“Just kick it away,” Juno ordered.
Zooey obeyed, staring with renewed admiration. The hostage—were he able to stand—had at least ten inches on his kidnapper. The difference showed even now. Juno noticed it; she thought it was funny.
“Since there are real cops after me now, I’ll have to hold on to this one until we’re in the clear,” she explained. Her eyes shone free of any trace of caution.
“Seems fair,” Zooey said.
Juno helped/dragged Danny to the Jaguar and kicked him onto the backseat.
“On the floor, facedown!”
Zooey nodded in acknowledgment: he would be as good as hogtied trapped there on the floorboard between the seats. Juno slammed his door, climbed in front, and as she sat down at the wheel she remembered about the present she was bringing.
She leaned out the window and tossed the last Erithra lunis. It landed gently on Victor Lyon’s stomach.
“Pleasure meeting you, Zooey.”
“Same here,” said Zooey. She meant it.
The engine wheezed through the first two tries of the ignition key, but on the third it finally harrumphed to a triumphant start. Juno smiled through the chickenpoxed windscreen, winking at Kimrean like, Hey, fuck plausibility, right?
Zooey gave her an admiring thumbs-up.
The car reversed into the garden like a stuffed elephant head on a wall would, leaving an astonishing gaping hole opening onto the starry night. It pulled a U-turn on the lawn, ruining the azaleas, and it rolled away, speeding down the garden path toward the beautiful smoking wildfire in the general area of what had once been the front gate.
The aroma of blood made Zooey pop back from her amazement to more pressing matters: she tightened the tourniquet around Victor’s shoulder, whose screaming had long ago remitted into a raspy gasp. A large red stain mitigated his Hawaiian shirt.
“FBI will get here in ten minutes. Try and hang in there,” Zooey told him. “I know I should stay, but I really like Danny better than you.”
She showed the courtesy of leaving properly through the front door and disappeared.
Lying on the ashes of his empire, the Lyon reined in his breathing. He attempted some movement: his right arm was out of discussion. And he would definitely require the strength of both arms to sit up.
His left one, scanning the rubble, bumped into a gun. The one the crazy P.I. girl had carried in.
That feeling, the loyal touch of steel, granted him some peace.
There wasn’t much left to deliberate. The FBI was on its way. A soft melody of fires crackling and crickets singing between the azaleas would serve as background to the curtain fall.
Victor Lyon thanked the moment with a tear.
He put the gun to his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.
Zooey popped her head back in through the hole in the west wall.
“Oh, by the way—I can tell whether a gun’s empty by its weight. I’m not stupid, you know.”
And she scurried off.
Victor dropped the gun by his side a few seconds later and stared at the remains of the ceiling. A teeming firmament spied between the roof beams, following the whole story that was developing down on Earth, and as the stars looked at the old man lying there in the wrecked pool house, they said, Look at that extra.
* * *
—
Kimrean reached the front gate in time to catch a glimpse of a single red taillight shrinking into the western horizon. That was far beyond the warped metal and stumps of pillars that constituted the gate proper, dotted here and there with burning bodies.
Kimrean ran on toward the dark end of the garden, hopped inside the parked Camaro, and keyed the engine to life. Ursula jack-in-the-boxed between the front seats:
“What happened?”
“Shit!” Zooey jolted. “The fuck are you doing here?!”
“You told me to stay!”
“Right. I knew that.” She reversed the car onto the driveway, offering Ursula her first view of what she’d had only red glows and booming sounds to hint at.
“Oh my God, what happened here?” she cried at the sight of the desolation. “Why is everything on fire?! What happened to my dad?!”
“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll live. (Shifts gears.) In prison, that is.”
And she gunned the car down the slope, rolling over debris that had probably been alive some minutes ago.
They hit the desert, and in far less time than the car manufacturer claimed they were doing 120 on the dirt road toward downtown San Carnal. By the time Ursula had fastened her seat belt, they were back on asphalt, traversing a residential neighborhood and flowing onto a neon avenue, causing much sensation among the bystanders and the many other vehicles that swiftly made room for them by climbing onto the sidewalks and head-butting the parked cars. At that point, feeling at ease on the wide, well-paved roads of downtown, Zooey deemed it safe to speed up.
Ursula didn’t see much of the race through her own fingers, but she was confident she would read about it in tomorrow’s newspapers anyway, provided she still had the ability to read. Zooey drove considerably well for someone who kept one hand on the horn all the time, and she even seized a tranquil stretch between unanimously red lights to check the radio for a decent station, although she desisted when she had to steer left for the expressway so hard that she goaled a newspaper vending box right into a bar and grill. After that, it was just a minute’s worth of dangerous overtakes and a couple of chain collisions on the junction before leaving behind the last skyscraper and hurtling onto the empty road to the coast.
Far ahead, where the dark earth and the last blue sigh of yesterday met, Zooey saw the single red taillight again.
“Do you have Danny’s number?”
“Yes,” Ursula uttered.
“Call him.”
Ursula glanced through her hands, found some reassurance in the scarcity of objects with which they could collide head-on in the desert, and pulled out her cell phone.
* * *
—
In the Jaguar, Danny, wedged facedown on the backseat floor, felt a new kind of vibration on his chest, besides that of the 464-horsepower engine reverberating through the chassis directly beneath him. The tune to Dora the Explorer also came out of his breast pocket.
“Is that you?” Juno asked, distractedly aiming the pistol at him while she steered with her left. “Please, pick it up. No problem.”
It took him a while to roll over on his injured leg, but the caller did not desist before he was able to draw a hand to his pocket and take the call.
“Yeah?”
“Hi!” Zooey greeted. “Put me on speaker.”
Danny obeyed and strained to prop the cell phone in the drink compartment.
“Juno!”
“Zooey!” the killer answered. “I’m driving, talking to you, and aiming a gun at this guy’s brain. Try and make it quick.”
“Let me take some of your load: give me Danny.”
“No way.” Juno queried her mirror. “In fact, I might shoot his other leg if you don’t keep your distance.”
“We can make a deal.”
“I don’t make deals.”
“Come on, not even with your old friend Zooey? I’m as nuts as you.”
“I’m not nuts. I’m thorough.”
“Not that much. You missed a spot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were trying to get rid of the spawn of Victor Lyon, weren’t you? Well, you forgot one. There’s a tween Lyon. She’s adorable! Say hi, Ursy.”
URSULA: What are you doing?
“Good girl. So, what do you think, Jay? My hostage for yours?”
Juno, frowning, checked with her hostage. Danny looked just as confused.
“Is that really a kid there with
you?” Juno wondered. “Where did she come from?”
“Glad you asked! Theoretically, she’s Victor’s daughter from his second wife, but actually she’s Xander’s daughter.”
URSULA: I’m what?!
“Shit. Sorry, I meant to tell you in private. Whatever. The thing is, Juno Mars, she’s a pure-blooded Lyon.”
DANNY: Zooey, what the fuck?!
“That can’t be true,” Juno said. “You’re playing me. There’s no little girl.”
“Oh, don’t be silly—just look at your phone screen.”
Juno let go of the gun or the steering wheel (both options were considerably reckless) and picked up the cell phone.
A little girl in a Bulbasaur costume grinned at her from a profile picture above the name: Ursula Lyon.
Juno floored the brake into the ninth circle of hell. The Jaguar skidded a full U-turn after one O-turn along a hundred-yard stretch, ripping flames off the tarmac.
* * *
—
In the Camaro, Zooey saw the lonely red light far ahead become two whites and pulled up.
“She’s here with me, Juno,” she lured into Ursula’s phone. “Come and get her.”
Then she hung up.
She turned to the terrified little girl in the backseat. “Right side, seat belt, head between your knees.”
The kid stared back, black teary eyes undecided between brown and green, like a broken compass. Her mind ached with a thousand thoughts put on hold; too many things had happened in the last five minutes.
“Ursy, look at me,” Zooey ordered.
Ursula’s eyes found hers, startled. Zooey’s unusual gravitas garnered the attention of the purring car and the desert itself.
“I know what I’m doing. I can play this game. Better than Adrian. But you have to do exactly as I say: right side, seat belt, head between your knees. Now.”
Ursula breathed in and out twice, then tightened up her seat belt and pulled her legs up.
* * *
—
Juno studied the Jaguar’s steering wheel, concluded that if her entrance in Villa Leona had not caused the airbags to deploy it was surely because there were none, sighed, and then casually glanced at Danny.
“You might want to hold on to something.”
The tires scraped another inch-thick layer of asphalt before firing the luxury sedan from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds.
* * *
—
Zooey made out the other car’s lights approaching and dedicated Juno a smug smirk.
“Right-brainer.”
She gripped the wheel, pressed the accelerator, and let the needle on the speedometer get acquainted with the right end of the dial.
* * *
—
Juno shifted two gears up at a time, the engine’s roar wandering out of tune due to the excitement.
* * *
—
Kimrean shifted to third, fixed her waistcoat, smoothed her tank top, pursed her lips at the mirror, shifted to fourth.
* * *
—
A dung beetle roaming in the middle of the road suddenly became aware of the air pressure on both sides rising slightly, foreshadowing the confluence of two four-wheeled horizontal rockets at jet fighter speed.
* * *
—
Gritted teeth.
* * *
—
White knuckles turned whiter.
* * *
—
Electric-blue eyes charging up.
* * *
—
Brown and green ones’ pupils shrinking under the opposing lights.
* * *
—
Two racing hearts counting the thousandths of a second available for the sudden steer that spares both from the impending catastrophe, and Zooey glances out her side window.
“Oh, look! Roadrunner!”
* * *
—
The crash sent a circular shock wave rippling across the tarmac, undulating the road and the desert like the surface of a pond after the drop of a meteor. The momentum was way too much for either car to stop the other: the vintage muscle car simply bounced over the larger, heavier sedan like it was a speed bump, made a full corkscrew in the air, and landed far away in the ditch.
A. Z. Kimrean stayed on the road, though. They flew straight through the Camaro’s windscreen on impact, glided some fifty yards through the air, then skidded fifty more on the coarse pavement.
They stopped, eventually, at the end of a trail of blood and glass powder parallel to the yellow dashed line.
The wind carried their tattered fedora a few seconds later.
* * *
—
Some minutes of unsuspected quietude followed.
Inside the yellow-striped blue wreck, Ursula regained consciousness to the sound of someone struggling with the warped door to her right. The seat belt had held her, at the cost of a burning red abrasion on her neck and a painful whiplash. She smelled blood in her nose from booping against the front seat. She couldn’t see anything: the stars had flicked off.
In fact, it took her quite a while to notice she was upside down.
The door opened, or came clanking off its hinges, and Ursula caught the gleam of a moonlit gun.
Juno, covered in glittery bulletproof glass, a broken arm hanging dead by her side with a piece of ulna sticking out to stargaze, allowed the desert night to adumbrate the face of the surviving child. Ursula never made out the killer’s features against the full moon.
Their breathing was heavy again, but not frantic. Juno’s hand was steady.
She murmured over the handcannon: “You could have just gotten out of the car, you know.”
Ursula thought about it. It had never occurred to her.
Or to Zooey.
She felt a tear blossom in her eye and roll down her forehead.
“That would have meant leaving me on the curb,” she whispered.
The killer clicked the gun’s safety off.
Or maybe on.
“I know a little girl in love when I see one,” she said.
And that was all.
She pocketed the gun and left on foot, heading west. The diner and the parking lot could not be that far.
* * *
—
Danny, wrapped inside a luxury twisted steel-and-aluminum cocoon, was already grazing his phone with his fingertip when he heard the first sirens.
A beautiful post-traumatic sun shone over the Bay Area, despite the new low-pressure front drifting in from Southern California. Meanwhile, a state government staffer had apologized for his unfortunate remarks on Armenian American citizens, BART was promising the renovation of its trolleybus fleet, and California Democrats had just announced their candidate for the Fifty-Fourth District—Gran South County. Hollywood rejoiced with the first photographs of a popular star couple’s second adopted child, and the Sacramento Kings had eked out an unlikely victory over the Lakers, 92–89. As for the weather, a beautiful sun was shining over the Bay Area.
Adrian squirmed to escape the nightmare of the infinite news loop, but dull, firm, multitudinous pain reined him in. White light and gamma rays jumped on his retinas like the infected on Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil movies. Or like Zooey on Milla Jovovich that day they ran into her in a Wendy’s. He lowered his eyelids, breathed once for courage, and lifted them a crack. He saw dust specks flying like distant whip-poor-wills in a sunray and the green hillscape of his EEG. He made out a balcony in the far back and the inconsiderately white day. In front he saw his sheets, a doorway, and a hallway in that bland pistachio green that is widely believed to soothe patients, thanks to psychiatrists who persistently ignore the evidence that homicidal mania feeds on pastel hues. To his right sat a retro woode
n radio, its voice pushed into the background by the noisy morning light.
He asked the pain permission to prop himself up and sat on his elbows. He caressed the many slashes across his arms, all shiny red. His right hand sported a clean bandage. Beneath the impractical hospital gown he felt more bandages constricting his chest, substituting the elastic band he used to wear for the same reason. He touched another bandage around his head; a swollen cheekbone too. He counted his teeth, then checked his nose, broken and realigned again. That was twice in one weekend.
“Well, there’s another unlikely story for you,” he said, and closed his eyes.
After a second he opened them again. Intrigued, he checked the inside of his skull.
“Zooey.”
In a delicate close-up shot, the brown and green irises shuddered with the opening and slamming of doors behind them.
“Zooey?”
The Kings had beaten the Lakers 92–89 and a beautiful sun was shining over the Bay Area.
Kimrean’s left hand scratched that side’s ear.
“Oh shit. I need a cigarette.”
A mischievous smile came to haunt their face.
“Breathe, nerd. Who would beat your ass at chess if I wasn’t here?”
* * *
—
Danny Mojave, or some Danny Mojave from a parallel universe with a bruised face and one leg in a splint and his sexiness lost to another polka-dotted gown, yet retaining the sunglasses from this dimension, limped in through the balcony door, a Newport hanging off his lips.
“Well, hello. How many children are up?”
“All of them,” Kimrean puffed, letting the fluffy pillow swallow them back like the Cure’s Robert Smith in that music video with the spider. “I saved your ass again, didn’t I?”
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