In the brightness of the sunlight that was shining over there Sullivan saw tears glisten on Bradshaw’s cheek—
But Bradshaw took hold of Oaks’s belt and lifted him over the rail—Oaks kicked but had no free hand with which to grab anything, and howled, though all his voices seemed to have lost the capacity to form words—and Bradshaw effortfully tossed the tethered pair away into the brightening abyss.
Away on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus deck, Sullivan cringed at the receding scream of a thousand voices.
Sullivan couldn’t roll over, but he saw Kootie look back toward the port deck to see if Obstadt and Oaks would land there—but there was no sound of impact from that direction. The supernaturally amplified magnetic field was obviously breaking down, and the two men had certainly fallen all the long way down into the walled lagoon that lay like a moat around the ship.
SULLIVAN HEARD Elizalde gasp, and looked across the lobby again—to see that Bradshaw had now climbed right up onto the starboard rail outside and was standing erect, balanced on it, with his arms waving out to the sides.
Bradshaw’s recently youthful and trim body was visibly deteriorating back into the gross figure of Solomon Shadroe, and with every passing second it became a more incongruous sight to see the fat old man tottering up there.
Bradshaw squinted belligerently down at the disheveled attorney, who had lurched back across the narrow section of outdoor deck and was leaning in the Piccadilly Circus doorway, panting. The attorney had evidently wet his pants.
“You okay, Frank?” asked Bradshaw gruffly.
The lawyer blinked around uncertainly, then goggled up at the fat old man standing on the rail; and he seemed to wilt with recognition. “Yes, Mr. Bradshaw. I—I brought all this—”
“Good.” Bradshaw blinked past him into the shadows of the Piccadilly Circus lobby. He was probably unable to see in even as far as where deLarava’s gorily holed body lay tumbled on the polished cork floor, but be called, “Pete, Beth—Angelica, Kootie—” The freshening breeze ruffled his gray hair, and he wobbled on his perch. “—Edison. I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go. This here just wont last much longer.”
He might have been referring to the psychically skewed magnetic field, but Sullivan thought he meant his control over his long-dead body and his long-held ghost; and nervously Sullivan thought of the descriptions of the way Frank Rocha’s body had finally gone.
Then Bradshaw’s face creased in a faint, self-conscious, reminiscent smile—and he curled one hand over his head and stuck his other arm straight out, and he spun slowly on the rail on the toe of one foot; and, almost gracefully, he overbalanced and fell away out into empty space and disappeared.
Sullivan found himself listening for a splash—irrationally, for the water was a good hundred feet below, and Sullivan was sprawled on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus lobby, closer to the port rail than the starboard one from which Bradshaw had just fallen—but what he heard three seconds later was a muffled boom that vibrated the deck and flung a high plume of glittering spray into the morning sunlight up past the starboard rail.
The lawyer seemed to be sobbing now, and he ran away aft, his footsteps knocking away to silence on the exterior deck planks, and the footsteps didn’t start up again from some other direction.
SULLIVAN DISCOVERED that he was able to sit up; then that he could get his legs under himself and get to his feet. Elizalde hurried around to his right side and braced him up, and at last he dared to look down at his chest.
A button hung in fragments on his shirtfront and a tiny hole had been raggedly punched through the cloth, but there was no blood; and then with a surge of relief he remembered the brass plaque from his father’s gravestone, tucked into his scapular, over his heart.
“Your arm’s bleeding,” said Elizalde. “But somehow that—seems to be the only place you’re hit.” Her face was pale and she was frowning deeply. Sullivan could see the lump of the .45 under the front of her sweatshirt.
He looked down at his left arm, and his depth perception seemed to flatten right down to two dimensions when he saw that his shirtsleeve was rapidly blotting with bright red blood. “Hold me up from that side,” he said dizzily, “and maybe no one will notice. You’re a doctor, Angelica—can you dig out a bullet?”
“If it’s not embedded in the bone, I can.”
“Good—Jesus—soon.” He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling as disoriented as if he’d had a stiff drink and an unfiltered Pall Mall on an empty stomach. “Uh…where to?”
“The bridge is there again,” said Kootie anxiously, “the one that leads to the stairs and the parking lot. Let’s get off this ship while we can.”
Sullivan looked up, across the wide lobby. DeLarava’s body was still sprawled out there in the middle of the deck, but the lights and camera gear at the forward end of the room were all her modern equipment again. The little old man in the khaki jacket was crouched over one of the Lowell light kits, busily packing away the scrims and light-doors and humming. He didn’t look up when Kootie ran back there, snatched up a half-used roll of silvery gaffer’s tape, and hurried back to Sullivan and Elizalde.
“Kootie’s right,” said Elizalde, scuffling back around to Sullivan’s left side and hugging his bloody arm to her breast. “Let’s get back to Solville before people are able to wander in here and find this mess.”
“JOEY,” SAID a frail voice behind Sullivan, “stop them.”
Sullivan looked back at the film equipment and saw that deLarava’s fat ghost was leaning on the tripod, her translucent chin resting on the black Sony Betacam. Her head ended right above the eyebrows, constricted to a short, stumpy cone by the rubber bands; and her translucent ectoplasmic right arm was still stretched out for yards across the deck, the limp fingers of the ghost hand twitching impotently on the grip of the automatic pistol.
The old man by the light kit looked up. “Oh, I’ve seen these before,” he said cheerfully, speaking toward the ghost. “I should pop it into a marmalade jar, so somebody can sniff it. Crazy. No more point to it than catching somebody’s shadow by slapping a book shut on it. If you ask me.”
“Joey,” said the ghost in a peremptory but birdlike tone, “you work for me. You gentlemen—why, you all work for me. Joey, I seem to have dislocated my wrist—take the gun from my hand and kill those three.”
“I hear a voice!” exclaimed Joey, smiling broadly. “A blot of mustard or a bit of undigested beef, speaking to me! A sort of food that’s bound to disagree—not for me.” He stood up and bowed toward Kootie, who was nervously holding the roll of gaffer’s tape. “Thanks a lot, boy,” Joey said, “just the same.”
DeLarava’s ghost was fading, but it straightened up and drifted across the floor straight toward Sullivan, and its eyes, as insubstantial as raw egg-whites, locked onto his. “Come with me, Pete,” the ghost said imperiously.
Sullivan opened his mouth—almost certainly to decline the offer, though he was dizzy and nauseated at the hard sunlight, and giving a lot of his weight to Elizalde’s right arm—but the breath that came out between his teeth was sharp with bourbon fumes, and it whispered, “What number were you trying to reach?”
DeLarava’s ghost withered before the fumy breath, and the gossamer lines of the fat face turned to Kootie. “Little boy, would you help an old woman across a very wide street?”