by Mel Gilden
'How come I never heard about this before?' I grumbled. Bright lights reflected into my eyes from the rearview mirror, and the guy who'd pulled up behind me tapped his horn. I drove. 'How come?' I said again as the guy swerved around me and roared up to a red light.
'It was never important before.'
'You may even be right about that. Where?'
'Where what?'
'Life without nouns is confusing, isn't it? The truck.'
'Where's the truck?'
'Dominguez. Near the Sue Veneer Novelty Company.'
Artesia Boulevard moved surprisingly well considering how solidly it was packed, and the San Diego Freeway south looked like a road race. Northbound looked like mud being forced through a pipe. There must have been an accident behind me. It could as easily have happened in front of me.
Sometimes you get lucky.
I followed Bill's directions through a maze of dark side-streets, illuminated only by the rectangles of yellow light that hung against the darkness like paintings in a gallery. I was a block away from the truck's location when I heard the sharp grunt of police calls hammering the neighbourhood like a pile driver. Further on, red and blue lights swept the nearby houses from behind a police barricade that kept out a clump of curious neighbours.
Beyond the barricade, a searchlight was focused on men in uniform who were crawling like ants over the Pantages truck. More policemen were standing with Police Detective Cliffy and Sergeant Robinson. A little to one side, Harry and Hilda stood, looking cold despite their heavy coats. They were not arguing, but I was sure it would be just a matter of time.
I backed up my car and found a place to park on a dark street about a block away. Bill and I walked toward the excitement. A woman dressed as if she were going somewhere fancy walked quickly in my direction, and I asked her what was going on.
'Truck full of drugs,' she said, pained as if it were her truck.
By morning the word on the street would be that the truck contained the yearly heroin output of a mythical but real-sounding South American country and enough weapons to overthrow the government of your choice. So much for hearing it through the grapevine. I nodded to her and walked on.
With Bill at my heels, I bobbed under the barricade and joined the confusion. Some giggles from the watching neighbours may have been for me. A man in uniform strolled over with a flare in one hand. He smiled pleasantly enough, and said, 'Sorry, sir. This area is temporarily closed.'
I said, 'I'm a friend of the guy who owns the truck. He'll be glad to see me.'
'That may be so, sir, but nobody gets in here without the OK of Lieutenant Cliffy.'
At this point, Philip Marlowe would have flashed his buzzer, but I didn't have one. I said, 'If he saw me, I'd get it.'
The policeman nodded, but only to show he'd heard me. 'This way, sir,' he said, and had me and Bill walk in front of him to where Cliffy was standing trying not to spit. When he saw me, his eyebrows butted together and his face hardened around his fleshy nose. Sergeant Robinson looked as relaxed as ever, with his left hand in the pocket of his overcoat.
'You know,' Cliffy said, 'somehow I knew you'd show up. I guess we can't have a sideshow crime in this town without you.'
'Thanks,' Bill said.
'Bots,' Cliffy said contemptuously and looked around. I waited for Robinson to pull a spitoon from his pocket, but he didn't. Cliffy glanced at the policeman who'd escorted me and Bill, and said, 'I'll take care of these two now, Mathews. Thanks.'
Mathews nodded, and took his flare away.
Cliffy put his fists on his hips while he narrowed his eyes at Bill and me. He said, 'What are you doing here?'
'My bot gets the police calls. When he told me about the truck, I thought I'd come over and have a look for myself.'
'They ought to outlaw them things,' Cliffy said, almost to himself.
I grumbled back, 'When radios are outlawed only outlaws will have radios.'
Cliffy meditated on that for a moment, looking none too happy. He said, 'There's the truck. Now, move along before I run you in as an accessory.' It was almost a snarl, but not quite.
He actually succeeded in surprising me. I said, 'Make me worry.'
He held up his fat fingers and ticked them off. 'One, you're there with that hat on the beach. Not illegal in itself, but very interesting when you hook it up with number two, you're there when the truck full of spines is hijacked. Now, wonder of wonders, you're here again when the hijacked truck is found.'
'What has the hat got to do with this?' I said, thinking of Avoirdupois.
'It's just peculiar, that's all. Ain't it peculiar, Robinson?'
'Peculiar,' Robinson said.
I waved a hand in front of my nose and said, 'Before the accusations get too thick out here, maybe you can tell me what's in the truck.'
'What's it to you?'
'That seems to be the question, doesn't it? The fact is that the spines are part of a case I'm working on.'
'Too bad.'
'Maybe Harry will tell me.' Before Cliffy or Robinson could do anything, I turned and called out, 'What's new, Harry?'
Harry said something angrily to Hilda, and marched over to us while Hilda watched with soft, worried eyes. She looked colder than could be accounted for by the temperature. By the time Harry got to us, he was smiling and had his hand out. I shook it. 'Well,' he said, 'it looks as if the police were a little more efficient than you thought.'
'Hah,' said Cliffy, and even Robinson smiled.
'They're good, all right. Maybe they're so good they can tell you why somebody bothered to borrow a truck full of plastic blowfish spine necklaces and then give them back.'
Cliffy and Harry frowned at each other.
I said, 'The truck is still full of necklaces, isn't it?'
'You're mighty smart for a guy who just got here,' Cliffy said, prodding me with the words as if they were his stubby fingers.
'I'm not smart, I just pay attention. Harry and anybody else with an opinion has told me that the necklaces are all the same. Whoever's been stealing these necklaces all over town is finding that out the hard way. When the Polynesians who stole the truck found out that these necklaces were just like all the others, they had no reason to keep them. Or is the truck empty after all?'
Cliffy puffed himself up and said, 'All of that's pretty obvious, isn't it?' He spat quickly, pretending nobody had seen.
'Of course it is,' said Harry. 'All the spine necklaces are the same.'
'Maybe none of these geeks,' Cliffy's eyes swerved at me and he went on, 'know that.'
Robinson shook a finger slowly in Cliffy's direction and spoke as if he'd had an idea. 'Or maybe they know it, but are thinking wishfully.'
'Thinking wishfully?' Cliffy said as if he were making sure he'd gotten the punchline of a joke. He smiled at me and said, 'What about you? You think anything wishfully?'
'Just about dinner,' I said.
'Tough guy,' Cliffy grumbled. 'What do you know about this?' He nodded to Sergeant Robinson, who pulled a folded sheet of pink paper from his righthand coat pocket. I unfolded it and read, 'Happy day! Medium Rare loves you!'
Suddenly I was as cold as Hilda looked. I'd be seeing Medium Rare for the first time the next day at the Aquaricon. But she cast a long shadow before her. I felt as if I'd already seen her, as if I already knew the rank smell of her breath as it blew down my neck. I said, 'Some geek gave me one of these when he tried to buy the spine necklace a friend of mine brought back from Hawaii.'
'Talk about your geeks,' Cliffy said and shared a chuckle with Harry and Robinson. 'Did you sell it to him?'
'No, I'm kind of sentimental for a geek.'
'Please don't take offence,' Robinson said.
'No offence taken. After toxic waste and nose drops, it would take more than one bad rib to exercise me. Does this have anything to do with the truck?'
Cliffy snapped the paper with a finger and said nastily, 'These flyers are showing up all over town, usually in the company o
f somebody who wants to purchase one of these blowfish spine necklaces. If the owner doesn't want to sell, he usually wakes up with a bump on the head and short one necklace. Sometimes there is some money missing, too, but more often, not.'
'You figure Medium Rare is somehow tied up with the dynamic duo that borrowed the truck?'
'I don't like tidy coincidences. What do you figure?'
'Nothing, at the moment. I'm just watching the master at work.'
Harry began to laugh, but was cut short by a petrifing glance from Cliffy. Cliffy looked at me, but his face was different, tired. It was a face that wanted to go home to the wife and kids, and think about nothing more taxing than how to work the pop-top on a can of beer. The mouth in that face said, 'If you're mixed up in this, we'll find out eventually. You'd better have something good up your nose or we'll nail you to the wall.' Robinson shook his head.
'I can't say I haven't been warned,' I nodded at each of them and walked away through the crowd with Bill.
Chapter 16
A Brisk Business In Hoo-Doo
IT was a long, dark ride back to Malibu. Clues, such as they were, swirled through my head, not sticking one to the other. It was obvious that the Polynesians—one of whom might be named Pele—were after something very special. They might have found it, and returned the truck and the rest of the spines out of courtesy. I didn't know if Harry kept a close enough inventory to tell if only one was missing. Was Medium Rare looking for the same spine, or was she looking for some other spine entirely?
Thinking tended to run in circular ruts and throw off more questions than answers—threadbare, slightly shabby questions. I was so tired that at least once when I saw a red light, I knew that something ought to be done about stopping the car, but it didn't occur to me till Bill yelped that the something should be done by me.
When I got the Belvedere into the garage at last, I turned off the engine and just sat there listening to the silence that gathered around my ears, and the occasional hiss of a car going by on Pacific Coast Highway
. It wasn't long before hunger drove me into the house.
If you didn't count the rabbits, what I found in the living room was the usual scene. The sound was too loud on a car chase careening around the TV screen. The surfers had paired off, but were still watching the action while they stroked each other and the rabbits, pretty much at random. Well, it was early yet. Bowls of yoyogurt were within easy reaching distance.
'What's shaking?' I called out, barely able to hear myself. 'You look really dogged,' Hanger cried from her seat on Mustard's lap.
'Dogged, drilled and wiped out. Is there any food?'
'Leftover pizza,' Thumper shouted. He frowned. 'Captain Hook didn't eat much. He just did magic with the pepperoni. Pulled it out of the air.' Thumper reached into the air as if he were pulling a book down from a shelf. 'I was getting tired of rabbits, anyway,' I said. Stepping over rabbits and their byproducts, I went to hang up my trenchcoat and found Whipper Will and Bingo leaning on pillows and each other while they read books.
Bingo looked up at me and said, 'What's happening, Holmes?'
'Confusion, small mayhem, large doubts. The usual.'
'Sounds as if we're getting our money's worth,' Whipper Will said without looking up.
'I hope so,' I said. 'I wouldn't want to be doing this for nothing.'
Bill followed me into the kitchen, where two slices of pizza waited on a round sheet of cardboard. Next to it was a pile of pepperoni slices. Evidently there was still some magic in them, because as I watched, one of them kind of burped and pulled itself into two slices, each the same size as the original. Bill sat down and began to move the slices around like checkers.
I was too hungry to worry about the magic being infectious, so I picked up a slice of pizza and took a large bite. It had been sitting there a long time. Room temperature had congealed the cheese into something you might use to resole your shoes. The tomato sauce was cold. The disks of pepperoni were stiff. The pizza was delicious. I even sampled some of the incredible pepperoni. It was just so much ground meat.
The first slice of pizza was gone almost before I knew it. I took up the remaining one and began to munch as I looked out the window. The surf was a little rougher than it had been when I'd left Busy Backson's apartment, and the foam was luminescent as it curled toward the beach.
Blocking my view of the ocean was a shadow vaguely in the shape of a hat. Orange lights on the sawhorses that surrounded it winked at me. The fact that the hat was still there told me that the two Polynesians had not yet found what they were looking for. Which meant I still had a chance to find them and somehow get them to cure Captain Hook. It would also be OK if they told me why they wanted the blowfish spine necklaces.
Under a light out on the public walkway. Captain Hook—at the moment the Great Hookini—was waving a couple of torches around for an admiring crowd of strangers. I gathered his friends could no longer stand him.
He threw a torch high into the air, caught it, stuck the burning end into his mouth, pulled the naked torch out, and blew fire back into it. I watched him while I finished my pizza. He was pretty gnarly, actually, but he didn't look happy. He was just going through the motions. Captain Hook was still inside the Great Hookini somewhere, and he'd be in a killer mood when he was freed at last.
Still, it had to be done. Captain Hook was who he was. It wasn't right for him to be somebody else. Especially if that somebody else might set the place on fire. And he'd have more fun being unhappy if he could choose his subjects.
The nutrition in the pizza hit my system, and I felt as if I were a balloon being inflated, but I was punchy from lack of sleep—as shown by the length of homey philosophy I was capable of spinning out. I told Bill I was going to bed. As I stumbled off, he was climbing up onto a chair so that he could watch the Great Hookini through the kitchen window.
The next morning, I awoke to find myself alone in the bedroom with some sunshine that looked much brighter than I felt. In the kitchen, I looked out the window and saw that Whipper Will and Bingo were out running their surfbots with the other surfers. Bill was sitting on a countertop, plugged into an outlet. I ate breakfast without disturbing him, then I unplugged him. His eyes snapped open.
'Airport Stanton Hotel,' I said.
He leaped from the counter and said, 'Right this way, Boss.'
When we got into the Belvedere, I just sat there for a minute with my hands in my lap. Bill waited as patiently as the car. I said, 'I feel as if last night didn't exist, as if I've never been away from behind this wheel.'
Bill said, 'Is that good?'
'Better than doing magic all night, I suppose.' I started the engine and carefully backed onto PCH.
The day was clear, and as bright as the sunshine in Whipper Will's bedroom promised. Cars moved along easily, nobody in much of a hurry. It wasn't a holiday, but the usual holiday crowds strolled with their bots and their boards and their blankets. The ocean was blue, but it had more character than the sky, which seemed a little garish for a sky. Out on the ocean, the white cream of waves seemed to leap like big fish.
I drove up the hill at Colorado and rolled through Santa Monica on Lincoln, a hodgepodge of small businesses with big signs. Traffic thickened for no good reason, and stayed thick until I was below Marina Del Rey. Maybe everybody was going to visit their yachts. Lincoln swept past the airport, not much concerned with the big silver bananas that seemed about to sit on the centre divider until they landed with a screech of wheels and rolled off on business of their own. Lincoln joined Sepulveda and went down to Century Boulevard where a line of hotels, looking as if they were lengths of runway that had been stood on end, shot up on either side of the street.
Bill got me to the Airport Stanton all right, but he had no particular ideas where I could park without spending my life savings. We gave up looking on the street, and parked under the hotel. I had the satisfaction of nicking a rear fender all by myself.
On the elevat
or from the parking levels up into the hotel lobby, Bill and I rode with two well-dressed women who crowded themselves as far away from us as they could get. Each of them wore a crisp print dress in a fruity colour, and had a chunk of transparent rock hanging around her neck on a chain. They held thick booklets to their nicely rounded chests while they talked excitedly about their latest experience in a former life. As far as I could tell, they'd both been a lot more interesting before they were born.
The lobby was a cavern with a brightly flowered carpet. Right now the carpeting had a lot of competiton from the crowds of people, each as trim and neat as a billiard ball. Every one of them carried one of those thick booklets, and most of them had managed to work rocks into what they were wearing. One way or another, they all had the sort of unfocused enthusiasm and faraway eyes that made Gone-out Backson look like a candidate for a long rest in a place where they'd make you rest and no back talk.
I walked through the lobby, feeling a little out of place wearing brown, but people either smiled at me as if they knew me, or they ignored me. In a conspicuous place was a long table next to a placard that said, AQUARICON REGISTRATION HERE.
Registering cost me ten bucks, and all it bought me was the right to go into the dealers' room, where I would have the opportunity to spend more money. They wanted to charge me for Bill, too, but I talked them out of it. Sometimes, when I'm feeling chipper, I'm able to do things like that.
The dealers' room was really a number of rooms, none of them smaller than an aeroplane hangar, and all of them cold enough to hang meat. In a smaller room, the pattern of big, bilious flowers on the walls would give you a headache. Here, they just crossed your eyes. Tables were set up around the walls and in two aisles down the centre of the room. Some of the tables held crystals, others held electronic gizmos with too many antennas, and still others held things that looked like board games but probably weren't. Men and women stood behind the tables, doing a brisk business in hoo-doo.
'This is great,' Bill said.
'You can be excited for both of us,' I said as I began to tour the room. The place was very quiet for a zoo, all reasonable explanations and low scientific discussions about electromagnetic cleansing of the aura, debirthing, crystal therapy, astrology…