Cauliflowers? Liz wondered. Dad could be weird sometimes. She didn’t believe this was the right moment for it.
But maybe she was wrong. Luke opened the hidey-hole, and he didn’t shoot first without bothering to ask questions later. “They gone?” he asked—quietly now, so his voice wouldn’t carry. Questions first: the right way.
“For now, anyway,” Dad answered. “How long do you want to stay there?” He asked questions, too.
“I was thinking till tomorrow night, if that’s cool,” the trader from Speedro said. “That way, they won’t jump up and down so much, you know what I mean? If I went and split tonight, they’d still be all uptight, like.”
“Groovy,” Dad said, a small smile on his face. He enjoyed talking like a twentieth-century hippie. Liz was fried if she could see why. It made him sound like a jerk. She sure thought so, anyhow. “I brought you some goodies, then,” Dad went on. He handed up the water and the … honey bucket. Then, from the top of the ladder, he told Liz, “Why don’t you get our friend some bread and a chunk of that chicken we had tonight?”
Because I don’t want to. Because I’m not more than fifty-one percent convinced he is our friend. Because I’d rather give him a clout in the teeth than a drumstick. All of that went through Liz’s mind in a fraction of a second. None of it came out. The only thing that did was, “Sure, Dad.”
As she hurried away, Luke laughed softly. “Don’t think your daughter trusts me for beans.”
“Don’t be silly!” Dad played the good host. Well, of course he was a good host. If he weren’t a good host, those bloodhounds would have been baying at Luke in here, pepper or no pepper.
How did he know? Liz wondered as she cut Luke a big chunk of bread and brought not a drumstick but a whole chicken leg back to the ladder. How could he tell? She was positive she’d been not just polite but even eager-sounding. But she hadn’t fooled him—not even close. So what did she do wrong? She wanted to ask, but that would mean admitting she didn’t trust him. She didn’t want to do that—it would be too embarrassing.
“Thanks, dear,” Dad said when she brought him the food. He handed it up to Luke.
“Thanks is right!” Luke echoed. “These are better rats than I’d see at most of the inns around town. If your room up here was just a little less cramped, you could make good money renting it out.” He laughed again.
That’s not rat! It’s chicken! was Liz’s first indignant thought. But she was listening to this alternate’s English with ears from the home timeline. Rats came from military slang, not hippie talk. It had nothing to do with Mickey Mouse’s bigger cousins: it was short for rations.
“This is the kind of room where, if you start advertising it, nobody wants to stay in it any more,” Dad said. He was bound to be right about that. If everybody knew about a hiding place, what good was it?
“Well, friend, in that case I’m going to pull my hole in after myself again,” Luke said. Dad took the ladder away. Luke put up the boards once more. As far as Liz could tell, the hidey-hole vanished completely.
Dad sighed. “Not the kind of game I like to play to settle my digestion.” He set a hand on Liz’s shoulder. “You did real well. Now … Do you think you’re up to going back to sleep?”
“Beats me,” she answered. “I sure aim to try, though.” To her surprise, she did it. She didn’t know what that proved—probably how tired she was to begin with.
When Dan saw a Valley patrol with bloodhounds working its way toward the Santa Monica Freeway, he wondered what was going on. “You guys looking for Luke the trader?” he called to them.
That won him more attention than he really wanted. The whole patrol converged on him. He was used to attention from Sergeant Chuck. Now he had the undivided attention of two sergeants at once, and discovered it was at least four times as bad.
“How come you wanna know, kid?” demanded the one with the dogs.
“How’d you hear about Luke, anyway?” the other one growled. The bloodhounds didn’t say anything, but in the torchlight their long, sad faces declared they were angry to have to pause in their search for even a minute.
“If it weren’t for me, you guys wouldn’t know about him.” Dan spoke to the sergeants. He hoped they’d make the bloodhounds understand. “Have you been to the trader’s house on Glendon?”
“Yeah, we were there,” said the sergeant with the dogs. “You really do know too much, don’t you? How’d you know about that house?”
“Well, it’s the girl there.” Now Dan knew he sounded a little sheepish. “Did you see her?”
“Oh. The girl.” That was the dog handler. All of a sudden, things seemed to make sense to him. “I might’ve known.” The other sergeant grunted. Even the bloodhounds seemed sniffy in a different way.
Dan wondered if his ears were on fire. They sure felt that way. “Don’t you guys have girls?” he asked—not that he had Liz or anything. He just wished he did.
“We’ve got girls,” the sergeant with the dogs said.
“But we don’t have Westside girls,” the other one added. “Not like that, we don’t. For fun, yeah. Not for real.”
To Dan’s amazement, his ears got hotter yet. He hadn’t thought they could. “How can you tell?” he asked. To make him feel like a complete idiot, his voice cracked in the middle of the question.
Both sergeants laughed themselves silly. Dan thought the dogs laughed, too, but maybe that was his imagination. The handler said, “You sound goofy when you talk about her, that’s why.”
Now Dan was the one who said, “Oh.” Then he changed the subject as fast as he could: “What about Luke?”
“He was there, but he got away maybe three jumps ahead of us.” The dog handler frowned. “I’m not sure how fresh this trail is, though. The dogs aren’t all that stoked about it, and we know he’s been down this way before.”
“So why are you following it?” Dan asked. Yes, talking about Luke was a lot easier than talking about Liz.
“’Cause it’s what we’ve got,” said the sergeant who didn’t take care of dogs.
“And ’cause that rotten villain messed up the trail before it got to the trader’s house,” added the one who did. “He put down something that almost made ’em jump out of their skins.” That was saying something—the bloodhounds had a lot of skin to jump out of. The sergeant went on, “It was as bad as though somebody turned on an Old Time electric flashlight right in front of your face.”
“Wow,” Dan said. “Oh, wow.” Electric lights were supposed to be bright, all right. He didn’t know exactly how bright, because he’d never seen one work. He didn’t know anybody who had, either.
“Yeah,” the dog handler said. “So if we ever do catch this guy, we’ll make him sorry. You bet we will.”
“I bet he’s sneaky,” Dan said. “He looks sneaky. He sounds sneaky, too—I’ve talked with him.” Was that really fair? Dan remembered Luke teasing him. If that didn’t exactly make the trader sneaky, it came close enough, didn’t it?
“He must be, or he wouldn’t have got away from us,” said the sergeant without the dogs.
“If we want to catch him, we’d better be sneaky, too,” said the one in charge of the bloodhounds.
“If he’s still here for us to catch,” the other sergeant said. “If he got over the freeway line, he’s a gone goose.”
“How could he do that?” Dan asked. “We have it plugged tight.”
Both sergeants looked at him as if he were still making messes in his drawers. “Kid, if he’s that sneaky, chances are he can find a way,” the one without the dogs replied. His voice was surprisingly gentle. He might have been explaining that the Easter Bunny wasn’t real.
“Well, maybe,” Dan admitted. The Valley soldiers were watching out for an attack from the south, not for one man trying to get past them and going that way.
“But if he is that sneaky …” the dog handler said.
“Yeah? What about it?” The other sergeant wasn’t much impress
ed.
“Listen,” said the three-striper with the bloodhounds. They put their heads together and talked in low voices. Dan did his best to listen without seeming to. The sergeants must have noticed, because they moved a couple of steps farther away. Dan muttered under his breath. He hadn’t caught much anyway.
The older men both nodded. Then they headed back up Westwood Boulevard toward Westwood Village. They said not a word to Dan about whatever they’d decided. He thought that was rude. What did they figure? That he’d tell Luke what they were up to if he knew?
After a moment, he decided that had to be just what they figured. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him angrier. He was a good Valley patriot. So what if he thought a Westside girl who knew Luke was cute? That had nothing to do with anything.
He could see himself explaining all this to the sergeants. He could see them both listening, and then laughing their heads off. And, because he could see all that so very well, he didn’t even bother to try.
Nightfall in Westwood, the sun sinking towards and then into the Pacific. Far fewer tall buildings between Liz and the ocean than there would have been in the home timeline. The bomb that flattened Santa Monica into glass took out the ones that were there in 1967, and not many had gone up since.
As twilight deepened toward true night, Luke came down from his hiding place between the ceiling and the roof. He tipped his hat to the Mendozas again. “Like I said, much obliged to you folks. You saved my bacon there.”
“When you go after somebody with dogs, most of the time you don’t deserve to catch him,” Dad said.
Luke started to say something, then checked himself. “You know what? I’m gonna have to think about that one for a while.”
“Probably won’t do you any lasting harm,” Liz’s father remarked.
Again, the trader started to answer. Again, he seemed to think better of it. He sent Dad a cautious stare. “You’re trouble, you know that?”
“Oh, no. He has no idea,” Liz said before Dad could get a word in.
That made him and Luke both look at her. They both started to laugh at the same time. “Heaven help her boyfriends, man,” Luke said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dad answered, deadpan. They laughed again, louder. Liz let out an indignant squawk. For some reason, her father and the hairy trader from Speedro thought that was funnier yet.
“Well, I’m gonna slide on out of here,” Luke said when he was done with his uncouth guffaws. That was how Liz thought of them, anyway. Luke went on, “Thanks one more time for putting me up, my friend.” He might have been talking about a night on the couch, not a day in a hiding place Liz hadn’t even known about.
“Any time,” Dad said, just as casually. “You want to be careful out there, you know what I mean?”
“I can dig it, man.” As if to prove as much, Luke dropped his right hand to one of his pistols. “And I expect I can take care of myself.”
“Okay, okay.” Dad spread his hands to show he hadn’t meant anything much. “I wasn’t hassling you or anything. But in case those Valley guys haven’t forgotten about you …”
The trader sneered. Liz didn’t think she’d ever seen anybody more than twelve years old do that before, but she did now. “Negative perspiration,” he said. She had to translate that into something that resembled the English she knew. Don’t sweat it, he had to mean. Then why didn’t he say so? He did go on, “If I can’t give ’em the slip, I don’t deserve to get out of here. They’re from the Valley, after all.” He laced the word with scorn.
“Yeah, well, just remember, that’s what the Westsiders thought, too. Look what it got them,” Dad said.
Luke didn’t want to listen. “I’ll send you a postcard, man,” he said. That would have been snarky in the home timeline. Given what the mails were like in this alternate, it was a lot snarkier here.
Out the door he went. Dad barred it behind him, then let out a sigh. “Well, I’m not sorry to see him go,” he said.
“And why is that?” Liz asked. “Just because he put us all in danger?”
“Might have a little something to do with it,” her father replied.
Then things outside came unglued. Liz had heard the bloodhounds baying the night before. Now they sounded twice as excited—and twice as fierce, too. A voice with a Valley accent yelled, “Hold it right there, freak!”
After maybe half a second, another voice yelled from a different place: “Keep your hands away from your guns, or it’s the last dumb thing you ever do!”
Dad said something under his breath that probably wasn’t any hotter than what Liz was saying under hers. She didn’t know why the Valley soldiers hadn’t believed the Mendozas’ story last night, but they hadn’t. And that meant nothing but trouble.
Outside, Liz heard running feet. A gun banged—a matchlock musket, not an Old Time repeater. Someone shouted, “Hold it!” again. Then another matchlock fired. A cry of pain split the night. “Got him!” said the voice that had told Luke to hold it.
“Oh, wow!” Dad said, which fit what Liz was thinking almost perfectly. For one thing, the Valley soldiers took a long chance. Their matchlocks weren’t very accurate. They would have to reload after firing. If they’d both missed Luke, they would have been at his mercy. But one of them got him.
And Oh, wow! fit too well another way, too. Now the Valley soldiers knew Luke had come out of this house. They wouldn’t be very happy about that. From their point of view, they had every right to be unhappy.
Liz didn’t care about their point of view. She did care about the hassles that were bound to come.
And they did, in no time at all. Soldiers started pounding on the door. “Open up in the name of King Zev!” they shouted. “Open up in there!”
“What do we do, Dad?” Liz asked. “We can’t let them in!”
“Tell me about it!” Her father was usually cool as an iceberg in January. Not now. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him so rattled. He raised his voice: “Sarah! Call for a chamber!”
“I’m doing it!” Mom answered. She didn’t sound exactly calm, either.
“We hear you!” the soldiers yelled. “Open up!” When the Mendozas didn’t, something thumped against the door—a man’s shoulder, Liz thought.
“How strong is the bar?” she asked. It wasn’t a question she’d ever thought she would have to worry about.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Now Dad sounded more like his usual self. But that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear, either. More quietly, he went on, “I think we’d better head for you-know-where.”
That was smart. He didn’t want the goons outside to hear that they were heading for the subbasement. The goons didn’t know the house had a subbasement. Maybe Luke would tell them about the attic hiding place. But he couldn’t talk about the subbasement, because he also didn’t know about it.
More thumps came from the door, and then one that brought a groan and a crackle as the hinges started to give way. The Valley soldiers bayed in triumph. “C’mon! Hit it again!” one of them said.
By then, Liz was hotfooting it down the stairs to the storerooms in the regular basement. The room with the computer link to the home timeline was there. When Mom came out, the door she closed behind her was all but invisible. Its hinges were a lot stronger than the ones to the front door. All the same, she carried the MacBook under her arm. “It’s coming, which means it’s here,” she said.
The door to the subbasement was as well concealed as the one to the computer room. Dad latched it from below after Liz and her mother hurried down the stairs. Then he followed them, his shoes clattering on metal stairs. The transposition chamber waited for them. Its door slid open automatically.
“Trouble, eh?” the operator said as they got inside.
“Oh, maybe a little,” Dad answered dryly—yes, he had himself back together again. After what felt like fifteen minutes and was really no time at all, they were back in th
e home timeline—which didn’t mean their hassles were over.
Nine
Dan was pacing his patrol beat atop the Santa Monica Freeway when Sergeant Chuck and another private from the company came up to him. “Sidney will take the rest of your shift,” Chuck told him. “Some guys down below need to talk to you pronto.”
“What’s happening?” Dan asked.
“If they needed to talk to me, they would’ve talked to me.” Chuck jerked his thumb towards a ladder leading down on the north side of the freeway. “Go on. Get moving.”
“Okay. Uh, yes, Sergeant.” Dan corrected himself in a hurry. Chuck didn’t even growl at him, which proved things were weird.
When he got to the bottom, he wasn’t astonished to see the dog handler and the other sergeant he’d spoken with before. He was surprised to see a captain with them. He came to attention and saluted. “Musketeer Dan, reporting as ordered!”
“At ease,” the captain said, and Dan let his spine relax. “Max and Mike here”—the captain pointed to the two sergeants—“and your Chuck say you probably know more about the traders on Glendon than anybody else from the Valley does. Is that the straight skinny?”
“I have no idea, sir,” Dan answered. “I mean, I was over there a few times, but that’s all.”
“You liked the girl.” The captain didn’t make it a question. Dan nodded—it was true. He hoped it didn’t land him in trouble. The captain said, “Well, that puts you one jump ahead of everybody else.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said. When you were a common soldier, that was always the right answer to give an officer.
“Come on, then,” the captain told him. “Maybe you’ll be able to help us figure out where the devil they’ve gone.”
“Gone?” Dan felt like somebody trying to play a game whose rules he didn’t know. “I heard some gunshots last night … .”
“That was us, when we caught that so-and-so of a Luke,” the captain said. “Max got him right where he won’t sit down for quite a while.” The sergeant who was usually in charge of the bloodhounds looked proud of himself. The captain went on, “Then we went and broke down the door to the Mendozas’ house. They were in there—we could hear ’em talking to each other.”
The Valley-Westside War Page 15