Expiration Date (57 page)

“Gotta run, kiddo,” she said. “Fast as you can, okay?
Corre conmigo, bien?
Just across the street. I’ll stay with you, but you’ve got to motivate with your feet.
Vayamos!
”

He nodded, and she noticed for the first time the faded bruise around his left eye. Not stopping to retrieve the hat and the sunglasses, she frog-marched him back around the liquor store to the Lucas Avenue sidewalk and started down it toward the stoplight.

Across the wide, busy street she could see the dusty brown box that was Sullivan’s van.

She looked behind her—there was no sign of the pickup truck.

The boy seemed to be able to walk, and she let go of him to dig the compass out of her pocket. The needle was pointed straight east. The ghost’s still ahead of us, she thought nervously; then she held it out in front of them, and the needle swung back toward north.

She moved it around, to be sure—and it was consistently pointing
at the boy who was lurching along beside her.

She knew that she would change her pace, one way or the other, when she gave that new fact a moment’s thought—so she instantly gripped the compass between her teeth and began to walk faster, dragging the boy along, lest she might otherwise stop, or ditch him and just flat-out run.

This
boy
is the ghost, she told herself; Sullivan said they can accumulate mass from organic litter, and eventually look like solid street people.

But Elizalde couldn’t believe it. For a moment she pulled her attention away from the sidewalk pedestrians they were passing, and craned her neck to look down into his pinched, pale face—and she couldn’t believe that a restless ghost could have made those clear brown eyes, now pellucidly deep with fear, out of gutter puddles and sidewalk spit and tamale husks. And his eye socket was bruised! Surely the bogus flesh of those scarecrows couldn’t incorporate working capillaries and circulating blood! He must have a ghost…
on
him, somehow, like an infestation of lice.

A
big
ghost, she reminded herself uneasily, remembering how steadily the compass needle had pointed at it from blocks away.

She still couldn’t see the red pickup truck, behind or ahead. Apparently the mace had worked.

They had nearly reached the corner. She spat the compass into her shopping bag. “What’s your name?” she asked, wondering if she would even get a response.

“The kid’s in shock,” said the boy huskily, his voice jerking with their fast steps. “Better you don’t know
his
name. Call me…Al.”

“I’m Angelica,” she said. Better you don’t know my last name, she thought. “A friend of mine is in that brown van across the street. See it?” She still had her hand
under his arm, so she just jerked her chin in the direction of the van. “Our plan is to get out of here, back to a safe place where nobody can find us. I think you should come with us.”

“You’ve got that compass,” said the boy grimly. “I’ve been
in
a Van,’ and I can scream these lungs pretty loud.”

“We’re not going to kidnap you,” said Elizalde.

They shuffled to a rocking halt at the Lucas corner, panting and waiting for the light to turn green. Elizalde was still looking around for pursuit. “I don’t even know if my friend would want another person along,” she said. She shook her head sharply, wondering if it could even be noon yet. “But I think you should come with us. The compass—anybody in the whole city who knows about this stuff can track you.”

The boy nodded. At least he was standing beside her, and hadn’t pulled away from her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That is true, sister. And if I put my light back under the bushel basket, if I—
step out of the center-ring spotlight
, here, this kid will collapse like a sack of coal. So you’ve got a place that’s safe? Even for
us
? How are you planning on degaussing me? This damned electric belt’s not worth
one
mint.”

Hebephrenic schizophrenia?
wondered Elizalde;
or one of the dissociative reactions of hysterical neurosis?
MPD would probably be the trendy analysis these days—multiple personality disorder.

She floundered for a response. What had he said? Degaussing? Elizalde had heard that term used in connection with battleships, and she thought it had something to do with radar. “I don’t know about that. But my friend does—he’s an electrical engineer.”

This seemed to make the boy angry. “Oh, an
electrical engineer
! Ail mathematics, I daresay, equations on paper to match the paper diploma on his wall! Never any dirt under his fingernails! Maybe he thinks he’s the only one around here with a
college degree
!”

Elizalde blinked down at the boy in bewilderment. “I—I’m sure he doesn’t—I have a college degree, as a matter of fact—” Good Lord, she thought, why am I bragging? Because of my rumpled old clothes and tangled hair? Bragging to a traumatized street kid? “But none of that’s important here—”

“B.S.,” said the boy now, with clear and inexplicable pride. “Let’s go meet your electrical engineer.”

“Shit, yes,” said Elizalde. The light turned green, and they started walking.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

S
ULLIVAN
had seen Elizalde crossing the street, and when he saw that the reason she was moving slowly was because she was helping a limping
kid
along, he swore and got out of the van.

He had noticed the onset of bar-time as he’d been driving, five or ten minutes ago, when he reflexively tapped the brake in the instant before the nose of a car appeared out of an alley ahead of him; he had then tested it by blindly sliding a random cassette into the tape player, cranking the volume all the way up, and then turning on the player—he had not only cringed involuntarily, but had even recognized the opening of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” just before the first percussive yell had come booming out of the speakers. He had switched the set off then, wondering anxiously what was causing the psychic focus on him, and if it was on Elizalde too.

And now here she was with some kid.

He met them by the traffic-light pole at the corner, and he took the shopping bag from her. “Say goodbye to your little friend,” he said. “We’ve gotta go
now
Bar-time, you feel it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, smiling. “Other people out here probably do too. Act natural, like you
don’t feel
it.”

She was right. He smiled stiffly back at her and hefted the bag. “So, did you get your shopping done? All ready to go?”

Two teenage Mexican boys swaggered up to them, one of them muttering,
“Vamos a probar la mosca en leche, porqué no?”
Then one of them asked her, in English, “Lady, can I have a dollar for a pack of cigarettes?”

“Porqué no?”
echoed Elizalde with a mocking grin. She reached into her pocket with the hand that wasn’t supporting the sick-looking boy, and handed over a dollar.

“I need cigarettes too!” piped up the other teenager.

“You can share his,” said Elizalde, turning to Sullivan. “We’re ready to go”, she told him.

We’re
not
taking this sick kid along with us! he thought. “No,” he said, still holding his smile but speaking firmly. “Little Billy’s got to go home.”

“Auntie Alden won’t take him today,” she said, “and it’s getting very late.” ‘

Sullivan blew out a breath and let his shoulders sag. He looked at the boy. “I suppose you
do
want to come along.”

The boy had a cocky grin on his face. “Sure, plug. On your own, you might get careless and open a switch without turning off the current first.”

Sullivan couldn’t help frowning. He had spent the morning at an old barn of a shop on Eighth Street called Garmon’s Pan-Electronics and he wondered if this boy knew that, somehow. Was the boy’s remark the twang of a snapped trap-wire?

“I told him you’re an electrical engineer,” said Elizalde in a harried voice. “Let’s
go!”

After a tense, anguished pause: “Okay!” Sullivan said, and turned and began marching his companions back across the liquor-store parking lot toward the van. “The collapsing magnetic field,” he told the boy, in answer to the boy’s disquieting remark, “will induce a huge voltage that’ll arc across the switch, right?” Why, he wondered, am I bothering to prove anything to a kid?

“Don’t say it just to please me,” the boy told him.

When they had climbed into the van and pulled the doors closed, Sullivan and Elizalde sat up front, and the boy sat in the back on the still-unmade bed.

“Why did you give that guy a buck?” asked Sullivan irritably as he started the engine and yanked the gearshift into drive.

“He might have been Elijah,” Elizalde said wearily. “Elijah winders around the Earth in disguise, you know; asking for help, and if you don’t help him you get in trouble at the Last Judgment.”

“Yeah?” Sullivan made a fast left turn onto Lucas going south, planning to catch the Harbor Freeway from Bixel off Wilshire. “Well, the
other
guy was probably Elijah, the guy you
didn’t
give a buck to. Who’s our new friend, by the way?”

“Call me Al,” spoke up the boy from the back of the van. “No, my name’s Kootie—” The voice sounded scared now. “—where are we going? It’s all right, Kootie, you remember how I didn’t trust the Fussels? These people are square. I’m glad you’re back with us, son. I was worried about you.”

Sullivan shot Elizalde a furious glance.

“He’s magnetic,” she said. She seemed near tears. “Compasses point to him. And I used up my mace spray on a crowd of bad guys who were trying to force him into a truck.”

“It’s okay,” Sullivan said. “That’s good, I’m glad you did. I wish I’d been there to help.” Good God, he thought. “Did you get some likely…groceries?”

“I think so.” She sighed deeply. “Did you hear what those two
vatos
said? They described you and me as
la mosca en leche
. That means fly-in-milk—like ‘salt-and-pepper,’ you know, a mixed-race couple. They thought I was a Mexican.”

Sullivan glanced at her. “You
are
a Mexican.”

“I know. But it’s nice that they could tell. How did you do, did you get some good electronic stuff?”

Sullivan was looking into the driver’s mirror on the outside of the door. A new Lincoln had sped up to make the light at Beverly, and it was now swerving into the right lane as if to pass him. He was glad of the distraction, for he didn’t want to talk about the ragtag equipment he’d bought.

“Not bad,” he said absently, “considering I didn’t know what I wanted.” When the Lincoln was alongside, Sullivan pressed the brake firmly, and the big car shot ahead. “They had some old carborundum-element bulbs there cheap, so I bought a few, and I got an old Ford coil for fifty bucks, and a Langmuir gauge.” He made a show of peering ahead with concern.

But the Lincoln ahead had actually
slowed
, and now another one just like it was speeding up from behind. “Other stuff,” he added—nearly in a whisper, for something really did seem to be going on here. His palms were suddenly damp on the wheel.

There was a cross street to the right ahead, and he waited until the last instant to touch the brake and whip the wheel around to cut directly across the right-hand lane; the tires were screeching, and a bar-time jolt of vertigo made him open the sharp turn a little wider before the van could roll over, and then he had stamped the gas pedal and they were roaring down the old residential street.

A glance in the mirror showed him the second Lincoln coming up fast behind him. He could hear the roar of the car’s engine.

“Bad guys,” he said breathlessly. “Fasten your belts—kid, get down somewhere. I’m gonna try to outrun ‘em. They want us alive.”

The other Lincoln had somehow looped back, and was now rushing up behind the nearer one, which was swerving to pass Sullivan on the left. Sullivan jerked the wheel that way to cut the car off, and he kept his foot hard on the gas pedal.

A loud, rapid popping began, and the van shuddered and rang and shook as splinters whined around the seats. Sullivan snatched his foot off the gas and stomped the brake; Elizalde tumbled against the dashboard as the front end dropped and the tires screamed, and then as the van slewed and ground to a halt, and rocked back, he slammed it into reverse and gave it full throttle again.

The closer Lincoln had driven up a curb and run over a trash can. Sullivan had to hunch around to watch the other one through the narrow frames of the back windows, for the door mirror had been blown out; the van’s rear end was whipping wildly back and forth as Sullivan fought the wheel, and he heard five or six more shots, but then the second Lincoln too had driven up onto a lawn to get out of Sullivan’s lunatic way, and the van surged back-end foremost right out into the muddle of Lucas Avenue.

A hard, smashing impact punched the van, and as Sullivan’s chin clunked the top of the seat back he heard two more crashes a little farther away. The van was stalled, and he clanked it into neutral and cranked at the starter. Feathers were
flying around the stove and the bed in the back, where he had last seen the kid. At last the engine caught.

Sullivan threw the shift into Drive again and turned around to face out the starred windshield, and he hit the gas and the van sped away down Lucas with only a diminishing clatter of glass and metal in its wake.

Sullivan drove quickly but with desperate concentration, yanking the wheel back and forth to pass cars, and pushing his way through red lights while looking frantically back and forth and leaning on the horn.

When he was sure that he had at least momentarily lost any pursuit, he took a right turn, and then an immediate left into a service alley behind a row of street-facing stores. There was an empty parking space between two trucks, but his sweaty hands were trembling so badly that he had to back and fill for a full minute before he had got the vehicle into the space and pushed the gearshift lever into park.