By abandoning the phone and the Ford, she would be conceding a possibility to the impossible. If she believed that the Wrong People could find her by such traditional means as high technology, it seemed she also had to accept that, when Calida held a divination session, these same people were alerted to the practice by the psychic equivalent of seismic waves that they could follow back to the source.
Headlights appeared three blocks to the west, ice-white and flaring strangely through the sentinel sycamores, as if this were the witchy light emanating from an extraterrestrial craft, stretching the bare-limb shadows until they broke. When Bibi pivoted at the sound of an engine, she encountered more headlights two blocks to the east, as an immense SUV rounded the corner with the menace of a vehicle packed full of CIA assassins. The moment seemed too genre-movie to be taken seriously, but many of the least credible movie villains of the past few decades had in recent years manifested in the real world, as over-the-top as any sociopath portrayed by any scenery-chewing actor. To run west or east might be to flee into the jaws of a pincer, and to go north would require dashing across the street in full view.
Left with no viable alternative, after the briefest hesitation, Bibi accepted the fact of this new dark and unfathomed world in which she found herself. She ran across the sidewalk, onto the front lawn of a shingle-sided house with dormered roof, white trim, deep front porch, and windows glimmering like the panes of a candled lantern. This was a place where you took refuge after a long and dispiriting day, where you could always go home again. But it was no home to her, and she suspected that if she attempted to take refuge there, her knock would bring to the door Chubb Coy or the once-named Faulkner now known as Birkenau Terezin, or someone more surprising and even more hostile. She raced alongside the residence, through the outfall of light from the windows, into the black night of the backyard, no destination yet in mind, driven by an instinct that promised safety only in perpetual motion.
Phone discarded, vehicle abandoned, clinging to the laptop not for its inherent value or its function, but for the 248 pages that existed nowhere except in its memory, Bibi Blair entered the backyard of the shingled house, wondering if she might be running from a twisted equivalent of the police detective in Les Misérables or from a variant of the robot assassin in The Terminator, as if it mattered a damn whether her ordeal conformed to classic fiction or to pop art.
From the street came the bark of brakes but no crash. Either an accident had been averted or two vehicles were disgorging pursuers. The property was encircled by one of those stucco-coated concrete-block privacy walls that Californians called a fence. At the rear of the lot, Bibi put her purse and computer on top of the fence. She got a two-hand grip on the bricks that capped the stuccoed blocks, and climbed into another backyard.
Having retrieved laptop and purse, she set out past a swimming pool dimly revealed by the quarter moon, circulation pump rumbling.
In the passage between the dark residence and the property fence, a bicycle with a front-mounted cargo basket leaned against the house. Bibi put the laptop and purse in the basket and wheeled the bike into the street. She boarded it and pedaled westward, adding theft to the crime of trespass. Glancing back, she saw no one and dared to believe that they would not discover she had nabbed the bicycle.
If bad men actually were pursuing her on foot, and if they returned to their SUVs to conduct a wider search, she would be dead when they caught her on the street. Their type wouldn’t be afraid to risk a four-wheel-drive execution in public.
Right away, she needed to get down from the hills and out of sight over the Balboa Peninsula bridge, so they wouldn’t know which way she’d gone. When she reached Newport Boulevard, she swung left past the hospital, leaning hard into the turn to shorten the arc and maintain speed. Out of the turn, onto a straightaway. All downhill from there to the peninsula. Three lanes, little traffic at the moment. If there was a bike lane, she had no interest, preferring the wide, clear pavement. Stones and sticks and junk ended up in the bike lane, all kinds of crap that, at high speed, could send you wobble-wheeled into an embankment or jack your ride out from under you. Leaning forward, head low, slicing through the cool night air. Going faster than she had ever ridden a bicycle before. Passing some of the cars and trucks, all of the drivers staying wide of her when they realized that she was among them. She would have been exhilarated if she hadn’t been expecting the Wrong People to ram her from behind.