Part 27 (1/2)

Y groaned. The image of an enormous jar of blackstrap mola.s.ses materialized next to him, then flickered and disappeared. ”That means the matter could be very sensitive,” Y said. ”You know what that implies.”

”Yeah. It could take months.”

”You're learning the ways of bureaucracy, aren't you? And speaking of which, I'd better go.”

Before we left for Aunt Eileen's, I had time to surf my usual Internet news sources. Two rogue waves had hit the coast south of Pacifica, but no one had been drowned or injured. The first wave had struck around five o'clock, close to the time when Fog Face had appeared at my window, and the second, around ten in the evening. Both waves had dislodged a considerable quant.i.ty of earth and rocks from the cliffs near Ano Nuevo Beach.

”I'm beginning to wonder,” I told Ari, ”if Caleb's been doing some excavating with these waves, trying to turn up the treasure.”

”Wouldn't it be easier to use a shovel?” Ari said.

”Not if Drake buried the treasure so deep that it's halfway down the cliff face.”

”He wouldn't have buried it right at the edge of a cliff. It's a sodding stupid place to look.”

”Only if the edge of the cliff then was where it is now, and it wasn't. The whole California coast has been eroding ever since the Ice Age ended. Eight thousand years ago you could have walked to the Farallon Islands, and now they're twenty-seven miles out to sea.”

”I didn't know that.”

”There was a ton of information about oceanic erosion on the news back in January. Down in Pacifica, the sea undermined a big apartment complex so badly that the buildings had to be condemned. When they were built, they were something like a hundred yards away from the edge, and that was only about fifty years ago.”

”So four hundred years ago, Drake might have buried his loot near the sh.o.r.e but not on it. I see what you're getting at.”

Over at the Houlihan house, Sophie was waiting for us in the living room. Dressed in new jeans and a lavender blouse with a little collar and pleats down the front, she looked fed, clean, and utterly dazed. She perched on the edge of the brown armchair and clutched a paper notebook with a mottled white-and-black cover.

”This is for you.” She handed me the notebook. ”I wrote down everything I could think of. Michael said you'd want to know about the gates and the weird things people can do and just anything weird.”

”I sure do.” I took the notebook and realized that the pages were actually sewn and bound rather than glued or threaded on a wire spiral. ”Where is Michael, by the way?”

”In school.” She gave me a quivering smile. ”People go to school for a long time, here, huh?”

”Yeah, they sure do.” I sat down in the blue armchair facing her. ”We need to see about getting you some education, too.”

”I'd like that. I really would.”

As usual, no one wanted to sit on the orange brocade sofa under the portrait of Father Keith. Ari looked around, found a wooden chair by the window, and brought it over to sit next to me. I opened the notebook and flipped through a few pages, written in pencil. Sophie had big round handwriting, perfectly clear if childlike. She wrote in long gasps of run-on sentences, so the information, while fascinating, lacked any kind of organization that I could see.

”I'll study this material later,” I said and laid the notebook in my lap. ”Thank you for this.”

”You're welcome. I bought it with my own money when Mike said I could come across.”

”Jose let you have money of your own?”

”Oh, yeah, twenty per cent of whatever we earned. He's really cool, one of the best gang guys. I was lucky.”

Lucky. Well, in a way she was. She was out of there. Sophie sat on the edge of the chair with her hands clasped together and looked around the room.

”It's so weird, y'know?” she said. ”I thought, well, when I got here, it was like a dream, but it's not. It's solid. Back in the old place, that was like a dream. Nothing really made any sense, y'know? Everyone always said it was the rads or the drugs. We all kinda felt it, but now that I'm here, I really feel it.”

”Oh, yeah?” I said. ”Did you write about that?”

”No, but I will if you want me to. I mean, I owe you so much. Anything you want, I'll do.”

I felt like saying, you don't need to grovel, but on the other hand, I was glad she was grateful. ”Look,” I said, ”Michael can give you a notebook to write in. Tell me what never made sense in your old place. It doesn't matter if it sounds dumb. Anything you can think of, why it doesn't seem solid now. And while you're at it, tell me what kind of drugs, how easy they were to get or how hard or whatever.”

”Okay.”

Ari looked my way and raised an eyebrow. I couldn't have explained why those details were important, but I knew they were. Ambiguity, again, but I'd learned over the years to minimize the risk of letting valuable information slip away.

”So,” I said, ”you know about the other gates?”

”Everyone knows about the gates, just not where they are or where they go. The big Dodger gangs keep that all secret, you see, so no one can muscle in.”

”Right. Did Jose want Michael to open gates for the BGs?”

”Yeah. And to work the coyote racket.”

”Coyote? Illegal immigrants?”

”Yeah, getting people to Brazzy-Brazil, I mean-or some other clean country. There's like rads everywhere, but some places it's not so bad as Merrka. So if Mike could open a road, Jose figured, to like Strayla or Brazzy or even Fricka, then they could clean up.”

”Makes sense. But dangerous, I'll bet.”

”Oh, yeah. If the cops found out, they'd have shot them both and taken the road over for themselves.”

Ari made a noise somewhere between a cough and a screech of outrage. Sophie flinched and shrank back into her chair.

”Sorry,” Ari said. ”I take it that the police in your world have very low standards of conduct.”

Sophie stared, utterly bewildered.

”In our world,” Ari said, ”the police obey the laws.”

”No kidding?” Sophie said. ”Wow, that's really something, huh?”

Ari muttered a few Hebrew words. I got back to the subject in hand.

”Sophie,” I said, ”what about immigration between worlds? Are there trans-world coyotes?”

”You hear about that,” Sophie said, ”but I don't know if it's true. I wrote down all the rumors. It'd be real dangerous. I mean, you might end up somewhere worse.”

”Hard to imagine,” Ari said.

”But there's one rumor I think is true,” Sophie went on. ”'Cause I saw it happen one night when I was working downtown. Cops from somewhere else bring prisoners through. I don't know where from, but I heard about it, and then this one night, real late, I was standing down on Ellis Street near Market-” She stopped. ”Is there an Ellis Street here?”

”There sure is.” I was thinking of Jerry. ”I don't suppose it's much different than the one in your old level.”

”Okay. So I saw these guys come out of a bar, two guys in uniform, I mean, and I thought, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t, cops!' So I got a twenty out of my pocket to give them so they'd leave me alone, you know? But they didn't even look at me. They were hauling along some guy in handcuffs. There was a streetlight, and you could see the weird color of their uniforms and the patches on them and stuff. They weren't our cops. So they shoved the guy into a squad car and drove off. And I was bored so I watched, and halfway down the block, poof! they just disappeared. They must have had a world-walker in the front seat.”

”You're sure about this?” Ari said.