Earthquake Weather (56 page)

Gawain, stand ready to ride, as you bargained;

Seek in the wilderness faithfully for me,

As these knights have heard you to solemnly promise.

Find the Green Chapel, the same blow take bravely

You’ve given today—gladly will it be given

On New Year’s Day.

—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,

lines 448–453

A
NGELICA GLANCED JERKILY BACK
over her shoulder—the bumper of the turquoise BMW was scooping fast across the motel parking lot pavement toward her—no, it would miss her—it was accelerating straight at Kootie.

She tried to run faster toward the boy, and she managed to suck enough air into her lungs to yell to him,
“Get out of the way!”

Kootie just stood and stared; but Mavranos was ahead of her now, his arms and knees pumping and his dark hair flying as he lashed himself across the lot. As the low BMW roared past her, painfully clipping her left elbow with the passenger-side mirror and nearly spinning her off her feet, she saw Mavranos bodyblock Kootie right off his feet into a driveway-side planter as the car screeched to a halt where Kootie had been standing. The two heads in the rear seat flopped forward and back as if yanked by one string.

Mavranos had rolled over Kootie and was struggling to his hands and knees on the sidewalk past the planter, and Angelica saw a clenched hand poke out of the BMW’s driver’s-side window. A stubby silver cylinder was squeezed in the fist, and it was pointed toward where Kootie lay thrashing weakly among the flowers.

The icy recognition of
It’s a gun
shrilled in Angelica’s head, but as she sprang forward again she also thought, imperatively,
but he’s!
—
the king now!
—
he’s got protections against plain guns!

The fist was punched back out of sight by the recoil, and the
pop
was loud enough to set her ears ringing and deafen her to the roaring of her panting breath and the hard scuff of her sneaker soles on the pavement.

Long John Beach tried to hold on to the seat-back with his phantom left hand, but when Armentrout stood on the brake the psychic limb snapped like taffy and his head smacked the windshield; still, he was able to peer out the open driver’s-side window as the doctor frantically contorted his own arm to get the little gun extended outside the stopped, rocking car.

Even in the passenger seat on the far side of the console, Long John Beach was only a couple of yards from the boy who was lying on his back among the pink geraniums … and in the instant before the gun flared and cracked back against the doorframe, their eyes met, and Long John Beach and the boy recognized each other.

The rangy man in denim who had shoved the boy out of the car’s path was on his feet, and he lunged at the car and slammed a tanned fist against the windshield hard enough to flash silvery cracks across it. Then he was reaching in through the open window and had grabbed a handful of the doctor’s white hair—

But wailing Armentrout stamped on the gas pedal, and though his head was yanked violently back the car had slewed out into the lanes of Lombard Street; horns were honking but there were no audible collisions, and in a moment Armentrout had wrestled the wheel into line and was steering the car fast down the eastbound left lane.

“That was the boy,” Armentrout was whispering rapidly, “I
know
that was the boy! He was older, but the face was the same as the one in the picture.”

“That was Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Long John Beach.

Peripherally he could see Armentrout glance at him, but Long John had seized on an
old
memory, and had no attention to spare for the doctor. The sight of the boy in the flowers had reminded him of some
old
event.

He nearly never remembered anything of his life before Halloween of 1992, when he had been found on the shore rocks beside the permanently moored
Queen Mary
in Long Beach. When the police and paramedics had found him he had had a ruptured spleen and a collapsed lung, with “pulmonary hemorrhages”—as well as a set of handcuffs dangling from his bloody right wrist. He had spent weeks in a hospital, at first with a chest tube inserted between his fifth and sixth ribs. Apparently he had been in the lagoon around the old ship when an underwater explosion had occurred. The doctors had speculated that he must have been exhaling in the instant of the blast, and curled up into a ball, and that that was why he hadn’t been killed; another man in the water
had
been killed … and must have lost at least his shoe and all the skin off his left foot, for … for somebody had previously handcuffed Long John Beach’s wrist to the man’s ankle!

But Long John Beach had been going by another name, then—another makeshift name based on a city he had found himself in.

Like a whisper the old name came to him:
Sherman Oaks.

He had been hunting for Koot Hoomie Parganas in that long-ago season, and so had the man who had died in the underwater explosion … and so had a fat woman who had been some kind of movie producer. Each of them had wanted to get hold of the Parganas boy, and kill him, and inhale the powerful ghost that the boy contained—the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.

Sherman Oaks had failed, and of course the man who’d died in the explosion had failed. Perhaps the fat lady had succeeded in inhaling Edison.

No—she couldn’t have, because that would have involved killing the boy, and Long John Beach had just seen the boy a minute ago, alive.

The boy’s face, when the haunted brown eyes had locked on to Long John Beach’s gaze just now, had been pale and gaunt, and openmouthed with surprise and apprehension—but the sick wrinkles around the eyes spoke of some imminent punishment feared but
expected,
even accepted. The expression was one of fearful guilt, Long John Beach thought.

The boy’s face had been younger when Beach had first seen it, but it had worn that same look of pathetically anticipating and deserving punishment.

The Parganas boy had apparently run away from home one night in October of ’92, directly after stealing the Edison ghost from whatever shielded hiding place his parents had kept the thing in. Long John Beach—Sherman Oaks, rather—had tracked the ghost’s intense field to the boy’s Beverly Hills home, and he had duct-taped the boy’s mother and father into chairs and tortured them to find out where the ghost had gone. But they hadn’t
known
where, and he had wound up killing them in a fury of hungry impatience, finally even gouging out their sightless eyes.

And then later that night the boy had come back home, repentant and sorry, visibly ready to take his punishment for having run away and stolen whatever glass container had held the ghost.

It had been Sherman Oaks, not his parents, who had awaited him; but the boy had eluded Oaks, and had run out of the house …
right through the room in which sat his dead mother and father.

And then a few days later Sherman Oaks had succeeded in briefly capturing the boy, in a van in the back of a moving truck—and after terrifying him nearly to madness Oaks had tried to kill him, and had in fact managed to stab him in the side with a hunting knife.

Long John Beach had never, since Halloween of ’92, had much awareness of himself as a distinct person. The Edison ghost had lashed out at him somehow and broken something in his mind, so that he’d been left with nothing but the useless ability to channel stray ghosts, as inertly and promiscuously as a tree harbors birds. But now, in this swerving, speeding car, that tortured boy in the flowers back there was connected to his self. The boy’s evident unhappiness was not—Long John Beach flexed the hoardings of his mind to be sure, and it was true—was not separable from the admittedly dim and decayed entity that was Long John Beach’s own self.

He knew that as Sherman Oaks, and probably as other personalities before that one, he had killed people; and he remembered that in those old days he had been addicted to inhaling ghosts, consuming them rather than just channeling them, strengthening his own soul by eating those poor dissolving “smokes”—but suddenly it was Koot Hoomie Parganas, whom he had not even killed, that was an intolerable weight on his frail mind.

There was no new sound in the humming BMW, and Long John Beach saw nothing but the drab motels of western Lombard Street through the windshield, but he was suddenly aware of a
change.

A personality that wasn’t a ghost, and might not even have been human, lifted him like a wave under a foundering ship; cautiously, still clinging to the prickly husk that was his identity, he nevertheless let the new person partway into his mind.

All at once he was speaking. “I always have a dog,” Long John Beach found himself saying. “For now he barks all night at the end of his tether. Chancy measures at the bowsprit of the million-dollar hot-air balloon, what you might call an exaltation of barks if you had to spit-shine a wingtip hanging upside down by one ankle.” He was laughing excitedly now. “Just imagine! Shouting out of your liver and lights to hand-deliver these parables—pair-o’-bulls!—to the momma’s boy who wants to put the salmon in the freezer.”

“You and your dog.” Armentrout was blinking rapidly at the traffic ahead, and breathing through his mouth. “It doesn’t matter now,” he whispered. “It’s all cashed out, I
killed
the boy back there.”

Long John Beach gathered back the shreds of his mind and pushed himself away from the big inhuman personality—and he got a quick impression of a young man in patchwork clothes, with a bundle over his shoulder, dancing at the edge of a cliff. He recognized the image—it was one of the pictures in the doctor’s set of oversized tarot cards, the one the doctor called The Fool.

The doctor was afraid of that one. And Long John Beach was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool. The one-armed old man’s identity was nothing more than a limp threadbare sack, angular at the bottom with the fragments of broken poisonous memories and short, rotted lengths of intelligence, but it was all he had.

In spite of his uneasiness with the memories of the Koot Hoomie Parganas boy, he was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool.

Kootie was sobbing and trying to get up when Angelica tumbled to her hands and knees in the muddy planter beside him; Pete slid to an abrading stop against the cement coping beside her.

Mavranos was kneeling on the other side of the boy, and holding him down with hands that were red with fresh blood. “Let your ma look at you, first,” Mavranos said irritably, and then he squinted up into Angelica’s face. “He was rolling over when the bullet hit him—I don’t think it was a direct hit.”

“Mom!” Kootie wailed. “I thought you were all dead!”

“Check it out as a doctor, Angie,” said Pete breathlessly.

“
Hit
him?” she panted. “We’re fine, Kootie, we’re—all just fine.” To Pete she snapped, “It can’t have
hit
him.” Gently but irresistibly she pushed Kootie down on his back in the snapping geranium branches and pulled his shirt up, and the familiar old unhealed knife cut over his left ribs was now a raw long gash with blood tunneling down his side and pattering onto the green leaves.

Angelica’s peripheral vision cringed inward so that all she could see was this gleaming red rip in Kootie’s white skin; but she replayed what Pete had said and forced herself to look at it professionally. “You’re right, Arky—it’s shallow, no damage at all to the muscle layer and hardly even scored the corium, the deeper skin layer—not life-threatening.” She grinned at the boy as confidently as she could, and gasped out, “Welcome back, kiddo,” but she knew the look she then gave Mavranos must have been stark. “Get the truck here right now. I don’t want my boy in a hospital like this.”

“Right.” Mavranos scuffled to his feet and sprinted heavily away.

“Let’s get you moving, Kootie,” Angelica said, grunting as she and Pete helped the boy stand up. Bright drops of blood spilled down the left leg of his jeans, and she mentally rehearsed grabbing the first-aid kit that Mavranos kept in a box beside the back seat. “That must have been a magical gun—” she began. Then she looked into his eyes. “You’re not hurt anywhere else, are you? Physically?”

“No.” But Kootie was crying, and Angelica knew it was about something that had happened before this shooting … and after he had run away in the pre-dawn darkness this morning.

“Tell your dad and me about it when we get clear of this,” she said gently.

“And I thought,” the boy sniffled, “that I got you killed, by running away. I just
ran away
from you! I’d give anything if I could go back and do that different.”

“We’re just fine, son,” said Pete, hugging the boy against himself. “It’s okay. And now you’re back. We’re all
alive
for our … reconciliation here, and that’s a very big thing.”

Angelica remembered Pete making a very similar apology to
his
father’s
ghost,
on the night before Halloween in ’92—Pete too had run away once, when it counted—and she winced in sympathy and opened her mouth to say something; but the shrill whine of the truck engine starting up stopped her.

The truck came grinding up behind her and squealed to a halt, and Angelica helped Pete hustle Kootie around the front bumper to the back door. As soon as they had boosted him in onto the back seat and clambered aboard themselves, Pete in the front seat and Angelica in the back seat with Kootie, Mavranos gunned the dusty blue truck out of the parking lot; Kootie sprawled across the seat, and Angelica, crouched on the floorboards beside him, had to lean out over the rushing pavement to catch the swinging door handle and pull the door shut.

Then she hiked the first-aid kit down with one hand while she raised her other hand over the back of the front seat; and Pete had already opened the glove compartment, and now slapped into her palm Mavranos’s nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon.

Kootie was lying on his back, and Angelica knelt over him and popped open the first-aid kit. “This’ll hurt,” she told him as she tore open a gauze pad envelope and spilled bourbon onto the cotton.