One ferry was at the dock, its iron gate swung up to let three cars move booming and creaking up the wooden ramp to the pavement; another ferry was receding away, now about halfway across the mile-wide channel. The ferries, with their worn red and white paint and weathered floorboards, seemed to be the only elements of the local scene that might date from Crane's time.
Crane stepped aboard, not liking the shifting of the deck. Fear death by water, he thought.
The wide wooden seats were puddled with rain water this morning, so after giving two quarters to the girl in the yellow rubber rain suit with the money changer on her canvas belt, Crane and Mavranos stood braced on the gray-painted tar paper deck as the engine gunned and the boat surged gently out onto the face of the water, and they watched the palm trees and boat masts and low buildings of Balboa Island draw closer.
Mavranos pushed back his ragged black hair and peered over the rail. "Jesus, look at all the fish—bass and mackerel, damn, and that's a sand shark. You could fire a shotgun into the water and kill a dozen of 'em."
Crane looked down into the water at the many vague forms under the surface. "I'll bet Saturn will be bright tonight," he said softly, "with all his moons moving behind him."
They got off the ferry at the island dock and walked east along the broad waterfront walk, between expensive, yardless houses to the left and a short, sloping beach fretted with private docks to the right. Crane was limping along steadily, though his face was sweaty and pale.
Dark clouds were moving in again from the north and west, contrasting vividly with the patches of blue sky. Crane looked up and saw high-circling sea gulls lit white by the slanting sun against a backdrop of black cumulus.
At the southern end of Marine Street a thick pipe protruded from the sand slope and extended a few yards out into the water. DANGER, said a sign above it, END OF STORM DRAIN.
More water, thought Crane, and dangerous. "It's to the left here," he said nervously. "There's a market up ahead. Vegetables, bread—that's where we used to get the doughnuts. Old place, been there since the twenties. You wait here."
"I might be able to help."
"You look like Genghis Khan. Trust me, wait here."
"Okay, Pogo, but if the old guy's there, remember everything he says."
"Hey, I'm sober today, remember?"
Crane limped away up the street, still in sunlight but walking toward the darkness that was tucked in under the northern clouds. Narrow houses crowded up to the sidewalks; the only people he saw were women kneeling in tiny gardens and men doing incomprehensible work with shrill, handheld power tools in open garages on this Saturday morning.
The market was called Hershey's Market now, not the Arden's Milk Market Spot as he remembered, and what used to be a drugstore across the street was currently a real estate office; but the shapes of the buildings were the same, and he began trying to walk faster.
"Freeze, Scott."
The remembered voice was still authoritative, and Crane obeyed automatically. Hesitantly he looked to the side and saw a tall, thin figure in the shadow under the awning of the old Village Inn restaurant, twenty feet away across the puddled street.
"Oz?"
"I've got a gun, cocked, hollow-point slugs, pointed straight at my own heart," said the old man tensely. "Who's your friend down by the water?"
"He's a neighbor of mine, he's in the same sort of trouble I'm in. I—"
"What the hell kind of truck is that to drive around in?"
"Truck …? The one we came in? It's his, it's a Suburban; he buys cars from an impound yard—"
"Never mind. What book were you reading when we went to get Diana?"
"Goddamn, Oz, you've got no right to expect me to remember that, but it was The Monster Men, by Edgar Rice—"
"Okay, he hasn't had the next game yet. Probably be this Easter, though." The old man stepped out of the shadows, leaning on an aluminum ortho cane with a quadripod base. His hair was thin and cottony white over his pink scalp, and he was wearing a baggy dark gray suit with a white shirt and blue tie. His free hand stayed in the right side pocket of his coat as he walked slowly across the wet pavement to Crane. "What do you want from me?"
Tears blurred Crane's eyes. "How about How've you been? Christ, I made a mistake, I was a stupid kid; how many kids aren't? Aren't you going to forgive me even now, twenty years later? This thing looks like killing me, and you're acting like—"
"You look like hell," the old man said harshly. "You drink way too much, don't you? And now, when it's too late, you're driving around with some bum in a joke truck trying to figure out how to stop the rain. Shit." He let his cane stand by itself and stepped forward and threw his free arm around Crane. "I love you, boy, but you're a dead man," he said muffledly into Crane's collar.
"Christ, Oz, I love you," Crane said, clasping the old man's narrow shoulders. "And even if I am dead, it's good to see you one more time. But listen, tell me what happened. How did I kill myself by playing in that—that God damned game?"
Ozzie stood back and again gripped the rubber handle of his standing cane, and Crane could see how the years had withered the once-strong face, extinguished the evidence of all emotions except for anxiety and—maybe still—some of the old humor.
"Assumption," Ozzie said. "That guy, that Ricky Leroy, assumed you, put a lien on your body. A sort of balloon lien. Shit, son, I read up on this, and asked around, after I lost you to it—and I had known a good deal about the dangers of cards even before, all that stuff you thought was like step-on-a-crack-break-your-mother's-back."
A car was making its way down the narrow street, and Crane and Ozzie stepped up onto the curb.
"You're still yourself now," Ozzie went on, "looking out of your eyes, but after the next game on the lake it'll be him, and he'll have everybody else, too, that took money for the assumed hands in that game in 'sixty-nine, that series of games. Leroy'll have you all like a collection of remote, mobile, closed-circuit TV sets. Don't start reading no real long books, son." The old man's eyes were wet as he shook his head. "And don't think it gives me any pleasure to tell you all this."
Crane clenched his fists, feeling the muscles in his palms with his tingling fingertips. "There's—isn't there anything I can do? Is it just over? Can't I go … I don't know, kill this guy?"
Ozzie shook his head sadly. "Let's go walk back to where your friend is. No, you can't kill him. You could kill one of the bodies he's in, or a couple even, but he'll have at least one stashed somewhere that you couldn't even hear of, much less get to. And besides, he's already started killing you, loosening your soul for the eviction. Dionysus has got his hand on your throat in the form of drink, and any family or pets you may have are going to start dying of the randomness illnesses: cancers, heart irregularities—"
Heart irregularities, Crane thought.
Heart irregularities.
He kept walking. "That would be … caused by me?" he said as evenly as he could.
Ozzie gave him a piercing look. "Shit, I'm sorry, that was damn thoughtless of me. Of course, it already has happened, hasn't it? Who?"
"My wife. She—" He was sitting on the curb suddenly. "Heart attack." His body felt hollowed out, and his hands moved vaguely in front of him as though he were groping in darkness for something he didn't know the shape of.
One of the randomness illnesses, he heard Ozzie's voice say in his memory. And then he heard his own voice: Caused by me?