"Get into the car, goddamn it! We're rescuing you."
The White Room
GIBSON DECIDED THAT he was getting nowhere with Kooning. If anything, he was digging himself in deeper. She had him talking too much about his previous "fantasy" life and the weird anomalies between "his" world and the world in which he found himself. At the same time, he knew that the regime of drugs and therapy, far from "curing" him, would eventually drive him truly and irrevocably nuts. Within the limits of his meager resources, he activated the first phase of his escape plan. He embarked on a painstaking study of the routines of the clinic. When doors might be left unlocked or the nurses away from their stations. He began to keep copious notes in a code that he'd invented for himself. The notes were obviously reported to Kooning, and when she asked him about them he told her quite frankly that he was conducting a study of the clinic's operation with a view to escaping. She found that extremely interesting and began talking about the motivation behind the compulsive gathering of data. He also attempted to discuss the idea with John West and to his surprise received a very similar response. He had toyed with the idea of taking a partner along, and West had been the ideal choice, but when he broached the idea he found it received with an amused disdain. In fact, West treated him as though he was endearingly crazy and a little stupid.
"Oh, yes, old boy, crashing out of the joint? I believe that's how they described it in the old Hollywood big-house movies. Have you carved a gun out of soap yet?"
Having only trusted the man after a good deal of soul-searching, Gibson was understandably miffed.
"I've been making a study of the routines in this place. I'm going to figure out a way of walking out of here."
"Oh, do give it up. They call it compulsive data gathering and they give you a whole lot of new and different drugs on top of what you're taking already."
Gibson persevered but only with great difficulty. "If I was to find a way out of here, would you come with me?"
West shook his head as though the answer was self-evident. "Oh, no, quite out of the question. I couldn't survive out there. They wouldn't let me."
Chapter Twelve
GIBSON WAS HALF thrown into the back of the Hudson. He went sprawling on his knees as Yop Boy dived in behind him, still spraying the Luxor Police Department with machine-gun bullets. Nephredana was lounging unconcernedly in the backseat. Slide was behind the wheel, sitting hunched in the driver's custom bucket seat, pumping the gas pedal, with his hat pulled down over his eyes and the collar of his duster coat turned up. The red and green displays of the car's complex and definitely non-1951 control panel bathed his face with a decidedly satanic light in the otherwise darkened interior. The moment everyone was safely aboard, he popped the clutch and sent the car rocketing toward the exit ramp. Gibson was tossed onto his side by the acceleration. Using his manacled hands, he tried to push himself into a sitting position.
"I thought you had a nonintervention policy?"
Slide laughed. "That was then, this is now. What's the matter, ain't you grateful?"
"I'm grateful, but you cut it pretty fine."
Nephredana shrugged. "Cutting it fine is the spice of life."
They were on the street hurtling straight at the traffic. Yop Boy, dressed for combat in his own outsize version of ninja fighting threads, had swung into the passenger seat, riding shotgun beside Slide, with his assault rifle pushed through the open window. A cab crossed an intersection, and the bewildered driver, seeing the Hudson coming at him like some avenging Detroit angel, stopped dead, right in their path. Slide only avoided it by mounting the sidewalk, sending a group of pedestrians diving for safety. Slide appeared to drive with a total disregard for the fate of innocent bystanders.
Fortunately the streets around police headquarters were comparatively empty in the small hours of the morning, and the innocent bystanders were down to a minimum. As they hurtled through the night, with Slide concentrating on the driving and Yop Boy playing defense, Nephredana pulled the electronic lock pick from her leather utility garter.
She pointed to Gibson's handcuffs. "Let's get those things off you."
She aimed the small cylinder at the handcuffs and they opened with a soft double click. A moment later, the padlock on the chain had opened and the whole deal had dropped to the floor of the car. Gibson eased himself into the seat, rubbing his wrists. "Damn, but it's good to be out of those things."
Nephredana crossed her legs. "You were in a lot of trouble back there."
"Tell me about it. I think I was just a fraction of a second away from being gunned down by the local Jack Ruby."
Yancey Slide turned in his seat. He seemed quite able to drive with one hand and without looking at the road.
"At last we've broken up that fucking pattern, I hope for good and all."
"You mean the Kennedy pattern?"
"I could have probably stopped the one in your dimension if I hadn't let Howard Hughes sidetrack me, the paranoid piece of shit."
"You knew Howard Hughes?"
"You have to deal with all kinds of assholes in my business. If Hughes hadn't faked me out by pretending that he knew more about the conspiracy than he really did, I might have had a chance to talk with Jack Kennedy before he went down to Dallas."
Gibson was getting a little off balance from all of Slide's name-dropping. He guessed that if you had lived for some twenty thousand years, you did get to meet a lot of people. Whether, though, you should retain a need to ostentatiously boast about it was something else again.
"You knew Kennedy, too?"
"Jack Kennedy wasn't an asshole. Except maybe for his need to jump on anything that breathed. That was neurotic behavior."
Nephredana snorted derisively. "That's kind of rich coming from you."
Slide flashed his sinister snaggletoothed grin, and his inhuman slit eyes blazed with a brief humor. "I'm a demon. I've got an image to maintain."
He turned back to the road. They were now running on a fairly empty highway that led out of the downtown district of government buildings and big business and possibly out of the city altogether. The Hudson was humming along at a speed that, from the way the streetlights flashed by outside the windows, must have exceeded 150 miles an hour, but its motion had a deceptive, almost dreamlike quality, a lack of vibration that made it feel as if they were in some sort of simulator rather than a real nuts-and-bolts vehicle.
Gibson leaned forward and asked the obvious question. "So what happens now? Are we going someplace or are we just on the run like Bonnie and Clyde?"
Gibson half expected Slide to launch into a detailed account of how he ran with the Barrow Gang and helped Bonnie with the poems that she sent to the newspapers. In this case, Slide either resisted the temptation or he had never met the gangster twosome, because he actually came up with a straight answer.
"We're getting out of this fucked-up dimension while the getting's still good."
Gibson glanced nervously out of the rear window. They might be going fast enough to outrun a police car, but the LPD also had helicopters.