The Patch of the Odin Soldier, page 9
Then Lincoln saw a car weaving through the traffic toward them. He suggested a greater speed. Oberon suggested a method of lightening the load. The pursuing automobile pulled up behind them and rode the bumper.
“Lincoln,” Molly said when she noticed.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Know what?” Oberon asked fearfully, thinking of the salad and the electrified metal detector.
There was no time for an answer.
The back window shattered at an explosion, and when Molly screamed, Lincoln saw Officer Oberon slump over the wheel—in the lefthand lane, doing eighty-three miles per hour and his foot jammed on the accelerator.
ELEVEN
At Linc’s order, and too terrified to protest the insanity of it all, Molly reached clumsily across the unconscious Oberon and did her best to grab the wheel. The Corvette swerved from lane to lane sharply as she sought a straight line from the awkward angle of her perception. Another volley of gunshots perforated the backs of the seats. Linc squeezed himself as best he could toward the lefthand well and yanked at Oberon’s leg. It was stiff. He punched at it, snarled at it, punched again and finally managed to slide the foot away from the accelerator. Then, paying no attention to Molly’s yelping protests, and trying not to pay attention to the sickening sway and lurch of the car, he leaned back, stretched out his own foot and aimed for the brake pedal.
He missed.
He aimed again, and missed again.
The angle was wrong, Oberon’s legs were too tangled, and Molly kept bleating about becoming a statistic.
A truck loomed ahead of them, its running lights amber and red, its wheels almost as large as the Corvette itself.
Linc wondered why the hell the car was still going so fast, and when he looked down saw that the foot was indeed away, but the toes were not. With a groan he tried a third time, then cursed and opened his door, held onto the handle and leaned out slightly. The wind tore through his hair and nearly blinded him; the sounds of freeway traffic finally catching on and getting out of the way made him grimace in anticipation of a collision; but by keeping his grip on the handle and holding onto the car’s frame over the door he was able, after kicking at Oberon’s legs again, to stretch out his own foot and jab at the brake, a second time, and a third before he connected.
The Corvette belched smoke from its undercarriage, filling his eyes with a harsh stinging and his nostrils with an acrid stench that made him gag.
The truck moved over into the middle lane.
So did the Corvette.
He stabbed at the brake again, swearing at the top of his voice when his foot kept slipping off.
Molly aimed precariously for the left lane and instead reached the narrow shoulder, scraping the car’s side with a metallic shriek before rebounding and nearly fishtailing.
A shot webbed the glass of the passenger door over Linc’s head, and another came within a hand’s breadth of shattering his elbow.
The brake again, and it seemed to him they were finally slowing down. The rest of the night-time traffic was not, however, and it blew past him, shaking him, making him realize that even if he wanted to, he would be unable to get back into the car.
He was stuck, about four inches above the road’s surface, and his hands were slipping from both frame and handle.
He yelled wordlessly over the roar of the wind, and attempted to regrip the frame. Perspiration made his fingers slick, and tension made them increasingly weaker. His rump began to slide off the seat, and he could feel without imagining it the rush of the road under his hip pocket.
The car shifted right again, into the next lane, definitely slower but not slow enough.
He aimed another lunge at the brake. As he did, successfully, his left hand came away from the car and he flailed wildly before swinging it over to grab onto the top of the door. Now he was facing downward, watching the reflecting lights buried in the dividing lines wink past him in a blur.
His right hand slipped away from the handle, and he swung again, grabbing onto the frame alongside his seat. Now he was chest down to the road, and when he looked behind he saw the black car closing in on him, on the inside lane.
Sonofabitch is going too fast, he thought.
It closed, and he could see the silhouettes of the two men in the front seat. Neither was reaching out a window with a gun; they were going to be content to clip him in half.
His left hand began slipping.
His right hand cramped.
A pebble kicked up from the road and took a small piece of his left cheek.
The other car was close enough now so that the headlamps blinded him, and he turned away, into the wind, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to think of a short, powerful prayer about now.
Then the Corvette suddenly lurched, bucked, slowed considerably and swayed into the righthand lane ahead of the black car. The shoulder, then, and when he chanced a look up he saw that the verge was bordered by a hill. A very close hill that was going to give him a haircut if Molly didn’t do something soon.
Another bucking, more lurching, and just as his left hand gave way, with nothing else to cling to, the Corvette came to a shuddering, backfiring stop.
“Damn,” Molly said, “I hate standard transmissions.”
He lay on his back on the slick grassy hillside, arms akimbo, his eyes closed and his ears paying no heed to the noise of passing traffic. In an odd way, he was hoping he was dead. Molly sat beside him, legs up and chin on her knees, one hand plucking at the grass and scattering the blades to the wind. Once in a while, her teeth began chattering. Every so often she would break into a violent trembling and hug her shins until she stopped; every so often he felt his arms falling off and would wiggle his fingers to be sure he still had his hands.
The Corvette sat on the shoulder, Oberon slumped behind the wheel.
“Well,” she said at last, her voice high and weak, “at least my hair is straight now.”
“Wonderful.”
She let her gaze follow the traffic’s flow, side to side as if watching a tennis match that bored her silly.
“Those men—”
“They won’t be back. They figure if I’m not dead, I’m at least too battered to do much damage.”
“Wow, how do you know that?”
“They’re stupid.”
“And how do you know that?”
“They work for Florenz Cull.”
“I see.”
An ambulance wailed past them, and she pulled away from it, wincing. “We can’t stay here long, y’know. A cop’s going to be by pretty soon and want to know what we’re doing here, in the middle of the night.”
“Where was he before, when we needed him?”
She shrugged, and watched the lights of the warehouses and homes across the freeway.
“I don’t think,” he said, “we’re far from the airport.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can smell the fuel they use.”
“Oh.”
He pushed himself up, grunting, to a sitting position. “It’s a talent we acrophobes develop.”
“Oh.”
He rubbed his face hard with his palms, brushed back his hair, and took a deep breath. Coughed. Wrinkled his nose at the layer of August smog that hung over the valley, and tried to remember what breathing was like back in Maine.
“What,” she said, “are we going to do about Officer Oberon? Is he dead?”
She swallowed before nodding.
“Damn.”
She looked at him sideways. “Do people always die when they meet up with you? I mean, do you always cause this much trouble?”
Slipping a little on the grass, he rose and stretched, took her arm and brought her to her feet. After a perfunctory dusting of their clothes, he led her to the car, peered in and confirmed the man’s condition—there were three small bullet holes along the length of his spine.
“No,” he said as he closed the door. “Not always.”
“But sometimes.”
With a hitch of his belt, he headed toward the exit ramp a hundred yards distant. “I remind you, Miss Partridge, that bringing me into this was your idea, not mine. I am a tailor by profession, and only occasionally an idiot who does things for people who won’t let him alone until he does it.”
Tagging along beside him, at times nearly skipping to keep up, she frowned. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“But you are a lot of trouble.”
Rather than shove her in front of the nearest automobile, he walked on, leading her silently off the ramp and onto a broad thoroughfare lined with dead cars at the curbs and seedy, darkened shops. In the near distance, southward, he saw a gaudy billboard advertising a cut-rate, splendid, no-frills but all the necessities tour of the entire Hawaiian Island chain, though certain restrictions applied and not all planes were available for this incredible offer.
“A sign,” he said in a tone of mock revelation.
“I can see it,” she told him grumpily. “And I can read, too.”
He sighed without a sound and walked on. It didn’t take him long to realize, somewhat gloomily, that they were the only two human beings within sight who were moving on their feet, perhaps the only two in the entire city, and most certainly in this particular neighborhood which, as they left the first hour behind them, changed into one filled with low office buildings with spotlighted fountains, motels with spotlighted palm trees, and the occasional service station and twenty-four-hour food market spotlighted with signs large enough to be seen in Arizona. The noise of arriving and departing aircraft increased, the aftermath of the overhead roaring creating a deeper silence than he would have liked. Even the infrequent automobiles seemed to have muffled their engines and their tires and the music that should have been blaring from their open windows.
A neon sign buzzed at them as they passed beneath it.
The street shimmered as if coated with water and oil.
Midway through their second hour she took his hand, less a token of affection than a quest for security.
At the next service station they waited in the shadows until a series of cars were lined up at the pumps and a handful of people milled about, asking directions and arguing over prices; then they used the none-too-sanitary rest rooms to clean themselves up, examine their bruises, and surrender to the unavoidable fact that a week at a health spa would still leave their essential humanity in serious question.
“Mr. Blackthorne,” she said as they moved on, signs to LAX finally in abundance, “this isn’t fun.”
“You could say that.”
“I mean, there is a certain amount of logic in continuing this madness since it’s frowned upon to leave important work undone in this society, especially when it deals with matters of cataclysm and lost culture. But it isn’t fun anymore.”
“It was before?”
“A little. Maine is nice, the moose were nice—”
“Moose?”
“Sure.”
“What moose?”
“The ones I saw after that truck nearly ran us down in that picnic area. Three or four of them, I think. I didn’t really stop to get a close look.”
“Three or four,” he said flatly.
“Sure. And rowing on the river was nice, too. Kind of romantic, in a way.”
He refused to nod or shake his head. Any movement now other than simply walking was, he was positive, going to cause his arms to foil from his shoulders, and his legs to crumble from his aching hips. A reaction to his recent experience, and the strain his muscles took, though understanding that didn’t make any of it any more bearable.
Then, suddenly, he stopped on a corner, took her gently by the shoulders and smiled. “Molly,” he said, “Oberon bothers you.”
“Yes.” She would not meet his gaze. “We … we just left him there.”
“Yes, we did. If we had waited for a policeman, we would have had to answer a lot of questions, the answers to which no one would understand. Not to mention the fact that Molahu and Takana were not around to share the blame.”
“I understand that,” she insisted softly, “but—”
“It isn’t going to get any better, not with Florenz Cull after our hides, and your brother’s.”
“I guess.”
“And if you want to forget it and go on home, wherever that is, it’s all right.”
She seemed to consider it as she pushed her hair away from her eyes. “What about you?”
“Not now. Before, it was ridiculous. Now it’s personal. Besides,” he said, grinning, “if you don’t want to save the world, I’m going to have to.”
She was slow in smiling, but when it finally came he was relieved, and with arms about each other’s waists they crossed the wide street and headed cautiously for the terminal. Just shy of the entrance they crossed over into the vast parking lot and waited for nearly an hour behind a charitably described junk heap that had taken up two spaces in order to preserve its rustic finish. They watched the pedestrian traffic for signs of Cull and his men or any inquisitive police; they discussed the relative merits of the airlines they should take to the Islands, Lincoln making a strong but futile case for an ocean liner out of Long Beach; and Molly did her best, with comb and spit, to make them both look presentable.
Finally, he decided they would either have to pay a fee or make their move. With a touch to Molly’s arm, then, they walked as fast as they could without running into the brightly lit ticket area. “And another thing,” he said before they reached the counter. “What?”
“Being on that river was not romantic.”
“Good god, don’t you like water, either?”
“You could drown in it, don’t you know that? The stuff gets into your lungs and prohibits the breathing apparatus from functioning properly and good god, I’m starting to sound like you.”
“I think,” she muttered sourly, “I’ve made a mistake.”
“Indeed you have,” said Florenz Cull from behind them.
Lincoln whirled, but could do nothing about the way the tall man hugged him as though they were old friends meeting at the airport; nor could he do anything about the stabbing he felt in his side.
It burned.
It spread rapidly to his arms and legs and paralyzed them.
Then it spread to his eyes, and Cull’s white hair turned slowly black.
TWELVE
It was, without a doubt, the most impressive beast he had ever seen, and certainly worth the wait after all the trouble he had gone through to find one—a bull moose that looked nothing like Teddy Roosevelt, with an antler spread that almost forbade it travel in the forest, with a bulk that made the ground tremble as it walked in its own stately procession, and with one unwinking white eye that stared mercilessly at him as it rode him across the undulating plain. He had no idea what he was doing riding a moose, and the faster the beast moved the more uneasy he became. It was one thing to observe these creatures in their natural habitat; it was quite another to hitch a ride on one, especially when it was wearing a flowered shirt and a lei about its neck.
Then it tripped in some unseen depression, and though its eye never wavered he felt himself beginning to fall. His stomach crept rapidly toward his throat, and his brain decided to expand through the gaps left by the hair that had deserted his scalp. He flailed for balance, moaning loudly that he didn’t want to die under the rampaging hooves of a maddened denizen of a black forest, and suddenly, with a strength he didn’t know he had, he thrust himself erect.
The moose vanished.
The eye sped skyward until it transformed itself into the moon.
And Molly looked at him quizzically. “Have you,” she said, “ever thought about seeing somebody for this fascination you have with mooses?”
“Moose,” he corrected. “And how the hell did you get here?”
“I was carried,” she said sourly. “They didn’t think I could walk on my own.”
“They?”
“For god’s sake, Lincoln, wake up, will you? We’re in trouble. Serious trouble.”
He accepted a damp cloth she pressed into his hand and used it to wipe his face, the back of his neck, and did his best to clear his eyes. When he thought he could see and think straight, he looked around and found himself in an airliner’s seat, a very wide, leather one, in a cabin that held only a dozen of them. Some were placed around tables bolted to the deck; others were by themselves as though to signal privacy. The walls were papered in soft dawn colors, and when he looked behind him toward the rear of the craft, he could see a silver Chinese screen separating this area from another behind. The deck was carpeted in a deep wine, and when he looked up he could see a series of small perforations which, he supposed, were part of a fire extinguishing system.
Ahead, past the galley, he could see the door to the cockpit, and in front of it, Eddie Takana sitting in a chair with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes tightly closed. In his lap was a crossbow.
“Well, I’ll be double-damned,” he said with something akin to disgusted admiration. “We’ve been kidnapped.”
Molly rolled her eyes and dropped back in her seat.
“Lincoln,” he said then.
“That’s right,” she said, looking a bit worried now. “That’s your name.”
“No, no. I mean, you called me Lincoln before instead of Mr. Blackthorne.” He stretched, realizing he wasn’t tied or chained or nailed to his seat. The mild turbulence that had awakened him had passed, and when he looked out the window and down, all he could see was the moon reflected in an avenue of silver across rolling waves.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she told him. “I did it in the heat of the moment.”
“We’re over the ocean,” he announced, snapping away from the window. “There are waves and things down there.”
“That’s right.”
He frowned, shook his head to scatter the last effects of the drug he’d been administered, and sighed. “We’re on our way to Hawaii.”
