“By the front door where you left ’em.”
She nodded and shuffled past him, her shoulders, too, slumped in unsought humility. “I’ll probably forget, once I’ve got them on—but the dinner will be ready to serve at sundown.”
And I’ll have something to serve to poor Cody, Cochran thought as he followed the old woman out of the bedroom. A flop that even Valorie might quail at. It makes me sick to think of him in here, in me.
ANGELICA HAD taken a bus into the city early that morning, and had spent the day consulting magos and santeros in the run-down Mission and Hunter’s Point districts south of Market Street. She came plodding back up the driveway just at sundown, and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and slumped on the couch in the living room while the others ate Mammy Pleasant’s beef bourguignonne. Angelica had had a late lunch of pork tamales and menudo and Tecate beer, and couldn’t now face a plate of steaming, vinous beef stew and a glass of room-temperature Zinfandel.
When Kootie and Pele had begun clanking the emptied dishes together and carrying them out to the kitchen sink, Angelica walked into the dining room.
She hadn’t looked behind the door when she had come in, to see if the eucalyptus-soled shoes were leaned against the wall, but by now she could recognize Cody Plumtree.
“Our supernatural escrow is about to close,” Angelica said, loudly enough for Pete and Kootie to hear in the kitchen. “Tet is only three days off, and we have no clue about what we’re supposed to do, this time. My people in the barrios and ghettos are getting signs of something big cooking, but for all their painted bells and chicken blood they don’t know what or where. Our crazy old lady keeps saying that Crane or C-cren will direct us when the time comes—but the old lady’s just a ghost.”
“Sid,” said Cody Plumtree, “speak up.”
Sid Cochran pushed his chair back. “C-cren has got a, a horrible proposal,” he said, “which as far as I’m concerned anybody here can veto—especially Cody.”
Angelica glanced at Cody, who was sitting across from Cochran in the corner against the kitchen-side wall and had just lit a cigarette—and she got the feeling that Cody knew what Cochran was going to say, and hated it, but was not going to interrupt now, nor veto later.
“Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, “that’s Cody and Janis’s dad, who killed Scott Crane, came on today, here—he was talking on the phone to our Dr. Armentrout.”
Armentrout! thought Angelica. That’s the man who shot Kootie! She darted a fearful glance toward the front door as she touched the .45 automatic at her belt and opened her mouth to speak.
But Cochran had held up his hand. “Wait. Salvoy faded off while they were speaking, and Cody and I heard Armentrout going on talking; Salvoy had not told the doctor where we are. But—” Cochran paused and shook his head. “But, from what Armentrout was saying, it was pretty clear that Salvoy knows what we did wrong, when we tried to bring Crane back to life last week.” He glanced at Cody, who just stared straight back at him. “I think,” Cochran went on stolidly, “we’ve got to do the Follow-the-Queen trick to talk to Omar Salvoy.” Angelica whistled a descending note.
“Why should he tell us anything?” interrupted Pete from the kitchen doorway.
“Valorie can make him, I bet,” said Cody. “She could be on with him, if you call her, like a second file showing in split-screen on a computer monitor.” Once again Angelica found herself admiring the woman. “It’s a—goddammit, it’s a good idea. My father probably would know. He knew enough to nearly become the king, twenty-five years ago, and from the day he exited his smashed body he’s had one foot in India.”
“And I think I could effectively threaten him,” said Kootie quietly from behind Pete.
Angelica stared at her adopted son warily. “With what, hijo mio?.
Ever since the seventeenth, when he had run away from the Star Motel before dawn and reappeared in the afternoon, having spent some part of the morning talking with Mammy Pleasant in her boardinghouse kitchen, Angelica thought Kootie seemed somehow far older than his fourteen years. All he had told Pete and herself about that morning was that he had killed someone, but Angelica had known that much when she had simply met his eyes as he’d lain shot and bleeding in the planter outside the Star Motel office—behind the physical shock that had paled his face and constricted his pupils, independent of that injury, dwarfing it, the new horror and guilt had been clearly evident to her.
“In ‘92,” said Kootie, “when Sherman Oaks or Long John Beach tried to eat the Edison ghost out of me, he had to lure it up toward the surface of my mind first. This was when we were in the ‘boat on the boat,’ the van inside the truck. And from what Miss Plumtree has said about her psychic striptease session with that doctor, he was trying to draw a personality to the surface, to bite it off. The one on top is the one that’s vulnerable.” The boy bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “It seems like a personality brought up by this Follow-the-Queen trick is…stuck in the on position for at least a little while. I think I could validly threaten to…bite him off.”
Angelicas ears were ringing. “But,” she said, “no, you cant—it’s like slamming bad heroin, Kootie, you’d have, his memories in you like heavy metal—his poisonous life force—” Much worse than whatever you’re carrying now, she thought helplessly, trust me.
“Besides,” said Pete Sullivan, staring in obvious dismay at his adopted son, “he’s not a ghost. He’s a full-power person. You’d—you’d probably blow up!”
“I said validly threaten” Kootie sat down in the dining-room chair next to Plumtree, where Pete had been sitting. “If I can’t be sure I can’t do it, neither can he And I think I could kill him, depending on how strong he is—swat him off the top of Miss Plumtree’s mind like driving a golf ball off a tee.”
Oh, don’t be flippant and proud of it, Kootie, thought Angelica unhappily; and she would have said it out loud but for the knowledge that they might in fact need him to do it, and if so she didn’t want to hamper him in advance.
“Without killing ‘Miss Plumtree’?” asked Cochran, his voice hoarse and his eyes wide with skepticism.
Kootie raised his eyebrows and squinted across the table at him—then peripherally caught Angelica’s anguished, vicariously mortified gaze; and the boy instantly looked down at the tablecloth, his face reddening. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know if he isn’t stronger than me, even. He’s older than me, and meaner, so he might be.” He looked up, clearly abashed. “But—see?—I can believably threaten him with it.”
“Just don’t kill me before he’s said what to do,” said Plumtree with what Angelica recognized as hollow, exhausted bravado. Plumtree held up her hands, and her voice skidded up and down the scale as she said, “Sid, do you have some duct tape?”
Kootie looked nauseous.
We won’t do it tonight,” Angelica said hastily. Plumtree was like a flexed piece of tempered glass, and Angelica was afraid one measured tap might actually shatter her mind into a thousand tiny personalities, no one of them more sentient than an infant. And Kootie wasn’t looking much better himself. “Not if he’s already been out once today,” Angelica went on in her most self-assured doctor-tone. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time.”