Elsewhere Page 8

  “You listen to me, Coltrane. Your old man got what he deserved. He’s damn lucky he was just sent to Folsom instead of being cut down for good. Can you get your head around that?”

  With his real father safe in another America, but with Amity at risk here, Jeffy said, “Yes. You’re right. He’s a stubborn man. He always has been.”

  “Frank knew the price he might have to pay for being on the wrong side. Some thought you were in it with him, but most of us gave you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Starkman looked doubtful. “Do you really?”

  “I know . . . I know who owns the future.” That didn’t sound right. “I want to be a part of it, the better world you’re making.”

  “Now you make me wonder,” Starkman continued, “coming around here. To what purpose? Did you mean to threaten my family?”

  “No, no. Not at all. I just did it for the girl. She doesn’t understand why . . . why my dad did what he did, why he fell in with the wrong crowd. I don’t understand any more than she does, but I wanted to show her, you know, how before he went so far off the rails, he did some good things, he was a great craftsman, he—”

  Jeffy embarrassed himself with his obsequious tone, though if he had been any less deferential, he might have invited trouble from which there would be no escape. His babble was as tedious as it was servile, so boring that Starkman dismissed him by cutting him off in midsentence. Turning to Amity, he said, “So who are you, young lady? What do you have to do with Frank Coltrane?”

  Abruptly Jeffy remembered that the version of himself native to this world lived alone and evidently had no daughter.

  The risk they’d taken by lingering in a strange timeline became manifest. This moment was a trap that one wrong word could spring.

  Again, his daughter proved quick and convincingly innocent. “Uncle Frank lived in our block. He’s not my uncle, really, but he’s always been, you know, so sweet to me and my dog, Snowball. I know he did a major bad thing and had to be sent away, but I wonder how he could be so nice and so bad at the same time. I guess the nice part must have been like a trick, and that makes me sad.”

  Starkman’s eyes remained as dark with suspicion as with pigment. “What did you mean by saying my boy is your half brother?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t be a real brother, just like Uncle Frank wasn’t my real uncle. But like if I join the Wolves, you know, the Justice Wolves, then him and me, we’d be friends, like in the same pack, brother wolf and sister wolf in the same pack.”

  Starkman stared at her for a beat, and then he focused once more on Jeffy. “Your father’s an agitator against youth enlistment. He said the state was turning children into robots. He said we were brain-fucking them.”

  Jeffy ducked his head and nodded. “My father’s stuck in the past. He hates change, progress. He can make you crazy in just two minutes, the way he rants.”

  “You know this girl’s parents well?”

  “Very well.”

  “What’s her last name?”

  “Crowley,” Jeffy said without hesitation.

  The Crowley family, with a daughter named Jennifer, lived on his father’s street in Earth Prime, though maybe not here on Earth 1.13.

  Nearly forty thousand people lived in Jeffy’s Suavidad Beach. Even if there were only half that many residents in this parallel reality, Dennis Starkman couldn’t know all of them.

  However, perhaps in this world Mr. Crowley had been executed or sent off to a prison camp. If his daughter was already a member of the Wolves and was known to Starkman, then Jeffy had just sprung the trap that Amity had avoided triggering.

  For the first time since they followed the brick walkway to the front steps, the sound of a vehicle rose in the street. A black van with heavily tinted windows, like the one in which Erasmus Gifford had been taken away, turned the corner and approached.

  Starkman glanced at the van and then addressed Jeffy again. “You tell the Crowleys they shouldn’t have let Frank Coltrane spew his hatred to this girl.”

  “I will. I’ll tell them.”

  “You also tell them to take her into city hall tomorrow and sign her up for the Justice Wolves.”

  “If you say they should, they will. They believe in the cause. They’re good people.”

  If the van swung to the curb in front of the house, he would have to act. Pull the key to everything from his pocket. Switch it on. That would take two or three seconds. When Snowball had pounced on it, the screen required maybe four seconds to fill with a soft gray light and a few more seconds before the buttons labeled Home, Return, Select appeared. A total of ten or eleven seconds. So then he would grab Amity by the hand, press Home—which might take three more seconds. From the moment he decided to act, they would be gone in perhaps fourteen seconds.

  Unless he fumbled with the device.

  Unless he dropped it.

  Fourteen seconds was an eternity. Supposing when Jeffy drew the device from his jacket, Starkman thought he was going for a weapon, a knife. The sonofabitch wouldn’t need fourteen seconds to draw the pistol and fire. Not a trigger-happy fascist like him. Even if he realized that the device wasn’t a weapon, he would intuit that it must be in some way a threat. He might knock it out of Jeffy’s hand.

  The van didn’t pull to the curb, but instead cruised past like a motorized gondola floating along a Styx of blacktop, its occupants barely discernible behind windows as dark as their intentions.

  Starkman said, “The recruiter will be waiting for her in city hall at nine tomorrow. He’ll have her name—Amity Crowley.”

  “Nine o’clock,” Jeffy said. “Her folks will be there with her.”

  “It’s pretty cool being a wolf, I bet,” said Amity. “Rudy’s uniform was totally the thing.”

  “I’m sorry if we’ve been any trouble,” Jeffy said. “We didn’t mean to inconvenience anyone.”

  He took his daughter by the hand and led her off the porch, down the steps, along the front walk to the street.

  As the van motored east, Jeffy and Amity turned west.

  When they had gone half a block, he dared to glance back.

  Dennis Starkman had descended from the porch. He stood on his front lawn, watching them, talking on a cell phone. Talking to whom? Checking that the Crowley family had a daughter named Amity?

  The girl, too, saw what was happening, and she started to walk faster.

  Tightening his grip on her hand, Jeffy said, “Slow. Be casual. We don’t want him to think we’re making a break for it.”

  That advice made sense only for as long as it took him to give it.

  From a distance behind them came the sudden bark of brakes. The sound of the van’s engine changed. Eastbound a moment earlier, it was coming west now, closing on them from behind.

  20

  Neither a siren nor a blaring horn commanded them to halt, and they turned left from Bastoncherry onto another residential street. The instant they were out of sight of Starkman, they broke into a run, Amity still holding her father’s hand, Jeffy seeking somewhere that they could get out of sight. The van was maybe five seconds behind them, not fourteen, so there was no time to stop and use the key to everything. Houses stood to the left and right. No one in view. Then a police car turned the corner less than one block ahead of them, coming this way, its lightbar displaying like a vintage jukebox waiting for someone to drop a nickel.

  He pulled Amity off the sidewalk, and they raced across a front yard to a gate at the side of the house. He fumbled with a gravity latch, and the gate opened. As they hurried toward the back of the house, a loudspeaker—on the patrol car or the black van—boomed like the voice of a forty-foot giant who had come down a beanstalk.

  “POLICE PUR
SUIT! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT! LOCK YOUR DOORS! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT!”

  The grass in the backyard needed mowing, the swimming pool contained no water, and one of the seats on a child’s swing set dangled uselessly on a single chain. The house seemed to be without a tenant until the kitchen door opened and a man charged onto the covered patio.

  He was all jowls and wattle and belly, barefoot, with a fringe of Friar Tuck hair and an insane gleam in his eyes, wearing gray sweatpants and a soiled white T-shirt. He carried what might have been a croquet mallet, with no intention of offering to play a game, either an obedient citizen and true believer in the police state, or a guy who saw a chance to ingratiate himself with the authorities by bashing a little girl and her father.

  Jeffy put the empty swimming pool between them and their would-be attacker, though they were all heading toward the same end of it, where they would inevitably meet.

  To Amity, he said, “Over the wall,” by which he meant the wall between this property and the next.

  That barrier stood between seven and eight feet tall. She might have found it insurmountable if it hadn’t been festooned with a decades-old, espaliered jasmine vine with gnarled woody runners two and three inches thick, offering plenty of footholds and handholds.

  As Amity sprinted to the wall and began to claw her way up through the foliage, as Friar Tuck angled toward her with the mallet raised, Jeffy picked up a terra-cotta pot from the patio deck. The vessel was maybe two feet in diameter, and though the withered red-flowering vine geranium in it was suffering a near-death experience, the pot was full of dirt. It was too heavy to be snatched up on the run, and yet he snatched it up; too heavy to be lifted over his head, and yet he lifted it over his head; too damn cumbersome to be thrown like a basketball, and yet he threw it. The thought of that mallet coming down on the back of Amity’s head instantly turned his brain into an adrenaline factory and set his heart to pounding as if he had reached the last mile marker of a marathon.

  Like a boulder launched from a catapult, the pot crashed into the would-be child basher before he reached his victim, staggering him. He went to his knees on the decking. The mallet clattered out of his hand, almost tumbled into the drained pool, and came to rest on the concrete coping. Spewing four-letter words in a deranged but colorful rant that suggested a deep though not broad vocabulary, the demonic croqueteur scrambled to his feet and lunged to recover his weapon.

  Jeffy reached it first. He lacked the homicidal passion to swing for his adversary’s head, went low instead, and kneecapped the guy’s left leg. Shouted obscenities thinned into a high-pitched squeal of pain. The man collapsed, clutching his cracked knee with both hands. Any further threat he might have posed was eliminated when, having fallen at the edge of the empty pool, he rolled onto his back and lost his balance and did another half turn and slid down the sloped wall, howling as if under the misapprehension that he was gliding down a chute to Hell.

  Throwing away the mallet, Jeffy turned to the property wall in time to see Amity disappear over the top. As he went after her, the police loudspeaker rocked the day with a call to arms.

  “CITIZENS RESPOND! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT! HALT AND DETAIN! CITIZENS RESPOND!”

  Hardly a minute after being told to lock their doors, they were being commanded to fling them open and join the hunt.

  Because his weight was greater than the girl’s, even the thick runners of the ancient jasmine vine sagged and split under him. He clambered up through a noisy crackling of wood, torn green leaves, and sweet-smelling tiny white flowers cascading to the ground behind him. When he reached the top, he saw Amity in another backyard, this one greener and more recently mowed than the previous property, sans pool, but graced by a birdbath and an English garden in which flourished pink phlox and Firecandle and May Night and blue poppies.

  A white-haired couple rushed at Amity, as though with concern for the child’s welfare, but instead grabbed her to prevent her from escaping.

  21

  The man appeared to be in his seventies, but he wasn’t frail. He must have been a strapping specimen in his youth, footballer and gym rat. He remained formidable, like a monster pickup truck with a quarter million miles on it but still able to uproot an oak by means of a tow chain. With his wreath of snowy hair and cherry-red nose, even without a generous belly, he could have played Santa Claus, although at the moment he was a psycho Santa, eyes bulging and face wrenched and teeth bared as if to bite, perhaps a patriotic citizen or just a retiree worried that his pension would be taken away if he allowed these enemies of the state to escape. He grabbed Amity by one arm, and when she tried to pull away, he seized her throat with his other hand.

  Leaping off the wall between properties, Jeffy shouted not at his daughter’s assailant, but at Amity, reminding her of how she had been taught to deal with the hordes of bogeymen, some real and some imagined, whose dark intentions were the stuff of a father’s worst nightmares. “Nutcracker!” he cried. “Nutcracker, nutcracker!”

  Perhaps the girl needed no reminder, because even as Jeffy shouted, she drove one knee hard into her attacker’s crotch. When the old man convulsed and let go of her throat, she gave him the knee again, harder than the first time. In an instant, his flushed face turned as gray as the cardigan he wore. He bent over, cupping his broken stones, staggered sideways and then backward, as though practicing a dance step that he was too awkward to master, and sat on the yard with an expression that suggested he had for the first time in his life taken seriously the concept of a wrathful God.

  The old woman’s cardigan was pink, complementing a pale-blue blouse and matching blue slacks with a pink belt, but in spite of that rather cheerful ensemble, her face was as severe as that of a witch who could call forth a squadron of flying monkeys. Her eyes burned with hatred. Maybe she was too arthritic to make use of the nutcracker defense effectively, but she had no need to resort to that because she had a garden spade with a three-foot handle. She swung it at Jeffy with the earnest desire to cut him with the edge of the shovel’s blade or concuss him with the flat of it, and then perhaps drive the point through his neck as he lay on his back on the grass.

  At her age, such a ferocious assault should have been of brief duration, consisting of three or four lunges with the spade before her body reminded her of the decades of strain it had previously endured. However, she seemed indefatigable, slashing at Jeffy, forcing him to duck and backstep as the shovel carved the air—whoosh, whoosh—with all the seeming lethality of a broadsword. Out in the street, the mobile loudspeaker continued to call to arms all loyal citizens, while the harpy in pink and blue snarled invective in counterpoint to her industrious work with the spade—“You fucking traitor . . . shitface creep . . . puke-eating scum”—like a grandmother possessed by a demonic entity.

  As grandpa lay on his side in the fetal position, whimpering and willing himself to be reborn, Amity snatched up a bucket in which a dozen freshly cut roses stood. She swung it at the woman, scattering the flowers and the few inches of water that sustained them.

  The pail met the spade-wielder’s head with a sound like a cheap bell, staggering her but not rendering her unconscious. She dropped her weapon and weaved away toward the birdbath, where she leaned with both hands on the rim of that bowl, as if dizzy.

  Amity grinned at her father, a rather wild-eyed manic grin, and he grinned at her as he snatched up the spade. He threw it over the wall, into the neighboring yard, where the kneecapped man was no doubt still lying at the bottom of the empty pool and wondering why he’d thought that it was a good idea to rush to the service of the nation.

  A weird exhilaration overcame Jeffy, a motivating astonishment that he and Amity, having been cast into this maelstrom of mortal threats, were proving so quick and competent. Like characters in one of the fantasy novels they enjoyed. He was a guy who restored old radios a
nd yearned to live in the past, a guy whose wife walked out on him, and Amity was but a slip of a girl, yet they were alive and free when by now they should have been captured and in chains. Their daring and spirit inspired him to believe they could handle this, split this dismal America, and flash across the multiverse to their own and better world.

  The harpy turned from the birdbath and came at Amity as if she would claw the girl’s eyes out. Jeffy interceded, snared the woman by her cardigan, spun her around, and shoved her facedown into a bed of red and purple primulas. He’d never imagined that he could treat a woman so roughly, let alone one old enough to be a grandmother, but he’d also never imagined that he would encounter a homicidal, geriatric champion of a police state.

  “You are the goat!” Amity declared.

  For an instant, Jeffy indeed almost felt he was the greatest of all time, father and stalwart defender. Even though his fear did not in the least relent, his confidence swelled. Perhaps dangerously.

  The barrier between this property and the next was not a wall like the one that he and Amity had scaled only a minute earlier, but instead a wrought-iron fence in front of which grew periwinkle and Cistus and golden candle and holly flame pea. Before they could even consider clambering over it, however, two policemen appeared in the neighboring yard. One of them had drawn his pistol.

  On his hands and knees, the crotch-kicked man growled as he tried to get up, and his wife spat out primula petals.

  A fence at the back of the property featured a gate to an alleyway where a black van now glided into view.

  They couldn’t flee to the street in front of the residence, because that was where some vehicle with a loudspeaker continued to blare warnings about enemies of the state.

  Men in black were getting out of the van in the alley, and the police in the next yard were rushing toward the wrought-iron fence, and a long soft peal of thunder rumbled through the lowering sky.