Authors: Peter Robinson
‘He would?’
‘Sure. I mean, I’m not his Princess, his Little Star, am I? Sure he would.’ She started singing to herself, ‘“Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are . . .”’
At which point Brook put his hand on her arm and said, ‘I wouldn’t let him, baby. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you.’ And he glared at Arvo with reinforced passion. Like hell, thought Arvo. From what he had heard, Mitch Cameron would make sushi out of someone like Brook.
There was nothing more to be learned from Candi. It was time to let the seduction run its course, if it wasn’t already too late, and it was time for Arvo to head back to the hotel and check if there were any messages. Maybe he would call in Mitch Cameron’s Social Security number. The DMV runs driving record checks for cops twenty-four hours a day, while you wait.
As he walked, Arvo remembered something Candi had said, and a little warning bell went off in his mind. She had said all Mitch could do was act as a bouncer or a bodyguard. Arvo had briefed Zak himself, and he remembered the compact body, the blond hair. Zak – Mitch. Surely it couldn’t be . . . But if he was right, Sarah was in great danger. He pulled up his collar and hurried towards the hotel.
36
Try to stay calm, Sarah told herself. Right foot, gas; left foot, brake. At least that was how she remembered it. She pressed her right foot down. Why wasn’t it moving? Then she remembered. First she had to shift the stick from
park
to
drive
.
She took her foot off the accelerator, pressed down on the brake and moved the lever. Then she stepped on the gas again.
The engine roared and the car started to shudder, but it still wasn’t moving. She realized she still had the brake pressed down to the floor, so she let it go.
The car kicked up gravel and shot forward into the drive with a squeal of tyres, swerving wildly from side to side. Sarah panicked and trod hard on the brake without taking her foot off the gas. The car slewed into the shrubbery that lined the drive, hit the base of a small palm tree and skidded to a halt.
Sarah banged on the wheel and let her head drop. Tears blurred her vision. She couldn’t do it; she couldn’t possibly control this monster. She had felt the same way that time trying to drive out in the desert.
The engine had stalled, and all she could hear was Stuart’s uneven breathing. Then she heard the noise of a car starting break the silence behind her, and she realized he was coming after her.
She didn’t have any alternative now.
She started the car up again. The problem now was that she was out of the range of Stuart’s motion-sensor lights, she couldn’t see where she was going. Headlights. Where was the headlight control switch? It had been daylight in the desert.
There were dozens of switches and buttons on the dashboard, all with little symbols that were supposed to make them easy to use. Sarah couldn’t understand a bloody thing, and she’d got the windshield wipers going and country music playing on the radio before the beams of light shot out and lit up the gravel drive and the road about fifty yards ahead.
Stuart shifted and groaned on the floor. His knees were wedged up against his chest, and his head rested between the edge of the seat and the door. He clutched his stomach with both hands, as if to keep his insides from spilling out.
‘Stuart, can you talk?’ Sarah asked.
‘Bleeding . . . hurts . . .’ was all she got out of him.
‘I’m going to get us out of here,’ she said. ‘Just hang on.’ Stuart groaned.
Sarah saw headlights in the rear-view mirror.
His
headlights.
She put the car in
drive
again, eased her left foot off the brake and put her right foot on the accelerator, not too hard this time. The car coasted down the drive. At the end, Sarah turned right onto the road, but the arc of her turn was too wide.
A horn blared and two bright lights came straight at her. She held the wheel straight, and the oncoming car skidded across the road with a squeal of rubber, hit the curb and turned over.
Sarah kept her foot down.
She had no idea of how to judge the car’s width and guess how much space she had around her. The Caddy was a big car, and she had always felt nervous when Stuart drove by the rows of parked vehicles in the street, sure he was so close he would hit someone getting out, or at least clip a wing mirror. There must be some secret to it. Lacking any knowledge of what it was, she decided the best she could do was stick with the car ahead and follow its tail-lights.
The windshield wiper squeaked across the dry glass every few seconds, and Garth Brooks was singing about a broken heart on the radio. Sarah loathed country and western, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road ahead for a second and she didn’t want to risk fiddling with the buttons and switches again.
A couple of oncoming cars blinded her with the dazzle of their headlights, honked their horns and veered away to the right at the last moment, when they realized she wasn’t going to give way. It was a fairly narrow road by Los Angeles standards, and Sarah realized she must be hogging the centre.
The red tail-lights were still in front of her, and behind she could still see the glare of his headlights. There was a cloying, slightly metallic smell in the car now, and she realized it was Stuart’s blood. Her hands felt sticky on the wheel and her jeans and T-shirt were stuck to her skin with blood and sweat.
At least Stuart was still alive, moaning on the floor beside her. The windshield wiper squeaked over the glass every second or so. Garth Brooks had given way to Tammy Wynette singing ‘Stand By Your Man.’
Then she saw the intersection up ahead. Sunset. And a red light. The car in front edged as far left as he could without being on the wrong side of the road and stopped. His left-turn indicator started to flick on and off.
Sarah followed him over, took her foot off the gas and pressed down on the brake. At least she knew how to indicate a turn, and she pushed the lever by the steering-wheel. As she waited for the lights to change, she took the opportunity to press a few buttons on the dashboard and stop the windshield wiper without turning off her headlights.
But her respite lasted only a brief moment. Just when she had succeeded in getting Tammy Wynette to give way to The Doors singing ‘Love Her Madly,’ a set of headlights grew bright in her rear-view mirror.
He
was still behind her.
She had no plan. She had to get Stuart to a hospital, that was clear enough, but where was the nearest one? There was a big medical centre in Santa Monica, but she didn’t know how to get there. It was all she could do to stay on one winding road following the car in front, let alone negotiate right and left turns through the LA urban maze.
Before she could come up with any ideas, the light began to flash green and the car in front turned. Sarah took her foot off the brake, pushed down on the accelerator again and started to turn the wheel as she shot forward.
But she had put her foot down too hard and she didn’t turn the steering-wheel far enough. Instead of gliding smoothly and effortlessly around the ninety-degree bend, she skidded too far towards the right.
The Caddy bumped over the curb. Metal scraped against the low stone wall of the house beyond the grass verge with an ear-wrenching scream, and Sarah saw sparks fly.
Instead of stopping, she kept her foot on the accelerator, and before she lost control completely she twisted the wheel sharply to the left. The back of the car clipped a signpost, then Sarah felt a bump as she passed over the curb and back onto the road again.
By now the traffic lights were favouring through traffic on Sunset, and Sarah managed to drive another two cars off the road in a blare of horns, blaze of lights and banshee screech of tortured rubber.
Christ, she thought, mouth dry, heart pounding in her throat, this was Los Angeles. She was more likely to get shot by an angry motorist than stabbed by a crazy fan. Surely a cop car would come along soon?
Now she was back on the road again, staying in the outside lane, with tail-lights to follow, the going was a little easier. She could afford to think for a moment about what to do.
Her best bet, she reckoned, was to stay on Sunset and hope a police car came along. She kept looking around for flashing red lights, listening for sirens, but she couldn’t hear any. She must have forced about five cars off the road already. Had nobody reported a crazy driver in the area yet?
She could try to drive Stuart to Cedars-Sinai. It was miles away, but all she had to do was keep going along the same road.
She thought she saw the lights of a garage at Barrington, but the traffic light was green and she was going too fast to pull over safely. Sunset wound on, all gentle curves and dips, nothing but curb, grass and houses on each side. There were no streetlights, and dark trees overhung the road.
But Sarah didn’t dare risk turning off. She might get lost, get stuck on some dead-end street, and
he
would be right behind her, just waiting for her to make a fatal error.
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 rear-view 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 rear-view 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.