As they climbed up the concrete ramp to the street, tires squealing as the long vehicle rounded the series of hairpin turns, Gabhart flipped up his Plexiglas face shield but didn't take off the helmet. Behind his head, the soundproof, one-way privacy window that divided the limo's driver and passenger compartments was up. The stars didn't want to be disturbed.
After they'd exited the parking garage and veered onto the street, a voice in Gabhart's headset said, "Captain Crunch, we are on your bumper."
"Roger that, Stinger," he said. "We'll proceed to base by the prearranged route."
Sticking to the major streets, the limo worked its way to the freeway on-ramp. As the driver merged with the thick evening traffic, Gabhart checked out the view on his side. In the distance were the glittering lights and concrete gridwork of Megalopolis. Just ahead, at the next off-ramp, he could see the sprawling roofline and acres of free parking of the Sepulveda Malt.
Then a knuckle rapped on the other side of the privacy window.
As the window dropped, the familiar face of Puma Lee appeared in the opening. Gabhart saw the tension around her eyes and mouth.
"We need to make a stop," she said.
The driver looked at her in the rearview, then over at Gabhart, who for the purposes of this mission was his boss.
"Sorry, ma'am," Gabhart said, "that's not on our itinerary. My orders are to take you directly to your mansion."
"My husband and I need to pick up a few things at the mall," the movie star insisted. "Take the next off-ramp."
Gabhart steeled himself and looked her straight in the eye. "No need to trouble yourself with that kind of thing, ma'am," he said. "If you'd like to make a list, the security team will be more than happy to pick up whatever you want after we get you settled in at home."
"I told you to take the next off-ramp."
"I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am. I have strict orders to see that you go straight home. It's for your own protection."
Gabhart saw the actress's fingers tighten on the top of the seat back. Her fingernails dug into the leather. For some reason, he hadn't noticed her nails before. They weren't just red, long and pointed; they were thick, almost like bone. And they sank into the seat cushion like five paring knives into an overripe peach.
Chiz Graham leaned into the window opening beside his wife. "For your protection, son, take the next off-ramp."
"It'll cost me my job, sir...."
Puma Lee reached through the privacy window and touched the driver's wide shoulder. "Turn now," she ordered.
The driver looked at Gabhart, who shook his head. The movie star responded by sinking her nails into the driver's deltoid. Instantly, the blood drained from his round face, and he swerved the limo for the offramp, cutting between a semitruck and a minivan poking along in the slow lane.
Behind the limo, the Explorer's brakes screeched as it attempted maneuver for the off-ramp, but it was cut off by the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The driver swung into the emergency parking lane, locking the brakes again. When the Explorer finally came to a stop, the driver reversed his way back to the ramp, tires smoking.
"This is Captain Crunch," Gabhart said into his headset mike. "Stinger, we've had a sudden change of plans. We're proceeding at once to the Sepulveda Mall."
"Negative, Captain Crunch," said the voice in his ear. "Repeat. Abort that. What is the trouble?"
"Victoria and Albert have the munchies," Gabhart explained. "I'll keep you updated on our position." When he looked over, he saw the blood dripping down the front of the driver's sleeve and lapel. Puma Lee still had her nails in him.
Gabhart thought about reaching for his side arm. But what then? If he pulled it, would he actually use it? Would he shoot a goddamned movie star he was supposed to be protecting? He didn't know. And the not knowing made him hesitate. He did know that drawing his gun and being unable to use it could put him in an even worse situation, as in being forced to eat it. So he reached for the cellular phone and started punching in the numbers for the Koch-Roche and Associates office.
"Who are you calling?" Puma asked.
"Got to report the change in route, ma'am."
"You don't got to do anything," she said, letting go of the driver and snatching the phone.
Gabhart didn't tussle with her over it. There wasn't time. She took it from him in a single, blindingly fast sweep of her hand, like stealing candy from a small, clumsy and not overbright child.
"I'm really getting tired of this guy, Chiz."
"Ditto," the action star said. "It's like being back in first grade."
"Open the sunroof," Puma told the driver.
As the panel slid back, exposing the rear of the limo to bright sunlight, the movie star seized Gabhart by both shoulders.
"Wait... !" he cried.
But it was already too late. With astounding ease, the woman pulled him through the narrow privacy window. Before the security man could do anything about it, she had thrust him halfway out of the sunroof, headfirst into the streaming wind.
Though he tried desperately to cling to the sunroof's opening, with one hard shove Puma Lee broke the power of his grip and sent him flying up and out of the limo.
Gabhart hit the trunk lid, then the road, bouncing and rolling wildly across the pavement. The driver of the Explorer, in high-speed pursuit of the wayward limo, once again had to slam on the brakes. He swerved the four-by-four into the oncoming lane to keep from running over Gabhart. Despite all the body armor, the impact shattered his right knee and shoulder. He rolled to a stop, facedown in the gutter.
As he lay there, gasping, Gabhart had no idea how lucky he was.
Chapter 24
When Puma Lee tapped the limo driver on the side of the neck, he flinched, horribly. His eyes full of dread, he glanced up at her in his rearview mirror.
"Stop over there," she said. She pointed across the parking lot, at a side entrance to the mall.
As Chiz opened the door, he warned the driver, "Wait here for us. We'll be back in a minute." But as soon as the movie-star couple stepped up on the curb, the limo driver put the gas pedal to the floorboard. With a squeal of tires, he shot away, highballing it for the nearest exit.
Chiz started to chase him down, and would have, but Puma caught his arm. "Don't bother," she said. "We'll take a cab home."
The movie stars slipped through the side door and onto the mall's main gallery. The shopping corridor featured marble-veneer floors and three-story-high atrium ceilings. There were full-size tropical trees and jungle plants in strategically positioned beds. Every hundred yards or so, the gallery walls were broken by a waterfall or fountain. Flashing neon lights lined both sides of the main walkway, luring customers into stores aimed at all age and demographic brackets. There was the young-and-baggy look. The old-and-dowdy look. The middle-aged-crazy look.
The stores seemed to be clustered according to the type of merchandise they offered. Chiz and Puma strolled past four jewelry stores in a row. Then four department stores. Shoe stores. Bookstores. It appeared that every business had cloned itself at least twice. The mall was a fertile spawning ground for various mercantile species. And some of them were wheeled. The shopping center had rented out some of the space in the middle of the gallery aisles to arts-and-crafts vendors with display carts. Again, there was strong evidence that some kind of cloning was going on. Witness the multiple outlets for handmade pottery. For watercolor portraits of Labrador retrievers. For potpourri. For wicker baskets. For gnome figurines.
Chiz and Puma Lee never ever shopped in such places. For one thing, they couldn't go out in public without being mobbed. For another, they had no interest in wearing what everybody else was wearing. They were the trendsetters, ahead of the current fashion curve by light-years. Their clothes and accessories were custom-designed, guaranteed one-of-a-kind items. They had appointments with exclusive couturiers and shoemakers. Nothing they put on their backs had ever seen the inside of a plastic bag.
As the movie star
s moved purposefully down the gallery, they drew stares and double takes from the regular mall shoppers. People stopped in their tracks, slack jawed, as if witnessing some miracle of Creation. Their eyes were at first puzzled, disbelieving, then brimming with delight. As Chiz and Puma strolled along, they could hear the same words uttered over and over: "Is that really them?"
The mall customers began to follow along behind them like they were pied pipers, dropping whatever it was that they were doing, wherever they were going, whatever they had intended to consume. The gnome and potpourri vendors struggled to keep their carts in place as more and more people surged into the main corridor.
Despite the gathering throng, Chiz and Puma proceeded without incident until they reached the spawning ground of the camera stores. One of the clerks, who happened to be standing outside his shop cleaning a display window, caught sight of the commotion coming toward him. Instinctively, he snatched a loaded camera from the counter and, thinking of posterity, rushed forth into the middle of the aisle to record the moment.
In so doing, he blocked the actors' path.
Chiz didn't react well to the flash going off in his face. It startled and angered him.
The well-scrubbed camera clerk was trying to get both stars in the frame when Chiz took matters into his own hands. He grabbed the camera, which hung around the clerk's neck by a webbed strap, and flung it over his shoulder. The gesture was halfhearted, like he was shooing away an annoying fly.
Halfhearted or not, it jerked the hapless clerk right out of his shoes and sent him hurtling onto the mob forming behind the movie stars, a mob further fueled by people rushing out of the stores for a look at what in the world was going on. Because he landed on the mob and not the marble floor, the camera clerk might well have survived the fall-were it not for the fact he was dead the moment his feet left his shoes, when Chiz's jerk had broken his neck in three places.
The mood in the mall's gallery was so joyous that people didn't seem to notice that someone had just died. The screams of those few who had actually been struck by the corpse were drowned out by the Muzak and the excited rumble of hundreds of other shoppers. Oblivious to what lay beneath their feet, the mob tromped on the camera clerk's body like it was a display dummy or a rolled-up length of carpet.
An obstacle. Not a victim.
Puma and Chiz were hardly aware of the tumult that surrounded them. They were that focused on aromas, on the myriad delicious smells coming from the direction of the mall's food court.
For its dining area, the mall's developers had created a miniature amphitheater. A sunken oval under huge skylights, with more of the ubiquitous jungle planters, palm trees and ferns, as well as a black tile floor. The semicircular seating area was bordered by individual take-out food shops. The cuisine on offer was a mixture of ethnic and traditional. There was the usual Italian, Mexican and Chinese fast food, but also curious, main-course cross-over items like Moo Shu Chimichangas, Carne Asada Calzones and the like. This, so the businesses could compete with their neighbors on either side. In addition to the full-meal-type of fast food, there were several all-dessert shops, including The Big Cookie, which sold enormous, half-cooked chocolate-chip cookies, and Sin-O-Bun, which sold enormous, half-cooked cinnamon buns.
The tables in the amphitheater were about a third full of shoppers, surrounded by bags full of purchases, by baby carriers, by avalanches of fast-food paper debris. The dull roar of the approaching crowd made them look up from their lasagne stir-fries and deepdish egg rolls.
It was into this arena that Chiz and Puma strode, with an army of awestruck fans at their heels. Most of these people were under thirty; many of them teenage mall rats who had been spending time, not money, in the faint hopes of being entertained.
As the juggernaut of humanity rolled onward, some people-the easily baffled-didn't move out of the way quickly enough. Chiz and Puma tossed the living statues left and right, sending them crashing into the plate-glass windows of the lines of shops on either side of them.
As the mob swept into the food court, mall security finally made its presence known. A dozen brown-uniformed men entered the amphitheater from all directions. At the sight of the huge crowd, they also seemed to freeze. There was no question of drawing their side arms; there were too many people for that. They conferred through their walkie-talkies, but it was clear that they didn't have a clue what they should do. Finally, the ranking officer ran to the nearest pay phone to call the LAPD.
Among the people loathe to move out of the way of the throng were the good folks waiting in line at The Big Cookie for a fresh batch hot out of the oven. They had already been waiting ten minutes.
Chiz and Puma weren't really interested in cookies, but the thought that someone else might be eating one right under their noses absolutely infuriated them. If anybody was going to eat cookies, it was them.
And them alone.
They altered their course a few degrees, just enough to put themselves dead center in the middle of the cookie line.
The would-be eaters and the service clerks in blue gingham paper hats gawked as the movie stars and their entourage bore down on them. They were unsure what it all meant.
Could it be part of a movie that was being filmed?
Were the newcomers trying to cut in line?
The three cookie fans with the mental wherewithal to take a good look into Puma Lee's eyes didn't stick around to find out. They beat feet. The others instantly became HFOs-Human Flying Objects. Chiz and Puma really put some muscle into these tosses, because it was a territorial thing, because there was real anger behind the action. They plucked the cookie fans out of the lineup and, with a single twist of their torsos, sent them into low and tenuous orbits. The cookie eaters' bodies cartwheeled as they arced over into the eating area, crashing limply upon the metal tables and the concrete-and-steel housings of the overflowing trash receptacles.
Mall security looked on in helpless horror.
And the crowd began to chant, "Poo-mah! Poo-mah!"
The confusion in the minds of the shoppers was understandable. Overstimulated by bright neon lights, by loud music, by flashy displays, they weren't really sure what they were witnessing. A music video. A computer game. An infomercial.
On the other hand, Chiz and Puma weren't thinking at all. They were simply reacting to the sights and smells of the food court. Nostrils flared, they moved along the ring of fast-food shops. It wasn't spices they were sniffing at; it was the fat content.
They passed by Veggie Haven with scarcely a sidelong look. At Tex-a-Que, it was a different story. The odors of roasted fatty meat and of steak-fry grease drew the actors like a magnet.
Woe to those fans of down-home barbecue who did not flee.
Practically swallowing his tongue in excitement at the prospect of serving the stars, the Western-shirted, Buddy Holly-spectacled clerk automatically said what he had been programmed to say, "Howdy, folks. What'll you have?"
"We'll take a little of everything," Puma said. Chiz smashed through the top of the plate-glass counter with his left fist while Puma cleared the queue of Tex-a-Que fans with a single look. After ripping away the remains of the countertop, they plunged their hands into the mounds of heavily sauced beef, smoked chicken and hot links, of potato salad and coleslaw that were ninety-five percent pure mayo, of baked beans swimming in bacon grease.
Behind them, the crowd closed in.
The teenagers continued to chant, "Poo-mah! Poo-mah!"
Some began to make howler-monkey sounds: "Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo."
The actress picked up a whole pork butt in one hand and a fistful of Louisiana hot links in the other. She alternated bites, gulping and gnawing, until both hands were empty.
Chiz meanwhile concentrated on the coleslaw. He didn't lift his head from the slaw bucket when he heard a megaphone order the mob to clear a path. Only when the amplified voice barked right in his ear did he raise his face.
"Stand back from the counter," the command said. Of c
ourse, that was absolutely the last thing Chiz and Puma were prepared to do. With grease running down their chins, the movie stars stared at the rent-a-cops. All four had their service revolvers drawn.
"We don't want any more trouble," said the head security man. "The LAPD are on their way. Don't make things any worse for yourselves than they already are."
Puma and Chiz shared a look. Trouble? What trouble?
The actress picked up the steel serving tray of barbecue beans and tipped it to her lips. The overflow of beans and sauce spilled all down the front of her cleavage.
"I'm asking you again," the head security guy said, "to please step away from the counter. We need you to follow us to a secure area. For your own safety, please."
The other three rent-a-cops looked mighty nervous, sandwiched as they were between the press of the mob-which was now shouting, "Let 'em eat! Let 'em eat!"-and the huge, animal-like, food-covered megastars.
"Mghhmppp!" Chiz said, gesturing with a slab of baby back ribs, his mouth crammed full of sweet potato pie.
At this point, three of the four bodyguards assigned to the stars by their lawyer finally caught up to them. The private security crew pushed to the front of the crowd.
"Oh, Christ," said Stinger as he viewed the carnage around Tex-a-Que.
"You guys aren't LAPD," said the mall's head security man. "So, who the hell are you?"
"Their court-ordered escort."
"The court isn't going to be real pleased with your service."
"They ditched us. And nearly killed one of our guys who was riding with them."
Above the chaos in the food court came the sound of approaching police sirens.
Lots of sirens.
The mob began to boo. Its size had grown. It looked like everyone in the shopping center, easily four or five thousand people, had migrated to the food-court area. All the shops were deserted, racks of merchandise and cash registers left unguarded, but even the thieves were too fascinated by the little drama to stay on the job.
"We don't want any gunplay here," Stinger told the world-famous couple. "A lot of innocent people could get hurt. The press for you two would be horrible. Before this gets any messier, let's just chill out."
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