by Tim Powers
Loria blinked at him. “I didn’t know we had a plan C.”
“We didn’t,” said Harlowe, “until tonight.”
Loria opened her mouth to ask what it was, but reconsidered when she saw the evident suffering in Harlowe’s face. “I’ll go downstairs,” she said instead, “and see how Taitz is doing.”
Harlowe had forcefully vetoed the proposal to take Taitz to an emergency room with aan obvious gunshot wound. Loria had cleaned, disinfected and bandaged the deep gashes on his right hand, but she was afraid he might lose a couple of fingers—including his trigger finger. And now it looked as if she might have to sew Nunez’s ear back on!
“Hm?” Harlowe’s attention returned from far away. “Oh, yes, do that. I’m—I think I’m going to spend a bit of time reading The Secret Garden.” Harlowe gave her a rictus smile and shambled toward the door.
Loria nodded. She was standing perfectly still, but she felt as if she were rushing in darkness downhill, past briefly glimpsed and scarcely known faces, toward a precipice, with no idea whether she would fall when she reached it, or take flight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Would You Prevent God?
Bluejays calling to one another in the trees outside woke Vickery.
The selective looting Fakhouri had referred to had not extended to Hipple’s bed or closet, though the paintings that had hung on the bedroom wall were gone. The twins had slept in the bed, Castine had slept on the couch, and Vickery and Fakhouri had found places on the floor. There had been enough blankets, on the bed and in the closet, for everybody to have one.
Vickery sat up when the twins began bumping around in the bedroom. Gray daylight shone in the many tiny windows on the far wall, and he was surprised to see Castine already awake, hunched in her blanket and looking at him.
“Not through eastern windows only,” she said, “when daylight comes, comes in the light.” She spread the fingers of her left hand, squinting at the cuts where her fingers had gripped the broken windshield in the flight from the assassins in the BMW; she had cleaned the cuts with some of Hipple’s brandy last night, and seemed satisfied that they weren’t getting infected.
“Hark hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings,” muttered Vickery, “and Phoebus ’gins arise.” The air in the room was stale with the smells of old barbecued chicken and guttered-out candles.
Fakhouri sat up abruptly and darted a glance toward the ceiling. Last night Vickery had opened the actions on his automatic and Castine’s and Fakhouri’s revolvers and run a lamp cord through the barrels, and then hung them, together with several wind-chimes, from a convenient hook in a ceiling beam. The magazine and bullets were on a shelf.
Vickery had been uneasy about making the guns difficult to get to, but he wasn’t sure Fakhouri wanted to let Castine and himself continue meddling in “an Egyptian thing,” as he had put it last night; and Vickery had made sure both doors were solidly locked, and he had known that he would awaken at any sound. And the guns were still there.
He threw his blanket aside and got to his feet, then climbed up on the table and freed the angular steel bundle from the hook. The wind-chimes made a jangling racket that got briefly louder when he jumped down to the floor.
The twins came scurrying up the hall, dressed in their overalls again, or still.
“The rhyming and the chiming of the bells!” exclaimed one.
Vickery was untying the knotted electrical cord, and the other girl said, as if he had asked her, “We didn’t hear any gun-wind during the night.” She looked at the paper bag on the floor. “We should have got more Pollo Loco.”
“I’d open that back door and yell,” said Castine, swinging her feet to the floor and reaching for her coat, “if I thought a ghost would bring me coffee.”
Vickery freed Castine’s revolver and loaded it. He turned around and put it in her outstretched hand, then worked his own gun loose. He crossed to the shelf and slid the magazine into the grip and worked the slide once, chambering a round, then popped the magazine out and pushed the last round into the top of it.
Turning to Fakhouri as he slid the magazine into the grip, he said, “And now I’m afraid I really have to beg your pardon.” He passed Fakhouri his revolver, still tangled in the electrical cord and the wind chimes. “It’s like this—Harlowe wants to kill, uh, Betty Boop and me, and my car isn’t driveable, and we’ve got no means to rent a car.” He grimaced and shook his head, aware that he was not the good guy in this moment. “The fact is, we’ve got to take yours. We’ll drop you and the girls anywhere you like—the Egyptian Consulate?”
Fakhouri looked at him sadly for several seconds, then glanced at the gun in Vickery’s hand and said, “You are resolute in this?”
“I’m afraid I am, yes. I am sorry.”
Castine was frowning at Vickery, but after a moment she got to her feet and faced Fakhouri. “We do sincerely apologize!”
Fakhouri looked toward the twins, but they were just watching with interest. He shook his head in evident disappointment, then said to Vickery, “You have a plan?”
Vickery shrugged. “A goal.”
Fakhouri spread one hand in a gesture of philosophical resignation. “As I do too. If there is a God, may He grant success to at least one of us. I can rent another car—from a different agency, I suppose. And as a representative of the General Intelligence Directorate, I can probably concoct a basis for giving these girls some species of temporary asylum at the Consulate. Ma hadhih alfawdaa! You don’t want me to report the Nissan as stolen.”
“No,” agreed Vickery. “Not till midnight, anyway.” He recalled that the Arabic phrase had meant something like, What a mess!
“Yes, midnight.” Fakhouri got to his feet. He had untangled his own gun from the wire and wind-chimes, and he crossed to the shelf and began dropping bullets into the chambers in the open cylinder.
Castine was standing by the old TV set with her hand in her coat pocket. When Fakhouri snapped the cylinder into place, he reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a key on a ring. He held both hands out in front of himself as if weighing the key against the gun, then tossed the key to Vickery.
“I hope we may all still be individuals after that,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Vickery. “We’re allies, more or less.” He crossed to the front door and unbolted it. The twins crowded up, but he pushed them back. “Go sit on the couch,” he told them sternly, and when they had retreated and sat down he glanced at Castine, who had now drawn her gun and was holding it pointed at the ceiling. He opened the door cautiously, keeping behind it. A cold wind angled in, chilling his nostrils with the scent of damp earth.
We weren’t followed, he thought, but what about Fakhouri? Could Harlowe have snipers among the trees on the slope? I shouldn’t have made so much noise with the wind chimes.
“I’m going to go up the slope to where the cars are,” he said to Castine. “If there’s nobody around, I’ll come back and fetch everybody.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said, stepping up beside him. “Mutual cover, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I trust Fakhouri not to shoot us in the back.”
Vickery looked at her in the wedge of daylight. Her auburn hair was disarranged from sleeping on the couch, and he could see the little bald patch over her right ear. There was anxiety in the narrowing of her eyes, but determination too.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
But when they sprang over the threshold and sprinted to a couple of widely-spaced trees at the edge of the clearing, no rifle shots echoed and there hadn’t even been a startled rustling of leaves, and Vickery relaxed and tucked his gun into his jacket pocket.
He began to climb the slope, crouching forward on the steeper patches to pull himself up by grabbing roots or jutting rocks. Castine angled toward him across the leaf-strewn unevenness, her suede coat already bristly with twigs and pine-needles, and soon they were within a couple of yards of each other.
“
We shouldn’t be so close,” he whispered across to her. The steam of his breath whisked away on the cold breeze.
“We had a chaperone,” she answered with a quiet laugh. “And anyway, if there were bad guys around, they’d have acted by now.”
“They probably know we’d think that,” he said, but in fact he agreed with her.
When they had worked their way up to the lower of the two cement trenches, Castine sat down on the coping and pushed her damp hair back from her forehead. “Coffee and a long hot shower,” she said, then looked up at Vickery. “It sounded like Ragotskie’s girl Agnes killed him.”
“Yeah, it did.” Vickery perched beside her. “But he still wants us to get her away from Harlowe. His ghost does, anyway.”
“Do we owe him?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Vickery. “He tried to poison you and shoot you on Monday . . . and last night he led Harlowe’s assassins to us, though they only managed to wreck my car. What we owe him wouldn’t be nice to say.”
“That girl with the bicycle then, at MacArthur Park on Monday. Remember? She was being subjected to that black-hole channeling, just briefly then, but at midnight she might fall into it for good, lose herself, whoever she is. And a lot of other people will do the same. Do we owe them?”
“Am I my stranger’s keeper?”
“Well, according to what Ragotskie said, it’ll be us too, eventually. After the egregore ‘comes online.’”
Vickery looked over his shoulder at the extent of wooded slope still above them. He could hear bluejays chattering away up there, evidently not disturbed by any unusual activity; though of course snipers would lie motionless.
“How’s your cut hand?” he asked.
“No problem. We can pick up band-aids and Neosporin someplace.”
“I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car.” He nodded and got to his feet. “Onward. Watchfully.”
Soon they reached the uphill trench, and stepped over it.
“Fakhouri got alarmed,” panted Castine, “every time the girls referred to some new thing. Part of his plan that he didn’t want us to know about, I was thinking; some new factor that old Booty didn’t know about?”
Vickery gripped a low branch to pull himself over a pile of loose leaves. “I noticed that. And they pronounced new differently—in the remarks that made Fakhouri anxious, they said noo, like moo or two. But when one of them said the boat was at a new marina, she said nyew, like few, or cue ball—and he didn’t have a problem with what she said.”
“I didn’t catch that.”
“I notice accents,” he said. “Like, a lot of people under thirty pronounce which and where the same as witch and wear. No huh in them anymore.”
“I suppose soon we’ll just have one word for everything. Just different inflections.”
“I hate to think what the word will be.”
They climbed a few more yards in silence. Then, “We’re coming to the top of the slope,” Vickery whispered. The incline was shallow enough for them to stand up, and they placed their feet carefully as they walked.
But the clearing at the top of the slope was empty except for the devastated Saturn and the partly hidden Nissan and the stump where Hipple’s mailbox had once stood. The birds had gone quiet, but unseen cars whooshed past on Mulholland Drive at the top of the long driveway.
Vickery walked across the dirt to Fakhouri’s Nissan and pushed a button on the key fob to pop open the trunk. The only thing on the trunk’s carpeted floor was a canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bag with pictures of fruit printed on it. Vickery shook two packages of dried Turkish apricots out of it and carried the empty bag across the clearing to the Saturn.
The Saturn’s back bumper was dented, and the trunk popped open when Vickery simply slid the key into the lock. Castine lifted out the two bags of clothes they had bought in Hesperia the day before, and Vickery tucked a flat metal box into the pocket of her coat. “Band-aids and Neosporin,” he explained.
He slid Ragotskie’s envelope into the shopping bag,and tossed the old brown-spotted sock into the bag too.
“Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, bury that damn thing?” asked Castine.
“It’s a mobile hotspot, or something,” said Vickery as he lifted the bag. “It spontaneously drew Platt’s ghost yesterday afternoon, and maybe Ragotskie’s last night, even up here on the hill, and it’s—”
“A sock with some of my year-and-a-half-old blood on it. Yuck.”
“It’s the blood of somebody who no longer quite fits flush in this reality. It’s a link to you, but I think it’s also a . . . a threadbare spot, in the sane world.”
“Where’s the sane world?” Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. “I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.”
Vickery opened the passenger door and hoisted out the old yellow blanket and draped it around Castine’s shoulders, then opened the glove compartment and pulled out all the papers, as well as a screwdriver. The papers he dropped into the shopping bag. He carried the screwdriver around to the driver’s side and leaned in through the gap where the windshield had been, and wedged the blade of the screwdriver under the metal VIN strip on the dashboard; the strip broke free when he twisted the screwdriver, and threw it out over the slope.
Castine carried the bags of clothing across the clearing toward the open trunk of the Nissan. The blanket flapped around her like a cape.
Vickery stepped back and took a moment to look at the Saturn. It was a 1998 model that he’d bought eight months ago in Barstow, for cash, and it had been a reliable car. Shortly after getting it, he had prepared the disguising styrofoam blocks and blue plastic sheeting, and three days ago, in preparation for his trip to Canter’s, he had laboriously glued it all onto the car; and the next day he and Castine had pulled it all off again in a hurry, in that alley off Fairfax. Now the car looked as if it had been abandoned for years—the primer-red driver’s side door had a six-inch strip of duct tape across it, covering the groove and puncture of an obliquely striking bullet, the windshield and rear window were pretty much gone, and the right side rear door was concave and streaked with yellow.
He shrugged and turned away, but Castine had walked back, and she caught his arm. “There’s a firing pin in the ashtray.”
“Oh. Right.” He pulled open the door and leaned in. The ashtray was open, and he quickly found the little firing pin from Ragotskie’s gun and dropped it too into the shopping bag. Straightening up, he said, “Let’s get the others up here and go. We’ve got to drop them off at the Egyptian Consulate.”
She eyed him curiously. “And then what?”
“Breakfast somewhere.”
“And then what?”
“Oh hell. Go talk to Gale Reed, I suppose, if she lives at that house we identified on Google Maps. Fakhouri can work his noo thing, but—”
Castine gave a quick, nervous nod. “It’d be nice if there was a second front. Our strangers’ keepers—I think we’re stuck with it.”
“Within reason.”
Castine laughed shortly. “As if reason has anything to do with any of this.”
A couple of joggers had thumped and panted across the grass, but no car engines punctuated the slow rumble and big exhalations of the surf. Santiago had locked his bicycle to a fence railing, and now waited in the shadow of a wide oak tree in Point Fermin Park until nobody was near him but a young couple walking back toward the cars parked along the shortened length of Paseo Del Mar. The street ended at a fence made of iron bars that curled outward at the tops, but an older, narrower extent of the street could be seen past the fence. Santiago knew that the fenced-off pavement stopped abruptly at the edge of a cliff.
He walked unhurriedly across the grass to the chest-high white wall at the south end of the park and rested his hands on it for a moment, looking out over the broad, wave-streaked face of the Pacific Ocean, deep blue in the morning sunlight; then he fitted a sneakered foot into one of the decorative openi
ngs in the wall and swung a leg over the top and dropped to the narrow pavement on the other side.
He stepped off the pavement onto a slanting surface of loose dirt. The sea wind was cold, and he zipped up his hoodie. Below him now was a deep crevasse in the seaside cliff, and he shuffled carefully past it to the downward-slanting end of the iron bar fence; the tops of the bars still curved forbiddingly outward, but the dirt had gullied away below the bottom ends, and he easily ducked under them. Here a path leveled out, and he strode past a No Trespassing sign that was nearly illegible with graffiti. To his right a steep slope descended to the stony beach, and already he could see canted slabs of old concrete down there at the surf line.
The path soon curved left to join the fenced-off length of Paseo Del Mar, and Santiago followed the broken old street pavement for six hundred feet to the edge of the cliff.
Below him now was an uneven, colorful ruin, where in 1929 a forty-thousand-foot section of San Pedro had slid down to the sea. Paths wound irregularly among palm trees and big, tilted sections of old pavement, covered now with brightly colored graffiti designs. Even at this early hour, Santiago could see a few people down there, perched on pavement fragments on the tower-like promontories or, beyond those, picking their way among the black rocks of the shore. He tried to identify the particular concrete block that Lateef Fakhouri had described—“the cement table by the old Red Car tracks”—but even viewed from above like this, the crumpled landscape was a snakes-and-ladders maze of precipices and chance-formed corridors and tilted foundation slabs, and Santiago couldn’t see any railroad tracks at all.
Fakhouri had told him that a man named Wystan had once got hold of an image, a sigil, that rightfully belonged to Egypt; Wystan had damaged his eyesight by drinking illegal liquor—and serve him right, according to Fakhouri—and the sigil had been buried in the yard of an old woman named Haas, who had lived on the now-fallen section of Paseo Del Mar. This had all been back in the 1920s. The sigil had wanted to go into the sea, and in 1929 it had nearly got there—and pulled down a whole section of San Pedro in the attempt.