Expiration Date (42 page)

No parties of tourists were being shown through the room at the moment, so she collapsed into one of the convention-hotel chairs and buried her face in her hands.

She had dreamed of a group of little girls who were camping out on a dark plain. At first they had played games around the small fire they had kindled up—a make-believe tea party, charades, hopscotch on lines toed across the gray dust—bur then the noises from the darkness beyond the ring of firelight had made them huddle together. Roars and shouts of subhuman fury had echoed from unseen hills, and the drumbeat of racing hooves and the hard flutter of flags had shaken in the cold wind.

Perhaps the girls had gathered together in this always-dark wasteland because they all had the same name—Kelley. They had formed a ring now, holding hands to contain their camp fire and chattering with tearful, nervous, false cheer, until one of the girls noticed that her companions weren’t real—they were all just mirrors set up closely together in the dirt, reflecting back to her own pale, dirt-smeared face.

And her sudden terror made the face change—the nose was turned up, and became fleshier, the skin around the eyes became pouched and coarse, and the chin receded away, leaving the mouth a long, grinning slit. Kelley had known what this was. She was turning into a pig.

Loretta had driven herself up out of the well of sleep then, and discovered that she was kneeling on the tile floor of the little bathroom, crouching over the toilet and calling down, down, down into the dark so that Kelley might find her way back up out of the deep hole she’d fallen into.

T
HERE WERE
no parking lines painted on the weathered checkerboard of cracked concrete and asphalt behind the apartment building, so Sullivan just parked the van in the shade of a big shaggy old carob tree. He dug around among the faded papers on the dashboard until he found Houdini’s thumb, unpleasantly spitty and dusty now, and then he groped below the passenger seat and retrieved the Bull Durham sack and pushed the thumb back into it.

With the sack in his shirt pocket and his gun snugged in under his belt, he pushed open the door and stepped down onto the broken pavement. Green carob pods were scattered under the overhanging tree branches, and he could see the little V-shaped cuts in the pods where early-morning wild parrots had bitten out the seeds.

This would be the sixth apartment building he checked out. When he had come down off the freeway at Seventh Street in Long Beach, he had quickly confirmed his suspicion that motels never had garages, and then he’d driven around randomly through the run-down residential streets west of Pacific and south of Fourth looking for rental signs.

He had stopped and looked at five places already, and, no doubt because of his stated preference for paying in cash, only a couple of the landlords had seemed concerned about his murky, out-of-state, unverifiable references. He thought he would probably take the last one he had looked at, a $700-a-month studio apartment in a shabby complex on Cerritos Avenue, but he had decided to look at a few more before laying out his money.

He was down on Twenty-first Place now, right next to Bluff Park and only half a block from the harbor shore, and he had just decided that any of these beachfront rentals would be too expensive, when he had driven past this rambling old officelike structure. He wouldn’t even have thought it was an apartment building if it hadn’t had an
APT FOR RENT
sign propped above the row of black metal mailboxes. It looked promisingly low-rent.

Sullivan walked across the pavement now toward the back side of the building, and soon he was scuffing on plain packed dirt. Along the building’s back wall, between two windowless doors, someone had set up a row of bookshelves, on which sat dozens of mismatched pots with dry plants curling out of them, and off to his left plastic chairs sat around a claw-footed iron bathtub that had been made into a table by having a piece of plywood laid over it. He stared at the doors and wondered if he should just knock at one of them.

He jumped; and then, “Who parked all cattywampus?” came a hoarse call from behind him.

Sullivan turned around and saw a fat, bald-headed old man in plastic sandals limping across the asphalt from around the street-side corner of the building. The man wore no shirt at all, and his suntanned belly overhung the wide-legged shorts that flapped around his skinny legs.

“Are you talking about my van?” asked Sullivan.

“Well, if that’s your van,” the old man said weakly; he inhaled and then went on, “then guess I’m talking about it.” Again he rasped air into his lungs. “Ya damn birdbrain”

“I’m here to speak to the manager of these apartments,” Sullivan said stiffly.

“I’m the manager. My name’s Mr. Shadroe.”

Sullivan stared at him. “You are?” He was afraid this might be just some bum making fun of him. “Well, I want to rent an apartment.”

“I don’t
need
to…
rent
an apartment.” Shadroe waved at the van. “If that leaks oil, you’ll have to…park it on the street.” The old man’s face was shiny with sweat, but somehow he smelled spicy, like cinnamon.

“It doesn’t leak oil,” Sullivan said. “I’m looking for an apartment in this area; how much is the one you’ve got?”

“You on SDI or some—kinda methadone treatment? I won’t take you if you are, and I—don’t care if it’s legal for me to say so. And I won’t have children here.”

“None of those things,” Sullivan assured him. “And if I decide I want the place I can pay you right now, first and last month’s rent, in cash.”

“That’s illegal, too. The first and last. Gotta call the last months rent a
deposit
nowadays. But I’ll take it. Six hundred a month, utilities are included….’cause the whole building’s on one bill. That’s twelve hundred, plus a
real
deposit of…three hundred dollars. Fifteen. Hundred, altogether. Let’s go into my office and I can…give you a receipt and the key.” Talking seemed to be an effort for the man, and Sullivan wondered if he was asthmatic or had emphysema.

Shadroe had already turned away toward one of the two doors and Sullivan stepped after him. ‘I’d,” he said laughing in spite of himself, “I’d like to see the place first.”

Shadroe had fished a huge, bristling key chain from his shorts pocket and was unlocking the door. “It’s got a new refrigerator—in it, I hooked it up myself yesterday. I do all my—own electrical and plumbing. What do you do?”

“Do? Oh, I’m a bartender.” Sullivan had heard that bartenders tended to be reliable tenants.

Shadroe had pushed the door open, and now waved Sullivan toward the dark interior. “That’s honest work, boy,” he said. “You don’t need to be ashamed.”

“Thanks.”

Sullivan followed him into a long, narrow room dimly lit by foliage-blocked windows. A battered couch sat against one of the long walls and a desk stood across from it under the windows; over the couch were rows of bookshelves like the ones outside, empty except for stacks of old
People
magazines and, on the top shelf, three water-stained pink stuffed toys. A television set was humming faintly on a table, though its screen was black.

Shadroe pulled out the desk chair and sat down heavily. “Here’s a rental agreement,” he said, tugging a sheet of paper out of a stack. “No pets either. What are those shoes? Army-man shoes?”

Sullivan was wearing the standard shoes worn by tramp electricians, black leather with steel-reinforced toes. “Just work shoes,” he said, puzzled. “Good for standing in,” he added, feeling like an idiot.

“They gotta go. I got wood floors, and you’ll be boomin’ around all night—nobody get any sleep—I get complaints about it. Get yourself some
Wallabees,”
he said with a look, of pained earnestness. “The soles are
foam rubber”

The rental agreement was a Xerox copy, and the bottom half of it hadn’t printed clearly. Shadroe began laboriously filling in the missing paragraphs in ink. Sullivan just sat helplessly and watched the old man squint and frown as his spotty brown hand worked the pen heavily across the paper.

The old man’s cinnamon smell was stronger in here, and staler. The room was silent except for the scratching of the pen and the faint hum of the television set, and Sullivan’s hairline was suddenly damp with sweat.

He found himself thinking of the containment areas of nuclear generating plants, where the pressure was kept slightly below normal to keep radioactive dust from escaping; and of computer labs kept under higher-than-normal pressure to keep ordinary dust out. Some pressure was wrong in this dingy office

I don’t want to stay here, he thought. I’m not
going
to stay here.

“While you’re doing that,” he said unsteadily, “I might go outside and look around at the place.”

“I’ll’ be done here. In a second.”

“No, really, I’ll be right outside.”

Sullivan walked carefully to the door and stepped out into the sunlight, and then he hurried across the patchwork pavement to his van, taking deep breaths of the clean sea air.

That apartment back up on Cerritos looks good, he told himself. (This place is only half a block from the beach, and I could probably see the
Queen Mary
across the water from the cul-de-sac right beyond the driveway, but) I certainly couldn’t count on getting anything done here, not with this terrible Shadroe guy blundering around.

He unlocked the van door, carefully so as not to touch the drying egg-smear, and climbed in. Mr. Shadroe was probably still sitting back there in the office, carefully writing out the missing paragraphs of the rental agreement; not even breathing as his clumsy fingers worked the pen.

Sullivan pulled the door closed, but paused with the key halfway extended toward the ignition. The man hadn’t been breathing.

Shadroe had
inhaled
a number of times, in order to talk, but he had not been breathing. Sullivan was suddenly, viscerally sure that that’s what had so upset him in there—he had been standing next to a walking vapor lock, the pressure of a living soul in the vacuum of a dead body.

What are you telling me? he asked himself; that Mr. Shadroe is a
dead
guy? If so, I should
definitely
get out of here, fast, before some shock causes him to throw
stress-shells, and his overdrawn lifeline collapses and he goes off like a goddamn firebomb, like the patient at Elizalde’s Día del Muerte séance.

Still uncomfortable with the idea, he put the key into the ignition.

Shadroe could be alive, he thought—he could just have been breathing very low, very quietly. Oh yeah? he answered himself immediately. When he inhaled in order to
speak
, it sounded like somebody dragging a tree branch through a mail slot.

Maybe he’s just one of the old solidified ghosts, a man-shaped pile of animated litter, who drifted down here to be near the ocean, as Elizalde in her interview unaware of how literally she was speaking, noted that the poor old creatures like to do.
(“Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface…”)
But Shadroe didn’t quite talk crazily enough, and a ghost wouldn’t be able to deal with the paperwork of running an apartment building; collecting rents, paying taxes and license and utility bills.

Okay, so what if he is one of the rare people who can continue to occupy and operate their bodies after they’ve died? What’s it to me?

Sullivan twisted the key, and the engine started right up, without even a touch of his foot on the gas pedal.

I wonder how long he’s been dead, he thought. If his death was recent, like during the last day or so, he probably hasn’t even noticed it himself yet; but if he’s been hanging on for a while, he must have figured out measures to avoid the collapse: he must not ever sleep for example, and I’ll bet he spends a lot of time out on the ocean.

C…patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water It’s been worth field trips.”)

He didn’t want to think, right now, about what Elizalde had said in the interview.

What would that blind witch on the Honda see, he wondered instead, if she were to come around here? With a dead guy up and walking around all over this building and grounds, insulting people’s vehicles and shoes, this whole place must look like a patch of dry rot, psychically.

This place
would
be good cover.

And the location is perfect for me. And six hundred a month, with utilities included—and a new refrigerator!—is pretty good.

Sullivan sighed, and switched off the engine and got out of the van. When he had walked back across the yard and stepped into the office, Shadroe was still at work on the rental agreement. Sullivan sat down on the couch to wait, stoically enduring the psychically stressed atmosphere.

(“Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”)

“If you’ll take cash right now, he said unsteadily, “I’d like to start moving my stuff in this afternoon.”

“If you right now got the time,” said Shadroe, without looking up. “I right now got the key.”