Sullivan stood beside the van now, his hand on the driver’s-side door handle.
Finally he unlocked the door and climbed in. The engine started at the first twist of the key, and Sullivan let it warm up for only a few seconds before clanking the van into gear and steering it out toward the road that would take him south to Claypool and the 60 Highway that stretched away west.
The sky flashed again, twice; and though he had rolled the window down as he drove past the glaringly lit front entrance of O’Hara’s and then picked up speed on the paved road, he still heard no following thunder.
He touched the brake pedal an instant before the brake lights of the car ahead came on; and then he saw the next jagged spear of lightning clearly because he had already glanced toward where it would be.
Bar-time for sure. He sighed and kept driving.
Everyone experiences bar-time occasionally, usually in the half-conscious hypnagogic stage of drifting into or out of sleep—when the noise that jolts one awake, whether it’s an alarm or a bell or a shout, is anticipated, is led up to by the plot of the interrupted dream; or when some background noise like the hum of a refrigerator compressor or an air conditioner becomes intrusive only in the instant before it shuts off.
The Sullivan twins had spent countless hours on bar-time during the eighties—it had seemed that they were always reaching for a telephone just before it would start to ring, and appearing in indoor snapshots with their eyes closed because they had anticipated the flash. Eventually they had figured out that it was just one more weird consequence of working for Loretta deLarava, but the pay had been good enough to make it, too, just a minor annoyance.
Pay. Sullivan glanced at his fuel gauge and wondered if he would ever be able to get his last paycheck from the power station. Probably not, if Sukie had been right about deLarava being after them. Could he get a job as a lighting technician again?
Probably not, if deLarava was still in any aspect of the film business.
Great.
Worry about it all later, he told himself, after you’ve got to Hollywood and fetched the mask—if it’s still in that weird garage, if somebody hasn’t planed off that hill and put up condominiums there.
Without taking his eyes from the highway rushing past in his headlights, he fumbled in the broad tray on the console beside him found a tape cassette, and slid it into the dashboard slot; and as the adventurous first notes of Men At Work’s ‘A Land Down Under” came shaking out of the speakers behind him, he tried to feel braced and confident. The intrepid traveler, he thought, the self-reliant nomad; movin’ on, able to handle anything from a blown head gasket to a drunk with a knife in a roadside bar; and always squinting off at the horizon like the Marlboro man.
But he shivered and gripped the wheel with both hands. All the way out to Hollywood? The oil in the van hadn’t been changed for four thousand miles, and the brakes needed bleeding.
Sukie had frequently, and apparently helplessly, made up nonsense lyrics for songs, and when the tape ended he found himself humming the old “Beverly Hillbillies” tune, and unreeling random lyrics in his mind:
Sister said; “Pete, run away from there.”
She said, “California is the place you ought to be,”
So he cranked the poor old van, and he drove to Galilee.
On the night of his sixteenth birthday he had borrowed his foster-father’s car and gone tearing around a dark shopping-center parking lot, and then the security guards had chased him for miles in their fake cop car, and at the end of the chase the furious guards had threatened to charge him with all kinds of crimes; nothing had come of it, and the only one of the wild charges he could remember now was Intercity flight to avoid apprehension.
And now here he was, twenty-four years later, his black hair streaked with gray at the temples, forlornly wondering how even an interstate flight could possibly let him avoid apprehension.
In the rearview mirror he saw the back window flash white, and this time thunder came rolling and booming across the desert, past him and on ahead into the darkness, followed a moment later by thrashing rain.
He switched on the windshield wipers. Her real name had been Elizabeth, but she’d somehow got her nickname from Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”—the song had briefly referred to a woman named Sukie Tawdry. His vision blurred with tears and he found that he was weeping, harshly and resentfully, for the twin sister who had been lost to him long before tonight.
The unfamiliar liberation of drink made him want to stomp on the accelerator—A.O.P., dude—and hammer the flat front of the van relentlessly through the desert air; but he remembered that this first rain would free up oil on the surface of the highway, slicking everything, and he let the speedometer needle drift back down to forty.
There was, after all, no hurry. DeLarava would want to do her work on Halloween, and that was still five days off.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”…
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
LUMPY and Daryl had not found Kootie’s bag of quarters in the knapsack’s side pocket, and in an all-night drugstore farther up Fairfax he had bought a cheap pair of sunglasses to conceal his swelling discolored eye. That left a little more than six dollars.
Kootie was sitting on a bus bench now, just because he had been too tired to walk one more block. Maybe it didn’t matter—maybe all the bus benches in the whole city looked like this one; or, worse, appeared normal to normal people but would all look like this to him.
The bench was black, with a big white skull and crossbones painted on it, along with the words DON’T SMOKE DEATH CIGARETTES.
And he had seen packs of these Death cigarettes at the drugstore. The packs were black, with the same skull and crossbones for a logo. Could that actually be a brand name? What could possibly be in the packs? Little white lengths of finger bones, he thought, stained with dried blood at one end to show you where the filter is.
He was shivering in his heavy flannel shirt. The sunlight was warm enough when it was shining on him, but in the shade like this the air was still nighttime air—chilly, and thin enough to get in between the teeth of a zipper. Maybe when the sun got up over the tops of the storefront buildings this strange night would finally be all the way gone and the bus bench would be stenciled with some normal colorful ad.
Maybe he could go home, and his mom and dad would be there.
(in their wedding clothes, those two had to have been his real mom and dad, not the bodies duct-taped into the chairs in the atrium, the bodies with their eyes—)
He was shaking now, and he leaned back, gripping his elbows tightly, and forced the shuddering breaths into his lungs and back out. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would probably be the best thing that could happen. He wished his feet could reach the ground so that he could brace them on the pavement.
Back up on Sunset, hours ago when the sky had still been middle-of-the-night dark, he had tried several times to call the police. Maybe in the daytime he’d be able to find a telephone that worked right. Maybe maybe maybe.
The shivering had stopped, and he cautiously took a deep breath as if probing to see if a fit of hiccups had finally gone away. When he exhaled, he relaxed, and he discovered that his toes could reach the pavement.