Innocent Blood

amusing.’

‘Margot, we just buried him.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, and walked away.

Nevile watched her go, and then he said, ‘Listen, I think it would be more diplomatic if I didn’t come. Let me meet you later. Where are you staying?’

Frank lay on his bed at the Sunset Marquis with a cold bottle of Molson, watching the television news. Outside his window, three girls were screaming and laughing as their boyfriends threw them into the pool. It was late afternoon already, over twenty-four hours since all of those people had been killed at Panorama-TV, and soon it would be Thursday, and then Friday, and then a week.

It was already a week since Danny had died, but he would always be stuck at Wednesday, September 12, like a small boy who has missed the bus home, gradually receding out of sight, and one day, out of mind.

On the news, the anchorwoman was saying ‘. . . killing one hundred and six people and seriously injuring a further seventy-three, including TV personality Garry Sherman, who lost an arm and was badly disfigured by the blast.

‘However it was confirmed less than an hour ago that the FBI anti-terrorist task force has positively identified the truck driver. He was named as Richard Haze Abbott, twenty-seven years old, an unemployed construction worker from Simi Valley.’

A blurry color photograph appeared on the screen of a grinning young man with a red baseball cap and a sunburned nose, with his arms around a black and white mongrel. Frank narrowed his eyes to focus on him. He certainly didn’t look like an Arab terrorist. More like one of those spotty kids who flipped burgers at MacDonald’s.

‘If you recognize Richard Abbott, or ever knew him, or have seen or talked to him recently, FBI agents and police would very much like to hear from you. The numbers are—’

The phone rang. Even before he answered it he knew it was Astrid. Maybe he was starting to develop that psychic sense that Nevile had talked about.

‘Frank? Are you OK?’

‘Sure, I’m fine.’

‘The funeral – it must have been terrible for you.’

‘Well, it was. But it’s all over now, and I guess it helped.’

‘How did Margot take it?’

‘Margot and me, we’re not really talking at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry. You really need someone to talk to at a time like this.’

‘I suppose I’m lucky, then. I have you.’

‘Do you want me to come round tonight? I won’t if you’d rather be alone.’

‘No, no. I’d like that. Come around ten thirty, we’ll have a couple of drinks together.’

‘Frank . . .’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I’ll tell you later.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘No, forget I ever said anything. I’ll see you later.’

Frank turned back to the TV. At a media conference in Sacramento, the Governor of California, Gene Krupnik, had declared a state of emergency in the greater Los Angeles area, and was calling out the National Guard to set up security cordons around all the major studios. A bomb threat had been received by Sony and they had evacuated their lot ‘until further notice.’ Production on seven daytime soaps had been suspended and two new series – the gung-ho military drama Desert Force and the dark supernatural thriller Exorcists – had both been canceled, and the cancellation of other shows was ‘imminent.’

The Governor said, ‘There are no two ways about it. War has been declared on America’s broadcasting industry, which means that war has been declared on our freedom of speech, which we hold more dear than life itself. Well, I can tell you this: violence will be met by determination. Terrorism will be met by steadfastness. We refuse to flinch. Whatever it takes, we are going to prevail.’

The news channel immediately switched to pictures of the San Diego and the Pomona Freeways, which were jammed solid with SUVs trying to escape from the city.

Nevile arrived just after six and Frank took him to the Alligator Bar on Sunset. They sat in the shadows in a semicircular booth, with the lights of Los Angeles glittering below them. The bar was conspicuously empty. It was a favorite haunt of some of Hollywood’s older celebrities, TV stars of the seventies and eighties, but not tonight. The pianist played a desultory version of the theme tune to Hill Street Blues, and kept stopping every now and then for a drink and a chat with one of the hostesses.

Nevile had changed into a dark gray three-piece suit with a cream shirt and a red silk necktie. ‘I agreed to be guest of honor at a new art exhibition,’ he explained. ‘“Visions of the World Beyond.”’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Rodeo Drive, the Kleban Gallery, nine o’clock. Don’t ask. I know just what it’s going to be like and I’m beginning to regret it already. Most American artists seem to think that the “world beyond” looks like one of those episodes of Star Trek when Kirk and the crew go on shore leave. You know, all Greek pillars and orange skies and girls walking around in lime-green mini-dresses.’

‘You’re quite a cynic, for a psychic.’

‘Not at all. I’m just a realist. The world beyond looks exactly like the world of the living, except that everybody’s in stasis – the same as they were the day they passed over, for ever. If you die angry, you stay angry. Let that be a warning to you.’

‘Tell me about Danny. Or this spirit that pretended he was Danny.’

Nevile sipped his Tom Collins. ‘When I spoke to Lynn Ashbee’s little girl, Kathy, there was no question at all that it was her. Young Kathy was shocked, and she was very faint, and she didn’t really understand what had happened to her, especially since she had suffered such massive physical trauma. The way you die has an enormous effect on you. If you pass over peacefully, your spirit adapts to death much more easily; you’re ready for it, you can accept it. But if it’s wham! – the way it was with Kathy and all of those other school-children – it can take you a long time before you adjust. Months, or even years.’

‘Did you see Kathy?’

‘I saw a dancing light, like a will o’ the wisp, and only for a few seconds. That’s all I would have expected to see, so soon after such a violent death. That’s why Danny’s appearance was such a surprise to me. Danny may not have passed over instantaneously, like Kathy and her classmates, but all the same he wasn’t really expecting to die, was he?

‘Yet there he was, and his image was almost as clear as if he were still alive. Not only that, he wasn’t bewildered or confused. Quite the opposite. He was full of resentment, and he was able to articulate that resentment very clearly. That’s why I’m ninety percent convinced that it wasn’t Danny, but another spirit trying to pass itself off as Danny.’

‘Can spirits do that? I mean, take on the shape of other spirits?’

‘Of course. A person’s spirit has no physical substance. It’s nothing but a highly charged collection of all the electrical impulses that made up their personality when they were alive. A spirit makes itself seen and heard by stimulating the synapses in your brain, so that you think you can see it and you think you can hear it, even though it’s invisible and it’s not making a sound. Why do you think there are no authenticated tapes of spirit voices, and no video recordings of ghosts – even though people swear that they’ve heard their dead mothers talking to them, and seen their dead lovers standing over their beds? What you saw outside the window was very vivid, but it was nothing more than a picture from your own memory.’

‘So how come you saw it, too?’

‘Because whoever this spirit is, it was able to conjure up Danny’s image in my brain, too, and Margot’s, and Lynn’s, so that we all witnessed what was more or less the same manifestation.’

Frank finished his vodka and beckoned the hostess for another one. ‘What I want to know is, why would another spirit do that?’