Part 28 (1/2)
At six o'clock They would be back for Juano. And then. He would. Find out.
Two or three hours in the all-night movie theatre downtown, merging with the shadows on the tattered screen. The popcorn girl wiping stains off her uniform. The ticket girl staring through him, and again when he left. Something about her. He tried to think. Something about the people who work night owl s.h.i.+fts anywhere. He remembered faces down the years. It didn't matter what they looked like. The nightwalkers, insomniacs, addicts, those without the money for a cheap hotel, they would always come back to the only game in town. They had no choice. It didn't matter that the ticket girl was messed up. It didn't matter that Juano was messed up. Why should it?
A blue van glided into the lot.
The Stop 'N Start sign dimmed, paling against the coming morning. The van braked. A man in rumpled clothes climbed out. There was a second figure in the front seat. The driver unlocked the back doors, silencing the birds that were gathering in the trees. The he entered the store.
Macklin watched. Juano was led out. The a.m. relief man stood by shaking his head.
Macklin hesitated. He wanted Juano, but what could he do now? What the h.e.l.l had he been waiting for, exactly? There was still something else, something else . . . It was like the glimpse of a shape under a sheet in a busy corridor. You didn't know what it was at first, but it was there; you knew what it might be, but you couldn't be sure, not until you got close and stayed next to it long enough to be able to read its true form.
The driver helped Juano into the van. He locked the doors, started the engine and drove away.
Macklin, his lights out, followed.
He stayed with the van as it snaked a path across the city, nearer and nearer the foothills. The sides were unmarked, but he figured it must operate like one of those minibus porta-maid services he had seen leaving Malibu and Bel-Air late in the afternoon, or like the loads of kids trucked in to push magazine subscriptions and phony charities in the neighborhoods near where he lived.
The sky was still black, beginning to turn slate close to the horizon. Once they pa.s.sed a garbage collector already on his rounds. Macklin kept his distance.
They led him finally to a street that dead-ended at a construction site. Macklin idled by the corner, then saw the van turn back.
He let them pa.s.s, cruised to the end and made a slow turn.
Then he saw the van returning.
He pretended to park. He looked up.
They had stopped the van crosswise in front of him, blocking his pa.s.sage.
The man in rumpled clothes jumped out and opened Macklin's door.
Macklin started to get out but was pushed back.
”You think you're a big enough man to be trailing people around?”
Macklin tried to penetrate the beam of the flashlight. ”I saw my old friend Juano get into your truck,” he began. ”Didn't get a chance to talk to him. Thought I might as well follow him home and see what he's been up to.”
The other man got out of the front seat of the van. He was younger, delicate-boned. He stood on one side, listening.
”I saw him get in,” said Macklin, ”back at the Stop 'N Start on Pico?” He groped under the seat for the tire iron. ”I was driving by and-”
”Get out.”
”What?”
”We saw you. Out of the car.”
He shrugged and swung his legs around, lifting the iron behind him as he stood.
The younger man motioned with his head and the driver yanked Macklin forward by the s.h.i.+rt, kicking the door closed on Macklin's arm at the same time. He let out a yell as the tire iron clanged to the pavement.
”Another accident?” suggested the younger man.
”Too messy, after the one yesterday. Come on, pal, you're going to get to see your friend.”
Macklin hunched over in pain. One of them jerked his bad arm up and he screamed. Over it all he felt a needle jab him high, in the armpit, and then he was falling.
The van was b.u.mping along on the freeway when he came out of it. With his good hand he pawed his face, trying to clear his vision. His other arm didn't hurt, but it wouldn't move when he wanted it to.
He was sprawled on his back. He felt a wheel humming under him, below the tirewell. And there were the others. They were sitting up. One was Juano.
He was aware of a stink, sickeningly sweet, with an overlay he remembered from his high school lab days but couldn't quite place. It sliced into his nostrils.
He didn't recognize the others. Pasty faces. Heads thrown forward, arms distended strangely with the wrists jutting out from the coat sleeves.
”Give me a hand,” he said, not really expecting it.
He strained to sit up. He could make out the backs of two heads in the cab, on the other side of the grid.
He dropped his voice to a whisper. ”Hey. Can you guys understand me?”
”Let us rest,” someone said weakly.
He rose too quickly and his equilibrium failed. He had been shot up with something strong enough to knock him out, but it was probably the Dexamyl that had kept his mind from leaving his body completely. The van yawed, descending an off ramp, and he began to drift. He heard voices. They slipped in and out of his consciousness like fish in darkness, moving between his ears in blurred levels he could not always identify.
”There's still room at the cross.” That was the younger, small-boned man, he was almost sure.
”Oh, I've been interested in Jesus for a long time, but I never could get a handle on him . . .”
”Well, beware the wrath to come. You really should, you know.”
He put his head back and became one with a dark dream. There was something he wanted to remember. He did not want to remember it. He turned his mind to doggerel, to the old song. The time to hesitate is through, The time to hesitate is through, he thought. he thought. No time to wallow in the mire. Try now we can only lose / And our love become a funeral pyre. No time to wallow in the mire. Try now we can only lose / And our love become a funeral pyre. The van b.u.mped to a halt. His head bounced off steel. The van b.u.mped to a halt. His head bounced off steel.
The door opened. He watched it. It seemed to take forever.
Through slitted eyes: a man in a uniform that barely fit, hobbling his way to the back of the van, supported by the two of them. A line of gasoline pumps and a sign that read WE NEVER CLOSE-NEVER UNDERSOLD. The letters breathed. Before they let go of him, the one with rumpled clothes unb.u.t.toned the attendant's s.h.i.+rt and stabbed a hypodermic into the chest, close to the heart and next to a strap that ran under the arms. The needle darted and flashed dully in the wan morning light.
”This one needs a booster,” said the driver, or maybe it was the other one. Their voices ran together. ”Just make sure you don't give him the same stuff you gave old Juano's sweetheart there. I want them to walk in on their own hind legs.” ”You think I want to carry 'em?” ”We've done it before, brother. Yesterday, for instance.” At that Macklin let his eyelids down the rest of the way, and then he was drifting again.
The wheels drummed under him.
”How much longer?” ”Soon now. Soon.”
These voices weak, like a folding and unfolding of paper.
Brakes grabbed. The doors opened again. A thin light played over Macklin's lids, forcing them up.
He had another moment of clarity; they were becoming more frequent now. He blinked and felt pain. This time the van was parked between low hills. Two men in Western costumes pa.s.sed by, one of them leading a horse. The driver stopped a group of figures in togas. He seemed to be asking for directions.
Behind them, a castle lay in ruins. Part of a castle. And over to the side Macklin identified a church steeple, the corner of a turn-of-the-century street, a mock-up of a rocket launching pad and an old brick schoolhouse. Under the flat sky they receded into intersections of angles and vistas which teetered almost imperceptibly, ready to topple.