Sullivan had flinched at the sight and the smell of the thing’s sudden appearance, but before Obstadt could straighten up Sullivan had sprung from the couch and whipped his right hand down in a fast arc past Obstadt’s jaw, so that the freed cuff cracked solidly against the back of the man’s head. Sullivan’s bar-time jolt of surprise, halfway through the move, had only made him hit harder.
The .45 went off with an eardrum-hammering bang and blew the black thing to wet fragments, and the ricochet rang around the metal room and punched a hole in the couch where Sullivan had been sitting; Obstadt was on his hands and knees, and from somewhere a fist malleted the back of his bloodied head, sending Obstadt’s face snapping down to the deck like a smacked croquet ball. Wind and a man’s shouting voice were blowing out of his mouth now.
Sullivan looked up—Oaks had freed himself from the gaffer’s tape, and it had been he that had punched Obstadt.
Sullivan’s right arm was paused across his body from the follow-through of his blow, and now he lashed it back up hard at Sherman Oaks’s face, which was looming over his own; the cuff just tore Oaks’s cheek, for Sullivan’s fingers had snatched at the chain, but Sullivan followed the blow with a solid kick of his left knee into Oaks’s groin, and the one-armed man convulsed double and fell over sideways into the stinking mess that had been the buglike expelled ghost. The other ghost Obstadt had exhaled, the one with a man’s voice, whirled gasping around the room and cycloned away in the hall.
Sullivan took one hitching half-breath, and the instant sting in his lungs made him decide not to breathe. He fished his comb out of his pocket and broke off another tooth, and when he had freed his right wrist he crouched to ratchet one cuff tightly around Oaks’s wrist and the other around Obstadt’s left ankle.
Then he tried to pick up the .45—but his fingers had suddenly gone limp, and all he could do was to push the weapon around clumsily; even by pressing the heels of both hands together, he couldn’t get a grip on the gun. Fuck it, he thought in despair, straightening up.
Still not breathing, though his eyes were watering from the harsh fumes of the sizzling, evaporating ghost, he reeled back to the couch, and his hands were suddenly strong and dextrous again as he leaned behind Elizalde and then Kootie and then Bradshaw and sprang free the left wrist of each of them.
He expelled the last exhausted air in his lungs in croaking to Elizalde, “Get the gun!”
Her nostrils were whitely pinched and her eyes were teary slits, but she nodded and quick-stepped to crouch by where Obstadt and Oaks, linked, were writhing in the wet, smoking mess. Elizalde snatched up the .45 without difficulty and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans, pulling the untucked sweatshirt hem over it.
“Out,” she barked, leading the way out the door and into the hallway.
Sullivan couldn’t tell how much of the screaming racket in his ears was external and how much was just the internal overload-protest of his eardrums, but at least the appalling smell seemed to be keeping deLarava’s employees back at the garage end of the hall.
Then he did hear something, from back in the direction of the garage—a familiar wailing laugh.
Elizalde was hurrying down the hall away from the garage, in the direction deLarava had gone, and Sullivan and Kootie and Bradshaw went stumbling hastily after her.
THE JEEP had been parked well in, right up against the inboard bulkhead of the garage area, and the trucks had parked behind it. At the boom-and-echoes of the gunshot, Strube’s guards had climbed out and rushed toward the hall; but they had been stopped by the fumes, and had joined the general rush out into the fresh air on the sunlit loading dock. Some men in undershirts had come inside from the dock carrying a burlap sack with a baseball cap on it and something thrashing inside it, and they hurried into the vacated hall.
Strube didn’t mind the smell. He hiked his left arm behind himself until he could reach the door handle with his right hand, and when he had timidly opened the door and stepped down to the deck, he wandered down the hall himself—slowly, so that any of deLarava’s men who might see him would be likelier to yell at him than shoot.
But apparently no one saw him. He walked past an open doorway and glanced in at two men rolling in a black puddle. The odd smell was strongest here, and one of the struggling men had only one arm, but Strube wasn’t curious. If he kept walking, he was sure to find an elevator or stairway that would lead him up to the tourist decks, where he could surely get someone to call the police for him; maybe he would be able to get a security guard to unlock the handcuffs.
And then what? He could refuse to press charges, and take a cab back to Twenty-first Place, where he had left his car. Then he would drive back to his office, to think. His venture into show-business law was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
BY the fluorescent tubes overhead, Sullivan could see that the hallway broadened out ahead of Elizalde—the port walls slanted outward with the hull, and were riveted steel with vertical steel crossbeams welded on, and the edges of the empty doorways on the inboard side were knobby from having been cut with torches—and in the far bulkhead, beyond a row of wheeled aluminum carts, he saw a tiny recessed booth with accordion bars pulled across it.
“Whoa, Angelica!” he called. “That’s an elevator.”
Elizalde nodded and skidded sideways and sprinted to the elevator. By the time she had pulled back the bars from the little stall, Sullivan was right behind her, and he took her arm as the two of them stepped into the telephone-boothlike box.
The walls were paneled in rich burl elm that was dinged and scratched at the tray-level of the wheeled carts. He folded up a hinged wooden seat and flattened him self against the elevator wall to make room for Kootie; and over the boy’s head he saw Bradshaw shuffling slowly across the deck.
“Come on, Nicky,” Sullivan called, thinking of the winged bag that had flown after them in the cemetery yesterday. “Hurry!”
“I don’t,” said Bradshaw, scuffling to a stop. “Feel so good. Motion sickness. I’d throw up in there. I’ll meet you. Later.”
The ringing in Sullivan’s ears had decreased to a shrill whining…and he was suddenly aware of an airy absence. He slapped his chest, feeling the angular hardness of the brass grave-portrait plaque, still in his scapular. “My father!” he said. “Is he with you, Nicky?”
Bradshaw paused, then shook his head. “But I’ll watch for him,” he said. “Go on now.”
Sullivan bared his teeth and clenched Houdini’s fists. His father might be anywhere down here. DeLarava might be anywhere down here. “Nicky, get in the elevator!”
Bradshaw smiled. “You know I won’t, if I say I won’t.”
“—Okay.” There’s nothing I can do, Sullivan thought. “Okay. Vaya con Dios, amigo”
“Y tu tambien, hermano,” said Bradshaw.
Sullivan pulled the folded gate out again across the gap until it clanged shut, and said, “We’ve got to go down a deck.”
“Down?” panted Elizalde. Her breaths were frightened sobs. “No, Pete—up! Sunlight, normal people!”