Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(102)

“So get on with it, Beebs,” she said. She wasn’t the only girl in trouble. Ashley Bell would be murdered—and suffer who knew what horrors and indignities before the lethal blow—perhaps as soon as twenty-four hours from now. When she pulled away from the curb and drove slowly south on Pacific Coast Highway, the GPS began to offer directions, like a little spirit guide in a box.



Pax was accustomed to knowing what to do and doing it. Navy SEAL training was an intellectual, physical, and emotional ordeal, a test to near destruction, being torn down so as to be built better, an education Harvard couldn’t match, a cultivation of honor and valor and integrity and ethics that could survive even the crucible of war, at the same time creating a sense of brotherhood that would survive a lifetime without corrosion. The intent of spec-ops schooling was to make you confident but never arrogant, bold but never reckless, prudent but never shy of reasoned risk, sagacious rather than shrewd, determined rather than willful, and in every sense—intellectual, physical, emotional—strong enough to kick ass. You became a SEAL to be able to do whatever was necessary, and to be unable to do was to die a little.

He was dying a little as he watched Edgar Alwine film Murphy’s statement and watched Bibi lying immobile in her bed. She was beset by cancer, by coma, but there was something else going on, damn it, something that excited the medical experts as much as it baffled them, something that Pax thought might be the salvation of his girl. But he was reluctant to let his natural optimism inflate itself, as it was wont to do, because this world offered more false hopes than real.

Just then the answer to his question—what to do?—opened the door and walked into the room. Pogo. His name was Averell Beaumont Stanhope III, but everyone called him Pogo, in part because he would not answer to anything else. He had long been Bibi’s best pal, closer to her than any girlfriend. She didn’t know where the nickname came from; he had been Pogo as long as she’d known him. Pax respected the kid and found him good company, but he didn’t yet know him well. He knew only that with most people Pogo played dumb but wasn’t, that he truly didn’t care about money, that he pretended to be lazy but was not, that in spite of movie-star good looks, he was so lacking in vanity that he had need of a mirror only when he shaved.

Pogo shook Pax’s hand, but only en route to the hospital bed, where he stood, looking down at Bibi, tears forming in his eyes the moment that he saw her. When Edgar Alwine began filming Nancy’s statement, Pogo learned what had everyone agitated. Pax saw the kid brighten as the paranormal nature of these recent events inspired hope, but then a measure of sobriety tempered his expression, as if he instinctively perceived the danger of unrestrained optimism, following in his own way the very progression of Pax’s attitude.

When he could draw Pogo aside, Pax said quietly, “There may be some things we can do to help her, but not here.”

“What things?”

“My guess is, I’ll figure that out as we go.”

“You’ll figure it out—but it’s real?”

“No bullshit. You heard Nancy say what happened. There’s more they don’t know about.”

“But you do.”

“That’s right.”

Although Bibi had said that Pogo was more realist than dreamer, the kid proved not to be one of the legion of knee-jerk skeptics who worked to make the world a more bitter place by doubting the motives and wisdom of anyone not a clone of them. He was at once game: “What do you need me to do?”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yeah. I call it a car,” Pogo said, wiping his eyes with his fingertips, drying his fingers on his jeans, “but a lot of people have other names for it. A thirty-year-old Honda, primer for paint, but still sweet in its quiet way. Do I drive?”

“Why wouldn’t you drive? It’s your car.”

Pogo smiled. “Man, this could be totally sacred—on the road for Bibi with the Incredible Hulk riding shotgun.”





Pax tossed his duffel bag into the back of the Honda, hulked into the front passenger seat, and pulled the door shut as Pogo turned the key in the ignition, which settled the issue of whether the car was the junker that it appeared to be. It was not.

“You worked on the engine.”

“Now and then.”

“Maybe it’s a Humvee in disguise.”

“If this baby were a Transformer,” Pogo said, “about the most it would change into is a 1968 Dodge Charger.”

“As good as it gets. The 440 Magnum?”

“You’ve got an ear for gear.” Pogo drove out of the parking lot and turned right into the street.

Pax said, “You had to make some space to fit it. But the body looks factory normal.”

Pogo grinned. “Wouldn’t be fun if it looked like what it was.”

They were going to Bibi’s apartment. It seemed the most logical place to start. Nancy had given them her key, assuming only that Pax was staying there, not that he had another purpose as well.

“You sometimes think,” Pogo asked, “the Bibi we know isn’t the full Bibi?”

“She is exactly what she says she is. That’s part of her beauty. No deception. No masks. But I know what you mean. She’s at the same time a mystery.”

“She’s way deep,” Pogo said. “She’s got these currents running through her, they come up from some abyss, so deep that if you tried to scuba down there, you’d be crushed, you know, by the weight of all the ocean above.”