Expiration Date (56 page)

With a blast of scorching air that hit her like a mailbag dropped from a tram, Frank Rocha’s body had exploded into white fire. Elizalde and the person who had been sitting on the other side of him were ignited into flame themselves and tumbled away in a screaming tangle of bodies and folding chairs, and everyone was dazzled to blindness by the man-sized, magnesium-bright torch that had been Frank Rocha.

And then the séance had started to be for real.

E
LIZALDE LOOKED
away from the white building across the street and made herself take deep, slow breaths.

Hoping to reassure herself, she dug the plastic compass out of her jeans pocket and looked at it—

But it was pointing southeast, straight ahead down Beverly toward the Civic Center.

The compass needle didn’t wobble in synch with any of the cars or pedestrians she could see. Unlike the readings she had got earlier at the abandoned Volkswagen and the barroom door, this one seemed to be some distance away.

There’s a…a
ghost
down that way, she thought carefully, trying to assimilate the idea. A big one.

A furniture truck made a ponderous low-gear left turn onto the boulevard from Belmont Avenue, and little Toyotas and big old
La Bamba
boat cars rattled along the painted asphalt, up toward Hollywood or down toward City Hall, and crows and pigeons flapped around the traffic lights or pecked at litter on the sidewalks in the chilly sunlight…but there was a big
ghost
awake and walking around somewhere clown Beverly in the direction of the Harbor Freeway.

T
HE GHOSTS
had arrived at the séance sometime during the confused moments when curtains were being torn down from the windows and bundled around the people who had been set afire; Frank Rocha himself was a roaring white pyre that no one could get close to.

Half of Elizalde’s hair had been burned off, and after she’d been extinguished herself she had scorched her hands and face in a useless attempt to throw a curtain over Frank Rocha, but what she today remembered most vividly was the agony of listening to the shattering, withering screams.

The hallway doors had opened, and a lot of people had begun to come in who didn’t even seem to notice the fire; and they hadn’t
walked
in, but seemed to glide, or float, or flicker like bad animation. The light had been wrong on most of them—the shadows on their faces had not been aligned with the flaring corpse on the floor, and when their faces had happened to turn toward it, the incongruously steady shadows had abruptly looked like holes.

Others appeared from the ceiling—several of these were oversized infants, impossibly floating in midair, with the purple umbilical cords still swinging from their bellies, and their huge faces were red and their mouths hideously wide as they howled like tornadoes.

Bloody, mewling embryonic chicks pecked and clawed at Elizalde’s scorched scalp, and fell into her face when she tried to cuff them off.

Instead of running for the ghost-crowded doors, everyone had seemed to be scrambling to the corners, down on their hands and knees to be below the churning burnt-pork-reeking smoke. The clothing burst away from three of her patients, two women and a man, to release long fleshy snakes, which lifted like pythons as they grew, and then dented and swelled to form grimacing human faces on the bulbous ends.

The faces on the flesh-snake bulbs, and the shadow-pied faces of the intruding ghosts, and the red faces of the giant infants, and the blood-and-smoke-and-tear-streaked faces of Elizalde’s patients, all were shouting and screaming and babbling and praying and crying and laughing, while Frank Rocha blazed away like a blast furnace in the middle of the floor. By the time his unbearably bright body had shifted and rolled over and then fallen through the floor, the big windows had all popped and disintegrated into whirling crystalline jigsaw pieces and spun away into the darkness, and people had begun to climb out, hang from the sill, and drop to the flower bed below. Elizalde had dragged one unconscious woman to the window, and had then somehow hoisted the inert body over her shoulder and climbed out; the jump nearly broke her neck and her knees and her jaw, but when the fire trucks had come squealing across the parking lot Elizalde had been doing CPR on the unconscious patient.

E
LIZALDE BLINKED
now, and realized that she had been standing for some length of time on the curb, shivering and sweating in the cold diesel breeze.

That was all two years ago, she told herself. What are you going to do right now?

She decided to backtrack up Belmont and then walk on down to Lucas along some other street; Houdini’s thumb was still there tickling her, down behind her sweaty anklebone, but something had paid attention to her a few moments ago, and she didn’t want to blunder into some supernatural event. She turned around and walked into the mariachi jukebox noise of the
mariscos
place and bought a couple of fish tacos wrapped in wax paper just so as to be able to wheedle from the counterman a plastic bag big enough to slide her ruptured grocery bag into.

The next block up was Goulet Street, gray old bungalow houses that had mostly been fenced in and converted to body shops and tire outlets after some long-ago zoning change. As she hurried along the sidewalk past the sagging fences, a young man stepped up from beside a parked car and asked her what he could get her, and half a block later another man nodded at her and made whip-snapping gestures, but she knew that they were both just crack-cocaine dealers, and she shrugged and shook her head at each of them and kept walking.

On the morning after the séance, she had been remanded from the hospital into the custody of the police, charged with manslaughter; she spent that night in jail, and on the following day, Friday, she had put up the $50,000 bail—and then had calmly driven her trusty little Honda right out across the Mojave Desert, out of California. She hadn’t had a clue as to what had happened at her therapy session—she had known only two things about it: that Frank Rocha and two of the other patients had died, and—of course—that she herself had had a psychotic episode, suffered a severe schizophrenic perceptual disorder. She had been sure that she had briefly gone crazy—and she had not doubted that diagnosis until this last Monday night.

Walking along the Goulet Street sidewalk now, she wondered if she might have been better off when she had thought she was crazy.

A
T
L
UCAS
she turned right, and then turned right again into a narrow street that curved past the the rear doors of a liquor store and a laundry, back to Beverly.
RAPHAEL’S LIQUOR
was across the Beverly intersection, and she was hurrying, hoping Sullivan wasn’t parked there yet.

But the compass was still in her hand, and she glanced at it. The needle was pointing behind her, which was north.

Good old reliable north, she thought. She sighed, and felt the tension unkink from her shoulders—whatever had been going on was apparently over—but she glanced at
it again to reassure herself, and saw the needle swing and then hold steady.

Grit crunched under her toes as she spun around to look back. A hunched, dwarfed figure was lurching toward her from around the corner of the liquor store.

Duende!
she thought as she twisted to get her balance leaned back the other way; it’s one of those malevolent half-damned angels the women on the beach told me about last night!

Then she had crouched and made a short hop to get her footing and was striding away toward Beverly, in her retinas burning the glimpsed image of a gaunt face behind glittering sunglasses under a bobbing straw cowboy hat.

But a battered, primer-paint-red pickup truck had turned up from Beverly, its engine gunning as the body rocked on bad shocks, and she knew that the half-dozen mustached men in wife-beater T-shirts crouching in the back were part of whatever was going on here.

Elizalde sprinted to the back wall of the laundry, leaning on it and hiking up her left foot to dig out it the can of mace; but the men in the truck were ignoring her.

She looked back—the
duende
had turned and was hurrying away north, but it was limping and clutching its side, and making no speed. The truck sped past Elizalde and then past the
duende,
and made a sharp right, bouncing up over the curb. The men in the back vaulted out and grabbed the dwarfish figure, whose only resistance was weak blows with pale little fists.

The hat spun away as the men lifted the small person by the shoulders and ankles, and then the oversized sunglasses fell off and she realized that the men’s prey was just a little boy.

Even as she realized it, she was running back there, clutching the bag in her left arm, her right hand thumbing the cap of the mace spray around to the ready position.

“Déjalo marchar!”
she was shouting.
“Qué estás hacienda? Voy a llamar a policía!”

One of the men who wasn’t holding the boy spun toward her with a big brown hand raised back across his shoulder to hit her, and she aimed the little spray can at his face and pushed the button.

The burst of mist hit him in the face, and he just sat down hard on the asphalt; she turned the can toward the men holding the boy and pushed the button again, sweeping it across their faces and the backs of their heads alike, and then she stepped over the spasming, coughing bodies and shot a squirt into the open passenger-side window of the truck.

A quacking voice from the bed of the truck called,
“No me chingues, Juan Dominguez!”
—but she didn’t see anyone back there, only some kind of cloth bag with a black Raiders cap on it. The
bag
seemed to have spoken, in merry malevolence.

The boy had been dropped, and had rolled away but not stood up; Elizalde’s own eyes were stinging and her nose burned, but she bent down to spray whatever might be left in the can directly into the faces of the two men who had only fallen onto their hands and knees. They exhaled like head-shot pigs and collapsed.

Elizalde dropped the emptied can and hooked her right hand under the boy’s armpit and hoisted him up to his feet. She was still clutching her bag of supplies in the crook of her left arm.