Earthquake Weather (28 page)

But he had needed the masking effect of the contraption. Long John Beach had been dangerously preempted during that ice-cream-social bedlam, and Armentrout had needed every masking measure he could put on, what with the god apparently
right in here,
breaking the place up with an earthquake and freeing inmates from their captivity.

Armentrout rocked his head back to look up at the raw cracks in the ceiling.

All at once he stood up, shuddering. His fully charged cellular telephone was a weight in his jacket pocket, but suddenly he couldn’t bear being in the TV lounge any longer. He waved at the night charge nurse through the station window as he hurried past.

Plumtree and
Cochran,
Armentrout thought as he strode down the dark hall toward his closed office door. Why would the god have freed Cochran
too?

Armentrout wondered uneasily if he ought to have paid more attention to the deluded widower. How
had
the man come to have that ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand? Cochran hadn’t reported having any delusional episodes—or visitations—while he was here; Armentrout would have been alerted by anything like that; but was the dreary fellow more than just psychically sensitive, could he have some
link
with the god?

Armentrout’s key unlocked his office door, but he was too distracted to be pleased by the little vindication. I should have had him on hard meds, he thought as he blundered across the linoleum floor and sat down at the desk; hell, I should have given
him
benzodiazepine and ECT! I lost more than I gained, working them out on Plumtree, even if my—even if no distant ghost got a fix on me.

I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package.
True, Armentrout thought now. But I do have a vial of your blood, Mr. Salvoy.

He stared at the two-figure manikin appliance that was canted against the couch. With shirts, jackets, trousers, and shoes hung and hooked onto the aluminum poles, and the pair of clothing-store manikin heads stuck on the swiveling neck-posts, the thing did look like two blandly smiling men with their arms around the shoulders of an invisible third man in the middle; and when he strapped the framework onto his own shoulders, Armentrout would become the third man, the man in the middle. A lever in the chest of the left-hand dummy permitted him to work the mechanical outside arms, and one in the right-hand dummy let him swivel the heads this way and that. And he had cored out holes in the backs of the Styrofoam heads, under the Dynel wigs, and stuffed into the holes dozens of paper towels spotted with patients’ blood samples. The thing weighed about twenty pounds and was awkward to wear, and in public it drew
far
too much derisive attention, but on several occasions it had proven to be an effective multi-level psychic scrambler, a terrifically refractive and deflecting mask. Even some moron with a plain old
gun,
Armentrout thought, would be likely to hit the wrong head.

The telephone on his desk rang, making him jump in his chair, and in the instant before he realized that the vibration in his ribs was just his cellular phone ringing too, he thought he was having some sort of cardiac arrest.

“Yes?” he said into the receiver when he had fumbled it up to his ear. Not long-distance, he thought fervently, please. Let it just finally be the cop.

And, thankfully, it
was
the cop.

“Doctor?” came the man’s voice. “Officer Hamilton here. Sorry it’s so late, I called as quick as I could after I got off work. Got a pencil? I’ve got the location of the place where your Appleseed girl said she killed the Flying Nun king.”

Armentrout shakily wrote down an address on Neptune Avenue in Leucadia. “And did you come up with anything about Neal Obstadt’s death two years ago?”

“More or less. Something damn peculiar was going on that week, and the L.A. cops are still trying to figure it out. Obstadt’s body was found in the water off the ocean side of the
Queen Mary
after some kind of bomb went off in the water there, on October 31 of ’92, though no traces of any kind of explosive chemicals were found in the water, and no bomb fragments at all were recovered; he was blown to pieces, but they found a small-caliber bullet in his guts too. And the body of a film producer named Loretta deLarava was found up on one of the tourist decks with a
.45
slug in her heart. She was filming some kind of TV special there, and we questioned a lot of her employees. Apparently deLarava had brought six people aboard
at gunpoint, as handcuffed prisoners.
One was that one-armed amnesiac nut you took charge of, who still had a pair of cuffs hanging from his wrist when they found him half-dead on the shore of the lagoon. And I’ve got the names of the other five, if you want ’em.”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay. Nicholas Bradshaw—he was the actor who played Spooky the ghost in that old TV show, ‘Ghost of a Chance,’ which was cancelled in 1960; a lawyer named J. Francis Strube, who spoke to detectives only through a lawyer of his own and basically had nothing useful to say; an itinerant electrical engineer named Peter Sullivan, whose twin sister had killed herself in Delaware five days previous; a lady psychiatrist who’s been wanted on manslaughter charges since November of 1990, named Angelica Anthem Elizalde; and an eleven-year-old kid named Koot Hoomie Parganas, whose parents were torture-murdered the same night Sullivan’s twin sister killed herself. All these people got free of their handcuffs, as if one of ’em had a key or was an escape artist.”

Hamilton sighed over the line. “Bradshaw and Sullivan and Elizalde and the Parganas kid haven’t been found since,” he went on, “even though they’re seriously wanted for at least questioning. DeLarava was offering a big reward for the fugitive Parganas boy, and the boy apparently called nine-one-one on the evening of the 27th, but the call was interrupted, and
I
think he’s probably dead; and the Elizalde woman apparently shot at a woman in the Westlake area on the 28th. And then after Halloween the LAPD was deluged with calls about all this—from
psychics
! Unhelpful.”

Elizalde!
thought Armentrout with a stir of remembered admiration. What a deluded pioneer that woman was! And a dark, long-legged beauty, too—I used to see her a lot when she was on the staff at the County Hospital in Huntington Park in ’88 and ’89.

But the mention of one-armed Long John Beach had reminded him that the crazy old man was presently in “three-points” in the Quiet Room, and that if he was going to have to take Beach out of the hospital, it would be far easier with just the night staff to get past.

“So, have there been,” Armentrout asked, knowing that this was his main question, and not at all sure what answer he wished for, “any of the peculiarities I asked about, going on at the Leucadia address, or near it?” Do I get to go home now and catch a few hours of sleep, and visit the Neptune Avenue place at my leisure and alone, he thought—or must I rush off there now, bringing all my cumbrous psychic-defense impedimenta along?

“Well,” said Hamilton, “nobody’s
reported
any ‘sudden growth of vegetation’ to the cops … nor the opposite … but they wouldn’t hardly, would they?”

“I suppose not,” said Armentrout with a smile, beginning to relax and think of his bed.

“But there’ve been a
whole
lot of calls about crazy teenagers driving through the neighborhood honking their horns and shooting off firecrackers—guns too, we’ve found ejected shells on the street. And either them or some other crowd of teenagers has been dancing on the beach at all hours, real noisy. You did mention ‘other disturbances.’ And,” Hamilton added, chuckling through a yawn, “you didn’t ask about this, but
two separate people
have called the
Union Tribune
to announce that Elvis Presley is going to be coming to town to stay with them for a few weeks. Oh, and you know the way evangelists are always saying the world’s about to end? Well, a nut Bible church on the 101 there, one of the charismatic-hysterical types that rent space in failed laundromats, has announced that the world
already
ended, on New Year’s Day. We’re all living in some kind of delusional Purgatory right now, they say.”

While the man had been talking, Armentrout had abandoned all thought of going home to bed, and was now wearily planning how he would get Long John Beach and the two-figure appliance out of the clinic past the security guards.

“These … teenagers,” Armentrout said, just to be sure, “are they … dressed nice? Seem to have money?”

“Not in particular. But hey, their cars all look like solid gold! They drive anything at all, Volkswagens, beat old Fords, Hondas, see—but a whole lot of them are painted metallic gold, and they’ve got wreaths of flowers hung over the license plates; even on the back plates, which is a violation. The neighborhood residents say it’d look like a parade if they weren’t tearing through so fast. The kids on the beach, it’s hard to tell—get this, they bring big pots of
white clay,
and smear themselves up with it for their dancing. Can’t even tell what race they are, I gather.”

Armentrout sighed. “Thank you, Officer Hamilton. I think that will be all.”

“Okay, Doc. Say, how’s your crazy girl working out? Was her name Fig-leaf? I hope she was worth the money.”

Armentrout thought of telling Hamilton that the woman had escaped, then discarded the idea. I don’t really want the cops in on this now, he thought. “Miss Figleaf has been a valuable addition to our team,” he said vaguely.

“Softball league, sounds like. Well, if you use electric scoreboards, nobody’ll know when you lose—right?—with her playing for you.”

Armentrout agreed absently and hung up the phone. “And if the referee’s got a pacemaker, he’d better not declare her out,” he said softly, to no one but the Siamese-twin manikins leaning against the couch.

Well, she really did kill the king, he thought, our Miss Plumtree, our Miss Figleaf … who certainly held tight to her fig leaf while she was here. And a new king is apparently in readiness. Those people expecting Elvis sense it—
the undying King is coming here!
—and the gangs of teenagers are clearly some kind of spontaneous embodiment of the Maruts who are mentioned in the Rig-Veda: noisy, armed youths from a culture so primitive that dance served the purpose of devout prayer, who—helpfully in this instance, while the king is temporarily out of the picture—aggressively embody fertility; and they’re assuming too the role of the Cretan Kouretes, who hid the vulnerable infant Zeus from his murderous father Kronos by performing their Sword Dance around the baby, and masked his crying with the noise of their clashing weapons.

It’s in Leucadia that I’ll get a line on the new king, Armentrout thought, whoever it turns out to be. I wonder if dawn is close enough yet for Venus to be shining like a star in the eastern sky.

The telephone rang again. Armentrout assumed Hamilton had forgotten some detail, and he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

And then his lungs seemed to freeze—because over the phone he was hearing once again, for the first time in eleven days, the familiar phantom bar sounds, laughter and clinking glass and moronic jabbering. Then a well-remembered voice came on the line—loud, as the very fresh ones always were: “Doctor?” whined the teenaged bipolar girl who had killed herself last week. “I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?”

He hung up the phone without saying anything. There was no use talking to ghosts anyway, and he didn’t want to give the thing the confirmation of having found him.

But she
had
found him, and no doubt would again. Hers was the first local death for which he’d been responsible since the mysterious and apparently one-shot amnesty that had been granted at dawn on New Year’s Day. How long could it possibly, reasonably be before he would need to send more people—or even just idiot mumbling fragments of people, which would clump together—to that uncorporeal bar?

As he stood up and crossed to the file cabinet to fetch out the two purple velvet boxes and the unrefrigerated blood sample from Plumtree, he was mentally rehearsing his imminent departure from the clinic. I can avoid some carrying-hassle by strapping the two-figure appliance right onto Long John Beach, he thought; he’s already established as crazy.

I’ll write him a pass, say we’re going on a field trip … to early-morning mass at some Catholic church. I’ll tell the guards that the old man thinks he’s the Three Wise Men, overdue at Bethlehem.

My father hath a power; inquire of him,

And learn to make a body of a limb.

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

“W
ATCH FOR A MOBIL
station,” said Plumtree, leaning back in the driver’s seat and squinting through cigarette smoke at the onrushing dark pavement of Highway 101.

Cochran nodded and peered through a wiped-clean patch of the steamy windshield, though there was nothing at the moment to see but the endless ellipsis of reflective orange lane-marker dots and the perilously close nighttime fog hanging on the road shoulder. They were north of Oxnard, out of L.A. County, and had just driven past the exit for something called Lost Hills Road.
Why would anyone take that exit?
Plumtree had wondered aloud.
If
hills
get lost out there, they’d certainly lose
you.

“The Jenkins woman’s not gonna be cancelling her credit cards till ten,” Plumtree went on now, “at the earliest. Hell, the way she was knocking back the margaritas, she probably won’t get up before noon.”

Jenkins had proven to be the name of the woman whose purse Plumtree had stolen at the Mount Sabu bar. After searching the Belmont Shore area for an older-model car, and then finding and quickly hot-wiring a ’69 Ford Torino that had been parked off Redondo Avenue, Plumtree had used the Jenkins woman’s Visa card in an all-night Ralph’s market to buy a carton of cigarettes and a dozen cans of soup and a can opener and a fistful of Slim Jim packages and two twelve-packs of Coors and two bottles of Listerine and three 750-milliliter bottles of Popov vodka. A vodka bottle was opened now, wedged between her thighs and occasionally rattled by the bumps on the steering wheel when she changed lanes.