by Tim Powers
“You said yesterday that we’re allies, but not friends. Allies is conditional, situational.” She shrugged. “Friends lasts better.”
“Yes,” he said; then, “Yes, it does.”
She opened her mouth to say something more, but—
“Vickery!” came a yell from behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Tom leaning out of the trailer. “Priority assignment. Car number two. Right now.” Tom nodded emphatically and disappeared back inside.
“Okay, don’t say anything,” Vickery told Castine, tossing his plastic cup into a trash can, “just walk beside me and look confident.”
“Are we leaving? My phone’s in the rest room.”
Vickery exhaled impatiently. “We shouldn’t separate at this point. I’ll walk with you, but we gotta walk fast. And there’s a USB port in the car.” They hurried to the nearby building, and at the restroom door Vickery said, “Give me your gun—they’ll take them, but I don’t want these guys to think you’ve been carrying.”
She passed it to him and he stuck it into his left jacket pocket as she opened the door and went in, and a moment later she was out again, carrying her phone and charger.
“And stash that stuff.” Vickery took her elbow and led her at a trot back to the bay.
Out on the pavement, a bearded attendant in coveralls was holding a red tablet like an iPad, and he waved Vickery over.
“Rush job,” the man said. “Specified our best driver available, which at the moment is you. If you’re carrying, leave it with the mechanic.”
“Okay. Who’s going to take Arnold to the airport?”
“Tom’ll find somebody.” The tablet the man was holding was an old Etch-A-Sketch, and he held it out toward Vickery. On the gray screen, spelled out in fine, jittery black lines, were the words valero at western + franklin.
Vickery read it and nodded, and the man turned the thing upside down and shook it.
Vickery walked with Castine across the pavement to the left side of the bay, where one of the mechanics was pulling a cloth cover off of a new Ford Taurus.
Castine audibly choked back a laugh and whispered to him, “That’s, uh, car two?”
Even for Vickery it was hard to recognize the vehicle as a Ford Taurus—the vinyl decals that covered every inch of the car’s body were no thicker than a coat of paint, but big full-color photorealistic faces printed on them made it look swollen. The darkly tinted windshield and windows were the only evident geometry on the car.
Vickery mouthed Shut up, then pulled the two .45s out of the side pockets of his jacket and laid them on a workbench.
“Note the hardware,” he called to the mechanic.
The man raised his eyebrows at the pair of guns. “You carrying now, Vick?” he said, then shrugged. “Consider ’em tagged and stashed.”
Vickery stepped around the car and opened the gaudy passenger door for Castine, and the attendant came hurrying up as she got in.
“Whoa. Who’s she?”
Vickery showed him the piece of paper that the yard manager had signed. “Copilot. I guess this is an important fare.”
The attendant peered at the paper, then just said, “Okay, fine.” He waved the Etch-A-Sketch toward the driveway. “Git.”
Vickery closed Castine’s door and got in on the driver’s side. The key was in the ignition, and ten seconds later he had driven across the lot and was turning right onto Eighth Street. A radio was attached to the dashboard above the car’s radio, and both were on and tuned to K-Earth 101.
Castine fitted the USB plug from her charger into a port on the console, then turned to Vickery and touched her ear and raised an eyebrow.
“No,” Vickery said, “part of what the customers pay for is the assurance that the cars are never bugged.” He glanced at her phone. “If your man calls while the fare’s in the car, tell him to call you back in half an hour and then let the fare see you power down the phone.”
“I might just ask you to pull over and let me out.”
“That’d be better, really. If you do, I’ll come back for you after I drop him or her off.”
“I’ve got to get in touch with Eliot as soon as possible. Can we turn the radios down?”
Vickery reached out and turned both volume knobs down slightly. The music was still clearly audible. “It’s like a police radio,” he said, “I need to be able to hear it.”
“It’s an old David Bowie song.”
“Yes.”
“O-kay.” She tapped the screen of her phone and held it to her ear. “Are you going to get in trouble, pretending the yard manager okayed me coming along on this fare?”
“Maybe. Not much.”
“I’m sorry.”
Vickery turned north on Western Avenue. “I owe you. I couldn’t just leave you there at the lot.”
“Baltimore, Maryland,” she said into the phone; and a few moments later, “Minerva’s Flowers.” She gave Vickery an empty look. He glanced at the traffic ahead, and then at the oil pressure and battery gauge needles and the little ivory-capped metronome on the dashboard. They were all reassuringly straight up and steady.
“Hi,” said Castine, “on the third floor of your building is the office of Eliot Shaw—I said Eliot Shaw—and if you give him this message he’ll pay you a hundred dollars, if you say I told him to. Have you got a pencil? Yes yes, it’s David Bowie. What? ‘Modern Love,’ I think. Pencil? The message is, call Ingrid at 818-555-3933, urgent. Hm? 3933. Yes, I’m Ingrid.” For several seconds she didn’t speak, then went on, “You’re risking a trip up the elevator against the likelihood of a hundred bucks. Good, thanks.”
She tapped the phone again and laid it on the console. “That wasn’t easy. Why do you have to listen to two radios? Or even one?”
“One has batteries in it, the other works off the car’s electrical system. If they get out of synch—usually on a freeway, in the current—you know you’re in a strong amplified possibility field. Then you better stay in your lane, keep your speed the same as everybody else, and hope your car doesn’t stall or start misfiring.”
“I always hope that. Why especially?”
“Oh—a lot of things can go wrong in a strong field. The engine, the tires, other drivers. Dust devils, sudden sandstorms.” He smiled briefly. “They say you and your car can even disappear right off the freeway, and you find yourself in the afterlife.”
“You mentioned something like that yesterday.”
“Right, some guy in the 1960s supposedly did it, and eventually came back through the omphalos on the Pasadena Freeway to tell about it. Without his car. He’d done a hit-and-run and he had a concussion, and his engine was screwed up and he was on the freeway shoulder, going a lot slower than the other cars, see, so he was generating a little field, and he was the same sort as you and me—he was one of the people who can see ghosts.” He steered quickly around a Metro bus. “And so he took an offramp that wasn’t exactly there, in terms of our reality, at least. And he and his car just vanished from this world.”
“That’s something to . . . worry about?”
“Well, no. There’s stories of it happening a time or two since, but there’s lots of urban myths around this stuff. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She shifted in her seat and glanced impatiently at her phone. “I suppose the faces all over this car are supposed to be that weird valley.”
“Uncanny valley, right. It’s an ad for some shampoo, but Lady Galvan likes it because the faces all look just slightly fake.” He tapped the steering wheel. “This is her main stealth car, not cheap to hire—the coolant is changed after every trip, though that’s really just to impress the customers, and the tires are run-flats with support rings inside them and they’re rotated and reversed every time, and filled with air that’s brought from Nevada in scuba tanks . . . the air filter is full of dust from Oregon or somewhere . . . even the name Taurus is supposed to scare ghosts away. We’re way more shielded from ghost attentions in this than we were l
ast night in the cemetery.”
“This must be like driving the presidential limousine. ‘The Beast,’ as they call it.”
“Secret Service guys never called it that. We all just called it Limo One. And I was never PPD, Presidential Protective Division; I was always just standing post at the curb as they drove by, or manning a restroom along the route. The PPD were a very elite group—we used to say they each carried two holsters, one for their gun and one for their hair-dryer.”
“Manning a restroom?”
“You bet. Several restrooms along the route have to have Secret Service guys in place, with entries and corridors cleared, in case the President stops the motorcade to go to the bathroom.”
“Did he ever?”
“Not in any restroom I was in charge of. But I’d have been there if he had, ready to hand him a paper towel.”
“I hope he’d have tipped you. Oh, when is Eliot going to call? Eventually we’re going to have to get out of this clown car—we’ve ditched our rings, but when do we get old shoes and foolish clothes?”
“After we drop this fare we can find a thrift store.”
“And remember to wear our watches on the other wrist,” she said, “set to the wrong time.” She raised her left hand and spread her now-bare fingers. “We’ll probably wish we’d got those pogo sticks.”
Vickery was looking at his own bare left hand on the steering wheel, and he remembered the dream he’d had two nights ago—the dream which had led the TUA to him.
In that dream he and Amanda had been hang-gliding over Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley, launching from the summit slope of Kagel Mountain and spiraling on thermal updrafts in the rotating sunlight; her orange-winged glider had stayed above and ahead of his own left wingtip as the green mountains and patchwork city slowly turned below them, and several times she had smiled across at him before finally banking out of the updraft and swooping away to the east to begin the loop down to the landing zone. He had banked his red-striped white wing to follow her, and in the dream he had known that lunch and beer and affectionate conversation awaited them down there on the grass.
Watching the traffic ahead of them on Western now, he wondered if another dream might pick up where that one had left off.
He was approaching the Franklin intersection, and the turquoise Valero gas station sign was visible on the right. He steered into the lot, and even as he braked he saw a tall, silver-haired man in a business suit hurrying across the asphalt toward them.
The man opened the rear passenger door and folded himself into the car; clearly he had been told what car to expect. “Church of the Blessed Sacrament,” he said as he pulled the door shut, “on Sunset, but the parking lot is at the north end, off of Selma.”
“I know where it is,” said Vickery, driving across the lot to make a left turn onto Franklin. Peripherally he saw Castine give a slight nod.
“I’ll stay on Franklin to avoid the traffic on Hollywood,” said Vickery, “and then take Highland down to Selma.” It was standard protocol to announce the route to a fare, like a pool player calling shots. “ETA is 8:45.”
The man in the back seat simply stared out the side window at the elm trees and old apartment buildings. He didn’t remark on the music.
When Vickery had turned south on Highland and was driving through the crowded Hollywood Boulevard intersection—wondering how crowded the sidewalks might appear to someone not able to see ghosts—a repeated buzzing sound that wasn’t from the radios made him glance across at Castine with a frown.
She raised her eyebrows and spread her hands, and a moment later Vickery realized that the sound had come from the back seat.
“Yes,” said their passenger; “I’m in a shielded car now, they always have music on. No, I’ll get in touch. I don’t want to go anywhere near the 710 yet, but I may check in at Hsaio later in the day.”
Vickery was aware that Castine had stiffened in the seat beside his, but he didn’t glance at her, and the passenger didn’t speak again until Vickery had turned onto Selma and driven into the church parking lot and stopped. Ahead to the left were the arches of the parish school, to the right a white building with a red-tile roof, possibly the rectory, and between and beyond these stood the tan Renaissance-style church with its bell tower and tall stained-glass windows.
The man got out of the car and began walking toward the back entrance to the church. Castine unfastened her seat belt and knelt on the seat to reach back and pull the rear door closed.
“He’s with TUA!” she said breathlessly when she had resumed her seat. “Hsaio is the building their offices are in, in Westwood, and the Extension is right off the 710.”
Vickery’s chest was suddenly cold. “You think he recognized you? We should take off.”
“No, I’ve never seen him before, and I don’t think he even looked at me. I didn’t look at him, except through the tinted glass when he walked to the car. He’s probably from the D.C. central office, and they don’t come west much.”
The man had disappeared around the corner of the church. “You’re okay then,” Vickery said.
But Castine opened her door and swung her legs out of the car. “I’ve got to see who he’s meeting.”
Vickery sat up straight and unfastened his own seatbelt. “No you don’t! Are you crazy? What difference does it make who he’s meeting?”
He opened his door and stepped out. The sun was over the tops of the apartment buildings to the east, and Vickery blinked in the sudden glare.
Castine was standing on the other side of the car now, and spoke quietly and urgently across the garish roof. “He’s got to be from the D.C. office, and he hasn’t checked in at Hsaio or the Extension! This is covert, off the record. If he’s meeting one of the top men here, like Wheeler, or Ollie or Brett, it’s got to be because Terracotta’s been acting so screwy lately, ignoring espionage taskings to concentrate on the desert highway afterlife—getting all paranoid about your dumb ‘air is free’ poem—” She shook her head impatiently. “If they do catch me before Eliot can rescue me, knowing about this meeting could be a bargaining chip.”
“They won’t catch you, I—wait, dammit!”
But she was walking rapidly away, her shoes knocking on the asphalt, toward the church. He started after her, then stopped. It would be no use getting into a physical struggle with her here. And, belatedly, it occurred to him that either party at this meeting might have arranged for backup; depending on the location of any such, his face might very well have been scrutinized by now. With luck any watcher was behind him.
He walked backward to the car, keeping his face turned toward the church as if he were just staring after Castine, and when he bumped against the fender he opened the driver’s door and got in. He shut the door and then peered around through the tinted windows at the other cars in the lot, and the nearby apartment buildings and the rectory and the parish school, calculating the best locations for watchers. The only person readily visible was a little girl in a straw hat and overalls, standing by a row of bushes in front of an apartment building a hundred feet away to his left; she had not been there when he drove in, and she seemed to be staring directly at him, but she could hardly be TUA.
He concluded that an open gallery over the arches on the ground floor of the school would be the best place from which to watch the whole parking lot and be close enough to act. Vickery stared at the gallery, and after a few long seconds he saw movement; and then a dark-haired head and a white T-shirt were briefly visible moving from one pillar to another.
Even at this distance through the tinted windshield he recognized the boy Santiago.
Vickery sat back and chewed a knuckle, frowning. Santiago was only slightly more likely to be working for the TUA than the little girl was, but the boy would hardly be here if he wasn’t doing some watching or courier job for somebody. And his position meant that he must certainly have recognized Vickery.
The car’s two radios were playing a Tom Petty song now, and were
still synchronized, and the dashboard metronome was motionless—at least there was no supernatural field in the immediate locality. The song ended and a Culture Club song started—“Karma Chameleon,” and Vickery wondered if it was ironic.
Castine was visible now, alone, walking in his direction from the church. She wasn’t hurrying, and she spread her hands to the sides and shook her head.
Apparently the meeting was over and the principals had left, no doubt on Sunset at the south side of the church. Vickery got out of the car without glancing toward Santiago, and he walked diagonally across the lot toward Castine, on a line that would take him close to the ground floor arches of the school.
When he was still a few yards short of meeting Castine, and directly below the gallery where Santiago hid, he stopped.
“I think you could come down here, Santiago,” he said.
After a pause he heard, “Okay. Since you still owe me ten dollars.”
Castine glanced upward in surprise. “That kid?” Turning to Vickery, she said quietly, “The other party was nobody from TUA. Some old guy with a white beard, on crutches. They left by the front—the TUA guy got in a car that pulled over on Sunset as soon as they walked out, and the old guy headed for a bus stop.”
Vickery could hear the boy’s shoes scuffing on stairs, and a moment later Santiago stepped out from one of the arches into the sunlight.
Santiago’s hand was extended, and Vickery tugged a bill free of the roll in his pocket; it was a twenty, and he gave it to the boy.
“The extra ten is for not telling anybody we were here,” Vickery said.
Santiago grinned and shook his head. “I got fifty to watch.”
Vickery pulled three more twenty dollar bills from his pocket and held them up.
“I dunno.”
“She saved your life yesterday! That guy was going to shoot you as you rode away.”
Santiago shrugged, then snatched the bills and stood on one foot for a moment while he tucked them into one of his worn tennis shoes. Vickery went on, “Who was the old guy with the beard and crutches?”
“Yo no creo you got enough for that.”
