Last Call: Expiration Date Part 28

Then he sighed and twisted the valve on the inhaler. He heard the hiss as the pressure from the punctured cartridge filled the inside of the cylinder, and then he lifted the tube to his lips.

The hit was cold with nitrous oxide, but nausea-sweat sprang out on his forehead at the hard, static absence of the rotted thing that rode the rus.h.i.+ng incoming stench and wedged itself hopelessly sideways in the breech of his mind. The back of Obstadt's head hit the carpet as his chair went over backward, and then his knees banged against a bookcase and clattered sideways to the floor, and he was convulsing all alone on the carpet under the high blue sky.

CHAPTER 36.

"I love my love with an H," Alice couldn't help beginning, "because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous..."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s AT EYE-HEIGHT ON one of the gla.s.s shelves was a white bas-relief of Jesus done in reverse, with the face indented into a plaster block, the nose the deepest part-as if, Elizalde thought, Jesus had pa.s.sed out face-first into a bowl of meringue. Someone had at some time reached into the hollow of the face to paint the eyes with painstaking lack of skill, and as Elizalde shuffled across the linoleum floor the head gave the illusion of being convex rather than concave, and seemed to swivel to keep the moronic eyes fixed on her.

What household out there, she asked herself nervously, is decorated to near perfection, lacking only this fine objet d'art to make it complete?

Frank Rocha's house had been full of things like that-prints of Our Lady of Guadalupe, tortured Jesuses painted luridly on black velvet. Elizalde nervously touched the bulge of her wallet in her back pocket.

The old woman behind the counter smiled at her and said, "Buenas das, mi hija. Cmo puedo ayudarte?"

"Quiero hacer reparaciones a un amigo muerto," said Elizalde. How easy it was to express the idea, I want to make amends to a dead friend, in Spanis.h.!.+

The woman nodded understandingly, and bent to slide open the back of a display case. Elizalde set down her grocery bag and clasped her hands together to still their trembling. Already she had stopped at a tiny corner grocery store and bought eggs and Sugar Babies and a pint of Myers rum and a cheap plastic compa.s.s with stick.u.m on the back so that it could be glued to a winds.h.i.+eld; and in another botnica she had bought a selection of herbs in cellophane packets, and oils in little square bottles, that she had been a.s.sured habra ojos abrir del polvo, would open eyes out of the dust-all of it had been set out on the counter in response to her request for something that would call up the dead.

Out of the display arrangement of stones and garish books and cheap metal medallions, the old woman now lifted a plastic bag that contained a sprig of dried leaves: YERBA BUENA, read the hand-lettered sticker on the bag, and Elizalde didn't even have to sniff it, just had to look at the dusty, alligator-b.u.mpy leaves, to be surrounded by the remembered smell of mint; and, for the first time, she realized that the Spanish name meant good herb-over the generations her family had smoothed and elided the words to something that she would have spelled yerra vuena, which she had always taken to mean something like "fortunate error," with the noun given an unusual feminine suffix.

"Incapacita las alarmas del humo en su apartamento," the woman told her-quietly, though they were alone in the shop. "Hace un te cargado, con muchas hojas; aade algn licor, tequila o ron, y dejalo cocinar hasta que est seco, y deja las hojas cocinar hasta que estn secas, y humando y quemadas. Habla al humo."

Elizalde nodded as she memorized the instructions-disable smoke alarms in the apartment, make a strong mint tea with booze in it, then cook it dry and let the leaves smoke, and talk to the smoke.

Jesus, she thought; and then in spite of herself she glanced at the disquieting bas-relief-in-reverse, which still seemed to be turned toward her, staring.

I still like "fortunate error," she thought helplessly as she took the bag from the woman and handed her a couple of dollar bills. She tucked the dried mint into the bag with her other purchases, thanked the woman, and shuffled out of the store. Bells hung on the doorframe rang a minor chord out into the sunlight as she stepped down to the Beverly Boulevard sidewalk.

Two young boys whirled past her on bicycles, giggling, one of them riding with one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching the metal box of a car stereo. Looking in the direction they'd come from, she saw a blue scatter of car-window gla.s.s on the sidewalk, and a white-haired old woman wrapped in a curtain scooping up the bits of gla.s.s and eating them.

Up ahead of her on the other side of Beverly was the two-story, fifties-vintage building where she had rented her psychiatric office. She could see a vertical edge of it from here, and a corner of glowing green neon-it was still standing, apparently still occupied.

Well, she thought with a shudder of nausea, the fire trucks did get there d.a.m.n quick.

Elizalde had rented a suite there for only a couple of months (before that final night, two years ago tomorrow)-a tiny reception room, her office, a bathroom, and the big conference room with windows looking out over Beverly (the gla.s.s of which had burst out in the intense heat of the flames).

At her Wednesday-night seances she would have the six or eight of her patients sit around the conference table, and after lighting a dozen or so candles on the shelves she would turn out the lights and have everyone hold hands. They took turns "sharing with the dead"-reliving old disagreements, talking with the dead sometimes, crying and praying sometimes-and Elizalde had tried to insist that if someone felt the need to say f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you to the group and then storm out of the room, that it at least be done quietly.

Frank Rocha had always tried to get the seat next to Elizalde, and the palm of his hand was often damp and trembling. At the penultimate seance, a week before Halloween, he had pa.s.sed her a folded note.

She had tucked it into her pocket, and only read it later, at home.

It had been painstakingly handwritten, and some misguided idea of formality had led him to draw quotation marks around nearly every noun (... my "love" for you ... the lack of "understanding" from my "wife" ... my concern for your "needs" and "wants" ... my "efforts" to make a "life" for you and me ... the "honor" of "marrying" you ...), which gave the thing an unintended tone of sarcasm. Elizalde had telephoned him at his job the next day and, as gently as she had been able, had told him that what he had proposed was impossible.

But she had cried over the note, alone in her living room late that Wednesday night, and she had kept it in her wallet through all the subsequent horrors and flight and migration.

Elizalde hadn't wanted to leave the Long Beach apartment this morning-or at worst go any farther outside than to where Sullivan had parked the van, to fetch his meager food and some instant coffee and then hurry back inside-until the dawning of Sunday morning, when Halloween would safely be pa.s.sed. But when Sullivan had begun to speculate on things that they ought to go buy before sundown today, his own readiness to be talked out of leaving Solville was so palpable that she had pretended to be unaware of it, and she'd made herself agree brightly to his proposed shopping trip. New socks and underwear, she noted, would be a necessity.

The apartment's toilet had indeed proved to be hooked up to the hot-water pipe-the bathroom window was steamy. They took turns showering and getting back into yesterday's unfresh clothes, and by the time they had moved the plaster hands away from the door and opened it to the fresh Friday-morning breeze, Sullivan was tight-lipped and grumpy and Elizalde was brittle with imitation cheer.

Sullivan had furtively switched license plates with a pickup truck in the Solville parking lot, and then the two of them had driven off north into the skyline-spiked brown haze of Los Angeles, Sullivan to buy some "electronics" and Elizalde to cruise the botnicas and hierverias for any likely-looking seance aids.

"I think that, in addition to being wisps of stuff, ghosts are an electromagnetic phenomenon," Sullivan had said nervously as he steered the van along the middle lane of the Harbor Freeway, "something like radio waves. When they focus somewhere, like they do when something energizes them and wakes them up, gets them into their excited state, they're located-a particle rather than a wave, for our purposes, or maybe a standing wave with perceptible nodes, sort of low-profile ball lightning-and they're detectably magnetic. Sometimes strongly so." Sullivan had been sweating. "I've seen them around the step-up transformers at power plants out in the desert, just a bunch of indistinct guys standing around blinking on the concrete, and if there's enough of them their magnetic field can interfere with the power readouts. What I'm going to ... try to do is scrounge together some gear that'll isolate an individual ghost's signal, step it up, and hook it to a speaker. Meanwhile, you can pick up whatever sort of voodoo stuff it is that ..."

He had paused then, at least having the grace to be embarra.s.sed ... that you used when you killed your patients two years ago, she had thought, mentally finis.h.i.+ng his sentence for him.

She had given him a hooded gaze under one raised eyebrow. "You just be sure you get some spare big-amp fuses for your electronics, gabacho," she'd said quietly.

He had pursed his lips and nodded, clearly intimidated by her supposed connections to some vast, secret, potent brujeria folklrica.

Now, standing on the sidewalk in her stale clothes and stringy long hair, among the baby carriages and beer signs, watching the progress of all the old beat Torinos and Fairlanes with defeated suspensions and screeching power-steering belts, she wondered if she could accomplish anything at all.

Sullivan had told her about "bar-time," and had explained that experiencing it was one of the consequences of being a spiritual antenna, with a psychic guilt-link to some dead person or persons; when hungry ghosts or ghost hunters focused their attention on her, she couldn't help but put some of her spiritual weight on her "one foot in the grave," so that she lived just a fraction of a second outside of time, ahead of time. He said it happened to all ghost-bound people.

And Sullivan had told her how dormant ghosts could be excited into fitful agitation by people such as themselves, and had told her how to spot the elusive creatures, once that had happened.

She had been careful not to make any of the moves that would rouse the things-she had not whistled any old Beatles tunes (Sullivan had told her that "The Long and Winding Road" was particularly evocative), nor, in this neighborhood, Santana's "Oye Como Va"; she'd been careful not to pick up stray coins on the pavement, especially very s.h.i.+ny ones; and she had not stared into the eyes of the faces, faded to washes of pink and blue, in the photos taped up in the windows of the little hairstyling salons, for Sullivan had told her that frightened new ghosts would cling to those paper eyes and then wait to meet and hold on to an unguarded gaze.

She had bought the compa.s.s, though. Sullivan had told her that when a compa.s.s needle pointed in some direction besides north, it was very likely pointing at one of the awakened ghosts. She had kept it in her pocket and glanced at it frequently-and at one point during her shopping stroll she had walked wide around a dusty old Volkswagen sitting on flat tires in a parking lot, averting her eyes as she skirted it; and a few minutes later she had crossed Beverly to avoid the open front door of a corner bar; because the needle had swung away from north to point at these things.

Sullivan had told her to wait for him by the video games in the RAPHAEL'S LIQUOR store at the corner of Lucas Avenue, and now she started angling through the crowd in that direction. It would be better for her to be waiting for him inside than for him to have to idle in the parking lot in the conspicuous van. Her bag of purchases was heavy enough now, and her hip and shoulder still ached from her fall on the Amado Street sidewalk two days ago; and she was walking awkwardly, for she had tucked the thing that Sullivan swore was Houdini's dried thumb into the high top of her left shoe, to balance the can of mace in her right one.

Un buen santo te encomiendas, she thought, quoting an old saying of her grandmother's. A fine patron saint you've got.

At a red light, she leaned her elbow on the little steel cowl over the signal-change b.u.t.ton on a curbside traffic-light pole-and then gasped with dizziness and heard the thump of the seat of her jeans and the grocery bag hitting the sidewalk in the instant before her vision jumped with the jar of the impact.

People were staring at her, and she thought she heard borracha!-drunk!-as she scrambled back up to her feet; the light box on the pole across the street had finally begun flas.h.i.+ng WALK, and she hoisted her bag in both arms and marched between the lines of the crosswalk toward the opposite curb, sweat of embarra.s.sment chilly on her forehead. Not until she heard a wet plop on the pavement by her foot, and looked down just in time to see an egg from her torn bag hit the asphalt, did she realize that she was on bar-time again.

She stepped up the curb so carefully that any bar-time effect was imperceptible, and then she crossed the sidewalk and leaned against the brick wall of a mariscos restaurant, panting in the steamy squid-and-salsa-scented air that was humming out of a window fan.

It could be just Sullivan nearby, she told herself nervously; he said we can have that effect when we're together, our antenna fields overlapped and making "interference fringes"-it happened with him and his twin sister all the time, he said. Or it could be Frank Rocha, resonating in the sidewalk in forlorn response to the scuff of my sneakers (though the dried thumb in my shoe should be keeping any spiritoids from recognizing me). Maybe I just got confused, and thought I heard the egg break on the street before it really did; I haven't had a decent night's sleep, a decent meal, in- But of course she was standing right across the street now from 15415 Beverly. She looked up, slowly and sullenly; the two-story building had been repainted, but she couldn't recall now anyway whether the fire had streaked the outside walls with soot. The windows of what had been her conference room had gla.s.s in them again, and between the gla.s.s and the curtains hung a green neon sign reading PSYCHIC-PALM READER.

Good luck to you, she thought bitterly to the present tenant. You'll never host as good a show as I did.

On that final Wednesday evening, that Halloween night, Frank Rocha had arrived very drunk. A week had pa.s.sed since the night when she had read his clumsy letter, and, mostly out of guilt and uncertainty, she had let him stay at the meeting in spite of his condition. At one point early in the evening he had taken his hand out of hers, and had fumbled at something inside his leather jacket; after a m.u.f.fled snap!, he had shuddered and coughed briefly, then returned his hand to hers, and the seance had proceeded. The smoke from the candles and incense had covered any smell of cordite, and Frank Rocha had continued to mumble and weep-no one present had realized that he was now dead, that he had neatly shot himself squarely through the heart with a tiny .22 revolver.

Later, in the darkness, he had again pulled his hand free, but this time it had been to squeeze her thigh under the table; not wanting to hurt his feelings, she had thought for a while before reaching down and firmly pus.h.i.+ng his hand away. Luckily she had had her face averted from him.

With a blast of scorching air that hit her like a mailbag dropped from a train, Frank Rocha's body had exploded into white fire. Elizalde and the person who had been sitting on the other side of him were ignited into flame themselves and tumbled away in a screaming tangle of bodies and folding chairs, and everyone was dazzled to blindness by the man-sized, magnesium-bright torch that had been Frank Rocha.

And then the seance had started to be for real.

Elizalde looked away from the white building across the street and made herself take deep, slow breaths.

Hoping to rea.s.sure herself, she dug the plastic compa.s.s out of her jeans pocket and looked at it- But it was pointing southeast, straight ahead down Beverly toward the Civic Center.

The compa.s.s needle didn't wobble in synch with any of the cars or pedestrians she could see. Unlike the readings she had got earlier at the abandoned Volkswagen and the barroom door, this one seemed to be some distance away.

There's a ... a ghost down that way, she thought carefully, trying to a.s.similate the idea. A big one.

A furniture truck made a ponderous low-gear left turn onto the boulevard from Belmont Avenue, and little Toyotas and big old La Bamba boat cars rattled along the painted asphalt, up toward Hollywood or down toward City Hall, and crows and pigeons flapped around the traffic lights or pecked at litter on the sidewalks in the chilly sunlight ... but there was a big ghost awake and walking around somewhere down Beverly in the direction of the Harbor Freeway.

The ghosts had arrived at the seance sometime during the confused moments when curtains were being torn down from the windows and bundled around the people who had been set afire; Frank Rocha himself was a roaring white pyre that no one could get close to.

Half of Elizalde's hair had been burned off, and after she'd been extinguished herself she had scorched her hands and face in a useless attempt to throw a curtain over Frank Rocha, but what she today remembered most vividly was the agony of listening to the shattering, withering screams.

The hallway doors had opened, and a lot of people had begun to come in who didn't even seem to notice the fire; and they hadn't walked in, but seemed to glide, or float, or flicker like bad animation. The light had been wrong on most of them-the shadows on their faces had not been aligned with the flaring corpse on the floor, and when their faces had happened to turn toward it, the incongruously steady shadows had abruptly looked like holes.

Others appeared from the ceiling-several of these were oversized infants, impossibly floating in midair, with the purple umbilical cords still swinging from their bellies, and their huge faces were red and their mouths hideously wide as they howled like tornadoes.

b.l.o.o.d.y, mewling embryonic chicks pecked and clawed at Elizalde's scorched scalp, and fell into her face when she tried to cuff them off.

Instead of running for the ghost-crowded doors, everyone had seemed to be scrambling to the corners, down on their hands and knees to be below the churning burnt-pork-reeking smoke. The clothing burst away from three of her patients, two women and a man, to release long fleshy snakes, which lifted like pythons as they grew, and then dented and swelled to form grimacing human faces on the bulbous ends.

The faces on the flesh-snake bulbs, and the shadow-pied faces of the intruding ghosts, and the red faces of the giant infants, and the blood-and-smoke-and-tear-streaked faces of Elizalde's patients, all were shouting and screaming and babbling and praying and crying and laughing, while Frank Rocha blazed away like a blast furnace in the middle of the floor. By the time his unbearably bright body had s.h.i.+fted and rolled over and then fallen through the floor, the big windows had all popped and disintegrated into whirling crystalline jigsaw pieces and spun away into the darkness, and people had begun to climb out, hang from the sill, and drop to the flower bed below. Elizalde had dragged one unconscious woman to the window, and had then somehow hoisted the inert body over her shoulder and climbed out; the jump nearly broke her neck and her knees and her jaw, but when the fire trucks had come squealing across the parking lot Elizalde had been doing CPR on the unconscious patient.

Elizalde blinked now, and realized that she had been standing for some length of time on the curb, s.h.i.+vering and sweating in the cold diesel breeze.

That was all two years ago, she told herself. What are you going to do right now?

She decided to backtrack up Belmont and then walk on down to Lucas along some other street; Houdini's thumb was still there tickling her, down behind her sweaty anklebone, but something had paid attention to her a few moments ago, and she didn't want to blunder into some supernatural event. She turned around and walked into the mariachi-jukebox noise of the mariscos place and bought a couple of fish tacos wrapped in wax paper just so as to be able to wheedle from the counterman a plastic bag big enough to slide her ruptured grocery bag into.

The next block up was Goulet Street, gray old bungalow houses that had mostly been fenced in and converted to body shops and tire outlets after some long-ago zoning change. As she hurried along the sidewalk past the sagging fences, a young man stepped up from beside a parked car and asked her what he could get her, and half a block later another man nodded at her and made whip-snapping gestures, but she knew that they were both just crack-cocaine dealers, and she shrugged and shook her head at each of them and kept walking.

On the morning after the seance, she had been remanded from the hospital into the custody of the police, charged with manslaughter; she spent that night in jail, and on the following day, Friday, she had put up the $50,000 bail-and then had calmly driven her trusty little Honda right out across the Mojave Desert, out of California. She hadn't had a clue as to what had happened at her therapy session-she had known only two things about it: that Frank Rocha and two of the other patients had died, and-of course-that she herself had had a psychotic episode, suffered a severe schizophrenic perceptual disorder. She had been sure that she had briefly gone crazy-and she had not doubted that diagnosis until this last Monday night.

Walking along the Goulet Street sidewalk now, she wondered if she might have been better off when she had thought she was crazy.

At Lucas she turned right, and then turned right again into a narrow street that curved past the rear doors of a liquor store and a laundry, back to Beverly. RAPHAEL'S LIQUOR was across the Beverly intersection, and she was hurrying, hoping Sullivan wasn't parked there yet.

But the compa.s.s was still in her hand, and she glanced at it. The needle was pointing behind her, which was north.

Good old reliable north, she thought. She sighed, and felt the tension unkink from her shoulders-whatever had been going on was apparently over-but she glanced at it again to rea.s.sure herself, and saw the needle swing and then hold steady.

Grit crunched under her toes as she spun around to look back. A hunched, dwarfed figure was lurching toward her from around the corner of the liquor store.

Duende! she thought as she twisted to get her balance leaned back the other way; it's one of those malevolent half-d.a.m.ned angels the women on the beach told me about last night!

Then she had crouched and made a short hop to get her footing and was striding away toward Beverly, in her retinas burning the glimpsed image of a gaunt face behind glittering sungla.s.ses under a bobbing straw cowboy hat.

But a battered, primer-paint-red pickup track had turned up from Beverly, its engine gunning as the body rocked on bad shocks, and she knew that the half-dozen mustached men in wife-beater T-s.h.i.+rts crouching in the back were part of whatever was going on here.

Elizalde sprinted to the back wall of the laundry, leaning on it and hiking up her left foot to dig out the can of mace; but the men in the truck were ignoring her.

She looked back-the duende had turned and was hurrying away north, but it was limping and clutching its side, and making no speed. The truck sped past Elizalde and then past the duende, and made a sharp right, bouncing up over the curb. The men in the back vaulted out and grabbed the dwarfish figure, whose only resistance was weak blows with pale little fists.

The hat spun away as the men lifted the small person by the shoulders and ankles, and then the oversized sungla.s.ses fell off and she realized that the men's prey was just a little boy.

Even as she realized it, she was running back there, clutching the bag in her left arm, her right hand thumbing the cap of the mace spray around to the ready position.

"Dejalo marchar!" she was shouting. "Que ests haciendo? Voy a llamar a polica!"

One of the men who wasn't holding the boy spun toward her with a big brown hand raised back across his shoulder to hit her, and she aimed the little spray can at his face and pushed the b.u.t.ton.

The burst of mist hit him in the face, and he just sat down hard on the asphalt; she turned the can toward the men holding the boy and pushed the b.u.t.ton again, sweeping it across their faces and the backs of their heads alike, and then she stepped over the spasming, coughing bodies and shot a squirt into the open pa.s.senger-side window of the truck.

A quacking voice from the bed of the truck called, "No me chingues, Juan Dominguez!"-but she didn't see anyone back there, only some kind of cloth bag with a black Raiders cap on it. The bag seemed to have spoken, in merry malevolence.

The boy had been dropped, and had rolled away but not stood up; Elizalde's own eyes were stinging and her nose burned, but she bent down to spray whatever might be left in the can directly into the faces of the two men who had only fallen onto their hands and knees. They exhaled like head-shot pigs and collapsed.

Elizalde dropped the emptied can and hooked her right hand under the boy's armpit and hoisted him up to his feet. She was still clutching her bag of supplies in the crook of her left arm.

"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 sungla.s.ses, 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 compa.s.s 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 compa.s.s 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 acc.u.mulate ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing, 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 compa.s.s 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 compa.s.s 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 n.o.body can find us. I think you should come with us."