Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (25 page)

I just did not know how long I could wait
for that.

We set off for Ojai at a few minutes past
ten. I had a date at midnight, remember, with Oom-ray-key-too.

I took the coast highway
up, through Malibu and Oxnard. Alison kept far to her side of the
car all the way. While easing through Malibu I asked her, "Still
playing with your numbers?"

She replied softly, "Bastard."

It was our first verbal exchange since the
invasion.

I said, "You're right, of course. I
apologize. But I won't alibi it. I did it deliberately. I might do
it again, too, if I have to. I am not playing parlor games here,
kid. People have lost their lives in this game already. You or I
could be next. So you sit there and mix that in with your numbers.
When you decide that perhaps it's best to pool the resources here,
I'm ready to listen to you."

She asked, grim-voiced, "What did you get
from me?"

I showed her a sober smile. "I calculate
there were roughly seventy-five to eighty pricks under the tables
back there."

She flared: "Jesus, Ashton! That's that's
just—"

I said, "Yeah, right, it's despicable."

She turned toward her
window, chin on fist, sat silent for perhaps ten seconds, then
laughed softly, said, "It's so hard to stay mad at you."

I shrugged, replied, "So you may as well
quit trying. I also picked up on your Twelve."

She said disgustedly, "Shit!"

I said, "Yeah. I'm ready to listen to you,
kid."

“
I'm not ready to talk to
you, Ashton.”

"Let me talk to you, then.
You can tell me how far off I am. Either you are one of The Twelve
or you work for them."

"I said I'm not talking to you, Ashton."

"Close, though?"

She fidgeted. "I won't say how close."

"You folks have had Jim Cochran and Frank
Valdiva on your payroll all these many years. I'd say about ten
years."

"Jesus
Christ
, Ashton."

"You're sponsoring Vicky and Manuel, aren't
you."

"Wait! Just wait right there! I told you I
am not talking to you! So just cut it out!"

"You were dispatched when the thing turned
violent. Wasn't supposed to work that way. Terrible glitch. And
there lay poor May-un-chee-tee, Vicky's natural mother, with her
head bashed in. Your own damned agent did it to her. So what are
you? The Wizard of Womanland? You can put it all back together
again, like Humpty Dumpty?"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

"The hell I will!
Damn
you! Damn you,
Alison, and all your wonderful Twelve! Who the hell gave you guys
the God franchise around here? Those poor little kids don't know
who they are or where they are right now! And their mother—yes,
dammit, their
mother,
the only one they've ever known, is totally abandoned and
left to bleed in the trenches. What's worse than being a widow is
to be the widow of a disgraced cop—and that's the way this is going
to come out, isn't it. Beaudfid, beautiful job you guys did
here!"

Alison was crying.

And, shit, I cannot handle female tears.

I reached over and touched
her, said, "Hey. If the shoe binds, don't wear it. It isn't yours.
I'm sorry. But if you're not going to talk to me, kid, I am just
naturally going to assume the worst. So tell me the way it is. So
we can both feel better."

She dabbed at her eyes
with a tissue, leaned her head against the window, said, very
quietly, “The fucking shoe fits very well, Ashton. But it was built
for binding. And I cannot get it off. So we'll both just have to go
on feeling...”

I sighed, said, "Well, maybe it's a
Cinderella slipper."

"How so?"

"Maybe it will slip right off come
midnight."

She shivered, touched me
lightly on the cheek with her fingers, replied, "It is not a
Cinderella slipper, Ashton. It's a ten-league boot. And I would not
take it off if I could."

And that, I supposed, was about as much
voluntary honesty as I was going to get all night.

I asked her, "How much is twelve and
one?"

She brightened, smiled,
told me, "It's the thirteen original colonies, isn't it? Judge and
jury. Jesus and the apostles. Quite a sum of things, I'd
say."

"A holy number, would you say?"

"Could be. Why not?"

I sighed, said, "Okay. Sign me on. But just
for the mission. I do not wear shoes that bind."

She said, "Silly man. You were born in shoes
that bind."

That surprised the hell out of me. I said,
"I was?"

She nodded, angled the gaze away from me,
said, "They were fitted to you on the backseat of a Fairlane
Ford."

I had not told her about that! Had she
seduced the seducer? God, I hoped so!

Chapter Thirty-Five: Saints and
Devils

There is an old saying: "Fools rush in where
angels fear to tread." Believe it came from Alexander Pope,
eighteenth century. Shakespeare conveyed the same idea with
different words in Richard III:

The world is grown so bad, that wrens make
prey where eagles dare not perch.

He went on to say, later in the play:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy
writ,

And seem a saint when most
I play the devil.

I was heading into a hell
of a night—whether to enact the role of Pope's fool or
Shakespeare's wren, I could not say— perhaps both or neither—but I
did have the strongest feeling that I was pursuing something
probably better left alone, because saints and devils are often
indistinguishable one from the other. I have even heard it argued
that they indeed are the same: They merely take the form in mortal
eyes of the effect experienced; good effect to you, saint; bad
effect, devil.

I do not claim to know the
truth of that. I do feel most strongly that there are
agencies
at work in this
world that utilize a set of moral rules that are different than the
common set, you might say a "higher order"—or even a
"transcendent morality." There are transcending laws in the
natural sense. The law of gravity, for example, keeps you and me
attached to the planet. The aerodynamic principle allows us to
transcend gravity to a certain degree, and we escape it entirely
via motive velocity.

In the moral sense, does a
just and loving God smile at the doe in the jaws of the hungry
predator, or does he rebuke the lion who is faithful to his own
wiring in eating the doe? The doe might cry out, "My god has
forsaken me!" while the lion is sending up "Thanks for food." Do
not they both address the one god? Is the god of the lion not also
the god of the doe? But how account for
justice
in this scenario unless we
admit to a higher sense, a "transcendent morality" that views the
same act in an entirely different way than you and I?

If there are rules to this game called life,
they should apply to one and all alike, shouldn't they? Sauce for
the saints should be sauce for the sinners; right for me is right
for you; wrong for me is wrong for God. Right?

Well...maybe not. Two apples and two pears
do not make four nectarines. Some of the most successful con men
make their bucks by mixing terms on us. If the car salesman gives
you a thousand-dollar "overallowance" for your trade- in while
overcharging you two thousand for the new one, who's coming out
ahead in the deal?

There is this "math
puzzle" concerning three traveling salesmen who arrive at the one
hotel in town at the same time. There is only one room available.
The three decide to share the room. The rate is twenty-five
dollars. The clerk is bad at math, so takes ten bucks from each.
The bellman overbears the men grumbling about the overcharge,
reports it to the clerk. So the clerk gives the bellman five
dollars to divide among the three men. The bellman is no better at
math than the clerk, so he refunds one dollar to each of the three
guests and pockets two for himself as a tip. The puzzle: Each man
ended up paying nine dollars as his share. Three men times nine
dollars equals twenty-seven dollars. Twenty-seven dollars for the
room and two dollars for the bellman equal a total of twenty-nine
dollars. What happened to the other dollar?

If you have trouble following that, pity the
retail clerk unwittingly playing a "change game" with a good con
man.

But, see, we are all of us retail clerks
handling the currency of life. Saints and devils look alike—and
where we usually go astray is in the mistaken belief that saints
wear halos and devils horns. It ain't necessarily so. The doe in
the jaws of the lion will see God with horns; the lion sees a halo.
This is subjective reality. Is there, somewhere, a truly objective
reality, from our point of view, wherein the horn and the halo
merge into one?

All our mystics say so.

They even seem to be telling us that the
lion and the doe are one.

If that is true, then it must be true also
that the subjective reality is a fool's game in which saints are
sinners and lions are does; we're all going to wake up one day to
discover that "life," as Shakespeare assured us, is a stage, and we
an itinerant repertory company, endlessly exchanging roles and
repeating our little plays until finally we get it all right.

It also necessarily
follows, then, that we have immortality now. Not later. Now. The
doe does not die in the jaws of the lion. He is transformed into
another role. Perhaps the lion eats so many does that he is
transformed into one himself, someday, somewhere.

Maybe so. But then, also, maybe not.

I just want you to be thinking about it.

And I lay it on you not in an idle way but
because you will need it later, as you advance with me into a hell
of a night.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Into the
Night

We hit Ojai at about
twenty minutes before the midnight hour. My appointment with
Oom-ray-key-too was for twelve sharp. She set the time herself. I
purposely arrived a bit early to afford a bit of scout time. But an
event was under way when we arrived. The drive was full of parked
cars. I found a place just up the street for the Maserati; Alison
and I walked in. I was wearing the Luger in a shoulder holster
beneath the left arm, Campbell's shotgun very much in
mind.

I counted twenty-two cars
parked on the property, so it was a large group. Of course, it was
a Friday night. The moon was high and bright in a cloudless sky,
the panoply of stars seemingly close enough to inhale. We could
hear the sounds of revelry traveling from the "sacred grove" in the
backyard by the time we reached the house. We were headed around
and toward the rear when Campbell, in loincloth and toting his
shotgun, stepped from behind a large oak. He sneered, "Well, I'll
be, if it isn't the jailbird. I guess it's no crime to shoot an
escapee, is it."

I shoved Alison aside and kept right toward
him. He was raising the shotgun to his shoulder when I took it away
from him and slapped his face with the stock. Muscles and all, he
went down like a steer in the slaughter pen, unconscious before he
hit the ground.

Alison squealed, "Oh, my
God!" and stood over him while I unloaded the magazine of the
semiauto shotgun. I threw the shells as far as I could and dropped
the gun beside the still figure. Alison had a finger at the pulse
point in his throat. She told me, "He's alive, but I don't know
why. You really hit him a lick there, Professor."

I growled, "So maybe he'll sleep awhile.
Come on, let's check out this party."

She asked me, "Sure you want to do
that?"

I replied, "No, but I think we'd
better."

She said, "Just don't lose your head this
time."

I said,
"
My
head! You're
the one was screwing the moon, not me."

"Gosh, you get nasty, don't you."

"You started it, kid."

"Just don't take it out on me, Ashton."

I told her, "Hate violence, that's all.
Pisses me when someone forces me into it. Sorry if I..."

She said, "It's okay. Was that a lovers'
quarrel?"

I gave her a surprised look. "I don't know.
Maybe so."

She squeezed my hand, said, "Put it on hold.
We'll get back to it."

"Will we?'

We were about halfway
between the house and the grove. Alison whispered, "Maybe we should
take care of first things first."

I growled, "Alison, you have a very evasive
way about you. Would you please work on that? Otherwise you are a
very lovely person."

She shushed me and pulled
me to a halt, moved very close. We were at the edge of the grove.
The sacred mound was no more than twenty feet away. The torches
were extinguished and the folks were cavorting. Quite a pile of
bodies, probably fifty or more, granting and wriggling all over
that mound—now and then a little shriek or an hysterical giggle,
ohs and ahs in sharp exclamation.

I could not recognize Oom, or anyone else
for that matter, could not even pick out a whole body, they were
all so interlaced.

Alison's eyes were sparkling. She gave me a
quick squeeze and whispered, "Is that what we were like?"

I told her, "No need to whisper. You
couldn't disturb that group with gunfire." I was reminded of
something, then. I told her, "I want to check one of those
torches."