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She looked at me over the rim of her cup with no expression. Her eyes flicked left and then right across my face. Finally, she sipped her coffee and then smiled. “Well, good,” she said. “I was beginning to think it was just the room service.”
“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “that’s pretty good, too.”
Jackie laughed, a short and musical sound, and her face lost its worry lines and changed back to perfection. “All right,” she said.
We finished our breakfast with scattered bursts of lighthearted chat and a brief infestation of Kathy—more paperwork and reminders of impending phoners—and in no time at all we were down in the lobby and hoping to get past Benny, the doorman, without hearing another hundred pages of his life story.
“Hey, Miss Forrest!” he called out cheerfully as we stepped out of the elevator. He completely ignored me, and although I couldn’t really blame him for preferring to look at Jackie, I still felt the snub.
Jackie, of course, took it right in stride. She gave him a big smile and said, “Benny! Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I can sleep when I’m dead,” he said. “But right now I got the world’s most beautiful star at my hotel.”
Jackie put a hand on Benny’s arm. “Very sweet,” she said, and the man actually blushed.
“No, listen, I mean it,” Benny said.
“Well, thank you,” Jackie said, patting his arm, and attempting to move past.
“Lemme get the door,” Benny said, rushing past us to hold the front door open and then waving Jackie through with a huge smile.
Jackie looked at me inquiringly. “Wait here while I check,” I said, and she nodded.
I stepped through the front door and nodded at Benny. “Thank you, my good man,” I told him, but I think his smile had stretched too wide and sealed his ears shut, because he kept looking toward Jackie and didn’t seem to hear me.
I went outside and went through my little security ritual. The Corniche was still parked ostentatiously in front, and our shiny new Town Car was pulled in behind it. Next to the Corniche, it looked like a wino crouching there and begging for spare change.
But the driver was the same, and all else seemed good, and so I went back in and pried Jackie away from Benny’s eager paws and handed her into the backseat of the Town Car. Just like yesterday, a small gaggle of onlookers clustered at the hotel’s front door and loudly wished us well. The car was already moving down the driveway as I buckled my seat belt, and as the driver turned onto the causeway leading to the mainland I heard the same popping backfire sound I’d heard last night. I remembered hearing a cycle starting yesterday morning, too, and I wondered whether they were everywhere now. Maybe there was a Harley convention in town. Or maybe the price of gas was forcing more people out of their SUVs and onto two wheels.
Or maybe it was more than that.
I felt a dry rustle of interior bat wings as the Dark Passenger stirred in its sleep and muttered, It’s only coincidence when you’re not paying attention, and I thought about that.
What if it wasn’t coincidence? What if it was not many motorcycles, but only one very persistent motorcycle, and it was following us?
Of course, even if that were true, it might be no more than a paparazzo hoping to snap a picture of Jackie without a bra, or picking her nose, or dancing drunkenly in a South Beach club. People like that were drawn to celebrities like moths to a flame. There were bound to be a few hanging around, and that was probably all it was: just somebody looking for a photo op.
On the other hand …
I have an extremely healthy natural sense of paranoia, and Jackie was, after all, paying me to exercise it. Our stalker might very well choose to follow on a motorcycle—it was an ideal vehicle for slipping in and out of traffic easily, and for escaping pursuit if you were spotted. And three encounters with a motorcycle seemed a little bit suspicious.
I turned in my seat to look out the back window, hoping for a glimpse of the cyclist, but my seat belt jammed, nearly strangling me, and I could get only halfway around. I reached for the release—but before I could snap the belt open, Jackie’s cell phone began to chime.
“Shit,” Jackie said urgently. “I think it’s the Times. Could you please get that, Dexter?”
I answered the phone; it was, in fact, the Times—the Los Angeles one. Jackie took the call, and by the time I could get unhooked from my homicidal seat belt and turned around to look, there was nothing to see except the usual mad, gleaming pack of angry, overpowered vehicles. I scanned in all directions a couple of times, but I saw no cycles, and I heard no more popping backfire sounds. So I shrugged it off before we were even halfway to work, and thought no more about motorcycles.
There was no real pause for contemplation when we got in to work, either. I delivered Jackie into Deborah’s care, and trudged down to my lab and the weary drudgery of another day as Robert’s shepherd.
I had expected Renny to be there, too, but I found Robert all by himself, feet up on my desk, staring intensely and raptly at a folded-back newspaper. As I came in, he looked up with a startled and oddly guilty look on his face, and immediately dropped the newspaper on the desk. I stopped in the doorway, and he looked up and remembered to smile. “Oh! Hey!” he said. Then he looked very guilty and whipped his feet off the desk and onto the floor. “I mean, good morning!”
“Isn’t Renny coming in today?” I asked him.
Robert shrugged. “He’ll be here later,” he said. “He’s never on time.”
It seemed to me like a strange habit for someone in show business, and I grew up in Miami, where Cuban time is a universal standard, and showing up early means you’re only twenty minutes late. “Why not?” I said.
Robert made a sort of what’d-you-expect face. “He’s a comedian,” he said, like that explained everything.
