Expiration Date (58 page)

“Kid,” Sullivan croaked, too shaky even to turn around, “are you all right?” His mouth was dry and tasted like old pennies.

In the sudden quiet, over the low rumble of the idling engine, he could now hear the boy sobbing; but the boy’s voice strangled the sobs long enough to choke out, “No worse than I was before.”

“‘They
want us alive,’”
said Elizalde from where she was crumpled under the dashboard. She climbed back up into the seat and shook glass out of her disordered black hair. “I’m glad you’ve got these guys figured out, you asshole.”

“Are you hit?” Sullivan asked her, his voice pitched too high. “They were shooting at us. Am
I
hit?” He spread his hands and looked down at himself, then shuffled his feet around to see them. He didn’t see any blood, or feel any particular pain or numbness anywhere.

“No,” said Elizalde after looking herself over. “What do we do now?”

“You—you left your jumpsuit in Solville. Get a jacket of mine from the closet in the back, and a T-shirt or something for the kid. Disguises. I got a baseball cap back there you can tuck your hair up into. You two take a bus back, you’ll look like a mother and son. I’ll drive the van, and—I don’t know, take backstreets or something. I think I’ll be out of trouble once I get on the freeway, but you’d be safer traveling in something besides this van.”

“Why don’t we all take the bus?” asked Elizalde. “Abandon the van?”

“He’d have to abandon the stuff he bought,” said the boy, who was still sniffling, “and a couple of these things aren’t useless rubbish.”

“Thanks, sonny,” said Sullivan, not happy that the kid had been examining his purchases. Then, to Elizalde, he said, “Oh—here.” He unsnapped the fanny-pack belt and pulled it free of his waist. “Have you ever shot a .45?”

“No. I don’t believe in guns.”

“Oh, they do exist, trust me.” He pulled the loop and the zippers sprang open, exposing the grip of the pistol under two straps. “See? Here’s one now.”

“I saw it last night, remember? I
meant
I don’t
like
them.”

“Oh,
like
them,” said Sullivan as he popped the snap on the straps and drew the pistol out of the holster sewed inside the fanny pack. Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, he managed to push the magazine-release button beside the trigger guard, but missed catching the magazine as it slid out of the grip. It clunked on the floorboards and he let it lie there. “I don’t
like
’em. I don’t
like
dental surgery, either, or motorcycle helmets, or prostate examinations.”

He pulled the slide back, and the stubby bullet that had been in the chamber flicked out and bounced off Elizalde’s forehead.

“Ow,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“That’s a Colt,” said the boy, who had shuffled up behind Sullivan’s seat. “Army issue since 1911.”

“Right,” said Sullivan, peripherally beginning to wonder who the hell this boy was.

The slide was locked back, exposing the shiny barrel, and he tripped the slide release and it snapped forward, hooding the barrel again. He held the gun out toward her, grip first and barrel up, and after a long moment she took it.

“It’s unloaded now,” he said, “but of course you always assume it is loaded. Go ahead and shoot it through the floor—hold it with both hands. Jesus, not that way! Your thumbs have got to be around the
side;
that slide on the top comes back, hard, and if you’ve got your thumb over the back of it that way…well, you’ll have another severed thumb to stick in your shoe.”

She rearranged her hands, then pointed the pistol at the floor. Her finger visibly tightened on the trigger for several seconds—and then there was an abrupt, tiny click as the hammer snapped down.

Elizalde exhaled sharply.

“Nothing to it, hey?” said Sullivan. “Now, it’s got fair recoil, so get the barrel back down in line with your target before you take your second shot. The gun recocks itself, so all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger again. And again, if you need to. You’ll have seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, eight in all. If you
hit
a guy with one of ‘em, you’ll knock him down for sure.”

She took hold of the slide with her left hand and tried to pull it back as Sullivan had done; she got it halfway back against the compression of the spring, and had to let go.

“Try it again,” said Sullivan, “but instead of pulling the slide back with your left hand, just hold it steady, and push the gun forward with your right.” He was nervous about having the pistol unloaded for so many seconds, but wanted her to have as much sketchy familiarity with it as might be possible.

This time she managed to cock it, and again dry-fired it at the floor.

“Good.” Sullivan retrieved the fallen magazine and slid it up into the grip until it clicked, then jacked a round into the chamber and released the magazine again to
tuck into the top of it the bullet that had bounced off Elizalde’s forehead. He slid the magazine into the grip again and clicked the safety up.

“Cocked and locked,” he said, handing it back to her carefully. “This fan-shaped ridged thing behind the trigger is the safety; pop it down, and then all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger. Keep it in the fanny pack, under the jacket, and don’t let the kid play with it.”

Sullivan’s chest felt hollow, and he was sweating with misgivings about this. He could have set up the pistol with the chamber empty, but he wasn’t confident that she’d be able to work the slide in a panicky second; and he could have left the hammer down, along with the safety engaged, but that would require that she remember two moves, and have the time for them, in that hypothetical panicky second.

“You still got money?” he asked her.

“Three or four of the twenties, and some ones and some change.”

“Fine. Grab the clothes and scoot.” To his own surprise, his head bobbed forward as if to kiss her; but he caught himself and leaned back.

She blinked. “Right.” To the boy, she said, “Is your name Kootie or Al?”

The boy’s mouth twitched, but finally he said, “Kootie.”

“All right, Kootie, let’s outfit ourselves and then get the hell out of here.”

I
N THE
dim living room of Joey Webb’s motel room off Grand Boulevard in Venice, Loretta deLarava sat on the bed and blotted her tears with a silk handkerchief. Obstadt’s man Canov had put her on hold, and she had been sitting here now lor
ten minutes
it seemed like, and the room reeked because Joey Webb, suspicious in an unfamiliar environment, had resumed his old precaution of hiding half-eaten Big Macs and Egg McMuffins behind the furniture.

“Hello, Loretta,” said Obstadt at last. His voice was echoing and weak. “Neal, I
know
about it, so don’t even waste a moment with lies. Why are you trying to impede me? You had your people try to
kill
Sullivan and the Parganas boy an hour ago! You should thank God that they got away. Now I want you to help me find them—and they’d better not be dead!—or I’ll call the police about the incident. I want, immediately, all the information you have—”

Obstadt inhaled loudly, and coughed. “Shut up, Loretta.”

“You can’t tell
me
to shut up! I can call spirits from the vasty deep—”

“Me too, babe, but do they come when you call? Face it, Loretta, nobody gives the least particle of a rat’s ass about your…
magical prowess.”

Over the line she heard a familiar metallic splashing. The man was urinating! He had
begun
urinating during the conversation! He was going on in his new, labored voice: “You work for me, now, Miss Keith—sorry, Mrs. Sullivan—oh hell, I guess I know you well enough to just call you
Kelley
, don’t I?”

DeLarava just sat perfectly still, her damp handkerchief in front of her eyes. “I know you’re busy tomorrow,” Obstadt said, “so I’ll drive down and say…’Hi!’… at your ghost shoot on the
Queen Mary.
I need to quiz you about a problem that can arise in this ghost-eating business. And you’ll tell me everything you know.”

The line went dead. Slowly she lowered the phone back down onto the cradle. Then her hands flew to her temples and pressed inward, helping the rubber bands constrict her skull and keep the pieces of her mind from flying away like a flock of baby chicks when the shadow of the hawk was sweeping the ground.

“The egged van was at the canals yesterday,” remarked Webb, who was sitting cross-legged on top of the TV set.

She dragged her attention away from the stark fact that her false identity had been blown. (If Obstadt talked, and Nicky Bradshaw stepped forward and talked, she could conceivably be arraigned for murder; and, even worse, everyone would see through the deLarava personality to the fragmented fraud that was Kelley Keith; and even if Obstadt told no one,
he
knew,
he
could—intolerably—see it.)

“The van,” she said dully; then she blinked. “The
egged
van, Pete’s van! You didn’t call me? He was
here in Venice
? What was he doing?”

“Relax, ma’am! He wasn’t here. He must have loaned the van to a friend. This was a curly-haired shorter guy in a fancy coat with breakaway sleeves.”

“Breakaway sleeves…? Oh, Jesus, that was
Houdini
you saw! It was Sullivan wearing ray goddamn
Houdini
mask!”

“That was Pete Sullivan? This guy didn’t look anything like your pictures of him.” Webb frowned in thought. “Not at first, anyway. He did get taller.” “Damn it, it was him, trust me. What was he doing?”

“Oh. Oh, chatting up a bird. A-sparkin and a-spoonin’, I’m assumin’. Mex gal. She got taller too, after a while. She was trying to reason with a guy who was in love with her, a sulking man hiding in a drainage pipe. But when Neat Pete showed up with his joke dinner jacket and fine white hands, she decided to chat with him instead. They stood in a parking lot that was in a traffic whirlpool, so I couldn’t intuit what they said. Dig this—there was a Venice Farmer’s Market in that very parking lot this morning! I bought various vegetable items. I will cook a
ratatouille.”

“Shut up, Joey, I’m trying to think.” Who on earth, she wondered, could this “Mex gal” be? Not just someone he met by chance, if the two of them took the precaution of talking in an eye of traffic. And the mask seems to have covered her too, giving her the appearance of some other person, which undoubtedly would have been Houdini’s wife, Bess!
(What a mask!)
(May thieving Sukie Sullivan’s ghost be snorted up by a shit-eating rat!) Was Pete in Venice looking for his father’s ghost? Did he
find
Apie’s ghost? What—

“Ratatouille,”
said Webb, “is an eggplant-based vegetable medley. I tried to write
MISTER ELEGANT
once on a T-shirt, and it was days before I realized that I’d got it wrong, and I’d been walking around labeled
MISTER EGGPLANT.”

“Shut up, Joey.” The Parganas kid, she thought, and Pete, and the “Mex gal” will be running scared now, keeping low; but maybe I can still get a line on Nicky Bradshaw. I’ll have to check my answering machine, see if there have been any Find Spooky calls.

And and and
—Obstadt’s coming to the shoot on the
Queen Mary
tomorrow. He wants to know about some “problem that can arise with this ghost-eating business.” (How vulgar of him to speak plainly about it!) I’ll have to watch for a weakness in him, and be ready to assert myself. There’ll be high voltage, and steep companionways—and the whole damned ocean, right over any rail.

“You don’t seem to be
getting ahold
of anybody, do you?” Webb said, smiling and shaking his head.

“Joey,
shut
the fuck
up
and get
out
of my stinking
face
, will you?” She levered her bulk off of the bed and swung herself toward the door of the motel room. “Keep looking for
Arthur Patrick
Sullivan. He’s got to be here, or be coming ashore in the next twelve hours—you haven’t left this area, and you’d have sensed him if he was
awake
anywhere within several blocks of here, wouldn’t you?”

“Like American Bandstand.” Webb hopped down from atop the TV set, agile as an old monkey. “He can’t have got past the walls of my awareness,” he said, nodding mechanically. “Unless someone opened the gate to a Trojan horse. A Trojan sea horse, that would be, locally.”

“A Trojan…sea horse.” Her face was suddenly cold, and a moment later the marrow in her ribs tingled.

“Oh my God that
fish
, that goddamn
fish
!” she whispered. “Could Apie have been hiding inside that fish?”
I am in control of nothing at all
, she thought dazedly.

Webb gave her a look that momentarily seemed lucid. “If so, he’s gone.”

“If so,” she said, pressing her temples again, “he’s in L.A. somewhere.” She was panting, clutching at straws. “He’ll probably try to find Pete.”

“Oh well then, said Webb with a shrug and a grin. “Find one and you’ve found them both, right? It’s that simple!”

“That simple,” echoed deLarava, still panting. Tears were spilling down her shaking cheeks again, and she blundered out the door.