Blue World Read Online Free PDF

third, and a fourth. The Voyager started up a hill--and Carla felt the engine kick.
    “Oh… God,” she whispered. Her hands, clamped to the steering wheel, were inflamed and horribly swollen. “No… no…”
    The engine stuttered, and the van’s forward progress began to slow.
    “No!”
    she screamed, throwing herself against the wheel in an effort to keep the van going. But the speedometer’s needle was falling fast, and then the stuttering engine went silent.
    The van had enough steam left to make the top of the hill, and it rolled to a halt about fifteen feet from the declining side. “Wait here!” Carla said. “Don’t move!” She got out, staggered on swollen legs to the rear of the van, and put her weight against it, trying to shove it over the hill. The van resisted her. “Please…
    please,“
    she whispered, and kept pushing.
    Slowly, inch by inch, the Voyager started rolling forward.
    She heard a distant droning noise, and she dared to look back.
    About four or five miles away, the sky had turned dark. What resembled a massive yellow-and-black-streaked thundercloud was rolling over the woods, bending the pine trees before it.
    Sobbing, Carla looked down the long hill that descended in front of the van. At its bottom was a wide S-curve, and off in the green forest were the roofs of houses and buildings.
    The droning noise was approaching, and twilight was falling fast.
    She heard the muscles of her shoulder crack as she strained against the van. A shadow fell upon her.
    The van rolled closer to the decline; then it started rolling on its own, and Carla hobbled after it, grabbed the open door, and swung herself up into the seat just as it picked up real speed. She gripped the wheel, and she told her children to hang on.
    What sounded like hail started pelting the roof.
    The van hurtled down the hill as the sun went dark in the middle of yellowjacket summer.
    Makeup
    Stealing the thing was so easy.
    Calvin Doss had visited the Hollywood Museum of Memories on Beverly Boulevard at three a.m., admitting himself through a side door with a hooked sliver of metal he took from the black leather pouch he kept under his jacket, close to the heart.
    He’d roamed the long halls--past the chariots used in
    Ben-Hur, past the tent set from
    The Sheik, past the
    Frankenstein lab mock-up--but he knew exactly where he was going. He’d come there the day before, with the paying tourists. And so in ten minutes after he’d slipped into the place he was standing in the Memorabilia Room, foil stars glittering from the wallpaper wherever the beam of his pencil flashlight touched. Before him were locked glass display cases: one of them was full of wigs on faceless mannequin heads; the next held bottles of perfume used as props in a dozen movies by Lana Turner, Loretta Young, Hedy Lamarr, in the next case there were shelves of paste jewelry, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds blazing like Rodeo Drive merchandise.
    And then there was the display case Calvin sought, its shelves holding wooden boxes in a variety of sizes and colors. He moved the flashlight’s beam to a lower shelf, and there was the large black box he’d come to take. The lid was open, and within it Calvin could see the trays of tubes, little numbered jars, and what looked like crayons wrapped up in waxed paper. Beside the box there was a small white card with a couple of lines of type:
    Makeup case once belonging to Jean Harlow. Purchased from the Harlow estate.
    All right! Calvin thought. That’s the ticket. He zipped open his metal pouch, stepped around behind the display case to the lock, and worked for a few minutes to find the proper lock-picker from his ample supply.
    Easy.
    And now it was almost dawn, and Calvin Doss sat in his small kitchenette apartment off Sunset Boulevard, smoking a joint to relax with and staring at the black box that sat before him on a card table. There was nothing to it, really, Calvin thought. Just a bunch of jars and tubes and