Both Kootie and Plumtree sagged in what looked like uncomfortable relief.
“Then for God’s sake right now get me a drink,” said Plumtree in a husky voice. “Sid, you got vodka?”
“Got vodka,” said Cochran, getting up out of his chair like an old man.
“Got a lot of it?”
Cochran just nodded as he shambled into the kitchen.
He paused by the sink before reaching up to the liquor cabinet overhead, and stared at the glittering white mound of tiny soap bubbles that stood motionless above the dish-filled sink. And he experienced a vivid memory-flash of how Nina had looked, so many times, wearing an apron and leaning over this sink; and all at once, silently except for a nearly inaudible hissing, the soap foam diminished away to nothing, leaving the dishes exposed poking out of the surface of the gray water.
Her ghost is gone, he thought giddily as he reached up for the vodka bottle, but my memories of her apparently still have some palpable force.
We’re not… finished, yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
I’ll hide my silver beard in a gold beaver…
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
COCHRAN woke up in his own bed, alone, roused by the gunning of the Torino engine in the back yard. From the gray light filtering into the bedroom through the lace curtains, he muzzily judged that it must be about seven in the morning. He had sat up drinking with Plumtree until after midnight; and when at last he had got up unsteadily and announced his intention of retiring to the couch, Plumtree had told him to take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch, she had said, enunciating carefully. I can see it from here, so I know I’ll be able to find it.
As much as anything, they had been discussing immortal animals. Cody had insisted that carp never died naturally, and survived the winter frozen solid in pond ice; and Cochran had told her about toads that had been found alive in bubbles in solid rock. When the animals in question began to be imaginary ones from children’s books and science-fiction movies, like the Pushmi-pullyu and E. T., Cochran had just followed the drift of the conversation, and talked about Reepicheep the mouse in the Narnia books, and the bread-and-butter-flies from Through the Looking-Glass. Plumtree’s voice had changed several times, and she had vacillated sharply between skepticism and credulity—but since Cochran was the only other person in the room she had not had to address him by name, and the nearest electric light that was on had been the one in the kitchen and Cochran couldn’t tell when it might have flickered, and their talk had been abstract and speculative enough to keep him from guessing who he might have been talking to at any particular moment. He hadn’t been aware of any obvious archaisms that would have indicated lines quoted from Shakespeare, though he hadn’t by any means caught everything she had said; and if Tiffany had been on, she had been subdued, and content with vodka.
He got into a fresh shirt now and pulled his jeans back on and opened the bedroom door. The car noise had evidently awakened the Sullivans too—he could hear Kootie and Pete talking quietly behind the closed door of the spare bedroom.
Mavranos was sitting at the dining room table frowning over the Saturday San Francisco Chronicle. In front of him a cup of coffee sat steaming, and on the opposite side of the table stood fourteen mismatched cups and tumblers. Cochran padded over barefoot and peered at them; each had a grainy white sediment puddled in the bottom.
“You better pick up some more Alka-Seltzer when you go out,” said Mavranos quietly; “a big bottle. I guess each of the girls had a hangover, and couldn’t stomach drinking out of another one’s used glass.”
Cochran stared at the cups and glasses on the table. “Fourteen?” he whispered in awe.
“Each one for a different bad flop, I reckon,” Mavranos said with a shrug. “Like chopping up a starfish.” He lifted his coffee cup in both hands to take a sip. “I kind of admire her restraint in having only fourteen, after twenty-seven years. If I had the option, I’d be splitting off all the time.” Softly he sang a line Cochran believed was from a Grateful Dead song: “‘I need a miracle ev-ery day.’”
Cochran began carrying the cups and glasses into the kitchen, gripping three with the fingers of each hand; and when he came back from carrying the first six out of the dining room, Kootie was wordlessly picking up four more.
When they had brought the last of the cups and glasses out to the counter, the Torino hood audibly slammed down outside; and after Cochran had rinsed out two of the cups and filled them with fresh coffee and carried them back to the dining-room table for himself and Kootie, he heard Plumtree come battering in through the kitchen door and run more water in the sink. A moment later she shuffled into the dining room with a steaming McDonald’s mug and slumped down into the chair beside Kootie. She was clearly Cody, and her T-shirt was correctly marked SUNDAY in crude black letters.
“You’re awake,” she observed as she lit a Marlboro.
“Somehow,” agreed Cochran.
“The Torino’s running again, a lot better than before. Let’s get this thing done.” She squinted at Kootie. “Your mom and dad up yet?”
“I think they are,” said Kootie nervously. “I think they’ll be out in a minute.”
“Sid,” said Cody, “if this goes real wrong, leave the Torino parked somewhere it’s sure to be towed, will you? And leave the registration on the front seat. Oh, and the Jenkins purse is in the trunk—first mail that to the Jenkins woman.”
“I—won’t hurt you,” said Kootie.
“It’s not you I’m scared of, kiddo—but thanks.”
Pete and Angelica Sullivan came in then, and Angelica sat down at the table while Pete went into the kitchen.
“This chair is no good,” said Plumtree, wiggling the arms of her dining-room chair. “My snips-and-snails parent could bust it to kindling. Let’s go out back and use one of the iron patio chairs.” She had one more sip of her coffee and then stood up.
“What,” said Angelica, wide-eyed, “right now? Before breakfast?”
“Well I’m just not hungry, somehow,” said Plumtree. “And the sooner we get my job done, the sooner you can have your old lady in the wooden shoes cook you up some fucking gumbo or something, right?”
“Sorry,” said Angelica.
“Shit,” said Plumtree. “If her nose isn’t bleeding too bad for her to cook, by then.”
FIVE MINUTES later Mavranos, Angelica, Pete, Kootie, and Cochran were sitting, uncomfortably like judges, on one side of the long picnic table under the patio roof between the kitchen and the backyard greenhouse, facing the chair in which Plumtree now sat confined by strips of duct tape wrapped tightly around her wrists and waist and ankles. The sky was low and gray behind the pepper trees that overhung the yard; and though the breeze was chilly, Cochran knew that wasn’t why Plumtree was visibly shivering. Inside Mavranos’s open denim jacket Cochran had seen the checkered wooden grip of the revolver tucked under the man’s belt.
For a few moments Plumtree waited blankly, relaxed enough for her teeth to chatter; then she rolled her head back to stare up at the beams of the patio roof, and she whispered, “Valorie, whatever you make at your job, you’re overpaid.” She took a deep breath, and Cochran did too. “Mom!” called Plumtree hoarsely.