The radio was playing the Stones singing “Sympathy for the Devil’ now, but she didn’t bother trying to turn it off. In a way, any music was a comfort, a necessary link to the real world. Stuart shifted position on the floor, trying to push himself up onto the seat. He managed it about halfway, then exhausted his strength and slipped down to the floor again with a groan.
“Stuart?” Sarah asked. “Are you all right?”
He mumbled something unintelligible and Sarah assured him again that they would soon get help.
She could smell his blood even more now it was getting warmer in the car. She didn’t know how to operate the air conditioner, but at least she knew where the electronic window button was. She reached out and pressed it. The window beside her slid down slowly and silently, and a welcome gust of cool evening air blew in.
She saw lights ahead, and a red light started to blink at the back right of the car in front. Sarah was about to follow suit when she realized this must be the freeway. She knew she had to stay on the surface streets if she hoped to have any chance at all of surviving this nightmare. She couldn’t drive on the freeway. They would die there for sure.
With a slight twist of the wheel, she edged over to the lane to her left. She managed to stay on Sunset and cross the bridge over the freeway, aware only in her peripheral vision of the speeding blurs of red and white light spread across the lanes below. Despite the breeze blowing in through her open window, she felt sweat bead again on her brow and start to itch behind her ears. It was worse than being under the studio lights.
As she crossed the overpass, she could see no one immediately ahead of her, and she felt frightened, alone, cut adrift. Luckily, someone exited the freeway just in front of her, heading east, so she eased her foot off the accelerator to let him in and settled down to follow. Her ankle and her neck were aching with tension. His headlights were still dazzling in her rearview mirror.
Some of the curves south of Bel Air were very tight, and Sarah bit her tongue in concentration as she made them. It was still dark all around her, even as she passed the north end of the UCLA campus. No haven there. Best stay with the car ahead, which she saw as a kind of umbilical cord, her only lifeline reaching up from the bottom of a deep, dark shaft. She knew she wouldn’t be able to handle both driving and thinking about where she was going at the same time.
Then, with a shock, she remembered that Cedars-Sinai was on Beverly Boulevard, not Sunset. She’d seen it on shopping trips to the Beverly Center. And she didn’t know which cross-street to go down. Rising panic clutched tight at her chest and stomach. She just couldn’t do it. Stuart was going to die. She would never be able to forgive herself.
Despair almost overwhelmed her. He was still behind her, his malevolent headlights blinding her whenever she looked in the rearview mirror. She had no choice; she had to keep going, stay safe in the car and pray the police would stop her soon. She honked the horn loudly a few times, then kept it pressed down for a full minute, but nothing happened.
At least he hadn’t tried to overtake her or run her off the road. If he had wanted to, he could have made her pull over at any time, broken the window, killed Stuart and made her go with him. He still could. Carjackings happened all the time in LA, and nobody in their right mind would stop to help.
But he hadn’t. Why?
Perhaps, she thought, if he did try to run her off the road, he might injure her accidentally, and he didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t in the script. Whatever the full-range stretch of his fantasy was, he still felt the need to protect her at this point. It was his hallucination; nobody else could be allowed to control it. So he was running protection for her, saving her; he would bring things to an end his way, in his own time. Unless she could do something to stop him.
Suddenly, she noticed there were streetlights, and the street signs were white, with little bumps on the top. That meant she was in Beverly Hills. The road broadened here, east- and west-bound separated by a grass meridian, and the traffic started to move faster. Tall palms lined the roadside and beyond them stood the high walls of wealthy estates.
Suddenly a white stretch limo shot out of a hidden driveway, and she couldn’t swerve aside without clipping the front before the driver jammed on the brakes. It was only a glancing blow, but it shook her up and the panic sent her skidding over into the fast lane, causing another flurry of horns and squealing brakes.
She righted herself and got back into the outside lane, moving slowly and carefully, ignoring the impatient drivers who honked at her from behind. Maybe hitting a limo in Beverly Hills would bring the cops down on her? She hoped so.
The radio was playing the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones” now. Up ahead, Sarah could see a tall glass office tower. Some of the windows were lit, but there would be no one around so late at night. There was also a large billboard advertising KOOL cigarettes. Civilization. Surely there must be cops around?
The road veered sharply to the left ahead, and as Sarah approached the corner she noticed the first flashing red light in her rearview mirror. The limo driver, she bet, got straight onto the cops on his car phone.
She was just about to take her foot off the accelerator and put on the brake, when a bright cone of light shot down suddenly from the sky and enveloped her.
She put one hand up to shield her eyes, lost concentration and pressed the gas pedal instead of the brake. The car bounced over the curb at the corner and ran straight through the plate-glass window of the Hornburg Jaguar showroom in a shower of glass and screech of tortured metal.
Part four
37
When Sarah opened her eyes all she could see around her was whiteness. Her mouth felt dry and her eyes prickled, as if they were full of ground glass, her lids under heavy weights. Pennies? Like they put on dead people’s eyes? Maybe she was dead. Then the sounds and sights of the hospital room came into focus and someone bent over her.
“Sarah?” the voice whispered. “Sarah?”
She groaned. “What happened?”
“Don’t you remember?”
Sarah closed her eyes again; they were so heavy. She tried. It was all very vague, but she thought she had been driving. Impossible. She couldn’t drive. Something must be wrong with her mind, then. Brain damage; that was it. She was a vegetable. She tried, but she couldn’t move her head. Her neck must be broken. She would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Seeing if she could move her hands, she reached out and touched skin. Hairy. A man’s hand. Slowly, she opened her eyes again. It was the detective, Arvo. So she wasn’t dead.
“Take it easy, Sarah,” he said.
She opened her eyes wider. They were beginning to feel better, less spiky. Arvo looked tired, his sport jacket all creased, bags under his red-rimmed eyes. “You again,” she croaked. “Have I really died and gone to hell?”
He smiled. “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
She licked her lips. “What happened?”
“You went off the road at Sunset and Cory. Want the good news first, or the bad?”
“The good.”
“You didn’t hit anyone and you’re not badly hurt.”
“And the bad?”
“You ran into a brand new Jag. The showroom owner’s really pissed.”
“It’s true, then? I was driving?”
“You might call it that. Others would disagree.”