The Puppet Master

'Good. If I'm not back day after tomorrow . . .' I looked in my billfold; I didn't have a lot of cash, but enough to give Myers a hundred. 'Catch a flight out of town, to Phoenix maybe, or San Francisco, and tell your story to the FBI.'

He nodded again.

I got the jacket and Dodger cap that Molly had loaned me, and went out to her old Dodge. She'd been damned generous to someone she hardly knew. Then I got in and started it up, but before I could drive away, it seemed to me someone was there, watching me. So I looked in the back, and saw no one.

Then I got out and looked in the enclosed luggage compartment. As I closed the hatchback, I suddenly realized.

'Get your goddamn ass out of my space!' I didn't shout it, but it slashed out of me with snap and anger. Waves of chills washed over me then, as intense as orgasm, and after half a minute, when they'd settled out, I realized there was no one there but me.

But there had been! I didn't doubt it. I hoped I'd blasted him out of his ectoplasmic socks.

32

PICTURE AT A PARTY

I got back in the Dodge and drove down Hollycliffe to Bronson. In some respects, Los Feliz and the I-5 Freeway was the most logical route to take, but Los Feliz was continually patrolled because of speeders, so instead I took Franklin west, and then the Hollywood Freeway. The freeways were safer for me than surface streets. They were patrolled by the California Highway Patrol, and I was pretty sure the bad apples in the LAPD wouldn't invite the CHP in on their game. They could order their own officers without questions getting asked, at least out loud, at least for a while. But the CHP or the sheriff's department would want explanations.

I crossed Cahuenga Pass and left the Hollywood for the Ventura Freeway westbound, then exited onto Coldwater Canyon and drove north. LAPD territory again. I hadn't gone far, hadn't crossed Tujunga Wash yet, when I heard a siren growl, the sort of little growl patrolmen use to get your attention. I looked in my rearview mirror, and sure as hell, there he was, coming up on me from behind, flasher spinning.

I'd been careful not to speed or break any other traffic laws, and it was still daylight, so it couldn't be a taillight out or the telltale wrong glint from an out-of-date license sticker. The first thing they'd want was to see my driver's license, and even if they didn't remember the all-cars bulletin, they'd check the name on their computer. Standard practice. And there I'd be.

I didn't think it all out like that, of course; that's simply the data I acted on. Instead of pulling over, I swerved through a short gap in the oncoming traffic. Horns blared; tires squealed. Someone sideswiped me and caromed into the police cruiser. Someone else broadsided me. I was pretty well shaken up. There were other crashes, half a dozen or more, then relative quiet. Molly's van was on its left side, and the right side was smashed in, so I unbuckled, crawled quickly to the rear and out the back door, which had sprung open. I needed to separate myself from the Dodge, hopefully before the patrolmen worked their way to where they could see me get out of it. The scene was turning into an ants' nest. People were running over, helping people out of smashed cars, and for half a minute I pretended to be part of them. The patrol car was on its side, too, and it looked as if the officers hadn't been able to get out yet. There were enough smashed cars there, and stopped cars, that it looked as if I'd get away with it. And I didn't even seem to be injured, just shaken up.

I walked over to the sidewalk, where a crowd of people stood staring at the wreckage. There were too many of them to have gathered since the pileup; they'd been there before. Mostly they were young; we were right next to Valley College. A small group of them, about eight or nine that seemed to be together, started walking away then, and I joined them. I didn't want to be around when more police arrived.

'Quite a pileup,' I said to a couple of them, a guy and a girl.

'You ain't just glibbin',' the guy answered. 'I wonder what started it?'

I shook my head. 'No telling. Someone lost control, I suppose. Went to sleep, maybe. What's the crowd about?'

'We just left the ball game. We beat Pierce.'

'Pierce? Are they good?'

'They're the defending league champions.'

'Huh! That's pretty good! Now what? Parties?'

'You got it.'

Of the group I'd attached myself to, one or two looked to be still in their teens, but most were in their twenties. We crossed Tujunga Wash on Victory Boulevard, and after a few more blocks turned north on a residential street, and went in a small house rented by several of them. Someone got a jug of wine out of the fridge and poured. Someone else went out for more. Three or four other people came in, one of them with a giant bag of tortilla chips, and opened it. A joint got passed around.

I didn't drink or toke or add to the conversation, just threw in a ten when someone else went out to get a bushel of chicken wings from Colonel Sanders. The conversation soon left baseball and went to psychic stuff. Since the 2006 Stanford study of psychic phenomena, interest had surged on campuses.

The place was getting crowded. A girl who came in about the time the chicken wings arrived was a psychic photographer with a different shtick. Instead of people pointing their cameras at her and getting strange results, she pointed her Polaroid at other people. And my being a total stranger, she asked if she could take my picture.

'What does it do?' I asked. 'Capture my soul?'

She laughed. 'Maybe, in a sense. Usually I get a picture of the person surrounded by their aura.'

'Kirlian photography?'

'No,' someone else said, 'better than that. Manuela uses ordinary Polaroid color film and gets the auras on that!'

'How does it work?'