Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Vickery was wearing faded jeans, boots, and a black guayabera shirt with two gray stripes down the front, and a denim jacket lay nearby. In his hands was a trade paperback book with a red and green cover.

  “The rain-storm had ended,” he read aloud, “and the grey mist and clouds had been swept away in the night by the wind. The wind itself had ceased and a brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had Mary dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot and blazing; this was of a deep, cool blue, which almost seemed to sparkle like the waters of some lovely, bottomless lake, and here and there, high, high in the arched blueness, floated small clouds of snow-white fleece. The far-reaching world of the moor itself looked softly blue . . .”

  Behind him shoes scuffed through the dirt; he looked over his shoulder, shook his head, then laid an olive leaf between the book’s pages to mark his place, and closed it.

  A few seconds later Santiago slid down and stopped in a crouch a yard away to his left. The boy was dressed, as always, in jeans and a white T-shirt, with the leather bands on his wrists, and his black hair was falling over his forehead.

  Santiago grinned. “Lady looking for you. No gun now.”

  “Really!” Vickery looked back up the slope. “How did you find me?”

  The boy shrugged. “First we checked the old nests at 10th and Arlington. One or two more and she would give up. Got a plane to catch.”

  Someone else was hitching down the wooded slope behind him now, and Vickery shifted around. A branch swung aside and Ingrid Castine slid down the last couple of feet and wound up sitting beside him, a gray skirt rucked up around her knees. Her auburn hair was longer now, and several oleander leaves were tangled in it.

  “I go get my bike off the rack,” said Santiago, straightening up.

  “I can drive you back to Pico,” Castine said.

  “Nah,” answered the boy, “I got business.” He nodded and scrambled away back up the slope. After a few seconds Vickery couldn’t hear him anymore.

  “You’d think he wouldn’t still charge me ten bucks,” Castine said. “He says they wouldn’t give him a refund on the bus tickets.”

  Vickery shrugged. “He was in Barstow. Missed the show.”

  Castine leaned back and looked through the foliage at the intermittently visible traffic below. After a while birds resumed chirping in the surrounding branches.

  “You’re not easy to find,” she remarked.

  Vickery carefully laid the book down on his denim jacket and looked at her. “Are you out on bail?”

  She widened her eyes and shrugged. “There are no charges, actually.”

  Vickery cocked an eyebrow. “Very good.”

  “The TUA office in Washington doesn’t want to poke into it very hard. Brett wrecked all the office hard drives and lawyered up, and the TUA closed down the whole western division and had a big organizational shake-up, and Ithink they hope Terracotta just stays disappeared.”

  “Safe bet.”

  A cool, diesel-scented breeze shook the branches over their heads.

  “I’m on paid leave, for now.” She reached out and tapped the book. “I’m glad you’re reading it.”

  “I do an hour every day. I’ve already finished it once and started again. It’s pretty good, really.”

  Castine sighed and nodded. “I loved it when I was a girl.”

  He hesitated, then waved down toward the freeway lanes. “When I read it in these old nests, I get the feeling that she’s reading it along with me.”

  Castine started to say something, then fell silent. After a pause, she said, “They did try to give me a hard time about Mike Abbott, but I’ve retained Eliot’s partner in Baltimore, and he showed them that they had nothing.” She hesitated, then went on, “The police . . . found Eliot’s body. A shallow grave alongside the 5 in East LA.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She blinked and waved it off. “All done and gone.” She pushed her disordered hair back with both hands. “My service gun turned up at Hipple’s place, but ballistics showed it wasn’t the gun that killed Hipple; and the two bullets that killed Abbott went right through his neck and away, so they couldn’t do a comparison. And there weren’t any witnesses, except for you, and they don’t know that. Oh, and Abbott himself, but it would never occur to them to get testimony from a ghost.”

  “Sure, what do ghosts know.”

  She shifted and gave him an apprehensive glance. “I, uh, got my lawyer to check out your situation too.”

  Vickery raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Listen, no charges were ever filed against you, okay?—he’s established that. And you can’t really sue the government, because of ‘sovereign immunity’ and the Federal Torts Claim Act, but the reorganized TUA would like to come to some kind of agreement, arrangement, settlement, with you—with a gag order and a heavy liquidated damage clause, to keep you quiet. And the lawyer would like to—all this would be on a contingency basis—he’d like to look into your old Secret Service pension and 401k funds, and even see how long they might have kept depositing payroll checks into your Herbert Woods bank account.”

  She had been talking rapidly, and now she paused and touched her purse. “You want his card? I gave one to Santiago to give you, in case we didn’t find you.”

  Vickery stared down toward the freeway lanes. “This guy,” he said after a few seconds, “this lawyer, he’s . . .”

  “He’s smart, and careful. Way more careful than Eliot was.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “Okay, I’ll probably call him sometime. Thanks.” He leaned back on the leafy slope. “It’s good to see you, Ingrid.”

  She had reached into the purse, dug out her wallet, and pulled out a business card. “Here. And I—I need to ask you about another thing—” She shook her head and tucked her wallet back into her purse. “Oh, it’s good to see you too, Sebastian! I wanted to thank you, for everything—going into the Labyrinth to get me out, that first time, and then the second time, thinking of making a hang-glider . . . I could never have . . .”

  “Well, I’d never have made it out, either time, without you. And—” He paused, and reached down to pick up a lump of soil, and he slowly crushed it in his fist as he went on: “And Amanda saved us, in that second trip, several times. Saved me, that is, and couldn’t help saving you too.”

  “Your wife?” Castine shook her head. “She did?”

  Vickery nodded. “She pulled me out of the truck when it was sinking in the river, and tucked that . . . particular . . . gun into my belt. And when our wing was about to fall away from the tornado, she steered her own wing right up under ours, so the repelling force would knock her down and nudge us up. And then when we were inside the Minotaur, she had got into it too, and gave me that particular gun again.” He wiped his hand on his jeans and stared down at the occasional gleams of rushing chrome through the leaves.

  Castine was silent for several seconds, then said, quietly, “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, it wasn’t her, was it? It was just something that thought it was her.” He turned to Castine and managed a smile. “What did you want to ask me about?”

  “Oh, right.” She shook her head. “After all this—Well, I—I can trust you, if I can trust anybody, right?”

  Vickery pursed his lips and nodded judiciously. “We already know a lot of each other’s secrets.”

  “So anyway—so where are you living these days?”

  Vickery knew she’d get around to asking him what she’d come to ask him, so he went along with the diversion. “Temporarily in a retired taco truck, painted over gray. Bunk, bathroom, obviously a kitchen. It’s back there on Crenshaw right now, and I mostly spend the nights in Walmart parking lots. Galvan’s taking the rent on it out of my pay. I keep meaning to get another apartment, but I discover I kind of like dislocation.”

  “Huh. I’ve been clinging to familiar things—landmarks, little routines—like I want every day to be a comforting duplica
te of the one before.” She looked around at the shrubbery on the slope. “You’re driving for Galvan again?”

  “Sometimes. There’s not as much demand now,” he said, gesturing down toward the cars rushing along the lanes, “since the freeways are kind of a dead battery, for a while. I do . . . sort of consultancy work now. For her, and people she refers to me.”

  Castine looked squarely at him, clearly excited. “I bet I know what sort of consultancy. You can find out what happened, in places, right? Sometimes?” She waved one hand. “I’m not going crazy?”

  Vickery looked back up the slope, then gave her a sympathetic smile. “I wondered if it would happen to you too. It’s not a lot of fun, really, is it? Even after you get where you can pretty well turn it on and off . . . most of the time.”

  She leaned toward him and gripped his arm. “Oh, Sebastian! For the first week I thought I was losing my mind—seeing people who weren’t there, who couldn’t hear me—walking into people who really were there—yes, I can do it or not, now, mostly. It was only a few days ago that I worked up the nerve, or negligence, to drive a car.”

  “Coffee helps. Drink lots of coffee before you get behind the wheel.”

  He shrugged and went on,”Even the casinos have corners the security cameras don’t cover, and an old friend of mine is putting out feelers to see if I could work with a very discreet LAPD detective.”

  “An old cop friend?”

  “A superhero, actually. One of the costumed characters who hang around outside the Chinese Theater.”

  “You lead such a humdrum life. Uh . . . how far back can you see?”

  “Oh—it seems to max out at about two hours. Three, maybe. Mostly it’s a lot less. Minutes. How about you?”

  “I guess it’s about that. It’s especially upsetting when I see myself, doing things I did a little while earlier.” She shivered. “I still keep trying to talk to her, I can’t help it. And then if there’s anybody who’s actually around, in the present, they think I’m crazy.”

  “It’s like Scrooge with the Spirit of Christmas Past,” Vickery agreed. “The worst part is that you can’t do anything about what you see—you can’t interfere, or help.”

  “I know! All you can do is watch! And the color’s lousy.” She shivered. “You’re likely to see some terrible things if you work with a detective.”

  “I’ve thought about that. I just don’t know if it’s okay not to look, if it’s there to be seen.”

  Castine frowned and looked away. “Obviously it’s a consequence of us having been in the Labyrinth.”

  “Sure. I think it was our dip in the river. Our . . . baptism into insanely expanded possibility. We’re not securely belted down in our car on the sequential time track anymore.”

  “And you can’t undo baptism.” She glanced at him and then away. “You still go to church?”

  He nodded. “Latin mass, still.”

  “I should. I . . . bought a rosary. But I can’t bear to look at it, after all the desperate math we did.”

  “It’s a start.”

  Castine sighed and got to her feet. “I’ve got a flight back to Baltimore at three. It took a while for us to find you. I should probably get going.”

  Vickery looked at his new watch. “Set to the right time these days,” he said. It was half past noon. “Yeah, they say you should be at the airport two hours early these days, and the 405 is always a mess.” He glanced at the string hanging from the popsicle stick in the jar, but it was still dry.

  “I’ll probably be back one day. Can I find you through Galvan?”

  “For a while. If I’m not doing work for her anymore,put an ad in the LA Times classifieds, run it for a week and I’ll be sure to see it. Mention . . . skeet shooting, and give a date and a time, and I’ll meet you then at Canter’s deli on Fairfax. They’re open twenty-four hours.”

  “Canter’s deli, Fairfax. Skeet shooting. I’ll remember.” She smiled down at him. “We pretty much wrecked each other’s lives, didn’t we?”

  He stood up and held out his right hand. “Got new ones. Can’t tell yet if they’re better or worse.”

  She shook his hand, then impulsively leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Goodbye for now, Sebastian.”

  He smiled and nodded, and when she had disappeared behind the olive branches and climbed away up the embankment, he sat down, sighed, and opened the book to the page he had marked with a leaf.