He groped through his mind for any remembered prayer—Our Father…? Hail Mary…?—but came up with nothing but a stanza of verse from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books, a bit Sukie had liked to recite:
“The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly.”
The motorcycle drifted past outside his window and pulled in ahead of him; through the close glass of the windshield he could hear the bass drumbeat of the motorcycle’s exhaust pipes, and through the fluttering gray hair he could see the old woman’s jaw twisted back toward him; but he kept a steady, moderate pressure on the gas pedal, though his legs felt like electrified bags of water. Was the driver of one of these cars around him seeing some signal from the old woman? Was he about to be cut off? They wanted him alive, but only so that deLarava could use him as lure for his father’s ghost.
In a hoarse voice he quoted more of the Alice scripture, thinking of Sukie and mentally hearing her remembered recitation of it:
“Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes”
The brake lights flashed on the transom of the gold motorcycle—but its rider leaned the heavy bike around in a U-turn and then accelerated back toward Cherokee, the diminishing roar of its engine rising and falling as the rider clicked rapidly up through the gears. Sullivan’s jacket was heavy and tight again.
He spat the old brown thumb out onto the dashboard and gagged hoarsely, squinting to be able to see ahead through tears of nausea.
He turned left on Wilcox, and then right onto the crowded lanes of eastbound Hollywood Boulevard. Don’t puke on yourself, he thought as he squinted at the cars glinting in the sunlight ahead of him. It looks like you got away this time. Now stay away. Hide. Buddy will have described the van, and might even have got the license number.
The thought of Buddy reminded him of the missile his old friend had thrown at the van as Sullivan had committed hit-and-run. Stopped at a red light, Sullivan now rolled down the driver’s-side window and craned his neck to look at the outside of the door.
A branching pattern of viscous wetness was splattered from the door handle to the front headlight. It was clear stuff mottled with yellow and dotted with angular bits of white, and half a dozen vertical trickles had already run down the fender from the initial horizontal streaking.
Buddy’s missile had been a raw egg.
The schoolboy-prankishness of the gesture was disarming. He egged my van, Sullivan thought; after I smashed the front end of his car! How could he have been colluding with deLarava at one moment and doing something as goofy as this in the next? I must have been wrong—poor Buddy wasn’t guilty of anything but beery tactlessness back there in the restaurant, and then he must really have been calling some business associate when he went to the phone. I should go back, and apologize, and agree to pay for getting his car fixed. This was pure paranoia. Even the people on the motorcycle had probably just been—
No. Sullivan remembered the old woman sitting high up against the sissy bar, blindfolded against visual distractions and sniffing the breeze, and he couldn’t make himself believe that the pair on the Honda had been random passersby.
He kept driving straight ahead.
East of Vine, the street stopped seeming to be Hollywood Boulevard, and was just another Los Angeles street, with office buildings and CD stores and boarded-up theaters, and red-and-yellow-blooming wild lantana bushes crouched in the squares of curbside dirt; but when he glanced out of his open window he saw, a smoky mile to the north against the green Griffith Park hills, the old white HOLLYWOOD sign—and for just a moment, to his still-watering eyes, it had seemed to read HALLOWEEN.
Not for two days yet, he thought, and he spat again to get rid of the taste of Houdini’s thumb. I’ve got about thirty-six hours.
Just past Van Ness he turned right onto the 101 southbound. The freeway was wide open and cars were moving along rapidly for once, and he gunned down the ramp with the gas pedal to the floor so as to be up to speed when he merged into the right lane.
A. O. fucking P., he thought as he took his first deep breath in at least five minutes. On the freeways, there you feel free.
He remembered now, now that he was at long last experiencing it again, the always-downstream rush of driving along open fast-moving freeway lanes. Up here above the surface streets, above them even if the freeway was sluicing through a valley, the real world off to the sides was reduced to a two-dimensional projection of sketchy hills and skyscraper silhouettes, and you dealt with the names of places, spelled out in reflector-studded white on the big green signs that swept past overhead, rather than with the grimy stop-and-go places themselves; even the spidery calligraphy of gang graffiti markers, looping across the signs in defiance of barbed wire and precarious perches and rushing traffic below, were formal symbols of senseless-killing neighborhoods, rather than the neighborhoods themselves.
Other drivers were just glimpsed heads in the gleaming solidity of rushing cars in this world of lanes and connectors; space and time were abridged, and a moment’s inattention could have you blinking at unfamiliar street names in Orange County or Pomona.
Sullivan had to find a place to stay, a place with a garage. After this, he couldn’t keep living in the van out on the streets. And he wanted to be close to deLarava, without putting himself in the way of her possibly stumbling across him.
Just short of the towers of downtown he turned south on the Harbor Freeway, toward Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor…and the Queen Mary.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
“If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: hut it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
FRANCIS Strube’s black leather electric office chair was acting up. It was made by the McKie Company, which was supposed to manufacture the best race-car seats, and he had punched the button on the “comfort console” to pump up the lower-back region, but it had inflated out grossly, to the size of a watermelon, and in order to sit back with his shoulders against the top of the chair he had to push out his chest and belly like a pouter pigeon.
Ludicrous. He leaned forward instead, dividing his attention between the flimsy sheets of fax paper in his hand and the man in the seat across the desk. The Goudie Snuff people—after extorting a thousand dollars out of him!—had printed out their mailing list in some kind of minimalist dot-matrix, and Strube was afraid he’d have to get Charlotte to puzzle it out for him.
‘But,” said the client uncertainly, “would that be best for them?”