At least the phantom fingers had moved away from him. “My shoulders are cramping up something terrible,” Sullivan said, deliberately, still staring at Oaks. Have we got a deal? he thought into the little eyes. I wont tell her you've got a “hand” free if you wont tell her about the ghost.
“Any discomfort is regretted,” said deLarava vaguely.
Sullivan looked back at the old woman. She was blinking rapidly, and her eyes, again fixed on the wall over the captives’ heads, were bright with tears.
“They could only find the thumb,” said deLarava hoarsely, looking right up at the skylight now. “Where are the hands?”
“Lost in the Venice canals,” said Sullivan at once. “I tried to fish them out, but they dissolved in the salt water like…like Alka-Seltzer.” Jammed behind him, his left hand was digging in his hip pocket; all that was in there was his wallet—containing nothing but ID cards and a couple of twenty-dollar bills—and his pocket comb.
“Why are we going to the Queen Mary?” asked Elizalde.
“To enjoy—” began deLarava; but her hair abruptly sprang up into a disordered topknot, drawing startled gasps from Kootie and Elizalde. And deLarava began to sob quietly.
Sullivan was aware of an itch in his right ear, but his father’s ghost didn’t say anything.
THE JEEP Cherokee was leading the procession, and when it turned left off Ocean onto Queen’s Way the two trucks followed.
J. Francis Strube didn’t dare hunch around in his seat, for the man in back was presumably still holding a gun pointed at him, but he could peer out of the corners of his eyes. They had driven past the new Long Beach Convention Center on the left, and past Lincoln Park on the right, and now they were cruising downhill toward a vista of bright blue lagoons and sailboats and lawns and palm trees. Out across the mile-long expanse of the harbor he could see the black hull and the white upper decks of the Queen Mary shining in the early-morning sunlight.
The car radio was tuned to some oldies rock station, and the driver was whistling along to the sad melody of Phil Ochs’s “Pleasures of the Harbor.”
For the past five minutes Strube had been remembering how cautious Nicholas Bradshaw used to be, when Strube had worked for him in 1975—refusing to say where he lived, never giving out his home phone number, always taking different routes to and from the law office. Maybe, Strube thought unhappily, I should have taken his paranoia more seriously. Maybe I was a little careless today, in the way I blundered into this thing. “Are we actually going to the Queen Mary?” he asked in a humbled voice.
The driver glanced at him in cheerful surprise. “You’ve never been on it? It’s great.”
“I’ve been there,” Strube said, defensively in spite of everything. “I’ve had dinner at Sir Winston’s many times. I meant, are we really going there now.”
“DeLarava’s scheduled a shoot there today,” the driver said. “I understood you were to be interviewed, along with that Nicky Bradshaw fellow. He was the actor who played Spooky, the teenage ghost in that old show. You must have seen reruns. He’s to do some kind of dance, was my understanding.”
Strube was squinting against his bewilderment as if it were a bright light. “But why am I handcuffed? Why all the guns?”
The man chuckled, shaking his head at the lane markers unreeling ahead of him. “Oh, she can be a regular Von Stroheim, can’t she? What’s the word? Martinet? I mean, you wanna talk about domineering? Get outta here!”
“But—what are you saying? What happened back there at that apartment building? You people threw all those wires and metal shutters out of the truck onto the street! And what was that awful smell?”
“Ah, there you have me.”
Strube was dizzy. “What if I try to get out, at the next red light? Would this man behind me shoot me?”
“Through the back of the seat,” said the driver. “Don’t do it. This isn’t a bluff, no, if that’s what you’re asking. The new automatics are ramped and throated so they have no problem feeding hollow-points, and it might not even make an exit wound, but it would surely make a hash of your vital organs. You don’t want that. In fact—” He slapped the wheel lightly and nodded. “In fact, if Sir Winston’s is open for lunch, we might be able to get her to spring for a good meal!”
“Never happen,” said the man in the back seat gloomily.
AFTER THEY had been driving for about ten minutes, stopping and starting up again and making some slow turns, Sullivan felt the truck stop and then reverse slowly down a ramp; and the skylight went dark, and he could hear the truck’s engine echoing inside a big metallic room. Then the engine was switched off.
Car doors chunked in the middle distance, and he could feel the shake of the truck’s driver’s-side door closing; footsteps scuffed across concrete to the truck’s back door, and the door was unlatched and swung open. The chilly air that swept into the truck’s interior smelled of oiled machinery and the sea.
“E Deck,” called a young man who was pulling a wheeled stepladder across the floor of the wide white-painted garagelike chamber. “We chased off the ship’s staff for the moment, and we’ve got guys around to whistle if they come back. They say they’ve turned off the power in the circuit boxes on the Promenade and R Decks, and the gaffers are off to patch in and get the Genie lifts and the key lights set up for the first call at ten.”
Test it with a meter anyway, thought Sullivan as his constricted left hand fingered his pocket comb. You don’t want to be hooking your dimmer-board to the lugs if somebody forgot, and there’s still a live 220 volts waiting for you in the utility panel.
Behind the fright that was dewing his forehead and shallowing his breathing, he was vaguely irritated at his suspicion that these efficient-looking young men might be better at the job than he and Sukie had been.
DeLarava was still sniffling as she clumped heavily down from rung to rung of the stepladder. “Get a couple of runners to take…the kid, and the old guy up by the front, and Pete Sullivan, he’s the guy in the white shirt…to that room they’re letting us use as an office. Gag the woman and the one-armed guy and leave them where they are for now.”
Sullivan looked at the one-armed man seated awkwardly beside him. Sherman Oaks seemed to be only semiconscious, and his breathing was a rattling, chattering whine, like a car engine with a lot of bad lifters and bearings. But the fabric of the man’s baggy brown-and-green trousers was bunching and stretching over the left thigh, as if kneaded by an invisible hand.
Does he have fingernails on that hand? wondered Sullivan. If so, are they strong enough to peel off the tape that’s holding down his flesh-and-blood arm? If he frees himself, and he’s left in here with Angelica, he’ll surely kill her to eat her ghost.
Should I tell deLarava about Oak’s unbound—unbindable!—hand? If so, he might in return tell her that my father’s ghost is on my person, and she’d fetch in some kind of mask and eat the old man with no delay.
Elizalde was sitting at Sullivan’s right, her taped ankles screwed down next to his, and he rocked his head around to look at her. Her narrow face was tense, her lips white, but she crinkled her eyes at him in a faint, scared smile.
“I’d bring Dr. Elizalde too,” Sullivan said. He was peripherally aware of an increasing ache in his left forearm; his fingers seemed to be nervously trying to pry the thick end-tooth off of his comb, which was a useless exercise since the comb was aluminum.