Wherever the hell we were going, we were making damn good time.
I raised my head up again when I heard the echo of a swishing noise begin to build around us. We’d rolled into a particularly narrow section of the dry river, the steeply banked walls no more than 25 feet apart here. I had to arch my back as best I could and tuck my head down into Annie’s corpse to sneak a peak in front, but I could see a glow just ahead of us. I heard music, too, echoing down the culvert. I expected my captor to stop or go back, but she started walking faster. I thought sure she’d pull the sack back over my head, and prepared to scream bloody murder before she could do it.
We came around a bend in the concrete river and there were The Lost Boys.
At least, that’s what it said on their tee shirts. Each of them wore an identical one: a black tee shirt emblazoned with a still from the movie – a young Kiefer Sutherland grinning evilly (it’s the only way a Sutherland can grin) – and the title logo underneath.
A gang of Joel Schumacher fans: this couldn’t be good.
They were all on skateboards, riding back and forth across the narrow walls of the river as though it were some colossal half-pipe. Though the river had narrowed, it was still impressive to see the kids – and none of them could have been older than thirteen – riding up and down the near vertical walls of the culvert. The speed at which they moved – the wheels of the skateboards barely seeming to hold contact with the cement as they swished along – was a wonder to behold. It was also terrifying. I once went out to dinner with a woman who worked as a nurse in the transplant unit at UCLA Medical Center. The date was a bust – she insisted on ordering liver – but I still remember her telling me how the transplant team referred to skateboards: donor cards.
“Criminy, do their parents know what they’re doing?” I asked in spite of myself. “That looks awful dangerous.”
“They’s safe,” my abductor said. “Nothing can touch ’em here. Won’t allows it.”
The kids spotted us and let out a series of whoops and catcalls. I thought sure they were going to attack as they sped toward us, but they all had big smiles on their faces as they skidded and swerved to a stop. I’ve never been big on skateboarding or snowboarding or BMX or any of that extreme sports crap that fills the cable channels in the wee hours – I don’t much care for Vin Diesel, either, thank you for asking – but I had to admit the sight of the squadron of Lost Boys roaring down the river walls in formation would put Riverdance to shame (and if those last four words aren’t a tautology I don’t know what is).
“Vibiana!” they all cheered as they hopped off their skateboards and crowded around the shopping cart. “Vib! Vib! Vib!”
It was practically a rally – you’d think she was Jerry friggin’ Springer or something. They reached out to the woman who’d bushwhacked me – was Vibiana her name? – as if her mere touch could bestow papal blessings.
“Hello, my wee ones, my graces, my wonders,” she said. And she brushed her dirty fingertips against their outstretched hands. I saw sparks fly as their flesh touched.
“What have you brought us?” one of the littlest of the Lost Boys called out.
“What does you need?” she asked them.
“Magic!” they all screamed as one. They could have been in the audience of some Saturday morning kid’s show cheering for prizes.
“That I always has aplenty,” she laughed.
The boys all cheered again.
“Umm, hello?” I said. “A little help here, please?”
The littlest Lost Boy put his hands on the edge of the shopping cart. His nose was level with the handle. I twisted around to look him in the eye.
“Is it Annie?” he whispered. He seemed not to see me at all. “Is it, Vib? Is it Annie? Again?”
My captor – Vib – got all sad looking. “Aye, Zalman. It is Annie.”
And her voice broke a little. As if she wasn’t the one who’d killed her, cold-cocked me and dumped us both in the cart.
“Awwwww,” the Lost Boys cried out around me. Many of them fell down to the ground. Some of them had real tears in their eyes.
“Can anyone hear me?” I said. “Hello, hello. Testing, one, two, three.”
“Who’s he?” one of the Boys asked. Another one poked me in the ribs, apparently just noticing that I was in the cart, too.
“Medicine Man,” Vibiana said.
They boys all “ooooh-ed.”
“He looks slam,” one of the oldest looking kids said. “Kind of old school, Vib.”
“Definitely slam,” a fat kid in the back stood up and yelled. He quickly sat back down.
“He a Gandy?” the little kid asked. “For true?”
“I’s hoping,” Vibiana said. She ran her hand down the back of my head and slapped me on the back. I felt like a prize steer at a cattle auction. “The signs is all there.”
“Listen, guys,” I tried. “I could sure use some help here. This lady underneath me is dead. Do you understand that?”
“Well, duh,” the older kid said. “It’s Annie.”
“I believe this woman killed her. And she’s got me tied up in here.”
“Would you conjure if she didn’t?” the kid asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not a conjurer . . . I’m a . . . I do a little bit of this and a . . . it’s a little hard to explain actually.”
“He ain’t a Gandy?” the kid asked, suddenly dubious.
“Gandy’s don’t always know, now does they?” she said.
“Righteous true,” several of the Boys called.
“Are you gonna help Vib?” the little one asked me. He touched the back of his hand to my cheek in a genuinely tender way. “You gonna help Annie? They need help, you know. Need it bad.”
“I would love to help Annie. But there’s not a lot I can do for her now,” I said.
Vibiana howled with laughter. The Boys joined in.
“This is fucking crazy,” I muttered.
“Language!” Vibiana snapped.
The littlest Lost Boy shook his head at me in a most disapproving fashion.
“You have to get me out of here,” I said.
“He don’t look comfortable,” one of the Boys agreed.
“Vib?” the oldest one asked.
“No,” she said. “Least not tills we get nearer to Yang-Na.”
“Passing through the Hondo, Vib?” a Lost Boy asked.
“Aye.”
“Full moon tonight,” another warned.
“That’s for why it’s got to be. Last chance this cycle.”
“Want us to go with you a ways?” the oldest one said.
“Could use the company,” Vibiana said. “And the comfort.”
The oldest Boy called out six names. A small squad of skateboarders got into formation around us.
“There’s still time, my Annie,” Vibiana whispered. “Still time for us.”
The little kid was on point. “Let’s roll!” he called in his prepubescent voice.
We did.
VI
The sound of wheels echoed across the culvert: the smooth ball bearings of the Lost Boys’ skateboards and the squeaky clickety-clack of the wobbly shopping trolley. All else was silence except for the odd squish of the body beneath me as dead Annie’s fluids shifted under my weight and gases leaked from her corpse.
It really wasn’t very pleasant.
Efforts to engage the Lost Boys in conversation proved as futile as my pleas to Vibiana. The kids were obviously devoted to her, or under her spell in either a figurative or literal way. Once, when she stumbled over a Mickey’s Big Mouth bottle, two of the Boys were instantly by her side, reaching out to support her before she even fell down on one knee. They touched and held her so gently that I might have thought she was their saintly grandmother. And when she righted herself, she smiled at them with the beneficence of the Madonna looking down on her little Joe. When she thanked them with a light touch of the back of her fingers to their che
eks they looked as if they would never wash their faces again.
(Then again, they were filthy little buggers who looked as if they’d never washed their faces before.)
“Moon’s going,” one of the Boys said.
Our little procession rolled to a halt. Vibiana looked up at a shroud of cloud which had come from nowhere and begun to cover the face of the moon. She stroked her chinny-chin-chin and looked worried.
“Bad omen, Vib,” the eldest Boy said.
“Maybe we should go back,” said the littlest one. “We got Yodels, you know, back at the Pipe. I snatched a whole carton.” He pulled a mashed one out of his pocket in evidence. The foil wrapper shone like a beacon in the dark. “Yankee Doodles, too.”
“A tempting offer, my pirate son,” Vibiana said. “But there’s Annie to thinks about. Things to be done.”
“Hondo’s just ahead,” said a Boy. “Don’t like crossing it without the moon.”
“Nor me and I,” Vibiana said.
The clouds thinned again and for a flash – just a trick of the moonlight, I’m sure – I saw a different Vibiana. The madness was ironed out of her expression and a glint of knowing shone in her bright eyes. Her wild hair melted into the sky and her round face seemed like a second low satellite in the darkness. I had a sudden sense that she could have been a very beautiful woman.
Then she cackled, a shrill sliver of ice that penetrated into my spine, and the illusion was shattered.
“On, my Lost Boys,” she called out. “On, my warriors.”
We rolled forward again.
More clouds crossed the face of the moon, and with every flicker of the night’s light my weird chauffeuse seemed to take a little stumble. The Lost Boys were less sure of themselves, too, and their formation – otherwise as precise as any performed by the Blue Angels – began to break apart. They couldn’t seem to restore it, either, and the Boys snarked insults at each other.
“Easy, my angels,” Vib comforted.
I heard a sploshing sound and managed to peer down around the side of the cart. A thin stream of water had appeared below. The liquid looked black in the night and smelled awful. Was it sewage? It had barely rained and there shouldn’t be any run-off at this time of year. At least, I hoped not. Did they dump run-off from somewhere in the wee hours of the night? I’ve lived in L.A. my whole life, but realized I didn’t actually know the first thing about the city’s river.
We came to another stop.
I contorted myself some more to get a better view of the situation. The Boys were all off their skateboards now, looking fearfully down at the murky flow that passed beneath us. Just ahead was a V in the culvert, with a section of the river branching off toward the north east. I realized, then, what the Boys had been talking about. This was L.A.’s other “river”: the Rio Hondo. It’s even more pathetic than the Los Angeles River. I remembered reading in the paper about a grandiose plan by the Army Corp of Engineers or some such to attempt to sink the whole thing underground, so the land above could be “properly” developed. Apparently there’s a serious problem with a lack of strip malls in Los Angeles. Somewhere nearby, a desperate Angelino has to walk four whole blocks to buy a Krispy Kreme donut or a Starbucks frappucino. Can’t let a situation like that linger and call ourselves civilized, now can we?
“Oh, lordy, that smell,” I said. The odour was positively vile.
“Hounds is out,” Vibiana whispered.
The Boys didn’t like the sound of that. Me, either.
“Hondo Hounds are scary,” said the littlest Boy. “They like Avril Lavigne.”
“They don’t know what they is,” said another Boy. “And they smell.”
“So what are the Hondo Hounds, exactly?” I asked. “Do they, like, chase the Cat People.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Vibiana hissed.
Seemed like a reasonable enough question to me.
Then I heard them howl.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. “What is that?”
“Full moon,” Vibiana said. She started to move forward again, but the Lost Boys hung back. She glanced over her shoulder at them, a white eyebrow arched.
“My warriors?” she asked.
The eldest looked sad, but shook his head. He pointed down at the foul smelling stream that ran in front of him. “Can’t do it, Vib. Can’t cross.”
“Hondo Hounds are scary,” the littlest one repeated. A tear rolled down his cheek.
“Aye,” Vibiana said. She took a deep breath, then offered a broad smile to her knights. “Lost Boys ruuuuule!” she bellowed into the night. The Lost Boys yelled along with her and for a moment, the Hounds – whatever they were – fell silent. Then they bayed angrily in reply.
The Lost Boys skated briskly back downriver. Vibiana watched them go, then looked at me. “Medicine Man?” she said.
“Umm. Yeah?”
What the hell; I’ve been called worse. Sometimes by family.
“Can I trusts you?”
“That’s a hell of a question,” I said. “What with me trussed up in here with a girl you just killed and you out there pushing us up a concrete ditch to god knows where.”
“That’s no answer.”
“What do you want me to say? What do you expect?”
“Can’t pushes you past the Hounds. Can’t risks it for Annie.”
“Isn’t it a little late to worry about that?” I said. Lying on top of a corpse didn’t get any more comfortable the longer you did it.
“I cuts you free, you gots to promise you ain’t gonna bolt on me. You gots to stay by my side. Take on the Hounds if it comes to it.”
“Oh, well, that sounds like a deal. Is there a mail-in rebate, too?”
“Will you does it for Annie?” she asked.
“For Annie? Don’t you get it that she’s dead? That you killed her?”
Vibiana shook her head and exposed her crooked teeth.
“Ain’t a quick study, is you?” she said.
“I prefer to think of myself as deliberate,” I said.
“I’d prefer to think of myself as Angie Dickinson. Don’t makes it so, though,” she said. Okay, it dated her, but who didn’t love Police Woman?
“What’s your point?”
She looked me over again. Hard.
“You been to the Other Side, ain’t you?” she asked.
“You mean Burbank?” I said.
“You knows what I mean.”
And I did know, goddammit. I did. But I didn’t answer right away. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a monocle she must have swiped from Werner Klemperer. She held it up to her left eye, then her right and studied me through it. Then she stuffed it back in her pocket. It had no lens.
“You been,” she said. “Oh, yeah.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
She closed her eyes then, and held one hand up to her forehead. She swayed a little in the breeze, which suddenly swelled up around us. I felt the temperature drop and goose bumps broke out up and down my skin. Vibiana opened her eyes and the cold faded away.
“Lily Stein says . . .” – she furrowed her brow in concentration and the quality of her voice changed – “. . . don’t be a putz all your life. Darling.”
I went colder than the body lying beneath me. Lily Stein was a dear friend and a remarkable woman who had once saved my life, not to mention something like the soul of the world from forces of darkness. She’d also been very dead for over two years.
There was no way that Vibiana could possibly have known her. Or known that I knew her.
“Who the hell are you?” I whispered.
“Can I trusts you?” she asked me once more.
“Cut me free,” I told her.
She did.
VII
We walked on as the howls in the night grew louder and giddier. Vibiana pushed the shopping cart and I trailed a half-step behind. The muscles in my back and legs throbbed and I couldn’t quite turn my neck straight. Blood
continued to ooze from my wrists where the coat hanger had torn the flesh. But it felt good to be out of the cart and upright.
And alive.
“How do you know Lily?” I asked.
“Don’t,” Vibiana replied. “Not from a hole in the dirty old ground.”
“You spoke in her voice. I’d know it anywhere.”
Vibiana merely shrugged. I grabbed hold of her shoulder, forcing her to stop. She growled back at me.
“What’s going on here, Vibiana? You killed Annie tonight, didn’t you?”
No answer.
“Didn’t you?”
“Kilt ain’t the ways to look at it.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Thinks of it as a transitional state,” Vibiana said.
“Between what and what?”
“That’s for you to helps decide.”
“Me? You whomped me upside the head with . . . what did you whomp me with, by the way?”
“Turkey leg.”
“You knocked me out with a drumstick?”
“Frozen. Past its date. They gives ’em away down the market in the Plaza, end of the day. Past their date’s why. Don’t tastes so good but they has their uses.”
“What did you do with it?” I asked.
“Tossed it in the bin, whats you think? Told you it was past its date.”
“Very tidy,” I muttered.
“Your Lily friend,” Vibiana said.
“What about her?”
Vibiana put her hand over her eyes again and swayed. I reached out to support her and felt how cold her skin was.
“She had a power,” Vibiana said. “A strong one.”
“She was a very special woman,” I said.
“She vouches for you. Says you is the real Dr McCoy.”
“Great, me and DeForest Kelley together again for the first time. And who vouches for you, might I ask?”
“I’m kinds of a free agent,” she said and shrugged once more. “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”
“Seems to me I got pickpocketed for my ante in this game.”
“However you got here, you is a player.”
The Hondo Hounds howled louder as if in response. We walked on.
“What in hell are they?” I said.
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