The telephone in the kitchen rang.
"Don't answer it!" she said urgently, so he ran back to the kitchen and triumphantly picked up the receiver.
"Hello?"
She was right behind him, still holding the foolish little blanket. He was pleased to see that her I've-got-more-important-things-on-my-mind-than-you look was gone. She was just scared now. Good.
"You say you want to talk to Diana?" he said, drawing out the pleasure of this moment.
She was white, shaking her head at him with the most imploring look he'd ever seen on a human face. "No," she whispered, "Hans, please!"
For a moment he almost relented, almost said, No, she hasn't been home since yesterday; her sister's here if you want to talk to her. Diana had suffered enough in this last twenty-four hours—leaving behind all her possessions, her son near dead in the hospital …
Through her own fault, and in the face of his sound advice. And now his dope plants were as good as gone, and he was a marked man in the eyes of the police.
His smile was crooked with sweet malice. "Su-u-re," he said, "she's right here."
At the first word she had taken off running for the back door, shouting at him to follow her.
He had even put the phone down and taken one step after her before he remembered his pride. I don't need some damned hysterical woman, he told himself. I'm a writer—a creator all by myself.
CHAPTER 27: I Don't Mind the Car, but Could We Go Now?
With a last glance at the duplex across the street Trumbill laid the telephone receiver down on the table, picked up the little radio transmitter, and stood up. He had put on his pants and shirt and shoes when the police had arrived, and now he carried the transmitter around the corner into the hall, away from the glass of the front window.
Diana sprinted between the trash cans and the gas barbecue and pounded across the scruffy grass toward the redwood fence at the back of the lot, and even as she wondered if she was just making a fool of herself, she leaped, caught the splintery tops of the boards, and vaulted over the fence into the next yard.
A startled dog looked up at her, but before it could even bark she had crossed the yard and scrambled over a chain-link gate and dashed down somebody's driveway and was running across the empty expanse of Sun Avenue, the old yellow blanket flailing from her pumping fist.
Ozzie had opened the cab door and swung his feet out onto the curb and had started to stand up—
—when the hard bam punched the air and slammed the car door against him, knocking him over onto the curbside grass.
The front of Diana's apartment had exploded out across the street in a million spinning boards and chunks of masonry, and as Ozzie sat, stunned, on the grass, he watched a cloud of dirty smoke mushroom up into the blue sky. All he could hear was the loud ringing in his ears, but he could see pieces of brick and roof tile thudding into the lawn at his right and shattering on the suddenly smoke-fogged sidewalk, and his nose stung with a sharp chemical tang like ozone.
Oliver was out of the back of the cab and running toward the destroyed apartment. The cabdriver was pulling Ozzie to his feet; the man was shouting something, but Ozzie shook him off and started after the boy.
It was like walking in certain frustrating dreams he often had. The effort of dragging one leg, and then the other, through the thick soup of the air was so exhausting that he had to look down at the littered sidewalk to make sure that he was moving forward and not simply flexing and sweating in place.
A two-foot length of metal pipe whacked the pavement in front of him and instantly sprang away to devastate a curbside bush, and he had dimly, distantly heard it ring when it hit. Perhaps he was not permanently deafened. He kept walking, though it was not getting any easier.
The apartment was a hollowed-out shell, with three walls leaning outward and the roof entirely gone. A yard-long jet of flame fluttered where the kitchen had been. The apartment next door looked relatively whole, though there was no glass in any of the windows.
Oliver was standing on the walkway with his arms spread wide, and then he fell to his knees and seemed to be stressfully vomiting or convulsing, and it seemed to Ozzie that the boy was forcing himself to do it—even though the spasms looked to be tearing his ribs apart—the way a person might cut his hand to bloody ribbons just to cut out of the flesh the unbearable foreignness of an intrusive splinter.
A moment later Ozzie blinked and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had suffered a concussion when the car door hit him, for he seemed to be seeing double—next to the little boy crouched on the walkway, and half overlapping him, was a semi-transparent duplicate image of the boy.
Then, though young Oliver didn't move, the duplicate image stood up, turned away, and stepped into invisibility.
Ozzie was having trouble breathing, and when he breathed out sharply, he realized that his nose was bleeding. There must be blood all down the front of his shirt.
He finally hobbled his way to Oliver, who was kneeling now. Ozzie knelt beside him. The boy's face was red and twisted with violent sobbing, and when Ozzie put his arms around him, he clung to the old man as if he were the only other person in the world.
In the laundry room of the apartment building on the other side of Sun Avenue, Diana braced herself against a washing machine and waited for her breathing and heartbeat to slow down.
She was too stunned by the almighty slam that had shaken the street under her feet to cry, but in her head was nothing but an endlessly repeating wail of Hans, Hans, Hans …
At last she was able to breathe through her nose, and she straightened up. Mostly because she found herself facing a washing machine, she fished three quarters out of her pocket, laid them in the holes in the machine's handle, and pushed it in.
The machine went on with a clunk, and she could hear water running inside the thing. The still air smelled of bleach and detergent.
Hans, you damned, arrogant, posing fool, she thought—you didn't deserve a whole lot, but you deserved better than this.
She forced herself not to remember the times, in bed but also cooking dinner or out with Scat and Oliver on a holiday, when he had been thoughtful and tender and humorous.
"Was that a bomb?" came a woman's voice behind her.
Diana turned around. A white-haired woman pushing an aluminum walker was angling in through the door, kicking along in front of her a plastic basket full of clothes.
Diana knew she should say something, seem curious. "I don't know," she said. "Uh … it sounded like one."
"I wish I could go look. I was shoving this stuff down the breezeway, and boom, I see all this shit go flying into the air! Probably it was a dope factory."
"A dope factory."
"PCP," the old woman said. "Could you put my clothes in here? It kills me to bend over."
"Sure." Diana stuffed the yellow blanket into her tight hip pocket, then hauled the clothes out of the basket and dumped them into a washer.
"They need chemicals like ether and stuff to make their PCP, and they gotta cook it. And since they're dopers, they get careless. Boom!" The old woman looked at the other machine, which was spinning its empty drum. "Honey, these machines are for tenants only."
"I just moved in." Diana dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. "I don't have a car yet. Could I pay somebody here to drive me to work? It's just—just over at the college."
The old woman eyed the bill. "I can drive you, if you can wait for my stuff to get done, and if you don't mind being seen in a beat-up ten-year-old Plymouth,"