Edgar Alwine had begun to film Nurse Julia, and those in the room, all but Pax, were fixated upon her account of the inexplicable emergence of the four-word tattoo.
Find me. Bibi had said, Find me. She was lying in bed, there before his eyes, and didn’t need finding. Pax could have attributed her request to delirium or merely to the confusion that plagued the mind when it was lost in the false world of a coma, whatever that might be like. But she had sounded so like herself, so to-the-point and assertive, not panicked or bewildered, calm and determined to be heard. He didn’t know how she could reach out to him in this way or why she couldn’t convey the nature of her plight and her needs in a more detailed and helpful manner, but the restrictions under which she had to function were no excuse for him either to shrug off her request or to wait for further communications that might never come.
But if Bibi, in whatever deep and strange place she currently inhabited, wasn’t bewildered, Pax certainly was, and he didn’t know what he could do to help her.
The amorphous fog writhing in the headlight beams as if intent on finding a suitable form to wear henceforth, the low rumble-purr of the car engine like an expression of animal pleasure at the prospect of the journey ahead, the first thin exhalations of welcome heat from the floor and dashboard vents, the witchy light from the instrument panel reflected in her eyes as she met her own otherwise dark gaze in the rearview mirror…Every detail of the moment suddenly seemed to be a portent of an approaching event, fraught with hidden meaning and ripe for divination by crystal ball or tea leaves, or Scrabble tiles.
Bibi sat behind the wheel, considering what she had said aloud to Pax, and wondering why she’d said it. Although he was half a world away, the fact that she’d spoken to him wasn’t strange to her, only what she had said. Why say that she wasn’t dreaming, when of course she wasn’t, being wide awake? Why ask him to find her when she wasn’t lost? She understood the needing-him part. She always needed him. And in the current madness, just having him at her side would smooth some of the craziness out of the night.
She was reminded of the key thing she had learned since she’d left her apartment and gone on the run: that she kept secrets from herself, pieces of her life that had been lost to Captain’s memory trick. Because she had recovered parts of those memories, she knew now that they hadn’t been rendered into ashes and blown away forever. They were barreled and stored and awaited discovery. Maybe the answer to why she’d said what she’d said to Paxton would become clear to her when she found that memory barrel, hammered a hole at the bottom, drained it, and learned, to the last drop, what was in it. Meanwhile, she couldn’t understand herself or fully trust herself, which was frustrating but not as frustrating as being dead of cancer.
“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.