TWENTY-ONE
He felt like running, as if this was something he could outrun. After he left Jean at her Malibu house, Jimmy drove north, not south, up California 1, then back inland through the mountains to Thousand Oaks and the 101 East, a great loop onto the 210 to cross the base of the Angeles Forest and the mountains above Glendale.
Now it was way after midnight.
When he turned back down into it, when he was riding down out of the foothills, it was like L.A. was on the bottom of a dark ocean, the spikes of downtown still a half mile below the surface, the green copper dome of Griffith Observatory a decorative toy on the floor of a midnight aquarium. And the air was bad, even in the middle of the night. The air was heavy. He felt compressed. The feeling was so real it was hard to breathe. He had to fight the panic, the urge to jump from the car and swim frantically for the surface.
He tried to drive it out. He cruised the streets of Hollywood until the whores were gone, down through the canyon of billboards on the Strip, past the all night newsstand.
He didn’t go home.
He drove all the way out through the winding turns of Sunset Boulevard, all the way back out to Malibu, to the beach at Point Dume, almost where he’d started. He parked on the access road. He found at the edge of the dial a drifting Mexican pirate rock station with old music. When morning came, an offshore wind came with it and stood the waves up straight and tall. Jimmy watched at the water’s edge. The wind came up stronger until there was a wave that rose and rose and rose and wouldn’t break.