Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  The minivan shook as something collided gently but firmly with the rear end, and then there were simultaneous knocks against the driver’s and passenger’s windows. Even from the back seat Kootie could see the blunt metal cylinders of silencers through the glass.

  That wasn’t ten minutes, thought Kootie.

  A voice spoke quietly from outside. “Roll down the windows right now or we’ll kill you both.”

  Both of the Fussels hastily pressed buttons on their armrests, and the windows buzzed down.

  “The boy’s in the back seat,” Mr. Fussel said eagerly.

  A hand came in through the open window and pushed Mr. Fussel’s head aside, and then a stranger peered in. Behind mirror sunglasses and a drooping mustache, he was nothing more than a pale, narrow face.

  “He’s taped in,” the face noted. “Good. You two get out.”

  “Sure,” Mr. Fussel said. “Come on, El, get out. You guys are gonna take the van? Fine! We won’t report it stolen until—what, tomorrow? Would that be okay? Is the money in something we can carry inconspicuously?”

  The face had withdrawn, but Kootie heard the voice say, “You’ll have no problems with it.”

  Mrs. Fussel was sobbing quietly. “Bill, you idiot,” she said, but she opened her door and got out at the same time her husband did.

  A fat man in a green turtleneck sweater got in where she had been, and the man with the mirror sunglasses got in on the passenger side. The doors were pulled closed, and the minivan rocked as the obstruction was moved from behind it, and then the fat man had put the engine into reverse and was backing out. He glanced incuriously at Kootie.

  “Check the tape on the kid,” he said to his companion.

  When the man in the sunglasses stepped into the back of the van, Kootie didn’t make any noises, but tried to catch his eye. The man just tugged at the seat belt, though, and then found the roll of tape and bound Kootie’s ankles together and taped them sideways to the seat leg, without looking at Kootie’s face.

  Somehow Kootie was still just tense, no more than if he were one of only a couple of kids left standing at a spelling bee. After the man had returned to the front seat and fastened his seat belt, Kootie wondered what had happened to the Fussels. He supposed that they were dead already, shot behind some Dumpster. It was easy for him to avoid picturing the two of them. He looked at the backs of his captors’ heads and tried to figure out who the two men could be. They didn’t look like associates of the raggedy one-armed man.

  Kootie was surprised, and cautiously pleased, with his own coolness in this scary situation … until he realized that it was based on a confidence that Thomas Alva Edison would think of some way to get him out of it; then he remembered that Edison seemed to have gone crazy, and in a few minutes tears of pure fright were’ rolling warmly along the top edges of the duct tape on Kootie’s cheeks as the minivan rocked through traffic.

  They may not mean to kill me, he thought. Certainly not yet. Our destination might be miles from here, and—

  He tried to think of any other comforting thoughts.

  —And there’ll probably be a lot of traffic lights, he told himself forlornly.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand, if it likes.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  SULLIVAN HAD DRIVEN UP the 405 past LAX airport, past one of the government-sanctioned freeway-side murals (this one portraying a lot of gigantic self-righteous-looking joggers that made him think better of the fugitive graffiti taggers with their crude territory markers), and then he followed the empty new sunlit lanes of the 90 freeway out to where it came down and narrowed and became a surface street, Lincoln Boulevard, among new condominium buildings and old used-camper lots.

  The plaster hands were on the passenger seat and the Bull Durham sack was in his shirt pocket, above the sun-and-body-heated bulk of his .45 in the canvas fanny pack. He had bought, a triple-A map at a gas station and studied it hard, and he had only nerved himself up to come to Venice by vowing to stay entirely out of sight of the ocean.

  The canals, thin blue lines on the map, were only half a fingernail inland from the black line that indicated the shore, and it was in the surf off this little stretch of beach that his father had drowned in ’59—and it was from there that he and Sukie had fled in ’86, leaving Loretta deLarava in possession of their father’s wallet and keys and the three cans of …

  Nothing looked familiar, for he had been here only that one time, in ’86. He managed to miss North Venice Boulevard, and had to loop back through narrow streets where summer rental houses crowded right up to the curbs, and parked cars left hardly any room for traffic, and then when he came upon North Venice again he saw that it was a one-way street aimed straight out at the now-near ocean; and though he was ready to just put the van in reverse and honk his way backward a couple of blocks, he saw a stretch of empty curb right around the corner of North Venice and Pacific, and he was able to pull in and park without having to focus past the back bumper of the Volkswagen in the space ahead of him.

  He didn’t want to be Peter Sullivan here at all, even if nobody was looking for him—presumably his father’s ghost was in the sea only a block away, and that was enough of a presence to shame him into assuming every shred of disguise possible.

  So he tied an old bandanna around the plaster hands and took them with him when he got out and locked the van. The sea breeze had cleared the coastal sky of smog, but it was chilly, and he was glad of his old leather flight jacket.

  Two quarters in the parking meter bought him an hour’s worth of time, and he turned his back on the soft boom of the surf and stalked across Pacific with the hands clamped against his ribs and his hands jammed in his pockets. The plaster hands were heavy, but at a 7-Eleven store an hour ago he had bought six lightbulbs and stuffed them into his jacket pockets, and he didn’t want to risk breaking any of them by shifting the awkward bundle under his arm. He stepped carefully up the high curb at the north side of Pacific.

  Almost there anyway, he told himself as he peered ahead.

  He was in a wide, raised parking lot between the North and South Venice Boulevards, and past the far curb of South, just this side of a windowless gray cement building, he could see a railing paralleling the street, and another that slanted away down, out of sight. There was a gap there between rows of buildings, and it clearly wasn’t a street.

  He crossed the parking lot and hobbled stiffly across South Venice, and when he had got to the railing and the top of the descending walkway, he stopped. He had found the westernmost of the canals, and he was relieved to see that it didn’t look familiar at all.

  Below him, fifty feet across and stretching straight away to an arched bridge in the middle distance, the water was still, reflecting the eucalyptus and bamboo and lime trees along the banks. The canal walls were yard-high brickworks of slate-gray half-moons below empty sidewalks, and the houses set back from the water looked tranquil in the faintly brassy October sunlight. He could see a broad side-channel in the east bank a block ahead, but this ramp from South Venice led down to the west bank, and apparently the only way to walk along that side-canal would be to go past it on this side, cross the bridge, and then come back.

  By the time he had walked halfway down the ramp toward the canal-bank level, he had left behind the gasping sea breeze and all of the sounds of the beach-city traffic, and all he could hear was bees in the bushes and wind chimes and a distant grumbling of ducks.

  He had never cared to read up on this particular seaside town, but from things people had said over the years he had gathered that it had been built in the first years of the century as a mock-up of the original Italian Venice; the canals had been more extensive then, and there had even been gliding gondolas poled by gondoliers with Italian accents. The notion hadn’t caught on, though, and the place had fallen into decrepitude, and in the years a
fter World War II it had been a seedy, shacky beatnik colony, with rocking oil pumps between the houses on the banks of the stagnating canals.

  He was walking along the sidewalk now, and he’d gone far enough so that he could look down the cross canal. Another footbridge arched over the blue-sky-reflecting water in that direction, framed by tall palm trees, and a solider-looking bridge farther down looked as though it could accommodate cars.

  City-planning types had moved to have the canals filled in, but the residents had protested effectively, and the canals were saved. The neat brickwork of the banks was clearly a modern addition, and many of the houses had the stucco anonymity or the custom Tudor look of new buildings, though there were still dozens of the old, comfortably weather-beaten California bungalow-style houses set in among ancient untrimmed palm trees and overhanging shingle roofs.

  Two women and a collie were walking toward him along the sidewalk he was on, and though neither of the women looked particularly like the pictures he’d seen of Elizalde, he dug with his free hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of the lightbulbs and the paper 7-Eleven bag.

  Sullivan noticed a brown plastic owl on a fence post, and it reminded him that he had seen another one on a roof peak behind him. Ahead, now, he spied still another, swinging on a string from a tree branch. And he could hear several sets of jangling wind chimes—maybe Elizalde was right about ghosts being drawn to places like this, and the residents had set out these things as scarecrows. Scareghosts.

  “Afternoon,” he said as he passed the ladies and the dog.

  When they were behind him he slid the lightbulb into the bag and crouched over the pavement. He glanced back at the two women, and then swung the bag in an arc onto the cement, popping the bulb.

  Both of the women jumped in surprise—right after the noise.

  “Excuse me,” he said sheepishly, nodding and waving at them.

  He straightened and kept walking, tucking the jingling bag back into his pocket.

  The white-painted wooden footbridge was steep, and he paused at the crest to shift the Houdini hands to his left side. He was sweating, and wishing now that he’d left the things in the van.

  The water below him was clear, and he could see rocks in it but no fish. There had been fish—

  He was halfway up the sidewalk of the branch canal, staring at a bleached steer skull on the wall of an old wooden house (another scareghost!), and he had no recollection of having descended from the bridge or walking this far up.

  Aside from the two women he had seen, who had since disappeared, there seemed to be no one out walking along the canals this afternoon. He looked around. Even the houses all seemed to have been evacuated—he hadn’t even seen a cat. (His heart was knocking inside his chest.) The water was too still, the houses by the canal were too low, crouching under the tall legs of the palm trunks, and the silence wasn’t nice anymore—it was the silence of a dark yard when all the crickets suddenly stop chirping at once.

  Elizalde wasn’t here, and he didn’t want to meet whatever might be.

  Without noticing it he had already passed the footbridge on this canal branch, but the wider bridge was still ahead of him, and as he started toward it he saw a car mount it from the islanded side, pause at the crest, and then nose down the far slope—slowly, for the arch was so steep that the driver couldn’t be able to see the pavement ahead of him.

  Just A.O.P., dude, Sullivan thought.

  He was clutching the plaster hands with both of his own hands as he walked now, and it was all he could do not to break into a run. He didn’t look back to make sure nothing was crawling out of the canal behind him, because he was sure that if he did, he would have to keep on looking back as he fled this place, would have to walk backward toward the bridge that led away to the normal city channels that were asphalt and not water, and something would manifest itself ahead of him, and then just wait for him to back into it.

  His eyebrows itched with sweat, and he was breathing fast and shallow.

  This is just a funk, he thought, a fit of nerves. There are other canals here (Are there?) and Elizalde might be on the sidewalk of the next one over, or the one beyond that; she might be stark naked and waving her arms and riding a goddamn unicycle, but you won’t see her because you’re panicking here.

  So be it. She couldn’t have helped me anyway. I’ll find some other way to warn my father’s ghost (this trip out here was an idiotic long shot) after I drive out of this damned town and find a place to relax and chug a couple of fast, cold beers.

  His right shoulder was brushing against vines and bricks as he strode toward the bridge, and he realized that he was crowding the fences of the houses, avoiding the bank—horrified, in fact, at the thought of falling into the shallow water.

  the way all sounds echo like metallic groans underwater

  He must have just dropped the plaster hands. He was running, and his unimpeded hands were clenched into fists, pumping the air as his legs pounded under him. From the shoulder of his jacket he heard a snap, and then another, as if stitches were being broken.

  At the foot of the bridge he stopped, and let his breathing slow down. This bridge was part of a street, Dell Street, and he could hear cars sighing past on South Venice Boulevard ahead. Even if something audibly swirled the water of the canal now, he felt that he could sprint and be in the middle of the boulevard before his first squirted tears of fright would have had time to hit the pavement.

  With a careful, measured tread he walked up the slope of the bridge, and he paused at the crest. Ahead of him on the right side of the street was the grandest yet of the neo-Tudor buildings, a place with gables and stained-glass windows and an inset tower with antique chimney pots on its shingled funnel roof. He was wondering if it might be a restaurant, with a bar and a men’s room, when in the bright stillness he heard something splashing furtively in the water under the bridge.

  All he did was exhale all the air out of his lungs, and then rest his hands on the coping of the bridge and look down over the edge.

  There was someone crouched down there, beside a small white fiberglass rowboat that had been drawn up onto the gravel slope beside the bridge abutment; the figure was wearing a tan jumpsuit and a many-colored knitted tam that concealed the hair, but Sullivan could see by the flexed curve of the hips and the long legs that it was a woman. Blinking and peering more closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t looking at the boat, but at the barred storm drain that the boat was moored to. She was swirling her hand in the water and calling softly through the grating, as if to someone in the tunnel on the other side of the steel bars.

  “Frank?” she said. “Frank, don’t hide from me.”

  Sullivan’s heart was pounding again, and belatedly he wondered if he had really wanted to find this Elizalde woman.

  For that had to be who this was. Still, he silently reached up to his coat pocket (the pocket flap felt rough, like cloth instead of leather) and fished out a lightbulb. Holding it by the threaded metal base, he swung the glass bulb at the stone coping of the bridge.

  “Yah!” shouted the woman below, scrambling up and splashing one foot into the water; and the bulb popped against the coping.

  She turned a scared glance up at him, and a moment later she had ducked under the bridge, out of his sight.

  “Wait!” yelled Sullivan, hurrying down the landward slope of the bridge. “Doctor—” No, he thought, don’t yell her last name out here, that won’t reassure her. “Angelica!”

  She had splashed under the bridge and was back up in the sunlight on the bank on the west side, striding away from him, obviously ready to break into a run at any sound of pursuit. A couple of ducks on the bank hurried into the water, out of her way.

  “We can help each other!” he called after her, not stepping down from the bridge onto the sidewalk. “Please, you’re trying to get in touch with this Frank guy, and I need to get in touch with my father!” She was still hurrying away, her long legs taking her fa
rther away with every stride. She wouldn’t even look back. “Lady,” Sullivan yelled in despair, “I need your help!”

  That at least stopped her, though she still didn’t turn around.

  He opened his mouth to say something else, but she spoke first, in a low, hoarse voice that carried perfectly to his ears but would probably have been inaudible ten feet back: “Go away. My help is poison.”

  Here I am in Venice Beach, he thought. “Well, so’s mine. Maybe we cancel out.”

  When she turned around she was pushing the knitted cap back from her face, and then she rubbed her hand down her forehead and jaw as if she had a headache or was very tired. “You know who I am,” she said. “Don’t say your name here, and don’t say mine again.” She waved him to silence when he opened his mouth, then went on, “You can follow me to the big parking lot, if you like. Don’t get close to me.”

  She walked back, past the foot of the bridge, and started up Dell Street, walking next to the slack-rope fence of the white Tudor house Sullivan had thought was a restaurant. When she had passed it and was halfway to the stop sign at South Venice, he started forward from the bottom of the bridge.

  After a few steps, he stopped in confusion and looked down at his own legs.

  He was wearing … someone else’s pants, somehow. Instead of the blue jeans he had pulled on in the gym at City College this morning, he was wearing formal gray wool trousers. With cuffs. He crouched to touch them, and two more snaps popped loose from the sleeve of his coat, and then the sleeve was disattached, hanging down over his hand. The sleeve was wool too—he slapped dizzily at his sides—the whole garment was, and it was a suit coat. He couldn’t help looking back, to see if his leather jacket might somehow be lying on the bridge behind him. It wasn’t.

  He pulled the sleeve off with his other hand. The upper edge was hemmed, with metal snaps sewed on. He gripped the cuff of the other sleeve and tugged, and that sleeve came off too, with a popping of snaps. (He noted that he was now wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, no longer the plaid flannel he remembered.) The coat was convertible, it could be worn with the sleeves long or short.