After a day of surprises, Clay was not the least surprised to find The Knickerbocker looming in the windshield. Savy snuck them in through a back entrance and they rode the service elevator to the 10th Floor. There, they passed along a corridor of open doorways, where old people sat watching TV or playing chess or muttering at ghosts Clay could not hear. “I’m not supposed to have a skeleton key,” Savy whispered. “But I need painkillers sometimes to help with Mo’s withdrawal, so Spider miscounts the inventory a little.”
At the very end of the mothball-reeking passage was a padlocked door, which Savy swiftly violated, stepping into a long, narrow closet filled with shelves and shelves of pills, medical kits, defibillators, creams, laxatives, thermometers, and plenty of things that Clay didn’t want to know about. In the back, among the old wheelchairs and blood-pressure machines, was a large oxygen tank on a handcart. Savy turned a valve and the tank produced a sudden gaseous whine. “Help me with this beast.”
“Where are we taking it?”
“To dive on the reef, Cousteau. Come on, put your back into it.”
Clay got the tank angled and the wheels moving. “You’re high, aren’t you?”
“Not high, man. Poisoned.”
They mouse-squeaked the tank down another hall and arrived at Room 1034, which was empty except for a few Spartan arrangements—a double bed with a bare mattress, an old scratched bureau, and a small window with a view of the fire escape and the Capitol Records Building. “The woman who lived here,” Savy explained, “died of an embolism four months ago. No surviving family. Guess who got to clean the room out? It breaks my heart every time. You wouldn’t believe the things people leave behind. The stories that get forgotten.”
They positioned the tank on the side of the bed, and Savy tore one of the new pillows from its plastic, and flopped onto the mattress. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting the bed beside her, “it’s new too.”
Clay wrenched off his charred Docs, never wanting to put them on again. Part of him still doubted they’d escaped Karney’s house of horrors; none of the old people had turned from their book reading and idle staring when the frizzy-haired girl and half-naked dirtball passed their doorways. What if it was because they hadn’t seen anything? What if he and Savy were ghosts now, as bodiless and lost as Rocco and Deidre? Marilyn and DiMaggio?
“Can’t be dead,” Clay decided, flopping down, “hurts too much.”
“What?”
Clay shrugged, feeling like a beached fish, his skin tingling with something like sunburn. “I was thinking how maybe we died in that blaze and our souls are wandering free of our bodies.”
“Please. If I had to be anchored to a place, it wouldn’t be here.” Savy loosened a tube on the side of the tank and clapped the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth; she gave the valve a hard turn and began breathing with the full expanse of her lungs. The tank responded with its gaseous hiss; and each inhalation seemed to restore a year or two of life back into her. Savy was tired, grimy, spent, but in short time she was also looking like herself again. “Pure oxygen,” she gasped. “Like we’d have gotten at Cedars or any ER. Suck it.”
A few breaths and the rotting organ of Clay’s brain began to ripen afresh. The choked traffic on the freeways of his veins and arteries loosened and his blood circulated freely. Clay breathed and breathed and breathed until his head spun and his body floated four inches off the mattress. Then he simply smiled and Savy grinned back.
For an hour, they stared at the ceiling, counting cracks in the plaster and passing the mask back and forth like some geriatric joint—all the while hearing speeding sirens and whirling chopper rotors racing for the Hills. “What was it?” Savy asked inevitably. “The thing that Rocco called The Hailmaker and Davis called The Man?”
“Oh, him,” Clay said, and though he tried to lather his words in gravitas, they still emerged happy and high. “I met him once before. He the devil.”
Savy paused, pulling a leaf from her hair. “As in the red-winged beastie whispering on your shoulder? The proprietor of Hell? The fiend with a thousand faces?”
“As in, the Queen Bitch. I guess he/she has a hoof-hold in the music industry?”
“Not surprising. Although”—and now Savy’s voice dropped and she sounded as serious as she had all day—“do you really think Rocket Throne existed because of some deal Rocco made with that thing?”
Clay admitted he didn’t know. Who but Boyle could say? And would he ever say? Clearly the idea troubled Savy. They were quiet a moment before she asked Clay if he believed in God.
“I guess. In the abstract.” Clay sucked hard on the mask. “You can’t have the yin without the yang, right?”
“Where was God today?”
“Well. We’re alive. Maybe He, or She, was in that platinum record that broke the window, or the canyon bushes that broke our fall. She—or He—is certainly in this oxygen mask right now. Hoo-ahh!”
Savy frowned and sat up. “That’s a cop out, Clay. Where was God in that video we watched? Rocco had rejected the Hailmaker, preached hope and redemption, but no angel came down with a thunderbolt. And say what you want, but our escape today? Pure dumb luck. I’m always looking for God around this place, and all I see is sagging flesh that’s almost out of time.” A spasm of coughs hit her and Savy took possession of the mask again. “I’m so sick of people saying God’s in the little things. ’cause, guess what? His adversary is in the big things. The other night a kid Mickey’s age got shot, two blocks from my apartment. Where was God? Where the hell was He when your mother fell?”
“Hey, easy.”
Savy laid back down. “Sorry.”
“What’s your point anyway?”
“I don’t know. Just that it seems like evil is a given in
