(Sullivan was shaking now, holding the scapular and the gun.
(Idaho, he thought desperately, up in the Pelouse area where they grow lentils instead of potatoes. It’ll be snowing soon now, and people always need electrical work done when it gets real cold. Or, what the hell, all the way out to the east coast, way out to Sag Harbor at the far end of Long Island—there was a lot of repair work of all sorts to be done during the off season, and you could hardly get farther away from Los Angeles.)
But helplessly he found himself remembering the moment on that chilly morning when deLarava had put down the shoebox on a truck fender, and Sukie had found an opportunity to peek inside it—and then had screamed and flung it away from her onto the sidewalk.
Pete had already spun around in sudden fright, and he’d expected to see something like a dead rat, or even a mummified baby, roll out of the box; but what had come spilling out of the box, tumbling across the looping electrical cables on the beachfront sidewalk, had been a well-remembered brown leather wallet and ring of keys and, somehow worst of all, three cans of Hires Root Beer. One of the cans rolled up against Pete’s shoes, spraying a tiny jet of brown foam.
He and Sukie had simply fled then, mindlessly, running away up Windward Avenue. He had eventually stopped, winded, at a gas station somewhere up on Washington Boulevard, and had taken a cab to their apartment, and then driven his car to his bank, where he had cashed out his savings account. To this day he didn’t know or care where Sukie had run to. Pete had been in Oregon by the next afternoon. Sukie had eventually tracked him down through union records, and they had talked on the phone a few times, but they’d never knowingly been in the same state at the same time again.
AND NOW deLarava apparently wanted them back again. Sukie had obviously believed that the old woman intended to try the Venice “exorcism” again, with Pete and Sukie again present—voluntarily or not.
Sullivan tried to think of some other explanation. Maybe deLarava didn’t want the twins back, hadn’t thought about them in years and Sukie’s car had simply been hit by some random drunk, and the sudden onset of bar-time was caused by something that had nothing to do with deLarava; or deLarava might indeed want the twins back, but just to do the sort of work they’d done for her before, nothing to do with Venice; or she did want to do the Venice one again, but wouldn’t be able to, now, because Sukie had killed herself. The old lady would be unable to do it unless she got a new pair of twins.
He bared his teeth and exhaled sharply. She might try to do it again with some other pair of twins. Probably on Halloween, four days from now. Halloween was even better than Christmas, probably, for her purpose.
Well, he thought in any case, I’m out of it. It has nothing to do with (—a Hires Root Beer can rolling against his foot, wasting itself spraying a thin needle of foam out onto the sandy sidewalk—) me.
For five full minutes, while cars roared past outside the van, he just crouched over the open underseat box.
Finally, with trembling fingers, he unbuttoned his shirt and draped the ribbons of the scapular over his head and onto his shoulders. After he had rebuttoned the shirt he flipped the black web belt of the fanny pack around his waist and snapped the buckle shut. Then he straightened up to go fetch the plaster hands so that he could put them away and reassemble the bed. The thumb in the Bull Durham sack he could carry in his shirt pocket.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
KOOTIE awoke instantly when he heard someone scramble over the wooden fence downstairs, but he didn’t move, only opened his eyes. The scuffed planks of the balcony floor were warm under his unbruised cheek; by the shadow of the big old banana tree he judged the time to be about four in the afternoon.
He had found this enclosed courtyard at about noon; somewhere south of Olympic he’d picked his way down an alley between a pair of gray two-story stucco-fronted buildings that had no doubt housed businesses once but were featureless now, with their windows painted over; a wooden fence in the back of one of the buildings was missing a board, leaving a gap big enough for Kootie to scrape through.
Towering green schefflera and banana and avocado trees shaded the yard he had found himself in, and he’d decided that the building might once have been apartments—this hidden side was green-painted clapboard with decoratively framed doors and windows, and wooden steps leading up to a long, roofed balcony. Someone had stored a dozen big Coca-Cola vending machines back here, but Kootie didn’t think anyone would be coming back for them soon. He doubted that anyone had looked in on this little yard since about 1970. It was a relief to be able to take the adult-size sunglasses off his nose and tuck them into his pocket.
He had climbed the rickety old stairs to the balcony, and then had just lain down and gone to sleep, without even taking off his knapsack. And he had slept deeply—but when he awoke he remembered everything that had happened to him during the last twenty hours.
HE COULD hear the faint scuff of the person downstairs walking across the little yard now, but there was another sound that he couldn’t identify: a recurrent raspy hiss, as though the person were pausing here and there to slowly rub two sheets of coarse paper together.
For several seconds Kootie just lay on the boards of the balcony and listened. Probably, he told himself, this person down in the yard won’t climb the steps to this balcony. A grown-up would worry that the stairs might break under his weight. Probably he’ll go away soon.
Kootie lifted his head and looked down over the balcony edge—and swallowed his instinctive shout of horror, and made himself keep breathing slowly.
In the yard, hunched and bent-kneed, the ragged man in camouflage pants was moving slowly across the stepping-stones, his single arm swinging like the clumped legs of a hovering wasp. The baseball cap kept Kootie from seeing the man’s face, but he knew it was the round, pale, whiskered face with the little eyes that didn’t seem to have sockets behind them to sit in.
Kootie’s ears were ringing shrilly.
This was the man who had tried to grab him in the living room of Kootie’s house last night—Hey, kid, come here. This was almost certainly the man who had murdered Kootie’s parents. And now he was here.
The rasping sound the man was making, Kootie realized now, was sniffing—long, whistling, inhalations. He was carefully seining the air with his nose as he made his slow way across the yard; and every few seconds he would jerk heavily, as if an invisible cord tied around his chest were being tugged.
Kootie ducked back out of sight, his heart knocking fast. He’s been following me, Kootie thought. Or following the glass brick. What does the thing do, leave a trail in the air like tire tracks in mud?
He is going to come up the stairs.
Then Kootie twitched, startled, and an instant later the bum began talking. “You came in here through the fence,” said the bum in a high, clear voice, “and you didn’t leave by that means. And I don’t think you have a key to any of these doors, and I don’t think you can fly.” He laughed softly. “Therefore you’re still here.”