Alternate Routes by Tim Powers

Author:Tim Powers [Powers, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781481483407
Amazon: 1481483404
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2018-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

On a narrow overgrown island in the Los Angeles River, Santiago sat in the shade behind a curtain of willow branches, holding a fishing pole that stuck out over the water. Leaves hung limp in the warm morning air, and dragonflies paused frequently to hover in place over the slow-moving water, but he was wearing a zipped-up windbreaker, gloves, and a wire-mesh fencing mask.

The Long Beach Freeway was less than half a mile away to the east; and to the north, just past the train tracks at the top of the concrete embankment on that side of the river, was a building on Bandini Boulevard that Laquedem said was familiar to certain ghosts, and might attract them. Santiago had long ago learned that ghosts could often be found lingering on the many little islands in the LA River, generally in the freeway-side stretch from Dodger Stadium down to Bell Gardens; and if he were separated from the mainland on all sides by running water, he could speak to them in complete sentences without them following him afterward.

Santiago was perched on the west side of this island, with a thicket of sumac and willow and tall weeds behind him, and in front of him, through the willow branches, a view up the concrete slope of the western embankment to the back side of a furniture warehouse.

The hook on the end of the boy’s line was a binder clip, and the bait was a parking sticker with TUA printed on it. He had broken the side-window of a car on Bandini Boulevard an hour ago to peel the sticker off the inner side of the windshield, a risk he would not have taken for anyone besides Isaac Laquedem. Two years ago the old man had found him hiding out in a packing crate behind a Home Depot on Figueroa, when Santiago had been ten years old and virtually starving, and Laquedem had given the boy food and money and directed him to various sorts of unofficial shelter, in exchange for agreeing to run errands that the old man couldn’t do himself.

It had been the leather bands that Santiago wore on his wrists that had led Laquedem to him—the boy was in the habit of sleeping with his hands crossed and clasping the bands, and that frail connection of the ghosts in the two bands had been enough for Laquedem to sense and locate him.

The boy flexed his hands now on the cork grip of the fishing pole, and looked with melancholy affection at the sweat-stained strips of leather.

The bands held the subsumed ghosts of Santiago’s mother and father, killed one midnight in 2015 while trying to cross the San Diego Freeway, south of the Border Patrol checkpoint at Camp Pendleton. The coyote who had smuggled the little family up from Rosarito in a truck camper had dropped them off on the freeway shoulder and told them to cross the freeway to the Buena Vista Lagoon, follow its banks down to the

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