“They booted my car,” Stein heaved, out of breath. “We’ve got to get to the warehouse.”
“I don’t think so,” Morty said and he popped the clutch and began to accelerate.
“Duluth. Where are your manners? You do as the man asks.”
“Mama.”
Morty slowed the truck down. Edna opened the passenger-side door and slid into the nest between the two front seats to make room for Stein. “No, please. I’ll sit there,” Stein insisted and climbed over her into the metal creche alongside Morty so she could have the cushioned seat. “They have my daughter,” Stein said looking straight ahead and shrinking the volume of his body so Morty would have room to drive.” They tore ass down Topanga Canyon. At Pacific Coast Highway they hit a dead stop. Nicholette’s funeral cortege, inching its way up the coast, was endless. Police scrutinized the credentials of every driver and passenger; the Paparazzi long since having learned the trick of turning on their headlights and pretending to be part of a funeral procession.
The tinted window of a silver Mercedes sedan opened. As the glass slid down, the reflection of the helmeted CHP officer yielded to the face of the driver inside the car. Stein leaned forward and wiped away grime from the inside of the Ford’s windshield. He could not see the driver but the passenger alongside him was Michael Esposito. That took some brass balls! Coming to the funeral of the person you’d killed. He couldn’t see into the back seat and was suddenly possessed by the possibility that Angie and Lila might be tied up there.
The woman in the Escalade directly in front of them was conducting an animated conversation on her cell phone. Stein looked desperately to the right of the Escalade. There was narrow shoulder and to the right of it, a ditch that in winter was a creek.
“Don’t even think about it,” Morty said, preempting Stein’s next thought. “There’d be two funerals.”
“You’re right.”
In the moment Morty relaxed, Stein stamped his left foot down onto Morty’s colossal right boot, jamming it down onto the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. Stein yanked the wheel to the right and they darted around the big tank and careened precariously along the shoulder. The grade was too steep to pull back onto the road and the line of cars was unbroken. They could see the horrified looks on people’s faces in the other cars.
“We’re gonna be dead like Butch and Sundance,” Morty howled.
“And Sundance’s mother,” Edna Greene added.
Morty threw Stein’s foot off his own, but there was nothing to do now but fly and hope that none of the six regiments of cops noticed them; and that the phalanx of sirens and motorcycles and patrol cars hot in their pursuit was a coincidence.
“It’s ok. I know these people. Keep going.”
“You know these people?” Edna repeated. “I feel really confident, now.”
In the next moment the truck was enveloped by police vehicles. A voice boomed out of a bullhorn. “STOP THE VEHICLE. PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE DASH WHERE I CAN SEE THEM.” Rifles were pointed at them from every direction, including from above, where Bayliss, having observed the chase and overheard the radio transmissions, had swooped down from the sky and landed in front of them. Dressed in his fatigues, Bayliss leaped out in a Prime Time news pose. When he saw that his quarry was Stein and Morty Greene, the catch he had already thrown back, he was furious that he had been diddled again and made a fool of.
“I swear to God you have fucked with me for the very last time in your life.”
Up ahead, the Mercedes followed the rest of the procession up the hill and was now gone from sight. “Coach!” Stein yelled, then, humbly, “Chief. The killers are getting away.”
With the door to freedom open, Watson sprang from Edna Greene’s arms and bolted out of the truck and up the hill. “Watson!” Stein vaulted around to the driver’s side of the truck and with the adrenaline rush of a pregnant woman, he shoved Morty to the passenger side and jumped in. He rammed the truck into gear, popped the clutch and held on. The rear wheels sprayed mud and grass and gravel, caught traction, and the truck shot forward up the hill.
Morty wrested the wheel away. “They’re gonna kill us.”
“They won’t even chase us. They think it’s a dead end.”
Indeed, as Morty peered cautiously back, he saw that the police were exercising uncharacteristic restraint. The truck jounced up the rutted road, its smooth tires spinning them ass-left and ass-right as it tried to gain traction. A small turnoff to an unpaved road loomed ahead.
“Take it,” Stein yelled. “Go right!”
Together they hauled the wheel right. Thistles and hedge whapped against both sides of the chassis.
“It’s cool. I used to take Watson here when he was a pup a million years ago, before the mortuary bought the land. There’s a back way in.”
“Be more fun to reminisce if I had a cushion,” Edna observed.
A quarter-mile further on, they found Watson sitting alongside a turnoff to a paved road, under a sign for the ETERNAL FLAME CRYPT AND CREMATORIUM. Orchards of young fruit trees swayed in the breeze on both sides of the road behind barbed wire fences. Morty was freaked out by the overly informational signage that described the high tech immolation units where controlled burns of ionized magnesium brought the kilns to temperatures of 4,000 degrees.
“I don’t know about being cremated. Hate to wind up a plate of barbecued ribs.”
“You’d be a lot less than that,” Stein said. “Be a handful of talcum powder.”
“No more of this talk,” Edna scolded. “I thought Jewish people had issues with ovens.”
Stein found what he was looking for, and parked under the sign that read NO ADMITTANCE. Morty and Edna passed a look between them that said it must be fun to be white and not have to obey signs. A trail led between the fences, uphill. “This path takes us to the mortuary side,” Stein said. “Anyway, it used to.”
Edna’s hips weren’t going to make that uphill climb and Stein asked if she wouldn’t mind staying back here with Watson, which was fine with everyone. Morty’s instinct was to stay with her, but she frowned on him. “Pay your debts on time or they gather interest.” Morty followed Stein into the underbrush. The pathway made a tight double ‘S’ between two rows of tall bougainvillea, and emerged at the top of the hill into a broad, quite beautiful, sequestered dell.
The service for Nicholette was being conducted in a small amphitheater on the level below them. The arched portal and floor of the entryway were made of marble. The walls appeared smooth until you looked more closely and saw the hundreds of little sliding vault drawers that were built in. Morty shook his head profoundly when he realized what they were. Several hundred mourners were gathered on the grassy lawn looking up at a portly, white-whiskered Reverend Parsegian. Stein recognized him from late night cable TV. His voice was raspy with the ravages of non-filter cigarettes and Aquavit. He opened a small parcel wrapped in a lovely Indian cloth.
“Death,” he intoned, “whatever we think it is, it’s bound to be something else.” He took a handful of what were presumably Nicholette’s remains and scattered the ashes to the winds. “Let her beauty fill the world,” he prayed.
“Any time you want to tell me what we’re doing,” Morty hinted.
Stein scanned the crowd below him intently. “I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.”
“That clears it all up.”
Stein sensed peripheral movement along the ridgeline. Fifty yards away, the diminutive figures of two mourners who had separated from the main body were absconding in rapid lockstep. Paul Vane was wearing a dark suit and designer sunglasses. Michael Es-posito was in Hunter Thompson gonzo white.
“That’s them,” Stein whispered.
Michael was doing most of the talking. Vane listened like a child being told a harsh truth by a younger, wiser, crueler boy. Stein tried to penetrate through the pantomime. “I think they may have my daughter and my friend in their car.”