"Where in Palm Springs?"
"Dammit," said Charlotte, leaning into a turn while Marrity stared tensely at the road, "this is what might save her. When I look through one of you I get a bleed through from the other. Have you got some kind of psychic connection with her or not?"
Marrity glanced at her, and he did see a glistening line down her right cheek, and a moment later the off-side wheels were thumping on dirt. "Watch the road!" she yelled.
He looked up to see a shaggy green oleander bush with white flowers rushing at them; Charlotte stood on the brake and the car stopped short of it, half on the shoulder. Dust swirled around the windows.
"You can drive now," she said, opening the door on her side and stepping out. "Watch me."
Marrity kept his eyes on her as he slid across the seat, and when she had shuffled around the front of the car to the passenger side and climbed in, and he had steered the car back into the lane and begun driving too fast down the road, he said, "Yes, for the past couple of days Daphne and I have been able to see into each other's minds. It's happened before. Usually lasts about a week. Where in Palm Springs?"
"That's good," she said, feeling for the seat belt. "I don't know where. I've got to call them, my former employers back there. What a mess that operation turned out to be." Having fastened the seat belt, she leaned back in the passenger seat and closed her eyes. "Did somebody get shot?"
The backs of Marrity's hands tingled, and he gripped the wheel more tightly, ignoring the sting of his scraped palms. "I shot a guy. One of the guys who grabbed Daphne."
"Shot dead?"
Marrity remembered firing the gun directly into the man's chest, and remembered the man falling. "I — I imagine so."
"Steady, slow down!" Charlotte said, her eyes still closed.
Marrity hastily took his foot off the accelerator. They were down out of the hills now, and the street was two lanes each way, but there were more cars to watch.
He tried to estimate what emotion killing that man had roused in him — it wasn't triumph, certainly, but it wasn't guilt or remorse either. He could hardly separate his own feelings from the tolling misery he sensed in Daphne's mind.
"Tell me the truth," he said. "Do they mean to kill her?"
"No," said Charlotte. "And there isn't any information they want out of her either. And they're going to find out that what they do mean to do with her can't happen while you're still alive."
"What do they mean to do with her? "
"They want to make her never have existed. Short out her lifeline. You'd never have had a daughter."
Marrity realized what emotion the shooting had left him with: depression. He thought of asking Charlotte, Why? but it seemed too hard; instead he said, "They can't do it unless they kill me first, though. You say."
"Right. You're her psychic Siamese twin right now. To, to unmake her, they'd have to isolate her, and they can't isolate her from you." She flinched, though her eyes were still closed. "Watch it."
He had been coming up fast on a station wagon that was moving too slowly in the left lane, and now he swerved around it to the right. "If you saw it," he said irritably, "you know I saw it."
"I'm paying better attention. We've got to—"
"My sister's back there, unconscious. Will they hurt her?"
"They don't care about her, or her husband, now. He can call paramedics. But we've got to figure out a way to hide from the — from your father. He can track us on this electric Ouija board they've got. It's in one of their other cars now, not the orange one we just smashed."
The helicopter, Marrity told himself, the guy you shot, the NSA man, the cartoon creature that talked to Daphne from the hospital television last night. Daphne setting Rumbold on fire. Serious people are taking this stuff seriously. Electric Ouija boards.
"My father saved my life. From you."
"That's not your father. We need a drink. Do you know—"
"Oh, bullshit. Excuse me."
"He's not. Now—"
"If he's not my father, who is?" Marrity shrugged impatiently. "You said we've got to hide from my father."
He glanced sideways at her and saw her frown. "Your father is somebody else, okay?" she said. "Do you know where the Roosevelt Hotel is? The lobby bar there has a million exits, and it's generally crowded, lots of eyes, I can monitor the whole place."
The next big street ahead of them was Hollywood Boulevard. To get to the Roosevelt Hotel he would turn right. "We should go straight to Palm Springs," he said. To get to Palm Springs he would turn left, and get onto the 101 south.
"I've got to call the guys who have your daughter. They don't know yet that they've got to kill you before they can do anything to her, and I've got to point that out to them. And I need three fast drinks. In vino immortalitas."
He sighed and clicked the turn signal up, for a right turn. "Can you remember a phone number?" he said. "I can remember it right now, but I might not remember it when we've got to a phone."
Racing east, the twin-engine Bell 212 helicopter had skimmed between Mount Hollywood and the domes of the Griffith Park Observatory and over the dry-brush hills of Eagle Rock and was now following its shadow along Colorado Boulevard, a few hundred feet below.
Denis Rascasse's body lay stretched out on the rearmost bench seat, right over the fuel tank. He was still breathing, though his consciousness was now focused in a couple of giant pink banksia flowers and an orange-glowing rocket-shaped lava lamp, all belted into a bracket on the starboard bulkhead.
Gray-haired Frank Marrity sat in a forward-facing seat, across from Golze, who was looking sleepy and red-faced since giving himself a shot of morphine from the bus's first-aid kit. The air inside the cabin smelled of something like burnt peanut butter.
On the floor between them was the duct-taped canvas bundle that contained Daphne.
Nobody had spoken in the minutes since the helicopter had lifted away from the cleared area at the top of Beachwood Canyon, but now the banksia blossoms vibrated, and Rascasse's voice rang out over the drone of the turbine engines on the helicopter's roof: "Now Mr. Marrity, you'll please explain — exactly how you worked the time machine."
In apparent response to the voice, Daphne's knees and head dented the canvas, and Marrity heard her muffled voice.
"Open the canvas at the head end," said Golze. "We don't want it smothering."
Marrity shook his head. "Soon," he whispered, "she won't exist anyway!"
"If it smothers," said Golze, shifting uncomfortably on his rear-facing seat, "it'll exist forever as a corpse. Open the package, dip-shit."
Marrity's face was hot. It seemed to him that he must somehow protest dipshit — that if he didn't, there would be ground lost that he would never recover.
"We're taping this," said Rascasse's voice. "What were the steps you took?"
"Uh…" Marrity began, but Golze scowled and pointed at the canvas bundle.
Marrity had to unbuckle his seat belt to lean down over the bundle, and with shaking hands he tore away the duct tape over Daphne's head, then unfolded the grommeted edges of the canvas.
In the shadows between the seats, Daphne's face seemed to be just wide green eyes and disordered brown hair.
"You!" she said, blinking up at him. "Where's my father?" Then she was looking past him at the quilted silver fabric that lined the ceiling and at the fiberglass bulkhead panels with their inexplicable inset round and oval holes. The cabin swung like a bell, and then extra weight told Marrity that they were ascending. "Are we in an airplane?" asked Daphne.