by Kyra Davis
“Wow,” I whispered. “From what you’re telling me, it sort of amazing Anita didn’t leave London sooner, addiction or no.”
Charity locked eyes with me in the mirror, her expression puzzled. “Who’s Anita?”
Marcus stopped cutting.
I swiveled my chair back and forth again, trying to keep my expression neutral. “Aaron’s wife?” I said, casually. “Isn’t that her name?”
“I never heard anyone call her that,” Charity said, now looking really confused. “Her name was Anne. And she didn’t leave him. She’s dead. She killed herself nine months ago.”
“Every great artist must also be a great liar. Slaves to honesty have no imagination.”
--Chaos, Desire & A Kick-Ass Cupcake
She’s dead. The words kept pounding against the inside of my skull as I drove away from the salon. The woman I had been talking to was not London’s wife.
Oh my God, the woman I’ve been talking to was not London’s wife! She showed up at the hospital right after he arrived there. How did she know to come? But of course there’s only one way she could have known that.
I decided to take residential side streets home. I was way too distracted to navigate serious traffic. And what about Anita’s daughter? Who the hell was that? Robin to her evil Batman? Seriously, what was going on??
Gun lied to me about not knowing anything about London’s social life. Anita and Catherine lied to me about their very identities. Everybody was lying to me. And they were lying so well! There was a momentary, distracting glare in my rearview mirror as the car behind me went over the speed bump I had gone over a few seconds before, it’s headlights bobbing up just long enough to cause a reflective glare.
Anita, Catherine, Gundrun, these people could teach courses to spooks they were so good at subterfuge and deceit. Well, maybe not Gundrun, I kind of knew he was lying but pulling off the whole wife thing? That was a different level.
I turned onto another residential avenue as new ideas and theories bubbled and boiled in my head. Anita had to be the killer. But then it was hard for me to believe Gundrun didn’t fit into this picture somehow.
I glanced in my rearview mirror. Nothing behind me but one set of headlights.
The same set of headlights that had been behind me on the last street?
I shook my head and let out a nervous chuckle. Don’t get paranoid. Just because people are lying to you, stalking you and possibly trying to kill you, that doesn’t mean you should be paranoid.
It wasn’t a very reassuring line of reasoning. I slowed and turned onto another quiet street, eyes on the rearview.
The other car turned too.
Oh. Shit.
Okay, so I was being followed. By a woman who was impersonating London’s wife. Or maybe by Gundrun, or the teenage girl who called herself Cat, or by the man with the black hat. There was no good option among them. I took another turn.
The headlights followed.
Was it a Zipcar? I couldn’t tell from this angle, in the dark of night. And really, did I honestly care if I got murdered by a Zipcar driver versus say, a Prius driver? It was really the murdering part that was the problem.
I glanced at my car’s clock. It was nine twenty. I could be home in about ten minutes and then maybe, maybe Anatoly would be there. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Here I was eager to get home so it would look like I didn’t lie to Anatoly (again) about going out but now if I did get home before him I could get myself killed. And if I didn’t get home before he did…well that might be better because the person following me might be less inclined to kill me if there was a witness around. But then Anatoly might kill me. Or at least break-up with me.
Shit, shit, shit, shit!
I stabbed at my car’s touch screen and called Dena.
“Not a good time.” Her voice sounded even deeper and grittier than normal.
“I’m being followed,” I said taking another turn. Oh my God, the headlights kept coming! Why wouldn’t they just go away!
“Okay, so here’s a thought. Maybe you’re not being followed. Maybe you’re being paranoid. There’s a great mental health…er…spa in Washington State I’m trying to get Jason to check into. Maybe you should consider it too.”
“I don’t need a psychiatric ward,” I snapped. “Listen to me. Yesterday someone in a Zipcar tried to run me over.”
“Wait, what?” Dena asked, her tone suddenly changing. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! And here’s the kicker, London’s wife? Her name’s Anne, not Anita and she’s been dead for months! I have no idea who the psycho bitch I’ve been talking to is! And Gundrun basically threatened me, and some freak in a black hat has been following me around. And one of these people left me a note, Dena! Taped to my front door! An anonymous threat! So no, I’m not being paranoid. I’m not being crazy. I. Am. Being. Followed!”
There was a ten-second pause on the other end of the line. Finally I heard Dena exhale deeply. “Shit.”
“Exactly!” I turned another corner. Oh God, the headlights took the same turn ten seconds later. “What do I do?”
“Um…okay, give me a second, I have to release Jason from his handcuffs.”
For a moment I actually forgot about the driver behind me.
“Fuck, where’d I put the key…” I heard her mutter then she stepped further away from the phone. I heard muffled voices on the other end of the line, including what sounded like a note of alarm from Jason immediately followed by a harsh shush from what I presumed to be Dena. “Forget it, he can stay chained up for a little while,” she said, coming back to the phone. “This is important.”
“Um…okay…if you’re sure...what were we talking about again?” I glanced up at my rearview mirror. “Oh, right! Okay, so I could just drive home but if Anatoly’s not there--”
“You can’t go home!” Dena said urgently. “You’ll be leading this asshole right to your house!”
“Right, right, okay. So what do I do?” I had made a bad call with this street. No streetlights whatsoever. Even most of the houses were dark.
“You’re in a car, right? Please tell me you’re in a car.”
“Yeah, I’m in a car. I’m half way between Marcus’ salon and my place.”
“Go to the police station.”
I hesitated for maybe a moment too long.
“Sophie, I know you and the SFPD haven’t always been BFFs but you can’t be fucking around with this. The only place you can safely go right now is the police station.”
“Okay. I really don’t want to--”
“Sophie!”
“Right, I’m going to the police station.” I thought about it for a moment before asking, “should I Waze it?”
“Don’t Waze it,” she said, sternly. “The last thing you should be doing right now is taking short-cuts through dark residential streets.”
“Um, right, of course not,” I choked out. “That would be stupid.”
“Yeah, stay on the busy streets. This is one of those times you should be thankful for traffic.”
There was not one other car on this dark residential street.
I fumbled for my phone and went to navigation, desperately punching in police station.
“Uh-oh,” my navigator voice chirped. “It seems you’re currently driving. If you are a passenger say or press Yes.”
“Yes!” I screamed.
“Sophie, are you okay?” Dena asked. “What happened?”
“Nothing I just--”
“I’m sorry, didn’t get that,” the navigator voice said. “Are you a passenger?”
I was going to die. I was going to die because of the failings of voice recognition software. Siri was literally killing me.
I pressed Yes on my screen this time instead of saying it. But I must have not pressed the screen in quite the right way because it went back to the home-screen without any help at all.
I glanced in my rearview mirror. The hea
dlights appeared to be getting closer.
“Dena, if I die I need you to check in on Anatoly from time to time. Same for Mr. Katz and Ms. Dogz. Do not let Anatoly give away Ms. Dogz in his grief.”
“You’re not going to die and real men don’t give away their dogs. Have you figured out where the nearest police station is yet?”
“I’m trying but my navigator isn’t being cooperative.”
Dena let loose with a series of expletives. “Your navigator is going haywire now?! They say all this technology is improving our lives but is it? Is it really? Are we better off than we were ten years ago or just more entitled and exponentially frustrated?”
“Yeah, I really don’t have time to do a deep dive into the societal impact of modern technology right now,” I said, tersely.
“Okay, right. Sorry. I need you to keep driving, don’t slow down and then carefully try to type in the information again.”
The headlights were now reflected even brighter in my rearview. I stepped a little harder on the gas, held my breath and tried one more time to get this navigating, hard-of-hearing, virtual bitch to take my typed commands.
“In three hundred feet take a left.”
“Yes!” I screamed. “Thank you technology gods. Thank you!”
“Is it keeping you on a busy street?”
“Um…” I turned left as directed. So did the headlights. I thought I could hear the sound of traffic a little more clearly now. “I think that’s in the cards.”
Three quick turns later I was on a major…well not major, but not exactly minor, thoroughfare. “I’m on a busy street!” I exclaimed.
“But you have been this whole time, right?” Dena asked suspiciously.
“Um…” I glanced in my rearview mirror. Now there were lots of cars behind me. Was one of them the headlights? I still couldn’t tell if any of the cars in my rearview were Zipcars.
“Your destination is coming up,” my navigator informed me.
“My destination is coming up,” I repeated for Dena’s benefit. “I’ll just pull into the police station and…oh…wait…Dena, what if the police station doesn’t have parking?”
“Police stations have parking,” she said, a little too dismissively.
“Do they?” I challenged. “Do they really, Dena? This is San Francisco! Parking is never, ever, ever a given! I could have to drive around the block slowly for a half hour with this freak on my tail and…oh look, they have parking.”
“Shocker,” Dena replied.
I took a sharp turn into the small parking lot behind the station, making my wheels squeal from the sudden change in direction. Not a good look when pulling into a police station. I took another deep breath and claimed the first parking spot I saw, putting my car in park but not turning off the engine.
“Are you there?” Dena asked.
“Yeah,” I was looking behind me, waiting to see if anything followed me in.
“Go into the station, Sophie.”
“Maybe just being in the parking lot is enough,” I said, hopefully.
“Don’t be an asshole. Go into the station.”
“And tell them what?” I asked. It was a small lot with only a few visitor spots but at the far end, there was a sectioned off area in which the cop cars were plentiful.
“Oh, hmm, let me think…maybe you could tell them that you were being followed.” I pulled gently on my seatbelt. Another black and white pulled into the lot. “And if that doesn’t peak their interest,” she continued, “toss in the fact that someone is leaving threats on your front door and that someone recently tried to kill you. I think the cops will be interested in attempted murder…it’s sort of their thing.”
“Okay, so about that…”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, what is it, Sophie? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing, I’m telling you everything. But the note? It said, be careful, Sophie. Someone taped it to my door at, like, three in the morning.”
“Yeah, okay, sounds pretty threatening to me.”
“Uh-huh,” I watched a cop and his partner walk into the station. Neither had noted me. “But would you say it’s something I could bring to the police and expect them to do…well, anything?”
“No, but coupled with the attempted homicide…”
“A Zipcar almost ran me over and then it took off. I think it was blue, but it was dark and it happened fast.” I clicked off my navigation, making all the virtual streets and suggested short-cuts disappear with a tap. “Also…I mean, how many near misses are there in San Francisco? I think there’s, like, nine hundred pedestrians hit a year here? And almost five hundred hit and runs? I’m going to go in there and say I was almost hit by a car and the driver didn’t stop and I think that’s suspicious?”
“Sophie, you can’t just hang out in the police station’s parking lot.”
“Can’t I?” I asked in a tone that would suggest I was posing a philosophical question. “Maybe--”
Someone tapped on my passenger window. I literally screamed and jerked back, causing my seatbelt to tighten. But it was a cop.
“Sophie? What’s going on?” Dena shouted.
“Nothing,” I replied apologetically and rolled down the window.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” He had salt and pepper eyebrows, a small gap between his front teeth and skin the color of coffee with a dash of cream. It was the kind of face you wanted to talk to…until you saw that it’s attached to a body wearing a uniform.
“Me?” I asked, self-consciously. “I’m fine.” I could hear Dena sigh through the Bluetooth speakers.
“We saw you pull in on the cameras a few minutes ago. Were you planning on coming into the station?”
“Planning?” I repeated. “No I…I mean, I didn’t originally plan on coming here at all--”
“Tell him, Sophie!” Dena snapped.
The salt and pepper eyebrows lifted in surprise. The way he was angled I couldn’t quite see his hair, but there was something going on with that. “Who do we got on the line?”
“Dena,” Dena said, irritably. “My friend Sophie here came to your station because another car was following her.”
Salt-and-pepper-gap-tooth-man looked at me with new interest. “Someone was tailing you?”
“Yeah,” I said, sheepishly. “I guess I just got a little freaked out and figured I’d try coming here.”
The cop pulled out a notepad and seemed to be about to jot something down while crouched by the window, then thought better of it. “You want to come out of the car for me? It’d be easier to talk that way.”
“Dena, I got to go.”
“Text me when you’re on your way home.”
I hung up and turned off the engine before getting out of the car.
Cornrows. This cop had cornrows. He was like the new Black Ken, all clean cut and representing. “Do you know who was following you?”
I shook my head, he took a note.
“Any chance you got the license plate?”
“No, I mean, I was driving so…”
“Totally understandable. How about the make or model of the car?”
I shook my head again. “It was dark.”
“Oh,” Officer Cornrows replied. No, understandable this time. “How about the color?” he asked hopefully. “Did you happen to notice the color of the vehicle?”
I gave him another head shake. “All I could really make out were headlights. I think they were kind of square-ish in shape. Does that help?”
He put his notepad away and offered me a sympathetic smile. Of course that didn’t help. “If you see him again, I encourage you to get some of those details. It might be helpful if next time you call us while you’re driving, that way the 911 operator can direct you and we can pull him over while he’s still on your tail.”
“While I’m driving. Oh, gosh, that makes sense.” I was surprised Dena hadn’t thought of that.
“There’s not a lot I can do for you right now--”
&
nbsp; “Can I ask you something?” I interrupted. “If someone put a GPS tracking device on my car, would you be able to find it?”
Officer cornrows blinked, taken a little off guard. “Um, is it visible?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, slowly, trying to make him understand. “If I knew that I wouldn’t need anyone’s help trying to find it.”
“Right.” A couple of other cops came out of the station, talking and laughing loudly. They both gave us a second look but didn’t bother to stop as they went to their own cars. Officer Cornrows followed them with his eyes as he considered my question. “Maybe try a mechanic?”
That’s what London had said he had been told. “Tell me this then,” I asked, “if someone did put a GPS tracker on my car, would that be illegal?”
“Huh, let’s see. We know car manufacturers do it all the time with their built in GPS systems or emergency road assistance software, rental car companies do it sometimes too with their vehicles and that’s definitely on the up and up…”
“So, no then,” I finished for him as another cop car pulled into the lot.