Arvo hadn’t a clue what Cal meant, but he made his way up to the gallery, which turned out to be less crowded than downstairs. Then he saw a little nook with a joke sign reading “Reserved for Lady Psychiatrists’ hanging over it, and two people at the table.
He walked over, told them his name and said he was looking for Mitch Cameron.
“Mitch?” said the woman. “Oh, yeah. Shit, Mitch. Right. Sit down, sit down.” A long skinny arm shot out of her baggy sleeves and she gestured for him to sit. She had rings on all her long, thin fingers, including the thumbs. “This is Brook,” she said, introducing the angst-ridden young man next to her, with his pale complexion and lock of hair falling over his eye. “He’s working on a movie screenplay and he wants me to be in it, don’t you, Brook?”
Brook glared at Arvo and grunted. Wants to get laid, more like, thought Arvo. Screenplay. Jeez, some things don’t change even north of Santa Barbara.
“I’m Candi,” she said. “With an “i.’”
At last, the elusive Candi. Exotic dancer and blow-jobber par excellence. “Pleased to meet you,” Arvo said. “Is there a little heart over it?”
She frowned. “Over what?”
“The ‘i’ ?”
Candi just looked confused. Maybe she hadn’t seen LA Story. She had long straggly brown hair that looked as if it could do with a good wash. Her face was pleasant and open, free of make up, but it had that blurred, unfocused quality, like her eyes, and probably like her life. Drugs will do that to you. Arvo didn’t know if she were drunk or stoned right now, but she was something. He hoped she was older than she looked.
“I’m trying to find Mitch,” Arvo explained slowly. Candi’s eyes were on him but not quite fixed. She had a mixed drink in front of her and sucked it through the crushed ice as he talked, making a slurping sound. Brook lit a cigarette and stared at the slide show. Arvo decided there and then it would be best not to tell them he was a cop. Maybe they’d guess, like Cal, but he wouldn’t put money on it. He probably looked like a tourist. Or a bookie.
“He’s gone,” Candi said finally.
“Do you know where?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“He owes me some money.”
“Huh. Good luck.”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
“LA. We went down there with Gary Knox, you know, the rock star, the guy who died of an overdose last year.” She nudged Brook. “I fucked him, you know,” she said to him. “I fucked Gary Knox.”
“Oh yeah?” said Brook. “What was he like?”
Candi frowned, then giggled. “Well, would you believe it, I can’t remember. Maybe I just blew him. What the hell.” She waved her arm and almost knocked over her drink.
Better work quick while she’s still on her feet, Arvo thought. “So Mitch stayed in LA?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Well, like, I had this new dancing job to come back to and all, but Mitch, he didn’t have nothing. He’d gotten fired. You know why, man?” She nudged Brook.
“No. Why?” he mumbled.
“For protecting me from this drunk asshole who was, like grabbing my tits, that’s why.” She looked at Arvo, eyes burning briefly with excitement at the memory. “Broke the guy’s fucking arm, Mitch did. And his face. His nose, I mean. Got himself fired. Shit.” She giggled. “He was my knight in shining armour.”
“So Mitch stayed in LA?”
“Uh-huh. Said it was his big chance.”
“Big chance? How?”
“Mitch wanted to be a rock star. Didn’t you know that? He played guitar, wrote songs and poetry and stuff. Gary Knox said he liked them and Mitch thought maybe he’d record some. Maybe he’d even let Mitch be in his band. But he died.”
“Do you remember Gary’s girlfriend at the time? Sally?”
Candi screwed up her eyes. “I think so,” she said. “Hey, is that the one who’s on that TV cop show? I had this argument with a guy—”
“That’s the one,” Arvo said.
She banged the table and made the glasses rattle. “Whoo-ee! Holy shit! I knew I was right. That’s twenty bucks Pete owes me.”
“Did you know Sally?”
“She was a cold one. Spaced out most of the time. No, we never talked. I fucked Gary, though. Did I tell you that?”
“You did,” said Arvo, smiling. “What about Mitch? Did he like girls?”
“Pants or skirt, it didn’t matter to Mitch. If it moved, he’d fuck it.” She laughed.
“He was bisexual?”
“Like a pendulum.”
“Did you notice how he got along with Sally?”
“Did he fuck her, do you mean?”
“How did he treat her?”
“He called her his Little Star. I don’t think he fucked her. She was a cold one, man, did I say that already? Prob’ly like fucking an iceberg. But what would I know? I don’t do girls. A girl’s got to draw the line somewhere, don’t you think?”
Arvo took a deep breath. He asked her if she knew what kind of car Mitch drove.
“A red one,” she said. “Or it might have been blue. I don’t know.”
Her head was starting to droop and loll onto her chest now. Brook seemed to be getting impatient beside her, Arvo thought, if indeed that was what the occasional tics and sighs coming from his general direction meant.
“Do you know where he might be living in LA, anyone he might be staying with?”
She shook her head without looking up.
“What about money? Work? He’d need a job. What kind of work does he do?”
At this she looked up. “Security,” she said. “’S’all he can do apart from write songs. Bouncer. Bodyguard. Do you want to know the truth?” She wrinkled her nose and crooked her finger at Arvo to come closer. He did. Close enough to smell the gin on her breath. “They sucked,” she whispered. “His songs sucked. But don’t you tell him I ever said that or he’d kill me.”
“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 toward 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 tires, 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 rearview 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 taillights.
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 center.
The red taillights 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 rearview 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 center 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 toward 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 favoring 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 taillights 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 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.
No Cure for Love Page 26