She recalled the boxy sedan she’d spotted the night of Andrew’s appointment. Rolling toward her from up the street and setting off her internal alarm, only to reverse direction and slip away. If someone really was following her, had the hunt commenced as she’d left West Hollywood?
Could this be the same car? The span between the headlights fit but that’s all she could make out.
She switched to the slow lane.
Ninety seconds later, the bouncing car did the same and now it was unshielded.
Definitely not a compact or a truck, so maybe... Grace lowered her speed abruptly, caught the car unawares, and earned a closer look.
Sedan. Boxy? Probably.
The first time she’d seen it, it had been parked near her office well after Andrew’s departure. Sometime that night, Andrew had been stalked, ending up human trash, dumped in a cold, dark place.
The timing didn’t work. So maybe she was letting her mind run away with — unless there were two people involved.
One for Andrew, one to clean up Andrew’s mess.
If he’d been tracked to her office, finding out why wouldn’t be a challenge, her nameplate — small, bronze, discreet — graced the front door.
Talking to a shrink, the ultimate sin? First Andrew had been punished and now Grace needed to be taken care of? The sedan crept up on her, she put on speed, the sedan hung back, too dark to ascertain the make and model... now it had allowed a smaller car to get in front of it.
Grace shifted lanes again.
This time the sedan took its time getting directly behind her, but there it was, following closer than ever. Grace slowed down, forcing it to brake. The sedan recovered, slowing itself, allowing a pickup to cut in front.
For all Grace knew the truck was part of a team.
But she couldn’t afford to let fear take hold, so she worked hard at building up anger. The nerve of these bastards... La Costa Beach was approaching, time to think clearly.
Going home was obviously out of the question. Once she entered her front door she’d be as vulnerable as a shooting range target. But the only escapes along PCH were dark, twisting roads snaking to canyons and dead ends.
So only one choice: keep going. But that provided no long-term solution because once she was past the Colony and the rolling hills fronting Pepperdine University, the traffic would thin further and the highway would darken and she’d be vulnerable to a bump or a swipe that ran her off the road.
A weapon aimed out of a window.
Unless she was wrong. She hoped she was but when the sedan moved up on her again and she had to push the Aston way past the speed limit, that hope died.
She knew.
Why had she let her guard down? The reason to consider that question wasn’t to beat herself up, it was to prevent recurrence of stupidity.
The obvious answer: what the Brits called brain fag. The motor neurons in her brain had been preoccupied with Andrew. Then thinking about anything but Andrew.
All that mental energy had overloaded her circuits and caused her to neglect Shoshana Yaroslav’s First Commandment: I don’t care how tough and liberated you think you are, you’re a woman, always vulnerable. So pay attention to your surroundings.
Commandment Two was: Do whatever it takes. Unless you believe in reincarnation and enjoy the thought of coming back as a bug.
No need for eight more.
Shifting slightly to the right so she could catch a better glimpse of the slow lane, Grace found it empty. Suddenly, she pushed the Aston’s throttle to the floor, reaching eighty ninety a hundred in seconds. Leaving the pickup and the dancing car and everyone else far behind.
Even at that speed, the DB7 was barely working up RPMs. Power poles zipped by like stripes on a curtain. Twelve cylinders whined in appreciation — finally you give me some exercise! — and Grace smiled. This level of speed felt like a natural state and besides, she’d flown this road before with her eyes literally closed, knew the bumps and turns and quirks, and if some highway patrol cruiser blue-lighted her, all the better, she’d be nothing but cooperative, pretend to pay attention to the officer’s tight-ass lecture, meanwhile she’d be watching from the shoulder as the bouncing car zipped by.
But as she reached La Costa, the nanosecond blur that was her house, and continued to the Malibu Pier and Surfrider, there wasn’t a trace of law enforcement to be found.
And now, by terrible attrition, only one set of headlights was behind her, maybe ten car lengths back. No longer moons, Grace saw them as eyes, now. Twin amber beacons of scrutiny.
She decelerated to seventy and the sudden bounce of the dancing car’s headlights told her it had braked precipitously, again. Pushing the Aston back up to eighty, she used its race-born agility to advantage, calling into service the performance-driving techniques Shoshana had showed her during an exhausting day at the Laguna Seca track in Salinas. Explaining to her that cars don’t go out of control, drivers do.
So avoid braking except when necessary because braking and accelerating rocks a car like a cradle and at high speeds that risks serious loss of traction and if you absolutely must brake, do it briefly, at the apex of the curve, then accelerate.
Fun stuff, then. Useful, now. Grace sped through Malibu’s western beaches, still hoping for a cop, but pleased as the bouncing headlights vanished.
Then she hit a straightaway near the fenced sprawl of the public beach at Zuma and all of a sudden they were back.
Gaining on her, coming right at her.
She veered sharply onto the shoulder, not liking the grinding, gnashing noise that ensued, and praying the Aston’s low-slung underbelly hadn’t been damaged.
Idling, she switched off her headlights, lifted her foot from the brake pedal to disengage the rear lights, and relied upon the emergency brake to keep the snorting beast at bay. Dark night, black car, she was sure of invisibility.
The Aston continued to fight being caged but remained in place and now she’d be ready when the sedan sped by.
But it didn’t. Had it caught on, somehow — picking up a glint of starlit glossy paint or chrome wheels or shining window?
What had given Grace away didn’t matter, only the result: Her pursuer was speeding directly at her again.
Releasing the emergency brake, she watched in her rearview, waited, and when the time was right, she turned the wheel sharply and hung a radical U that made the Aston fishtail on squealing tires.
But it righted itself quickly and Grace had barely made it across the center of the highway and into the southbound lanes when a massive shape came barreling down from the north.
During the seconds it took for Grace to speed out of its way, the semi she’d narrowly avoided sounded its Klaxons and roared by, enraged.
Eighteen-wheeler, according to the cheerful sign on its flank, a company hauling restaurant produce. Less than an instant to read all that but somehow she had.
She’d also absorbed details of the dancing car: dark, probably gray, blocky sedan as she’d theorized, maybe a Chrysler 300.
Spinning its wheels in the dirt of the shoulder as it tried to back its nose out of an embankment. Too dark to make out the plate.
Dark windows.
Stock wheels.
The sedan wouldn’t budge. The tires stopped spinning. A man got out, bulky, broad.
Clutching something at his side.
Grace raced away.
She adhered to the speed limit, reached Kanan Dume Road quickly enough, and turned off. That took her over the mountains and into the Valley, where she hooked up with the 101 East. Even at this hour, the freeway provided a fine social circle — a thin but steady stream of fellow motorists and, yes, there it was, law enforcement in the person of a CHP black-and-white in the center lane, trawling for taxpayer money, where the hell were they when you needed them?