At the last moment, Henry jogged left to stand directly beside the window and gestured to bring me beside him. “Start counting,” he said, and then he stepped away from the wall, backed up two long paces, brought his elbows up, and dove headfirst through the window screen. At the count of two, I followed.
I landed on my elbows, getting a nice carpet burn, and rolled to the left, away from the door, until I hit a wall. I was pushing myself to my feet when the light went on, and Henry bloomed from the darkness with his pistol pointed straight at my middle.
“You count fast,” he said.
The room was empty except for a low wooden coffee table with a telephone on it and a six-inch stack of newspapers pulled up next to the table, like a cushion. The edge of the table was fringed with long black scars as though cigarettes had burned themselves out on it. The smell of tobacco was heavy in the air.
A small kitchen glared white across a low counter. Next to it was a corridor. “Bedroom,” Henry said, pointing to it.
Henry preceded me down the hallway, turning left to flick on the lights in the bathroom. I went on to the bedroom, found the light switch, and snapped it up.
The long white thing against the back wall was a bed of newspapers, maybe two inches thick and seven feet long, with an unopened copy of the Sunday Times drafted into service as a pillow. The shapeless olive thing crumpled at the foot of the newspaper bed was an army surplus blanket. The brown rectangle in the center of the room was another low wooden table, a twin to the one in the living room. The black thing in the center of the table was what was left of Max Grover’s hand.
A turquoise ring gleamed at me as I approached. Clutched between two of the three remaining fingers was the stub of a filter cigarette.
I got down on hands and knees. The music came from a cheap boom box under the table: a cassette unspooled itself through the little window. The boom box was equipped with auto-reverse. It could have been playing for hours.
Four-twenty.
“The fuck is that?” Henry said from the doorway.
“I think it’s Kool and the Gang,” I said. “Did you touch anything?”
“The thing on the table,” Henry said.
“Behold the hand of man,” I said, “and dreadful are its works. I asked you whether you touched anything.”
He was standing over the table looking down, his mouth screwed into a knot of muscle. “No.”
“Give me some newspaper.”
He grabbed a sheet from the bed and handed it to me, and I put it over the boom-box and picked the contraption up. Then I hauled it into the living room and opened the front door wide.
“Get ready to leave,” I said. “We’re going to move fast.”
“I never been readier,” Henry said at the door.
I cranked the boom box up full and positioned it in the center of the door. Stepping over it, I ran across the courtyard and through the gate with Henry right behind me. Kool and the Gang bounced off the walls behind us.
Henry was silent all the way back to Hanks’s house. I dropped him at the gate, shepherded Alice down the hill to Sunset, and turned right. West, toward the freeway.
17 ~ Hesperia
Bird’s flight down the freeway, actually free for once, eight lanes of blank concrete like a long sentence punctuated by blue-white lights and green-and-white signs; here and there the dependent clause of an offramp. Left on the Ventura Freeway, premature morning traffic streaming south on the other side of the chain-link fence with its desiccated, hallucinogenic laurels, and then off on Reseda Boulevard, gliding between looming old pepper trees and dark houses and the deathly glare of all-night markets.
My eyes burned like someone had put Tabasco in my eyedrops, and there was an empty, fluttery feeling in my gut. Drive-time disk jockeys, preternaturally alert guys who couldn’t have passed for wits in a gathering of battery-powered appliances, made smutty jokes and played twenty-year-old music to ease the world into the gray disappointment of another day.
I’d driven this route only a few hours earlier, but it felt as distant as childhood.
By now some hustler or screenwriter, righteously steamed by the rhythms of Kool and the Gang, would have called the sheriffs. I hoped some alert deputy had awakened Spurrier from his dreams of shiny badges and broken jaws. Why should he get all the sleep?
The dawn was breaking pale and wet-looking, two fingers of vodka in the eastern sky, as I parked Alice around the corner and hiked the thorny lawns of Hesperia Street to Elena Aguirre’s house. The nine-millimeter pressed against my thigh like twenty dollars in change, but my feet barely seemed to brush the ground and my head was anchored to my shoulders by the thinnest of strings. The world slid by like a baggage belt in an airport, and I was hardly moving at all. I ticked off the symptoms of exhaustion with an almost medical disinterest.
A light was on in the front window: The poor get up early. I drifted past Elena’s dented car and went around to the back and sat on one of the big rocks. I was transparent, a cloud of gnats, something you could have read an eye chart through. The rock had a nice, regular, liquid motion. It was a cork, and we were afloat on an ocean of gelatin, and the ocean was thickening as the waves grew gentler and farther apart. We’d never get there at this rate. What we needed was a sail, or maybe a Mixmaster. I could hang it over the side and use it like an outboard.
I opened my eyes to a blare of light, a full brass section triple-tonguing brilliant baroque figures against my retina. The sun was a hand’s breadth above the house across the street, and Elena’s car was gone.
All the old aches punched the time clock, organized for action, as I stood up. Some of them went for my arms and others assailed my legs, but the really smart ones, the ones that had learned to use tools, picked up their Louisville Sluggers and took batting practice against my lower back. Trying to remember whether any of Joseph Campbell’s heroes had back problems, I limped to the back door and tried the knob.
No go. The window at the side of the house was closed and locked, and the front door made it a matched set. Expecting nothing, I knocked and got what I’d expected. This was a situation that called for cunning and discretion. I went around to the back, picked up one of the smaller rocks, one about the size of my head, lugged it around to the side of the house, and lobbed it, shot-put style, through the window.
It sounded like the entire morning had been shattered. The noise sliced through my fatigue, galvanized me, maybe even frightened me. Eschewing Henry’s highly personal head-first style, I found a place where I could put my hands without cutting them to ribbons and hoisted myself inside.
I had both feet on the carpet of a cramped little dining room when I realized that I was hearing a woman’s voice. She babbled on, cheerful, confident-sounding, apparently unperturbed that an asteroid had just ventilated her dining room.
Television, I thought, and turned from the window to find myself looking down at a miniature human being, no more than twenty-four inches tall, with a large head and very small, white-clad feet. In my addled state it took me a good five seconds to summon up and discard three or four mutant possibilities and identify it as a child.
“Arounnaworld in thirty miniss,” the child said loudly. “I’m Lyn Vaughn.”
“ Shhhhh,” I said, forgetting that I’d essentially entered the house by coming directly through the wall. “For God’s sake, be quiet.”
“Awholeday’s news-” the child began.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “We’re playing a game. Look, look-” I picked up a saltshaker from the table and pointed it at the child. Salt poured out onto the floor. “This is the remote.”
“Headlinnnnnnnne SPORSSS!” the child shrilled, raising both arms in a good approximation of a distance runner breaking the tape. It seemed to be a girl, but the evidence at that age is scant, and I’m no judge.
“And when I push the remote like this,” I said frantically, salting the floor some more, “the sound goes off and you can’t talk. Okay, now, off.”
