CHAPTER TWOCHAPTER TWO
The Transportation Utility Agency maintained a suite of offices in the Hsaio Tower on Lindbrook Drive in Westwood, three blocks from the UCLA campus, but the Operations Extension was a converted warehouse eighteen miles east in the Vernon district, on Bandini Boulevard just west of the 710 Freeway.
The Extension stood less than two hundred yards from the freeway, and, separated only by a tall fence and a row of pepper trees, half that distance from the circular Bandini onramp. On the other side, facing a windowless white wall that bore the TUA logo in modest yard-tall sans-serif letters, four gray Chevrolet sedans sat in a parking lot that could accommodate eight. The whole property was surrounded by high chain-link fencing topped with coils of concertina wire.
The interior of the onetime warehouse was still mostly open space, lit by the glow of sunlight on two rows of dusty skylights in the high, corrugated roof, but the expanses of wall were now paneled in a checkerboard of blue and white wedge-foam acoustic tiles, and a layer of textured blue vinyl covered the original cement floor. An old truck tire, which had proved to be too high to reach, still hung from the roof above the tall, broad doors on the east side; personnel used a pair of conventional doors opening onto the parking lot, and the old doors hadn’t been slid open in anyone’s memory. The renovation smells of paint and putty had long since given way to faint scents of coffee and microwaved Lean Cuisine chicken and fish dinners.
The boxy 20th century fans and air-conditioners had all been replaced by a 20-ton Trane unit, and in the row of interior offices along the north wall of the warehouse, personnel generally wore sweaters or jackets even when the summer sun was baking the streets and onramp outside.
But in one office three young men in shirtsleeves and loosened ties now sat around a radio under high-set fluorescent lights, each holding a script and a wireless keyboard in his lap, and sweat gleamed on their faces.
“Amanda,” read one of them in a flat voice, immediately followed by the man next to him reading, “Woods,” and the third man reading, “where.”
Continuing in sequence, they rapidly proceeded to read aloud from the scripts the words, “is”—“your”—“husband”—“now.”
A faint but shrill voice vibrated out of the speaker. “A panda doesn’t need to be baptized,” it said, “I do. Where’s my mom?”
One of the three seated men tapped rapidly at his keyboard, and the words that’s not her either appeared on a monitor beside the radio. The other two men rolled their eyes and nodded. One of them hit three keys, and the previous observation was now followed by duh.
They repeated their one-word-at-a-time relayed question, and this time there was no reply at all, only the hiss of the vacant frequency.
Standing in the doorway to the next office, a tall, gaunt man in a Princeton sweatshirt, with gray hair tumbling down to his shoulders, shook his head and stepped back, closing the door on the trio huddled around the radio. In this office were two men in business suits, one seated in front of a metal desk and holding a cell phone, the other standing and looking out the window at the warehouse floor, and they both turned to him.
“No luck,” he told them, “they’re still getting everybody but. His wife has apparently withdrawn back into the ether.”
The seated man said into his phone, “I gotta go.”
“Jeez, Terracotta,” said the man by the window, “let them take a break. Abbott and Vendler have found him.”
“And they’ve broken off communication,” said Terracotta. “Until we get confirmation from them, the scanners can keep trying to raise his wife again.”
“Deleted persons are all crazy anyway.”
“She was right this morning,” said the man at the desk, tucking his phone into a pocket, “about his apartment in Culver City.” He tapped his pocket. “Westwood still hasn’t heard anything more from Abbott and Vendler, and listen, Castine’s car is there, within a block of where they are, though her phone’s still at the Westwood office.”
“Why would she be there?” Terracotta stepped away from the closed door into the middle of the room; he frowned for a moment, then added, “I wish she were here, though. When she’s part of the triangle, ghosts nearly always reply.” He smiled faintly at the man standing by the window. “Sorry, Brett—‘deleted persons.’”
“Words have connotations,” Brett muttered, and added, derisively, “Ghosts.”
“Ollie,” said Terracotta, “where’s the backup?”
Pulling out his phone again, Ollie tapped the screen. “Where are you guys?” he said; and a moment later he lowered the phone. “They’re only a block or two away from where the cars are. They’ll—huh.” He raised the phone to his ear again and after a couple of seconds said, “Okay.” Then to Terracotta he said, “Westwood says LAPD is responding to a shots-fired on that block. I’ll—”
The door behind Terracotta slammed open, and one of the trio from the next office leaned in and said, breathlessly, “We got Mike Abbott. On the fucking ghost band.”
Ollie swatted his phone and bared his teeth impatiently, then barked into it, “Police responding to shots fired at your destination. We have at least one man down, there. Maximum caution.”
Terracotta’s eyes were wide as he led Ollie and Brett back into the radio room, and he held up his hand for silence; then said, “Abbott,” and waved toward Ollie.
“Uh, what,” said Ollie nervously. His face was pale under his close-cropped red hair, and his freckles stood out like drops of spattered coffee. The three men who had been manning the radio stood now against the outer wall.
“Happened,” said Brett.
“We had the goods, we had Woods,” came a sing-song voice from the radio speaker. “Get me back, Jack, this place . . . who is that man with the wings? That factory way out there in the desert, does it move? What number were you trying to reach, shithead? You think you’re so—”
“Castine,” interrupted Terracotta.
“Was,” said Ollie.
“There?” finished Brett, on a rising note.
“Castine,” said the tinny voice, “shot me. Get paramedics, dammit! I’m all fucked up—”
The voice failed to answer further three-voice questions, subsiding instead into misremembered nursery rhymes; and then other voices replaced Abbott’s, all just babbling nonsense sentence fragments. After another full minute of uselessly trying to elicit anything coherent, Terracotta, Ollie and Brett returned to the other office and Terracotta closed the connecting door.
Ollie slumped back into his chair. “I hate to hear Abbott like that. You think paramedics might . . .?”
Neither of the other two answered; the fact of Abbott coming through on that band spoke for itself. Terracotta found an elastic loop on the desk and carefully pulled his long gray hair back in a ponytail. “I find I’m wondering what Terry Vendler’s situation is,” he observed.
Brett had sat down on the corner of the desk, and he exhaled loudly and shook his head. “You think Castine really shot him? Killed him?”
Ollie jumped, then muttered, “Shit,” and fished out his phone again. “Yes?” After a few seconds he put it away and said, “Cops are there, sirens coming, Vendler and Abbott are lying on the pavement, nobody else visible. Our backup guys drove on by.”
“What a mess,” said Brett.
Ollie wiped his forehead on his shirt-cuff. “We’ll have to establish jurisdiction—”
“Westwood will be working that out now,” said Terracotta.
“What a . . . major mess,” Brett elaborated.
“Okay,” said Terracotta. “Abbott may be confused about who killed him. But Castine was pretty clearly there, and if I were to lizard a guess, it would probably be that she at least interfered with the unplanned arrest. She works under the delusion that she has a conscience. There’s a chance that she’s with Woods now, and that’s not good.” He thought about what he had said, then added, “I mean hazard a guess.”
He smiled at the other two; Ollie flinched perceptibly. “This morning,” Terracotta went on, “Amanda Woods said Herbert Woods was dreaming about her, which is probably why she was accessible here—he restored some definition to her. When was it she killed herself?”
“2012,” said Brett. He shrugged. “Alcoholic, depressive. Left a note and then parked on a freeway shoulder and shot her head off with a .357 magnum.”
“That’s right—she probably didn’t like being a Secret Service agent’s wife. Understandable, I suppose, if one could understand things. Well, she’s been dead a while, but obviously she’s coalesced, and she can sense him—we must keep trying to get her up. Have somebody find details about their marriage—vacations, dogs, what movies they liked—so we can have personal stuff to hold her attention.”
Brett stood up and stretched. “It’s not a good idea to get deleted persons too waked up. They can develop motivations.”
“What can she do?” said Terracotta. “She’s our main lead on Woods, and we’ve got to get him out of the picture.” He sighed. “And we’ve got to get Castine back here. She really is the best at coaxing deleted persons into talking.”
“What if she did kill Abbott?” protested Ollie.
Terracotta pursed his lips judiciously. “We’ve wanted to get an agent over there on the other side, one we could call back and debrief. Why do they so often mention a desert highway, a flying man, a distant factory? We hoped for a volunteer, of course, but—now we do have a man in place.”
“Not really at his best, though,” noted Brett.
“But will he talk to Castine?” said Ollie.
“He’s responded to discipline before,” said Terracotta. “Like us all.”
Ollie shifted uneasily in his chair, then blurted out, “And of course ghosts have no civil rights to worry about violating.”
“Deleted persons,” said Terracotta. He tapped his chest. “They’re not this anymore.” Stepping to the door that led out onto the factory floor, he added, “I believe I’m about to do my yoga routines,” he said, sounding slightly surprised. “Keep people working on Abbott, too, in two-hour shifts. Non-stop till we get something useful out of him.”
“That’s kind of hard on him,” said Ollie.
“Can’t be helped,” said Terracotta. “Requiescat in agitatio.”
When Vickery switched on the overhead fluorescent lights at the Galvan commissary kitchen, brushed stainless steel surfaces gleamed everywhere—ranks of stoves and holding cabinets and steam tables and deep fryers, and a big range hood that ran under the ceiling from one end of the room to the other.
There had been no other trucks in the lot when Vickery parked. He had fetched Terry’s gun from under the dashboard, locked the truck and released the canvas sheets from the hooks at the bottom edges of the truck sides, and when he had closed the commissary door against the sunlight, he and Castine were alone. The air conditioner came on with the lights, and the long room smelled only of bleach.
Castine was blinking around at the vast kitchen. She opened her mouth to say something, but just then a door in the far wall opened and an old man in khaki shorts and a white undershirt leaned out of an office. His name was Primo, and Vickery recalled that he was an uncle of Galvan’s.
“What the hell, Vick?” Primo called. “It’s not even two o’clock yet!”
“Emergency,” Vickery said. “Any unscheduled rides booked for today?”
“One in an hour and another at four. Ortiz says he can take them, but he’d rather not. You want ’em?”
“I can’t, I’m clocking out. I had to ditch ’Turo and Ramon. When they get back here tell ’em I owe them. I gotta be taking off here pretty quick.”
“You were just doing standby shoulder clean-up work today?” the old man asked. When Vickery nodded, he went on, “Okay. You’re scheduled to drive an Unterbird tomorrow morning, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be at the lot on time, don’t worry.”
The old man nodded and stepped back into the office and closed the door.
“He didn’t want to know who I am?” said Castine quietly.
“No,” agreed Vickery, “he did not. And,” he said, hefting Terry’s gun, “he didn’t want to know what the emergency was. Ramon and ’Turo won’t want to know either—when they heard the gunshots, they’ll have moved east along the shoulder and come down in a different street, and started walking back here. They’ll just be glad to see the truck parked outside. The metronome will probably be okay on the shoulder there overnight.”
He sat down cross-legged on the waxed brown linoleum, set Terry’s gun on the floor beside him, and rubbed both hands over his face. “There won’t be anybody in here till the trucks start coming back at five-thirty to put away all the frijoles and enchiladas.” He sighed and looked up at her. “You should see this place at 5 AM—twenty people chopping onions and banging pans around.”
“That’s what you’re thinking about right now? Cooking?”
“No. I’m thinking about . . . what happened back there, in that alley behind the thrift store. I’m trying to think of something else.”
“Oh. Yeah. Me too, me too.” She shivered. “And what do I do now. Kill myself, maybe.”
“You think that would take you out of the picture?”
“Oh,” she said quietly, “shut up.”
Castine walked a few steps down an aisle between big double-door refrigerators. On a wheeled worktable stood half a dozen six-inch-tall metronomes with wooden or bone beads at the tops of the inverted pendulums; she reached out and touched one, and it clicked back and forth twice and then fell silent.
She turned to Vickery with her eyebrows raised.
“All Galvan trucks carry them,” he said. “Most of the workers think they’re just reminders to stay busy—like, ‘time is fleeting’—but some of the cooks leave M&Ms and cigarettes for them here, at night.”
“I’d like to hide in one. Live here forever on M&Ms and cigarettes.”
He nodded toward the metronomes. “Some do.”
Castine sat down against a nearby refrigerator with her legs stretched out, shifting for a moment to get the holstered gun at her back into a comfortable position, then yawned so widely that tears ran down her cheeks. “So why were you up the hill by the freeway if you were driving a food truck around?”
He patted his orange vinyl vest. “Freeway shoulder clean-up—Galvan public relations, civic virtue. And . . . to be on call to do other sorts of jobs for her. She’s in more businesses than just taco trucks.” Pausing to take a deep breath, he said, “What was the lead your people got on me this morning?”
“Oh. You—you won’t like it.”
He almost laughed. “Well no, I don’t imagine I will.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “You used to have a Top Secret security clearance. I’m with TUA, the Transportation Utility Agency—”
“I thought you were some variety of the Secret Service.”
“No. Well, sort of. Until half an hour ago, anyway!” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then took a deep breath and went on, “The TUA got created in the divvying-out when the Secret Service was shifted from the Treasury Department to Homeland Security in 2003. At first we worked pretty closely with the Secret Service—”
“This is answering my question?” When she nodded, he said, heavily, “So it was this TUA crowd, manning that Countermeasures Suburban in that motorcade four years ago.”
“Yes. And another of them would have arrested you, if I hadn’t! Regular Secret Service was forbidden to go near the vehicle! And I didn’t know . . .” She glanced at him quickly, then returned her gaze to the ceiling. “It was all about reactive armor, at first. Ordinary reactive armor on a vehicle explodes outward when a projectile strikes it—”
“I know. So the projectile in effect winds up with a lot more distance between itself and the target than it counted on.”
“Right, it increases the distance in space. Well, the TUA reactive armor increases the distance in time—between the awareness of an attack on the Presidential limousine and its actual occurrence.”
He nodded, and she paused and gave him a sideways glance. “You don’t find this crazy,” she said.
“It’s been an educational four years since I stepped into that Suburban.”
“I suppose it must have been, at that. They—”
A sudden rapid clicking made her sit up, quickly reaching behind her back, and her glance darted from the parking lot door to the office door before fixing on the little metronomes on the work table. The bead-capped pendulums had all begun furiously rocking back and forth, and after a few seconds they all stopped. “Sorry,” she whispered as she relaxed and let her hands fall in her lap. “I thought someone was coming.”
Vickery was looking at the metronomes too, and he was frowning. “Somebody did,” he said. “In a way. That was a big surge, we’re two miles from the nearest freeway.” He looked back at her. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“I’ve helped talk to deleted persons. But they have no physical substance, you can’t see them.”
“Some people can.” She started to object, but he shook his head impatiently. “You were saying, about reactive armor.”
“Okay. Yes. They—well, it was Emilio Terracotta, he’s actually a civilian, a physicist, but they’ve given him a lot of power, he’s in charge of their whole research division—he’s written books of philosophy, too—he discovered that each of the stationary people in a crowd that’s being passed by a motorcade carries something like an electric charge—something analogous to that—and it induces a current in the moving charges, that’s the agents in the Suburban. And in the field of that current, with the right hardware, the agents can actually see a little way into the past and the future. Enough to evade attacks.”
“Sure,” said Vickery impatiently, “various pasts and futures, anyway, not always the one. The LA freeway gypsies have known about that since the Pasadena Freeway opened in 1940, but they work it better—they just set up a stationary nest on a freeway shoulder, and let the freeway provide the moving charges. There’s probably a hundred fortune-tellers out there right now plugged into the current, and their ‘hardware’ is just dead people’s eyeglasses and boombox speakers.”
“Well, we figured that out too,” she said defensively. “Our Operations Extension is a stone’s throw from the 710 now, and we use the current from the moving charges in the lanes. And motorcades too, still. How far ahead can your freeway gypsies see? The TUA scouts can’t get more than a few seconds ahead of themselves.”
Vickery shrugged. “Maybe a few minutes. They’re frauds when they claim they can see stuff like marriages and deaths years ahead. What was the lead your people got on me this morning?”
“Oh God. It was . . . the result of a related effect they’re pursuing. They discovered that—well, you know, don’t you?”
“They discovered that they could also talk to dead people, in the induced field—at least, people who died on or near a freeway. In the current. Sure, I talked to a dead guy four years ago, on the radio in that Suburban, didn’t I? He recited poetry or something to me.” He stood up and crossed to the worktable with the half-dozen metronomes on it, and picked one of them up, turning it in his hands. “The freeway gypsies have known that for twenty years, at least. It’s Galvan’s main business.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and the look he turned on Castine made her right hand momentarily twitch again. “Your answer involves that effect,” he said flatly.
She opened her mouth, then just nodded and looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“I was dreaming about her last night. I suppose that brought her within your range. Whatever’s left of her. Enough to identify where I was, anyway.”
Castine was looking at the floor. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Cruising Culver City via Google Earth on a laptop till . . . she . . . said, ‘Yes, that’s the place, he lives there.’” She looked up. “You’re lucky you were out of your apartment when the TUA squad got there,” she reminded him.
Vickery glanced at the wedding ring he still wore. “I was sorry to wake up from that dream.”
The little metronome began twitching in his hands, and he hastily dropped it. All the metronomes were clicking again. Castine watched them in evident alarm.
Vickery said, speaking more loudly over the racket, “Your crowd monitors this stuff? Ghost chatter?”
Castine waited to answer until the metronomes fell quiet again. “It’s difficult,” she said, “but yes, we do. Solicit it, instigate it.”
“I suppose Amanda . . . my wife, could track me down again.” He glanced at Castine. “You think the guy you shot today could track you, for them, the same way?”
“Oh God, thanks for that thought. I don’t know—no, well not—oh, maybe. It did happen fairly close to the freeway there.”
“Definitely in the current,” said Vickery, nodding.
“But it takes a while, even when there’s no snags, narrowing it down with Google Earth on street-view, and I’m the best one at getting the things to talk.”
Vickery stared at her with no expression. “Are you the one who interrogated Amanda?”
She looked up at him. “Yes,” she said, “I was one of the three who questioned her. We didn’t have to use any coercion, no feedback or anything like that.” She shook her head. “I mean we didn’t hurt her. But blame me, not her—deleted persons don’t know what they’re doing.”
Vickery waved it aside. “I wasn’t blaming her. I’ll think about blaming you.”
He exhaled and ran his fingers through his hair. “We have to get both of us out of here, I don’t want them finding this place.” He crouched and picked up Terry’s gun. “We’ve got to assume my landlord gave your guys a description and the license number of my car—that’s all the landlord knows about me. I’ve got dealer plates in the spare tire well that I can put on it, and we can take it to a storage unit I keep under a dead friend’s ID.”
She stood up and followed him toward the exterior door. “Leave the car there?”
“Right. There’s a motorcycle there, part of my all-around emergency kit, but—well, this is an emergency. And it’s a dirt bike, which is good, because there’s a guy I’m afraid we both ought to go see, and as it happens you can’t get to his place on pavement. It’ll save us a hike.”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
Vickery laughed briefly in spite of himself. “Not yet, as far as I know. There’s still lots of living people in LA.”
She nodded, her eyes empty. “Dozens, I bet.”
Vickery took hold of the door lever, then paused and looked back at her. “I want you to know,” he said, “you and I are allies for a few hours, I do owe you that—we’re not friends.”
“Belabor the obvious. You want me to switch off the lights here?”
Vickery worked the key into the recessed padlock on the segmented metal door, and when the bar finally snapped back he took hold of the tethered rope end and stood up, noisily hauling the door up on its track.
Behind him his Chevy Blazer idled on the narrow paved alley between two rows of identical red and white storage units. The door in front of them was the only one that was raised.
In the dimness of the ten-by-ten space, a few boxes were visible stacked around a long, angular shape under a tarpaulin. Castine stepped into the shadowed cubicle and lifted the flap of a box with the Marlboro logo on it; the box was packed with cartons of Marlboro cigarettes.
“You smoke a lot?” she ventured.
“That’s currency,” said Vickery as he shuffled in, picked up a box and set it down by the wall. “If civilization collapses, money or even gold won’t be worth anything.”
Castine followed his example and pushed the box to the wall. “But people will still need to smoke.”
“Sure. Those other boxes are jars of instant coffee and pints of Jack Daniel’s.” He shrugged out of the vinyl vest and tossed it aside, then lifted a dusty leather flight jacket out of a box and slid his arms through the stiff sleeves.
“Right now, though,” he added, pulling open another box, “we need contemporary currency.” He dug out a thick envelope and opened it; inside was a bundle of twenty-dollar bills. He counted out fifteen of them and handed them to Castine.
“Here,” he said. “It was my fault you had to pay to get your own gun back.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “That’s fair,” and pocketed the bills.
He separated a third of the remainder and stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans, then closed the envelope and tucked it into an inner pocket of the jacket. “There’s another leather jacket in that other box. I think it’ll fit you.”
Castine tugged the unwieldy garment out of the box and brushed it off before struggling into it. She had to push the sleeves back to have her hands free.
“Good enough,” said Vickery. “Help me get the rest of these boxes stacked by the walls.”
When they had moved all the boxes, he lifted the tarpaulin aside, revealing a light Husqvarna motorcycle with high fenders and a black exhaust pipe that curled up nearly to the seat. The fenders were white and the gas tank was bright red with a silver panel. “I come out here every couple of weeks to charge the battery and check the tires,” he said, “and the gas tank’s full.”
“Festive little thing,” Castine said, a bit shakily. “ Will I fit?”
“If you hang on to me and keep your feet on the pegs.” He folded the tarpaulin and laid it aside, then wheeled the motorcycle out into the sunlight and away from the open door and leaned it on its kickstand.
He got into the Blazer and carefully backed it into the cleared space in the storage cubicle. After climbing out, he opened a box in the corner.
“This is for you,” he said.
Castine sidled in beside the Blazer, and he handed her a gray open-face helmet. “There’s goggles in it,” he told her. He crouched over to another box and found a black soup-bowl style half-helmet and another pair of goggles. “And I can wear this. We don’t want to be pulled over for not wearing any.”
She paused, then tilted her wrist to peer at her watch. “Damn, it’s after five in Baltimore—too late now to call the flower shop.” She looked up at him. “I need to get a burner phone.”
“You . . . want to order flowers for your fiancé.” He took the dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.
She shook her head impatiently. “Terracotta will be watching Eliot’s—my fiancé’s incoming phone calls, yes. But there’s a flower shop on the ground floor of his office building, and I can ask the girl there to go up and tell him that Ingrid Castine wants him to call the number of my burner phone. I can tell her that he’ll give her a hundred dollars for doing this for me, and he will.”
“We’ll get you one right after we see this guy.”
They shuffled out of the dim cubicle and Vickery pulled the segmented door down and fastened the padlock. He swung onto the motorcycle seat and pulled his helmet on and cinched the strap.
Castine walked up beside him, hefting her helmet and pulling a pair of goggles free of the straps.
“No Bibles?” she said, fitting the goggles strap on over her short dark hair.
Vickery flipped up the kickstand and gave her a blank look, and she nodded back toward the locked door. “Cigarettes, liquor, coffee. You do still go to church.”
He tromped on the kickstarter, and the engine roared to life. “Hop on,” he said, and when she had climbed on behind him, he looked back and said, “No, no Bibles. And I still go to Mass, but I haven’t taken Communion since that motorcade four years ago.”
He tapped the gear-shift and let out the clutch lever, and they sped away toward the storage yard entrance.