“I don’t know,” said Armentrout. “I don’t think so.” Sid Cochran and janis Plumtree were in the truck, he thought. And Sid Cochran, who I heedlessly let slip through my net back at Rosecrans Medical, shot a gun at me! “I think they were all staying somewhere in the area, and we just ran across the truck before we found the boy. But they must have gone to him after they evaded you people, or else they called him.” He shook the pomegranate, again, and felt its inertial northward pull. “The primary is certainly northwest of us now. I can’t imagine why Salvoy didn’t call me—we could have been waiting for the boy right now, at whatever place they’re going to, instead of just chasing him this way.”
The radio on the dashboard clicked, and then an amplified voice said, “I thought we were going to where the Macondray chapel used to be.”
The driver unhooked a microphone from the console. “The—” He smiled at Armentrout in the rear-view mirror. “—dousing rod is apparently indicating the west coast,” he said. “Tell the brothers coming in from Danville not to waste time circling the Washington and Stockton site. Straight west on Turk to Balboa, tell them, and link up with us probably somewhere below the Cliff House.”
“Aye aye,” said the man in the following car, and clicked off; and Armentrout thought eye-eye, and remembered the tiny pupils of Plumtree’s eyes.
“The woman who pulled … the gunman back into the truck,” Armentrout said, “was Janis Plumtree, the one with your man Salvoy in her head. I’d like to … have her, after Salvoy has moved on.” Moved on to his eternal reward, ideally, he thought.
“Everybody except the king has got to be retired, sorry,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “But we do have to wait until we figure out who the king is, and what body he’s in.” He reached out and unhooked the microphone. “Andre,” he said, “tell the field men not to go shooting anybody until the subjects are out of the vehicles, and even then no women or boys. Got it?”
The driver was shaking his head. “Crisis of faith!” he said quietly.
“Nix” came the voice from the radio. “The field men understand that the true king can’t be hit with a casual bullet.”
“But he might not be in his chosen body yet!” protested the man in the front seat. “You can tell ’em that, can’t you? It’s nothing but the truth.”
“Better we don’t introduce the complication,” insisted the voice from the radio; “and hope for the best.”
The man replaced the microphone and fogged the window with a sigh. “Field men” he said. “Manson-family rejects.”
“Knuckleheads, panheads, and shovelheads,” agreed the driver. “Look, the Koot Hoomie body is the king, and it’ll deflect bullets. All we stand to lose is old Salvoy in the Plumtree, and that might not be altogether a bad thing.”
Armentrout touched the little lump in his jacket pocket that was the derringer. No casual bullet, he thought. But nothing fired from this gun is casual, and I’ve got a couple of very serious .410 shot-shells in it. That’s the way this has got to work out—these Lever Blank boys kill the Plumtree body and everybody in it, and I kill the Parganas boy.
And then stay well clear of the zealot field men.
ON THE long straight stretch of the Great Highway with the black-iron sea to the west, a relayed spot of darkness moved up the coast as each of the sodium-vapor streetlights went out for a moment when the red truck sped past on the pavement below.
Pete Sullivan was driving, and beside him Angelica was irritably drying off the .45 carbine with a handful of paper towels. The knapsack with the spare magazines had been under the seat too, and was also soaked by the rain water that had puddled on the floorboards.
She laid the gun down on the seat, then snapped open the glove compartment; and when she shifted around to look back at Cochran and Plumtree, she was holding the pagadebiti in her hands. “I never brought the … the hardware into your house,” she said to Cochran. “I think the Wild Turkey bottle that had Crane’s blood in it is behind you, in the hub of Arky’s spare tire.”
Cochran winced, for he’d been able to feel Plumtree shivering beside him, even through the soaked leather jacket she was wearing, ever since they’d stopped to call Mavranos and Kootie, and this reminder of the stressful failure two weeks ago wasn’t likely to cheer her up. But he rocked his head back to peer into the truck bed. “Voila” he said. “Still there,” he added shortly.
He had been mentally reciting the multiplication tables to monitor his own alertness, and now he had forgotten his place.
“Here,” said Angelica, handing the wine bottle over the back of the front seat “Pour some of this pagadebiti wine into it, and swish it around and then pour it back.” When he just stared at her, she added, “I say that in my capacity as the king’s ad hoc bruja primera.”
Cochran took it from her. “O-kay.” He hiked one knee up onto the seat to be able to reach back with his free hand to the Wild Turkey bottle. Sitting back down again, he gripped the wine bottle and the pint bourbon bottle between his thighs, and pulled the corks out.
“When I close my eyes,” said Plumtree in a voice that was shaky but recognizably Cody, “I’m in a bus seat, and the crazy smashed-up man is standing at the front and holding a gun on the driver. Row, row, row your boat.”
Cochran carefully lifted the wine bottle and tilted it over the pint bottle and poured a good four ounces of dark wine into it. He re-corked the little bottle and shook it up, then uncorked it and poured its foaming contents back into the bottle of pagadebiti.
“So far,” said Angelica to Plumtree judiciously, “you’re better off keeping your eyes open, then. But, any time now, that vision might be preferable to what’s actually going on outside your eyelids.”
“Oh, that’s helpful,” snapped Cochran as he shoved the corks back into the bottles and reached around to drop the Wild Turkey bottle onto the wet truck-bed floor behind his seat. He wiped his hands on his damp jeans, glad that he had taken his own sip of the wine before this adulteration.
The truck was moving up a grade now, and angling to the left. Cochran peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw concrete barriers on the right shoulder, with yellow earth-moving machines and black cliffs beyond it.
“Cliff House coming up on the left,” said Pete. “I’ll go on past and park in the Sutro Heights lot, up the hill. Rainy walk back down, but I guess we can’t get any wetter than we are.”
“Sorry,” Angelica told Cochran. Then she said brightly to Plumtree, “Of course nothing bad will happen to any of us. As soon as we’re done with this, we could all take Scott Crane to dinner at the Cliff House Restaurant, even.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, except that we’re drenched in black mud!”
Plumtree gave a hitching laugh. “And Crane’ll p-probably be wearing that garlic banner again,” she said. “And some restaurants,” she added quietly, “don’t like you bringing your own wine.”
PETE TURNED in to the Sutro Heights Park driveway, and drove slowly up the hill with the headlights off and parked the truck against a dark grassy bank with overhanging elms. The nearest parking lot light dimmed but didn’t go out—and Cochran was glad of it as he climbed out of the truck carrying the wine bottle, for the overcast sky was already winter-night-time dark. There were many other cars in the lot, and they all seemed to have wreaths hung on them, but Cochran didn’t see any other people.