Expiration Date (40 page)

He thought: How quickly can they get here, today?

Warning—you are too close to the vehicle.

Sullivan was out of the chair and walking toward the front door and feeling in his pocket for the keys to the van.

“Pete! Hey, where you going, man?”

Sullivan pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight. Behind him he heard Buddy yell, “Goddammit,” and heard Buddy’s feet pounding on the wooden floor.

Sullivan was running too.

He had the van key between his thumb and forefinger by the time he slammed into the driver’s-side door, and he didn’t let himself look behind him until he had piled inside and twisted the key in the ignition.

Buddy had run to a white Toyota parked two slots away; he had the door open and was scrambling in.

Sullivan jerked the gearshift into reverse and goosed the van out of the parking slot, swinging the rear end toward Buddy’s Toyota; the Toyota backed out too, so Sullivan bared his teeth and just stomped the gas pedal to the floor.

With a jarring metallic
bam
the van stopped, and Sullivan could hear glass tinkling to the pavement as the back of his head bounced off the padded headrest. Luckily the van hadn’t stalled. He reached forward and clanked the gearshift all the way over into low and tromped on the gas again.

Metal squeaked and popped, and then he was free of the smashed Toyota. He glanced into the driver’s-side mirror as he swung the wheel toward the exit, and he flinched as he saw Buddy step out and throw something; a moment later he heard a crack against his door and saw wet strings and tiny white fragments fly away ahead of him. Then he was rocking down the driveway out onto Cherokee amid screeching rubber and car horns, and wrenching the van around to the left to gun away down the street south, away from Hollywood Boulevard. He slapped the gearshift lever up into Drive.

He caught a green light and turned left again on Selma, and then drove with his left hand while he dug the Bull Durham sack out of his shirt pocket. Feeling like a cowboy rolling a smoke one-handed, he shook the dried thumb into his palm and tossed the sack away, then drove holding the thumb out in front of his face, his knuckles against the windshield. It felt like a segment of a greasy tree branch, but he clung to it gratefully.

Out of the silvery liquid glare of the cold sunlight, a big gold Honda motorcycle was cruising toward him in the oncoming lane; he couldn’t see the rider behind the gleaming windshield and fairing, but the passenger was a rail-thin old woman sitting up high against the sissy bar, her gray hair streaming behind, unconfined by any sort of helmet…and she was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna tied right over her eyes.

Her head was swiveling around, tilted back as though she was trying to smell or hear something. Sullivan inched the thumb across the inside of the windshield to keep it blocking the line from her blindfolded face to his own.

Sweat stung his eyes, and he forced himself not to tromp on the accelerator now; the Honda could outmaneuver him anywhere, even if he got out and ran. (The shadows of wheeling, shouting crows flickered over the lanes.) And it was probably only one of a number of vehicles trolling between Highland and Cahuenga right now.

God, he prayed desperately as a tree and a parking lot trundled past outside his steamy window, let me get clear of this and I swear I’ll
learn.
I won’t blunder into predictable patterns again,
trust me.

The 101 Freeway was only a couple of big blocks ahead, and he ached for the breezy freedom of its wide gray lanes.

Keening behind his clenched teeth, he pulled over to the Selma Avenue curb and put the engine into Park.

He sprang out of the driver’s seat and scrambled into the back, tossing the mattress off the folded-out bed. Buddy would even now be telling them that Sullivan was in a brown Dodge van, but they’d recognize him even sooner if he didn’t have the full mask working. They would already have been given his name, his birth date,
too much of what was himself.
When he and Sukie had worked together they had been a good pair of mirror images, being twins, and so there had been no solid figure for a ghost or a tracker to focus on; but now he was alone, discrete, quantified, discontinuous. Identifiable.

He had to grip the thumb between his teeth to bend over and lift the plaster hands out of the compartment under the bed, and he was gagging as he hopped forward and slid back into the driver’s seat. He laid one plaster hand on the dashboard and grotesquely stuck the other upright between his legs as he put the van back into gear and carefully pulled out away from the curb.

The Honda had looped back, and now was passing him on the left. The riders hadn’t had time to have talked to Buddy, but the old woman swung her head around to blindly face Sullivan, and peripherally he could see the frown creasing her forehead.

She’s sensing a psychic blur, he thought; a mix of Houdini’s birth and life, and my own. She won’t be catching any echoes of Houdini’s death, because the old magician was masked for that event, and got away clean even though he died
on
perilous Halloween. She’ll be wondering if I’m a schizophrenic, or on acid—what it is that makes the driver of this vehicle such a psychic sackful of broken mirror. (He even felt a little different—his jacket seemed looser and lighter, though he didn’t dare look down at himself right now.)

He groped through his mind for any remembered prayer—
Our Father…? Hail Mary…?
—but came up with nothing but a stanza of verse from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books, a bit Sukie had liked to recite:

The motorcycle drifted past outside his window and pulled in ahead of him; through the close glass of the windshield he could hear the bass drumbeat of the
motorcycle’s exhaust pipes, and through the fluttering gray hair he could see the old woman’s jaw twisted back toward him; but he kept a steady, moderate pressure on the gas pedal, though his legs felt like electrified bags of water. Was the driver of one of these cars around him seeing some signal from the old woman? Was he about to be cut off? They wanted him alive, but only so that deLarava could use him as lure for his father’s ghost.

In a hoarse voice he quoted more of the Alice scripture, thinking of Sukie and mentally hearing her remembered recitation of it:

The brake lights flashed on the transom of the gold motorcycle—but its rider leaned the heavy bike around in a U-turn and then accelerated back toward Cherokee, the diminishing roar of its engine rising and falling as the rider clicked rapidly up through the gears. Sullivan’s jacket was heavy and tight again.

He spat the old brown thumb out onto the dashboard and gagged hoarsely, squinting to be able to see ahead through tears of nausea.

He turned left on Wilcox, and then right onto the crowded lanes of eastbound Hollywood Boulevard. Don’t puke on yourself, he thought as he squinted at the cars glinting in the sunlight ahead of him. It looks like you got away this time. Now stay away. Hide. Buddy will have described the van, and might even have got the license number.

The thought of Buddy reminded him of the missile his old friend had thrown at the van as Sullivan had committed hit-and-run. Stopped at a red light, Sullivan now rolled down the driver’s-side window and craned his neck to look at the outside of the door.

A branching pattern of viscous wetness was splattered from the door handle to the front headlight. It was clear stuff mottled with yellow and dotted with angular bits of white, and half a dozen vertical trickles had already run down the fender from the initial horizontal streaking.

Buddy’s missile had been a raw egg.

The schoolboy-prankishness of the gesture was disarming. He egged my van, Sullivan thought; after I smashed the front end of his car! How could he have been colluding with deLarava at one moment and doing something as goofy as this in the next? I must have been wrong—poor Buddy wasn’t guilty of anything but beery tactlessness back there in the restaurant, and then he must really have been calling some business associate when he went to the phone. I should go back, and apologize, and agree to pay for getting his car fixed. This was
pure
paranoia. Even the people on the motorcycle had probably just been—

No. Sullivan remembered the old woman sitting high up against the sissy bar, blindfolded against visual distractions and sniffing the breeze, and he couldn’t make himself believe that the pair on the Honda had been random passersby.

He kept driving straight ahead.

East of Vine, the street stopped seeming to be Hollywood Boulevard, and was just another Los Angeles street, with office buildings and CD stores and boarded-up theaters, and red-and-yellow-blooming wild lantana bushes crouched in the squares of curbside dirt; but when he glanced out of his open window he saw, a smoky mile to the north against the green Griffith Park hills, the old white
HOLLYWOOD
sign—and for just a moment, to his still-watering eyes, it had seemed to read
HALLOWEEN.

Not for two days yet, he thought, and he spat again to get rid of the taste of Houdini’s thumb. I’ve got about thirty-six hours.

Just past Van Ness he turned right onto the 101 southbound. The freeway was wide open and cars were moving along rapidly for once, and he gunned down the ramp with the gas pedal to the floor so as to be up to speed when he merged into the right lane.

A. O. fucking P., he thought as he took his first deep breath in at least five minutes.
On the freeways, there you feel free.

He remembered now, now that he was at long last experiencing it again, the always-downstream rush of driving along open fast-moving freeway lanes. Up here above the surface streets, above them even if the freeway was sluicing through a valley, the real world off to the sides was reduced to a two-dimensional projection of sketchy hills and skyscraper silhouettes, and you dealt with the
names
of places, spelled out in reflector-studded white on the big green signs that swept past overhead, rather than with the grimy stop-and-go places themselves; even the spidery calligraphy of gang graffiti markers, looping across the signs in defiance of barbed wire and precarious perches and rushing traffic below, were formal
symbols
of senseless-killing neighborhoods, rather than the neighborhoods themselves.

Other drivers were just glimpsed heads in the gleaming solidity of rushing cars in this world of lanes and connectors; space and time were abridged, and a moment’s inattention could have you blinking at unfamiliar street names in Orange County or Pomona.

Sullivan had to find a place to stay, a place with a garage. After this, he couldn’t keep living in the van out on the streets. And he wanted to be close to deLarava, without putting himself in the way of her possibly stumbling across him.

Just short of the towers of downtown he turned south on the Harbor Freeway, toward Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor…and the
Queen Mary.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

F
RANCIS
Strube’s black leather electric office chair was acting up. It was made by the McKie Company, which was supposed to manufacture the best race-car seats, and he had punched the button on the “comfort console” to pump up the lower-back region, but it had inflated out grossly, to the size of a watermelon, and in order to sit back with his shoulders against the top of the chair he had to push out his chest and belly like a pouter pigeon.

Ludicrous. He leaned forward instead, dividing his attention between the flimsy sheets of fax paper in his hand and the man in the seat across the desk. The Goudie Snuff people—after extorting a thousand dollars out of him!—had printed out their mailing list in some kind of minimalist dot-matrix, and Strube was afraid he’d have to get Charlotte to puzzle it out for him.

‘But,” said the client uncertainly, “would that be best for them?”

Strube looked up at him. What dreary aspect of the man’s divorce case had they been discussing? Damn the chair. He pushed the “deflate” button several times, but the leather-covered swelling behind his kidneys didn’t diminish; if anything, it swelled more. But he put patient concern in his voice as he asked, “Best for whom?”

“Whom
we’re talking about, Mr. Strube! Heather and Krystle!”

These, Strube recalled, were the man’s daughters. He remembered now that custody of the children had been the topic at hand.

“Well, of
course
it would be best for
them,”
Strube said, indicating by his tone that he was way ahead of the man, and had not lost track of the conversation at all. “Our
primary
concern is the well-being of Heather and Krystle.” Strube had made a bad impression early on, when, having only read the girls’ names on the information form, he had pronounced the second one to rhyme with
gristle
rather than
Bristol

“But,” went on the father of the girls, waving his hands bewilderedly, “you want me to demand alternating custody of the girls, a week with me and then a week with Debi, and then a week with me again? How would that work? They’d have to pack their clothes and…and toothbrushes and schoolbooks and…don’t even know
what all. Every weekend! Would Debi be supposed to feed their goldfish, every other week? They wouldn’t even know what was in the refrigerator half the time. The girls I mean.”

Rather than the goldfish, thought Strube. I follow you. “It’s your right—and it’s to their benefit,” he said soothingly. “For two weeks out of every month they’d be living with you, in a normal, nurturing environment, away from that woman’s influences.” He let his gaze fall back to where the fax sheets lay in a patch of slanting sunlight on the desk. Most of the customers for Goudie snuff were shops, but there were a couple that seemed to be residential addresses. He noticed one on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana, and drew a checkmark beside it. Santa Ana was just an hour away, down in Orange County—that could easily be where Nicky Bradshaw was hiding out these days. Strube reminded himself that he would have to scout all the likely addresses, and actually see Bradshaw at one of them; he wouldn’t get the credit for having
found Spooky
if he just sent in half a dozen likely addresses.