My eyes filled in the semidarkness. I wasn’t sure of anything, not anything. What the hell was happening to me? What the hell was happening to my life?
Miserable, I rolled my head on the pillow so I could look out the door at the lighted hallway. I saw right away that something was wrong, but it took me a moment to figure out what it was.
It was the chair, the chair out in the hall by the door. It was empty. The cop was gone.
I SWUNG OUT of bed, my gut aching. I pulled my track pants off the chair and put them on. I stepped through the room’s shadows out into the hall.
The whole hall was empty! The entire hospital hall from one end to the other: empty. The questions went through my mind again: How powerful was Orosgo? How far did his influence reach? Could he have me killed right here, right now, with no one around to stop him?
Somewhere, out of sight around the corner to my right, I heard a swinging door pushed open. I heard it swing shut. I heard footsteps coming my way. I stood there, indecisive, helpless, almost surrendered to my fate, as the footsteps came closer and closer.
Then a nurse came around the corner, reading charts on her tablet. She glanced up and smiled at me briefly as she went past.
The hallway was empty again. Quiet. I went back into my room.
IN THE MORNING, an aide came to fetch me with a wheelchair. It was hospital policy, he said. I wasn’t allowed to walk to the front door on my own. I sat in the chair with an overnight bag in my lap. As the aide pushed me along, I watched the faces rolling past.
And the faces watched me. Or at least, I thought they were watching. I thought there was more than one nurse and doctor and aide and security guard who followed my passing with expressions that blended fear and guilt and pity. It could have been my imagination. It must have been.
We rounded the semicircular reception desk and reached the big glass doors of the hospital exit. The aide brought the chair to a stop. I stood up. I said goodbye to him. He was a young, cheerful, caramel-colored guy, six feet tall and broad shouldered. He gave me a grave nod of farewell.
“Be careful out there, my man,” he said. Then he winked and turned around and wheeled the chair around the reception desk and out of sight.
Be careful. I wondered why he had said that. But really, anyone could have said it, just to be nice.
I turned back toward the exit. I approached the doors. I put my hand on the metal bar that opened them. I hesitated and looked through the glass, surveying the scene.
The hospital was part of a medical complex, a small maze of streets and structures set apart from the traffic-packed boulevards and leafy residential lanes of Beverly Hills. It was like a small town set in the midst of a big city. Beyond the doors, across the street, medicos in scrubs and patients in day clothes walked on the sidewalk, passing by the open maw of a blocky parking structure set between a tower of glass and a tower of white stone. There were cars parked by the curb and cars and delivery trucks cruising along the street. Everything looked normal out there, even serene.
I pushed outside.
It was a fine autumn day, warm and mellow, bright and clear. My plan was to get some air and exercise after my long confinement by strolling out to the main road and then summoning a car on my phone.
But before I took a single step, there was a piercing tone—a series of piercing tones. I jumped and stiffened. But it was only the warning signal from a van that was backing up from my left, edging slowly toward me.
Smiling ruefully at my own nerves, I stood and watched as the van drew up in front of me. It was a white van with pictures on the side of loaves of bread. I guessed it was delivering fresh baked goods to the hospital cafes.
Still emitting those sharp, high tones, the van backed slowly past me until its large windshield came into view. The windshield was dark and reflected the street in front of it.
I saw Sera’s image on the glass.
THE ASSASSIN WAS STANDING ON THE CORNER TO MY left, standing at the corner of the white building there, watching me.
I held my breath. I spun to face him. I caught one glimpse of the feline face beneath the boy-short blond hair, one glimpse of the girl-slender legs in hug-tight jeans and the man torso in a leather jacket with a red T-shirt underneath. He was smiling a louche, sensuous smile. I knew he was there to kill me.
One glimpse. One second. Then he was gone. Slipping behind the building and out of sight.
Had I really seen him? Or was I worked up to such a state of suspense my mind had conjured him out of nothing? I wasn’t sure. For the last few days, I’d thought I was being transported back and forth between LA and a land of nymphs and ogres. How the hell could I be sure of anything?
My heart was hammering just as rapidly as it had hammered after my nightmare last night. Maybe this was a nightmare too.
I swallowed hard. I turned away from the spot where Sera had been standing. I started walking quickly in the opposite direction, toward the boulevard. I tried to be cool about it, but I was not cool. I kept looking back over my shoulder to make sure the kitten-faced killer wasn’t following me or hadn’t snuck up right behind me.
There was no sign of him. I kept walking.
Then I reached the corner and saw him again.
He must have moved quick as thought. Somehow, he had circled the block and come out from behind a medical building across the next street. I was sure I saw him this time. He was standing by the point of a wall, grinning at me. At this distance, I could even see the threat of death in his lunatic eyes.
A truck rumbled between us and, like in a conjuring trick, Sera vanished once again. The truck went past and he was gone, just like that.
I cursed. Enough. This was no dream. I shifted my overnight bag to my left hand, took my phone out of my pants pocket with my right. Slipping the bag handle over my wrist, I clumsily worked the business card the detectives had given me out of my shirt pocket. I tapped in the number.
“Detective Lord,” came the big woman’s matter-of-fact voice.
“This is Austin Lively,” I said.
I could almost feel the detective sit up and take notice. I could hear the sudden focus in her tone. “Yes?”
“He’s here. The man who stabbed me. The man who killed Gunther. He’s following me.”
There was a long pause. It was unnerving. What the hell was there to pause about? This was an emergency, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t she be sending help?
“Where are you?” asked Detective Lord carefully.
I heard my own voice spiral higher with growing panic. “I’m just outside the hospital. Just at the corner of San Vicente.” I looked longingly across the boulevard. I wanted to keep moving, to get out of there. But the traffic light was red. There was nowhere to go.
“Do you see him now?” Detective Lord asked me.
“Not right now. But he was there just a second ago. Twice. I think he’s toying with me. He shows himself, then disappears. You said to call …”
Again, that pause. It made my stomach drop. What the hell was going on with her? Even in the fine, clear weather, I felt a clammy sweat break out on the back of my neck.
“Hello?” I said.
“So you don’t see him right now,” said Detective Lord. She was still speaking very carefully, very slowly.
“Not right this minute but …”
There was a beat of silence. Then Detective Lord said, “Uh huh.”
The light changed. I started moving across the wide avenue. Somehow, I already knew what Lord was going to say next. All the same, when she actually said it, I felt my whole body fill with a bleak gray atmosphere that I recognized as despair.
“Well …” she began—and now she put on a bland, official, mock businesslike tone. “We can’t really do anything if you don’t see him at the moment. What I would suggest: why don’t you give me a call if you see him again, and we’ll try to check it out.”
An answer started to rise up into my throat, but it stuck there like a solid thing, like p
lastic letters all jammed up and jumbled together in my gullet. I wanted to cry out to her: If I see him again? He’s a murderer! If I see him again, I’ll be dead! But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I knew there was no point. Detective Lord had her instructions from on high. I hadn’t found Another Kingdom. To Serge Orosgo, I was now just a loose end, another witness who could link him to Sean Gunther’s murder, a stumbling block on the way to Utopia. In other words: a dead man.
I cut the connection. To hell with her. To hell with the cops. I pocketed the phone. I upped my walking speed.
Up ahead of me, there was a construction site, a massive indoor shopping mall either undergoing renovations or being torn down, I wasn’t sure which. One half of it was a sleek white stone-and-glass commercial palace several stories high, the other half was a skeletal ruin of dirt, girders, cement, and rebar rising above wooden street-level fencing. Here and there in the fence were open corridors and dark doors, mysterious entrances and exits in and out of nowhere. It was an immense, haunting monument to failure or promise, one or the other. I eyed it as I approached, wondering if I might duck into the mess of it and make my escape.
I reached the curb. There was a trash can on the corner. I dumped in my overnight bag. It was weighing me down, slowing me up. I glanced back over my shoulder and took a long scan of the landscape behind me. The traffic rushing along the big avenue. The medical complex across the way. No Sera. The assassin was gone.
I faced forward—and there he was.
How the hell did he keep doing that? Suddenly, he was right in front of me, sashaying along the length of the mall fencing in that aggressively feminine way of his. The motion made his short blond hair bounce gaily around his feline features. He smiled at me, sweetly, his bright eyes mad.
There was no one else on the sidewalk. This was LA. No one walked here. People were in their cars, grinding, honking, rushing past. Here, it was just him and me converging quickly.
He slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket. The pocket bulged and stiffened, protruding in my direction. Was it my imagination, or could I see the outline of a gun muzzle shaping the fabric? I did not think it was my imagination.
I figured I only had a single second before he pulled the trigger. No one would hear the muffled shot with all this traffic roaring past. I would simply wilt to the sidewalk like a dying flower. Who knew how long it would be before someone even noticed I was dead?
Instinctively, I turned to avoid the shot—a useless gesture. But in turning, I saw an entryway. A sign: Escalators to Shops. Without breaking stride, I ducked in.
I was in a high, high stairwell of metal and cement. Zig-zagging flight after flight of escalators rolled up alongside the green walls. There were people standing on each slanting length of moving stairs, riding up from the parking structure beneath the mall or descending back down into it.
I got on the first escalator up and started climbing the metal steps, weaving between the shoppers who were standing still. I glanced back behind me as I rose—and yes, there was Sera, standing below at the street-level doorway, watching me ascend.
His smile was gone. His pouting lips were taut. His cat’s eyes were flashing. I knew from the look of him that he had, in fact, been about to kill me on the street. He was frustrated I’d managed to dodge him. He wouldn’t kill me here with all these witnesses—or would he? Would anything stop him now? How crazy was he anyway?
I wasn’t sure. I climbed the moving stairs. Up to the top of the first escalator, then whipping around onto the second, then climbing to the top of that to the third, pushing past the customers the whole way. I nearly tripped and fell as the next escalator ended. I stumbled off and saw an open doorway. I dashed through it.
I emerged from the darkness of the well into bright daylight: a scene both dazzling and bizarre. The mall seemed to have been cut in half. To my right was a vast expanse of bright white floors and storefront windows. Above me were rings of gallery walks under cascading skylight panels that were full of the bright blue sky. To my left, through a towering wall of protective glass, an open construction site was on display: a pit of dirt littered with abandoned bulldozers, a half-completed structure of iron girders and wooden planks, empty platforms on dangling pulleys between unidentifiable structures of cement. Either they were tearing this place down while shoppers rushed to consume the last of the merchandise, or building the place up while shoppers scrambled hungrily over what was already there.
The mall half was crowded with people, women mostly, walking purposefully past sleekly dressed mannequins, past window displays of glittering purses and jewels, past spanking new sports equipment and workout machines and electronics and toys and a featureless cafe of tall bland chairs and squat bland tables. Tinkling pop music filled the high spaces like a colorless mesmeric gas and settled over the shoppers like a pall.
I tried to vanish. I wove myself into the fabric of the crowd and threaded my way through it, trying to hide among the moving bodies and confound the searching gaze of my pursuer.
I looked around for him as I went. I couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe it was he who was confounding me.
I pushed on along the glassed-in edge of the open pit, hoping to find an exit, hoping to duck out of there before he caught me. But the place was built like a trap. They do that with malls. They make sure you have to walk the length of them before you can exit. The idea is, once you start shopping, you have to shop everywhere, shop the merchandise to its dregs before you can reach the open air again. I kept pushing through the crowd, but my wound had weakened me. I was already out of breath and losing energy quickly. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up my pace.
I almost made it all the way. I made it to where the shops curled around to meet the glassed-in construction site. There was a last string of well-stocked storefronts on one side, the wilderness of the open pit on the other, and between them a narrow hallway—a way out—maybe twenty yards ahead.
I pulled to a stop. I had to. I had to rest. I stood amidst the swiftly passing clots of people, my chest heaving as I gulped in air.
“Ausss-tiiiin. O-oh, Ausss-tiiiin.”
He sang my name like plainsong, low and rhythmic, at such a key it was somehow audible above the footsteps and the voices and the pall of tuneless music. The sound sent a jagged bolt of terror through me. I raised my head.
He was right in front of me, coming out of the exit hall. How had he done it? How had he gotten around me so fast?
Never mind, there he was. Strutting toward me like a model on a catwalk, completely unimpeded by the wave of shoppers washing over him. They jostled each other, but not him, never him. He just passed right through them like a shark—like the ghost of a shark—coming at me.
He was seconds away. Moving fast. Drawing his hand out of his pocket so that already I could see the black grip of the gun between his fingers. I looked for a way out. To my left was the window on the pit. To my right: a shop. A storefront window. Two dozen TV screens within. Moving scenes of rushing silver rivers, waving meadows of yellow-green grass and purple Alpine mountains covered in white snow. Shelves and shelves of incomprehensible gewgaws and flashing gizmos, glittering contraptions and devices and their multi-colored cases and accessories. A confusion of electronic riches. No clue, in my panic, what any of it was.
Who cared? I just wanted to live. I charged toward it. Reached the store in two steps. Heard a woman scream. Thought: She must have spotted the gun.
I heaved the glass door open, expecting the blast any second, the searing jolt of the bullet, the long plummet into black and bloody death.
But I made it. I was through the door. Running …
In my mind, I kept on running, but no, I was getting nowhere. The world spun wildly. Disoriented, I thought the shop had tipped over and spilled me onto the floor. I was on the floor, anyway. On my back. In a pool of blood. So much blood. Sera must have shot me. No one could lose so much blood and live.
I heard another scream
, a high scream ragged with anguish. Then Lady Betheray flung herself down on top of me, her tearstained face smeared with gore.
“No! You’ve killed him!”
I was back in Galiana, back in Netherdale, in the bedroom, on the floor where I had fallen after Sir Aravist kicked me off the length of his sword and through the door.
Hearing Lady Betheray scream, seeing the anguish on her face, I almost sat up, almost embraced her. I would have—I would have done it on instinct—if I hadn’t been so disoriented and confused by the sudden change. But as I lay there dazed, as I only slowly began to realize what had happened to me, I caught myself. I kept still. I went on lying there.
Because I should have been dead. Right? I would have been dead if I hadn’t just received ten days of twenty-first-century health care complete with expert surgery and enough antibiotics to kill every infection within a mile of me. Here in Galiana, though, Sir Aravist must have thought he’d killed me. Of course he did.
I let my eyes slip nearly closed. I stopped breathing. For another second—only a second—Lady Betheray bent over me, sobbing.
Then Sir Aravist loomed above us both. His eyes were hot. His cheeks were scarlet. He grabbed her arm. She cried out as he hauled her brutally away from me.
I turned my head just enough so I could watch it all through half-parted eyelids.
Sir Aravist was dragging her across the floor toward the four-poster bed. She struggled in his grip.
“Let go of me, you animal!”
But she was helpless. He was just too much stronger. He yanked her up and tossed her onto the four-poster as if she were a rag doll. She came up immediately into a sitting position.
“How dare you, you—”
“Shut up!” He slapped her.
The shock of the blow made her go still, wide-eyed.
“That’s it! Not so fine a lady now, are you?” he growled.
“My husband …” she whispered fiercely.
Another Kingdom Page 23
