“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”
Kootie rolled his eyes and then stared hard at her.
Alter a moment her expression of concern wilted into dismay. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Twenty thousand dollars? You were a witness!”
Close enough. Rocking his head back and humming loudly was as close as Kootie could come to conveying congratulations.
She was saying “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” as she got out of the seat and stepped over the console, and then she was prying with her fingernails at the tape edges around his wrists.
The tape wasn’t peeling up at all, and Kootie didn’t waste hope imagining that she’d free him. He wasn’t surprised when keys rattled against the outside of the passenger door and the lock dunked and then Mr. Fussel was leaning in.
“What are you doing, El? Get away from—”
“He’s a witness, Bill! The people that killed his parents are—are the ones you just called! Did you tell them where we are? Let’s get out of here right now!” She hurried back up front to the driver’s seat and grabbed the gearshift lever.
Mr. Fussel gripped her hand. “Where’d you get all that, El? He can’t even talk. These people sounded okay.”
“Then let’s drive somewhere and let Goaty talk to us, and you can call them back if we’re sure it’s all right.”
“Mm-hmm!” put in Kootie as loudly as he could.
“El, they’ll be here in ten minutes. We can talk to them right here, this is a public place, he’ll be safe. It’s his safety I’m concerned with; what if we have an accident driving? We’re both upset—”
“An accident? I won’t have an accident. They can—”
“They’re bringing cash, El! We can’t expect them to be driving all over L.A. with that kind of cash, in these kinds of neighborhoods!”
“You’re worried about them? They killed his—”
The minivan shook as something collided gently but firmly with the rear end, and then there were simultaneous knocks against the driver’s and passenger’s windows. Even from the back seat Kootie could see the blunt metal cylinders of silencers through the glass.
That wasn’t ten minutes, thought Kootie.
A voice spoke quietly from outside. “Roll down the windows right now or we’ll kill you both.”
Both of the Fussels hastily pressed buttons on their armrests, and the windows buzzed down.
“The boy’s in the back seat,” Mr. Fussel said eagerly.
A hand came in through the open window and pushed Mr. Fussel’s head aside, and then a stranger peered in. Behind mirror sunglasses and a drooping mustache, he was nothing more than a pale, narrow face.
“He’s taped in,” the face noted. “Good. You two get out.”
“Sure,” Mr. Fussel said. “Come on, El, get out. You guys are gonna take the van? Fine! We won’t report it stolen until—what, tomorrow? Would that be okay? Is the money in something we can carry inconspicuously?”
The face had withdrawn, but Kootie heard the voice say, “You’ll have no problems with it.”
Mrs. Fussel was sobbing quietly. “Bill, you idiot,” she said, but she opened her door and got out at the same time her husband did.
A fat man in a green turtleneck sweater got in where she had been, and the man with the mirror sunglasses got in on the passenger side. The doors were pulled closed, and the minivan rocked as the obstruction was moved from behind it, and then the fat man had put the engine into reverse and was backing out. He glanced incuriously at Kootie.
“Check the tape on the kid,” he said to his companion.
When the man in the sunglasses stepped into the back of the van, Kootie didn’t make any noises, but tried to catch his eye. The man just tugged at the seat belt, though, and then found the roll of tape and bound Kootie’s ankles together and taped them sideways to the seat leg, without looking at Kootie’s face.
Somehow Kootie was still just tense, no more than if he were one of only a couple of kids left standing at a spelling bee. After the man had returned to the front seat and fastened his seat belt, Kootie wondered what had happened to the Fussels. He supposed that they were dead already, shot behind some Dumpster. It was easy for him to avoid picturing the two of them. He looked at the backs of his captors’ heads and tried to figure out who the two men could be. They didn’t look like associates of the raggedy one-armed man.
Kootie was surprised, and cautiously pleased, with his own coolness in this scary situation…until he realized that it was based on a confidence that Thomas Alva Edison would think of some way to get him out of it; then he remembered that Edison seemed to have gone crazy, and in a few minutes tears of pure fright were rolling warmly along the top edges of the duct tape on Kootie’s cheeks as the minivan rocked through traffic.
They may not mean to kill me, he thought. Certainly not yet. Our destination might be miles from here, and—
He tried to think of any other comforting thoughts.
—And there’ll probably be a lot of traffic lights, he told himself forlornly.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
“I don’t like the look of it at all” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand, if it likes.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
SULLIVAN had driven up the 405 past LAX airport, past one of the government-sanctioned freeway-side murals (this one portraying a lot of gigantic self-righteous-looking joggers that made him think better of the fugitive graffiti taggers with their crude territory markers), and then he followed the empty new sunlit lanes of the 90 freeway out to where it came down and narrowed and became a surface street, Lincoln Boulevard, among new condominium buildings and old used-camper lots.
The plaster hands were on the passenger seat and the Bull Durham sack was in his shirt pocket, above the sun-and-body-heated bulk of his .45 in the canvas fanny pack. He had bought a triple-A map at a gas station and studied it hard, and he had only nerved himself up to come to Venice by vowing to stay entirely out of sight of the ocean.
The canals, thin blue lines on the map, were only half a fingernail inland from the black line that indicated the shore, and it was in the surf off this little stretch of beach that his father had drowned in ’59—and it was from there that he and Sukie had fled in ’86, leaving Loretta deLarava in possession of their father’s wallet and keys and the three cans of…
Nothing looked familiar, for he had been here only that one time, in ’86. He managed to miss North Venice Boulevard, and had to loop back through narrow streets where summer rental houses crowded right up to the curbs, and parked cars left hardly any room for traffic, and then when he came upon North Venice again he saw that it was a one-way street aimed straight out at the now-near ocean; and though he was ready to just put the van in reverse and honk his way backward a couple of blocks, he saw a stretch of empty curb right around the corner of North Venice and Pacific, and he vas able to pull in and park without having to focus past the back bumper of the Volkswagen in the space ahead of him.
He didn’t want to be Peter Sullivan here at all, even if nobody was looking for him—presumably his father’s ghost was in the sea only a block away, and that was enough of a presence to shame him into assuming every shred of disguise possible.
So he tied an old bandanna around the plaster hands and took them with him when he got out and locked the van. The sea breeze had cleared the coastal sky of smog, but it was chilly, and he was glad of his old leather flight jacket.