Earthquake Weather (64 page)

“I can
see
a car,” protested Plumtree’s mother, “and I can
smell
the ocean! Are you too squeamish to kill her body? You said you loved her!”

At the same time Angelica was leaning forward from between Mavranos and Pete to say, quietly, “Sid, this isn’t even a ghost of her mother, this is just a, an ‘internalized perpetrator,’ why are you talking to it—”

“As far as Cody’s concerned,” Cochran interrupted, “it’s her mom.” He looked back at Plumtree taped into the chair. “Trust me,” he said, “I won’t let him have her.”

“We won’t let him have her,” Mavranos agreed.

“Oh, Jesus,” said the mother’s voice. She looked back to Cochran. “I hope you’re a lot smarter than you look, mister.” She sighed shakily. “Go ahead, and God be with you.”

“Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, and he felt Kootie tense beside him.

Plumtree’s eyes hadn’t left Cochran’s face, but now it was an amused, crafty, almost reptilian gaze. Again the arms flexed, but the tape held, even though the muscles had bulked out more. “
Hell
-lo, baby!” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. Cochran’s nerves were twanging with the impulse to run, but his muscles felt as loose as wet cement.

“Valerie,” said Cochran then, breathlessly.

One of Plumtree’s pupils visibly tightened down to a pinprick.
Split-screen,
thought Cochran.

Like a pole-vaulter visually picking out each spot his feet would touch on the run to the bar, Cochran prepared his words; then, carefully, he spoke: “What did we do wrong twelve days ago, when we tried to get Scott Crane restored to life?”

“Oh, eat me.” The childish taunt rode incongruously on the deep, vibrating voice.

“I will, if you don’t tell us,” spoke up Kootie. “I can.”

“Ay,” came a new, flat voice from Plumtree’s lips, speaking to Kootie, “sharp and piercing, to maintain his truth; whiles thy consuming canker eats his falsehood.” The face contorted and gasped for breath, and the man’s voice added, “Dammit, that’s
Henry the Sixth, Part One
! Valerie, you traitorous bitch! Who do you think you got all your lines from, anyway? Do you remember
Love’s Labour’s Lost!
‘We to ourselves prove false, by being once false for ever to be true to those that make us both—fair ladies, you.’ ”

“Valerie is on our side,” said Kootie, “and she’ll know it if you lie.”

Plumtree’s gaze fixed on Kootie, and her teeth were bared.

Kootie’s shoulder jumped against Cochran’s arm, and then the boy leaned tensely forward—

—The air was suddenly colder, and Cochran thought the pepper trees shook in no breeze—

And in the same instant Plumtree’s head was rocked back as if from a physical blow. “Easy, kid!” gasped the man’s voice. “Unless you want all the fair ladies dead!”

“I bet you can tell I pulled that punch,” said Kootie. His voice was calm and level, though Cochran could feel the boy shivering. “I
have
used it full strength, before today. And I don’t believe that punching you dead out of that head would hurt any of the Plumtree ladies.”

“You haven’t yet seen
any
of
my
strength, boy.” Salvoy’s voice seemed to vibrate in Cochran’s ribs. “That was a love-pat a moment ago. I
killed
your king, and I did
not
flinch when I did it. But I don’t want you to be hurt.” The teeth were still bared, and now the lips curled in a smile. “I’m prob’ly the only one here who doesn’t want you to kill yourself.”

Angelica started to say something, but a rumbling, liquid growl from Plumtree’s throat stilled her.

“You’re the one with the wound in your side, boy,” the man’s voice went on, loudly and almost anguished. “It’s always been you that would have to drink the real
pagadebiti,
even supposing you assholes could ever find a bottle of the stuff. It’s
you,
Baby Gawain, that would have to be possessed by the actual god, abandon yourself to his … bestial mercies. You sure you’re up for that, Gumby Gunslinger?”

Cochran heard elbows shift on the wooden table somewhere to his right, and guessed it was Angelica.

Plumtree’s gaze swung toward Angelica, and the flat Valorie voice said, “Pardon me, madam: little joy have I to breathe this news; yet what I say is true.”

“Were we at the right
place,
at least?” asked Mavranos insistently. “Out at those ruins by the yacht club? Mammy Pleasant was talking about a spot out on that shore.”

“You were in the right place,” said Omar Salvoy, “but you didn’t have the right wine, and I’m glad to say I don’t even know where you would get—” Abruptly Plumtree choked; and then Valorie’s voice said, “Upon my soul a lie, a wicked lie. Touching this dreadful sight twice seen of us—you may approve our eyes, and speak to it. Looks it not like the king? Thou art a scholar; speak to it.” And immediately Salvoy’s voice shook breathlessly out of the mouth: “Valerie, when I have you alone under me—”

“At those other ruins, she means,” said Kootie, “the ruins of the baths, by that restaurant. That’s where we saw Crane’s ghost. And it was the second time Plumtree had seen it.”

The Plumtree body leaned back in the chair and took a deep breath. “You all were so embarrassed by that, I bet,” said Salvoy, grinning. “Your exalted king, probably babbling nonsense and dressed like a bum, right? Or naked, looking like a crazy man. Brought down in the world, and how. Dizz-gusting! And you sensible folks probably just ran away from him. Think how pleased he must have been with his
friends
.”

“I,” stammered Mavranos, “ran after him—!”

“The palindrome should have been a clue,” Pete Sullivan interrupted, making a chopping gesture at Mavranos. “The Valorie personality gave Cochran one line of that, at the ruins, and we knew that palindromes were good for nothing but drawing ghosts.”

“Palindrome?” said Salvoy. “What palindrome?”

“Sit on a potato pan, Otis,” Kootie told him.

“And that foghorn was a clue,” said Mavranos. “I bet the foghorn we heard in that motel room at dawn was the one you’d hear out at the Sutro Baths ruins. Shit, I even
noticed
it.”

Plumtree’s face was red and twitching, but in a mockingly conversational tone Salvoy asked, “Is one of you ready to
die
? That’s part of it, you know. To get a life back, the god wants one in exchange. Even to repay an old debt-of-honor,” he said, with a scorching glance at Cochran, “he can’t violate his own math. And blood—fresh blood has got to be spilled. Splintered bone, torn flesh, before he’ll consider it consummated. Ask apple-o’-my-eye Valorie if you think I’m lying about this.” Plumtree’s head rocked back, and the Valorie voice said, “That this is true, father, behold his blood. ’Tis very true.” Her head came down and Salvoy’s furious gaze swept across them. “And what
body
is your king going to take, now? Some bum’s? That’s another death, in addition to the god’s bargain!” He gave a harshly jovial laugh, and then Plumtree’s eyes squeezed shut. “I’m fading out, thank Ra. Think about what I’ve said, Koot Hoomie—and any of the rest of you that care—”

Plumtree’s chin fell forward onto her chest, and for a moment she just panted. Then she looked up, in blank puzzlement; but when her eyes darted to Cochran she looked away again quickly. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” She flexed her arms and legs and then said again, in a voice shrilling with panic, “I can’t stay here! Arky, what’s going on?” She smacked her lips. “Was my
father
just here?”

“Can I talk to Cody?” said Cochran, standing up from the table. He was aware now that his shirt was clinging to his back with sweat.

“Nobody can talk to anybody, please,” said Plumtree quickly. Her hands were fists. “Arky, get me
out of this
!”

Mavranos had stood up too, and was opening his lockback pocket-knife one-handed as he strode around the table to the chair. “Relax, Janis,” he was saying gruffly, “you’re gonna hurt yourself. Here.” He crouched in front of her iron chair to swipe the knife blade through the duct tape on her wrists and ankles, then got up and went around to the back of the chair to cut the strips that bound her waist. “Sorry about this imposition,” he said to her as he helped her struggle to her feet. “
Inquisition,
even. We can explain it whenever you want to hear about it.”

“I just want to get inside,” she muttered quickly, “away from him.”

Cochran wondered which
him
she meant as he watched her shakily peel cut flaps of duct tape from her wrists. She was limping past him toward the kitchen door, with one hand on Mavranos’s shoulder, and she looked at her wristwatch and then raised her elbow and tilted her head to hold the watch to her ear.

But of course it was a black Casio quartz watch, with a liquid-crystal display. Her gesture reminded Cochran of old black-and-white Timex ads on TV, and in his head he heard the old shampoo-ad song:
You can always tell a
Halo
girl …

When, Cochran wondered, did I last see anybody with a watch that
ticked
?

Oh, Jesus, she’s still
split-screen
!

But her mismatched eyes had been watching him, and caught his instant comprehension, and as he opened his mouth now she was snatching the revolver from Mavranos’s belt and lunging, smashing the barrel and butt of the gun like brass knuckles into Cochran’s belly.

Then Plumtree had danced back away as Cochran folded and sat down jarringly hard on the concrete, and she slapped both hands to her face, her left palm covering her eyes and her right hand pointing the gun up at the patio roof.

And she pulled the trigger. The
bang
was a ringing impact in Cochran’s ears, and Plumtree’s head smacked the stucco wall at her back.

But an instant later the gun barrel was horizontal, the muzzle pointed at Mavranos’s chest. Mavranos stepped back, his hands open and out to the sides.

“Mom,” Cochran choked, not able to get air into his lungs. “Janis’s … mom.” Fragments of wood and tar paper spun down from the new hole in the roof.

Angelica understood what he was doing, and called “Janis’s mom! Mother!”—before visibly wilting with the realization that Plumtree was deaf now.

As Mavranos shuffled backward across the patio deck, the gun muzzle swung toward Angelica. To Cochran’s tear-filled eyes it seemed to leave a rippling wake in the air. “Koot Hoomie,” said Salvoy, much too loudly, “pick up the roll of duct tape and come here—or I put a big hole in your mom. Scant-boy—reach slow into your pants pocket and throw me the car keys.” Plumtree wasn’t looking at Kootie directly.

Cochran thought he could feel ruptured organs inside himself ripping further open as he dragged his legs up under his torso and crawled across the concrete to Plumtree; he even had to reach out and brace himself with one hand on Plumtree’s blue-jeaned thigh as he hitchingly got up onto his knees. His lungs were chugging in his rib cage, but he still wasn’t able to draw any breath down his throat, and his vision had narrowed to a tunnel.

Plumtree had her back against the house wall, so she couldn’t retreat; Cochran was looking up at her, and his dizzy focus shifted effortfully outward from the ring of the .38-caliber muzzle to her eyes. Both of her eyes were wide and staring at him, the tiny-pupilled one and the dilated one, and at the bottom of his vision he could still blurrily see down the rifled barrel of the gun.

“Troilus, farewell!” hissed Valerie as Plumtree’s body shook with internal conflict against the stucco wall. The finger lifted out of the trigger-guard ring. “One eye yet looks on thee, but with my heart the other eye doth see.” Then the Salvoy voice grated, “No,” and the finger wobbled back down onto the trigger, and whitened.

Abruptly a youthful brown right hand sprang into Cochran’s narrow field of vision and closed over the muzzle, and from above him Kootie’s voice said, “You want this to be
your
right hand one day, don’t you? Will you shoot it off?”

Plumtree couldn’t have heard what the boy had said, but her eyes lifted. And Kootie’s gaze must have caught hers, for she suddenly convulsed sideways across the wall onto the projecting hose faucet as Kootie crouched along with her and violently twisted the gun in her hand.

Cochran threw himself onto her back as she rolled off the faucet and thudded heavily to the concrete, and he too was grabbing for the gun—and when he saw the hammer jump back he got his thumb in under it as it came down.

At last Kootie yanked it away, tearing a gash in the base of Cochran’s thumb. Cochran was breathing at last, in abrading gasps.

With a solid boom Mavranos rebounded off the wall then and fell to his knees on Plumtree’s right arm, and the roll of duct tape shrilled as he tore a long strip free and wrapped it around her wrist; then he had grabbed her other arm and wrapped tape around that wrist too.

Her back was rising and falling as she panted, and after a moment she rolled her head so that she could squint up sideways at Cochran. “How’d it,” she gasped with a bloody rictus of a smile, “go?”

Her nose was bleeding, though Cochran couldn’t guess whether it was from the physical stresses of Salvoy’s visitation or from having collided with the concrete deck.
“Can you hear me?”
he managed to croak loudly.

Cochran’s heart ached to see how wrinkled her eyelids were as she closed her eyes.

“Yes, Sid, oh, shut up!” She was gasping for breath and her bloody upper lip was twitching away from her teeth. “God, Sid, I hurt! Did I fall off the roof? What the fuck
happened
?”

“Cut her loose, Arky,” choked Cochran, in horror, as he braced his hands on the concrete deck and carefully climbed off her legs.

“She may still be split-screen,” came Angelica’s voice from behind him.

“Not—Cody.” Cochran reached out his jigging, bleeding hand and gently touched Plumtree’s shoulder. “We can—trust Cody.”

And in fact Mavranos was already knifing the tape off of her wrists.

Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.

Between our Ilium and where she resides

Let it be called the wild and wand’ring flood,

Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar

Our doubtful hope, our convoy, and our bark.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida