“Cuffed to a cable,” said deLarava.
“And I assume,” he went on, “that all five of your guests here will be dead before sundown?”
DeLarava rolled her eyes. “If you insist on subverting the civilized circumlocutions of—”
“You gonna kill ‘em or not? I don’t have all day, and neither do you, trust me.”
“Fuck you, Neal. Yes.”
“I can talk freely then. Some smoke dealer named Sherman Oaks sold me a dead ghost. Well, they’re all dead, aren’t they? But this one had gone rotten, and now it’s stuck in my head; it’s in the way, and I can’t eat any more ghosts. All that happens when I try is that I get the nitrous oxide—but I don’t get a life. The life in the dose just gets exhaled away. Does me no good. Have you run into this problem?”
“I’ve heard of it, yes,” deLarava began.
“I know how to undo it,” said Sherman Oaks—surprising Sullivan, who had thought the ragged one-armed man was nearly unconscious.
“So do I,” said Sullivan and Kootie in quick unison.
“My name is Sherman Oaksssss…” said the one-armed man.
He went on exhaling past the end of his sentence, and the breath didn’t stop, but kept whistling out of him as if his mouth were an opening in a windy canyon; and on that wind came the chanting voices of half a dozen little girls:
“There was a man of double deed
Sowed his garden full of seed.
When the seed began to grow,
‘Twas like a garden full of snow.”
Obstadt had reached into his jacket and smoothly drawn a stainless-steel .45 semiautomatic, cocked and locked. Sullivan blinked helplessly at Elizalde and nodded. Same kind of gun, he thought. God help us.
“When the snow began to melt,” the girls’ voices chanted on out of Sherman Oaks’s slack mouth,
“Twas like a ship without a belt;
When the ship began to sail,
Twas like a bird without a tail”
Behind Sullivan’s back, the strong fingers of his left hand quickly broke another narrow tooth off the comb-end, and again began working the end of it into the handcuff housing, in under the pawl wheel. This time he didn’t try to help his hands.
“When the bird began to fly,
‘Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
‘Twas like a lion at the door.”
“The fuck is he doing?” shouted Obstadt. He pointed the pistol at Oaks and yelled, “Shut up!” Sullivan could see that the safety lever was down now.
The voices continued, with the businesslike diligence of a child’s jump-rope ritual; and Oaks’s mouth was slack, and his throat wasn’t visibly working; as the soprano syllables stitched his outrushing breath:
“When the door began to crack,
‘Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
‘Twas like a pen-knife in my heart;
When my heart began to bleed,
‘Twas death and death and death indeed”
Oaks’s eyes were crossed sharply together behind his nose. He was frowning and shaking his head, and Sullivan was sure this performance wasn’t voluntary; Sullivan guessed that it was some kind of after-effect of the unclogging the man had done back in the apartment.
DeLarava had stood up, and now Sullivan looked away from Oaks at her. Her face was as pale as bacon fat, and her mouth was trembling.
“My little girls!” she screamed suddenly. “That’s them! He’s the one who ate my little birth day girls!”
Then she was end-running around the desk, her blubbery arms swinging horizontally and her belly jumping under the flowered dress, and she flung herself onto her knees in front of Oaks and planted her lips over his still-exhaling mouth.
And the wind out of Oaks must have increased, for deLarava’s head was flung aside, and she teetered and windmilled her arms for a moment before sitting down heavily on the deck—and a smell of flowers and green grass tickled Sullivan’s nose, and the room was full of flickering shadows and quick tapping and anxious little cries.
All at once Sullivan could see several skinny little girls in white dresses—or it might have been one, very quick, skinny little girl—flashing around the room, like a carousel of hologram photographs spinning under a strobe light; then the apparition was gone, and he heard sobbing and laughter and light fluttering footsteps receding away down the hallway beyond the door, away from the direction of the trucks, farther into the maze of the ship.
Sullivan felt the tiny metal blade trip the pawl inside the cuff mechanism, and then the fingers of his left hand squeezed the cuff tight, and released it—and his left hand was free.
“You can have the Parganas,” wheezed deLarava as she rolled over onto her hands and knees and began dragging one big knee, and then the other, under herself, “kid. And Oaks.” She raised her obese body to her feet in one steady straightening, though the effort sent bright blood bursting out of her flaring nostrils and down the front of her dress. “Leave me the others.”
Then she took a deep breath and went charging out the door after the girl-ghosts. “Wait,” she was bellowing hoarsely as she clumped and caromed down the hall, “wait, I’m one of you too! Delaware punch! Tell me the—goddammit—”
Obstadt was still pointing the .45 at Sherman Oaks’s round face, but his finger was out of the trigger guard and he was looking after deLarava.
“Like that,” said Oaks in a frail voice.
Obstadt looked down at him over the sights. “What?”
“What I just did. That’s how you do it. I just now spit out those ghosts. To get cleared of the rotten one, hike one of your quick ones up to the top of your mind. Cross your eyes, hard, so you can see the quick one standing there on the diving board of your mind, and then exhale and spit. The live one goes, and knocks the rotten one out with it.”
Sullivan was still sure that Oaks’s latest seizure had been involuntary, and that the little girl-ghosts had simply forced their way out of him, past the now-compromised containment of his will; Sullivan guessed that the one-armed man was simply incontinent now, and would leak ghosts whenever he so much as sneezed. Nevertheless, Sullivan was a little surprised that Oaks would give the crucial information away with no security.
Sullivan had got his toes well back in under the couch, and he was watching Obstadt intently.
Obstadt stepped back, leaned against the desk, and crossed his eyes. Sullivan heard a creaking from down the couch to his right, and when he glanced that way he saw Bradshaw squinting and gathering himself as if for a rush, as if he’d forgotten that he was tethered. Sullivan caught the old man’s eye and frowned hard, shaking his head slightly.
Obstadt exhaled, leaning forward with the .45 pointing at the deck, and coughed; and he shook spasmodically, and his shoulders went up and his chin dropped onto his chest, then his shoulders fell and his head snapped forward and a black cylinder with ribs or folded legs ridging its sides came inflating out from between his gaping jaws, balanced for a moment on his teeth, and then fell and slapped onto the floor where it flexed muscularly. The irregularities on its sides separated and proved to be legs that waved uselessly in the fouled air.