Sullivan at last rocked his head around to look up at her. Pouches of pale flesh sagged under her bloodshot eyes, and her fat cheeks hung around her sparking cigarette in wrinkly wattles.
“Hi, stepmother,” he gasped, hardly able to hear his own voice. He hadn’t wanted to speak to her, or even look at her, but it was important to let the ghost of his father know who this was. He wasn’t sure how well the ghost could see, and in any case Loretta deLarava didn’t look anything like the Kelley Keith of 1959.
DeLarava frowned past him, sucking hard on the cigarette, and didn’t reply.
On one of the second-floor balconies, a white-bearded man in jeans and a T-shirt was looking down at this crowd in alarm. “Sol!” he yelled. “What’s going on? Was that a gunshot? What’s that terrible stink?”
“You’re the manager here, Nicky?” said deLarava quietly. “I don’t want your people to get hurt.”
Bradshaw squinted up at his alarmed tenant. “Health-code enforcement,” he grated. “Stay inside. These new renters have some kind of. Bowel disorder.”
“Jesus, I’ll say!” The man disappeared from the balcony, and Sullivan heard a door slam.
More by vibration in the pavement under his back than by hearing, Sullivan became aware of someone else striding up now, from the direction of the street. “Ms. deLarava?” a man said brightly. “My name is J. Francis—” The voice trailed off, and Sullivan knew without looking that he had noticed the guns. “I’m an attorney. I think somebody here is going to need one.”
“Cuff that asshole too,” said deLarava.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
“Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
A couple of deLarava’s men hustled the handcuffed attorney to a new Jeep Cherokee at the curb out front; three others opened the back of a parked truck and tossed about a thousand dollars’ worth of red and black cable coils and clattering black metal light doors out onto the street to make room for the rest of her captives: Kootie, Sullivan, Elizalde, the one-armed man, and Bradshaw. Sullivan noted that Johanna had eluded capture, and he wondered if Nicky had in some sense anticipated this, and sent her safely away; if so, Sullivan wished Nicky had conveyed his misgivings to the rest of them.
A Plexiglas skylight cast a yellow glow over the interior of the truck. The captives were arranged along the truck’s right wall, with their cuffed wrists behind them; each pair of ankles was taped together and then taped at two-foot intervals onto a long piece of plywood one-by-six, which was then screwed into the metal floor with quick, shrill bursts of a Makita power screwdriver. The one-armed man wasn’t cuffed—deLarava’s men had simply taped his right arm to his body, with his hand down by his hipbone.
And deLarava stayed in the back with the captives when the truck door was pulled shut, leaning against the opposite wall while her driver backed and filled out of the cul-de-sac and then made a tilting left turn onto what had to be Ocean Boulevard.
“Nicky,” she said immediately, “remember that you’ve got an innocent woman and child in here with you. If you feel any kind of…psychic crisis coming on, I trust you’ll be considerate enough to let me know, so that my men can transfer you to a place where you won’t harm anyone.”
“Nothing ever excites me when I’m awake,” said Bradshaw, who was slumped below some light stands up by the cab. “And I’m not feeling sleepy.”
“Good.” She reached into the bosom of her flower-patterned dress and pulled out a little semiautomatic pistol, .22 or .25 caliber. “If anyone wants to scream,” she said, sweeping her gaze back and forth over the heads of her captives, “this will put a fairly quick stop to it, understood?”
“Lady,” said the one-armed man weakly, “I can help you. But I need to eat a ghost, bad. I just threw a couple of pounds of dead ectoplasm, and a good ghost, and I’m about to expire.” He was sitting next to Sullivan, against the door, and each one of his wheezing breaths was like a Wagnerian chorus.
DeLarava’s mouth was pinched in a fastidious pout, but without looking down at him she asked, “Who are you, anyway?”
The man was shaking, his right knee bumping Sullivan’s thigh. “Lately I’ve been calling myself Sherman Oaks.”
“How can Sherman Oaks help me?”
“I can…well, I can tell you that the boy there is carrying the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.”
DeLarava gave a hiccuping laugh. “That I already knew,” she said, greedily allowing herself to actually stare at Kootie.
Sullivan looked angrily past Elizalde at Kootie. “Why in hell did you tell him how to unclog himself, anyway?”
Kootie flinched, and said defensively, “Mr. Edison didn’t tell him exactly how. He—” Kootie choked and spat. “I can speak for myself, Kootie. He did more than what I told him, Pete. He kicked the rotted one out by throwing out a good one.”
“After you told him the right…posture to assume,” said Sullivan.
“Pete,” said Elizalde, “let it go, it’s done.”
Meaning, Sullivan thought, don’t torment a senile old man who made a mistake out of wounded vanity.
“What do you all mean by ‘unclogged’?” asked deLarava, still staring at Kootie.
Sullivan looked up at her, and realized that Kootie and the one-armed man were looking at her too. This might conceivably be a bargaining chip, he thought.
“When you suck in a ghost that has rotted in an opaque container,” said Sherman Oaks, “your ghost-digestion gets clogged. Impacted, blocked. You can’t eat any more of them, and the ghosts already inside you get rebellious. I was that way. Now I know how to get clear of it, how you can Heimlich-yourself. Ptooie, you know?”
“Could we refer to them as ‘essences’?” said deLarava stiffly. “And use the verb ‘enjoy’?
“Where are we going?” asked Elizalde in a flat voice.
DeLarava squinted at her as if noticing her for the first time. “Pete’s Mex gal! One of my boys tells me you’re the crazy psychiatrist who’s been on the news. We’re all going to the Queen Mary.”
Sullivan’s leather jacket had been left back at the apartment, probably still balled up on the floor from having served as a pillow; and now through his thin shirt he felt fingers fumbling weakly at his left shoulder.
He looked at the man next to him, surprised that Oaks could have freed his single arm from the tape—and he saw that Oaks’ hand wasn’t free, was in fact still strapped down against his right hip; but Oaks was hunched around toward Sullivan, as if miming the act of reaching toward him with the arm that wasn’t there.
Breath hissed in through Sullivan’s teeth as he jerked away from Oaks in unthinking fright.
“What—” snapped deLarava, convulsively switching her little pistol from one hand to the other, clearly startled by his sudden move. “What is it?”
Sullivan realized that she hadn’t once looked directly at him, and that she apparently didn’t even want to speak his name. She plans to kill me at some point today, he thought; and because of that she’s too fastidious to acknowledge me.
He turned back to look at Sherman Oaks, and the tiny eyes returned his gaze with no expression; but the man now sniffed deeply.
You smell my father’s ghost, Sullivan thought. You know he’s in here with us.