ELIZALDE BLINKED now, and realized that she had been standing for some length of time on the curb, shivering and sweating in the cold diesel breeze.
That was all two years ago, she told herself. What are you going to do right now?
She decided to backtrack up Belmont and then walk on down to Lucas along some other street; Houdini’s thumb was still there tickling her, down behind her sweaty anklebone, but something had paid attention to her a few moments ago, and she didn’t want to blunder into some supernatural event. She turned around and walked into the mariachi jukebox noise of the mariscos place and bought a couple of fish tacos wrapped in wax paper just so as to be able to wheedle from the counterman a plastic bag big enough to slide her ruptured grocery bag into.
The next block up was Goulet Street, gray old bungalow houses that had mostly been fenced in and converted to body shops and tire outlets after some long-ago zoning change. As she hurried along the sidewalk past the sagging fences, a young man stepped up from beside a parked car and asked her what he could get her, and half a block later another man nodded at her and made whip-snapping gestures, but she knew that they were both just crack-cocaine dealers, and she shrugged and shook her head at each of them and kept walking.
On the morning after the séance, she had been remanded from the hospital into the custody of the police, charged with manslaughter; she spent that night in jail, and on the following day, Friday, she had put up the $50,000 bail—and then had calmly driven her trusty little Honda right out across the Mojave Desert, out of California. She hadn’t had a clue as to what had happened at her therapy session—she had known only two things about it: that Frank Rocha and two of the other patients had died, and—of course—that she herself had had a psychotic episode, suffered a severe schizophrenic perceptual disorder. She had been sure that she had briefly gone crazy—and she had not doubted that diagnosis until this last Monday night.
Walking along the Goulet Street sidewalk now, she wondered if she might have been better off when she had thought she was crazy.
AT LUCAS she turned right, and then turned right again into a narrow street that curved past the the rear doors of a liquor store and a laundry, back to Beverly. RAPHAEL’S LIQUOR was across the Beverly intersection, and she was hurrying, hoping Sullivan wasn’t parked there yet.
But the compass was still in her hand, and she glanced at it. The needle was pointing behind her, which was north.
Good old reliable north, she thought. She sighed, and felt the tension unkink from her shoulders—whatever had been going on was apparently over—but she glanced at it again to reassure herself, and saw the needle swing and then hold steady.
Grit crunched under her toes as she spun around to look back. A hunched, dwarfed figure was lurching toward her from around the corner of the liquor store.
Duende! she thought as she twisted to get her balance leaned back the other way; it’s one of those malevolent half-damned angels the women on the beach told me about last night!
Then she had crouched and made a short hop to get her footing and was striding away toward Beverly, in her retinas burning the glimpsed image of a gaunt face behind glittering sunglasses under a bobbing straw cowboy hat.
But a battered, primer-paint-red pickup truck had turned up from Beverly, its engine gunning as the body rocked on bad shocks, and she knew that the half-dozen mustached men in wife-beater T-shirts crouching in the back were part of whatever was going on here.
Elizalde sprinted to the back wall of the laundry, leaning on it and hiking up her left foot to dig out it the can of mace; but the men in the truck were ignoring her.
She looked back—the duende had turned and was hurrying away north, but it was limping and clutching its side, and making no speed. The truck sped past Elizalde and then past the duende, and made a sharp right, bouncing up over the curb. The men in the back vaulted out and grabbed the dwarfish figure, whose only resistance was weak blows with pale little fists.
The hat spun away as the men lifted the small person by the shoulders and ankles, and then the oversized sunglasses fell off and she realized that the men’s prey was just a little boy.
Even as she realized it, she was running back there, clutching the bag in her left arm, her right hand thumbing the cap of the mace spray around to the ready position.
“Déjalo marchar!” she was shouting. “Qué estás hacienda? Voy a llamar a policía!”
One of the men who wasn’t holding the boy spun toward her with a big brown hand raised back across his shoulder to hit her, and she aimed the little spray can at his face and pushed the button.
The burst of mist hit him in the face, and he just sat down hard on the asphalt; she turned the can toward the men holding the boy and pushed the button again, sweeping it across their faces and the backs of their heads alike, and then she stepped over the spasming, coughing bodies and shot a squirt into the open passenger-side window of the truck.
A quacking voice from the bed of the truck called, “No me chingues, Juan Dominguez!”—but she didn’t see anyone back there, only some kind of cloth bag with a black Raiders cap on it. The bag seemed to have spoken, in merry malevolence.
The boy had been dropped, and had rolled away but not stood up; Elizalde’s own eyes were stinging and her nose burned, but she bent down to spray whatever might be left in the can directly into the faces of the two men who had only fallen onto their hands and knees. They exhaled like head-shot pigs and collapsed.
Elizalde dropped the emptied can and hooked her right hand under the boy’s armpit and hoisted him up to his feet. She was still clutching her bag of supplies in the crook of her left arm.
“Gotta run, kiddo,” she said. “Fast as you can, okay? Corre conmigo, bien? Just across the street. I’ll stay with you, but you’ve got to motivate with your feet. Vayamos!”
He nodded, and she noticed for the first time the faded bruise around his left eye. Not stopping to retrieve the hat and the sunglasses, she frog-marched him back around the liquor store to the Lucas Avenue sidewalk and started down it toward the stoplight.
Across the wide, busy street she could see the dusty brown box that was Sullivan’s van.
She looked behind her—there was no sign of the pickup truck.
The boy seemed to be able to walk, and she let go of him to dig the compass out of her pocket. The needle was pointed straight east. The ghost’s still ahead of us, she thought nervously; then she held it out in front of them, and the needle swung back toward north.
She moved it around, to be sure—and it was consistently pointing at the boy who was lurching along beside her.
She knew that she would change her pace, one way or the other, when she gave that new fact a moment’s thought—so she instantly gripped the compass between her teeth and began to walk faster, dragging the boy along, lest she might otherwise stop, or ditch him and just flat-out run.