George knew enough to know he didn’t know everything. Hell, if he did, he’d have picked a winning horse or Lotto number and retired to some paradise where naked and brown island girls would make him feel young again. He turned in the cramped airline seat and looked at his companion, an old Indian man in a plaid shirt, his silver hair pulled back and tied with a leather thong. This was a long way from paradise. Hell, they probably didn’t even have enough money for a good titty bar.
Life is sure a shit box
, George thought, and went to sleep.
* * *
While Jimmy and George had been enjoying their inflight cocktail, Stan Roberts had been pondering his predicament.
Had Stan been able to talk to someone, say his late partner, who was resting peacefully in the trunk, he would have told them it was like being drunk, or hypnotized.
He got hypnotized once when he was in his early twenties. He was a beat cop then and he and Cherie were out for their second anniversary. They had gone to a nightclub, Rayburn’s on Forty-second. The food had been good, and they had danced and laughed and drunk champagne. The music had finally stopped, and The Amazing Nigel had come out onstage. He was elegantly dressed in a tux, and Stan had thought he looked like a fag. That aside to Cherie had prompted her to volunteer him when the time came. When the hypnotist found out he was a cop, he had everyone applaud for New York’s Finest. Everyone had, enthusiastically, and that had felt pretty good. Then The Amazing Nigel had asked him if he had ever been hypnotized. Stan told him no, and that he thought it was all pretty much “bullshit.” The word had slipped out before he could edit it, and The Amazing Nigel had smiled as the audience laughed. Stan had thrown down the gauntlet, and The Amazing Nigel was only too glad to pick it up.
He had put Stan under rather quickly and had him sing “Whole Lotta Love” as if he were Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. Stan had done an enthusiastic, off-key rendition of the rock classic. The Amazing Nigel had told Stan he was five years old and was lost in a department store. Stan tearfully asked the audience if they had seen his mommy, and this had elicited both laughter and sympathy from them. Finally, The Amazing Nigel had had Cherie come up while
Stan performed a “dance of love and lust” for her. Stan had taken off most of his clothes, stopping at his boxers only because The Amazing Nigel was afraid they would be “raided.”
When Stan came out of it, he was fully dressed. Part of him wanted to punch The Amazing Nigel, but the other half of him was both awed and frightened about the lack of control he had shown. The thing was, he remembered all of it, from his terrible singing to the impromptu striptease. It was like he was on a ride-along in his own mind, watching someone else at the controls. Worse, even though he knew he was embarrassing himself, he didn’t seem to have any motivation to stop. Like he was drugged or something.
The Amazing Nigel had given them a coupon for dinner at Tavern on the Green and had had everyone thank Stan for being such a good sport. When they had gotten home, he and Cherie had had some amazing sex—she had apparently been extremely aroused by his ardor in the “dance of love and lust.” Still, he never forgot that feeling of being conscious but unwilling or unable to act, a passenger in his own body.
It was like that, now. A tiny bit of him was fully aware he had shot his partner in cold blood, was horrified both at the act and the possible repercussions of it. This same little germ of consciousness was also aware he was transporting a package across the country for some malevolent purpose. Yet he felt powerless, shackled by some sort of parasite infesting his will.
He drove on, dimly aware he needed to relieve himself. He urinated into his pants and kept driving.
A tiny portion of him was deeply ashamed.
The first thing Jimmy noticed as he got off the plane was the air. It was foul and dirty. Having lived in Alaska, then Washington, he was unprepared for the air quality in Los Angeles. The odor reminded him of a time when he was working at the Esso gas station. A car had careened onto the lot, its engine ablaze. The driver had had the good sense to steer clear of the pumps and instead had crashed into a phone booth on the far side of the station. Before Jimmy could reach it with a fire extinguisher, the vehicle was engulfed. He and the driver watched the inferno helplessly while the volunteer fire department was gathering its members. The smell of charred upholstery and the acrid black smoke of melting tires—those smells were present in the Los Angeles air, along with sweat, desperation, and greed. He felt like he wanted to gag. Worse, it was muggy out even though the time was just shy of 10:00
P.M
. Jimmy hadn’t even seen Los Angeles, and he hated it already.
George, on the other hand, was beaming. As they entered the terminal, he tipped his hat to three college girls waiting for a flight to San Francisco. They giggled appreciatively at the old man’s gesture.
“Mmmm, mmm, mm,” George said to Jimmy, as they passed the trio. “I do believe I’m gonna like it here.”
“Air stinks,” Jimmy groused.
“Guess you need a bath,” George joked, and Jimmy made an exasperated sound.
Fred had booked them on a flight to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport. He told them this would put them closer to Hollywood and that LAX could be “a real bitch.” The airport was relatively small, and they quickly made their way to the National Car Rental counter near the main entrance.
The woman on duty, Jolie, did her best to sell them a collision-damage waiver and upgrade them into a larger car. George haggled with her, finally agreeing to take the insurance if they would get the larger car at no extra charge. Jimmy suspected the larger car was all she had, but George was pleased with his negotiations, and Jimmy didn’t want to burst his bubble. The car turned out to be a Lincoln Town Car, navy blue with leather seats. George whistled appreciatively as Jolie’s assistant dropped them off with the keys. He walked them around the vehicle, explained the controls for air and the CD player, and made sure they had the map to their
hotel Jolie had given them.
Fred had made reservations for them at the Holiday Inn in Burbank. He had figured the short drive would be better, that they could go to Hollywood the following morning. He had also downloaded maps and directions from Mapquest. They were well prepared.
Except Jimmy had no idea where to go, what to look for, who to see.
He planned to start at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Of all the clues Raven had provided him, it was the only one he understood, and that had been with Fred’s help.
Some shaman
.
George drove them into the city of Burbank, a community at the very edge of the San Fernando Valley. They were at the hotel in fifteen minutes and paid cash for their room on the tenth floor.
George wanted to watch
The Tonight Show
when they finally settled in, but Jimmy wanted to get an early start in the morning. George agreed to keep the sound and his own comments down. Jimmy fell asleep as Jay Leno was telling everyone how Los Angeles was full of freaks and liars. Jimmy hoped he would receive another visit from Raven, one that would tell him what he needed to know.
He slept soundly, and no dreams or visions disturbed his rest.
Stan Roberts thought that the thing controlling him was kind of a fuckup. At least, the part of him that was still Stan Roberts thought so. That was the part that had to sit on the sidelines and watch as he performed like a trained dog. He likened it to being on a train’s observation deck, unable to control the course or speed, just along for the ride and supposedly enjoying the view.
This rebellious line of thought was not constant. His emotions, normally held in check because of the nature of his work, went skittering out of control like novice skaters on a canted sheet of ice. He grieved for Richie, feared for his own life, missed his children, felt shame at being a puppet, and felt hatred for the thing that was pulling his strings. It was like having a multiple personality, with only that part of him he thought of as Detective Roberts aware of the other facets of his personality. When one of his other incarnations was on the observation deck, he faded away into the background but was always cognizant of what was going on even as he was powerless to alter it. When his rational self returned, he had full knowledge of what had occurred in his absence. He tried communicating with these other selves, these other Stans, but they seemed unaware of him, each playing out its little drama. Each facet, each self, seemed to originate from a specific incident in his life. The grieving part of him tapped into his memories and emotions when he was six and his dog had gotten run over by a car. It was a gut-wrenching sort of heartbreak, untempered by maturity or the fatalism that comes with age. The fearful part of him was even younger, four years old and terrified of the dark, a child who has just walked into a spider’s web and felt that sticky silk nothingness enshrouding his face and knew that the spinner of that web was even then crawling about, looking to roost in his ear, his nostril, his mouth. The hateful side of him was the closest to his “normal” self, drawing on rage at the brutal rape of a teenage girl last March. But it was rage without reason, a blind and virulent sort of madness. Each of these voices struggled for preeminence on the observation deck, each one behaving as if it were the true Stan Roberts. It was like the thing controlling him was playing his emotions like the keys of a pipe organ, delighting in the music it made. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed the thing was trying to learn from him. It seemed to be studying his emotions, at least the negative ones, trying to learn the components in fear and dread, anger and sorrow. He was a guinea pig for … whatever it was, and all the while his body drove the mysterious package in the backseat to its eventual destination. Wherever that was.
When those other voices vying for expression would quiet, the detective part of him would examine his situation, trying to puzzle out what was going on. It was these rare moments when he decided the thing, whatever it was, was a fuckup.
True, it was powerful. It had made him kill his best friend and was now sending him across the country on some unknown mission. Yet it seemed unaware of the vagaries of U.S. highways. It merely directed him to travel west, as fast as possible without causing an incident. It appreciated the speed of cars but didn’t seem to know that there was not a straight line from New York to California. In addition, it seemed perplexed that Stan did not know how to get from New York to California. He had never been farther than Jersey, so this was not knowledge he could access.
Of course, he could have consulted road maps, but he tried to keep this information from his puppet-master. It seemed to know his thoughts, so he tried to keep things hidden. No maps meant delays, and delays might give him time to figure a way out of this. Whatever it planned, it wasn’t good. Perhaps he could stop it.
He had no worries that one of his other “selves” might spill the beans; each one was far too engrossed in its own emotional state. For them, it was always that particular “now,” that moment of overriding emotion that precluded any logical thought. By keeping much of him locked in hysteria or rage, the thing had limited its access to what information he did possess—concepts like road maps, for instance.
Like he said, a fuckup.
After some time phasing in and out of consciousness, he realized the thing was “elsewhere” when Detective Roberts came to the fore. He wondered if it was off torturing others, if it was directing the so-called Taxidermy murders. In a perverse way, he was lucky it was off doing whatever it was doing. Had it been in his mind full-time, he would never have moments of lucidity. That was a frightening thought, worse than contemplating what they would do to him if they found Richie in his trunk, shot with his gun. Of course, he also figured that once he had done whatever he was supposed to do, the thing would dispose of him.
Like Richie.
So he would drive, trying by trial and error to make his way across the country. The thing controlling him directed him to head west. It wasn’t communication in the normal sense; it was like hypnosis. The thoughts would occur to him and seem right, so he would carry them out. Never mind that the part of him that was still Stan felt the cold touch of something foul and alien picking through his mind. He would drive west, ever west, compensating whenever a route veered in the wrong direction. He would do this automatically, that tiny portion of his mind jumping from Fearful Stan to Grieving Stan to Panicked Stan to Sad Stan to Angry Stan to Detective Stan. It was like a carnival fun house in his head, full of starts and stops, blind turns
and screaming things popping up around corners. In this case, the screaming things were all him. As amusement parks went, he wanted his money back.
He might have continued like this for months, making headway, then backtracking, inching his way across three thousand miles. But the thing had grown impatient with this lack of progress. In Demeter, Pennsylvania, Stan had gotten off a highway that had veered suddenly north and had stopped alongside the road to get his bearings. The thing had reared up inside his mind, all darkness and ice, and let him know it was ready to snuff him out and replace him with someone who had the knowledge to get to California. Fearful Stan had been on the observation deck at the time and had quickly transformed into Panicked Hysterical Stan. Detective Stan, realizing his other self was going to spill the beans, had tried to stop him but was powerless in his own mind.
Hysterical Stan had pleaded for mercy and immediately told the thing about the availability of maps at any gas station along the highway. The thing had gotten angry that such information had been withheld and had squeezed his mind like it was a grape between its icy fingers. The pain had been beyond imagining, full of lightning, sparks, and fire rushing along the convolutions of his brain. He had screamed and blacked out. When he came to, his eyes teared up and blurred, then focused. He found that his nose had bled all down the front of his white shirt, mixing with Richie’s blood to create a crimson Rorschach blot. He also seemed to be deaf in one ear. He knew the price for any further omission or rebellion would be slow and agonizing. He made his way to a Texaco station across the road.