Ole wasn't actually grumpy, but he wasn't smiling or saying much. It wasn't that the gray sky and steady drizzle had gotten to him. Rather, he'd wanted to make an early getaway—be on the 210 freeway by nine, headed east out of metro L.A. But Carol had needed to repack; she'd had more luggage than Ole was willing to take. The luggage of all three of them had to fit into the Caddy's big trunk, he'd said; the back seat was for relaxing and sleeping, not for suitcases.
Part of it too was the six-month deadline that Madame Tanya had implied. And he didn't have an inkling of where they would go, once they crossed the state line into Arizona. Last night's easy confidence had weakened, and the psychic vision that he'd used so effectively to guide others seemed now to have gone on vacation.
Informed of the space limitation, Carol quickly and efficiently trimmed her gear to camping clothes, hiking boots, and a few other relative indispensables. While she was sorting and repacking, Ole phoned Jerry and told him to do any repacking he needed to do before they arrived to pick him up.
Ole's treatment for his broken arm the night before had begun with about twenty minutes of what Jerry mentally termed "laying on of the hands." It hadn't seemed like any big deal at the time, but it had relieved the ache and throbbing considerably. Then Ole had run through the traffic accident with him, using a procedure a bit like he'd used on Carol, although the results were less dramatic. That, Jerry had decided, was because the incident dealt with pain, not grief.
This morning Jerry and his arm both felt a lot better. He hadn't even taken an aspirin.
With Carol's baggage in the trunk, Ole started for Jerry's, and like Carol the evening before, he avoided the pass, taking Laurel Canyon Boulevard across the hills to the Valley. On the way, they passed a shopping center that had been extensively damaged the previous September by a terrorist bomb. The construction crew either wasn't working today or was working under cover to keep out of the rain; corners and edges of heavy plastic coverings flapped in the wet and windy grayness.
"Hnh!" said Ole.
"What?"
"V'at do you mean, 'v'at?' "
"You said 'hnh,' and I wondered what that was about."
"Oh." He said nothing more for several seconds as he drove, while Carol waited. "Vell," he said at last, "ve got another visitor."
"Visitor?"
"Ya. Another ghost. Lefty yust picked him up v'en ve drove past the shopping center back there."
"Ghost? At a shopping center?"
"Ya, v'ere the construction vork vas back there. A guy bombed it last summer or fall and killed a bunch of people. I guess vun of them vas still hanging around; anyvay, Lefty picked us up a ghost there."
He said nothing further for a minute or so, driving more slowly than was usual for him, while Carol sat wondering if this was real or not.
"God damn!" Ole blurted suddenly. "It's the guy v'at blew the place up! No vonder he's got so much shit stuck to him!" He glanced at Carol. "Excuse me for svearing like that."
"That's all right, Ole," she said. "It really is. I understand." You should have heard some of the girls I went to school with, she added to herself. Especially junior high. "But thanks anyway." She touched his arm and smiled. "It was thoughtful of you to consider me like that. Especially since I threw your schedule off this morning."
He glanced at her, and a grin crept through his dourness. "I voke up grouchy today. But I'll get over it; I am already. Maybe next time I'll remember to tell people ahead of time v'at's vanted."
He pulled over to the curb. "Excuse me," he said. "I got to stop and help this guy. Don't talk till I tell you, okay?"
She nodded soberly and sat back. To her surprise, the next thing she knew, she was waking up; Ole was looking at her curiously.
"Okay," he said, "ve're done vith that." He pulled out and drove down the street.
"Is he all right?" asked Carol.
"Ya, he's in good shape now. But he's staying vith us, like Lefty." He looked at her. "Did you dream anything v'en you were asleep back there?"
"I don't think so." She looked at her watch; it had been about ten minutes. "Mr. Sigurdsson?"
"Ya-ah?"
"Why did you invite me on this trip? What help can I be?"
"I'm yust riding hunches, Carol. Psychics do that, you know. I like as much information as I can get, but even then I ride my hunches. The biggest trouble vith this trip is that I ain't got no more hunches than I got information—damn little of either vun."
His eyes moved to her face for a moment. "The vay it seems to be," he said, "is that people know a lot more than they know they know. It's like there's a shield or a curtain, vith part of you on vun side and part on the other. The part this side don't know very much, even though the part on the other side seems to know yust about everything. So the part of a person that's on this side got to figure-figure to make up for not knowing.
"But a psychic, he gets more looks or sniffs or ideas from the other side than most people do. Some people are natural athletes or natural musicians or v'atever, and some of us are psychic."
He turned into Connor's street, then added thoughtfully: "Maybe somevun like McBee, maybe he's all on the other side of the curtain. Maybe v'at's special about him is, he's got an outlet to the everyday side, our side, through Benning."
They saw Jerry waiting in the entryway of his building, out of the wet, with an old duffel bag at his feet. "And Carol," said Ole, as he pulled up to the curb, "don't say nothing about our new ghost. I vant Yerry to have a chance to notice him by himself."