Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

Vickery dropped his phone and yanked the .45 out of his pocket, and in one stretched-out instant he calculated the distance and the downward angle and squeezed the trigger.

  The loud, hard pop punched his eardrums and the Chevrolet’s windshield turned white, and the man looked up the slope in surprise.

  Vickery had corrected his aim to compensate for the slight error in the sights, and he fired again.

  The man’s head jerked back, and then he dropped the rifle and collapsed behind the open car door.

  Two more gray Chevrolets raced into view now from around the curve to the right, and Vickery put a bullet through the left front tire of the one in front; it swerved abruptly, striking a parked car, and the front end of the car behind dipped as its driver hit the brakes.

  Vickery screamed, “Go!” down the slope and Castine leaped back into the Taurus, quickly started it, and sped away to the left, out of Vickery’s view. The second Chevrolet swerved around the stopped car and sped up after her, followed by still another that appeared from the right.

  Vickery shoved the gun into his left pocket and tromped the bike into gear, and a moment later he was riding it down the slope; he bumped over the sidewalk and curb onto the street and swerved to the left, twisting the throttle back and forth as he clicked up through the gears and accelerated in pursuit. Peripherally he had glimpsed the passenger-side door of the stopped car swinging open, but Vickery was a moving target against the other cars, and no shots were fired after him.

  The cars ahead roared around the leftward curve of the street to a north-south cross street, and Vickery glimpsed the colorful Taurus speeding away to the right, followed by the first of its two pursuers. Vickery jumped the bike onto the sidewalk and passed the rearmost Chevrolet, and then he had bounded back onto the asphalt and leaned around the right turn; he was now riding the off-rear corner of the car behind Castine, trying to get close enough to disable it somehow, which would at least slow the one behind it.

  Castine turned right on 2nd Street without slowing at all, and the Taurus would have spun out if its rear end had not slammed the side of a passing bus; the Taurus wobbled and then gunned away east, and the lead Chevrolet lost some ground in making a more controlled turn.

  Vickery laid the bike so far over to the right that the footpeg briefly scraped the pavement, and when he righted it he downshifted and cranked the throttle, the bike kicked forward past both of the Chevrolets.

  The next hundred yards was a straightaway with no traffic lights at the intersections, and Vickery was able to catch up to the Taurus. With his left hand he pulled the .45 out of his jacket pocket and started to twist around on the seat; but three gunshots from the closest Chevrolet were followed by a rightward swerve of the Taurus, and Vickery nearly dropped the gun as he yanked the bike to the right, one-handed, to keep from being sideswiped.

  The Taurus had moved ahead of him in that moment, but not before Vickery had glimpsed blood on Castine’s profiled face. The rear window of the Taurus was now frosted with cracks surrounding two small holes.

  Twisting around again on the seat, Vickery fired a couple of fast shots at the sunglare of the lead Chevrolet’s windshield; the car slowed, and the one behind it swerved into view. He tucked the gun in his pocket and got both hands back on the handlebar grips.

  Castine was still driving, for the street bent slightly to the left and the Taurus stayed in its lane, and even sped up.

  Vickery caught up with her again, then had to brake when she made a wild and squealing right turn across his lane onto Beaudry Avenue; but a moment later he leaned to the right himself and accelerated after her, hearing the roar of one of the Chevrolets close behind him.

  Castine must have been alert, for she wove deftly around slower-moving cars. Vickery was able to follow easily on his narrow and agile machine, and a quick glance in a rear view mirror showed him that the two pursuing cars were not gaining on them.

  At Third Street she simply ran a red light to make a left turn—horns blared, brakes screeched, and a truck struck a glancing blow to the Taurus’ driver side, but she straightened the car and sped away east, her rear bumper now dragging and bouncing on the pavement. Several cars had halted in the intersection, and Vickery steered his bike around them to follow her.

  And half a block down Third Street she made a sliding left turn into an onramp to the 110 Freeway.

  “You don’t get on a freeway!” Vickery shouted, uselessly, and then he gritted his teeth and gunned the bike across the oncoming lanes and rode into the onramp himself.

  Low bushes and trees swept past on either side, and he saw that the onramp split into two lanes ahead; the southbound lane was crowded with slow-moving traffic, so the Taurus took the right-hand lane, with Vickery now only a car length behind her and the pursuers a few car lengths behind him.

  As the freeway lanes opened to their left, the Taurus swept carelessly out across them, raising a jarring cacophony of horns and wild swervings of the cars behind it; its rear bumper broke free and went cartwheeling into the median fence. Vickery swore and looked in a rear view mirror—the two gray Chevrolets were just emerging from the onramp and accelerating.

  Then a gust of wind from the east made him wobble in his lane as he had to lean against it, and a moment later a veil of brown dust swept across the freeway. The battering wind was laced with stinging sand and the sharp smell of ozone. Immediately the wind broke up into a dozen spinning dust-devils, and the motorcycle shuddered under him as if the cylinder’s spark plug were misfiring.

  The Taurus was moving at sixty miles per hour or better now, and drawing further ahead of Vickery’s bike, but he heard the roar of its engine interrupted by coughs and momentary haltings, and he guessed, with horror, that she was switching the engine off and on.

  One of the gray cars swept ahead of Castine on the left, crowding the median fence, obviously only moments from being in position to cut her off; the other hung back, and Vickery saw its passenger side window going down, and a hand gripping a pistol rise ready to emerge.

  Vickery’s chugging motorcycle was falling behind, and he let go of the left handgrip to reach into his pocket for the .45—when through the columns of whirling dust ahead he briefly glimpsed an exit lane slanting away to the right, and his scalp tightened in disoriented shock when he realized that the diverging lane was too long and straight, and the flat expanses of shoulder on either side of it too wide, for it to exist here in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.

  And then he had to slap his hand back onto the handgrip and brake sharply, for Castine steered the Taurus back across all the lanes to the right and disappeared from his view in the direction of the briefly seen impossible offramp. He felt the iPad tumble out of his jacket.

  He kept hard pressure on both the front and back brakes and steered the bike onto the narrow half-lane of freeway shoulder, and the dust devils were already dispersing in an ordinary breeze.

  He spun the bike around and rode back along the shoulder, against the flow of traffic that now swept past in a windy stream to his right. Galvan’s iPad was a scatter of plastic and broken glass in the middle lane.

  He rode slowly all the way back to the Third Street onramp, without passing any diverging lane, before surrendering to the realization that the offramp down which Castine had disappeared was no longer there. And even if that had been a hallucination, he had passed no scarred or broken section of the waist-high retaining wall to show where a car might have driven off of the freeway.

  She, and the Taurus, had simply disappeared out of this reality. Into . . . what?

  I should have known, he thought bitterly, and convinced her, that the TUA would certainly have got to her fiancée, and that the proposed rendezvous had to be a trap.

  And it was, and I shot a man.

  He looked back, but neither of the pursuing cars had tried to pull over onto the narrow shoulder lane; they had been carried away north by the surrounding traffic. Vickery’s motorcycle was running smoothly again, but he didn
’t ride away—instead he clicked the bike into neutral and flipped down the kickstand, for his face was suddenly sweaty and it seemed likely that he’d need to lean over the retaining wall and vomit.

  He lifted his right hand from the throttle grip and stared at his trembling fingers. I aimed at the middle of his face, he thought, because my old training said that he might be wearing body armor. And I pulled the trigger, and he collapsed, out of sight behind the car door.

  Vickery made a fist and pounded once, lightly, on the gas tank.

  The man was about to kill Castine, he thought. That made it inevitable that I had to stop him with deadly force; really he killed himself by pointing that rifle at her!—and used me to do it.

  Ending someone’s earthly life from him is about as intimate as you can get, Hipple said.

  He’s the third man I’ve killed, but in each case it was to stop them from killing me . . . or someone I care about.

  Vickery cut the thought short and tromped the bike into gear, raised the kickstand and turned the bike around. Traffic was clear again, and when a gap in the pattern of northbound cars appeared, he sped up along the half-lane and merged into the right-hand lane.

  He nodded firmly, thinking again: He killed himself.

  And where do I go now? he wondered as the mounting headwind cooled the sweat on his face. My apartment’s gone, my job’s gone . . . and my ally is gone.

  Ally? He gunned the bike angrily around a slow-moving Volkswagen. She lied to me so she could steal Galvan’s precious Taurus, and then she banged the shit out of it before finally tossing it right out of the world, and herself along with it! Like a skeet out of a catapult . . . And all because she was fool enough to trust her cowardly fiancé—just like I was fool enough to trust her.

  Though whatever else she was, she certainly wasn’t cowardly.

  The 110 branched into a complex interchange ahead, and two big green freeway signs over the lanes offered several choices—the 5, north to Glendale or south to Orange County, Old Man 10 out toward San Bernardino, the 101 to Hollywood, or continue on the 110 to Pasadena—and Vickery found himself in the lane that would take him northwest to Hollywood.

  So be it.

  She did apologize, he told himself; on the phone, there, in the moments before that damned TUA guy with the rifle tried to kill her. And really, would I have done any different, in her situation? Wouldn’t I have stolen a car to save my life and—

  And he recalled what she had said to him then: It’s not a trap. Or if it is, and I’m caught, don’t worry, I won’t betray you . . .

  She was just about caught—the men in those two cars were within moments of catching her, and if they’d got her alive—

  —There was blood on her face—

  If they’d got her alive, and interrogated her, she might have had to tell them everything she knew about me. Perhaps she chose the nonexistent freeway exit to prevent that. Don’t worry, I won’t betray you.

  Did she dive out of the world to save me? In fact she nearly knocked me off my bike to do it, but—is that, could that be part of, why she aimed herself into that exit-to-nowhere? She was never cowardly, and she knew what the out-of-synch radios and the clicking metronome meant.

  He sped contemptuously around another slow-moving car and cut in sharply in front of it, and in a rear-view mirror he saw the car’s windshield wiper sweep up and down, once. Vickery grinned sourly, realizing that the driver had flipped him off with his car.

  He waved and rode on toward Hollywood.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Vickery walked along the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk and looked around bewilderedly. He seldom drove down the always-crowded boulevard, and he had not been a pedestrian here for years.

  Gold letters over the high concave pediment in front of him now spelled dolby theater instead of the kodak theater he remembered, and he wondered what else might have changed since he had last stood on this wide, glossy black pavement with its inset pink stars. He was relieved to see that costumed characters still strode back and forth among the crowd, vying with curbside evangelists and food carts for the attention of the milling tourists in shorts and T-shirts and backward baseball caps.

  He saw a Captain America, and a couple of Captain Jack Sparrows in tricorn hats and beaded beards, but he didn’t see Wonder Woman. He edged and sidled through the crowd to the Chinese Theater forecourt, and he stood on tip-toe to scan the dozens of people peering at the handprints and footprints in the cement paving blocks. A portly man in a threadbare tuxedo and top hat was selling animals he made out of balloons, but no Wonder Woman was anywhere in sight. It was chilly in the shade, and the turbulent air smelled of chocolate from the Ghirardelli ice cream parlor across the boulevard and exhaust fumes from the roofless tour buses at the curb.

  He asked a passing Spiderman if Wonder Woman was around, and got a garbled reply that seemed to be in the negative, and a tall yellow Transformer robot just ignored his question. He was about to give up when someone tugged at his sleeve and said, “Jeez, Woods, where you been?”

  He turned and saw a Supergirl squinting up at him, trim and fit-looking in her red and blue Krypton suit and red cape. The blonde wig was new, but he remembered her voice.

  “Hi, Rachel. Not Wonder Woman anymore?”

  “Not for years,” she said. “I’m really too short for that, but people like a short Supergirl.”

  “Does Supergirl drink? Wonder Woman used to, I recall.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Supergirl is always thirsty.”

  “Boardner’s?”

  “You’re an evening type of guy, aren’t you? Boardner’s doesn’t open till four. But we can get a couple of beers at the Snow White Café.”

  “East of here, right?”

  “One block.”

  She took his arm as they joined the throng tangling in both directions on the broad sidewalk. She waved off several requests from Asian and German tourists to be photographed with her, claiming to be on a break. Men hawking guided tours recognized her as a regular citizen of the boulevard and let them pass unaccosted, though Vickery now felt like a foreigner himself as he blinked around at the tall new arches and glass walls and the towering Pepsi advertisement above The Gap clothing store.

  They moved with the crowd across Highland Avenue, and managed to sidle out of the eddying flow of pedestrians when they reached the red awning over the entrance to the Snow White Café. Rachel led the way in.

  The place was long and narrow, and dim after the morning sunshine out on the sidewalk. Below the high ceiling were murals of scenes from the Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. High up on the far wall, the Wicked Queen offered Snow White the poisoned apple, and Vickery and Rachel sat down at a small table beside a painting of the dwarf Doc.

  After they’d ordered two Budweisers, he sat back and smiled at her. “So how’s business?”

  Rachel Voss, onetime Wonder Woman and now Supergirl, had been one of Vickery’s off-the-books CRIs, confidential reliable informants, when he had been an LAPD officer. Though officers were supposed to register all informants in the Confidential Informants Tracking System database, Vickery had kept the knowledge of a few of them to himself, and Voss had been one of these. She had been very helpful in making a couple of ATM fraud cases—but now he was interested in an old case that hadn’t panned out.

  She took a long sip of the beer and sighed gratefully. “Oh, business isn’t bad. I can make two hundred dollars a day having my picture taken with tourists, and I’m cool as long as I keep clear of street crazies and don’t cross the other superheroes or argue with the customers. One of the Spidermans got arrested for beating up a tourist woman a year or so ago, and SpongeBob SquarePants always seems to be in some kind of trouble with the cops.” She shrugged and looked across the table at him. “Are you still a cop? A couple of the guys selling pirated CDs are using cell-phone apps to process credit cards. I know one of ’em’s selling the data afterward.”

  Vickery lift
ed his glass and took a swallow. “No,” he said, exhaling, “I’m not a cop anymore, and I’m not after data thieves. I want to know about a guy you told me about in 2009 or 2010. He was—”

  “Lord, that’s ancient history! I’d have to really bestir my memory.”

  Vickery sighed and reached into his pocket and peeled off one more of the twenty dollar bills. When he laid it on the table, she grinned at him from under the blonde wig.

  “And it’s all the way up to 2017 now, honeybun,” she said gently.

  He dug out two more twenties and laid them on the first one, and raised his eyebrows.

  “For old time’s sake,” she allowed, and tucked them into the neckline of her blue leotard, “since you never put me on the LAPD snitch list. Go on.”

  “Well, you told me about this old guy down in the Fairfax district who was charging suckers to get messages from their dead relatives; and I was working up a fraud case on him, but it fell apart when the ghost of some woman’s uncle supposedly told her where he had hidden a lot of Krugerrands, and then there actually were a lot of Krugerrands where the ghost said. You remember that one?”

  “Sure,” she said, “that was a guy they called Ike Liquidatem, ’cause he later got arrested for murder, but they didn’t pin that on him either.”

  “Right.” Vickery thought back. “A couple of people saw him with a woman who was found strangled, but he was released when it turned out the body was found before the dates when he was seen with her.”

  “That’s him.” Voss gave him a quizzical look. “You didn’t used to be interested in my occulty tips.”

  He could feel that his smile was strained. “I’ve got careless friends. Ike Liquidatem? Do you have any idea how to find him?”

  “Oh gee, Woods, it’s been years. Is it urgent?”

  “A friend of mine is . . . in some trouble,” he said, trying to speak casually, “and I’d like to be able to get her out of it. And it’s the sort of thing I think this guy might know about.”

  “Well, he used to hang out at one of those kosher places down on Pico, where they’re all in a row so a certifying rabbi can check them all in one visit and relight any stove pilot lights that’ve gone out. PKD, that was it—Pico Kosher Deli.”