“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.
CHAPTER 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 rein
state 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.”
&
nbsp; “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.”