CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
A Couple of This Old Lady’s Fingerbones
Oak trees, wide grassy meadows, widely scattered cement picnic tables—Joel Finehouse wouldn’t have guessed he was still in Los Angeles, though in fact he was only two miles north of Hollywood Boulevard.
He had left Agent Atkins staked out down the street from Anita Galvan’s garage, and just after three o’clock the agent had reported that Galvan had driven out of the lot and was moving west on 8th Street. Finehouse and Cendravenir and two other agents had been searching an unoccupied trailer in Long Beach, by the L.A. River—Agent Yoneda had given Commander Lubitz the address yesterday, and claimed that it was the home of Sebastian Vickery, but papers and mail in the trailer indicated that it belonged to someone named William Ardmore. Fingerprints had been taken and would soon be identified, but Finehouse had concluded that Yoneda or her allegedly GRU informant had probably made a mistake.
It was nothing, though, to the mistake Yoneda had made at a little after 2:30 this afternoon. Finehouse had had to tell Lubitz how Yoneda had evaded a Highway Patrol traffic stop, and afterward Lubitz had simply ended the call, without comment.
In any case, Finehouse had more questions for Galvan.
He had called off the search of the trailer, got Cendravenir and the two agents into the SUV and set off to find Galvan.
After twenty minutes Atkins had reported that she was on Los Feliz Drive, northeast of Hollywood, and Finehouse had taken the 710 Freeway up through Bell Gardens and Commerce, and by the time he had switched to the 5 and was passing Dodger Stadium, Atkins had radioed that Galvan had entered Griffith Park and stopped by the ruins of the old Los Angeles zoo, and got out of her car and begun to walk. Finehouse had told Atkins to wait for him near her car.
Fifteen minutes later Finehouse had parked beside Atkins’ car, and when he opened the SUV door and stepped down to the weathered cement pavement, he just looked around at the wide green meadows and the oak trees and the hills beyond, and filled his lungs with the woodland air. There was not a building in sight, and for a moment he was reminded of his boyhood in Cosby, Tennessee.
Agent Atkins got out of the SAS car and hurried over to him, breaking the nostalgic spell.
“That old Cadillac is Galvan’s,” Atkins said, nodding toward a long white sedan parked a few spaces away. “She’s alone. She walked down that path between the trees to the south.”
“Cendravenir,” said Finehouse, “you and Atkins come with me.” To the pair of agents still in the SUV he called, “I’ve left the keys. If she comes back and leaves before we show up, follow her.”
Finehouse walked around to the rear of the SUV and lifted the back gate, and from a black plastic case he took a narrow ten-inch shotgun microphone and a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. He slid the microphone up the left sleeve of his windbreaker; with the end of it flush with the edge of his cuff he couldn’t bend his elbow, but he could shuck the thing out in a hurry. From another case he took a pair of binoculars and slung the strap around his neck.
He led Atkins and Cendravenir across a strip of grass between two lanes, then up a narrow paved path beneath overhanging boughs. Birds twittered among the leaves, and Finehouse realized that this was the first time since he had arrived in Los Angeles that he could not hear at least the remote swish of traffic. The shotgun microphone should work perfectly, if they located Galvan and she talked to anyone.
Cendravenir was already sweating in his black turtleneck sweater. “Did the Highway Patrol know Yoneda’s an ONI agent?”
Atkins stepped ahead, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement.
“We just told them ‘Persons of Interest,’” said Finehouse shortly.
Commander Lubitz had learned last night that Yoneda had rented a car at the Long Beach airport, and he passed the license number on to Finehouse; Finehouse, in turn, had given the license number to the LAPD and asked that they put out an Attempt to Locate bulletin for the car, describing Yoneda and her companion as persons of interest to Naval Intelligence. And an hour ago a Highway Patrol officer had spotted Yoneda’s Toyota Camry on the southbound 110 freeway, and pulled her over; but while the officer was still in his vehicle, reporting the fact that he had located the subject car, a crash-priority report of multiple shots fired and officers down on a nearby street had come over the radio, and the officer had sped off to assist—and of course the call had been a ruse, and Yoneda’s burner phone had been found on the freeway shoulder.
She’ll have ditched the car, Finehouse thought. They’re probably on a bus now, headed God knows where, with God knows what purpose. And Vickery, if that was Vickery running away from the cathedral this morning, managed to set me off on a wild goose chase after a bus that yielded nothing but a couple of bloody bandages stuck behind the bumper.
Cendravenir was stroking his disordered goatee, clearly trying to restore its pointed shape. “I bet the Highway Patrol is pissed,” he remarked.
They’ll certainly demand some information, thought Finehouse, which Lubitz will have to fabricate. I should start thinking seriously about how to disassociate myself from him if—when—operation Pleiades collapses and comes under harsh review.
After a hundred feet the path emerged from the trees onto a circular area of grass about three hundred feet across, on the far side of which, abutting a wooded slope, ran a blocky tan stone wall with three irregular holes which might have been entrances.
Finehouse quickly scanned the people standing or sitting on the grass, but none of them was Galvan. Looking more closely at the stone wall, he saw that it extended to the left, with two more entrances. The wall appeared to be made of giant stone blocks haphazardly stacked, and he wondered if it could be an abandoned movie set, until he remembered that Atkins had said it was the ruins of an old zoo.
Cendravenir was ambling to the right across the grass, and Finehouse caught Atkins’ eye and nodded. Cendravenir did claim to be a magician, and in this insane context his instincts might have value.
A narrow paved road ran in front of the wall, and to the right, past a cluster of trees and shrubbery, stood a line of cages. Cendravenir seemed to be walking toward them.
Finehouse caught up with the magician and, taking him by the shoulder, turned him around. “If she’s in one of those cages, she mustn’t see your damn Svengali beard again. Sit down. We’re picnickers, see? Sit,” he added to Atkins.
When the three of them were seated on the grass, Finehouse raised the binoculars and looked over Cendravenir’s shoulder at the cages a hundred feet away.
The cages were of close-set horizontal and vertical black rods, with a low stone wall and bench at the rear of each. The gates to the cages were all open, probably fixed. The cages weren’t big enough for an adult to stand upright inside, and Finehouse saw that only one had people in it.
He sharpened the focus, and recognized Anita Galvan’s profile in the shifting dappled shade. Sitting on the stone bench near her, facing Finehouse, was a young girl with long black hair, dressed in a white skirt and a paisley shawl.
Finehouse twisted the earbuds into his ears, then shook the shotgun microphone out of his sleeve, switched it on, and slid it back in place. He extended his arm and rested his wrist on Cendravenir’s shoulder.
“Hold still,” he snapped when Cendravenir tried to wiggle away. “I have to aim.”
He moved the microphone by fractions of an inch one way and then the other, and at one point the background whisper was suddenly voices.
“— tonight,” the girl was saying. “My father took his boat out at dawn for yellowtail, way out past Catalina and San Nicolas Island, and early this morning he radioed me—he saw the spacemen in their silver helmets, flying around in the sky. And the fishermen know—Naves espaciales por día, anillos de luz en la noche, spaceships by day, light rings at night—there will be the wheels in the sea tonight.”
“Wheels . . . in the sea,” said Galvan, almost too quietly for Finehouse’s microphone to pick up. “Okay. So the spacemen have shown up out at sea before? That’s no use—can’t lay lines of sugar and honey in the ocean.”
The girl’s voice said, “The spacemen many times appear where they’ve appeared not long before—it’s like coming through a hole they already made, before it can close up again.” Finehouse heard cloth shifting on stone, and the girl went on, “The symbol would maybe stop the spacemen, but even on streets the sugar and honey lines of it are . . . wooden swords and toy guns, okay? Your friend says he has the whole picture—how big? Like a poster? How can he get the spacemen to look at it?”
“Beats me,” came Galvan’s voice, “but he’s been clever in the past.” She laughed shortly. “To my cost. I loaned him a good concealment car this morning, but lately I’ve been putting back doors in ’em.”
“The brujas say ghosts are up,” came the girl’s voice again, “metronomes going like castanets, noise in the sky like thunder that is not thunder, pigeons flying everywhere marking the edges of the freeway auras. A vision of a woman in water at night intrudes on a lot of their visions.”
“A woman under water?” came Galvan’s voice.
“I think—no—more like the water is enclosing her. Some think it is the Virgin Mary.”
Finehouse slid the microphone out of his sleeve and turned it off, then yanked the earbuds out of his ears.
“This is just santeria bullshit,” he said to Atkins and Cendravenir. “Let’s go talk to her.” He stood up, wondering uneasily what the girl had meant by the symbol. Could these back-alley fortune-tellers actually have some means of impeding the UAPs?—preventing Operation Pleiades? And if so, what outlandish, undignified measures might he have to take to stop them?
Finehouse and his two companions strode across the grass, and when they were still fifty feet away, both faces in the cage turned toward them, and the girl in the shawl crouched out through the gate and began running down the road to the right. Atkins glanced at Finehouse, who shook his head.
“We just want to talk to Galvan,” he said, handing the tubular shotgun microphone to the agent.
Galvan had lit a cigarette, and she smiled at the three men when they walked up to the cage. Finehouse gestured for Atkins and Cendravenir to wait out on the road, and walked up the three old stone steps and bent to shuffle into the cage. He sat down on the stone bench where the girl had been sitting.
He sighed, then said, “It would be difficult to arrest you.”
“More difficult than you know,” Galvan agreed.
“Hah. I believe you.” He stretched and looked at the old bars overhead. “I think you meant to tell me how to find Vickery, last night when you telephoned that boy. You told him I hadn’t offered you any money, while of course I offered you ten thousand dollars.” Galvan opened her mouth to correct him, but he raised his hand and went on, “We followed the boy to the Catholic cathedral on Temple this morning—he seems actually to have found Vickery by using old cloths soaked in blood!”
Galvan looked past him at Cendravenir, who had moved back to stare to the right, toward the eccentric old zoo architecture. “Traveling with him,” she said, “you should be used to some weird developments.”
“I’m getting there. Faster than I’d like. We got the bloody cloth—two of them, actually—but instead of leading us to Vickery, they led me to a bus. Vickery put fresh blood on a couple of bandages and stuck them behind the bumper. We burned those, but now the bloody cloths just hang limp. No reception.” He sat back and smiled at Galvan. “I wondered why they had stopped working till I heard you say just now that you loaned him a concealment car.”
Galvan gave him a mocking grin. “The cold iron cage is just to stop ghosts from butting in. You’re showing off.”
Finehouse laughed quietly. “I guess I am. But you also said you’ve been putting back doors in your concealment cars—I assume that’s like backdoor code in computer software, to evade encryption and authentication. I don’t want to know what kitchen sorcery you use for it, but I assume you can override your own concealments and get in touch with him.”
She just stared at him.
“If you can,” Finehouse said, “tell him this. We will inevitably catch him and Ingrid Castine, but if he turns himself in, surrenders to me—you still have my card? Good—Ingrid Castine will face no charges or penalties, or even demotion, for anything she’s done in these last two days. If he doesn’t, she’ll be charged with all sorts of felonies. Theft of a government vehicle, assault on a government agent, abetting the escape of a suspected traitor, and those are just off the top of my head. She will certainly lose her current and any substantial future livelihood and spend a long time in prison. And I’ll see that you get ten thousand dollars if he surrenders as a result.”
He shifted as if to get up in the hunched posture the cage necessitated, then sat back and gave her a quizzical look. “A symbol in sugar and honey?”
Galvan just shrugged.
“To stop the spacemen,” Finehouse went on, “if they’ll look at it? Why would you want to stop us from getting in touch with the spacemen, as you call them? Can you imagine the benefits that contact with them might bring? A cure for—”
“Cancer,” said Galvan, “sure. Or Alzheimer’s or something. And anti-gravity cars.” She gave him a direct look. “Or maybe they’ll freeze the Earth solid.”
Finehouse cocked h head, frowning. “Freeze? Why should they freeze the Earth?”
Galvan opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Finally she said, “They’re spacemen. Who knows why they’d do anything?”
This time Finehouse did get up. “I’m afraid you have a closed mind.”
“And maybe you’re opening yours too wide. Careful you don’t fall out.”
He sighed. “A risk of the trade, it looks like.”
Finehouse ducked out of the cage and stood up straight. He turned back to face her through the bars and said, “Ten thousand dollars. And immunity for Castine.”
“If I hear from Vickery, I’ll tell him.”
At Franklin Castine pulled in to a grocery store parking lot to switch places with Vickery, and he was was now driving south on the 110 Freeway, with the skyscrapers of L.A. on his left. In a couple of miles he would pass the Third Street exit.
In the seat beside him, Castine was looking around. “Isn’t this . . .?”
Vickery nodded. “Just on the other side of the median, in the northbound lanes, is where we took an offramp that didn’t exist.”
“Three years ago?”
“Three years this April.”
Plowman leaned forward from the back seat. “Is that when you drove a taco truck into Hell? And flew out on a hang-glider?”
In the rear view mirror Vickery saw that Santiago was listening wide-eyed.
“It might as well have been Hell,” said Castine with a shiver. “It was the Labyrinth—Minotaur and all.” She peered to the left, but the median was too high to see over. “We had to make the hang-glider, out of vellum and fishing poles.”
“Which,” said Plowman, leaning back, “is of course impossible.”
“You should have seen these fishing poles.”
“And,” said Vickery, “we had to fly it into a tornado to get out. The hole back to the real world was up in the sky.”
“Somewhere over the rainbow,” muttered Plowman.
“It’s true,” said Santiago quietly. He didn’t go on, but Vickery recalled that a man who had been a surrogate father to the boy had driven a car into the Labyrinth in 1960, and got out again somehow.
Vickery had his eyes on the lane ahead when the dashboard metronome began rattling furiously back and forth and a scuffling started up in the back seat. He darted a quick glance at the rear view mirror—and his face was suddenly cold.
There was a third person in the middle of the seat back there, and Plowman and Santiago were crowded against the doors.
Castine had looked back, and now popped her seatbelt loose and turned around on her seat.
Vickery corrected his involuntary swerve in the lane and then peered into the rear-view mirror again for a closer look at the intruding figure.
It was an old woman in a shapeless black dress, with a thick black veil over her face.
“Don’t look her in the—” began Castine, but closed her mouth. It was clear that the veil would prevent anyone from looking the thing in the eye, if it had eyes.
Vickery could hear Plowman and Santiago breathing quickly through open mouths; and he caught a scent of mingled cocoa and mildew.
Vickery almost swerved again when the figure spoke. Its voice was a hoarse monotone against the staccato racket of the metronome: “Vickery, Betty Boop.”
Vickery just gripped the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the rushing pavement, but Castine exhaled and then said, “Uh . . . what?”
“This is Galvan,” the figure said.
“They—killed you?” grated Vickery; for the thing in the back seat was clearly a ghost, as Castine had instantly realized.
“No no,” said the ghost, “shut up, I plant tethered ghosts in my cars since you stole my Cadillac in ’18. I’ve got a back door link, and there’s a couple of this old lady’s fingerbones in the car for a handhold, and a couple more in this telephone I’m talking on. I can override her ghost, and talk.”
Vickery bent to grope on the floor, and found an empty paper cup; he straightened and put it over the metronome like a candle snuffer. The cup shook, but the rattle was muffled.
The ghost burst into a torrent of fast Spanish, and Santiago said quietly, “Saying the Rosary.”
In spite of the disruption, Vickery found a moment to pity the ghost, which like all ghosts was a semi-aware scrap of identity cast off when the trauma of death had separated the old woman’s body from her soul. The body, except for some finger bones, apparently, had doubtless gone into a grave, and the soul had gone on to whatever eternity awaited it—the good one, he guessed, unless praying was a habit this thing had picked up after its death— but the ghost must have wandered, lost, until Galvan had caught it and installed it in this twenty-year-old Dodge.
The ghost’s voice sputtered and choked to a halt, and Galvan came back on. “The Navy man has the old blood cloths Santiago tracked you with—he chased a bus you put fresh bloody bandages on, that was a good trick—and he knows you’ve got one of my cars, so don’t come back here until you’ve got rid of all the spacemen. A bunch of—”
The old woman’s ghost took over again, babbling in Spanish, and was again choked off.
“Damn,” said Galvan’s distorted voice. “I gotta get better control of these things. So listen—a bunch of flying saucers were over the ocean out past Catalina this morning, and there’ll be light-rings in the sea tonight. Naves espaciales por día, anillos de luz en la noche, spaceships by day, light rings at night. And the brujas have been having a vision of a woman enclosed in water who they think is the Virgin Mary. Don’t ask me. The spacemen appear in places they’ve appeared not long before, because the hole hasn’t all the way closed up yet. Don’t ask, I’m just telling you all the stuff I heard from my grand-niece, she walks around and talks to the quiet people. And—are you—”
The steering wheel jerked in Vickery’s hands in the same moment that the ghost exclaimed, “Hah!” and the lane divider bumps were a rapid drumming under the right-side tires. Vickery had just steered the car back into its lane when it happened again. He was vaguely aware that the ghost was bobbing in the back seat, and that Santiago was gripping the back of the driver’s seat. The paper cup had been flung off the metronome, and Castine picked it up and shoved it back over the wiggling pendulum.
“Don’t math her out!” gasped Galvan from the ghost’s ectoplasmic throat as Vickery straightened the speeding car once more. “I can—hold her.” The car remained steady for several seconds, and then for several seconds more. “There,” said Galvan, “I’m holding her back. She lived in Cerritos, I think she wants to drive back there. The Navy man gave me a message for you, Vick—turn yourself in, and Betty Boop won’t face any of the felony charges they’re ready to hit her with. Total immunity, even keep her job, or else years in prison and work in a car wash when she gets out. I can give you his phone number.”
“He doesn’t want it,” said Castine.
“Well, we ought to have it in any—” Vickery began, then had to shove the gear shift into neutral, for the gas pedal had dropped away from his foot and now lay flat against the floor. The engine went on roaring as the car coasted in the lane and he signaled for a lane-change to the right. He was sure the old engine would blow its head gasket, but after ten long seconds it subsided, and the temperature gauge needle stayed vertical.
He clicked the gear shift lever back into drive and kept his hand on it, but the car was behaving normally again. The speed had dropped to sixty miles per hour, but he didn’t accelerate to get back into the faster lane.
“She wants to get to Cerritos in a hurry,” he said breathlessly. He looked in the rear-view mirror, but Plowman and Santiago were alone back there. Castine slumped down in her seat.
“Boss?” Vickery called. “You still with us?”
There was no answer, but the muted metronome was still shaking the paper cup. The steering wheel began straining to the right, and he had to exert increasing counter-pressure to hold it steady.
Castine patted the dashboard beside the covered metronome as if soothing a restive dog. “Can you drive?” she asked Vickery. “If we ditch this car, that ONI guy will be able to track us by our blood.”
“Sorry,” said Santiago meekly.
“Done is done, kid,” said Vickery. The ghostly tugging at the wheel abated, slowly enough so that he was able to let his muscles relax and keep the car from swerving again. He kept a firm grip on the steering wheel with his left hand and kept his right hand on the gear shift lever, ready to throw it into neutral again.
“Santiago, I can drop you and Plowman off somewhere as soon as I get this thing off the freeway.” He glanced at Castine and said, “I can drive, if I hang on tight and be ready for her tricks. But I don’t dare do it on freeways.”
Castine shook her head in agreement. “As long as we’re getting off the freeway, I wouldn’t mind finding a rest room.”
“Seconded,” growled Plowman.
The radio wasn’t turned on, but over the rattling of the paper cup a hoarse voice shook out of the speaker: “Los truenos son ellos.”
“The thunder is them,” translated Santiago. “I’ll go with you, for a while, at least. Laquedem would.” Vickery recalled that Laquedem was the name of the old man who had taken care of Santiago when the boy had been a homeless fugitive.
Vickery glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He had known of Santiago for years, probably since the boy had been about ten, and since 2017 their paths had intersected from time to time. The boy must have been about fifteen by now. Santiago had always apparently made some sort of living in the supernatural underworld of Los Angeles as a courier and watcher. Three years ago Vickery had described him to Castine as freelance—not loyal, but honest, to an extent.
“Thanks,” said Vickery.
“For a while, at least,” Santiago repeated.
“I,” Plowman began; then went on more quietly, “I last saw Becky in 1993. She was ten years old. Birthday party. She—loved me.”
Vickery recalled Linda Loma saying that Becky had killed herself eleven years ago, therefore at the age of . . . twenty-six. There was really nothing to say.
He steered the car off the freeway at the Seventh Street exit and drove carefully past the big Salvation Army headquarters.
“Trudy,” Plowman said, and Vickery recalled that that was the name of the old man’s daughter who currently lived in Yucaipa, “hates me. But maybe by saving her . . .” He shifted on the seat. “I’ll go with you. God help me.”
“God help us, every one,” said Santiago softly.