He was at my window. He wore dark pants. A dark polo shirt. A belt. His crotch was at my eye level. I stared at it. My cell phone was in reach, but I knew it was worthless. Doc had talked me into it, for emergencies. He must’ve meant emergencies in neighborhoods with better cell signals.
I can’t stand to be afraid. When I’m cornered, my fear aversion is stronger than my fear, so strong that I experience a kind of denial and act as if what’s happening is not happening, as if I’m in a parallel universe where everyone is my friend and everything is fine. Joey calls it playing dumb. Fredreeq calls it dumb.
He was leaning down now, his face level with mine, elbows resting on the car door. With a flick of the hand, a snap of fingers against the glass, he motioned me to roll down my window.
The advantage of playing dumb is that it postpones the moment of confrontation, when you acknowledge you’re on opposite sides, when someone fires the first shot. If you’re already at a disadvantage-like, for instance, if your car’s in neutral when you thought it was in reverse-it gives you a chance to reach for a weapon. I slid my hand to the passenger seat, distracting him by rolling my window down an inch.
“Hi, there,” I said, and cleared my throat. “What’s up?”
He flicked his finger against the window again, motioning. “Come on. Open.”
“No, it’s chilly. Out there. There’s a chill in the air. I’m-”
“Chilled. Yeah. Open.” He didn’t look threatening, merely annoyed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Then quit it!” Fear moved over, making room for anger. “If you’re not going to hurt me, quit scaring me, quit following me, quit driving me off the road-”
“I was trying to get you to pull over. Why didn’t you stop?”
“I did stop. I-” I rolled down the window, tired of talking through it. “I’m stopped. I stopped last night, too, I was cowering on the sidewalk forever, so why-”
“Last night?”
“Larrabee. Outside my-” Don’t say “apartment,” dummy. Maybe he doesn’t realize you live there. “-friend Hubie’s apartment.”
He said nothing.
“So,” I said. “What do you want from me?”
Mulholland was quiet. Then an owl hooted. He spoke. His voice was conversational. “I’d like to think I made an impression on you the last time we met.”
“You did.”
“Yet here we are.”
He had nice breath. That’s unusual, when someone’s very close to you and you don’t know them and you find their breath appealing. It happens with babies, of course, but not often with people over the age of four. “Okay,” I said, “I have a question. When you told me to back off, did you-”
“I said ‘back off’?”
I thought about it. “Or ‘buzz off.’ ”
“I wouldn’t have said ‘buzz off.’ ”
No, he wasn’t the type. He was the type who dresses up for an airplane flight. “Back off, buzz off, words to that effect,” I said. “You didn’t say what from.”
The blue of his eyes was purple in the dark. He smelled like soap, like he’d just showered. For Saturday night. Such an intimate smell. “From what,” I amended. Maybe if I could keep my prepositions in their proper places, my thoughts would follow.
“What is that you’re holding?” he asked. “Price tag’s still on it.”
I looked down at my hand. “This is a meat mallet. I’ve been meaning to return it.” I put the silver gadget back in the Williams-Sonoma bag.
“What were you doing downtown this morning near Temple Street?”
“Looking for the morgue.”
That surprised him. After a moment he nodded. “I want you to rewind a week,” he said. “Go back to Sunday.”
“Okay.” Sunday: paying bills, clipping coupons, researching frogs, that leftover piece of quiche, so disappointing because of the soggy crust…
“Now stay there.”
I stared. “What the heck does that mean? Stay in Sunday?”
He turned to check out the traffic, which did not exist, or maybe to check out the owl. The owl quieted. He turned back. “Monday you showed up on my radar. I want you to drop off again.”
“Why don’t you just turn off the radar?”
“You don’t turn off radar.”
“Fine. I’m not a radiologist-”
“Physicist.”
“-but you’ll have to get more explicit about this problem you’re having.”
He leaned in very close. “You’re the problem I’m having. Think about the bad things you do. Then stop doing them.”
I blushed. I didn’t even know what I was blushing about. “I… um.”
His eyes were looking at my mouth. Was there food on it? When had I last eaten? No, there was nothing on my mouth but a pair of lips. Could it be he was going to kiss me? Was there something I’d said that made him think I wanted him to?
Did I want him to?
And then he was gone, a shadow in the moonlight, heading back to his car. But there was an echo of the thing he’d said so softly I wasn’t sure if he’d said it or if I’d just thought it. Five words.
“Forget you ever met her.”
17
I drove toward West Hollywood in a daze. “Forget you ever met her,” he’d said.
Forget her? I couldn’t forget him, and I didn’t even know him.
I replayed our conversations. For some reason this man wanted me to give up looking for Annika but wouldn’t come out and say so. What kind of enforcer, or whatever he was, followed someone only to play twenty questions? Maybe he was just a bad bad guy. A novice. A bad guy with scruples. A big, blue-eyed bad guy who looked like he was in good shape, judging by the close-up I’d had of his waist, which suggested abdominal exercises, because a lot of guys get a little cuddly right there once they hit forty, which the lines on his face suggested to me he had. I liked the lines on his face. The hardness of his face. I like a face that’s been around.
Okay, he was on my radar now.
The question was, Why was I on his? Why bother with me? It’s not like I was doing such a bang-up job of finding Annika.
Unless I was closer than I knew. Maybe I’d ruffled someone’s feathers asking about her. Not Marty Otis: I couldn’t imagine this man, this blue-eyed force of nature, in the employ of rabbity little Marty.
But I didn’t have to worry about it tonight. He was done for the night, unless he suddenly remembered another cryptic utterance he had to make. I should give him my phone number, save him some gas. Maybe he had it, I thought, remembering the recent hang-ups.
Waitaminute.
The guy lurking last night on Larrabee-when I’d alluded to the incident, Mr. Tall had said, “Last night?” like he didn’t know what I was talking about.
He didn’t know what I was talking about. They weren’t partners.
Someone else was following me too.
The thought made me swerve. Get a grip, I told myself, clutching the wheel. I hated this Integra, Doc’s hand-me-down. It swerved too easily. I checked the rearview mirror. Yes, there was a car behind me. Two cars, four, endless cars, hundreds of people following me, a nocturnal procession. When we got out of the canyon into the flat part of Beverly Hills, my cell phone rang, alerting me to missed calls. Three. All from Fredreeq. I called her back, with compulsive glances into the rearview mirror.
“Joey told me we have another stalker situation,” she said. “She waited for you to call back and now she’s having sex with her husband, so I’m taking over. You home?”
“No. Car. Sunset. Beverly Hills. Fredreeq, I’m scared to go home. There was someone outside the apartment last night and-”
“I’ll talk you through this. Francis and I are at a bowling alley with Franceen’s sixth-grade class. We got eight more frames. That should get you parked and inside the apartment and you can check all your closets.”
“What if I don’t make it, what if-”
“I hear any screaming, I put you on hold and call 911.”
“That’s ridiculous, it’ll be too late-”