Kootie shrugged bewilderedly. “I’m sold,” he said.
They were stopped now at the Hope Street corner curb, waiting for the east-west light to change, and several men in suits and a woman in a coffee-colored dress had drifted up beside them, chattering about whoever was singing the Phantom role today.
The words I’m sold went on ringing in Kootie’s head as he stared to his right, back north across Temple.
The sky and the houses on the Echo Park hills and the greenery of the Hollywood Freeway shoulder all faded into a blurry two-dimensional frame surrounding the white, white billboard with the black lettering and the livid color photograph.
Kootie was icy cold inside his heavy flannel shirt. His ears were ringing as if with the explosions of the dreamed firecrackers, and he wondered if he would be able to run, able to work his muscles at all. It had not occurred to him that there might be more than one of the billboards—this affront had the disorienting dreamlike intrusiveness of supernatural pursuit.
The billboard was in English here, three blocks north of the first one:
CASH REWARD FOR THIS MISSING BOY:
NAMED KOOT HOOMIE
LAST SEEN MONDAY, OCTOBER THE 26TH,
ON SUNSET BOULEVARD
$20,000 CALL (213) JKL-KOOT $20,000
NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Kootie swung his head around to blink up at Raffle.
Raffle was staring at the billboard, and now looked down at Kootie with no expression on his weathered brown face.
The little green figure was glowing now in the screened box below the traffic signal across Hope, and the people beside Kootie stepped out into the crosswalk. Kootie found himself following them, staring at the crude silhouette in the box and hearing Raffle’s step and Fred’s jangling chain coming right along behind him.
“You’d get eight thousand,” said Raffle quietly “After my cut and Fred’s.”
“Damn Ford,” said Kootie helplessly.
“We can get a Cadillac,” said Raffle. “Hell, we can get a Winnebago with two bathrooms.”
“I can’t…go to them,” Kootie said, involuntarily. Why not? he asked himself—I surely can’t live in a damn car forever. Then he heard himself saying, “They’ll eat me and kill you.”
Kootie stepped up the curb, helplessly letting the theater goers hurry on ahead, and turned to face Raffle.
Raffle was frowning in puzzlement. “Eat you?” he said. “And kill me?”
“Not you,” Kootie said, speaking voluntarily now. “He was talking to me—he meant kill me.”
“That’s what he meant, huh?” Now Raffle was grinning and nodding. “I get it, Jacko—you really are crazy. Your nice clothes and nice manners—you’re the escaped schizo kid of some rich people, and they want you back so you can take your Thorazine or lithium, right? I’ll be rescuing you.”
Kootie, entirely himself for the moment, stared at the man and wondered how fit Raffle was. “I can just run, here.” His heart was thumping in his chest.
“You got a bad ankle. I’d catch you.”
“I’ll say I don’t know you, you’re trying to molest me.”
“I’ll point at the billboard.”
Kootie looked past Raffle at the momentarily empty sidewalk and street. “Let’s let these cops decide.”
When Raffle turned around, Kootie hopped up the stairs and broke into a sprint across the broad flat acropolis-like plaza, toward the curved brown wall below the flared white turret of the Mark Taper Forum; a walkway crossed the shallow pool around the building, and he focused on that. The tall glass facade of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was too far away.
Behind him he heard a yelp as Raffle collided with Fred, and then he heard the big man’s shoes scuffling up the steps; but Kootie was running full tilt, ignoring for now the pounding blaze of pain in his ankle, and when he crossed the moat and skidded around the circular brown wall of the Mark Taper Forum he couldn’t hear his pursuers.
Then he could. Fred’s claws were clattering on the smooth concrete and Raffle’s shoes were slapping closer. Kootie was more hopping than running now, and his face was icy with sweat—in a moment they’d catch him, and there was no one around who would help, everybody would want a piece of the $20,000.
Caught. Jagged memories crashed in on him—whipping his horse as he drove home at night past a cemetery while unsold newspapers tumbled in the back of the cart as insubstantial fingers plucked at the pages; crashing through the dark woods at Port Huron, pursued by the ghost of a recently dead steamship captain; fleeing west to California under the “mask” of a total eclipse of the sun in 1878, leaving no trail, sitting uncomfortably on a cushion on the cowcatcher of the racing Union Pacific locomotive, day after day, as it crested the mounting slopes toward the snowy peaks of the Sierras…
And too he remembered expiring in the bedroom of the mansion in Llewellyn Park in October of 1931, breathing out his last breath—into a glass test tube.
Anyone could eat him now, inhale him, inspire the essence of him. In his tiny glass confinement he had been taken to Detroit, and then eventually back out to California, and this prepubescent boy had inhaled him; the boy wasn’t mature enough to digest him, unmake him and violate him and put his disassembled pieces to use for alien goals…but the people pursuing him could, and would.
If they caught him.
At this moment the boy was just a shoved-aside passenger in his young body, and the old man turned on the dog that came bounding around the curve of white wall.
NO MORE than two other people at the worst, thought Raffle, at the very worst, and that’ll still leave sixty-six hundred for me, since dumb Jacko is forfeiting his share, making me run after him like this; I can knock him down and then start yelling Rightful Glory Mayo! Rightful Glory Mayo!—no, no jail names here, use the real name—what the hell is the real name?—and then tell ’em to call 911, this kid’s having a prophylactic fit, swallowing his tongue. I can take off my shoe and stick it in the kid’s mouth so he can’t talk, say it’s a first-aid measure.
Raffle sprinted across the walkway over the shallow pool and skidded around the curved wall of the Mark Taper only a few seconds after Kootie had, and practically on Fred’s tail just as a deep thump buffeted the morning air.
And he clopped to a frozen halt, slapping the wall to push himself back.
The wall was wet with spattered blood that was still hot, and through a fine, turbulent crimson spray he stared at the portly old man, dressed in a black coat and battered black hat, who was gaping at him wide-eyed. Thinking gunshot, Raffle glanced down for Kootie’s body, but saw instead the exploded, bloody dog-skeleton of Fred.
Kootie was nowhere to be seen.
The old man half turned away, and then suddenly, whirled and sprang at Raffle, whipping up one long leg and punching him hard in the ear with the toe of a hairy black shoe; the impact rocked Raffle’s head, and he scuffled dizzily back a couple of steps, catching himself on the pool railing.
The old man’s mouth sprang open, and though more blood spilled out between the uneven teeth, he was able to say, “Let’s see you capture me now, you sons of bitches”