But so was the Saturn. And all Cochran could remember now was Armentrout saying to him three weeks ago, I will heal you, Sid. That’s a promise. Still perceiving all the motions and sounds as discrete fragments, Cochran fumbled under the back of his sopping windbreaker and pulled out his muddy revolver; and he aimed it at the white hood of the Saturn, between and just behind the headlights, and pulled the trigger.
The flare was dazzling, but the noise of the gunshot was just a thud against his abused eardrums. He fired again, and then Plumtree had leaned out of the truck and closed her fist in the fabric of his shirt. The truck was moving, slowly. Cochran flailingly pulled the trigger again, and one of the Saturn’s headlights exploded; and then he threw the gun onto the truck floor and lunged inside.
Pete must have floored the accelerator then, for Cochran was tumbled into the seat half across Plumtree’s lap, and the door slammed shut without his help. The interior of the truck was dark in the renewed rainstorm.
“—the fuck were you doing—!” Pete was shouting, and Cochran yelled back, overriding him, “It was Dr. Armentrout In the instant of silence this news caused, Cochran sat up and added, “In that car. He would have followed us. He shot Kootie, remember?”
The roar of the engine rose and fell as Pete swerved from lane to lane to pass slower-moving cars. He had switched on the headlights, and the road ahead was only dimly visible behind a glittering curtain of rain.
“Good,” panted Angelica, “that was good, you were right to shoot him.” She was glancing around wildly, wide-eyed. “What the fuck hit us, Pete? How can the truck be running? We should be—”
“The god hit you,” said Mrs. Winchester from the shadows beside Cochran, in a quavering voice that seemed to carry a trace of satisfaction, “a good deal less hard than he hit my house in 1906.”
“I didn’t shoot him,” said Cochran loudly, “I shot the car, the radiator.”
“We’ve got to cross the 280 and pick up Kootie and Arky,” said Pete.
“No,” said Angelica, “there were other white Saturns driving around back there, and Armentrout’s still fucking alive. We might lead them to Kootie—and this truck’s a beacon, magically and plain-old visually. And turn off your headlights.”
“These are sorcerous bad guys, Angie,” said Pete, nevertheless reaching forward to switch off the lights. “What do you think they were doing down here? Following us? I bet they were tracking the new king, which is Kootie. They might be zeroing in on Cochran’s house right now.”
“Ah, you’re right, you’re right,” said Angelica desperately. “Get on the freeway, get right over in the fast lane to draw any pursuit, and then cut off hard at the first off-ramp, hard enough to send ’em on past it, if they are following us. We’ll call Kootie from a pay phone.”
“It’s getting late, you must let this Kootie person fend for himself,” said Mrs. Winchester’s voice. “I heard that!” added Cody; “they’d surely kill the boy, and anyway we need his help, and Arky’s, to get this thing done.” And then Valorie’s flat voice said, “O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’“
“A pay phone at a gas station,” said Pete, his wet shoe sole squeaking from the gas pedal to the brake and back. “We’re gonna need gas.”
PETE FOLLOWED Angelica’s directions so exactly that Cochran thought they were all going to be killed. From the fast far left-hand lane of the northbound 280, while a scatter of anonymous headlight-pairs bobbed behind them at hard-to-judge distances, Pete cut the wheel sharply to the right, and the truck veered across the shiny black lanes like a banking surfboard, booming over the lane-divider dots in brief staccato bursts, finally half-missing the exit and throwing Cochran onto Plumtree again as the two left wheels slewed on the shoulder.
Then he had straightened the wheel, braked down to about twenty miles per hour without quite making the tires squeal, and pulled sedately into a Chevron gas station, steering the truck around to the back by the rest rooms and pay phones. The headlights were still switched off.
He pushed the gearshift lever over into neutral. “No—” he began, but his voice was squeaky; “nobody’s followed us here,” he said in a deeper tone.
“Guess not,” said Angelica faintly. Then she stirred herself and pushed open the door. “Let’s call …”
She froze with one leg extended out into the rain, and Cochran followed the direction of her gaze to the cone of light around the pay telephone.
At first glance he thought the light was full of moths; then he saw that the fluttering streaks of light were rain-gleams on transparent figures: the streak of a contorted jawline here, the squiggle of a flexed limb there, invisible wet lips working in imbecilic grimaces.
“Something’s got all the ghosts worked up this evening,” Angelica said. “They’re drawn by the magnets in the phone, or they each want to call somebody and haven’t got any quarters.” She gave Pete a stricken look over her shoulder. “I’m not masked enough for this. Breathing, talking on the-phone, in that stew? My voice—and Arky might say, my name! I couldn’t hide my—my psychic locators, my name, my birthday—from all of them. At least a couple of them would be into my head like piranhas in five seconds.”
“These same thoughts people this little world,’” said Mrs. Winchester confidently out of Plumtree’s mouth; to which Cody added, “All us kids on the bus got bogus birth-dates and somebody else’s picture on our IDs,” and the flat voice of Valorie said, “I shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.”
“Oh, thank you—!” said Angelica to Plumtree, clearly at a loss as to what name to use. “Give her a quarter, Pete,” she added as Cochran opened the truck’s back door and stepped down into the rain. “Speak this: tell Kootie and Arky to get out of there,” she told Plumtree urgently. “Tell ‘em don’t take the Granada, we were driving that when I shot at the bikers out at the yacht club, they might remember it. Tell ‘em to take the old Torino out back.”
“And bad guys might be out in front of the house, nervous about our guns and waiting for reinforcements,” added Pete. “Tell Arky to drive right out through the greenhouse, like Cochran said this morning—there’s apparently a mud road that leads down the backyard slope right to the 280.”
Cochran could see that Plumtree had to do this, but after she had stepped wearily down out of the truck he grabbed her unbandaged hand and said, “Would it help to have another person beside you? I can concentrate on you, and not pay attention to the ghosts.”
The tired lines in her face lifted in a wan smile. “I’d like that, Sid. Yeah, you’ll be safe enough if you just don’t speak a word, and look nowhere but at me.”
“That’s my plan.” He was nervously pleased to be speaking coherently, after having drunk the pagadebiti; and he was reminded of a time an unidentified snake had bitten him on a hike, and how he had monitored himself for the rest of the day, watching for slurred speech or numbness or any other symptoms of poisoning.
Plumtree took a quarter from Pete, and then she and Cochran walked hand-in-hand across the pavement to the cone of rain-streaked and ghost-curdled light around the telephone.
The ghosts were whispering and giggling in Cochran’s ears, and though he tried not to listen he heard faint, buzzing sexual propositions, pleas for rides to other states, demands for money, offers to wash his car windows for a dollar.