Sullivan jerked his head toward the slope and the ruined stairs. “Go, then.”
Nodding as rapidly as a pair of wind-up chattering teeth, the old man turned and began limping rapidly back toward the stairs.
Sullivan stepped out into the light, his heart pounding against the little bag in his pocket. The old woman had stopped a few yards away and was gaping at him uncertainly.
“I…was keeping your plant watered,” she said. “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep:”
Sullivan recognized the line as something from the Alice in Wonderland books. So many of these poor souls had read them and somehow remembered them. Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.
“Fine,” Sullivan told the old woman, making a vaguely papal gesture with one of the hands. “Carry on.”
The old man had by now scrambled some distance down the side stairway, and in a birdy old voice was calling, ‘I got away-ay! I got away-ay!” in the nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nah! cadence of spiteful children.
Sullivan glanced back in distaste, then turned and looked past the old woman at the driveway that curled away down the hill to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Best to leave that way, he thought. I haven’t heard any sirens, and it’s less important, now, that I not be seen. At least now I’ve got the goddamn things.
“Excuse me,” he said, and stepped around the woman.
After a few moments, as he was trudging down the driveway, she called after him, “Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
That was what the Lion had asked Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass. “It’s a fabulous monster!” he called back, quoting what the Unicorn had answered about Alice.
Don’t I wish, he thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I ca’n’t help it,” said Alice very meekly. “I’m growing.”
“You’ve no right to grow here,” said the Dormouse.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
THE van shook every time a car drove past it, but after carefully laying the plaster hands and the little bag with the dried thumb in it on the front seat, Sullivan climbed in the back and tossed the sheets and blanket and cushions off the unmade bed. The bed could be disassembled and partially telescoped to become a U-shaped booth with a little table in the middle, but when it was extended out like this, the boards under the booth-seat cushions could be lifted off, exposing a few cubic feet of unevident space. He hooked his finger through the hole in the forward board and levered it up out of its frame.
Inside the booth-seat box lay a couple of square, limp-plastic rectangles connected by two foot-and-a-half-long ribbons, and a gray canvas fanny-pack containing his 45 semi-automatic Colt and a couple of spare magazines.
He lifted out the fanny pack and helted it. He hadn’t shot the 45 since an afternoon of target practice in the desert outside Tucson with some of the other tramp electricians a couple of years ago, but he did remember cleaning it afterward, and buying a fresh box of hardball rounds and reloading all three magazines.
The strung-together plastic rectangles were meant to be worn around the neck while traveling, with one rectangle lying on the chest and the other back between the shoulder blades—right now he had about six and a half thousand dollars in hundreds in the one, and his union papers in the other. Sullivan always thought of the pair as his “scapular,” because the linked flat wallets looked like one of those front-and-back medallions Catholics wear to keep from going to hell. He was always vaguely embarrassed to wear it.
He glanced toward the front of the van, where the three pieces of Houdini’s “mask” lay on the passenger seat.
What would he put away in the seat box, and what would he keep out?
If he was going to drive straight back to Arizona and try to save his job at the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station, he would peel off a couple of hundred dollars to comfortably cover gas and food, and leave the rest of the cash hidden in the seat box here, along with the loaded gun, which was a felony to take across state borders; and the mask would be most effective where it was, out in the open. But if he was going to stay in Los Angeles for a while he’d have to allow for the possibility of being separated from, or even abandoning, the van—he’d want to have the cash and the gun on him, and the mask would have to be hidden from the sort of people who might get into the van and ransack it.
Another car drove past on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and the van rocked on its shocks.
Stay in Los Angeles? he asked himself, startled even to have had the thought. Why would I do that? She works here, Loretta deLarava, and she probably still lives aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach and commutes right up through the middle of the whole city every day.
I’d be crazy to do anything but leave the mask on the front seat and drive… anywhere. If I’m screwed with the Edison network I can still get electrician work, in Santa Fe or Kansas City or Memphis or any damn place. I could be a plain old handyman in any city in the whole country, doing low-profile electric, as well as cement work and drywall and carpentry and plumbing. An independent small-time contractor, getting paid under the table most of the time and fabricating expenses to show to the IRS on the jobs where I’d have to accept checks.
And if I scoot out of here right now, I might not even be screwed with Edison.
SUKIE’S NONSENSE Christmas carols were still droning in the back of his head, and he found himself thinking about the last time he’d seen her, at the shoot at Venice Beach on Christmas Eve in ’86. He had somehow not ever been to Venice before—he was certain—and of course he had not been there since.
But on that overcast winter morning he had recognized the place. Driving around in one of deLarava’s vans, he had several times found himself knowing what he would see when he rounded the next corner: a gray old clapboard house with flowers growing in a window box, the traffic circle, the row of chipped Corinthian pillars lining Windward Avenue.
On this Christmas Eve of ’86, big red plastic lanterns and garlands of fake pine boughs had been strung around the tops of the pillars and along the traffic-signal cables overhead, and the sidewalks had been crowded with last-minute Christmas shoppers and children, and dogs on leashes, and there had seemed to be a car in every curbside parking slot—but the pavements in his flickering memory had been empty and stark white under a harsh summer sun, and in his memory the shadows in the gaping windows and behind the bone-white colonnades were impenetrably black, all as silent and still as a streetscape in some particularly ominous De Chirico painting.
Under an overcast sky the real, winter ocean had been gray, with streaks of foam on the faces of the waves, but luckily deLarava had not wanted to actually go out onto the sand. Sukie was already drunk and wearing sunglasses, and Pete had been shaking as he set up the lights along the sidewalk.
They’d been supposed to be doing a short subject on the bodybuilders who apparently spent all their days lifting weights in the little fenced-in yard by the pavilion at the bottom of Windward Avenue, but deLarava’s props had been old—a rented 1957 Buick, a Gigi movie poster to hang in a shop window—and she had had something else, too, that she’d carried in a shoebox.