'Then you better settle your mind and go see she's all right. You can come back here anytime, Travellin Jack.'
'Okay,' the boy said, and then hesitated before running outside. 'I think . . . I think I remember when we met before.'
'Nah, nah, my brains got twisted,' Speedy said, shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth before him. 'You had it right. We never met before last week. Get on back to your mom and set your mind at ease.'
Jack sprinted out the door and ran through the dimension-less sunlight to the wide arch leading to the street. Above it he could see the letters DLROWNUF AIDACRA outlined against the sky: at night, colored bulbs would spell out the park's name in both directions. Dust puffed up beneath his Nikes. Jack pushed himself against his own muscles, making them move faster and harder, so that by the time he burst out through the arch, he felt almost as though he were flying.
Nineteen seventy-six. Jack had been puttering his way up Rodeo Drive on an afternoon in June? July? . . . some afternoon in the drought season, but before that time of the year when everybody started worrying about brushfires in the hills. Now he could not even remember where he had been going. A friend's house? It had not been an errand of any urgency. He had, Jack remembered, just reached the point where he no longer thought of his father in every unoccupied second - for many months after Philip Sawyer's death in a hunting accident, his shade, his loss had sped toward Jack at a bruising speed whenever the boy was least prepared to meet it. Jack was only seven, but he knew that part of his childhood had been stolen from him - his six-year-old self now seemed impossibly naive and thoughtless - but he had learned to trust his mother's strength. Formless and savage threats no longer seemed to conceal themselves in dark corners, closets with half-open doors, shadowy streets, empty rooms.
The events of that aimless summer afternoon in 1976 had murdered this temporary peace. After it, Jack slept with his light on for six months; nightmares roiled his sleep.
The car pulled across the street just a few houses up from the Sawyers' white three-story Colonial. It had been a green car, and that was all that Jack had known about it except that it was not a Mercedes - Mercedes was the only kind of automobile he knew by sight. The man at the wheel had rolled down his window and smiled at Jack. The boy's first thought had been that he knew this man - the man had known Phil Sawyer, and wanted just to say hello to his son. Somehow that was conveyed by the man's smile, which was easy and unforced and familiar. Another man leaned forward in the passenger seat and peered toward Jack through blind-man glasses - round and so dark they were nearly black. This second man was wearing a pure white suit. The driver let his smile speak for him a moment longer.
Then he said, 'Sonny, do you know how we get to the Beverly Hills Hotel?' So he was a stranger after all. Jack experienced an odd little flicker of disappointment.
He pointed straight up the street. The hotel was right up there, close enough so that his father had been able to walk to breakfast meetings in the Loggia.
'Straight ahead?' the driver asked, still smiling.
Jack nodded.
'You're a pretty smart little fellow,' the man told him, and the other man chuckled. 'Any idea of how far up it is?' Jack shook his head. 'Couple of blocks, maybe?'
'Yeah.' He had begun to get uncomfortable. The driver was still smiling, but now the smile looked bright and hard and empty. And the passenger's chuckle had been wheezy and damp, as if he were sucking on something wet.
'Five, maybe? Six? What do you say?'
'About five or six, I guess,' Jack said, stepping backward.
'Well, I sure do want to thank you, little fellow,' the driver said. 'You don't happen to like candy, do you?' He extended a closed fist through the window, turned it palm-up, and opened his fingers: a Tootsie Roll. 'It's yours. Take it.'
Jack tentatively stepped forward, hearing in his mind the words of a thousand warnings involving strange men and candy. But this man was still in his car; if he tried anything, Jack could be half a block away before the man got his door open. And to not take it somehow seemed a breach of civility. Jack took another step nearer. He looked at the man's eyes, which were blue and as bright and hard as his smile. Jack's instincts told him to lower his hand and walk away. He let his hand drift an inch or two nearer the Tootsie Roll. Then he made a little stabbing peck at it with his fingers.
The driver's hand clamped around Jack's, and the passenger in blind-man glasses laughed out loud. Astonished, Jack stared into the eyes of the man gripping his hand and saw them start to change - thought he saw them start to change - from blue to yellow.
But later they were yellow.