Expiration Date (71 page)

“They could only find the thumb,” said deLarava hoarsely, looking right up at the skylight now. “Where are the hands?”

“Lost in the Venice canals,” said Sullivan at once. “I tried to fish them out, but they dissolved in the salt water like…like Alka-Seltzer.” Jammed behind him, his left hand was digging in his hip pocket; all that was in there was his wallet—containing nothing but ID cards and a couple of twenty-dollar bills—and his pocket comb.

“Why
are we going to the
Queen Mary?”
asked Elizalde.

“To enjoy—” began deLarava; but her hair abruptly sprang up into a disordered topknot, drawing startled gasps from Kootie and Elizalde. And deLarava began to sob quietly.

Sullivan was aware of an itch in his right ear, but his father’s ghost didn’t say anything.

T
HE
J
EEP
Cherokee was leading the procession, and when it turned left off Ocean onto Queen’s Way the two trucks followed.

J. Francis Strube didn’t dare hunch around in his seat, for the man in back was presumably still holding a gun pointed at him, but he could peer out of the corners of his eyes. They had driven past the new Long Beach Convention Center on the left, and past Lincoln Park on the right, and now they were cruising downhill toward a vista of bright blue lagoons and sailboats and lawns and palm trees. Out across the
mile-long expanse of the harbor he could see the black hull and the white upper decks of the
Queen Mary
shining in the early-morning sunlight.

The car radio was tuned to some oldies rock station, and the driver was whistling along to the sad melody of Phil Ochs’s “Pleasures of the Harbor.”

For the past five minutes Strube had been remembering how cautious Nicholas Bradshaw used to be, when Strube had worked for him in 1975—refusing to say where he lived, never giving out his home phone number, always taking different routes to and from the law office. Maybe, Strube thought unhappily, I should have taken his paranoia more seriously. Maybe I was a little careless today, in the way I blundered into this thing. “Are we actually going to the
Queen
Mary?” he asked in a humbled voice.

The driver glanced at him in cheerful surprise. “You’ve never been on it? It’s great.”

“I’ve been there,” Strube said, defensively in spite of everything. “I’ve had dinner at Sir Winston’s many times. I meant, are we really going there now.”

“DeLarava’s scheduled a shoot there today,” the driver said. “I understood you were to be interviewed, along with that Nicky Bradshaw fellow. He was the actor who played Spooky, the teenage ghost in that old show. You must have seen reruns. He’s to do some kind of dance, was my understanding.”

Strube was squinting against his bewilderment as if it were a bright light. “But why am I handcuffed? Why all the guns?”

The man chuckled, shaking his head at the lane markers unreeling ahead of him. “Oh, she can be a regular Von Stroheim, can’t she? What’s the word? Martinet? I mean, you wanna talk about
domineering?
Get outta here!”

“But—what are you saying? What happened back there at that apartment building? You people threw all those wires and metal shutters out of the truck onto the street! And what was that awful smell?”

“Ah, there you have me.”

Strube was dizzy. “What if I try to get out, at the next red light? Would this man behind me
shoot
me?”

“Through the back of the seat,” said the driver. “Don’t do it. This isn’t a bluff, no, if that’s what you’re asking. The new automatics are ramped and throated so they have no problem feeding hollow-points, and it might not even make an exit wound, but it would surely make a hash of your vital organs. You don’t want that. In fact—” He slapped the wheel lightly and nodded. “In fact, if Sir Winston’s is open for lunch, we might be able to get her to spring for a good meal!”

“Never happen,” said the man in the back seat gloomily.

A
FTER
T
HEY
had been driving for about ten minutes, stopping and starting up again and making some slow turns, Sullivan felt the truck stop and then reverse slowly
down a ramp; and the skylight went dark, and he could hear the truck’s engine echoing inside a big metallic room. Then the engine was switched off.

Car doors chunked in the middle distance, and he could feel the shake of the truck’s driver’s-side door closing; footsteps scuffed across concrete to the truck’s back door, and the door was unlatched and swung open. The chilly air that swept into the truck’s interior smelled of oiled machinery and the sea.

“E Deck,” called a young man who was pulling a wheeled stepladder across the floor of the wide white-painted garagelike chamber. “We chased off the ship’s staff for the moment, and we’ve got guys around to whistle if they come back. They say they’ve turned off the power in the circuit boxes on the Promenade and R Decks, and the gaffers are off to patch in and get the Genie lifts and the key lights set up for the first call at ten.”

Test it with a meter anyway, thought Sullivan as his constricted left hand fingered his pocket comb. You don’t want to be hooking your dimmer-board to the lugs if somebody forgot, and there’s still a live 220 volts waiting for you in the utility panel.

Behind the fright that was dewing his forehead and shallowing his breathing, he was vaguely irritated at his suspicion that these efficient-looking young men might be better at the job than he and Sukie had been.

DeLarava was still sniffling as she clumped heavily down from rung to rung of the stepladder. “Get a couple of runners to take…the kid, and the old guy up by the front, and Pete Sullivan, he’s the guy in the white shirt…to that room they’re letting us use as an office. Gag the woman and the one-armed guy and leave them where they are for now.”

Sullivan looked at the one-armed man seated awkwardly beside him. Sherman Oaks seemed to be only semiconscious, and his breathing was a rattling, chattering whine, like a car engine with a lot of bad lifters and bearings. But the fabric of the man’s baggy brown-and-green trousers was bunching and stretching over the left thigh, as if kneaded by an invisible hand.

Does he have fingernails on that hand? wondered Sullivan. If so, are they strong enough to peel off the tape that’s holding down his flesh-and-blood arm? If he frees himself, and he’s left in here with Angelica, he’ll surely kill her to eat her ghost.

Should I tell deLarava about Oak’s unbound—unbindable!—hand? If so, he might in return tell her that my father’s ghost is on my person, and she’d fetch in some kind of mask and eat the old man with no delay.

Elizalde was sitting at Sullivan’s right, her taped ankles screwed down next to his, and he rocked his head around to look at her. Her narrow face was tense, her lips white, but she crinkled her eyes at him in a faint, scared smile.

“I’d bring Dr. Elizalde too,” Sullivan said. He was peripherally aware of an increasing ache in his left forearm; his fingers seemed to be nervously trying to pry the thick end-tooth off of his comb, which was a useless exercise since the comb was aluminum.

“Why would I want to bring Dr. Elizalde?” deLarava mused aloud.

“She’s a medical doctor as well as a psychiatrist,” Sullivan said, at random.

Sherman Oaks was singing in a whisper with each scratching exhalation now without moving his lips at all, and his voice seemed to be a chorus of children: “…
Delaware punch, tell me the initials of your honeybunch, capital A, B, C-D-E…”

“In that case bring them all!” cried deLarava; though Sullivan thought it was Oaks’s eerie singing rather than his own suggestion that had changed the old woman’s mind. “Put cats in the coffee,” she sang wildly herself, “and mice in the tea, and welcome Queen Kelley with thirty-times-three!”

Sullivan recognized the bit of verse—it was from the end of
Through the Looking-Glass
, when Alice was about to be crowned a queen.

DeLarava kept her little pistol pointed at her captives, as a runner hopped up into the truck and knifed the tape off of everyone’s ankles.

“You want that lawyer that’s in the Cherokee?” the man asked.

“Leave him where he is,” deLarava said. “Lawyers are for after.”

The fingers of Sullivan’s left hand suddenly strained very hard at the end of the aluminum pocket comb, and with a muffled snap it broke, cutting his thumb knuckle. He palmed the broken-off end when the runner hopped down from the truck and began hauling Oaks’s legs out over the bumper.

After Oaks had been propped upright against the side of the truck it was Sullivan’s turn, and when he had been lifted down he stepped back across the floor to make room for Elizalde and Kootie—and Bradshaw, the shifting of whose bulk across the truck floor required the summoning of a second runner.

Down on the deck at last, Bradshaw hopped ponderously to shake the legs of his shorts straight. “I bet those guys were gay,” he muttered.

“Don’t try to shuffle away, Pete!” said deLarava sharply; and Sullivan was tensely sure that this direct address meant that she intended to kill him very soon indeed.

“Not me, boss,” he said mildly.

When at last Bradshaw was standing next to Kootie and Elizalde on the concrete deck, deLarava pirouetted back, then mincingly led the way down a white hallway while the runners prodded the captives along after her. “O Looking-Glass creatures,” called deLarava shrilly over her shoulder, “draw near. ’Tis an honor to see me, a favor to hear.”

Sullivan managed to catch Elizalde’s glance as they fell into step, and he gave her an optimistic wink.

It wasn’t completely an empty gesture—it had just occurred to him that the hands sticking out of his shirt cuffs might well be Houdini’s. The mask wasn’t complete—he wasn’t wearing the jacket with the detachable sleeves—but that was probably because he didn’t have the whole outfit, he wasn’t carrying the magician’s dried thumb; nevertheless the plaster hands had disappeared when he had touched them, back there in the funny apartment, and now
somebody’s
left hand was clutching a bit of broken metal.

Lurching along up at the head of the procession, Sherman Oaks was tall enough to have to duck under a couple of valves connecting the pipes that ran along under the low ceiling, but the room deLarava led them into was as expansive as a TV studio. Fluorescent lights threw a white glow over two low couches against the walls and a metal desk out in the middle of the floor and rolls of cable on stacked wooden apple-boxes in a corner; deLarava waved toward one of the couches and then crossed ponderously to the desk and lowered her bulk into the chair behind it.

To the pair of her employees who had herded her captives into the room, deLarava said, “Loop a cable through their cuffs—under the arm of the one-armed fellow—and sit them down on the couch and tie the cable where they can’t reach it.”

As soon as Sullivan had been tethered and pushed down onto the couch, again sitting between Elizalde and Oaks, he felt his thumb begin to pry at one of the narrow comb-teeth that had broken away with the thick end-tooth. To explain any muscular shifting of his shoulders, he leaned forward and looked to his right—Elizalde and Kootie were whispering together, and Bradshaw, at the far end of the long couch, was just frowning and squinting around at the walls as if disapproving of the paint job.

DeLarava waved the runners out of the room with her little gun. From the floor behind the desk she lifted a big leather purse, and with her free hand she shook it out onto the desktop. Three cans of Hires Root Beer rolled out, two of them solidly full and one clattering empty; and then a brown wallet thumped down beside the cans, followed by a ring of keys.

“You recognize these, Pete?” deLarava asked, staring down at the items on the desk.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

S
ULLIVAN
didn’t answer. He took a deep breath—and thought he caught a whiff of bourbon on the air-conditioned breeze.