He heard more keyboard clicking. “Yeah, it is.” The man sighed. “Well, for that we’d need a guarantor, somebody we’ve got listed, who can put up forty grand. Counter-offers have to be double, house policy. If we get that, we’ll go ahead and list it under the Parganas heading. But the guarantor would have to do all the other work, like maybe putting a trap on the reward-number phone and being ready to intercept anybody who, you know, might already have the kid and be trying to get the original reward. I don’t have to tell you that hours count in this one. Minutes, even.”
“I know.”
Oaks looked down at the compass in the pommel of his knife—right now it was pointing up in the direction of Dodger Stadium, which was plain old north, but a few minutes ago it had joggled wildly and then, for what must have been nearly a full minute, pointed emphatically west. After that it had wobbled back to north, and he hadn’t seen it deviate from that normal reading since.
During it all, he had felt no heat in his absent arm—but the compass had clearly registered a brief re-emergence of the big ghost; and the ghost had been in the excited state, too, for ghosts didn’t cast the huge magnetic fields when they were in their normal quiescent ground state. It was clathrated in the boy’s psyche, and not dissipated or eaten. Oaks was achingly anxious to get off the phone and resume his jogging pursuit—westward!—but this insurance was worth a minute’s delay.
“So who’s your guarantor?” the man on the phone was asking him. “Or do you have forty grand yourself, to put up instead of your smoke?”
“No, not me. Uh…” The street dealers he ordinarily sold to wouldn’t have this kind of money ready to hand. He would have to go higher up. “You got a Neal Obstadt listed?” Oaks asked. “Under gambling, probably, I think that’s his main business.”
“Yeah, I got Obstadt.” (Clickety-click.) “What do I tell him? Even for him, forty ain’t just lunch money.”
Oaks had heard Obstadt described as a heavy user, a good customer who was generally able to score the best specimens in the dealers’ stocks. “Tell him it’s from the guy named Sherman Oaks, the producer who brought you such hits as—I hope you’re taping this?”
“Always got a loop going.”
“Such hits as Henrietta Hewitt, the old lady who died on September fifth and whose kids were named Edna and Sam.” It was a fairly long shot, but old Henrietta had been the best ghost Oaks had bottled lately, and anyway Obstadt might very well recognize Oaks’s name and reputation. He might not, but the possibility of changing the Parganas listing was definitely worth this delay.
“I’ll play it for him. I imagine he’ll want to tape your voice himself, as your receipt for the money, if he goes for it. Are you at a number?”
“No, I’ll call back in an hour. But if he authorizes it, you can list it on the board right now, can’t you?”
“Yup. As soon as he says okay, it’s on, and the…mere mercenary details are between you and him.”
“Go,” said Oaks, and hung up the phone.
Immediately he wondered if he was making a costly mistake. He could easily get to all of his stashes within a hopping hour or two, but turning it all over to Obstadt’s people would leave Oaks with approximately nothing. He might even have to kill a few street people to make up the full thousand bottled doses. But of course he wouldn’t have to cough up the smoke unless he received the Parganas boy, and the big ghost inside the boy was clearly worth a thousand ordinary bottled dead folk. The nightly fresh catches in his traps would keep Oaks going until he could build up reserve stocks again.
He could feel his missing arm again, but it was just clutching his chest, and it was as uselessly cold as if it were cradling a bag of ice. He actually looked down at his grubby shirtfront, and was remotely surprised not to see the fabric bunched by the clawed fingers. His compass was still pointing north—either the ghost was in the normal catatonic ground state, or was reimprisoned inside the boy’s psyche, or both.
The burning-plastic smells of sizzling shrimp and cilantro helped propel him across the linoleum floor and out onto the Figueroa sidewalk.
Oaks despised the processes of biological ingestion and digestion and elimination, and he generally lived on crackers, and bean soup fingered up cold and solid right out of a can, and water from unguarded hoses and faucets. His real sustenance was his ghosts, snorted up raw and new and vibrant from a hand-lettered palindrome or a pile of scattered coins, or—occasional serendipitous luxuries!—furtively inhaled in hospital corridors or from a body freshly tumbled on the street.
He remembered stalking the halls of County Hospital during the war, when every one of the hundreds of windows had been painted black in case of a Japanese air raid, and the ghosts of newly dead patients were too fearful to dissipate normally, and instead huddled in the corners of the halls, always faintly asking him, as he swept them into his bottles, “Are the fops out there?”… And the maternity ward at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he had often been able to inhale the fresh-cast virtual ghosts thrown off by newborn infants in the stress of birth. …
But it was now getting on to forty-eight hours since he had last “got a life”—which had been before he’d gone to the Parganas house. He hadn’t even bothered to consume the ghosts of Kootie’s parents after he killed them, so confident had he been that the big ghost must still be nearby; he had not wanted to waste the chase-time by pausing to eat those two minor items.
Out on the sidewalk he realized that the day had turned cold, and that the gray light would be diminishing toward evening before too long. Already the zigzag neon sign of a shoe store across the street was glowing yellow against the ash-colored wall. An orange-and-black SCE truck roared past, and he flinched away—from the roaring of it.
Those two minor items. Oaks would have been grateful for one such minor item right now. One lungful of real soul food, to keep away the Bony Express.
For he could feel the unrest of the ghosts he had consumed in the past. When he was forced to fast, they all became agitated, and his exhalations were more and more audibly wheezy with their less and less distant roars, as if they were all riding toward him—the Bony Express!—ever closer, over the midnight black hills of the unmapped borderlands of his mind, toward the lonely middle-of-nowhere campfire that was his consciousness.
His phantom left hand had crawled down his chest and now gripped his abdomen, squeezing so hard that Oaks was wincing as he hurried west along the Sixth Street sidewalk. He thought of making a detour, catching a bus up to—which stash was he nearest to?—the rooftop air-conditioning shed over the hair salon on Bellevue; but the thought of how strongly the compass needle had pointed west only a few minutes ago, and the memory of the collapsed face on the parking garage stairs at the Music Center, made him keep on putting one foot ahead of the other on the westward-leading sidewalk.
Mouth-to-mouth unsuscitation, with Koot Hoomie Parganas’s body still twitching under him in protest at being so newly dead, and the two souls, the boy’s and the big ghost, blasting hotly down Oaks’s windpipe to his starving lungs.