Earthquake Weather (46 page)

Driving the Granada with Cochran and Plumtree and Angelica in it, Pete had followed Mavranos’s red truck up Divisadero to Marina and Yacht Road, and the two vehicles were now parked side by side in the otherwise empty lot. Beyond the curb and a short descending slope of tumbled wet boulders, the gray sea of the San Francisco Bay looked as rolling and wild as open ocean.

On a shoulder strap under her tan raincoat Angelica was carrying a compact black Marlin .45 carbine, its folding stock swiveled forward to lie locked against the left side of the trigger guard; and as she stepped away from the Granada she pulled back the rifle’s slide-lever and let it snap back, chambering a live round. The extended base of a twelve-round magazine stuck out from the magazine well, and back in the motel room Cochran had seen her stuff a couple of extra magazines in the pocket of her jeans and a couple more in the raincoat’s left pocket.

You expecting an army?
he had asked her.

I want to have plenty of the ghost-killer hollow-points,
she had answered in a flat, singsong voice, as if talking to herself,
but I want hardball too, full-jacket, ’cause if I shoot off the first magazine’s dozen rounds and need more, I’m likely to be shooting at a distance after that, or through car doors, and hardball’s more reliable for that kind of thing; and adrenaline’s likely to make me shaky, loosen my grip, and hollow-points don’t feed through smoothly sometimes if the gun’s not being braced firmly. Hardball in the raincoat, hollow-point
omieros
in the jeans.

You’ve given it thought, Cochran thought now as he watched her pull the raincoat around herself and loosely tie the belt in front.

Plumtree was wearing a cranberry-colored cashmere sweater of Nina’s, and she was huddled against the Granada’s front bumper beside Cochran and blowing into her cupped hands. “I don’t see any of Mavranos’s hippie druids,” she said quietly.

“With luck they don’t get up this early,” said Cochran. I hope nobody does, he added to himself. Mavranos said we’ll be trespassing, going on out to the end of this peninsula.

And what about coming back? Is it really conceivable that Scott Crane will be
walking back
here with us? Limping, I guess, with the bullet in his thigh now. And—

“My God,” he said; then, speaking more loudly, “Angelica? You’re gonnna remember to pull the spear out of his throat, right? It’d be no good if he
did
come back to life, if—”

He saw two reflections of his own pale face in Angelica’s mirror sunglasses when she smiled at him. “We’ve thought of that, Sid. Thanks, though.” She looked past him. “Arky? How wide is the path to the cemetery temple place? I think you should just back the truck right out to it.”

Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was kneeling on the tailgate. “
Back
it out there?” he said, squinting over the Granada’s roof at her. “Well, it would mean we don’t have to
carry
Scott’s body. …”

“Nor the rest of the crap,” Angelica agreed. “And I like the truck’s exhaust—with the muffler all fucked up the way it is, it’s kind of a spontaneous
bata
drumbeat, and it’s the pulse of the king’s vessel.”

“There’s a chain across the path,” Mavranos went on. “Probably padlocked.”

“What’s another dent? What’s some more scratches in your paint?”

“Quicker exit afterward, too,” allowed Mavranos. “That’s worth a lot. Okay.” He hopped down to the pavement and hoisted the lower half of the tailgate shut, though he left the top half raised. “Pete will walk backward ahead of me, waving directions so I don’t go off into the water; Plumtree and Cochran ahead of Pete, so I can keep an eye on ’em over Pete’s shoulder; Angelica behind, watching for pursuit.”

“I should have my gun,” said Cochran.

Mavranos frowned at him. “Actually, I suppose you should. Okay.” He walked around to the open driver’s-side door and leaned in, then walked back to the rear of the truck with Cochran’s holstered revolver. “Just keep it away from Miss Plumtree,” he said as he handed it to Cochran. “And put it away for now.”

Cochran reached behind himself with both hands to clip the holster to the back of his belt.

Mavranos pointed to the northeast corner of the parking lot. “The path starts behind that building, as a paved service road. All of you meet me there.”

He got into the driver’s seat and closed the door, started the engine again, and audibly clanked it into reverse; the truck surged backward out of the parking space and began yawing away across the asphalt in a broad circle.

“After you two,” said Angelica to Cochran and Plumtree, punctuating the request by letting the hidden rifle barrel briefly tent the tan fabric of the raincoat in front of her knee.

They all began trudging after the receding red truck. When Plumtree took his hand, Cochran glanced at her in surprise, for Cody had been on a moment before; but then he saw that it was still Cody—by now he could recognize her stronger jaw and the deeper lines around her flinty eyes.

Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply. “Kahlua,” she said, “burning.”

Cochran too had caught a whiff of hot-coffee-and-alcohol on the cold sea breeze. “Just like down in Solville.”

She squeezed his hand. “I guess that means
something
is gonna happen.”

He looked at her again, but the humble and subdued voice had still been Cody’s.

The battering exhaust of Mavranos’s truck rolling along at idle speed in reverse behind them set the pace of their walk.

“Don’t fall over the chain here, Pete,” called Cochran over his shoulder.

After Plumtree and Cochran stepped over the chain with the rusty
NO ADMITTANCE
sign hanging from it, their shoes were crunching in sandy red dirt, and they could see a cluster of low, rectangular stone structures and an iron light pole a hundred yards ahead of them at the end of the narrow spit of land; and a few seconds later they heard the chain creak and snap and then thrash into the dry wild-anise bushes that fringed the road.

“What chain?” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from behind them, speaking loudly to be heard over the indomitable drumming of the truck’s exhaust.

Cochran and Plumtree kept walking along the dirt path, their hands in their pockets now because of the chill. Puddles in the road reflected the gray sky, and the red dirt was peppered with fragments of brick and marble.

They were close enough to see the structures ahead now—Cochran and Plumtree were already walking past ornate broad capitals of long-gone Corninthian columns that sat upside-down on the dirt like heroic ashtrays, and spare blocks of carved and routed granite that lay at random among the weeds; but though the low walls and stairs and tomb-like alcoves ahead had been cobbled together out of mismatched scavenged brick and marble, the site had a unified look, as if all these at-odds components had come to this weathered, settled state together, right here, over hundreds of years.

A motorboat had been crossing the choppy water of the yacht harbor to their right, between the peninsula and the distant white house-fronts on Marina Boulevard; it had rounded the tip of the peninsula and was coming back along the north side, several hundred feet out, and now Cochran heard a rapid hollow knocking roll across the waves.

And behind him, much closer, he heard the rattling pop of car-window glass shattering. Brick fragments exploded away from a stairway head in front of them even as he had grabbed Plumtree’s forearm and yanked her forward into a sliding crouch behind a low marble wall.

He looked back—Pete was running back toward Angelica, who had flung open her raincoat and raised the short pistol-grip rifle, and the open back end of the red truck was jumping on its old shock absorbers as it picked up speed.

Angelica fired three fast shots, then quickly unfolded the stock and had it to her shoulder and fired two more even as the ejected brass shells of the first three were bouncing on the red dirt. Out here under the open sky the shots sounded like sharp hammer blows on a wooden picnic table.

The truck ground to a halt with its back bumper rocking only a couple of yards from where Cochran and Plumtree were crouched, and two more hard gunshots impacted the air—Cochran realized that Mavranos was now shooting at the boat through the hole where his passenger-side window had been.

The motorboat had paused, out on the gray water; but now its engine roared, and its bow kicked up spray as it turned north and began curving away from the peninsula, showing them nothing but wake and a bobbing transom.

Pete and Angelica came sprinting up as Mavranos hopped down out of the truck.

“Let’s get him out,” Angelica gasped, “and down these stairs to that cobblestone lower level there. I should have had hardball rounds first up. You all carry him, I’ll fetch the
bruja
stuff.”

Cochran stood up, and realized that he had drawn his revolver at some point during the confrontation, and that it was cocked; and after he had carefully lowered the hammer he had to touch the cold barrel to be sure he hadn’t fired it. His right hand was shaking as he reached around behind him and stuffed the gun back into its holster. He brushed a buzzing fly away from his ear, and then, with huge reluctance, stepped toward the truck.

Robed and whole and in some sense still barefoot, the spirit of Scott Crane stood beside the lapping gray water. It wasn’t precisely where Mavranos and the Plumtree woman and the two silver coins were—he was just as immediately aware of the capering naked ghost of himself that was flickering like a hummingbird at the ruins by the sea, where the foghorn moan came for two seconds every fifteen seconds—but what confronted him either way was the water, the obligation to cross the cold, unimaginable water.

Obligation but not inevitability. He could with only moderate difficulty blunt and truncate himself enough to animate the ghost, become no more than the ghost but at least be wholly that, and stay here, with real physical mass; free to shamble around in the familiarity of noisy human streets, and bask in the earthly sun, and pour the coarsening common short-dog wine down his shabbily restored throat. He would be a poisoned and diminished quantity, but still a real quantity.

Or he could take the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought back to him, at such cost, and spend them on the oblivion that the Greeks had represented as Charon’s ferry over the River Styx
—
and then drink from what the Greeks had called Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and surrender.

No guarantees of anything there, that way, not even of nothing. Total abject and unconditional surrender, to whoever or whatever it might ultimately be behind the busy, clustering gods and archetypes that humanity had tried to hold up to it for size. He could hope for mercy, but there would certainly be justice, a justice older and more implacable than the forces that kept the suns shining and the galaxies wheeling in the nighttime sky.

Sitting in the steamy BMW idling in the Star Motel parking lot, Long John Beach turned to the two-manikin appliance in the back seat. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said.

“Talk to
me,
goddammit,” said Armentrout hoarsely, gripping the sweat-slick steering wheel.
They were here during the Marina 3.2 earthquake last night,
one of the motel guests had told him.
They were all yelling at each other, and yelling, “Where’s Kootie?” They carried a guy down the stairs to a truck, and drove away, some of ’em in the truck and some in a beat old brown Ford.

“I’ll tell you all,” Long John said equably. “A man’s car drove over a cliff, and in midair he jumped out, and caught hold of a tree stump halfway down the cliff. Below him is only fog, and he can’t climb up or down. He looks into the sky and says, ‘Is there anybody up there? Tell me what to do!’ And a big voice says, ‘Let go of the tree.’ So after a few seconds the guy says, ‘Is there anybody
else
up there?’ ”

Armentrout nodded impatiently, and finally turned to Long John. “So? What did he do?”

The one-armed man shrugged. “That’s the end of the story.”

Down a set of mismatched brick-and-marble stairs, under the shadow of a scrollwork-roofed marble alcove that looked as if it should shelter the carved effigy of a dead king, a broad cobblestone-paved crescent with a raised stone edge-coping projected out over the sea like an ancient dock.

At the moment the only dead king present was laid out on the pavement below the alcove, his jeans and white shirt blotting up moisture and grime from the puddles between the uneven paving stones; and all that was on the broad table-like slab under the alcove roof was a couple of sheets of corrugated cardboard, bedding for some absent transient.

In the direction of the peninsula point and the iron light pole another set of steps led back up to road level from this stone floor, flanked against the open gray sky by a bench that was a marble slab laid across two broken granite half-moons. Cochran realized that he badly wanted to feel that this shelter was an enduring, solid edifice—but it was too obvious that what distinguished this place from a real, old ruin was the fact that all the stone edges here, even the ones fitted up against each other as part of some wall or seat, were broken and uneven. A line from some poem was tolling in his head:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

Plumbing pipes projected up out of the muddy ground at every shelf and wall-top, their open-mouthed ends bent horizontal to project the echoing sound of sea water rising and falling in their buried shafts, a deep twanging like slow-fingered ascending and descending slides on slack bass-guitar strings. Cochran’s thudding heartbeat and his shallow panting seemed to provide a counterpoint, and it was only Plumtree’s evident, valiant desperation to accomplish the task at hand, and his own queasy shame at having called for Nina’s ghost during the Follow-the-Queen episode, that kept him from wading out into the cold sea on the Marina side and trying to swim to shore.

His face was chilly with sweat, and not just because of having had to help carry the cold dead body a few moments ago. In his mind he was again seeing the carbine jolting in Angelica’s fists and flinging out ejected shell casings, and the brick stairway-top exploding into dust and high-speed fragments, and he was shaking with a new, visceral comprehension of velocity and bullets and human mercilessness. He couldn’t help but be glad that he hadn’t fired his own gun.