Compulsion

Realizing she was exposed by the interior lights, she switched them off.

Now what?

Call the Triple A! Why hadn’t she thought of that?

It took what seemed like a long time to find her cell phone in her purse. Even longer to locate her Triple A card.

Tapping out the toll-free number was hard because even with the phone light the numbers were teeny and her hands were shaky.

When the operator answered, she read off her membership code. Had to do it twice because her eyes had blurred and it was hard to see what was a 3 and what was an 8.

The operator put her on hold, came back and said her membership had lapsed.

Kat said, “No way.”

“Sorry, ma’am, but you haven’t been active for eighteen months.”

“That’s frickin’ impossible-”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but-”

“Like hell you are-”

“Ma’am, there’s no reason to be-”

“Like hell there isn’t.” Kat clicked off.

Now what?

Think, think, think – okay, plan B: Call Bethie’s cell and if that interrupted something, too frickin’ bad.

The phone rang five times before Bethie’s voice mail kicked in.

Kat hung up. Her phone went dead.

Jabbing the Power button did nothing.

That brought back a vague memory of something she’d neglected.

Charging up before she went out tonight – how the hell had she forgotten?

Now her whole body was shaking and her chest was tight and she was sweating.

She double-checked to make sure the car was locked.

Maybe a highway patrol dude would come by.

What if another car did?

Don’t talk to strangers.

What was her choice, sleeping here all night?

She nearly fell asleep before the first car showed up, speeding toward her, headlights startling her.

Big Range Rover; good.

Kat waved out the window. Bastard sped right by.

A couple of minutes later, headlights brightened her rearview and enlarged. This vehicle stopped right next to her.

Crappy pickup, stuff piled in the back, under a tarp.

The passenger window rolled down.

Young Mexican guy. Another Mexican sat at the wheel.

They looked at her fu

The passenger got out. Small and scruffy.

Kat slid down low in her seat and when the Mexican came over and said something through the glass, she pretended he wasn’t there.

He stood there, really freaking her out.

Kat kept making believe she was invisible and the Mexican finally returned to the pickup.

It took five minutes after the truck drove away before she was able to sit up and breathe normally. She’d wet her thong. Rolled it off her butt and down her legs and tossed it into the backseat.

Soon as the undies made contact, her luck turned.

A Bentley!

Screw you, Range Rover!

Big, black, and glossy, that aggressive grille.

And slowing down!

Oh shit, what if it was Clive?

Even if it was Clive, she could handle it, better than sleeping here all -

As the Bentley rolled to a halt, she opened the window, tried to get a look at who was inside.

The big black car idled, moved on.

Damn you, rich bastard!

She jumped out of the Mustang, waved frantically.

The Bentley stopped. Backed up.

Kat tried to make herself look safe by shrugging and smiling and pointing to her car.

The Bentley’s window lowered silently.

Just a driver inside.

Not Clive, a woman!

Thank you, God!

Kat said, “Ma’am,” in the syrupy voice she used at La Femme. “Thank you so much for stopping I ran out of gas and if you could just take me somewhere where I could maybe find a-”

“Certainly, dear,” said the woman. Throaty voice, like that actress Mother liked… Lauren Lauren… Hutton? No, Bacall. Lauren Bacall had rescued her!

Kat approached the Bentley.

The woman smiled at her. Older than Mother, with silver hair, huge pearl earrings, classy makeup, a tweed suit, some sort of silk scarf, purple, looked expensive, draped over her shoulders in that casual way that came easy to the classy ones.

What Mother pretended to be.

“Ma’am, I really appreciate this,” said Kat, suddenly wanting this woman to be her mother.

“Get in, dear,” said the woman. “We’ll find you some petrol.”

Petrol – a Brit.

A frickin’ aristocrat in a frickin’ Bentley.

Kat got in, beaming. What had started off as a shitty night was going to end up a cool story.

As the Bentley glided away, Kat thanked the woman again.

The woman nodded and switched on the stereo. Something classical – God what a sound system, it was like being in a concert hall.

“If there’s any way I can repay you…”

“That won’t be necessary, dear.”

Big-framed woman, sturdy bejeweled hands.

Kat said, “Your car’s incredible.”

The woman smiled and turned up the volume.

Kat sat back and closed her eyes. Thought of Ria

Telling this story was going to be delicious.

The Bentley cruised silently up the Pass. Cushy seats, alcohol, weed, and the adrenaline drop plunged Kat into sudden, nearly comatose sleep.

She was snoring loudly when the car made a turn, climbed smoothly into the hills.

Headed for a dark, cold place.

CHAPTER 2

I was having lunch with Milo at the Surf Line Café in Malibu when the call came in.

No reason for either of us to be here other than gorgeous weather. The restaurant’s a clapboard bungalow with wall-sized windows and a wide plank deck, perched high on the west side of PCH, just south of Kanan Dume Road. At half a mile from the ocean with no view of the water, it was misnamed. But the food’s fantastic and even at that distance you can smell the salt.

It was one p.m. and we were out on the deck eating barbecued yellowtail and drinking beer. Milo was back from a week in Honolulu, where he’d managed to preserve a skim-milk pallor. Bad light brings out the worst of his complexion – the lumps, the acne pits, the scowl lines, gravity tugging at mastiff jowls. Today’s light was glorious but the best it could do was obscure the rough spots.

Despite that and the ugliest aloha shirt I’d ever seen, he looked good. None of the twitches and split-second winces that betray his attempt to hide the pain in his shoulder.

The shirt was a riot of puce elephants, aqua camels, and ocher monkeys on a sea of olive-green rayon that clung to his kettledrum torso.

The Hawaiian trip had followed a twenty-nine-day stay in the hospital: recuperating from a dozen shotgun pellets embedded in his left arm and shoulder.

The shooter, an obsessive psychopath, was dead, sparing everyone the nuisance of a trial. Milo had dismissed his own injuries as “a stupid goddamn flesh wound.” I’d seen the X-rays. Some of the pellets had missed his heart and lung by millimeters. One chunk of deer shot was too deep to remove without causing serious muscle injury, hence the winces and twitches.

Despite all that, only a three-day hospitalization had been projected. On the second day, a staph infection set in and he ended up on antibiotic drips for nearly a month. Sequestered on the VIP floor because he lived with Dr. Rick Silverman, director of the E.R.

Bigger rooms and better food didn’t help where it counted. His fever ran high and at one point his kidney function didn’t look good. Eventually, he pushed through and started griping about the accommodations and the twenty-one-year-old actress in the corner suite up the hall. Her official diagnosis was “Exhaustion.” The hospital’s detox director had virtually moved in.

Two paparazzi had managed to breach security, only to be tossed unceremoniously by one of the starlet’s private security guards.

I said, “They don’t get her, maybe they’ll settle for you.”