How had the waiter known it?
Oh hell, Buddy had probably been in here for a while, and this one hadn’t been his first. Or maybe he was a regular, these days. Sullivan breathed deeply and wished he had gone somewhere else for lunch.
Why was Buddy hanging around drinking beer at Miceli’s when he had a noon appointment somewhere? Miceli’s wasn’t the sort of place one ducked into for a quick beer.
Maybe the appointment was for lunch right here at Miceli’s, and Buddy had arrived early to drink up some nerve.
Through the high window overlooking Cherokee, a beam of morning sunlight lanced down onto the tabletop and gleamed on a stray sliver of broken glass.
Sullivan had certainly jumped, when Buddy had tapped him on the shoulder; grabbed not only for the gun but for Houdini’s mummified thumb, too. What had he been afraid of? Well—that deLarava had found him.
Maybe deLarava had found him. Who was Buddy calling?
Jesus, he thought, taking a deep breath. Where’s that waiter? You need a couple of beers bad, boy. Pa-ra-noia strikes deep. You meet one of your old friends in one of your old hangouts…
Both of which deLarava would have been aware of, just as she’d been aware of Steve Lauter. Maybe there was no one I knew at Musso and Frank’s, day before yesterday, just because that was Sukie’s and my personal place. We never went there with anybody else, so deLarava wouldn’t have known to plant an “old friend” informer there.
If Buddy’s here to betray me, he might very well want to pick a fight, to justify it to himself.
Sullivan stood up, walked around the table and sat down in Buddy’s chair, facing the entry.
Are you seriously saying, he asked himself as his fingers tingled and he took quick breaths, that you believe deLarava has planted an old friend at each of your old hangouts? Restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, bookstores? (Do I have that many old friends? Maybe the roster is filled out with strangers who’ve each got a picture of me in their pockets.)
Oh, this really is paranoia, boy—when you start imagining that everybody in the city has nothing in mind but finding you; imagining that you’re the most important little man in Los Angeles.
But I might be, to Loretta deLarava. If she really wants to capture and eat my father’s ghost. And she has money and power, and the paranoid insect-energy to put them to directed use.
O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking, he thought, remembering his flight out of Arizona on Monday night, after Sukie’s call. He had calculated then that it would take less than half an hour for bad guys to get from the nuclear plant to O’Hara’s.
He thought: How quickly can they get here, today?
Warning—you are too close to the vehicle.
Sullivan was out of the chair and walking toward the front door and feeling in his pocket for the keys to the van.
“Pete! Hey, where you going, man?”
Sullivan pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight. Behind him he heard Buddy yell, “Goddammit,” and heard Buddy’s feet pounding on the wooden floor.
Sullivan was running too.
He had the van key between his thumb and forefinger by the time he slammed into the driver’s-side door, and he didn’t let himself look behind him until he had piled inside and twisted the key in the ignition.
Buddy had run to a white Toyota parked two slots away; he had the door open and was scrambling in.
Sullivan jerked the gearshift into reverse and goosed the van out of the parking slot, swinging the rear end toward Buddy’s Toyota; the Toyota backed out too, so Sullivan bared his teeth and just stomped the gas pedal to the floor.
With a jarring metallic bam the van stopped, and Sullivan could hear glass tinkling to the pavement as the back of his head bounced off the padded headrest. Luckily the van hadn’t stalled. He reached forward and clanked the gearshift all the way over into low and tromped on the gas again.
Metal squeaked and popped, and then he was free of the smashed Toyota. He glanced into the driver’s-side mirror as he swung the wheel toward the exit, and he flinched as he saw Buddy step out and throw something; a moment later he heard a crack against his door and saw wet strings and tiny white fragments fly away ahead of him. Then he was rocking down the driveway out onto Cherokee amid screeching rubber and car horns, and wrenching the van around to the left to gun away down the street south, away from Hollywood Boulevard. He slapped the gearshift lever up into Drive.
He caught a green light and turned left again on Selma, and then drove with his left hand while he dug the Bull Durham sack out of his shirt pocket. Feeling like a cowboy rolling a smoke one-handed, he shook the dried thumb into his palm and tossed the sack away, then drove holding the thumb out in front of his face, his knuckles against the windshield. It felt like a segment of a greasy tree branch, but he clung to it gratefully.
Out of the silvery liquid glare of the cold sunlight, a big gold Honda motorcycle was cruising toward him in the oncoming lane; he couldn’t see the rider behind the gleaming windshield and fairing, but the passenger was a rail-thin old woman sitting up high against the sissy bar, her gray hair streaming behind, unconfined by any sort of helmet…and she was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna tied right over her eyes.
Her head was swiveling around, tilted back as though she was trying to smell or hear something. Sullivan inched the thumb across the inside of the windshield to keep it blocking the line from her blindfolded face to his own.
Sweat stung his eyes, and he forced himself not to tromp on the accelerator now; the Honda could outmaneuver him anywhere, even if he got out and ran. (The shadows of wheeling, shouting crows flickered over the lanes.) And it was probably only one of a number of vehicles trolling between Highland and Cahuenga right now.
God, he prayed desperately as a tree and a parking lot trundled past outside his steamy window, let me get clear of this and I swear I’ll learn. I won’t blunder into predictable patterns again, trust me.
The 101 Freeway was only a couple of big blocks ahead, and he ached for the breezy freedom of its wide gray lanes.
Keening behind his clenched teeth, he pulled over to the Selma Avenue curb and put the engine into Park.
He sprang out of the driver’s seat and scrambled into the back, tossing the mattress off the folded-out bed. Buddy would even now be telling them that Sullivan was in a brown Dodge van, but they’d recognize him even sooner if he didn’t have the full mask working. They would already have been given his name, his birth date, too much of what was himself. When he and Sukie had worked together they had been a good pair of mirror images, being twins, and so there had been no solid figure for a ghost or a tracker to focus on; but now he was alone, discrete, quantified, discontinuous. Identifiable.
He had to grip the thumb between his teeth to bend over and lift the plaster hands out of the compartment under the bed, and he was gagging as he hopped forward and slid back into the driver’s seat. He laid one plaster hand on the dashboard and grotesquely stuck the other upright between his legs as he put the van back into gear and carefully pulled out away from the curb.
The Honda had looped back, and now was passing him on the left. The riders hadn’t had time to have talked to Buddy, but the old woman swung her head around to blindly face Sullivan, and peripherally he could see the frown creasing her forehead.
She’s sensing a psychic blur, he thought; a mix of Houdini’s birth and life, and my own. She won’t be catching any echoes of Houdini’s death, because the old magician was masked for that event, and got away clean even though he died on perilous Halloween. She’ll be wondering if I’m a schizophrenic, or on acid—what it is that makes the driver of this vehicle such a psychic sackful of broken mirror. (He even felt a little different—his jacket seemed looser and lighter, though he didn’t dare look down at himself right now.)