She ate in the last booth, which was narrower than the others, made for two instead of four. The laminated-granite tabletop had surely been Formica when Benny ruled the room. The tables and the designer fabric on the booth-bench cushions and the barstools, along with a marble-tile floor in a harlequin pattern, laid a claim to prosperity and status never quite fulfilled but so American that Jane found it surprisingly poignant.
Among the customers, a columnist for the local newspaper was having lunch and a beer or two, though he could not restrain his reportorial instincts. She watched him moving through the long room with notebook, pen, and bottle of Heineken, passing out his card and engaging patrons in discussions of the latest act of terrorism.
He was about forty, with good hair that looked as if he spent more on styling than an accountant would have advised. He was proud of his tush, wearing his jeans the slightest bit too tight. He liked his manly forearms as well, and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up on a day not warm enough for that.
He came to her booth as both a reporter and a man, with the calculation in his eye that some women found offensive but that she did not. He wasn’t boorish, and he had no way of knowing she’d taken herself out of the game. She was well aware that men noticed her in any circumstance, and she knew that if she refused a three-minute interview, whether politely or dismissively, she would linger longer and more vividly in his memory.
His name was Kelsey, and she said her name was Mary, and at her invitation he sat across the table from her. “Terrible day.”
“One of them.”
“Do you have friends or family in Philadelphia?”
“Just fellow citizens.”
“Yeah. It still hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It should.”
“What do you think we ought to do about it?”
“You and I?”
“All of us.”
“Realize it’s part of a bigger problem.”
“Which is?”
“Ideas shouldn’t matter more than people.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting. Explain a little.”
By way of explanation, she reversed the order of two words and eliminated a contraction: “People should matter more than ideas.”
He waited for her to continue. When instead she took the next-to-last bite of her burger, he said, “My column’s not political, it’s human-interest stuff. But if you had to put a political label on yourself, what would it say?”
“Disgusted.”
He laughed, making notes. “Might be the biggest political party of all. Where are you from?”
“Miami,” she lied. “You know a story you should look into?”
“What’s that?”
“The increasing rate of suicide.”
“Is it increasing?”
“Check it out.”
He watched her even as he tipped back his bottle of beer and drank. “Why would a girl like you have such a morbid interest?”
“I’m a sociologist,” she lied. “You ever suspect that shit like this Philadelphia attack gets used?”
Although he wrote a column of human-interest stories, he had police-reporter eyes that didn’t just look at things, that flensed them layer by layer. “Gets used how?”
She gestured toward the nearer TV. “That story they give like a minute to every hour, between bouts of Philly coverage.”
A former governor of Georgia had shot and killed his wife, a wealthy contributor to his campaigns, and himself.
“You mean the Atlanta atrocity,” Kelsey said, which was the tabloid title already slapped on that case. “Hideous thing.”
“If it happened yesterday, it would be the big story. But it happens same day as Philly, and no one remembers by next week.”
He didn’t seem to get her implication. “They say the wife and the deep-pockets donor were having an affair.”
Having finished her burger, she wiped her hands on a napkin. “There you have one of the greatest mysteries of our time.”
“Which is?”
“Who the hell ‘they’ are that we’re always hearing about.”
He smiled, indicated her empty bottle. “Buy you a Dos Equis?”
“Thanks, but one’s my limit. You know the murder rate has also been going up?”
“We’ve done stories on that, sure.”
The waitress appeared, and Jane asked for the check. Leaning across the table toward Kelsey, she whispered, “It’s a good bet what numbers will be up next.”
Leaning toward her, taking her intimacy for some kind of invitation, he said, “Tell me.”
“Murder-suicides. The governor might be an indication of things to come. The next phase, so to speak.”
“The next phase of what?”
Having been sincere to this point, she played it deadpan when she slipped into fantasy that would send him on his way. “Of what started at Roswell.”
He was too practiced a journalist to let his smile freeze or his eyes glaze over. “Roswell, New Mexico?”
“That’s where they first landed. You’re not a UFO denier?”
“Not at all,” he said. “The universe is infinite. No thinking person would believe we’re alone in it.”
But by the time the waitress brought the check, Kelsey had declined to take the bait when she asked if he believed in alien abductions, had thanked Jane—or Mary from Miami—for sharing, and moved on to another interview.
After paying cash and wending through the lunchtime crowd, she glanced back, perhaps intuitively, and saw the columnist staring at her. As he looked away, he brought a cell phone to his ear.
He was just a guy who had come on to her, a guy whom she had turned away rather cleverly, just a guy who still liked what he saw. The phone was a coincidence; it had nothing to do with her.
Nevertheless, once outside, she moved fast.
13
* * *
WHITE KITES against the looming storm’s volcanic-dark plumes, gulls swooped in from the sea and scalloped down the sky to safe roosts in the eaves of the buildings and among the fronds of phoenix palms.
Jane could have parked in the restaurant lot. She had not. She had left the Ford at a meter around the corner and two blocks away.
She approached the vehicle from the farther side of the street, seeming to have no interest in it, all the while surveying the scene to determine if the Ford might be staked out.
Not for the first time, she told herself that this was how fully formed paranoids jittered their way through life, but she still believed in her sanity.
Although she saw no surveillance, she walked a block past the Escape before crossing the street and approaching it from behind.
The reporter had thanked her for sharing, and in fact she had always been a sharing person in the sense that she had been open with others regarding her feelings, hopes, intentions, and beliefs. Her current isolation, therefore, proved that much harder to bear. Because friendship required sharing, she had to forgo seeing old friends and making new ones for the duration. Sharing might be the death of her or of those with whom she shared.
When she’d sold her house, when she’d converted everything she owned into cash and stashed it where it could not easily be found, she had thought “the duration” might be six months. Now, two months into this journey and almost three thousand miles from where it had begun, she no longer had the false confidence to put a tentative end date to the mission.
She pulled away from the curb, inserting the Ford into a river of vehicles. In nearly every case, each car and SUV and truck and bus was continuously signaling its position for the benefit of commercial collectors of megadata, police agencies—and whoever owned the future.
14
* * *
THE NEW San Diego Central Library—either a postmodern triumph or a regrettable hodgepodge, depending on your taste—had nearly half a million square feet spread over nine floors, making it too big for Jane’s purposes. Its spaces were too thoroughly surveilled for her comfort, and too difficult to exit with alacrity and stealth in an emergency. She went in search of an older branch library.