Expiration Date (59 page)

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

S
ULLIVAN
had parked the van in the shade under one of the shaggy carob trees at the back of the Solville parking lot, and then he had got out and looked the old vehicle over.

The back end was a wreck. The right rear corner of the body, from the smashed taillights down, was crumpled sharply inward and streaked and flecked with blue paint. Apparently it had been a blue car that had hit them when he had reversed out onto Lucas. The doors were still folded-looking and flecked with white from having hit Buddy Schenk’s Honda in the Miceli’s lot yesterday, and the bumper, diagonal now, looked like a huge spoon that had been mauled in a garbage disposal.

In addition to all this, he could see four little-finger-sized holes in and around the back doors, ringed with bright metal where the paint had been blown off.

Forcing open the left-side back door, he had found that the little propane refrigerator had stopped two 9-millimeter slugs, and he had disconnected the appliance and laid the beer and Cokes and sandwich supplies out on the grass to carry in to the apartment; the sink cabinet had a hole punched through it and the sink itself was dented; and a solid ricochet off of the chassis of the field frequency modulator he’d just bought had ripped open one of his pillows, the deformed slug ending up shallowly embedded in the low headboard. One of the back-door windows was holed, and the slug had apparently passed through the interior of the van and exited through the windshield; and one perfectly round, deep dent in the back fender might have been put there by a bullet. And of course the driver’s-side mirror was now a half-dozen fragments dangling from some kind of rubber gasket.

These were the extent of the damage, and he shivered with queasy gratitude when he thought of the boy having been crouched on the van floor in the middle of the fusillade and of Elizalde’s head nearly having been in the way of the one that had punched through the windshield. They had been lucky.

Sullivan had made several trips to the apartment to stack his electronic gear in a corner with Elizalde’s bag of witch fetishes beside it, and put the drinks and the sandwich things into the refrigerator. Finally he had locked the van up and covered the whole vehicle with an unfolded old rust-stained parachute, trying to drape it as neatly as he could in anticipation of Mr. Shadroe’s probable disapproval.

Now he was sitting on a yellow fire hydrant out by the curb across Twenty-first Place, holding one of Houdini’s plaster hands and watching the corner of Ocean Boulevard. There was a bus stop at Cherry, just around the corner. Clouds like chunks of broken concrete were shifting across the sky, and the tone of his thoughts changed with the alternating light and shade.

In shadow: They’ve been caught, Houdini’s thumb can’t deflect the attention the boy was drawing; they’re being tortured, disloyal Angelica is leading bad guys here, I should be farther away from the building so I can hide when I see the terrible Lincolns turn onto Twenty-first Place.

In sunlight: Buses take forever, what with transfers and all, and Angelica is a godsend, how nice to have such challenging and intelligent company if you’ve got to be in a mess like this, even if this séance attempt
doesn’t
work; and even the kid, Shake Booty or whatever his name is, is probably going to turn out to be interesting.

It’s been an hour just since I came to sit out here, he thought finally—and then he heard a deliberate scuffing on the sidewalk behind him.

His first thought as he hopped off the hydrant and turned around was that he didn’t have his gun—but it was Elizalde and the boy who were walking toward him from the cul-de-sac at the seaward end of Twenty-first. The boy was carrying a big white bag with KFC in red on the side of it.

“You stopped for food?” Sullivan demanded, glancing around even as he stepped forward; he had meant it to sound angry, but he found that he was laughing, and he hugged Elizalde. She returned the hug at first, but then pulled away.

“Sorry,” he said, stepping back himself.

“It’s not you,” she said. “Just use your left arm.”

He clasped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to himself, her head under his chin.

When they turned to walk across the street to the old apartment building, she nodded toward the white plaster hand that Sullivan was holding in his right hand. “I just don’t like strangers’ hands on me,” she said.

“I don’t like people with the wrong number of hands,” said the boy.

Sullivan looked dubiously at the boy, and then at the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag the boy was carrying, and he tried to think of some pun about
finger-lickin' good;
he couldn’t, and made do with saying, “Let’s get in out of the rain,” though of course it wasn’t raining.

W
HEN THEY
had got inside the apartment and dead-bolted the door and propped the Houdini hands against it, the boy set the bag on the painted wooden floor and said, “Has either of you two got any medical experience?”

“I’m a doctor,” said Elizalde cautiously. “A real one, an M.D.”

“Excellent.” The boy shrugged carefully out of his torn denim jacket and began stiffly pulling his filthy polo shirt off over his head.

Sullivan raised his eyebrows and glanced at Elizalde. Under the shirt, against his skin, the boy was wearing some kind of belt made of wire cables, with a glowing light at the front.

“What are your names?” came his voice from inside the shirt.

Sullivan was grinning and frowning at the same time. “Peter Sullivan, Your Honor,” he said, sitting down in the corner beside his boxes. He had opened all the windows when he had carried the things in here earlier, but the heat was still turned on full, and the air above about shoulder height was wittingly hot.

“Angelica Elizalde.”

“This kid is—I’m called Koot Hoomie Parganas.” The boy had got the shirt off, and Sullivan could see a bloodstained bandage taped over his ribs on the right side, just above the grotesque belt. “A man cut us with a knife yesterday afternoon. We treated it with high-proof rum, and it doesn’t seem to be infected, but the bleeding won’t quite stop.”

Elizalde knelt in front of him and pulled back the edge of the bandage—the boy’s mouth tightened, but he stood still.

“Well,” said Elizalde in a voice that sounded irritated, even embarrassed, “you ought to have had some stitches. Too late now, you’ll have a dueling scar. But it looks clean enough. We should use something besides liquor to prevent infection, though.”

“Well, fix it right,” Koot Hoomie said. “This is a good little fellow, my boy is, and he’s been put through a lot.”

“‘Fix it right,’” echoed Elizalde, still on her knees beside the boy. She sighed. “Fix it right.” After a pause she shot a hostile glance at Sullivan, and then said, “Peter, would you fetch me a—damn it, an unbroken egg from my grocery bag?”

Wordlessly Sullivan leaned over from where he was sitting and hooked the bag closer to himself, dug around among the herb packets and oil bottles until he found the opened carton of eggs, and lifted one out. He got to his hands and knees to hand it across to her, then sat back down.

“Thank you. Lie down on the floor, please, Kootie.”

Kootie sat down on the wooden floor and then gingerly, stretched out on his back. “Should I take off the belt?”

‘What’s it for?” asked Sullivan quietly.

‘Degaussing,” said Elizalde.

“No,” said Sullivan. “Leave it on.”

Elizalde leaned over the boy and rolled the egg gently over his stomach, around the wound and over the bandage, and in a soft voice she recited,
“Sana, sana, cola de rana, tira un pedito para ahora y mañana
.” She spoke the words with fastidious precision, like a society hostess picking up fouled ashtrays.

Sullivan shifted uneasily and pushed away the bullet-dented field frequency modulator so that he could lean back against the wall. “You’re sure this isn’t a job for an emergency room?”

Elizalde gave him an opaque stare.
“La cura es peor que la enfermedad
—the cure would be worse than the injury, he wouldn’t be safe half an hour in any kind of public hospital. Kootie is staying with us.
Donde comen dos, comen tres.”

Sullivan was able to work out that that one meant something like “Three can live as cheaply as two.” He thought it was a bad idea, but he shrugged and struggled to his feet, up into the hot air layer, and walked into the open kitchen.

“There you go, Kootie,” he heard Elizalde say. “You can get up now. We’ll bury the egg outside, after the sun goes down.”

Elizalde and the boy were both standing again, and Kootie was experimentally stretching his right arm and wincing.

“Voodoo,” said the boy gruffly. “As useless as the hodgepodge of old radio parts Petey bought.”

Sullivan turned away to open the refrigerator. “Kootie,” he said, pulling a Coors Light out of the depleted twelve-pack carton, “I notice that you refer to yourself in the first person singular, the third person, and the first person plural. Is there a—” He popped the tab and took a deep sip of the beer, raising his eyebrows at, the boy over the top of the can. “—
reason
for that?”

“That’s beer, isn’t it?” said Kootie, pressing his side and wincing. “Which costs a dollar a can? Aren’t you going to offer any to the lady and me?”

“Angelica,” said Sullivan, “would you like a beer?”

“Just a Coke, please,” she said.

“A Coke for you too, sonny,” Sullivan told Kootie, turning back toward the refrigerator. “You’re too young for beer.”

“I’ll start to answer your question,” said Kootie sternly, “by telling you that one of us is eighty-four years old.”

Sullivan had put down his beer and taken out two cans of Coke. “Well it’s not me, and it’s not you, and I doubt if it’s Angelica. Anyway, you can’t divvy it up among people socialistically that way. You gotta accumulate the age yourself.”

Kootie slapped his bare chest and grinned at him. “I
meant
one of
us
. First person plural.”

A knock sounded at the door then, and all three of them jumped. Sullivan had dropped the cans and spun toward the door, but he looked back toward Elizalde when he heard the fast
snap-clank
of the .45 being chambered. An ejected bullet clicked off the wall, for she hadn’t needed to cock it, but it was ready to fire
and her thumbs were out of the way of the slide.

He sidled to the window, ready to drop to the floor to give her a clear field of fire, and pushed down one slat of the Venetian blinds.

And he sighed, sagging with relief. “It’s just the landlord,” he whispered, for the window beyond the blinds was open. He wondered if Shadroe had heard the gun being chambered.

Elizalde engaged the safety before shoving the gun back into the fanny-pack holster and zipping it shut.

Sullivan unbolted the door and pulled it open. Gray-haired old Shadroe pushed his way inside even as Sullivan was saying, “Sorry, I’m having some friends over right now—”

“I’m a friend,” Shadroe said grimly. He was wearing no shirt, and his vast suntanned belly overhung his stovepipe-legged shorts. His squinty eyes took in Elizalde and Kootie, and then fixed on Sullivan. “Your name’s
Peter Sullivan”
he said, slowly, as if he meant to help Sullivan learn the syllables by heart. “It was on the… rental agreement.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a common enough name—” Shadroe paused to inhale. “Wouldn’t you have thought so yourself?”

“Yes…?” said Sullivan, mystified.

“Well, not today. I’m your godbrother.”

Sullivan wondered how far away the nearest liquor store might be. “I suppose so, Mr. Shadroe, but you and I are going to have to discuss God and brotherhood later, okay? Right now I’m—”

Shadroe pointed one grimy finger at the also-shirtless Kootie. “It’s him, isn’t it? My pigs were—starting to
smoke.
I had to pull the batteries out of ‘em—and I sent my honey pie to my boat—to take the batteries out of the pigs aboard there. Burn the boat down, otherwise.” He turned an angrily earnest gaze on Sullivan. “I want you all,” he said. “To come to my office, and see. What your boy has done to my television set.”

Sullivan was shaking his head, exhaustion and impatience propelling him toward something like panic. Shadroe reeked of cinnamon again, and his upper lip was dusted with brown powder, as if he’d been snorting Nestle’s Quik, and Sullivan wondered if the crazy old man would even hear anything he might say.

“The boy hasn’t been out of this room,” Sullivan said loudly and with exaggerated patience. “Whatever’s wrong with your TV—”

“Is it ‘godbrother’?” Shadroe interrupted. “What I mean is,
your father”
Sullivan coughed in disgust and tried to think of the words to convince Shadroe that Sullivan was not his son, but the old man raised his hand for silence. “Was my
godfather”
he went on, completing his sentence. “My real name is Nicholas Bradshaw. Loretta deLarava is after my. Ass.”