CHAPTER THREECHAPTER THREE
Vickery rode the sputtering bike west to Cahuenga Boulevard, then up through Hollywood to the foothills below the Hollywood Bowl, where the Pilgrimage Bridge crossed over the 101 freeway. Cahuenga ran close alongside the freeway for several miles here, and in that stretch he cranked the throttle and leaned fast around the curves to get quickly past any ghostly attention that might be radiating from the freeway lanes; though in fact traffic in the lanes was jammed and nearly motionless in both directions, glittering and inert in the afternoon sun. The only field being generated would be the one around himself and Castine, as they moved rapidly past the stationary charges on the Freeway to the right, and Vickery was confident that it would be too small and fleeting to have any effects.
Flocks of pigeons all flying together made shapes that twisted and stretched and compressed over the freeway lanes, the fluid masses of birds flaring white when a hundred of them all tilted at once, then becoming nearly invisible in the moments when they were flying directly away. The freeway gypsies said the pigeons liked to ride the edges of the amplified possibility fields around the freeways, and Vickery was relieved to see that the birds were not straying far from the lanes here.
Passing the trundling cars on northbound Cahuenga, he was as aware of the gun in his belt as he was of the woman perched behind him. The gun felt wrong there, and he kept having to resist the impulse to shift a nonexistent holster over to the right side, where he had always worn one when he had been a Los Angeles police officer.
Now he was carrying a stolen gun, tucked into his pants.
As a low scrub-brush slope flashed past on his left and hills studded with red-roofed houses swung into view on the far side of the freeway, he thought about the fact that he was thirty-six years old and on the run again.
During most of his time with the LAPD he had worked in the Financial Crimes Section of Bunco Forgery, dealing with everything from ATM fraud and gas-pump credit card skimmers to money laundering schemes in casinos and the fashion district. And that experience had stood him in good stead when he applied to the Secret Service. After six months of paperwork and medical exams and an eight-hour polygraph test, and then nine weeks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia and eleven weeks at the Secret Service Agent Training Course in Maryland, he was assigned to the Los Angeles field office. He was at a GS-6 pay scale that was less than what he’d made as a policeman, and he was investigating counterfeiting and, once again, ATM fraud.
And then, in October of 2013, President Obama made a fundraising visit to Los Angeles, and rookie agent Herbert Woods was picked to stand post on Pico Boulevard as the presidential motorcade drove past. And President Obama decided to stop the motorcade at a Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant. That had been in the late afternoon; by midnight Agent Woods was wounded and in hiding under a false name in the back room of a veterinary clinic in Simi Valley, a fugitive who had killed two other government agents.
Just past another bridge over the freeway he slowed the motorcycle and made a left turn onto a broad area of cracked concrete, and continued the left turn uphill onto Mulholland Drive. Then he and Castine were riding along the two-lane road that wound between wooded slopes, Vickery leaning the bike around curves as the road zigzagged through the hills.
White gables and sun decks were occasionally visible above the ascending green branches on their right, and scatterings of tile roofs and turquoise pools spread away into the southern distance to their left, but after riding a few miles, in which the road had looped through every point of the compass, they had for the moment left all visible houses behind, and soon Vickery downshifted and swerved into an unmarked drive that descended to the left. The driveway curled away below Mulholland, and, out of sight of the cars passing above, widened out in a clearing with a weathered aluminum mailbox on a post at the south end. The breeze was from that direction, and smelled of mesquite.
Vickery halted the bike by the mailbox, clicked the gear shift pedal into neutral and let out the clutch lever. “I’ll go slow in first gear now,” he told Castine, “but hang on. The next bit is bumpy.”
But Castine hopped off the back of the bike, and when he looked over his shoulder at her, he saw that she had taken several steps back across the dirt and was holding her gun halfway raised.
The motorcycle engine puttered quietly.
Vickery couldn’t see her eyes behind the goggles. “What,” he said.
“Get off the bike and spread out on the ground.”
Vickery tensed, and he mentally rehearsed clicking the bike into gear and twisting the throttle; the bike would jump forward into the brush, and he might be able to yank it from side to side and evade her shots as he rode it fast down the wooded slope, right on past Jack Hipple’s house all the way to the Franklin Canyon reservoir. He knew her gun still had eight or nine rounds in it.
He didn’t like the prospect. “Why?”
“This is too perfect a place to kill somebody and hide a body!” she called. “Maybe you’ve buried other people out here. You might be thinking I plan to reinstate myself with the TUA by telling them where you are and saying it was you who shot Abbott—or you might just want to kill me for calling up your wife and interrogating her.”
Vickery exhaled in relief—apparently she did not primarily intend to kill him, just prevent him from killing her.
Still looking at her over his shoulder, he said, “You can see that both my hands are on the handlebar grips. I’m going to put the bike into gear and steer it wide around you, very wide, and ride back up the path and take off on Mulholland. You can walk back up there, I’ll be long gone, and I don’t imagine you’ll have much trouble hitching a ride, if you put the gun away. I’ll come back and see this guy later.”
He looked down and watched the green neutral light go out as he squeezed the clutch and tapped the bike into first gear, and then he slowly let the clutch out and swung the front wheel sharply to the left; he walked the bike around in a half circle so that it was now facing back up the road.
“Wait!” called Castine. “I may have made a mistake!”
“We don’t agree on the definition of ‘allies,’” he said, and then he rocked his right hand back on the throttle and rode fast across the clearing and around the ascending curve back up to the crest, where the lanes of Mulholland curled away to west and east.
His shoulders had been hunched in half-anticipation of a shot, and now he halted the motorcycle and relaxed and looked back. He couldn’t see her or the clearing from up here. A couple of cars hissed past the turnout, heading east.
He clicked the engine into neutral and took several deep breaths as the breeze cooled the sweat on his face.
All she actually knows for sure about me, he reflected, is that I killed two of her fellow agents four years ago. Maybe I wouldn’t trust me either. And I did say I’d help her.
And in this new situation, I could use an informed ally.
What the hell.
He turned the bike around and rode back down the semi-circular track with the engine roaring in first gear, and halfway down he met her trudging up. She was still wearing the helmet and goggles.
She stopped, and he braked to a halt beside her. “‘Allies,’” he explained, “means we agree not to kill each other.”
“I knew that,” she said. “It just slipped my mind for a second.”
“Hop back on?”
“Thanks.”
She swung a leg over the back of the seat and linked her arms around his waist, and again he rode down to the southern end of the clearing and halted at the edge of the downhill slope. Leafy carob and acacia branches waved below them.
“Bumpy now,” he said, and he felt her nod behind him.
He let out the clutch and leaned back against Castine as the bike tilted down. The front wheel bounced and twisted against his grip on the handlebars, and as they slewed between two trees he heard her gasp at the sight of a black-robed figure now visible in the dappled shade ahead; its face was just an oval of mirror.
“It’s a dummy, a distraction,” he said as he swerved around it. “He got the idea from some art movie.”
“Meshes of the Afternoon,” said Castine in his ear. “Maya Deren, in the ’40s.” Her helmet bumped his as she looked around. “Half these trees are artificial Christmas trees!”
“Lots of artificial flowers too,” he said. “Contradiction.” At a narrow stream implausibly flowing in a trench from left to right across the face of the slope, he squeezed the clutch and paused, looking for the clearest path to cross it; he angled the bike to the left a few yards and then gunned the machine across. Castine yelped as sudden steam from the bottom curve of the exhaust pipe whipped past her ankle.
“One more stream,” said Vickery, “then we’re nearly there.”
The next stream confirmed that both watercourses were artificially maintained, for it flowed from right to left. A short green metal statue of a man stood in the brush on the far side; its arms were outstretched, and instead of hands it had spinning pinwheels, apparently made from pieces of DVDs, that flicked rainbow glitters on the surrounding green leaves.
Off to the left, a bearded man and a girl, both in denim overalls, were scrambling hastily uphill. The girl paused to wave, and Vickery felt Castine shift on the bike seat as she apparently returned the wave. There had been no vehicles in the uphill clearing, and Vickery wondered if the couple had hitchhiked here, or walked.
At last a one-story clapboard house appeared among the trees, with shingled eaves extending well out past the visible wall, which was peppered with dozens of tiny windows. The roof bristled with old-fashioned TV antennas from which dolls and sets of false teeth dangled on strings, like wind-chimes. Vickery slanted across the dirt slope to a level stretch of Astroturf in front of wooden steps that led up to a screen door.
He braked to a stop, and reached under the gas tank and switched off the engine. In the ensuing silence he could hear faint music over the rustling of branches.
Castine slid off the motorcycle seat and pulled off her helmet and goggles.
“If it weren’t for you and your affairs,” she said, blinking around, “I’d be at the office in the Hsaio Tower right now, just back from lunch at Ike’s. Instead I’m a, a fugitive, in . . . low-rent Oz.” She stared at the peculiar house, then turned and scowled at him. “This is necessary?”
Vickery flipped down the kickstand and swung a leg over the gas tank, and as he stood up and pulled off his helmet he glared back at her. “If you hadn’t decided to interfere with my wife . . . my dead wife . . . I could be driving somebody around in an air-conditioned car and getting paid for it, and I’d have a place to sleep tonight.” He resisted an impulse to spit. “Yes, lady, you have unfortunately made this necessary.”
He hung his helmet on the clutch grip and stepped up to the screen door and knocked on it. Through the fine wire mesh he could dimly see the shapes of furniture. The music stopped.
“Come in, Sebastian,” came a resonant voice from inside. “And your girlfriend too.”
Vickery pulled the flimsy door open and held it for Castine, who muttered “Girlfriend!” scornfully as she stepped past him. Vickery followed her in and closed the door.
On a boxy old computer monitor in the far corner, a screen saver video of swimming fish threw a faint glow, and the room was only spottily lit by the many little windows in the west wall, but after a moment Vickery could make out the couch and table and overstuffed armchairs, and he saw that the east wall was still hung with a dozen paintings of dogs and cats. The air smelled not unpleasantly of fried onions and tarry latakia tobacco smoke.
“It’s been a long time, Sebastian,” said a man who was sitting deep in one of the armchairs. Again he slightly emphasized the name.
“You’re wasting your snark,” said Vickery irritably. “She knows about Herbert Woods.”
The man sat up and set a briar pipe in an ashtray on the table, and now Vickery could see the familiar horn-rimmed glasses and narrow moustache. The man stared at Castine for a moment and then turned to Vickery with raised eyebrows.
“How does she know?”
“That’s not important,” snapped Castine.
The man in the chair nodded slowly and touched his perfectly combed dark hair. “She knows what’s important and what’s not! Enviable. And evidently what we have so far is not.” He blinked through the lenses at Vickery. “You drove down to the mailbox, then back up to Mulholland, then down again. I think you should go away and come back if something should in fact prove to be important.”
Vickery clicked his tongue impatiently. “She works for the agency that has wanted me dead these last four years. Today they contacted my wife’s ghost, and used her or it to find my apartment, and this lady stopped me from going there and getting caught—oh, Jack Hipple, this is Miss Castine; Miss Castine, Jack Hipple.”
Hipple and Castine nodded to each other, not warmly.
“It’s, uh, Ingrid,” said Castine.
Hipple looked back at Vickery. “Go on.”
“No, don’t,” said Castine. “You at least used to have a Top Secret security clearance. Why are we here, anyway?” She glanced around the dim room with evident distaste.
“We’re here,” said Vickery to both Hipple and Castine, “because I, and possibly Miss Castine too, have connections to ghosts who can track us, and her agency wants to use them to find us and kill me, and probably kill her too, now. We need to know about camouflage.” He looked squarely at Hipple. “I’m scheduled to drive for Lady Galvan tomorrow, and I can’t afford to skip out on that.”
“You’d be wise to stay in her good graces,” Hipple agreed, “and at least her Unter cars are stealth-equipped.” He held up his hand. To Castine, he said, “Until today you worked for the Transportation Utility Agency?”
“How do you know about it?” asked Vickery. He was ignored by the other two.
“Can you break our connections to deleted persons?” Castine countered.
Hipple laughed softly. “Deleted persons! No. But I can tell you measures to take which are likely to make it difficult for them to find you, and I can provide you with some helpful apparatus.” He leaned back in his chair. “The TUA has been very busy these last few months—the retro waves on the freeways are happening more often, and some of them now form self-consistent solitons that move backward for miles. And they’re always moving away from the omphalos—south on the 110, west on the 134, even east out the 60 toward Palm Springs.”
“That’s fine,” said Castine. “We don’t have anything to do with whatever you’re talking about. Omphalos! Sultans!”
“Solitons,” said Vickery. “Waves that hold their shape longer than they should.”
Castine rolled her eyes. “We don’t deal with any of this stuff.”
“In that case,” Hipple said with a sigh, waving at the wall away from the windows, “perhaps you have a cherished cat or dog you’d like to have a fine art portrait of. Guinea pig, parrot. I do acrylic paintings of pets, from photographs. Very reasonable rates.”
Vickery explained to Castine, “You people are evidently causing weird freeway conditions lately by calling up so many ghosts out of the current.”
“Well why didn’t he say that?”
“Miss Castine,” said Hipple, “did you see a man and woman climbing the hill, as you came down? The man probably still had a beard.”
She blinked at him. “Yes.”
“You need my help, not a pet portrait.” He shook his head sternly, as if she had come to him asking for one. “Only someone compromised by a ghost could have seen those two.”
Castine bust out, “Oh, give me a break! What, they were some of your ghosts? Easy to say, now that they’re gone.” She turned to Vickery. “I’ve got to get a phone. This man’s a charlatan. Deleted persons have no visible substance. We researched that.”
“He’s a lot of things,” said Vickery, “and probably a charlatan too, a lot of the time. But ghosts are visible to some people. And vice versa.”
“And you’re one of those people,” said Hipple, apparently unoffended. “You are indeed trackable by them. Obviously you have been intimate with someone who died within the freeway current.”
Vickery looked at Castine. “You were less than a hundred yards away from the freeway. These days that’s in the current.”
“I was never intimate with him!” she protested. “This is ridiculous.”
“Did you kill him?” asked Hipple.
“What? What’s that got to do with—”
“Answer him,” said Vickery. “Or I will.”
Castine bit her lip. “Yes. I—I killed him.”
Hipple nodded. “Ending someone’s earthly life from him is about as intimate as you can get. Was this recent?”
“An hour or so ago,” said Vickery.
Hipple stood up and crossed to a television set beside the computer, and twisted a knob; the screen stayed dark. Then he stepped to a door in the south wall and pulled it open. Sudden bright daylight showed drifts of dust on the pattern of the rug underfoot, and a breeze tossed Castine’s short hair and fluttered papers on the table. Fresh air blew away the tobacco and onion smells.
Vickery and Castine followed him and looked out over a view of descending green canyons to the distant spires along Sunset Boulevard. Vickery looked straight down, then took a step back; the house sat flush on the edge of a sheer cliff, and he estimated the drop beyond the threshold to be a hundred feet.
“That’s a door you don’t have to lock,” said Castine, stepping back herself.
“On the contrary,” said Hipple, moving back to the television, “I get more visitors by way of that door than the one you came in through. The couple you saw climbing away up the hill, for example.” The television screen now glowed gray. “Let’s see how close your astral companions are. Stand closer to the door so everybody can see you.”
“I don’t want to be seen!” said Castine.
“I don’t think I do either,” said Vickery. “Just tell us how to hide ourselves from them!”
“I need to know how heavy a dose to prescribe.” Hipple crouched beside the television, peering at the screen. “Analog TV broadcasts stopped eight years ago, so there’s bandwidth free for a more fleeting sort of signal on this old set.” He sat back on his heels. “Ah, Sebastian, do you recognize this face?”
Vickery peered warily at the screen, and saw a brighter oval against the gray, with dark spots that might have represented eyes and a mouth. The mouth spot was changing shape, as if the face were trying to speak.
It might have been an image of Amanda. “Switch it off, damn it!” Vickery said hoarsely.
Hipple shrugged and clicked the channel selector knob a few notches.
After a few seconds he said, “Miss Castine, does this seem to be your intimate friend?”
Castine glanced at the screen, where another pale oval was collecting.
“No,” she snapped; then added, “Turn it off.”
Hipple chuckled indulgently and clicked the set off. “The surprising thing, really, is not that their unwitting self-portraits on the cathode ray tube are good, but that ghosts can produce them at all. And your two admirers are in fact very local and wide awake.”
Vickery glanced at the open doorway, and saw two vertical areas where the sky appeared to be rippling, as if seen through agitated water. He stepped forward and closed the door firmly.
“Oh,” said Hipple, straightening up, “yes. You don’t want them coming through here and scampering away up the hill as well.”
Vickery suppressed a shiver, and Castine muttered under her breath.
“So how do we evade them?” Vickery asked, trying not to imagine his wife’s ghost hovering insubstantially in mid-air outside the closed door.
“I charge fees for consultation, Sebastian.”
“Sorry, what? Oh—I have money.”
“I’m sure you do, and I’ll be happy to take some of it for incidental extras, but for my expert consultation . . .” He squinted from one of his guests to the other. “You’re both carrying guns. Miss Castine, is yours the one you killed—” he nodded toward the dark television, “—with?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“I’ll take that for your payment. A weapon that’s participated in killing a person never loses a valuable connection with that event. Sebastian, how about yours? Was it ever used to kill a person?”
Vickery looked at Castine, and after a moment she nodded. “Terry shot one of your crazy freeway gypsies last year.” She faced Hipple. “I’m not giving you my gun. It’s registered in my name, I could get in big trouble. And until I can get in touch with a certain person, I think I need to have a gun.”
“I’ll provide you with replacements in exchange,” Hipple assured her. “I’ve got a couple of unassociated .45 autos, 1911 model.”
Castine shook her head. “How do we know they’re not stolen? And in California you can’t legally just—”
“For God’s sake, Ingrid,” interrupted Vickery, “you’ve got bigger problems.”
Her face lost all expression, and Vickery wondered if she was about to cry.
She closed her eyes for a moment. At last, “I’ve always obeyed the law,” she said quietly. “Even with Abbott, it was a justifiable shooting.”
Vickery thought of reminding her that she had almost certainly broken the law by warning him of the imminent arrest this morning; but, remembering that again, he just said gruffly, “He can have the gun I picked up this morning, and you can keep yours.”
“Miss Castine’s has the greater value,” interjected Hipple, “having done its spiritual work this very day. I want both.”
For several seconds no one spoke.
“Very well,” said Castine finally, “yes, I’ll do it.” She smiled at Vickery for the first time, though it was an uncertain smile, accompanied by a worried frown. “We’ve fallen outside the law, haven’t we? Even,” she added, waving toward the southern door, “outside natural law. I don’t know what I’m doing out here.” She coughed out two syllables of a laugh. “I watch myself walk and talk, but I don’t know what I’m doing!”
Hipple folded himself back into his chair and tapped the table. “Bring out your dead.”
Vickery pulled the gun from his belt and laid it on the table. Castine made an aimless gesture, then quickly reached around behind her back, drew her gun, and clunked it down beside the other. The two stainless steel semi-automatics gleamed in the light from the western windows.
“Okay,” said Hipple. “There are several things you should do and not do. Time spent in the ghost currents is said to keep a person young, but of course you must try to stay out of them. Ghosts are—”
A gust of wind shook the abyss door, and Vickery thought it went on rattling for a moment or two after the gust had abated.
“Ghosts,” Hipple went on more loudly, “are compatible with alkaline bloodstreams, so you should be acidic—drink lots of Cokes and coffee, eat roasted nuts, blueberries, prunes. Pickles, chocolate. Right? You probably don’t want to go into stores with security cameras, but I have packets of these things that I can sell you for plain cash. But avoid hard liquor—a lot of ghosts miss it, and they’re drawn to the smell. And you want to change the aspects of yourselves that ghosts can recognize, so get rid of your rings, get uncharacteristic used clothes and wear them inside out or backward, replace your shoes with used ones as often as you can, part your hair on the other side if not shave it all off, wear your watches on the other wrist and set to the wrong time. You’re pretty untrackable while you’re on that velocipede you rode here, but of course stay off freeways if you can; and if you’re in a car, be ready with a portable radio to check your immediate surroundings. Hop on one foot as much as is convenient. I have pogo sticks for sale with durable pads made of human hair, and these have proven effective. When using a rest-room—”
“Spare me,” interrupted Castine. She glared at Vickery. “For this lot of nonsense I’m giving up my SIG?—and getting a .45 with a seven-round magazine? Pickles? Pogo sticks? What kind of—”
“This is good, as far as it goes,” interrupted Vickery, “some of it, anyway, but—”
“And I can provide ten-round magazines for the .45s,” said Hipple. “With one in the pipe, you’ve got eleven shots.”
“But,” Vickery went on, turning to Hipple, “aren’t there ways to repel ghosts?—besides just eating a lot of chocolate? I mean, this is all good-sounding advice for avoiding their notice, but if one catches us with our shoes off or no part in our hair at all—how can we drive it off?” He made himself not look at the closed southern door.
Hipple rocked his head judiciously. “I won’t lie to you, there’s nothing foolproof. I can sell you a couple of spirit-level stars and fixed compasses, those can disorient ghosts . . . and it might help to recite the multiplication tables in a loud voice; math is deterministic, and ghosts are an effect of possibility extended beyond reason. It might repel them—they wouldn’t like ‘to know that two and two are four, and neither five nor three,’ as A.E. Housman wrote.” He leaned back and shook his head. “Get used shoes and don’t take them off.”
Castine was rubbing her temples as if she had a headache. “What,” she asked with labored patience, “are spirit stars and fixed compasses?”
Hipple got up and crossed to a bookcase, and when he returned to his chair he was carrying a wooden cigar box. He pulled out of it a pocket compass and held it out on his palm.
“The needle points north, you see; but—” He flipped it over to show a knurled knob on the underside. To Vickery the thing now looked like a speed-loader for a revolver. “By twisting this knob,” Hipple went on, “you can fix the needle in one position. Swing the compass around in a circle then, and the apparent shifting of north might induce a terminal y-axis spin in a ghost.”
“Unless he won’t look at it,” said Vickery.
“True,” admitted Hipple. He now lifted from the box a plastic disk on which eight little glass tubes were glued like spokes on a wheel. Each tube was partially filled with clear lucite, with a motionless bubble in the center of it.
“They’re levels, you see. But each one in the ring is defining a different line as level. Looking at this might induce a negating z-axis spin in an attentive ghost.”
An attentive ghost, thought Vickery. I don’t think they’re ever very attentive.
Hipple produced another of each device and slid all four across the table. “You owe me eighty bucks. And you’ll probably want some packets of dried prunes and blueberries, and some Hershey bars, and maybe a couple of—”
“No pogo sticks today,” rasped Castine.
Vickery was squinting skeptically at the objects on the table. “The old gypsies talk about some brass thing that repelled ghosts like WD-40 repels water.”
Hipple smiled. “Yes, it’s supposed to have been a brass capital letter L, as big as a chair. Some fellow brought it through the omphalos, the story goes, in 1960, from the other side, from the desert-highway afterlife. They say it was a supremely effective ghost repeller, but people got cancer if they owned it for very long, and it disappeared about thirty years ago. The word is that the Vatican bought it, and keeps it in a lead box.”
“Is this the same guy,” asked Vickery, “who supposedly did some kind of phase-change on the freeway around then, and just disappeared, car and all?”
Hipple shrugged. “Could be. If it ever happened at all. Stick to the multiplication table.”
“This is the second time,” said Castine, “that you’ve mentioned this omphalos. It sounds like something a proctologist would look for.”
“It’s an exit on the Pasadena Freeway,” said Vickery, “where the freeway current was first used to open a conduit to the, uh, other side. That was in the ’40s, I think. It’s the center, the main . . . ghost drain, or ghost fountain.”
“The Pasadena was the first freeway,” remarked Hipple, closing the cigar box, “and they didn’t know how to build them yet. The exits are too tightly curled for freeway velocities.” He stood up and stepped to the bookcase to put the cigar box back. “Of course,” he remarked over his shoulder, “sometimes a ghost can be induced to subsume itself forever in some organic physical object.” A pipe rack with a dozen pipes in it stood on a higher shelf, and he touched two briars and a corncob, as if picking out notes on a xylophone.
Vickery nodded and said to Castine, “The wooden or bone knobs on the metronomes, for instance. The ghosts in those are in there for good.”
“But that’s generally ghosts who are fairly exhausted,” said Hipple, turning back to the room, “or who were never born.”
“They died,” said Castine, “but they were never born?”
Vickery too was looking questioningly at Hipple.
“They never lived or died,” said Hipple. “Expanded possibilities. In the desert-highway afterlife, personalities can exist whose potential for birth, for life, never quite got realized, for one reason or another. Children Romeo and Juliet would have had, as it were.”
The dim room had come to seem narrow and oppressive, and Vickery reached into his pocket for the loose twenty dollar bills.
“Fetch out those two .45s,” he said, “and we’ll take the compasses and the spirit-level rings. And a few packets of raisins or whatever. We’ve got to get moving.”
Hipple sighed. “Very well . . . Herbert.”
“It’s been fun,” Castine told him. “Sort of.”