She kicked back hard, hit flesh with a sharp heel and heard someone curse, then she mustered all the strength she could and got to her feet. She swayed for a moment, dots swimming in front of her eyes, and steadied herself with her hand on the wall. The room was spinning around her; everyone was looking at her like faces in a fish-eye lens.
The dog growled. Gary was holding his shin but still laughing. The fat woman near the door had put down her bottle of nail polish remover and was starting to look threatening in a blank, porcine kind of way. The dog was still worrying Sarah, barking, rubbing against her legs, licking them and jumping up to push its snout in her crotch.
Nobody moved. They were all just watching her. Sarah managed to dredge up all her reserves, and with what felt like a superhuman effort, she pushed open the door. Just before she got outside, the fat woman grabbed her roughly by the arm and tried to drag her back in.
As she struggled, she became aware of a quick movement and a slapping sound from behind her. She turned. Mitch Cameron had hit the fat woman in the face and blood poured from her piggy mouth. Her grip loosened and Sarah staggered out, crying, into the harsh daylight. Nobody else tried to stop her. She weaved her way through the trailer park, then toward the road, dodging between the lanes of honking traffic on the wide road and tottering on her high heels back to the hotel.
She looked behind once, but no one was following her. Something snapped inside her, and now there was only one thought in her mind. Run far away from here.
By the time she had crossed the road, she had regained enough basic control to know that the only thing she could do was take a cab to Ellie Huysman’s. She knew the address by heart, even when she was stoned. Ellie would help her.
The doorman at the hotel recognized her, knew she was hooked up with money and got her a cab. It was only when she had collapsed in the back seat and given the cabby Ellie’s Redondo Beach address that she realized she’d left her purse, wallet and everything else she owned either back at the trailer or in the hotel room. But by then she didn’t care. There could be no going back; it was all over; she just had to get away. Ellie would pay the cabby. All Sarah wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and cry.
Sarah rubbed her eyes, as if to erase the memory, then pushed the gin and tonic aside. Why she had even poured it in the first place, she didn’t know. She hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff since she had walked out on Gary. Damn hotel rooms, the things they made you do, made you remember. She took a small can of ginger ale out of the fridge and sipped that to take the taste of the gin away.
An airplane left a vapor trail across the horizon above the Hollywood Hills. Closer to the hotel, a police helicopter whirred over the Blue Whale, maybe keeping an eye on her. Sarah sighed and picked up The New Yorker again.
Nothing to do now but wait.
40
Waiting. waiting. waiting.
He hadn’t been able to wait outside the hospital all night — there were other things he had to do — but he was certain they wouldn’t let her out until morning. He had seen the crash from a distance, and though it had wrenched his heart to watch and to think he might have been partly responsible, that there had been a misunderstanding, he could tell that she hadn’t been seriously injured.
Now, in different clothes, with darker hair and driving a new rental car, he watched the chaos outside the hospital as the detective wheeled her out.
She was Their prisoner now. His love was a prisoner, and there was nothing he could do. It was obvious They had tightened security since last night. That studio bodyguard had been pathetically easy, only too willing to jump to the bait of a macho game of freeway cat-and-mouse.
Now, though, he was certain that the car following them was an unmarked police car, and he made sure, after he had broken from the crowd of reporters, that he stayed well behind.
Again, it turned out to be remarkably easy. His sense of luck was developing fast and strong. Instead of taking her to jail, they took her to a hotel. Well, a hotel could become a jail easily enough, couldn’t it?
He knew there would be guards on her door and maybe even a bodyguard in the room with her. The thought made him shake with rage. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white and told himself to be calm, calm, calm.
He wanted to kill them all and carry her high into the mountains or deep into the sea. He no longer had any fear of the unknown. The way things had been going, with the lies they had probably brainwashed her to believe about him and the shyness and awkwardness that still inhibited the way he communicated with her, he knew now that their best chance, their only chance, lay beyond the confines of the flesh. She must learn to love the unknown with him.
Soon. It would be soon. Nothing to do now but wait. Wait and think.
41
Stan Harvey’s office was on the fourth floor of a low-rise stucco building on Hollywood Boulevard, just a stone’s throw from the Capitol Records Tower, that bizarre construction on Vine, built to look like a stack of records. It was showing its age, Arvo thought as he parked. These days it would be built more like a stack of CDs.
Harvey himself answered Arvo’s knock at the frosted-glass door and excused himself for a moment. He was on the phone, he apologized, and his secretary had left early. Wearing jeans and a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, the kind with the tongue sticking out between red lips on the back, he looked about fifty. He was mostly bald, and whatever gray hair he could muster from the sides and back was tied in a ponytail. Lord deliver us from middle-aged men with pony-tails, Arvo thought. Don’t they realize how ridiculous they look?
While Harvey finished his phone call, Arvo studied a signed photograph of Gary Knox among the dozens of other framed celebrity photos on the walls. He had forgotten how decadent, how aristocratically, poetically and elegantly wrecked Knox had looked, a sort of cross between Jim Morrison and Keith Richards, with his full lips in a pout, faintly sneering expression, five o’clock shadow and the lank brown hair perpetually falling over one eye.
The other eye, however, stared out with disconcerting clarity, as if piercing into your soul, knowing all your faults and secret shames. Knowing and not forgiving. Gary Knox looked merciless in his judgements.
As he looked at the image, Arvo found it impossible to picture Sarah Broughton as part of this man’s life. From what he knew of her, she seemed an intelligent and sensitive woman; what on earth could she possibly have seen in him? On the other hand, Arvo knew well enough that whatever powers governed human coupling often showed a very black sense of humor indeed.
“Nasty looking piece of work, ain’t he?” said Harvey, hanging up the phone and lighting a cigarette with an initialled gold lighter. Not much to look at himself, he had a scraggly gray beard and matching moustache. Where the facial hair left off, little red veins were visible under dry skin. Above the thin lips and the slightly hooked nose, his eyes seemed to weave the motifs of his hair and complexion; they were gray, streaked red with burst blood vessels.
Harvey was yet another member of the Brit “Mafia.” A Cockney, by the sound of him. “Siddown, siddown,” he said. Arvo sat in a black swivel chair opposite the cluttered desk. “What can I do you for?”