“Why would I want to bring Dr. Elizalde?” deLarava mused aloud.
“She’s a medical doctor as well as a psychiatrist,” Sullivan said, at random.
Sherman Oaks was singing in a whisper with each scratching exhalation now without moving his lips at all, and his voice seemed to be a chorus of children: “…Delaware punch, tell me the initials of your honeybunch, capital A, B, C-D-E…”
“In that case bring them all!” cried deLarava; though Sullivan thought it was Oaks’s eerie singing rather than his own suggestion that had changed the old woman’s mind. “Put cats in the coffee,” she sang wildly herself, “and mice in the tea, and welcome Queen Kelley with thirty-times-three!”
Sullivan recognized the bit of verse—it was from the end of Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice was about to be crowned a queen.
DeLarava kept her little pistol pointed at her captives, as a runner hopped up into the truck and knifed the tape off of everyone’s ankles.
“You want that lawyer that’s in the Cherokee?” the man asked.
“Leave him where he is,” deLarava said. “Lawyers are for after.”
The fingers of Sullivan’s left hand suddenly strained very hard at the end of the aluminum pocket comb, and with a muffled snap it broke, cutting his thumb knuckle. He palmed the broken-off end when the runner hopped down from the truck and began hauling Oaks’s legs out over the bumper.
After Oaks had been propped upright against the side of the truck it was Sullivan’s turn, and when he had been lifted down he stepped back across the floor to make room for Elizalde and Kootie—and Bradshaw, the shifting of whose bulk across the truck floor required the summoning of a second runner.
Down on the deck at last, Bradshaw hopped ponderously to shake the legs of his shorts straight. “I bet those guys were gay,” he muttered.
“Don’t try to shuffle away, Pete!” said deLarava sharply; and Sullivan was tensely sure that this direct address meant that she intended to kill him very soon indeed.
“Not me, boss,” he said mildly.
When at last Bradshaw was standing next to Kootie and Elizalde on the concrete deck, deLarava pirouetted back, then mincingly led the way down a white hallway while the runners prodded the captives along after her. “O Looking-Glass creatures,” called deLarava shrilly over her shoulder, “draw near. ’Tis an honor to see me, a favor to hear.”
Sullivan managed to catch Elizalde’s glance as they fell into step, and he gave her an optimistic wink.
It wasn’t completely an empty gesture—it had just occurred to him that the hands sticking out of his shirt cuffs might well be Houdini’s. The mask wasn’t complete—he wasn’t wearing the jacket with the detachable sleeves—but that was probably because he didn’t have the whole outfit, he wasn’t carrying the magician’s dried thumb; nevertheless the plaster hands had disappeared when he had touched them, back there in the funny apartment, and now somebody’s left hand was clutching a bit of broken metal.
Lurching along up at the head of the procession, Sherman Oaks was tall enough to have to duck under a couple of valves connecting the pipes that ran along under the low ceiling, but the room deLarava led them into was as expansive as a TV studio. Fluorescent lights threw a white glow over two low couches against the walls and a metal desk out in the middle of the floor and rolls of cable on stacked wooden apple-boxes in a corner; deLarava waved toward one of the couches and then crossed ponderously to the desk and lowered her bulk into the chair behind it.
To the pair of her employees who had herded her captives into the room, deLarava said, “Loop a cable through their cuffs—under the arm of the one-armed fellow—and sit them down on the couch and tie the cable where they can’t reach it.”
As soon as Sullivan had been tethered and pushed down onto the couch, again sitting between Elizalde and Oaks, he felt his thumb begin to pry at one of the narrow comb-teeth that had broken away with the thick end-tooth. To explain any muscular shifting of his shoulders, he leaned forward and looked to his right—Elizalde and Kootie were whispering together, and Bradshaw, at the far end of the long couch, was just frowning and squinting around at the walls as if disapproving of the paint job.
DeLarava waved the runners out of the room with her little gun. From the floor behind the desk she lifted a big leather purse, and with her free hand she shook it out onto the desktop. Three cans of Hires Root Beer rolled out, two of them solidly full and one clattering empty; and then a brown wallet thumped down beside the cans, followed by a ring of keys.
“You recognize these, Pete?” deLarava asked, staring down at the items on the desk.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
… and she had a vague sort of idea that they must he collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
SULLIVAN didn’t answer. He took a deep breath—and thought he caught a whiff of bourbon on the air-conditioned breeze.
“And I’ve got an electromagnet,” deLarava went on, “and some very specific music, and a schizophrenic who’s a better mask than you and your sister ever were. I don’t want a glut today, just your father—and, as long as they’re here, Thomas Alva Edison and Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She lifted her pouchy face and stared right into Sullivan’s eyes. “And, wherever he is, Apie will come when I call him,” she said. “Did you know that he and your mother had their honeymoon aboard the Queen Mary, in 1949?”
“No,” said Sullivan. Their father had never liked to talk to the twins about their mother, who had died in 1953, when they were a year old.
His left hand had broken off one of the narrow comb-teeth, and his fingers were prodding the tiny sliver of metal into the gap between the hinged single-blade swing-arm and the pawl housing of the cuff on his right wrist.
Sullivan was trying to remember what he’d read last night about Alice’s coronation party; he wished he could lean across Elizalde and ask Kootie, who’d been reading the book this morning. Sullivan’s fingers were still pushing the comb-tooth against the cuff, and, recalling the trick his hands had done yesterday inside the magically projected milk can in the cemetery lake, he tried to help—and immediately the tooth sprang out of his grip, and was lost forever down between the couch cushions.
A young man who was apparently the second assistant director leaned in at the doorway. “That producer guy, Neal Obstadt, is here,” he said. “He says you’re—Jesus!—expecting him!” the young man finished as a burly man in a business suit pushed right past him into the room. The newcomer’s iron-gray hair was clipped short, and the cut of his jacket didn’t conceal broad shoulders that Sullivan guessed were probably tattooed.
Sullivan’s heart beat faster at the thought that this intrusion might mean rescue—but the surge of hope died when the tanned cheeks spread back at the sight of deLarava’s five captives, baring white teeth in a delighted smile.
“Why, Kelley!” he said. “I don’t see how that boy there could be anyone but the famous Koot Hoomie Parganas! What a thoughtful,” he added, frowning abruptly “tithe.” He glared across the room at her now. “You’ve been eating ghosts for years right? You know how it works?”
“That will be all, Curtis,” deLarava said hastily to the young man in the doorway, who seemed relieved to be able to hurry away.
Neal Obstadt waved at the captives. “They’re secured?”