Earthquake Weather (11 page)

His belly felt hollow with anticipation as he pulled the door closed behind him—We’ll surely get some tasty therapy done, he told himself smugly, in our therapy session at three.

An hour after lunch Cochran stood in the fenced-off picnic yard, smoking his third-to-last Marlboro, which the charge nurse had lit for him with her closely guarded Bic lighter when she had let the patients out here for the hourly smoke break. The afternoon sunlight shone brightly on the expanse of asphalt and the distant palm trees outside the iron-bar fence, and Cochran was squinting between the bars at two men in the parking lot who were using jumper cables to try to start a car, and he was envying them their trivial problems.

Long John Beach was leaning on the fence a couple of yards to Cochran’s right, gingerly scratching the corner of one swollen eye under the silvery nose brace. Cochran remembered the old man
eating
nine cigarettes last night, and he tried to work up some resentment over it; and then he tried to be grateful that the one-armed lunatic seemed to have no memory of, nor even any interest in, how his nose had been broken; but these were just frail and momentary distractions.

Cochran threw the cigarette down and stepped on it. “Nina,” he said, loud enough for Long John Beach to hear but speaking out toward the parking lot, “can you hear me?”

The old man had jumped, and was now craning his neck around to peer across the sunny lot at the men huddled under the shade of the car hood. “You’ll have to shout,” he said. “Hey, was I snoring real bad last night? I got coughing when I woke up, thought I’d cough my whole spirit out on the floor like a big snake.”

Cochran closed his eyes. “I was talking to my wife,” he told the old man. “She’s dead. Can you … hear her?” After a moment he looked over at him.

“Oh—” Long John Beach shrugged expansively. “Maybe.”

Cochran made himself concentrate on her bitter voice as he had heard it last night.

“Nina,” he answered her now, as awkwardly as a long-lapsed Catholic in the confessional; he was light-headed and sweating, and he had to look out through the fence again in order to speak. “Whatever happened, whatever—I love you, and I miss you terribly.
Look,
goddammit, I’ve lost my
mind
over it! And—Jesus, I’m sorry. Of course you were right about the Pace Chardonnays—” He was talking rapidly now, shaking his head. “—they are too loud and insistent, and they do dominate a meal. Show-off wines, made to win at blind tastings, you’re right. I’m sorry I called your family’s wines flinty and thin. Please tell me that it wasn’t that silly argument, at the New Year’s Eve thing, that—but if I am to blame—”

He paused; then glanced sideways at his attentive companion.

Apparently aware that some response was expected of him, Long John Beach shuffled his feet and blinked his blackened eyes. “Well … I was never much of a wine man,” the old man said apologetically. “I just ate smokes.”

Cochran was clinging to a description of lunatics a friend had once quoted to him—
One day nothing new came into their heads
—because lately he himself seemed to be able to count on at least several appalling revelations every day.

“ ‘Think not the King did banish thee,’ ” he said unsteadily, quoting the lines he’d skipped last night, “ ‘but thou the King.’ ”

Long John Beach opened his mouth, and the voice that came out was not his own, but neither was it Nina’s; and it was so strained that Cochran couldn’t guess its gender. “ ‘The bay trees in our country are all withered, and meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,’ ” the voice said, clearly quoting something. “ ‘These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.’ ”

“Who are you?” Cochran whispered.

“ ‘I am bastard begot,’ ” the eerie voice droned on, perhaps in answer, “ ‘bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in
valor,
in everything illegitimate.’ ”

Cochran was dizzy, and all at once but with no perceptible shift the sunlight seemed brassy amber, and the air was clotted and hard to push through his throat. “Where is my wife?” he rasped.

“ ‘Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.’ ”

“Wh—
India
? Are you—talking to me? Please, what do you mean—” He stopped, for he realized that he was looking
up
at Long John Beach, and the base of his spine stung. He had abruptly sat down on the pavement beside one of the picnic tables.

There had been a startled shout from out in the parking lot, and the power lines were swinging gently far overhead. When Cochran peered out at the men, he saw that the car hood had fallen onto one of them; the man was rubbing his head now and cussing at his companion, who was laughing.

“Whoa!” said Long John Beach, also laughing. “Did you feel that one? Or are you just making yourself at home?”

Cochran understood that there had been an earthquake; and, looking up at the power lines and the leaves on the banana tree in the courtyard, he gathered that it was over. The sunlight was bright again, and the jacaranda-scented breeze was cold in his sweaty hair.

He got to his feet, rubbing the seat of his corduroy pants. “I suppose you’ve got nothing more to say,” he told Long John Beach angrily.

The one-armed man shrugged. “Like I say, I was never a wine man.”

The charge nurse was standing in the lounge doorway, waving. The smoking break was apparently ended.

Cochran turned to trudge back to the building. “You don’t know what you’ve been missing,” he said.

When the two of them had shuffled up to the door, the nurse said, “Dr. Armentrout wants to see you.”

“Good,” said Cochran stoically. “I want to talk to him.”

“Not you,” the nurse said. “Him.” She nodded toward the one-armed old man.

Long John Beach was nodding. “For the Plumtree girl,” he said. “He wants me on the
horn.
On the
blower.
”

“The usual thing,” said the nurse in obvious agreement as she flapped her hands to shoo the two men inside.

Armentrout knew it wasn’t Cody that knocked on his office door at three, because when he peeked out through the reinforced glass panel he saw that Plumtree had walked down the hall and was standing comfortably; Cody would have needed the wheelchair he had told the nurses to have ready.

He unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Come in … Janis?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down,” he told her. “Over on the couch there, you want to relax.”

The tape recorder inside the Faraday cage in the desk was rolling, and the telephone receiver was lying on the desk, with Long John Beach locked into the conference room on the other side of the clinic, listening in on the extension—Armentrout was psychically protected, masked. Beside the receiver on the desk was the box that contained the twenty Lombardy Zeroth tarot cards, along with a pack of Gudang Garam clove-flavored cigarettes and a box of strawberry flavor-straws, so he was ready to snip off and consume at least a couple of Plumtree’s supernumerary personalities—escort some of the girls off the bus, he thought with nervous cheer, kidnap a couple of Snow White’s dwarves.
The better to eat you with, my dear.
And if Cody chose to step out and get physical, he had the 250,000-volt stun gun in the pocket of his white coat. A different kind of Edison Medicine.

When she had sat down on the couch—sitting upright, with her knees together, for now—he handed her the glass of water in which he had dissolved three milligrams of benzodiazepine powder.

“Drink this,” he said, smiling.

“It’s … what?”

“It’s a mild relaxant. I’ll bet you’ve been experiencing some aches and pains in your joints?”

“In my hand, is all.”

“Well …
Cody
will appreciate it, trust me.”

Plumtree took the glass from his hand and stared at the water. “Give me a minute to think,” she said. “You’ve jumbled us all up here.”

Armentrout turned toward the desk, reaching for the telephone. “Never mind, I’ll have them give it to you intravenously.”

The bluff worked. She raised her bruised hand in a
wait
gesture and tilted up the glass with the other, draining it in four gulps; and if the desk lamp had flickered it had only been for an instant.

She now even licked the rim of the glass before leaning forward to set it down on the carpet; and when she straightened up she was sitting forward, looking up at him with her chin almost touching the coat buttons over his belt buckle.

“This is a highly lucrative position,” she said. “But I guess nobody can see us right here, can they?”

“Well,” said Armentrout judiciously, glancing from the couch to the door window as if considering the question for the first time ever, “I suppose not.” The drug couldn’t possibly be hitting her yet.

She reached out with her right hand and winced, then with her left caught his left hand and pressed it to her forehead. “Do you think I have a fever, Doctor?”

She was rubbing his palm back and forth over her brow, and her eyes were closed.

His heart was suddenly pounding in his chest. Go with the flow, he told himself with a jerky mental shrug. Without taking his hand away from her face he sat down on the couch beside her on her left. “There are,” he said breathlessly, “more reliable … areas of the anatomy … upon which to manually judge body temperature. From.”

“Are there?” she said. She pulled his palm down over her nose and lips; and when she had slid it over her chin and onto her throat she breathed, “Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.”

He had got his fingers on the top button of her blouse when the desk lamp browned out and she abruptly shoved his hand away.

“Shouldn’t there be a nurse present for any physical examination?” she said rapidly.

He exhaled in segments. “Janis.”

“Yes.”

“Who … was that?”

“I believe that was Tiffany.”

“Tiffany.” He nodded several times. “Well, she and I were in the middle of a, a useful dialogue.”

“Valerie has locked Tiffany in her room.”

“In the … dwarves’ cottage, that would be?”

Plumtree smiled at him and tapped the side of her head. “Exactly.” She had begun shifting uncomfortably on the couch, and smacking her lips, and now she said, “Could I go take a shower?”

Of course there was no tone of innuendo at all in the remark. “Your hair’s damp right now,” Armentrout told her shortly. “I bet you took a shower since lunch. You can take one after we’re done here.” He slapped his hands onto his knees and stood up, and crossed to the desk. With shaky fingers he fumbled a clove cigarette out of the pack and lit it with one of the ward Bics. He puffed on it, wincing at the syrupy sweet smoke, and then flipped open the purple velvet box.

“Well!” he said, spilling the oversized tarot cards faceup onto the desktop, though not looking directly at them. “I did want to ask you about New Year’s Day. You said you killed a man, remember? A king called, somehow, the Flying Nun? A week later Mr. Cochran saw a man who had a bull’s head, in Los Angeles. On
Vignes
Street, that means ‘grapevines’ in French; there used to be a winery there, where Union Station is now.” Pawing through the cards and squinting at them through his eyelashes and the scented cigarette smoke, he had managed to find the Sun card, a miniature painting of a cherub floating over a jigsaw-edged cliff and holding up a severed, grimacing red head from which golden rays stuck out like solid poles in every direction.

Now he spun away from the desk and thrust the card face-out toward her. “Did your king have a bull’s head?” He sucked hard on the cigarette.

Plumtree had rocked back on the couch and looked away. And Armentrout coughed as much from disgust as from the acrid smoke in his lungs, for there was no animation, no identity, riding the smoke into his head—he had missed catching the Janis personality, the Plumtree gestalt had parried him.

“Hi, Doctor,” Plumtree said. “Is this a come-as-you-are party?” She stared at him for a moment, and appeared to replay in her head what had last been said. “Are you talking about the king we killed? Look, I’m being cooperative here. I’ll answer all your questions. But—trust me!—if you hit us with the … Edison Medicine again, none of us will tell you anything, ever.” Her shoulders had slumped as she’d been talking. “No, he didn’t have a bull’s head. He was barefooted, and had long hair down to his shoulders, and a beard, like you’d expect to see on King Solomon or Charlemagne.” She rubbed her hand over her face in an eerie and apparently unwitting re-enactment of what she had done with Armentrout’s hand. “But I recognized him.”

Armentrout knew his shielded tape recorder would be getting all this, but he tried to concentrate on what the woman was saying. You let that Tiffany girl get you all rattled, he told himself; you don’t
want
to eat the
Janis
personality, you idiot, she’s the one you want to leave
in
the body, to show how successful the integration therapy was. You’re
lucky
you didn’t get her, in the clove smoke. “You … say you recognized him,” he said, nodding like a plaster dog in the back window of a car. “You’d seen him before?”

“In that game on the houseboat on Lake Mead in 1990. Assumption—it’s a kind of poker. He was dressed as a woman for that, and the other players called him the Flying Nun. Our mental bus navigator Flibbertigibbet was trying to win the job Crane was after, the job of being the king, which is why he had us there, playing hands in that terrible game; and he didn’t succeed—and he went flat-out crazy on Holy Saturday when Crane won …
it,
the crown, the throne.”

“Crane?”

“Scott Crane. I didn’t know his name until we all got talking together today; I thought Flying Nun was, like, his
name,
it might be a Swedish name, right, like Bra Banning? He was a poker player in those days.”

“I remember another man who wanted to be this king,” said Armentrout thoughtfully, “a local man called Neal Obstadt. He died in the same explosion that collapsed Long John Beach’s lung, two and a half years ago. And Obstadt was looking for this Crane fellow back in ’90—had a big reward offered.” He looked at her and smiled. “You know, you may
actually have
killed somebody, ten days ago!”