But he knew what his psychically concussed symptoms this morning meant. As Mavranos had pointed out, Kootie was a member of Scott Cranes magical army now—and he knew, in his guts and his spine and the primitive base of his brain, that their army had within the last hour suffered the equivalent of a nuclear strike.
All he could sense with his stunned powers was injury and absence. The attempt to restore Scott Crane to life had palpably failed. Mavranos and Plumtree and Cochran were very likely dead.
Kootie’s thoughts just exploded away into chaos whenever he tried to think about his foster-parents. He couldn’t believe that Pete and Angelica were dead, but he knew too that his individual capacity for belief wouldn’t affect whatever was. His natural parents had been tortured to death only a little more than two years ago; and now the fugitive couple who had taken him in, and had loved him and cared for him and been loved by him, might very well be dead too.
He could only postpone that thought, for now.
For now, Kootie was alone and conspicuous in a hostile, awakened city.
49 80, he thought. 12.
He had emerged at last from the dimness of the alley—his sneakers were scuffing on the wet cement of the street sidewalk now, and the passing cars were so obviously real that he could see the momentarily clear tread-prints of their tires on the puddled asphalt as they rolled past, and so close that he could see faces behind the rain-beaded window glass. This street was Stockton. Washington should be the next street down to his left.
He shoved the crumpled paper into his jeans pocket. His legs were shaky, and he had to actually glance down at his belt to make sure he had not buckled it in a Möbius twist—he had not—but he sighed and began shuffling south, toward Washington Street.
THE BLUE truck hadn’t been stopping for red lights as it led the Granada on a swerving, skidding chase through the dawn streets of the Richmond district. The truck had braked for cross-traffic, but then gunned through the rainy intersections as soon as a gap between oncoming cars appeared, as if the red lights were just yield signs. Cochran had been hard-pressed to keep the vehicle in sight through the slapping windshield wipers, and even so he had had to run a couple of red lights himself, cursing and sweating as he did it. He had told Angelica to stash her gun under the seat in case they were pulled over by a cop.
On the long westbound stretch of Geary Street, Cochran had briefly been able to pull up in the left lane alongside the racing blue truck, and Pete had hiked himself up nearly to a standing position in the Granada’s passenger seat, with his head and shoulders out the window; and when he had slumped back down in the seat and looked across Angelica at Cochran, his rain-wet face was pale.
“He’s lying across the seat,” Pete had said flatly. “Face down, with blood on the seat by his head.”
Cochran had hissed angrily as the truck had edged ahead again. Both vehicles had at times reached speeds of at least fifty, probably sixty—at green lights flying right across the stepped intersections and clanking the abused shock absorbers on the downhill slopes—and he’d been glad these Chinese restaurants and secondhand clothing shops weren’t open yet, and that traffic was sparse. “So who’s driving?” he’d demanded.
“Nobody is,” Pete had said. “The truck is.”
“I don’t mean to be—” Cochran had begun. “Damn it, do you mean the truck is driving? Driving itself?”
“That’s what he means,” Angelica had told him, chewing her knuckles. “If he’d stop—if it would stop—at a red light, Pete could get out and get behind the truck’s steering wheel.”
“No chance of that, it looks like,” Cochran had said grimly. “Maybe the thing’ll run out of gas.”
NOW THE truck and the car were on the Great Highway, headed south along the western coast under the lightening gray sky, having screeched through the twisting promontory lanes of Point Lobos Avenue and gunned past the Sutro Bath ruins and the Cliff House Restaurant.
Last week we saw Crane’s naked ghost on the seaside rocks down there, Cochran had thought as he had leaned the speeding car around that bend of the highway. Today we’re chasing a runaway truck with Crane’s skeleton dumped in the back of it and the Kootie kid is gone and Mavranos is probably dead. The king’s army has been pruned back right down to the dirt.
The open lanes of the Great Highway stretched straight ahead, with the slate-colored sea to the right and the massive greenery of Golden Gate Park and the stumpy tower of an old windmill rolling past to the left beyond the northbound lanes. Ahead of the Granada the truck was barrelling along, staying in its lane.
Pete Sullivan was sweating. “Pull up right behind him,” he told Cochran, “and kill the wipers. We left the back window of the truck’s tailgate open, see?”
Cochran switched off the windshield wipers and carefully edged up behind the truck, watching its close bumper rock nearer by inches as the two engines roared on and the lane markers whipped past under the wheels. The raised horizontal window at the back of the truck bobbed on its struts.
“Hope he don’t brake,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, “or—”
“What the hell are you going to do, Pete?” interrupted Angelica. “You can’t!”
“I can’t,” said Pete Sullivan, flexing his hands and staring at the close back of the truck through the rain-stippled windshield, “but I bet Houdini can.” He glanced at Angelica. “Arky might be dying in there”
“Or dead, she told him shrilly, “and you might be dying right on this highway! Under the wheels of this very car I’m driving in! Pete, you can’t. You may have Houdini’s hands, but you haven’t got his…the rest of his body!” Out of the corner of his eye Cochran saw her pat Pete’s knee, as if the subject were closed. “We’ll wait for the truck to run out of gas.” To Cochran she said, “Hey, back off, you’re gonna run right up his tailpipe. And turn the wipers back on.”
The seat jerked hard then as Plumtree grabbed it from behind, and Cochran lifted his foot away from the gas pedal to keep from being jolted into accidentally ramming the truck. Plumtree seemed to be trying to climb over the seat—and then she was clawing at the open passenger-side window as if she intended to climb right out of the speeding car.
“Take these rats thither” she was saying loudly, “to gnaw their garners. Worshipful mutineers, Valorie puts well forth; pray, follow.”
Pete Sullivan pried her wet hands loose from the window frame. “I’ll go,” he said, speaking distinctly into her blank face. “I will go. You stay.” He pushed her backward against evident resistance until she was again sitting stiffly in the back seat.
In the rear-view mirror Cochran saw her lean back in the seat, watching Pete steadily.
“Catch up,” Pete told Cochran as he turned around in the front seat and again peered out through the rain-blurred windshield. “Get closer. Angie, what you can do is say a prayer to…Ogun, right?” He was panting, almost laughing. “Isn’t he the orisha of iron—Detroit iron, I hope!—and the guy who takes people who die in traffic accidents? Tell him to hold off, here.”
Angelica held up the hand she’d been chewing on, and Cochran saw blood on her knuckles. “I’ve been,” she said. “There’s iron in blood. But—Kootie needs you! I need you, goddammit!”