Expiration Date (44 page)

Kootie was breathing whistlingly, messily, through his nose. He heard tape rip, and then Mr. Fussel was taping Kootie’s elbows and forearms to the seat belt.

Against the tape that his teeth were grinding at, Kootie was grunting and huffing, and after two or three blind, impacted seconds he realized that his lips and tongue were trying to form words; they couldn’t, around the tape, but he could
feel
what his mouth was trying to say:

Stop it! Stop it! Listen to me, boy! You
might
die even if you calm down and stay alert watch for a chance to run, but you’ll
certainly
die if you keep thrashing and screaming like a big baby! Come on, son, be a man!

Kootie let the mania carry him for one more second, howling out of him to swamp Edison’s words in a torrent of unreasoning noise; finally the muffled scream wobbled away to silence, leaving his lungs empty and aching. He raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, held it for a moment, and then let them slump back down—and the panic fell away from him, leaving him almost calm, though the pounding of his heart was visibly twitching his shirt collar.

Kootie was motionless now, but as tense as a flexed fencing foil. He told himself that Edison was right; he had to stay alert. Nobody was going to kill him right here in these people’s minivan; eventually someone would have to cut him free of this seat, and he could pretend to be asleep when they did, and then jump for freedom in the instant that the tape was cut.

He was in control of himself again, coldly and deeply angry at the Fussels and already ashamed at having gone to pieces in front of them.

And so he was surprised when he began weeping. His head jerked down and he was wailing
“Hoo-hoo-hoo”
behind the tape, on and on, even though he could feel drool moving toward the corner of his distended mouth.

“For…God’s sake,
William,” said Mrs. Fussel in a shrill monotone. “Have you gone crazy? You can’t—”

“Pull over,” the man said, blundering back up toward the front of the van. “I’ll drive.
This is the kid.
El, it’s Koot Hoomie Parganas and he’s obviously an escaped nut! They’ll put him back in restraints as soon as we turn him over to them! I’ll…bite my arm, and say he did it. Or better, we’ll buy a cheap knife, and I’ll cut myself. He’s dangerous, we
had
to tape him up. And it’s
twenty thousand goddamn dollars.”

Kootie kept up his
hoo-hooing,
and did it louder when Mrs. Fussel turned the wheel to the right to pull over; and then he felt his drooling mouth try to grin around the tape as the three of them were jolted by the right front tire going up over the curb. Edison’s
enjoying
this, Kootie thought.

Mr. Fussel slapped him across the face—it didn’t sting much this time, through the tape. “Shut up or I’ll run a loop of tape over your nose,” the man whispered.

Edison winked Kootie’s good eye at Mr. Fussel. Kootie hoped Edison knew what he was doing here.

The Fussels found a place to park in a lot somewhere—the windshield faced a close cinder-block wall so that no passersby would see the bound and gagged boy in the back of the minivan—and then Mr. Fussel picked some quarters out of a dish on the console and climbed out, locking the passenger door behind him.

After several seconds of no sound but the quiet burr of the idling engine, Mrs. Fussel turned around in the drivers seat.

“He’s a nice man,” she said. Kootie could almost believe she was talking to herself. “We want to have children ourselves.”

Kootie stared at the floor, afraid Edison would give her a sardonic look.

“Neither of us knows how to deal with…a child with problems,” she went on, “a runaway, a
violent
runaway. We don’t believe in hitting children. This was like when you have to hit someone who’s drowning, if you want to save them. Can you understand? If you tell the people from the hospital—or wherever it is that you live—if you tell them Bill hit you, we’ll have to tell them
why
he hit you, won’t we? Trying to bite, and yelling obscenities. That means nasty words,” she explained earnestly.

Kootie forgot not to stare at her.

“Your parents were murdered,” she said.

He nodded expressionlessly.

“Oh, good! That you knew it, I mean, that I wasn’t breaking the news to you. And I guess someone hit you in the eye. You’ve had a bad time, but I want you to realize that today really
is
the first day of your, of the rest of your—wait, you were living at home, weren’t you? The story in the paper said that. You weren’t in a hospital. Who’s put up this reward for you?”

Kootie widened his eyes at her.

“Relatives?”

Kootie shook his head, slowly.

“You don’t think it was the people that murdered your
parents,
do you?”

Kootie nodded furiously. “Mm-hmmm,” he grunted.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

Kootie rolled his eyes and then stared hard at her.

Alter a moment her expression of concern wilted into dismay. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Twenty thousand dollars? You were a
witness!”

Close enough. Rocking his head back and humming loudly was as close as Kootie could come to conveying congratulations.

She was saying “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” as she got out of the seat and stepped over the console, and then she was prying with her fingernails at the tape edges around his wrists.

The tape wasn’t peeling up at all, and Kootie didn’t waste hope imagining that she’d free him. He wasn’t surprised when keys rattled against the outside of the passenger door and the lock dunked and then Mr. Fussel was leaning in.

“What are you
doing
, El? Get away from—”

“He’s a witness, Bill! The people that killed his parents are—are the ones you just called! Did you tell them where we are? Let’s get out of here right now!” She hurried back up front to the driver’s seat and grabbed the gearshift lever.

Mr. Fussel gripped her hand. “Where’d you get all that, El? He can’t even talk. These people sounded okay.”

“Then let’s drive somewhere and let Goaty talk to us, and you can call them back if we’re
sure
it’s all right.”

“Mm-hmm!”
put in Kootie as loudly as he could.

“El, they’ll be here in ten minutes. We can talk to them right here, this is a public place, he’ll be safe. It’s his safety I’m concerned with; what if we have an accident driving? We’re both upset—”

“An accident? I won’t have an accident. They can—”

“They’re bringing
cash,
El! We can’t expect them to be driving all over L.A. with that kind of cash, in these kinds of neighborhoods!”

“You’re worried about
them?
They killed his—”

The minivan shook as something collided gently but firmly with the rear end, and then there were simultaneous knocks against the driver’s and passenger’s windows. Even from the back seat Kootie could see the blunt metal cylinders of silencers through the glass.

That wasn’t ten minutes, thought Kootie.

A voice spoke quietly from outside. “Roll down the windows right now or we’ll kill you both.”

Both of the Fussels hastily pressed buttons on their armrests, and the windows buzzed down.

“The boy’s in the back seat,” Mr. Fussel said eagerly.

A hand came in through the open window and pushed Mr. Fussel’s head aside, and then a stranger peered in. Behind mirror sunglasses and a drooping mustache, he was nothing more than a pale, narrow face.

“He’s taped in,” the face noted. “Good. You two get out.”

“Sure,” Mr. Fussel said. “Come on, El, get out. You guys are gonna take the van? Fine! We won’t report it stolen until—what, tomorrow? Would that be okay? Is the money in something we can carry inconspicuously?”

The face had withdrawn, but Kootie heard the voice say, “You’ll have no problems with it.”

Mrs. Fussel was sobbing quietly. “Bill, you idiot,” she said, but she opened her door and got out at the same time her husband did.

A fat man in a green turtleneck sweater got in where she had been, and the man with the mirror sunglasses got in on the passenger side. The doors were pulled closed, and the minivan rocked as the obstruction was moved from behind it, and then the fat man had put the engine into reverse and was backing out. He glanced incuriously at Kootie.

“Check the tape on the kid,” he said to his companion.

When the man in the sunglasses stepped into the back of the van, Kootie didn’t make any noises, but tried to catch his eye. The man just tugged at the seat belt, though, and then found the roll of tape and bound Kootie’s ankles together and taped them sideways to the seat leg, without looking at Kootie’s face.

Somehow Kootie was still just tense, no more than if he were one of only a couple of kids left standing at a spelling bee. After the man had returned to the front seat and fastened his seat belt, Kootie wondered what had happened to the Fussels. He supposed that they were dead already, shot behind some Dumpster. It was easy for him to avoid picturing the two of them. He looked at the backs of his captors’ heads and tried to figure out who the two men could be. They didn’t look like associates of the raggedy one-armed man.

Kootie was surprised, and cautiously pleased, with his own coolness in this scary situation…until he realized that it was based on a confidence that Thomas Alva Edison would think of some way to get him out of it; then he remembered that Edison seemed to have gone crazy, and in a few minutes tears of pure fright were rolling warmly along the top edges of the duct tape on Kootie’s cheeks as the minivan rocked through traffic.

They may not mean to kill me, he thought. Certainly not yet. Our destination might be miles from here, and—

He tried to think of any other comforting thoughts.

—And there’ll probably be a lot of traffic lights, he told himself forlornly.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

S
ULLIVAN
had driven up the 405 past LAX airport, past one of the government-sanctioned freeway-side murals (this one portraying a lot of gigantic self-righteous-looking joggers that made him think better of the fugitive graffiti taggers with their crude territory markers), and then he followed the empty new sunlit lanes of the 90 freeway out to where it came down and narrowed and became a surface street, Lincoln Boulevard, among new condominium buildings and old used-camper lots.

The plaster hands were on the passenger seat and the Bull Durham sack was in his shirt pocket, above the sun-and-body-heated bulk of his .45 in the canvas fanny pack. He had bought a triple-A map at a gas station and studied it hard, and he had only nerved himself up to come to Venice by vowing to stay entirely out of sight of the ocean.

The canals, thin blue lines on the map, were only half a fingernail inland from the black line that indicated the shore, and it was in the surf off this little stretch of beach that his father had drowned in ’59—and it was from there that he and Sukie had fled in ’86, leaving Loretta deLarava in possession of their father’s wallet and keys and the three cans of…

Nothing looked familiar, for he had been here only that one time, in ’86. He managed to miss North Venice Boulevard, and had to loop back through narrow streets where summer rental houses crowded right up to the curbs, and parked cars left hardly any room for traffic, and then when he came upon North Venice again he saw that it was a one-way street aimed straight out at the now-near ocean; and though he was ready to just put the van in reverse and honk his way backward a couple of blocks, he saw a stretch of empty curb right around the corner of North Venice and Pacific, and he vas able to pull in and park without having to focus past the back bumper of the Volkswagen in the space ahead of him.

He didn’t want to be Peter Sullivan here at all, even if nobody was looking for him—presumably his father’s ghost was in the sea only a block away, and that was enough of a presence to shame him into assuming every shred of disguise possible.

So he tied an old bandanna around the plaster hands and took them with him when he got out and locked the van. The sea breeze had cleared the coastal sky of smog, but it was chilly, and he was glad of his old leather flight jacket.

Two quarters in the parking meter bought him an hour’s worth of time, and he turned his back on the soft boom of the surf and stalked across Pacific with the hands clamped against his ribs and his hands jammed in his pockets. The plaster hands were heavy, but at a 7-Eleven store an hour ago he had bought six lightbulbs and stuffed them into his jacket pockets, and he didn’t want to risk breaking any of them by shifting the awkward bundle under his arm. He stepped carefully up the high curb at the north side of Pacific.

Almost there anyway, he told himself as he peered ahead.

He was in a wide, raised parking lot between the North and South Venice Boulevards, and past the far curb of South, just this side of a windowless gray cement building, he could see a railing paralleling the street, and another that slanted away down, out of sight. There was a gap there between rows of buildings, and it clearly wasn’t a street.

He crossed the parking lot and hobbled stiffly across South Venice, and when he had got to the railing and the top of the descending walkway, he stopped. He had found the westernmost of the canals, and he was relieved to see that it didn’t look familiar at all.

Below him, fifty feet across and stretching straight away to an arched bridge in the middle distance, the water was still, reflecting the eucalyptus and bamboo and lime trees along the banks. The canal walls were yard-high brickworks of slate-gray half-moons below empty sidewalks, and the houses set back from the water looked tranquil in the faintly brassy October sunlight. He could see a broad side-channel in the east bank a block ahead, but this ramp from South Venice led down to the west bank, and apparently the only way to walk along that side-canal would be to go past it on this side, cross the bridge, and then come back.