CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
A Confederacy of Bums
Ingrid Castine almost froze—the huge glassy cylinders curling behind Vickery’s head looked like the tentacles of some leviathan—but she knew they must be the fingers of the alien’s enormous right hand, lifted from the sea.
Several phobically inhibiting images flashed across her mind in the instant before she moved: the terrified woman in the crop circle in Wiltshire, whose echo-viewed form had passed right through Castine; and the near-overlap with another woman seen in echo-view, at Cole’s restaurant yesterday; and, somehow, the face of Eliot Shaw, the man to whom she had been engaged and who had been killed by the rogue Transportation Utility Agency in 2017.
She broke through the momentary paralysis by convulsively pushing away from the bulkhead in a fast forward somersault across the wet deck, and when she rolled to her feet her momentum made it impossible to avoid colliding with the big-headed translucent figure swaying at the aft end of the cockpit deck.
There was a sensation of icy envelopment, and free-fall in an unsuspected direction—and then she was inside it, surrounded and supported by cold sea water, and her head was up inside the elongated head of the alien whose death had made the rotating light-wheel in the sea.
It had died, and Castine experienced the devastating phase-change of its death—but in this unsought post-mortem communion she knew that it was nevertheless aware of her intrusion in its fallen material form. Castine was helplessly participating in its death, her frail identity fragmenting in the thing’s dissolution, and when she desperately tried to comprehend its nature as something distinct and separate from her own, she found herself picturing triangles, trinities, the three-sided chessboards at the Zeta Reticuli Chess Club temple; it seemed that there were only three of the alien entities—no, they consisted of three sexes, or existed on three axes or polarities—and comprehension of chaotic free wills was what killed them and had killed this one: had mortally rendered this one self-aware, broken it out of the eternal three-way reciprocation of attention that sustained its kind.
For one timeless instant she nearly comprehended the existence this entity had lost—and to which it would surely be restored: something like the breathless moment of springing from a high diving board, or an orchestral chord that never faded.
Castine’s body was clenched in vertigo and revulsion. A small and diminishing part of her knew that she was on a boat on an ocean on the spherical Earth, but the concept of curvature seemed to be an optical illusion, a simplification so crude that it was meaningless; substituting the idea that all surfaces were parallel was less inadequate.
She comprehended that in their unfallen state the entities had no personal memories or intentions, but this fatally individualized one knew, without thought, that its . . . companions? kin? . . . both quick and dead, were experiencing something comparable to an increasing pressure, and that when the pressure burst its constriction they would all be released from the web of indeterminist unreason that had ensnared them here; and the concept of that bursting was something her mind could encompass only by analogy from its own store of images: a firestorm rising over a city, Dracula as a bat flying away from a shrunken and drained corpse, a blistered and opaque magnesium flash bulb.
With the last strength of her will, she drew partway back from her psychic overlap with the alien entity, and she tried to muster and project a thought—a desperate solicitation of recognition; but it was clear that the thing didn’t and couldn’t perceive the thought. Her call for its attention existed in discrete moments of time—but, for this alien being, time was a long wavelength that stepped right over her mental gesture.
Then it recoiled away from her intrusion by bursting into spray, and she collided with the transom and collapsed, sitting down on the deck and panting as if she’d just run a gruelling race.
Hands were on her, lifting her up. In the few moments it took for her personality to reclaim her mind, she cringed at the deliberate individual attention. She was aware of noises, and then recognized that some of them were speech.
“Are you okay?” said a voice that she knew: Sebastian Vickery. “You dove right through it!” he added.
I’m not dead, she thought. I’m a physical body, but somehow not dead.
She managed to say, I’m—freezing.”
She moved her head from side to side and made her eyes focus. Vickery was holding her up with an arm around her waist, and Santiago was tucking a, a gun back into his jacket pocket, and two others, Yoneda and Tacitus, were hurrying this way across the deck, glancing nervously at the sky and the sea.
“Some communication,” said Yoneda breathlessly. “You pop him like a water balloon and then bounce on your ass.”
Castine forced her mind to work. “It was—” she stammered, “it wasn’t a him. Or a her, but not exactly neuter—I was in it for a while.” She tried to wipe sea water away from her eyes, but he cuff of her suede coat was sopping wet. “Wasn’t I?”
“Maybe for one second,” said Vickery, leading her toward the bulkhead door.
Plowman was crouched below the topside helm, cursing.
“Let’s get inside,” said Vickery. “We’re stalled, and it’s likely to get very cold here shortly.”
“Only one second?” said Castine vaguely. “It was an illuminating second.”
She tried to straighten up and walk without help, but to her annoyance she wasn’t able to work her legs correctly, and she let Vickery take most of her weight as they crossed the deck, and she let him lift her down the steps to the main cabin. The overhead light had gone out. Yoneda and Tacitus and Santiago followed, and Vickery led Castine to the bench where they’d been sitting two minutes earlier. The door swung in the cold wind, and Castine could hear Plowman cursing out on the deck.
At last the engines started, and the overhead light came on. A few moments later Plowman came clumping down the steps and pulled the door closed. He stepped past the others to sit down at the cabin controls, and after gunning the engines a couple of times he worked the gear lever and then steered the boat back toward the lights of the coastline.
“Go fast,” said Vickery.
“Sure,” said Plowman, “but I’ll want some help figuring out where we came from.” He seemed to catch some of Vickery’s urgency—the engines were roaring under the deck and Castine could feel the vibration through the soles of her feet.
“Just get the boat ashore anywhere,” advised Yoneda. “We can ditch it.” She glanced at Castine, who was shivering, and added, “Is the damn heater on?”
“Yes,” said Plowman. “You can’t just park a boat somewhere. I’d like to find the marina.”
“And the same slip?” said Yoneda. “Good luck. Anyway, the GRU probably has assassins waiting there.”
“Unlikely,” spoke up Tacitus. “They’ll have found the mat, and know the trap was discovered. Only crazy people would go back to the same slip after that.”
“Crazy people,” echoed Plowman, nodding.
“And Galvan’s concealment car is parked there,” said Vickery. “I don’t want Ingrid and me walking far with our blood exposed.”“I watched when we came out,” said Santiago. “I’ll know the way back.”
“Even in the dark?” asked Yoneda, and the boy nodded.
Castine had recovered enough to perceive that none of them, not even Yoneda, was ready to talk about what had happened within the last couple of minutes; and she guessed that they were surprised and embarrassed by their hesitancy.
Am I ready to? she wondered. I feel drunk, or concussed. I can’t even put words to the things I learned about the alien, just my own images of what the things remind me of. Dracula? Flash bulbs?
She ran cold-numbed fingers through her wet hair, pressing on her scalp. For at least a moment there, she thought, I had to break through my phobia about overlapping with people—people, much less aliens!—to save Sebastian from I don’t know what. There was the girl in the crop circle in England who seemed to walk right through me, and the woman at Cole’s yesterday who seemed about to lean into me—but why did I think of Eliot?
Her mind was still too shaken for her to avoid the next thought.
Was my promised marriage to Eliot one of those things you busily and sincerely make plans for—but know, deep inside, will not actually come to pass?
No, she told herself with as much firmness as she could muster. No, you’re like the rest of them here, just using any handy distraction to avoid addressing what happened back there on the cockpit deck.
Then she tried without success to keep from remembering a line about marriage in the gospel of Mark: And the twain shall be one flesh; so then they are no longer twain, but one flesh. And she shuddered.
Quickly and too loudly, she said, “I communicated with it.” When all of them, even Plowman in the captain’s chair, turned toward her, she went on, “Or no—at least I saw into its mind. Or something. For more than a second, subjectively.”
She took a breath to say more, but her voice caught and she suppressed a sob. None of the others spoke, but she gasped, “Shut up, never mind.” She inhaled again, leaned her head back against the paneled bulwark and stared at the low ceiling.
Plowman turned away from her and spoke, slowly. “I’m sorry it was you it happened to,” he said, speaking loudly because the engines were roaring and he was facing the windshield. “It should have been me, again. That happened to me on that night in ’68, out by Pahute Mesa at the Nevada Test Range. The thing was made of sand and dust, and it had a big head but long limbs and narrow hands . . . it was running around in the spotlights, in confusion, maybe, and it . . . it ran right through me. I was it, for a long, long second, and it was me, and we both . . . hated that.”
Santiago pointed ahead, and Plowman altered their course slightly. “I never managed to get close to anybody,” he went on, “after that. But—yeah, I saw what you saw.”
“Thank you,” said Castine, exhaling. When Yoneda made a beckoning gesture, she went on,“There’s three of them—no, that’s not right. They come in threes, or think of themselves in threes . . .”
As the bright line of Seal Beach through the windshield widened and became individual lights, and the three yellow-lit stacks of the Queen Mary became visibly separate on the close port horizon, Castine did her best to convey what she had learned in her moment of communion with the dead alien. She was aware of Vickery looking at her with sympathy—no doubt recalling her horror at even sharing space with another human—but she addressed herself mainly to Tacitus and to Plowman, who kept his eyes on the lights ahead in the darkness but nodded from time to time as she spoke.
Santiago was standing beside Plowman, occasionally pointing out particular lights, and he soon identified the lights at the ends of the two arms of the Seal Beach jetties. “Go between them and turn right when you can,” the boy said, “go back under the freeway bridge and then it’s just past the restaurant that looks like a water tower, I’m sure that’s lit up at night.” He turned away from the helm and said to Castine, “Dracula?”
“That’s just what its concept made me think of,” Castine told him. “It wasn’t anything about drinking blood—or even about people.”
“Emptying something of its vitality,” said Plowman. “The way a fire-storm ascends by using up all the oxygen below.”
Tacitus nodded. “And I’m surprised you remember flash bulbs!” he said to Castine. “They were for one-time use—each one was destroyed in producing light, energy, for a photograph.”
“And tomorrow night’s the flash,” said Vickery.
Santiago had moved back to the cockpit door to peer through its window. Now he gasped, and when everyone turned toward him he just tapped the glass.
Vickery got up and looked out, then motioned the boy aside and carefully opened the door, dispelling the scarcely-warmed air of the interior. Knowing what she would see, Castine got up and stood beside him.
On the rippled black plain of the sea a hundred yards astern, a tall pale column was dimly visible against the night sky. Warm breath on her neck let Castine know that Yoneda had stepped up behind her and was staring out too, and she heard Tacitus, and then Plowman, shuffle across the deck to join them.
“I’m glad you got the engines started,” Vickery said to Plowman. After thirty more seconds he softly closed the door. Plowman returned to the helm, and the others resumed their seats.
Castine sat back down on the bench, aware again, more forcefuly, of being cold and exhausted. “I’m afraid the good ship Ouranos didn’t restrain the hundred-handed ones tonight,” she said, with a big shaky yawn that mixed tears with the salt water on her cheeks. “The thing was aware of me, but I—I couldn’t even get its attention!”
Tacitus frowned at her. “You did far more than poor Frankie dared to do. When one of the things appeared to him, on this boat, he just ran to the controls and sped away.”
“I—” She paused, and mentally finished the sentence: I had to save Sebastian. “I suppose I did,” she said instead. She watched the jetty lights pass on either side as Plowman steered into the calmer waters. “I should have been carrying your negation symbol, Pierce.”
“The alien wouldn’t have been able to see it,” said Plowman over his shoulder, “with its now spread out like you say.”
“I don’t think a drawing of the negation symbol would catch their attention anyway,” said Vickery, “even if you paint it on a parking lot and leave it there for hours. You’d have to draw their attention to it somehow.”
“Sugar and honey,” said Santiago.
“Or something,” said Vickery quietly.
Castine shook her head. “So what do we do, before tomorrow night? Just—be sure to get to Confession and an early mass?”
“I don’t know what,” said Plowman from the captain’s chair, “but I bet I know where. That old ghost woman in the car said the spacemen show up in places they’ve appeared at recently—she said it’s ‘cause the hole of their intrusion hadn’t closed up all the way yet.”
Castine saw Vickery press his lips together, and she realized that he wished Plowman hadn’t said that in front of Yoneda and Tacitus; and she guessed that he did have some sort of plan.
“Ah,” said Yoneda, slumping in her wet clothes. “Back to Giant Rock.”
“I missed the show yesterday,” said Plowman.
For several seconds none of them spoke. The engines droned on, and the boat bobbed steadily over the waves.
Yoneda spoke up. “In the meantime the three of you,” she said to Vickery, Castine and Tacitus, “should split up as soon as we’re ashore. We don’t need another monster dying on top of us tonight. But you said they don’t do the crop circle death thing by daylight—so where do we meet up tomorrow morning? I can’t drive all the way out to the damn desert with the Highway Patrol watching for my car—even,” she added with a nod to Tacitus, “with stolen plates.”
“We?” Castine frowned and looked across the table at her. “I thought you were going to take your GRU defector to Agent Finehouse. He won’t let Tacitus participate in . . . trying to mummify all the aliens with the negation symbol. That’s not Commander Lubitz’s plan.”
“And I think I cannot, after all, defect,” said Tacitus. “I agree with Miss Castine that your masters would not sanction this effort.” He stretched and ran a hand through his thinning dyed hair.
Yoneda’s mouth was open as she looked at Tacitus, and then at the others, but she didn’t say anything. Slowly she took a small object from her pocket, and Castine and Vickery both tensed when they saw that it was a cell phone; but it was an old flip phone, surely soaked with salt water, and when Yoneda held it up, the battery compartment was visibly empty and corroded.
She opened the phone and the cover came right off. She laid both pieces carefully on the table. “I must transfer my allegiance,” she said, “from recognized authority to . . . a confederacy of bums. I must.” She carefully fitted the cover back onto the phone, though it was still unattached, and put it back in her pocket; and Castine noticed that Tacitus was giving Yoneda an odd, possibly sympathetic look. Yoneda continued, “No, Lubitz and Finehouse would not sanction it. But I can’t pretend I don’t know what I know.” She nodded toward the cabin door. “Or seen what I’ve seen. My career is over, and I don’t even know what the penalty is for making a false police report to avoid arrest!” She gave Tacitus a faint, for-once-frightened smile. “I’m an orphan too.”
Vickery caught Castine’s eye and shrugged. I know, she thought, it would be interesting to hear the story of that false police report and the Highway Patrol. If we ever have time.
The boat purred into Anaheim Bay and under the Pacific Coast Highway bridge, and then they were in Huntington Harbor, and the water glittered with the lights of houses on the starboard side and the buildings of the Sunset Beach Harbor Patrol to port. With Santiago’s help, Plowman found the four long docks of the Howard’s Landing Marina, and Castine was surprised at how smoothly Plowman worked the gears and throttle to ease the boat bow-first between the finger piers of a slip—presumably the correct slip.
Castine stood up, bracing herself with a hand on a low ceiling beam. The car, she thought, the heater turned on full, solid pavement under the wheels, some store for dry clothes, a couple of big greasy tacos drenched in hot salsa, and several shots of bourbon neat.
Perhaps guessing her thoughts, Vickery nodded and said, “Another and another cup to drown/ The memory of this impertinence,” which she recognized as lines from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.
The bow of the Ouranos bumped gently against the fenders at the front of the slip, and Vickery stepped up to the cabin door and pulled it open. To Santiago he said, “You can help me tie her up, I’ll show you how.”
Castine crossed to the steps and gripped the door frame with her left hand to pull herself up to the deck level just as a softball-sized metal sphere sailed over the cabin and bounced on the deck—and even as she recognized the fuse assembly protruding from one end of it she was diving forward, catching it on the first bounce and using its momentum to flip it over the starboard gunwale.
“Fire in the hole!” she shouted as she she let her dive become a roll across the wet deck to the opposite gunwale.
Vickery had seen the grenade fly past his shoulder, and he had spun to try to grab it and get it overboard before it detonated— but when Castine threw it over the gunwale he continued his spin to knock Santiago down and fall on top of him.
The explosion sounded like a sledge hammer punching a cinder block wall, and the deck shook. A moment later Vickery was drenched in cold spray as he rolled off Santiago. Through a sudden churning mist he saw Castine getting to her feet holding Tacitus’s revolver, and he realized that he had pulled his .45 out of his jacket pocket.
They’ll have heard the grenade detonating under water, he thought, and not on the deck or in the cabin.
He ran to the cabin and vaulted onto the roof, and he slid prone and scanned the long dock over the pistol’s barrel. He could hear shouts from the other boats.
A man in a heavy jacket and knitted cap stepped cautiously out from behind the bow of the boat in the next slip, and a moment later a similarly dressed man appeared behind him. The first man was holding a round object, certainly another grenade; Vickery sighted on him and rested his finger lightly on the trigger. The man had not drawn his arm back for a throw, and Vickery quickly calculated what shot would put the grenade into the water on the far side of the dock.
But two shots cracked from behind him, and the man simply sat down on the dock; his hand opened and the grenade rolled across the planks. His companion lunged toward him, one hand darting toward the grenade.
Vickery buried his head behind his crossed forearms, and the hard bam threw shrapnel whistling overhead and striking the nearby hulls. He must have fumbled it, Vickery thought.
Raising his head, he saw a ragged hole in the dock below a curling smoke cloud, and when he turned to push himself back off the cabin roof he saw Santiago on the roof behind him, holding the Sig Sauer pistol. The boy hopped down to the cockpit deck, and Vickery landed in a crouch right beside him, pocketing the .45. The air was sharp with a smell like burnt gunpowder and ammonia.
Yoneda and Tacitus were out on the tilting deck now, and Vickery waved them back toward the transom, where Castine stood holding Tacitus’s revolver. A glance past the cabin showed him several people already hurrying up the dock, with a couple more standing at the bows of the other boats.
“We all swim away from this,” said Vickery, hurrying to the transom. He tugged his shoes off and shoved them inside his jacket. “Fast but quiet. Try to come ashore somewhere without being seen. Plowman, Santiago, meet us at the car, we’ll wait for you for a while.” He swung one leg over the transom gunwale.
“And us?” called Yoneda.
“You two,” Vickery said, nodding back toward her and Tacitus, “tomorrow at seven AM at—”
He hesitated, and Castine said, “Canter’s, on Fairfax.”
Vickery barked a quick laugh, for he and Castine had had a hectic reunion at Canter’s a year and a half ago. “Canter’s,” he agreed.
Castine tucked the revolver under her waistband, shrugged out of her soaked coat and vaulted right over the transom. Vickery heard the quiet splash as she knifed into the water, and he swung his other leg over and jumped.
The water was breathtakingly cold, and when he surfaced he was panting. Castine was treading water six feet away, he hair streaked across her face, and she brushed it back and nodded reassuringly. Vickery looked back and saw Yoneda and Tacitus clamber over the transom and drop, and then Santiago. Tacitus and Santiago were both carrying life-preservers.
Vickery and Castine quickly swam out away from the marina docks, and when they were about halfway between the docked boats on either side of the channel they paused, treading water. At the moment no moving vessels were within two hundred yards of them. Vickery didn’t see the other three swimmers, and he was glad Santiago and Tacitus had grabbed life-preservers.
Castine’s head was just a bobbing silhouette against the now-distant marina lights. He listened to her breathing, and she was taking deep, unhurried breaths. “You okay?” he asked. “I can tow you if you get tired or too cold.”
“Your old Secret Service training,” she said. Her voice was tight but not panicky. “If the limo went off a bridge. I’m okay.”
“This way,” Vickery said, beginning a slow sidestroke east along the channel, and Castine adopted the same energy-conserving stroke. Vickery’s right side ached, and he wondered if Galvan had cracked a rib when she punched him. “We’ll find an empty dock in front of a dark house, a good distance from the explosion.”
For several minutes they swam silently through the black, glittering water, each occasionally rolling to give one arm a rest. Vickery watched Castine, alert for signs of diminished coordination due to hypothermia, and he hoped this immersion in sea water wasn’t rousing traumatic flashbacks of her envelopment in the alien.
“You still okay?” he asked quietly, wanting to assess her speech.
“Damn cold. Find us a dock.” She spoke clearly, to his relief. She rolled to face him, her right arm now taking its turn at doing most of the swimming. “You shot the grenade guy?”
“Santiago did. Got the guy and his pal, both.”
“Good God.”
Vickery had been regularly craning his neck to watch the shoreline on their right, which was a long row of white two or three story houses with docks in front, but though he had seen a couple of empty docks, lights were on in the houses and rock music rolled faintly across the water. He didn’t want Castine and himself to be seen and questioned as they came ashore, but his own muscles were beginning to ache even with the relatively easy sidestroke, and the cold water was leaching his strength, and he knew Castine must be nearing the end of her endurance.
He had spied the white lamp of a channel marker ahead, indicating side traffic, and when they had paddled their way to it—SLOW NO WAKE was stenciled on its three-foot-tall white column—he lifted his head and tried to see over the low waves that lapped at this chin.
He saw a roughly fifty-foot gap in the row of houses, and a street light a couple of hundred feet further back. The gap had to be a boat ramp—and at this hour it wasn’t surprising that no pickup truck was backed onto the ramp to launch or retrieve a boat.
He caught Castine’s eye and nodded in that direction. “Ashore there,” he said, and the slack exhaustion in her answering nod made him wish he’d led them ashore at one of the empty docks they’d passed.
But she rocked her head back and looked in the direction of the ramp, and there was new strength in her stroke as she swam toward it; and in minutes they had crawled up the grooved concrete slope and got shakily to their feet. They left the ramp darkly streaked with water behind them.
Castine was barefoot, and Vickery pulled his shoes out from his jacket and gave them to her. When she demurred, he said quietly, “Put them on, we’re carrying guns—we’ve got to look as normal as possible walking back to the car, and I bet I can walk barefoot better than you.”
“No contest.” She crouched, and soon had the shoes on and tied. “You don’t mind,” she said hoarsely as she pressed her hands on the pavement and then on her knees to straighted up again, “if I lean on you. A lot.”
“Good idea. Look like we’re a couple.”
“Sure. Your Pasadena waitress girlfriend.”
Vickery thought of reminding her that their blood was still exposed, but as they began shuffling forward it was clear that she was walking as fast as she could. For all their strenuous effort to get this far, the car was only a few hundred yards away.
When they got to the car and climbed in, Vickery started the engine and drove to a parking space on the other side of the lot, from which they could see anyone approaching the previous spot and, if necessary, exit directly onto Pacific Coast Highway. He switched off the headlights and shifted the engine to neutral. He had turned the heater up to the maximum, and every few seconds he had to wipe steam from the windshield. “Santiago’s got that gun, unless he lost it in the channel.” He rolled down his window to be able to see the driver’s side mirror, and he flexed his aching and stinging feet. The soles of his socks were almost completely worn away.
Castine nodded. Several times she opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. Finally she said, “I suppose the boat sunk.”
“Probably the one next to it too,” agreed Vickery. He looked at her leaning over the heater vents. “If you weren’t so quick catching that grenade, we’d be dead. Santiago too.”
“I was on the girls’ softball team in high school,” she said. “Shortstop.” She lowered her head to get the hot air blowing into her hair. “There was a second explosion—not underwater.”
“There were two guys—probably the same ones that were under my trailer last night. One of them had a second grenade, but Santiago shot him and he dropped it. His . . . comrade tried to get it and pitch it at us or drop it in the water, but he was too slow.”
“God help us, every one.” She sat back and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. After a few moments she said,“Our fingerprints are—”
She stopped talking, for the dashboard metronome had begun clicking back and forth, slowly; and even though he was expecting it, Vickery jumped when he looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the figure of the old woman’s ghost in the back seat again. In the shadows, the thing’s opaque black veil made its lowered head seem like an extension of its hunched shoulders.
Castine looked back, and just widened her eyes.
“Are you there, boss?” said Vickery wearily. He caught again the smells of cocoa and mildew.
The ghost began speaking rapidly in Spanish.
“The Rosary again, I bet,” whispered Castine. “If I’d brought mine along, I’d say it with her.”
Vickery turned around to face the fortunately impenetrable black veil. “Boss?” he said. “Galvan, you there?”
The ghost just kept reciting in Spanish.
“Two hundred Hail Marys,” said Castine quietly, “if she does all the Mysteries of the whole Rosary.” She shivered and turned to face the windshield. “I wonder if Mary hears prayers from ghosts.”
“I imagine it’s like replaying prayers left on an answering machine,” said Vickery. “Boss!”
The Spanish prayers were choked off, and the voice said, more slowly, “Vickery? What?”
“Did you try to call us? The, uh, speaker has started up.”
“In Spanish, right? If it’s me it’ll be in English. How are you doing with the spacemen? Is my car all right?”
“Your car’s fine,” if a bit wet, he thought. “And Castine—Betty Boop—got to talk to one of the spacemen, sort of. But how do we make the old lady stop talking when it’s not you speaking through her?”
“You can’t,” said the monotone voice, so unlike Galvan’s own voice. “It’s prayers, I bet. Pray along with her, you could use it.”
“Naval Intelligence is probably still after us with the blood cloths,” Vickery protested, “we’re going to have to sleep in the car. How can we—”
“You get out of my car to eat, understand? I don’t want grease all over the upholstery. And to go to the bathroom. And it had half a tank of gas when it left here, it better be the same when you bring it back.”
Vickery looked at Cathine and rolled his eyes. “Understood, boss.”
The flat monotone managed to carry some emphasis when it added, “And don’t math out my walkie-talkie ghost!”
“She tries to grab the wheel when I’m driving! And pushes the gas pedal! I can’t—”
“You telling me you can’t outwrestle an old lady? A dead old lady?” It was jarring to hear the words seeming to emanate from the old lady in question. “So hang onto the wheel! Put it in neutral if she plays with the gas! Jeez, Vick, how you gonna handle spacemen if you can’t even—”
“Okay, boss. I gotta go—catch you later.”
“Don’t fuck up.”
After a moment the voice started up in Spanish again.
Castine exhaled. “Can she hear us now?”
“I don’t think so. I had to call to her to get her on just now.” Vickery was looking through the damp windshield at the bamboo antenna, which was visibly swaying; after a few seconds it stopped.
“So,” said Castine, speaking over the ghost’s endless prayers, “earplugs, to sleep?”
“Hm? Oh.” Vickery shrugged. “We’ll figure something out.”
Castine peered impatiently through the steamy windshield, then said, “How long do we wait for them?”
“Another few minutes. They’re both—” Vickery saw motion in the driver’s side mirror, two trudging figures; when they passed in front of a brightly lit shop window he recognized them. “Ah, here they are.”
Castine turned around in her seat and looked out the back window. “What do we do with them?”
The ghost droned on.
“Drop them back at the cathedral parking garage—though I’ll stay off freeways, with our stowaway trying to take the wheel and drive to Cerritos. The parking garage,” he repeated more loudly to be heard over the ghost. “If Santiago’s bike’s stolen, Plowman can give him a ride. Plowman should put him up and feed him. And buy him a new bike.”
“I think he would, though he’d put it on his daughter’s VISA. What do we do, after?”
“Drive to my studio, quickly change into dry clothes—and get some socks and shoes!—and heat up some more Beef Stroganoff and bring it and a bottle of something out to the car.” He rocked his head back toward the praying ghost. “And not spill anything.”
“And sleep in the car.”
“We slept in a taco truck one time.”
Castine nodded. “And a tomb, one time before that. And some towels, these seats are wet. In fact the world can wait while I take a hot shower.”
“Not too much to ask. A quick one.”
Vickery switched the headlights on and off; and in the mirror he saw Santiago tug on Plowman’s sleeve and point toward the car.
“And pillows and blankets,” he said. “It’s likely to be a cold night.”
Castine held her hands out in front of herself and spread her fingers, as if trying to gauge the shape of something. “And a colder day.”
When Plowman and Santiago walked up to the car, they opened the back doors and then stepped back. The old ghost had not stopped praying.
“Get her out,” said Plowman.
“She’s part of the car,” said Vickery wearily, “and she can’t hurt you as long as she’s got the veil on. Come on, I’ll take you back to your car.”
The steering wheel jerked suddenly under Vickery’s hand and the engine roared in neutral. After a moment it subsided to normal idling.
Plowman stepped even further back. “That was her, wasn’t it, doing that? I ain’t goin’.”
Vickery sat back and closed his eyes. His muscles ached with fatigue from having swum three hundred yards in cold water, and from having more-or-less continuously wrestled the steering wheel on the drive down here. The soles of his feet stung, and he dreaded the effort of pressing them on the pedals.
He sighed and opened his eyes. “Santiago, can you do multiplication in Spanish? You know, two times two is four? Loud?”
Castine pursed her lips, but nodded.
“Sure,” said the boy, peering into the car at the ghost. “I’ve met these before.”
Vickery waved toward the back seat. “Two times two is four, then four times four. Make her hear it.”
Santiago leaned toward the open door and began reciting in Spanish. After he had said a few short sentences, the ghost stopped speaking, and was shifting in evident discomfort on the seat.
Castine glanced at Vickery. “I hate to be interrupting her in her prayers.”
“It, not her.”
She nodded, her lips pressed together. “Santiago,” she said with evident reluctance, “now tell her that the last number, minus itself, is nothing. And repeat that.”
“Y eso, menos en si mismo, no es nada,” Santiago told the ghost. “Nada!”
Vickery jumped, for the ghost emitted a flat, prolonged wail and was suddenly upside-down, with her feet blocking the back window; then all he could see in the back seat was flickering patches of black and gray, like a spinning kaleidoscope filled with ashes.
Castine was bracing one hand on the dashboard. “Terminal spin,” she said through clenched teeth, “in a confined space!”
The wail was cut off abruptly, and Vickery exhaled as the air shifted in the car. The ghost was gone.
“Like a damn buzz-saw,” muttered Plowman. “Just like Frankie.” He got into the back seat, slowly.
“Wow!” said Santiago breathlessly. He got in and closed his door.
The dashboard metronome was motionless now. Vickery opened the driver’s side door and stepped out, wincing as his abraded soles pressed the cold asphalt, and cringing at the breeze on his wet shirt and pants. He limped around the front bumper and took hold of the bamboo antenna, and with one yank wrenched it off.
A white object the size of a cigarette butt fell out of the base of it and clicked on the pavement. He tossed the bamboo stick away and crouched to pick the thing up.
It was a bone—almost certainly a finger bone. He tossed it after the stick.
When he got back into the car, Castine gave him a questioning look. “I wondered about that antenna,” he said. “One of the old lady’s finger bones was in it. It was Galvan’s monitor—the way she, at least, could keep track of her concealement car.”
“So why . . .?”
“She’s gonna be pissed that we mathed out her ghost—maybe pissed enough to reconsider the money the ONI guy offered her to turn me in.”
“Probably would,” agreed Santiago from the back seat.
“Uh,” said Vickery, “good job back there.”
In the rear-view mirror he saw the boy look away and nod.
Vickery shifted the engine into gear, pressed his bare sole onto the gas pedal, and steered toward the exit onto Pacific Coast Highway.