Expiration Date Read online

  And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything.

  For a moment Sullivan found himself remembering an enigmatic image from his recurrent adolescent nightmare: three cans of Hires Root Beer, sitting in beach sand, unopened forever … a man’s voice saying, You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer—

  And he shuddered and thrust the thought away. He lifted his glass and took such a huge slug of beer that his throat ached sharply, and he had to sit rigid until the swallow had finally gone down. At last he could breathe again.

  Now he could feel the sudden cold of the beer in his stomach. At least it had driven away the momentary memory. God, he thought, I’m turning into Sukie.

  A.O.P., dude.

  She’d been good at driving the L.A. freeways drunk—she always said that if you started to weave in your lane, you could cover it by accelerating as you corrected, and nobody would know you’d been out of control; it had become a motto of theirs—Accelerate Outta Problems.

  Morrie finally refilled the shot glass; Sullivan nodded and took a cautious sip. I was never any good at shooting pool, he thought. Or else I’ve always been fairly good at it, but I was just jumpy when I was playing earlier tonight. I can’t accelerate out of this town, out of this job. Probably she made the whole thing up—giggling in a house somewhere right now, not in Delaware and not even owning a gun anymore—just to wreck my life one more time.

  No way it’ll happen.

  He took a moderate swallow of the beer. I could just resign from this job, he thought. If I turn in my resignation to the general foreman, it won’t be held against me. Tramp electricians are always getting “a case of red-ass” and moving on. I’d just have to sign out, and get a Whole Body Count, wearing paper pyjamas and lying in the aluminum coffin while the counter box inches over me, measuring the rems of radiation I’ve picked up this year; then drive to California and retrieve the … the mask, and move on, to Nevada or somewhere. There’s always utilities work for someone who’s still in good with Edison.

  But if Sukie’s just jerking me around, why should I bother?

  And if she’s not, he thought, then there’ll be people waiting for me to show up at the station, as she said. In fact, if bad guys were listening in on our call, at the front desk of her hypothetical hotel, then they’d have heard Morrie answer the phone here the way he always does, O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking.

  It’s a half-hour’s drive from the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station to O’Hara’s … if you’re not in a tearing hurry.

  Sullivan bolted the rest of the bourbon and the beer and walked out of the bar. Morrie would add the cost of the drinks to the rent on the parking space in the back lot.

  As he trudged across the obliquely lit gravel, the sight of the familiar, homely old van slowed his pace. He could just climb in, pull the doors shut behind him and lock it and get back into the fold-out bed, and tomorrow morning at eight be driving through the gate at the Roosevelt Station, waving his badge at the guard who knew him anyway, and then happily spend all morning tightening conduit bolts that would have to be ripped out and done again after the foreman noticed that the inspection date on all the torque wrenches had expired a week ago. Assured, meaningless, union work, at thirty dollars an hour. Where would he find another trade like it?

  He jumped in surprise, and an instant later the Honda said “Warning—you are too close to the vehicle.” The breeze was suddenly cold on his forehead, and his heart was pounding. “Step back,” the thing went on. He stepped back. “Thank you.”

  Bar-time. It had not just been clumsiness at the pool table. He was definitely on bar-time again.

  I woke up on bar-time, Pete!

  That’s what the Sullivan twins had called the phenomenon when they’d first noticed it, early in their years of working for Loretta deLarava in L.A.—Sukie had got the term from California bars that keep their clocks set about ten minutes fast, so as to be able to get all the drinks off the tables by the legal shut-down time of 2 A.M., and drinkers experience 2 A.M. a little while before it actually occurs. The twins had spent a lot of nights in bars, though Pete drank only Cokes and the occasional beer, and he could still vividly see Sukie, wearing dark glasses at some dark corner table, sucking a cigarette and asking someone, One-thirty? Is that real time or bar-time?

  Sullivan stood beside the van now, his hand on the driver’s-side door handle.

  Finally he unlocked the door and climbed in. The engine started at the first twist of the key, and Sullivan let it warm up for only a few seconds before clanking the van into gear and steering it out toward the road that would take him south to Claypool and the 60 Highway that stretched away west.

  The sky flashed again, twice; and though he had rolled the window down as he drove past the glaringly lit front entrance of O’Hara’s and then picked up speed on the paved road, he still heard no following thunder.

  He touched the brake pedal an instant before the brake lights of the car ahead came on; and then he saw the next jagged spear of lightning clearly because he had already glanced toward where it would be.

  Bar-time for sure. He sighed and kept driving.

  Everyone experiences bar-time occasionally, usually in the half-conscious hypnagogic stage of drifting into or out of sleep—when the noise that jolts one awake, whether it’s an alarm or a bell or a shout, is anticipated, is led up to, by the plot of the interrupted dream; or when some background noise like the hum of a refrigerator compressor or an air conditioner becomes intrusive only in the instant before it shuts off.

  The Sullivan twins had spent countless hours on bar-time during the eighties—it had seemed that they were always reaching for a telephone just before it would start to ring, and appearing in indoor snapshots with their eyes closed because they had anticipated the flash. Eventually they had figured out that it was just one more weird consequence of working for Loretta deLarava, but the pay had been good enough to make it, too, just a minor annoyance.

  Pay. Sullivan glanced at his fuel gauge and wondered if he would ever be able to get his last paycheck from the power station. Probably not, if Sukie had been right about deLarava being after them. Could he get a job as a lighting technician again?

  Probably not, if deLarava was still in any aspect of the film business.

  Great.

  Worry about it all later, he told himself, after you’ve got to Hollywood and fetched the mask—if it’s still in that weird garage, if somebody hasn’t planed off that hill and put up condominiums there.

  Without taking his eyes from the highway rushing past in his headlights, he fumbled in the broad tray on the console beside him, found a tape cassette, and slid it into the dashboard slot; and as the adventurous first notes of Men-At Work’s “A Land Down Under” came shaking out of the speakers behind him, he tried to feel braced and confident. The intrepid traveler, he thought, the self-reliant nomad; movin’ on, able to handle anything from a blown head gasket to a drunk with a knife in a roadside bar; and always squinting off at the horizon like the Marlboro man.

  But he shivered and gripped the wheel with both hands. All the way out to Hollywood? The oil in the van hadn’t been changed for four thousand miles, and the brakes needed bleeding.

  Sukie had frequently, and apparently helplessly, made up nonsense lyrics for songs, and when the tape ended he found himself humming the old “Beverly Hillbillies” tune, and unreeling random lyrics in his mind:

  Sister said, “Pete, run away from there.”

  She said, “California is the place you ought to be,”

  So he cranked the poor old van, and he drove to Galilee.

  On the night of his sixteenth birthday he had borrowed his foster-father’s car and gone tearing around a dark shopping-center parking lot, and then the security guards had chased him for miles in their fake cop car, and at the end of the chase the furious guards had threatened to charge him with all kinds of crimes; nothing had come of it, and the only one of the wild ch
arges he could remember now was Intercity flight to avoid apprehension.

  And now here he was, twenty-four years later, his black hair streaked with gray at the temples, forlornly wondering how even an interstate flight could possibly let him avoid apprehension.

  In the rearview mirror he saw the back window flash white, and this time thunder came rolling and booming across the desert, past him and on ahead into the darkness, followed a moment later by thrashing, rain.

  He switched on the windshield wipers. Her real name had been Elizabeth, but she’d somehow got her nickname from Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”—the song had briefly referred to a woman named Sukie Tawdry. His vision blurred with tears and he found that he was weeping, harshly and resentfully, for the twin sister who had been lost to him long before tonight.

  The unfamiliar liberation of drink made him want to stomp on the accelerator—A.O.P., dude—and hammer the flat front of the van relentlessly through the desert air; but he remembered that this first rain would free up oil on the surface of the highway, slicking everything, and he let the speedometer needle drift back down to forty.

  There was, after all, no hurry. deLarava would want to do her work on Halloween, and that was still five days off.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not” …

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  LUMPY AND DARYL HAD not found Kootie’s bag of quarters in the knapsack’s side pocket, and in an all-night drugstore farther up Fairfax he had bought a cheap pair of sunglasses to conceal his swelling discolored eye. That left a little more than six dollars.

  Kootie was sitting on a bus bench now, just because he had been too tired to walk one more block. Maybe it didn’t matter—maybe all the bus benches in the whole city looked like this one; or, worse, appeared normal to normal people but would all look like this to him.

  The bench was black, with a big white skull and crossbones painted on it, along with the words DON’T SMOKE DEATH CIGARETTES.

  And he had seen packs of these Death cigarettes at the drugstore. The packs were black, with the same skull and crossbones for a logo. Could that actually be a brand name? What could possibly be in the packs? Little white lengths of finger bones, he thought, stained with dried blood at one end to show you where the filter is.

  He was shivering in his heavy flannel shirt. The sunlight was warm enough when it was shining on him, but in the shade like this the air was still nighttime air—chilly, and thin enough to get in between the teeth of a zipper. Maybe when the sun got up over the tops of the storefront buildings this strange night would finally be all the way gone, and the bus bench would be stenciled with some normal colorful ad.

  Maybe he could go home, and his mom and dad would be there.

  (in their wedding clothes, those two had to have been his real mom and dad, not the bodies duct-taped into the chairs in the atrium, the bodies with their eyes—)

  He was shaking now, and he leaned back, gripping his elbows tightly, and forced the shuddering breaths into his lungs and back out. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would probably be the best thing that could happen. He wished his feet could reach the ground so that he could brace them on the pavement.

  Back up on Sunset, hours ago when the sky had still been middle-of-the-night dark, he had tried several times to call the police. Maybe in the daytime he’d be able to find a telephone that worked right. Maybe maybe maybe.

  The shivering had stopped, and he cautiously took a deep breath as if probing to see if a fit of hiccups had finally gone away. When he exhaled, he relaxed, and he discovered that his toes could reach the pavement.

  He brushed back his black curly hair and stood up; and when he had walked several yards to be able to stand in a patch of sunlight, he discovered that he was hungry. He could afford breakfast, but probably not much after that.

  “You waiting for the 217 bus, kid?”

  Kootie glanced up at the old man who had spoken to him. “No,” he said quickly. “No, I’m … walking to school today.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and hurried on south down the Fairfax sidewalk, forcing himself not to glance fearfully back over his shoulder.

  That guy looked normal, Kootie told himself. He might have been just a man on his way to work, curious about this kid out by himself at dawn here.

  But Kootie remembered some of the people he’d met during this long, alarming night. An old woman pushing a shopping cart across a bright-lit supermarket parking lot had shouted to him, calling him Al, and when he had hurried away from her she had started crying; her echoing sobs had been much louder than her shouting, and he’d still been able to hear her when he was a block away. Later, ducking away from an old man that had seemed to be following him, he had interrupted a young bum, his pants down around his ankles, defecating behind some trash cans … and Kootie shook his head now to drive away the memory of seeing rocks and bottlecaps coming out of the embarrassed guy’s butt and clattering on the asphalt. And one woman had pulled up to the curb in a gleaming XKE Jaguar and rolled down the passenger-side window and called out to him, “You’re too young to smoke! I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your cigar!” That time he’d started crying, because even though he couldn’t understand what she’d meant, he had wanted to run to the nice car and beg the pretty lady for help, but her eyes and lips and teeth had been so glitteringly bright that he could only hurry away, down an alley too clogged with trash cans and stacks of wooden pallets for her car to follow.

  Behind him now he heard the familiar puff of air brakes and the roar of a bus engine, and a moment later the big black-and-white RTD bus had gone grinding and sighing past on his left. Kootie distantly hoped that the old man had got aboard, and was going to some job that he liked, and that to him this city was still the malls-and-movie-billboards place Kootie remembered living in.

  He watched the bus move ponderously through the lanes of morning traffic—what was down in that direction? The Farmer’s Market, Kootie recalled, and that Jewish delicatessen where a big friendly man behind the fish counter had once given him samples of smoked whitefish and salmon—and Kootie saw a police car turn north from Beverly.

  There was a pair of pay telephones in front of a minimart ahead of him, and he slanted his pace to the right, toward them, walking just fast enough so that he could be standing there holding a receiver to his ear when the police car would be driving past at his back. When he got to the phone he even went so far as to drop one of his precious quarters into the slot. I need time to think, he told himself.

  He was imagining waving down the police car, or the next one that came by. He would let himself just hang on to the door handle and cry, and tell the officers everything, and they would all go back to Kootie’s house on Loma Vista Drive. He would wait in the car with one of the cops while the man’s partner checked out the house. Or else they’d radio for another car to go to the house, and they’d take Kootie “downtown.”

  And then what? Several times during his long night’s trek he had paused to close his eyes and try to believe that his parents weren’t dead, that he had just hallucinated all that terrible stuff about them being dressed up for a wedding in the living room and at the same time sitting murdered in the atrium, and about the one-armed hobo rushing up the hall and trying to grab him; and he had tried to believe too that the glass brick in his shirt pocket had nothing to do with the people he was encountering; and he hadn’t once been able to believe either thing.

  Could he believe them now, now that the sun had cleared the rooftops of the shop buildings across the street and all these distracted, ordinary strangers were busily going to work?

  He could do an easy test. With a trembling finger he punched the 9 button once and the 1 button twice. I can still change my mind, he told himself nervously. I can sti
ll just run away from this phone—jeez, walk, even.

  There was a click in the earpiece, and then a man’s blurry voice: “… and I told him to just go fuck himself. What do you think of that? I don’ gotta …” The voice faded, and Kootie was listening to the background murmur—laughter, mumbling, glasses clinking, someone singing. He could just barely hear a child’s voice reciting, over and over again, “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep.”

  Kootie’s chest was empty and cold. “Hello,” he said, in a voice that might have been too loud because he had to talk over the sudden ringing in his ears, “hello, I was trying to get the emergency police number—” It could still be all right, he thought tensely, all the L.A.-area phones could be crossed-up in this way—but even just in his head, just unspoken, the thought had a shrilly frightened tone. “Who have I reached, please?”

  For a moment there was just the distant clatter and slurred speech, and then a woman’s voice, choking and thick, wailed, “Al? Al, thank God, where are you gonna meet me tonight? That supermarket parking lot again? Al, my legs’ve swelled up like sausages, and I need—”

  Kootie hung up the phone without dropping it, and he was able a moment later to walk easily away down the Fairfax sidewalk; but he was surprised that the air wasn’t coagulating into the invisible molasses that, in nightmares, kept him from being able to drag one foot ahead of the other.

  It was all real. The sun was up, and he was wide awake, and that voice on the phone had been the voice of the old crazy woman he’d run away from in the parking lot, hours ago. His parents really were dead, obviously killed because he had broken the Dante and taken away the glass brick.

  Kootie had killed them.

  And even though the police wouldn’t ever believe that, they would make Kootie do things—like what? Identify the bodies? No, they wouldn’t force a kid to do that, would they? But he’d still have to make probably a million statements, which would either be true and sound crazy, or be lies and sound like a kid’s lies; and eventually he’d be put into a foster home somewhere. And how would the telephones behave there! What sort of person would be in charge of the place, or soon come visiting? And if by then they’d decided he was crazy, they might have him in restraints, strapped down on his bed.