The other Hermione was affronted on behalf of her idols. “It’s a freakin’ reunion tour, they can’t be nineteen on a reunion tour.”
“Jo,” said the blond Hermione, for they had decided to use the name of the sister they most admired in Little Women, Josephine, as Bibi’s fake-sister name. The Louisa May Alcott novel was a little corny, but it was beautiful, too, and you couldn’t help but love it, and of course cry buckets, in fact rivers, Niagaras of tears; all that Bibi learned while in line with them at the cashier’s station. “Jo, Jo, Josephine—do you see?—Meg here is getting old-lady hormones, panting after a bunch of geezers.”
“They were cute then, and they’re cute now,” Bibi said as they walked by the thug with the Starbucks. “Anyway, they’re only thirty.”
“Well, I want boys in my boy bands, that’s all. Hey, before we go, let’s stop at that cool place, get some espresso and beignets.”
The other Hermione said, “I totally adore beignets.”
They were passing the large koi pond, where people gathered to watch the brilliantly colored torsional beauties glide through the water, delicate fins wimpling.
The blond Hermione said, “We both totally adore beignets and espresso. You do, too, Jo. I know you do.”
A man with a hands-free phone sat on a bench beside the koi pond, watching not the fish but the people moving along the main promenade.
“If I stuff you with beignets not even three hours before dinner,” Bibi said, “Mom will skin me alive.”
“Oh, yes, your beastly mother, the human-skinning devil,” said the brunette Hermione. “Jeez, when did you become a grown-up all of a sudden?”
“It happens to the best of us,” Bibi assured her as they turned a corner, onto the last few hundred feet of promenade, toward Neiman Marcus and the parking lot where the Honda waited.
From behind her sunglasses, she scanned the crowd of shoppers and spotted other men like the first two, all dressed casually but each wearing a sport coat or another jacket that could conceal a shoulder rig and a weapon. The girls had been right. Some of the thugs were lean and sleek, with slicked-back hair like gigolos in silent movies, some were bulls with shaved heads, and others were former high-school football stars with clean-cut faces and styled hair, but something about them was so adamantly the same that she could have drawn a line from one to the other as easily as connecting the stars of well-known constellations. Maybe it was their alertness, their pent-up energy as apparent as that of wolves poised to pounce, or just an evil aura. A lot of people would laugh at the idea of an evil aura, because they didn’t believe in evil, only in problematic psychologies, and if Bibi had once been one of those who would have laughed, she wasn’t anymore. The girls were also right that these hatchet men were everywhere.
“I want to get a pair of those new jeans,” said blond Hermione, “the ones with the decorative stitching on the side seams and the hot words on the butt pockets.”
Brunette Hermione said, “Like your mom is ever gonna let you wear them before you’re thirty.”
“I’m gonna wear them, all right. A guy has to read your pockets, he’s looking at your butt, which is how it starts.”
“How what starts? Getting hit on by a pervert?”
As if the swarm of trigger men wasn’t a gauntlet hard enough to negotiate, Bibi spotted a serious complication forty or fifty feet ahead. Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack, former eleventh-grade English teacher, remade woman married to a multimillionaire, self-appointed enforcer of the concealed-carry laws, apparently spent the day going from one shopping experience to another, acquiring until the trunk of her café-au-lait Bentley couldn’t hold another item. She stood at a display window, coveting whatever it offered, holding two shopping bags from upscale stores.
Bibi thought they might be able to pass behind the woman and away while she remained mesmerized by the merchandise. But the risk was too great. If Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack turned from the display window and came face-to-face with her former student, she would see through the sunglasses and the baseball cap. No disguise short of a gorilla suit would deceive the bitch.
“Wait,” Bibi said, halting the girls. “You see that woman ahead, she’s expensively but inappropriately dressed, the one with the two shopping bags? I know her. She’s louder than a Mack truck. She’ll blow my cover. I’m going to duck into this store and pretend to look at a dress. You stay out here, chatter with each other—you’re doing great, by the way, really super-great—and when she’s gone, come inside and tell me. But I mean really gone, off where we won’t run into her.”
“This so kicks it,” brunette Hermione said with evident delight.