Earthquake Weather (63 page)

She hadn’t looked behind the door when she had come in, to see if the eucalyptus-soled shoes were leaned against the wall, but by now she could recognize Cody Plumtree.

“Our supernatural escrow is about to close,” Angelica said, loudly enough for Pete and Kootie to hear in the kitchen. “Tet is only three days off, and we have no clue about what we’re supposed to do, this time. My people in the
barrios
and ghettos are getting signs of something big cooking, but for all their painted bells and chicken blood they don’t know what or where. Our crazy old lady keeps saying that Crane or
C-cren
will direct us when the time comes—but the old lady’s just a ghost.”

“Sid,” said Cody Plumtree, “speak up.”

Sid Cochran pushed his chair back. “
C-cren
has got a, a horrible proposal,” he said, “which as far as I’m concerned anybody here can veto—especially Cody.”

Angelica glanced at Cody, who was sitting across from Cochran in the corner against the kitchen-side wall and had just lit a cigarette—and she got the feeling that Cody knew what Cochran was going to say, and hated it, but was not going to interrupt now, nor veto later.

“Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, “that’s Cody and Janis’s dad, who killed Scott Crane, came on today, here—he was talking on the phone to our Dr. Armentrout.”

Armentrout! thought Angelica. That’s the man who shot Kootie! She darted a fearful glance toward the front door as she touched the .45 automatic at her belt and opened her mouth to speak.

But Cochran had held up his hand. “Wait. Salvoy faded off while they were speaking, and Cody and I heard Armentrout going on talking; Salvoy had
not
told the doctor where we are. But—” Cochran paused and shook his head. “But, from what Armentrout was saying, it was pretty clear that Salvoy knows what we did wrong, when we tried to bring Crane back to life last week.” He glanced at Cody, who just stared straight back at him. “I think,” Cochran went on stolidly, “we’ve got to do the Follow-the-Queen trick to talk to Omar Salvoy.”

Angelica whistled a descending note.

“Why should he tell us anything?” interrupted Pete from the kitchen doorway.

“Valorie can make him, I bet,” said Cody. “She could be on with him, if you call her, like a second file showing in split-screen on a computer monitor.” Once again Angelica found herself admiring the woman. “It’s a—goddammit, it’s a good idea. My father probably
would
know. He knew enough to nearly become the king, twenty-five years ago, and from the day he exited his smashed body he’s had one foot in India.”

“And I think I could effectively threaten him,” said Kootie quietly from behind Pete.

Angelica stared at her adopted son warily. “With what,
hijo mío
?”

Ever since the seventeenth, when he had run away from the Star Motel before dawn and reappeared in the afternoon, having spent some part of the morning talking with Mammy Pleasant in her boardinghouse kitchen, Angelica thought Kootie seemed somehow far older than his fourteen years. All he had told Pete and herself about that morning was that he had killed someone, but Angelica had known that much when she had simply met his eyes as he’d lain shot and bleeding in the planter outside the Star Motel office—behind the physical shock that had paled his face and constricted his pupils, independent of that injury, dwarfing it, the new horror and guilt had been clearly evident to her.

“In ’92,” said Kootie, “when Sherman Oaks or Long John Beach tried to eat the Edison ghost out of me, he had to lure it up toward the surface of my mind first. This was when we were in the ‘boat on the boat,’ the van inside the truck. And from what Miss Plumtree has said about her psychic striptease session with that doctor, he was trying to draw a personality to the surface, to bite it off. The one on top is the one that’s vulnerable.” The boy bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “It seems like a personality brought up by this Follow-the-Queen trick is … stuck in the
on
position for at least a little while. I think I could validly threaten to …
bite him off
.”

Angelica’s ears were ringing. “But,” she said, “no, you can’t—it’s like slamming bad heroin, Kootie, you’d have his memories in you like heavy metal—his poisonous life force—” Much worse than whatever you’re carrying now, she thought helplessly, trust me.

“Besides,” said Pete Sullivan, staring in obvious dismay at his adopted son, “
he’s
not a
ghost.
He’s a full-power person. You’d—you’d probably blow up!”

“I said
validly threaten
.” Kootie sat down in the dining-room chair next to Plumtree, where Pete had been sitting. “If
I
can’t be sure I can’t do it, neither can he. And I think I
could kill
him, depending on how strong he is—swat him off the top of Miss Plumtree’s mind like driving a golf ball off a tee.”

Oh, don’t be flippant and proud of it, Kootie, thought Angelica unhappily; and she would have said it out loud but for the knowledge that they might in fact need him to do it, and if so she didn’t want to hamper him in advance.

“Without killing ‘Miss Plumtree’?” asked Cochran, his voice hoarse and his eyes wide with skepticism.

Kootie raised his eyebrows and squinted across the table at him—then peripherally caught Angelica’s anguished, vicariously mortified gaze; and the boy instantly looked down at the tablecloth, his face reddening. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know if he isn’t stronger than me, even. He’s older than me, and meaner, so he might be.” He looked up, clearly abashed. “But—see?—I can believably
threaten
him with it.”

“Just don’t kill me before he’s said what to do,” said Plumtree with what Angelica recognized as hollow, exhausted bravado. Plumtree held up her hands, and her voice skidded up and down the scale as she said, “Sid, do you have some duct tape?”

Kootie looked nauseous.

“We won’t do it tonight,” Angelica said hastily. Plumtree was like a flexed piece of tempered glass, and Angelica was afraid one measured tap might actually shatter her mind into a
thousand
tiny personalities, no one of them more sentient than an infant. And Kootie wasn’t looking much better himself. “Not if he’s already been out once today,” Angelica went on in her most self-assured doctor-tone. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time.”

Both Kootie and Plumtree sagged in what looked like uncomfortable relief.

“Then for God’s sake right now get me a drink,” said Plumtree in a husky voice. “Sid, you got vodka?”

“Got vodka,” said Cochran, getting up out of his chair like an old man.

“Got a lot of it?”

Cochran just nodded as he shambled into the kitchen.

He paused by the sink before reaching up to the liquor cabinet overhead, and stared at the glittering white mound of tiny soap bubbles that stood motionless above the dish-filled sink. And he experienced a vivid memory-flash of how Nina had looked, so many times, wearing an apron and leaning over this sink; and all at once, silently except for a nearly inaudible hissing, the soap foam diminished away to nothing, leaving the dishes exposed poking out of the surface of the gray water.

Her ghost is gone, he thought giddily as he reached up for the vodka bottle, but my memories of her apparently still have some palpable force.

We’re not …
finished,
yet.

I’ll hide my silver beard in a gold beaver …

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

C
OCHRAN WOKE UP IN
his own bed, alone, roused by the gunning of the Torino engine in the back yard. From the gray light filtering into the bedroom through the lace curtains, he muzzily judged that it must be about seven in the morning. He had sat up drinking with Plumtree until after midnight; and when at last he had got up unsteadily and announced his intention of retiring to the couch, Plumtree had told him to take the bed.
I’ll sleep on the couch,
she had said, enunciating carefully.
I can see it from here, so I know I’ll be able to find it.

As much as anything, they had been discussing immortal animals. Cody had insisted that carp never died naturally, and survived the winter frozen solid in pond ice; and Cochran had told her about toads that had been found alive in bubbles in solid rock. When the animals in question began to be imaginary ones from children’s books and science-fiction movies, like the Pushmi-pullyu and E. T., Cochran had just followed the drift of the conversation, and talked about Reepicheep the mouse in the Narnia books, and the bread-and-butter-flies from
Through the Looking-Glass.
Plumtree’s voice had changed several times, and she had vacillated sharply between skepticism and credulity—but since Cochran was the only other person in the room she had not had to address him by name, and the nearest electric light that was on had been the one in the kitchen and Cochran couldn’t tell when it might have flickered, and their talk had been abstract and speculative enough to keep him from guessing who he might have been talking to at any particular moment. He hadn’t been aware of any obvious archaisms that would have indicated lines quoted from Shakespeare, though he hadn’t by any means caught everything she had said; and if Tiffany had been on, she had been subdued, and content with vodka.

He got into a fresh shirt now and pulled his jeans back on and opened the bedroom door. The car noise had evidently awakened the Sullivans too—he could hear Kootie and Pete talking quietly behind the closed door of the spare bedroom.

Mavranos was sitting at the dining room table frowning over the Saturday
San Francisco Chronicle.
In front of him a cup of coffee sat steaming, and on the opposite side of the table stood fourteen mismatched cups and tumblers. Cochran padded over barefoot and peered at them; each had a grainy white sediment puddled in the bottom.

“You better pick up some more Alka-Seltzer when you go out,” said Mavranos quietly; “a big bottle. I guess each of the girls had a hangover, and couldn’t stomach drinking out of another one’s used glass.”

Cochran stared at the cups and glasses on the table.
“Fourteen?”
he whispered in awe.

“Each one for a different bad flop, I reckon,” Mavranos said with a shrug. “Like chopping up a starfish.” He lifted his coffee cup in both hands to take a sip. “I kind of admire her restraint in having only fourteen, after twenty-seven years. If I had the option, I’d be splitting off all the time.” Softly he sang a line Cochran believed was from a Grateful Dead song: “ ‘I need a
mir
acle
ev
-ery day.’ ”

Cochran began carrying the cups and glasses into the kitchen, gripping three with the fingers of each hand; and when he came back from carrying the first six out of the dining room, Kootie was wordlessly picking up four more.

When they had brought the last of the cups and glasses out to the counter, the Torino hood audibly slammed down outside; and after Cochran had rinsed out two of the cups and filled them with fresh coffee and carried them back to the dining-room table for himself and Kootie, he heard Plumtree come battering in through the kitchen door and run more water in the sink. A moment later she shuffled into the dining room with a steaming McDonald’s mug and slumped down into the chair beside Kootie. She was clearly Cody, and her T-shirt was correctly marked
SUNDAY
in crude black letters.

“You’re awake,” she observed as she lit a Marlboro.

“Somehow,” agreed Cochran.

“The Torino’s running again, a lot better than before. Let’s get this thing done.” She squinted at Kootie. “Your mom and dad up yet?”

“I think they are,” said Kootie nervously. “I think they’ll be out in a minute.”

“Sid,” said Cody, “if this goes real wrong, leave the Torino parked somewhere it’s sure to be towed, will you? And leave the registration on the front seat. Oh, and the Jenkins purse is in the trunk—first mail that to the Jenkins woman.”

“I—won’t hurt you,” said Kootie.

“It’s not you I’m scared of, kiddo—but thanks.”

Pete and Angelica Sullivan came in then, and Angelica sat down at the table while Pete went into the kitchen.

“This chair is no good,” said Plumtree, wiggling the arms of her dining-room chair. “My snips-and-snails parent could bust it to kindling. Let’s go out back and use one of the iron patio chairs.” She had one more sip of her coffee and then stood up.

“What,” said Angelica, wide-eyed, “right now? Before breakfast?”

“Well I’m just not hungry, somehow,” said Plumtree. “And the sooner we get my job done, the sooner you can have your old lady in the wooden shoes cook you up some fucking
gumbo
or something, right?”

“Sorry,” said Angelica.

“Shit,” said Plumtree. “If her nose isn’t bleeding too bad for her to cook, by then.”

Five minutes later Mavranos, Angelica, Pete, Kootie, and Cochran were sitting, uncomfortably like judges, on one side of the long picnic table under the patio roof between the kitchen and the backyard greenhouse, facing the chair in which Plumtree now sat confined by strips of duct tape wrapped tightly around her wrists and waist and ankles. The sky was low and gray behind the pepper trees that overhung the yard; and though the breeze was chilly, Cochran knew that wasn’t why Plumtree was visibly shivering. Inside Mavranos’s open denim jacket Cochran had seen the checkered wooden grip of the revolver tucked under the man’s belt.

For a few moments Plumtree waited blankly, relaxed enough for her teeth to chatter; then she rolled her head back to stare up at the beams of the patio roof, and she whispered, “Valerie, whatever you make at your job, you’re overpaid.” She took a deep breath, and Cochran did too. “Mom!” called Plumtree hoarsely.

Then she lowered her head to stare at the five people sitting across from her at the table, and her shoulder muscles flexed under her T-shirt. At last her gaze fixed on Cochran. “Are we near the sea?” she asked him in the shriller voice of Plumtree’s mother. “Are you going to call her up now, and send her to India?”

“No,” Cochran said. “We need to learn some things Omar Salvoy knows. We’re going to call
him
up, and question him. You can see that he’ll be restrained.”