That apartment back up on Cerritos looks good, he told himself. (This place is only half a block from the beach, and I could probably see the Queen Mary across the water from the cul-de-sac right beyond the driveway, but) I certainly couldn’t count on getting anything done here, not with this terrible Shadroe guy blundering around.
He unlocked the van door, carefully so as not to touch the drying egg-smear, and climbed in. Mr. Shadroe was probably still sitting back there in the office, carefully writing out the missing paragraphs of the rental agreement; not even breathing as his clumsy fingers worked the pen.
Sullivan pulled the door closed, but paused with the key halfway extended toward the ignition. The man hadn’t been breathing.
Shadroe had inhaled a number of times, in order to talk, but he had not been breathing. Sullivan was suddenly, viscerally sure that that’s what had so upset him in there—he had been standing next to a walking vapor lock, the pressure of a living soul in the vacuum of a dead body.
What are you telling me? he asked himself; that Mr. Shadroe is a dead guy? If so, I should definitely get out of here, fast, before some shock causes him to throw stress-shells, and his overdrawn lifeline collapses and he goes off like a goddamn firebomb, like the patient at Elizalde’s Día del Muerte séance.
Still uncomfortable with the idea, he put the key into the ignition.
Shadroe could be alive, he thought—he could just have been breathing very low, very quietly. Oh yeah? he answered himself immediately. When he inhaled in order to speak, it sounded like somebody dragging a tree branch through a mail slot.
Maybe he’s just one of the old solidified ghosts, a man-shaped pile of animated litter, who drifted down here to be near the ocean, as Elizalde in her interview unaware of how literally she was speaking, noted that the poor old creatures like to do. (“Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface…”) But Shadroe didn’t quite talk crazily enough, and a ghost wouldn’t be able to deal with the paperwork of running an apartment building; collecting rents, paying taxes and license and utility bills.
Okay, so what if he is one of the rare people who can continue to occupy and operate their bodies after they’ve died? What’s it to me?
Sullivan twisted the key, and the engine started right up, without even a touch of his foot on the gas pedal.
I wonder how long he’s been dead, he thought. If his death was recent, like during the last day or so, he probably hasn’t even noticed it himself yet; but if he’s been hanging on for a while, he must have figured out measures to avoid the collapse: he must not ever sleep for example, and I’ll bet he spends a lot of time out on the ocean.
C…patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water It’s been worth field trips.”)
He didn’t want to think, right now, about what Elizalde had said in the interview.
What would that blind witch on the Honda see, he wondered instead, if she were to come around here? With a dead guy up and walking around all over this building and grounds, insulting people’s vehicles and shoes, this whole place must look like a patch of dry rot, psychically.
This place would be good cover.
And the location is perfect for me. And six hundred a month, with utilities included—and a new refrigerator!—is pretty good.
Sullivan sighed, and switched off the engine and got out of the van. When he had walked back across the yard and stepped into the office, Shadroe was still at work on the rental agreement. Sullivan sat down on the couch to wait, stoically enduring the psychically stressed atmosphere.
(“Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”)
“If you’ll take cash right now, he said unsteadily, “I’d like to start moving my stuff in this afternoon.”
“If you right now got the time,” said Shadroe, without looking up. “I right now got the key.”
Sullivan had the time. He was suddenly in no hurry to go find Angelica Anthem Elizalde, for he was pretty sure that he knew where she would be.
At the canals at Venice Beach.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“I cant go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
SITTING in a bus seat by a sunny window, warmed by the noon glare through the glass and by the oversized fleece-lined denim jacket he had bought at a thrift store on Slauson, Kootie was too sleepy and comfortable to worry. He was sure that the last two days and three nights had aged his face way beyond that picture on the billboards, and, especially with the sunglasses; he was sure he must look like a teenager. The denim jacket even smelled like stale beer.
Keeping his face maturely expressionless, he cocked an eyebrow out the window at the pollo stands and the 1950s-futuristic car washes along Crenshaw Boulevard. He would be transferring at Manchester to catch another RTD bus to the Dockweiler State Beach at Playa del Rey.
The boy had awakened at dawn, his eyes already open and stinging in the ancient paint fumes in the abandoned car, and he had recognized the still drop cloth under his chin, and the split and faded dashboard in front of him; he had clearly remembered breaking the wind-wing window the night before, and opening the door and climbing in.
But he hadn’t recognized the city dimly visible beyond the dusty windshield.
Cables and wires were strung so densely against the sky overhead that for one sleepy moment he had thought he was under some kind of war-surplus submarine-catching net; then he had seen that the wires were higher than he had thought, and separate, strung haphazardly from telegraph poles and bulky insulators on the high roofs of all the old buildings. And even through the grime on the glass he could see that they were old buildings—imposing brick structures with arched windows at the top and jutting cornices.
He knew he’d have to prove himself here, in spite of being virtually broke and so terribly young—here in Boston, his first big city—
Boston?
He reached a hand out from under the drop cloth and opened the door. It squeaked out on its rusty hinges and let in a gust of fresh morning air that smelled distantly of what he knew must be coal smoke and horse manure—and then Kootie was glad he was sitting down, for he was suddenly so dizzy that he grabbed the edge of the seat.
“You’re,” croaked his own voice, “don’t tell me—Kootie.” After a moment he said, voluntarily, “Right.” Then his voice went on, thickly, “I was dreaming. This isn’t Boston, is it? Nor New Jersey yet. It’s…Los Angeles.” His eyes closed and his hands came up and rubbed his eye sockets. “Sorry,” said his voice as his right hand sprang away from the painful swelling around his right eye.
When he looked around again, it was typical backstreet Los Angeles that he saw and smelled around him: low stuccoed buildings and palm trees, and the smells of diesel exhaust and gardenias; above a three-story building a couple of blocks away, crows were diving over the condenser fans of a big rooftop air-conditioner shed and then lofting up on the hot air drafts, over and over again. Only a few wires drooped overhead from the telephone poles.