Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “Strangers,” said Vickery. “We’ll never know.”

  “Your man Hipple didn’t seem happy that I knew about the Herbert Woods identity.”

  “It’s leverage he’s had on me. I guess he figures it’s worth less if he has to share it.”

  Castine nodded and took another bite, chewing as she blinked around. After a few seconds she started to get out of her chair, then subsided, frowning. “That woman over there just lit up a cigarette! I guess I shouldn’t make a scene.”

  “No,” agreed Vickery. “And in places like this, nobody cares. That kid by the far wall with the beer probably isn’t twenty-one, either.”

  “Are we safe here? What if the police raid the place?”

  “They won’t. When I was a cop, we knew about a lot of places like this in LA. We figured they were private and harmless—a lot of them have the ghost-repelling pictures on the walls, but in those days I didn’t know about all that stuff. I knew there were crazy fortune-tellers in shacks beside the freeways, too, but it didn’t seem like my job to roust them, and I thought their metronomes were just set dressing, like the skulls and candles in Mexican botanicas.”

  Castine nodded, still looking out at the other tables. “You’re supposed to say Hispanic,” she said absently. “Mexican isn’t PC.”

  Vickery laughed. “To me PC still sounds like Probable Cause. And there never was any, to investigate the freeway gypsies and their ways.”

  The tattooed old man made his way back to their table, and now set down two 16-ounce cans of beer, one Budweiser and one Coors.

  Castine shook her head and finally took the Budweiser. “How long were you a cop?” she asked, popping the tab and taking a quick swallow. “What did you do?”

  “Six years.” Vickery opened the Coors can and took a deep sip. “Mostly I was putting together forgery and money-laundering cases.” He smiled. “Though for a while it looked like I’d be an LAPD ultralight pilot. You know, those little one-man airplanes?”

  “LAPD uses those?”

  “No. The Downey Police Department was using one in the ’80s because they’re cheaper than helicopters, but they shut it down—insurance got too expensive, and people would shoot at it. But in 2010 the LAPD looked into the idea, and they tapped me for it because my wife and I did a lot of hang-gliding, and they figured the skills were similar. But eventually they decided they had enough helicopters and didn’t need the insurance headache.”

  “And now you drive a taco truck. And . . . unter cars, that Hipple guy said?” She took another sip of the Budweiser and smiled—a bit scornfully, it seemed to Vickery. “Is that like underworld Uber?”

  Vickery decided not to take offense. “I drive people who don’t want to be tracked by anybody, dead or alive. Unter is German for under—” Castine rolled her eyes to indicate that she knew that; he went on, “—I stay under the radar.”

  “So you take surface streets and don’t go near freeways. Don’t get in the current.” She shrugged. “You can tell a GPS to show you how to get someplace with no use of freeways. What’s the big—”

  “It’s—not that simple. Listen, after we get your phone set up tomorrow morning, I’ll drive you back to the storage unit and—” He sighed, then resolutely went on, “—you can borrow my Chevy Blazer, but sometimes you have to drive on freeways—evasion, speed—and even on surface streets there’s precautions you have to take. I’ll explain it all for you. You should get a portable radio—”

  “Get it where?” she interrupted, frowning now, “a store with security cameras? The TUA has state-of-the-art facial recognition software, and they’re sure to be casting a very fine net, locally, now. And they’re onto your car, even with dealer plates on it. Are you cutting me loose?”

  Vickery bared his teeth in a grimace. “I’ll get you the radio—they probably don’t have much of a referent for my face in any recognition database—and I’ll give you some money, but yes, I’ll be cutting you loose tomorrow. You’ll be in touch with your fiancé—”

  “Maybe.”

  She didn’t speak for a while, occupying herself with the pickled onions and carrots on her plate. Vickery tried without success to think of anything more to say.

  “Oh hell, you’re right,” she said finally. “You’ve done—you’re doing—much more for me than I could have had any right to expect.” She gave him a melancholy smile. “I just wish you could get hold of an ultralight plane! The TUA’s got access to cameras all over the ground—stores and intersections and airports—but the air—it’s free of their attention.” She laughed softly. “A really big catapult and parachute would do.”

  Something she had just said had stirred a memory, but Vickery dismissed it for now. “No,” he said, “I—I can’t. And I can’t leave you to hang out in the cemetery all day.” He took several deep swallows of the beer and exhaled. “You’ve got to come with me tomorrow. Galvan’s unter cars are masked and secure, and I can claim you’re an apprentice driver. It just slipped my mind for a second!—that we’re allies.”

  “Honestly, Herbert, no, you don’t have to, I’m sure my fiancé will be able to—”

  “As soon as he does, I will cut you loose. And call me Sebastian now. But—” He held up his hand to stop any further protests. “Give me a minute here.”

  Castine nodded and took a sip of her own beer.

  Vickery looked up and said, carefully, “Something something thy dominion be, we’ll go through air, for sure the air is free.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “That’s what the ghost said to me,” Vickery told her, “four years ago, when the motorcade stopped on Wilshire Boulevard and the TUA guys came jumping out of that Suburban like it was on fire or something. I leaned in to see if there was anybody injured inside, and the voice on the radio said that.”

  She started to laugh, then choked it off. “That? ‘For sure the air is free’? That is what they wanted to kill you for hearing?”

  “And ‘thy dominion be.’ Yes.” Vickery looked away from her, the taste of the beer sour now in his mouth. “And as soon as attention was called to my—illicit intrusion—”

  “Sorry!”

  “—Right away a couple of your guys cuffed me and shoved me into another car. They drove me out to the desert by Palmdale, away from any freeway or even paved road, and marched me out into an arroyo with their guns drawn, and if a pickup truck hadn’t hit their car parked on the side of the road and distracted them, I’d be dead now instead of them. I nearly was anyway.”

  Castine, sobered, said nothing.

  Vickery recalled that it had been a gray day threatening rain, and there had been puddles in the low spots of the little gulley. When the screech of brakes and jangling crash had shaken the air, the agent on Vickery’s left had turned his head in that direction, and Vickery, though handcuffed, had instantly hopped forward and kicked him hard in the groin; and as the man was folding but determinedly raising his gun, Vickery drove the top of his forehead into the man’s face. Then with a jarring bang a hammer blow knocked Vickery’s right leg out from under him and he spun and fell face-up on top of the man he’d kicked and head-butted, his cuffed hands clawing desperately behind him for the man’s gun as another gunshot shook the arroyo and a second bullet punched Vickery in the ribs. But he had got hold of the fallen man’s gun, and managed to stretch his left arm across his back and partly roll over and fire twice from beside his hip, as a bullet kicked up sand beside him and another jolted the fallen man’s body—and then the other agent bowed his head and knelt on the sand, halfway raised his gun again, and finally pitched forward on his face.

  Dizzy and shivering, forcing himself not to look yet at the widening stains of bright red blood on his pants and shirt, Vickery had felt the pockets of the dead man beside him and then dug out the handcuff key.

  By the time the pickup driver—finally, hesitantly—stepped down into the gulley, Vickery had managed to unlock the cuffs and was tying his belt tightly around his right th
igh.

  The driver had had a cell phone, and had handed it over when Vickery pulled out his commission wallet and waved his badge and photo ID at him, and with that stranger’s phone Vickery had called his onetime LAPD partner and asked for a last enormous favor. Then, after the pickup driver had helped him back up to the road and broken out a first aid kit and applied makeshift field dressings to Vickery’s gunshot wounds, the two of them had sat for half an hour in the cab of the crumpled pickup truck. Vickery was holding the gun with which he had killed one of the two dead agents, and conversation was limited. The driver obediently waved away the couple of passing cars that slowed at the sight of the accident, and fortunately neither of them was a random police car. When Vickery’s old partner called to say that he was ten minutes away, Vickery had convinced the pickup truck driver that he’d be wise to make a blindfold for himself.

  The ex-partner had not wanted to know anything about the empty car the pickup truck had hit, and reluctantly consented to drive Vickery to the clinic of a veterinarian in Simi Valley who was known to treat gunshot wounds in humans and not report them, and the veterinarian was induced to do it one more time. The ex-partner had given Vickery a hundred dollars and told him never to call him again.

  The two bullets proved not to have hit any arteries or vital organs, but Vickery had stayed in the back room of the clinic for a nerve-wracking and monumentally inconvenient week before he could move.

  Vickery thought now of the way the shooting this morning had activated his memory of that desperate fight four years ago, and then he shook the memories away and drank the rest of his beer. Castine was chewing another mouthful and staring at him curiously.

  “Sorry,” she said again.

  He waved it off. “You done?” He laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table and bent to pick up his helmet. “We should move on. It’s starting to get dark out, and it must be after five by now.”

  Castine nodded and pushed back her chair, pausing to touch the railing and peer at the wall that crowded right up to it, as if hoping to see through the added-on shop to the lawn that must once have been visible from this now-enclosed porch.

  She picked up her helmet and lifted her leather jacket from the chair. “Is that,” she asked hesitantly as she slid one arm and then the other into the sleeves, “why you could see those people climbing the hill this afternoon? Four years ago, that . . . intimacy with those two agents, as your friend Hipple would say?”

  “No.” Vickery shrugged into his own jacket. “Don’t forget our purchases.”

  He led the way around the other tables to the back door, and when they stepped out into the dirt lot, it was in shadow, and clouds overhead were streaked with a pink glow. A diesel-scented breeze swayed the shaggy tops of palm trees visible over the rooftops.

  He unchained the motorcycle, and when he had kicked the engine to life and Castine had got onto the seat, he leaned back and said to her, “Those two agents picked a good place to kill me—or for them to die, as it turned out—far away from any current. No, it’s not because of them. I can see ghosts because my wife killed herself on a freeway shoulder, in an intense current, a year before that. Homicide isn’t the only qualifying intimacy.” He tromped the gear shift lever into first. “And now we’re off to spend the night in a cemetery.”

  He let out the clutch and bumped across the lot and turned right on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Vickery rode past the cemetery entrance and turned left on Gower Street, and halfway down the block he swerved to the right into a narrow alley that faced the back ends of apartment buildings and small-business parking lots. The alley was littered with fast-food bags and fragments of furniture, and Vickery rode along slowly in first gear, passing tiny back gardens and barbed-wire-topped walls and stacks of old tires behind chain link fences, and even one old clapboard house with a green-painted upstairs balcony that must once have overlooked something besides this alley. Vickery thought of the enclosed porch in the For Lease place. They passed through pockets of smells—garbage, flowers, gasoline, teriyaki.

  He was considering parking the bike in the gap between an apparently non-functioning panel truck and a fence, but before he reached the next street he saw something that might be better—a stained old mattress that was leaned up against a cinder block wall. He stopped the bike’s engine and told Castine to get off, then quickly looked around; there was no one in the alley at the moment, and no faces at the few apartment bathroom windows overhead. He leaned the bike against the wall and dragged the mattress over to it, then dug a jackknife out of his pocket and cut away the fabric and padding on the wall-side of the mattress so that the bike’s right handlebar would fit partly in among the springs. He set both helmets on the bike seat and leaned the mattress onto the bike and stepped back.

  “There,” he told Castine quietly, “nobody’d think there was anything behind that, would they?”

  “Even if they did,” she said, tucking the bag from Hipple’s into her jacket pocket, “I don’t think they’d touch that mattress. You should wash your hands.”

  “Later. Come on.”

  Vickery led her back down the alley and across Gower, and paused beside the six-foot high cemetery wall.

  A row of close-set, outward-curving spikes ran along the top of the wall, hidden in patches by big clusters of bougainvillea dotted with red flowers that were contracting in the dusk, and across the street was a wholesale carpet warehouse, closed for the night. Even in the shadows, the ground floor of the otherwise-gray warehouse was vivid with sprawling graffiti.

  Vickery reached in behind a lush curtain of bougainvillea and for several seconds tugged and twisted at something; finally he drew out a yard-long section of two-by-four with five holes drilled along one of the narrow sides. He quickly leaned it against the wall and stood in front of it while several cars drove past.

  “Act casual,” he said to Castine. “We’re just a couple out for a walk.”

  “Why,” asked Castine wearily, “a cemetery?” A cooler evening breeze was drifting up Gower from the south, and she took a deep breath and let it out. “I shouldn’t have eaten all those pickled carrots.”

  “They’re acidic. And wandering ghosts seem to be excluded by clusters of stationary ones. Or so the gypsies say, anyway.”

  At last no car was in sight, and Vickery picked up the board and said, “Give me a boost—make a stirrup.”

  Castine crouched and cupped her hands, and Vickery stepped up onto them and straightened, and, wobbling for balance, fitted the holes in the two-by-four over five of the wall-top spikes.

  He hopped down and made a stirrup of his hands for her. “Up and over,” he said, “quick. There’s grass on the other side.”

  Castine muttered, “Shit,” but put her right foot into Vickery’s hands, and then as he heaved upward she sprang to the two-by-four, gripped it and vaulted over the wall. A few seconds later Vickery jumped, took hold of the length of wood, and pulled himself up; he swung one leg over the board, then crouched on the wall top with his shoes between the bases of the spikes. He tugged the board free, and jumped backward with it.

  He landed lightly on the grass and straightened up, and he laid the two-by-four against the inner side of the wall. The cemetery was in dusky shade now, and Vickery and Castine stood in deeper shadow between two of a row of cypresses that paralleled the wall.

  “Come on,” Vickery whispered, “there’s an empty tomb to the south.”

  “Why empty?” she whispered back. “A salesman’s sample? With a Your Name Here sign on the front?”

  “Somebody thinking ahead. Shut up.”

  Vickery led the way between standing headstones, glancing frequently across the marble-studded lawn to the north, where the security office was. The only sound was the remote rumble of traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  At one point Castine gasped and clutched his arm. “There are people here! A lot of them! I just noticed. All sitting on—or are there?”r />
  Vickery could see them now too. Dim figures were perched motionless on many of the headstones, all simply staring into the dimming sky.

  “Don’t disturb them,” he whispered.

  Ahead stood a tomb like a miniature Greek temple no more than twelve feet wide and ten feet tall, and Vickery started toward it, but a burly man in overalls stepped out from behind it and blocked their way.

  “Not so fast,” he said.

  Vickery had a story ready. “We were in the mausoleum,” he said quickly, “praying. Did we stay too long? Has the cemetery closed? What time does it close?”

  It was hard to see, but the man seemed to be blinking rapidly. “Take a powder, Buttercup,” he said.

  The man’s clothing shifted—now it was a sweater and pale slacks, and there was a dark patch on his face like a moustache. Vickery looked away from the figure’s eyes and involuntarily stepped back across the grass; this was a evidently a ghost, and he had never been this close to one before.

  He tried to think. It was too dark now to use a spirit level or a fixed compass, and too breezy to hope that a lighter might illuminate the things.

  Vickery heard Castine inhale sharply, and he guessed that she had only now understood what this creature was.

  The ghost turned to her. “You can stick around, babe.”

  Vickery’s heart was pounding and he groped for something to say. “How old are you?”

  “Seven,” said the figure standing in front of the tomb. “How old are you?”

  Seven was probably the age its atrophied mind recalled most clearly.

  “Seven times seven is forty nine,” Vickery said. “Forty-nine times seven is—”

  Castine cleared her throat and said, in a small voice, “Three-hundred and forty-three.”

  The ghost shook its head violently, as if to clear it. “Sez you,” it muttered. “I can take you.”

  “This isn’t your tomb,” said Vickery. “You’re a hermit crab, you’re not fooling anyone. You have no place.”