldn’t honestly take refuge in that shabby category. He was dead (through no fault of his own), but his soul had not ever vacated his body.
His face was cool, and when he brushed his hand across his forever-unstubbled jowls, it came away wet. Tears or sweat, it was Eat-’Em-&-Weep juice either way.
Bradshaw would, he was determined that he would, simply lean over the boy’s face and, with the telephone magnet between his teeth, inhale the boy’s dying breath.