“Don’t say it just to please me,” the boy told him.
When they had climbed into the van and pulled the doors closed, Sullivan and Elizalde sat up front, and the boy sat in the back on the still-unmade bed.
“Why did you give that guy a buck?” asked Sullivan irritably as he started the engine and yanked the gearshift into drive.
“He might have been Elijah,” Elizalde said wearily. “Elijah winders around the Earth in disguise, you know; asking for help, and if you don’t help him you get in trouble at the Last Judgment.”
“Yeah?” Sullivan made a fast left turn onto Lucas going south, planning to catch the Harbor Freeway from Bixel off Wilshire. “Well, the other guy was probably Elijah, the guy you didn’t give a buck to. Who’s our new friend, by the way?”
“Call me Al,” spoke up the boy from the back of the van. “No, my name’s Kootie—” The voice sounded scared now. “—where are we going? It’s all right, Kootie, you remember how I didn’t trust the Fussels? These people are square. I’m glad you’re back with us, son. I was worried about you.”
Sullivan shot Elizalde a furious glance.
“He’s magnetic,” she said. She seemed near tears. “Compasses point to him. And I used up my mace spray on a crowd of bad guys who were trying to force him into a truck.”
“It’s okay,” Sullivan said. “That’s good, I’m glad you did. I wish I’d been there to help.” Good God, he thought. “Did you get some likely…groceries?”
“I think so.” She sighed deeply. “Did you hear what those two vatos said? They described you and me as la mosca en leche. That means fly-in-milk—like ‘salt-and-pepper,’ you know, a mixed-race couple. They thought I was a Mexican.”
Sullivan glanced at her. “You are a Mexican.”
“I know. But it’s nice that they could tell. How did you do, did you get some good electronic stuff?”
Sullivan was looking into the driver’s mirror on the outside of the door. A new Lincoln had sped up to make the light at Beverly, and it was now swerving into the right lane as if to pass him. He was glad of the distraction, for he didn’t want to talk about the ragtag equipment he’d bought.
“Not bad,” he said absently, “considering I didn’t know what I wanted.” When the Lincoln was alongside, Sullivan pressed the brake firmly, and the big car shot ahead. “They had some old carborundum-element bulbs there cheap, so I bought a few, and I got an old Ford coil for fifty bucks, and a Langmuir gauge.” He made a show of peering ahead with concern.
But the Lincoln ahead had actually slowed, and now another one just like it was speeding up from behind. “Other stuff,” he added—nearly in a whisper, for something really did seem to be going on here. His palms were suddenly damp on the wheel.
There was a cross street to the right ahead, and he waited until the last instant to touch the brake and whip the wheel around to cut directly across the right-hand lane; the tires were screeching, and a bar-time jolt of vertigo made him open the sharp turn a little wider before the van could roll over, and then he had stamped the gas pedal and they were roaring down the old residential street.
A glance in the mirror showed him the second Lincoln coming up fast behind him. He could hear the roar of the car’s engine.
“Bad guys,” he said breathlessly. “Fasten your belts—kid, get down somewhere. I’m gonna try to outrun ‘em. They want us alive.”
The other Lincoln had somehow looped back, and was now rushing up behind the nearer one, which was swerving to pass Sullivan on the left. Sullivan jerked the wheel that way to cut the car off, and he kept his foot hard on the gas pedal.
A loud, rapid popping began, and the van shuddered and rang and shook as splinters whined around the seats. Sullivan snatched his foot off the gas and stomped the brake; Elizalde tumbled against the dashboard as the front end dropped and the tires screamed, and then as the van slewed and ground to a halt, and rocked back, he slammed it into reverse and gave it full throttle again.
The closer Lincoln had driven up a curb and run over a trash can. Sullivan had to hunch around to watch the other one through the narrow frames of the back windows, for the door mirror had been blown out; the van’s rear end was whipping wildly back and forth as Sullivan fought the wheel, and he heard five or six more shots, but then the second Lincoln too had driven up onto a lawn to get out of Sullivan’s lunatic way, and the van surged back-end foremost right out into the muddle of Lucas Avenue.
A hard, smashing impact punched the van, and as Sullivan’s chin clunked the top of the seat back he heard two more crashes a little farther away. The van was stalled, and he clanked it into neutral and cranked at the starter. Feathers were flying around the stove and the bed in the back, where he had last seen the kid. At last the engine caught.
Sullivan threw the shift into Drive again and turned around to face out the starred windshield, and he hit the gas and the van sped away down Lucas with only a diminishing clatter of glass and metal in its wake.
Sullivan drove quickly but with desperate concentration, yanking the wheel back and forth to pass cars, and pushing his way through red lights while looking frantically back and forth and leaning on the horn.
When he was sure that he had at least momentarily lost any pursuit, he took a right turn, and then an immediate left into a service alley behind a row of street-facing stores. There was an empty parking space between two trucks, but his sweaty hands were trembling so badly that he had to back and fill for a full minute before he had got the vehicle into the space and pushed the gearshift lever into park.
“Kid,” Sullivan croaked, too shaky even to turn around, “are you all right?” His mouth was dry and tasted like old pennies.
In the sudden quiet, over the low rumble of the idling engine, he could now hear the boy sobbing; but the boy’s voice strangled the sobs long enough to choke out, “No worse than I was before.”
“‘They want us alive,’” said Elizalde from where she was crumpled under the dashboard. She climbed back up into the seat and shook glass out of her disordered black hair. “I’m glad you’ve got these guys figured out, you asshole.”
“Are you hit?” Sullivan asked her, his voice pitched too high. “They were shooting at us. Am I hit?” He spread his hands and looked down at himself, then shuffled his feet around to see them. He didn’t see any blood, or feel any particular pain or numbness anywhere.
“No,” said Elizalde after looking herself over. “What do we do now?”
“You—you left your jumpsuit in Solville. Get a jacket of mine from the closet in the back, and a T-shirt or something for the kid. Disguises. I got a baseball cap back there you can tuck your hair up into. You two take a bus back, you’ll look like a mother and son. I’ll drive the van, and—I don’t know, take backstreets or something. I think I’ll be out of trouble once I get on the freeway, but you’d be safer traveling in something besides this van.”
“Why don’t we all take the bus?” asked Elizalde. “Abandon the van?”
“He’d have to abandon the stuff he bought,” said the boy, who was still sniffling, “and a couple of these things aren’t useless rubbish.”
“Thanks, sonny,” said Sullivan, not happy that the kid had been examining his purchases. Then, to Elizalde, he said, “Oh—here.” He unsnapped the fanny-pack belt and pulled it free of his waist. “Have you ever shot a .45?”