Earthquake Weather (42 page)

Armentrout sighed deeply and sank down cross-legged beside the two velvet boxes. At least his mother was gone, for now. But Muir surely intended to report this, and investigate Beach’s transfer, and end Armentrout’s career. “Come over here, Philip,” he said huskily, lifting the lid of the box that contained the derringer. “I think I can show you something that will explain all of this.”

“It’s not me you need to be explaining things to. Why on earth did you give Plumtree ECT? What the hell happened during the ice-cream social last Wednesday? Mr. Regushi swallowed his
tongue
!”

Armentrout again got wearily to his feet, one hand holding the box and the other gripping the hidden derringer. “Just look at this, Philip, and you’ll understand.”

Muir angrily stepped forward across the grass. “I can’t imagine what it could be.”

“I guess it’s whatever you’ve made it.”

The flat, hollow boom of the .410 shot-shell was muffled by the cypresses and the hillside.

TROILUS:
What offends you, lady?

CRESSIDA:
Sir, mine own company.

TROILUS:
You cannot shun yourself.

CRESSIDA:
Let me go and try.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

“C
OCHRAN SAID HE’S BEEN
walking and taking the cable cars to get down here into Chinatown,” said Archimedes Mavranos. “Maybe the cable cars were full today, and he’s gotta hike the whole way.”

Shadows from a slow ceiling fan far overhead swept rhythmically over the red Formica tabletop.

“He might have sold us out,” said Kootie. “Maybe bad guys are just about to come busting in here.” He had asked for a straw with his Coke, and now he glanced over his shoulder; the bartender was looking at the television in the corner above the bar, so Kootie stuck his straw into Angelica’s glass of Chardonnay and took a sip of it. “It’s sacramental,” he explained to his foster-mother when she frowned at him. “The king needs a sip at noon, especially if bad guys are due.”

“I don’t need Coke in my wine,” Angelica said.

“If bad guys want to open a hand in a no-limit game like this,” said Mavranos with more confidence than he felt, touching the front of his denim jacket and glancing at Angelica’s purse, “they’re liable to see some powerful raises.”

Pete Sullivan was sitting beside Angelica at the table by the stairs that led down to the rest rooms, and he was deftly, one-handed, cartwheeling a cigarette over the backs of the knuckles of his right hand; it had been unlit, fresh from the pack, when he’d started, but the tip was glowing when he flipped it into the air off his last knuckle and caught it by the filter in his lips.

“Wow,” said Mavranos.

“Yeah, wow,” agreed Pete irritably as he puffed smoke from the cigarette. “Magic tricks. But if I try to hold a
weapon,
my hands are no good at all. Even a pair of scissors I drop, if I think about stabbing somebody.” He wiggled his fingers. “Houdini made sure his mask wouldn’t be capable of hurting anybody.”

Kootie grinned wanly. “He can’t even play video games,” the boy told Mavranos. “The hands think he’s really trying to shoot down enemy pilots.”

Mavranos opened his mouth to say something, then focused past Kootie toward the front door of the bar. “Heads up,” he said.

Sid Cochran had just stumbled in from the street, and Mavranos felt his face tighten in a smile to see the blond Plumtree woman lurching along right behind him.

Mavranos pushed his chair back and stood up. “I was afraid we weren’t ever going to see you again, ma’am,” he said to Plumtree.

Plumtree’s hair was wet, and Mavranos thought she looked like someone going through heroin withdrawal as she collapsed into the chair beside Kootie. There were cuts under her chin and at one corner of her mouth, and her face had a puffy, bruised look. “Shove it, man,” she said hoarsely. “I’m an accessory to a murder today. More than anything else in the world, I want
not
to be. Soon, please God.”

“A murder
today
?” asked Kootie.

Plumtree closed her eyes. “No. I’m
still,
today, an accessory to Scott Crane’s murder. Is what I meant. But tomorrow I might not be.”

“Tomorrow you might not be,” Mavranos agreed.

“She insisted on coming,” said Cochran nervously as he took the chair opposite her, next to Pete Sullivan. “We’re laying our cards on the table here, but we can see yours too. We saw your truck in the Portsmouth Square parking structure, and saw what had to be your, your
dead
guy under a tarp in the back of it. If we’d wanted to screw this up, we’d have put a bullet through Crane’s head right then.”

Plumtree was blinking around now at the gold-painted Chinese bas-reliefs high up on the walls, and she squinted at a yard-wide, decorated Chinese paper lantern hanging from a string above the bar. An old Shell No-Pest Strip dangled from the tassel at the bottom of the lantern.

“Can I get a drink in this opium den?” she asked. “What is all this shit? The entrance to this place looks like a cave.”

Mavranos could smell bourbon on her breath right across the table. “It’s named after a famous eighth-century Chinese poet,” he told her. “The pictures painted on that lantern are scenes from his life.”

“What’d he do to earn the No-Pest Strip?” she asked. “Somebody get me a Bud, hey?”

I guess there’s no need for her to be sober, thought Mavranos; he shrugged and leaned over to pick up his own beer glass, which was empty.

“I’ll have a Singapore Sling,” Cochran said. He glanced at Plumtree. “They make a good Singapore Sling here.”

“Said the Connecticut Pansy,” remarked Plumtree absently. “Did flies kill him?” she asked Mavranos. “Your eight-cent poet, I mean—that yellow plastic thing is to kill flies, if you didn’t know.”

“Las moscas,”
said Cochran, and Mavranos realized that he wasn’t totally sober either, “That’s what they call flies at a vineyard. They can get into the crush, if you do it after sunup—the Mexican grape-pickers think flies will carry little ghosts into the fermenting must, make you dizzy and give you funny dreams when you drink the wine, later. I suppose you might die of it, if enough ghosts had got into the wine.”

“I’m sure each of us has a funny story about flies,” said Mavranos patiently, “but right now we’ve got more important …
issues at hand.
” He turned away toward the bar, then paused and looked back at Plumtree. “The poet is supposed to have drowned—the story is he fell out of a boat, drunk, in the middle of the night, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.”

“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.

When Mavranos got back to the table with the three drinks and sat down, Plumtree greedily took the glass he pushed across to her and drank half of it in one long, wincing sip. “I should have told you to get two,” she said breathlessly when she had clanked the glass back down. “Do you people have a set of handcuffs? My father took over control of my body three days ago, and I just this morning got free of him; and I feel like he spent the whole time body-surfing in avalanches. But he might come back on at any time.” She opened her mouth and clicked her teeth like a monkey.

Mavranos stared at her. We should just ditch these two losers, he thought. Get back to the truck now, and just drive away.

“No, Arky,” said Angelica sharply. She was glaring at him. “
She’s
the one that’s going to do the … that’s going to let Crane assume her body.”

Plumtree glanced at their faces. “Well,
yeah.
What, were you—” Her bloodshot eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “My God, you were gonna have the
kid
do it! Shit, did you people even consider the possib-lil—
possibil
ity that Crane might not be able to get back
into
his old body, afterward?—that he might have to
keep
the one he takes for this?”

“We did consider that,” said Kootie. “
I
did consider that. But we’re
all
gonna get
killed
if this doesn’t get settled. Our TV burned up today, and—well, you had to be there. And,” he added with a scared glance at Mavranos, “I’m taking Arky’s word that Crane won’t keep my body, if he can help it at all.”

“Well, he won’t get a chance,” Plumtree told him with a haggard but possibly kindly meant smile, “
I’m
going to do it.”

“Damn right,” said Angelica.

“Kootie’s correct,” said Mavranos, “in saying that we’ve got to settle this situation—we’ve got to collapse this probability wave, let the daylight into Schrödinger’s shitty cat box. As long as there’s no real king working, we’re all exposed—hell,
spotlighted
—and pretty near totally defenseless. You’re staying at a motel or something?”

“Ye-es,” said Cochran cautiously.

“Well congratulations, you now have four houseguests. I hope the management won’t mind. We’re gonna do this thing tomorrow at dawn, it looks like, this
restoration-to-life,
so there’s no point in us getting a different room at the same motel. We just this morning got rousted out of our place by some kind of walking department-store dummies, and—”

Cochran choked on his Singapore Sling. “Did they,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth redly on his sleeve, “move in synch, like they were puppets working off the same strings?”

“They did,” said Mavranos stolidly. “And suddenly I don’t like the idea of Scott’s body sitting out there in the truck, you know? Let’s finish up here, and get to your motel. With you and me and Pete, we should be able to get Scott into the motel room. And then we’ve got some preparations to make.”

Kootie nodded, and Angelica scowled at him.

“Finish every drop of your drinks,” said Plumtree with a ghastly, exhausted gaiety, “there’s poor people sober in China.”

Chinese New Year was still two weeks off, but Asian boys on ribbon-decked bicycles tossed strings of lit firecrackers ahead of the six of them, as they walked south on the Grant Street sidewalk under the red-and-gold pagoda-roofed buildings, so that their ears rang with the staccato popping, and their noses burned with the barbecued-chicken smell of gunpowder, and Kootie was treading on fragments of red paper that crumpled and darkened on the wet pavement underfoot like fallen rose petals; and when they trudged across the wet grass of Portsmouth Square, the hoboes and winos hobbled out of their path and seemed to bow, or at least nod, as they passed.

And when they had piled into the two vehicles—Plumtree riding in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, and Pete riding in the Granada with Cochran, for mutual trust as much as to make sure both parties knew the way to the Star Motel—crows and mockingbirds swooped over them as the old car and truck labored up Van Ness, the darting birds seeming to be fighting in the gray sky.

At Lombard Street at the top of Russian Hill, where a right turn would have led them down the ornamental, brick-paved “crookedest street in the world,” they turned left instead, and drove down the straight lanes between bars and car-repair shops and liquor stores and motels, and after three blocks both vehicles ponderously turned left up the driveway into the Star Motel parking lot.

When they’d parked and all climbed out onto the asphalt, Angelica and Plumtree crowded around the tailgate of Mavranos’s dusty red truck to block the view as Pete and Cochran and Mavranos slid Scott Crane’s body out from beneath the tarpaulin. The body was dressed now in jeans and a white shirt, though with no shoes or socks, and Cochran tried not to look at the bloody bandage knotted around the thigh, over the denim.

The body was limp, not stiff, but they managed to tilt it into an upright posture and march it right past the ice and Coke machines and up the stairs to Cochran’s room; Plumtree had got her key out and scrambled ahead of them, and had got the door open by the time they had carried the dead king to the room.

They flopped Scott Crane down onto the bed that didn’t have Cochran’s homemade Ouija board on it, and Mavranos straightened the body’s arms and legs and unlooped the graying beard from the sawn-off stump of spear that stood up from the throat. The room was still humid from Plumtree’s and Cochran’s showers this morning, and smelled like old salami and unfresh clothing.

“Just like Charlton Heston in
El Cid,
” said Kootie bravely. “Dead, but leading the army.”

“He is d-damn cold,” panted Cochran as he stood back and flapped his cramping hands. His heart was pounding more than the couple of minutes of effort could justify, and he was shivering with irrational horror at having touched the dead man again. “How can you—
think
he—” His voice almost broke, and he turned toward the TV set and just breathed deeply.

“Your place—could use some airing,” said Angelica, smoothly calling everyone’s attention away from his momentary loss of control. “Kootie, see if you can’t open the windows, while I go back down to the truck for our witchy supplies.”

“Don’t blame me for this pigpen,” said Plumtree, “I been away.”

“Witchy supplies,” put in Cochran in a carefully neutral tone. He gave Plumtree a resentful glance, very aware of the cassette tape in his shirt pocket and the French-language missal in the bedside table drawer. Kootie had ducked under the curtains and was noisily yanking at the aluminum-framed window.

Mavranos had his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket as he stared at Cochran. “I got to ask you to give me your gun,” he said. “I almost apologize, since we’re all really on the same side here and my crowd is taking over your place this way, for tonight—but Miss Plumtree said herself that her dad came on three days ago and she just this morning came back to herself; and you appear to have a … loyalty to her. I can’t justify—”

“Sure,” said Cochran, speaking levelly to conceal his reflexive anger. Slowly, he reached around to the back of his belt and tugged the holster clip free. Then he tossed the suede-sheathed gun onto the bathroom-side bed.

Mavranos leaned forward to pick it up with his left hand, keeping his right in his jacket pocket. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “If we run into outside trouble, I’ll give it back to you.”