Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(44)
Bibi forgot. Not forever, as it turned out, but for years, she forgot the bad idea that she had written on the slip of paper, the thing she had wanted to do—had almost done—that would have ruined her life. Her sharp grief remained, but her fear was lifted from her with the memory. She slept without dreams that night and on the following day returned to family life.
That was the third time that she had used the captain’s method of forgetting. She as yet had no memory of the first and second.
In the lot behind the apartments, the parked vehicles and the thick posts supporting the roofs of the open-air carports provided cover for anyone who might have bad intentions. At the very least, Bibi expected the guy who brooded over the meaning of vanity license plates.
She walked directly to her Ford Explorer, which was parked beside Nancy’s BMW. Step by step, she surveyed the night for a suspicious malingerer, ready to drop the laptop and draw the pistol from her shoulder rig to warn him off. She reached her SUV without being assaulted and, in the driver’s seat, at once locked the doors.
She felt foolish for wondering if the Explorer would explode when she switched on the engine, and of course it did not. Whatever real-life drama she had been thrown into, it thus far had been free of mafia-movie clichés.
Just as she pulled out of the lot and turned left, headlights flared behind her, glaring off her rearview mirror. A sedan followed her into the street. When she turned right at the first intersection, so did the other vehicle. After two more turns, she had no doubt that she was being tailed.
Might this be one of them—one of the mysterious Wrong People? she wondered, capitalizing the term for the first time. No. Common sense argued that adversaries with paranormal abilities, which the Wrong People evidently possessed, wouldn’t need to resort to standard private-investigator techniques, shadowing her the same way that a PI would conduct surveillance of a wife suspected of adultery.
There was only one means by which to identify the follower in the sedan, but Bibi hesitated to plunge into a confrontation. She was grateful to Paxton for encouraging her to get a firearm and teaching her how to use it, but the difficult truth was that acquiring a gun, with expert knowledge of its function, was not adequate preparation for pointing it at another person and squeezing the trigger. For five minutes she drove a random route, brooding about options. The tail fell back and moved closer and fell back again, even allowing another car to come between them and provide him with cover, but he didn’t fade away as she hoped he might.
At last she became sufficiently agitated to force the issue. She drove to Pacific Coast Highway, to an area that boasted a wealth of trendy restaurants and nightspots, ensuring a flood of traffic and enough witnesses to make her feel safe. She timed her approach to an intersection and stopped first in line as the controlling light turned red. The stalker-on-wheels was two vehicles behind her, mostly blocked from view by a Cadillac Escalade. She put the Explorer in park, set the brake, and got out.
As she strode past the Escalade, which sparkled with a surfeit of aftermarket gewgaws, the man behind the wheel flashed her a scowl and a what-the-hell gesture, powering down his window to say gratuitously, “You don’t own the road, bitch.” In a mood, she drew one finger across her throat, as if threatening to slash his, and left him to worry that he had insulted a violent lunatic.
The stalker slouched in a black Lexus. Even through a windshield half cataracted by reflections from a streetlamp, the identity of the driver was as apparent as it was surprising: Chubb Coy. The head of hospital security. Who had all but accused Bibi of lying about the middle-of-the-night visit by the man with the therapy dog. Chubb Coy sat like a humorless Mr. Toad behind the wheel of the Lexus, his old cop intuition no doubt itching like poison ivy.
The moment he saw Bibi coming, Coy wheeled the Lexus to his left, nearly clipping her with the front bumper, and crossed the double yellow lines into the southbound lanes. To a chorus of car horns and shrieking brakes, he completed a 180-degree turn and accelerated into the night.
Bibi Blair trembled violently when she got behind the wheel of the Explorer and pulled shut the driver’s door. The cause of her shakes was not primarily fear, although fear was part of it. Anger, yes, all right. Coy’s offensive invasion of her privacy angered her, but she was smoldering, not hot. The principal cause of her distress was indignation, shock and displeasure at the intrusion of massive unreason into the workings of the world, resentment at the sudden tangle of narrative lines in her life, which she had spent so many years crafting into a tight and comfortable linear story. The whole Calida business made no sense: opening a door to Somewhere Else, to a cold and smelly rotten-flower elsewhere in which dwelt hostile and inhuman powers. The hoodie-wearing Good Samaritan and therapy dog who were visible to some cameras but not to others. Now Chubb Coy and his itchy intuition. Trailing her through the night. Far beyond the limits of his authority, which extended only as far as the hospital grounds. In retrospect, she was pretty sure it had been Coy’s voice on the phone, asking about TOP AGENT. He had come into her life before Calida Butterfly, before the divination session that supposedly had invited the supernatural upon her, before Bibi had even heard about the Wrong People, and yet common sense insisted that each weirdness was linked to the others.
The driver of the Escalade behind her pressed hard on his horn the instant the light changed, having gotten in touch once more with his essential rudeness, now that Bibi turned out not to be a violent psychopath.