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.
A few minutes later, on a residential street lined with massive old sycamores gone leafless at winter’s end, she parked at the curb to think. She turned off the headlights but not the engine, because she felt safer if she remained able to rocket away from the curb at an instant’s notice.
Think. Since everything had gone screwy in her apartment, she had been reacting with animal emotion to events, instead of with her usual calm and consideration. She had been playing by their rules, the Silly-Putty rules of crazy people. Now she realized that by doing so, she had contributed to the momentum of the insanity. Think. The unreal and flat-out seemingly impossible things that had happened would have logical explanations if she thought about them enough, and the threats that seemed to be rising all around her would then either diminish or even evaporate altogether. Think.
Her phone rang. The caller ID indicated that Bibi was phoning herself. So they were mocking her. Clever bastards. Whatever else the Wrong People might be, they were apparently techno wizards.
She answered with minimal commitment. “Yeah?”
A man with a silken, subtly seductive voice said, “Hello, Bibi. Have you found Ashley Bell yet?”
She told herself that by participating in a conversation, she would be playing by their rules, but if she terminated the call, she stood no chance of learning anything useful. She said, “Who is this?”
“My surname at birth was Faulkner.”
From that peculiar reply, Bibi inferred that obfuscation and evasion would define his style, but she played along. “Any relation to the writer?”
“I’m delighted to say no. I hate most books and bookish people, so I changed my name. I am now—and have been for a long time—known as Birkenau Terezin.” He spelled it for her. “Friends call me Birk.”
She doubted that such a name appeared in any Orange County phone book, on the voter rolls, or in the property-tax records. “What can I do for you, Mr. Terezin?”
“I’m standing now in your apartment.”
She did not take the bait.