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“Hey,” I said, sprinting across the road between a stretch limo and a Bentley. “Hang on. Just a second. Wait up.” The words tumbled out stupidly as she turned and looked at me, arching one perfect eyebrow. Her right foot was on the step leading up into the van, presenting me with a view of her leg. I took back everything I had ever said about legs just being something you walk around on. Hers were a lot more than that.
“Yes?” she said. There was polite curiosity in her voice, as though the interlude on the airplane was long past and nothing more was supposed to happen.
I came up to her, breathing a little hard. A bus went by. Its exhaust washed over me and I got my first L.A. headache in a year and a half.
“Uh,” I said. Not original, not very witty, not a good start. I coughed.
“I think my shuttle is leaving,” she said, a light brush of throaty giggle dragging across her words.
“Uh,” I said again. “Uhm, I.” I stopped. I couldn’t say any more to save my life. I looked at her; actually, I goggled at her. My tongue felt like it was twice the size of my mouth and made from some rare heavy metal. She started to smile; that made me blush. I looked away. Another bus went by, followed by a van, a Mercedes, a battered Chevy, a Corniche, and two shuttles.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“No. No. I’m not, no.”
“Never asked anybody for a phone number before?”
I looked at her, then looked away again. “Not for a long time.”
The shuttle driver leaned over, a lean young black man with a goatee. “We leaving now, miss. Got to close the door,” he said.
I looked back at Nancy in a panic. I could feel sweat break out over the entire surface of my body. She smiled at me, and for a half-second a different kind of sweat took over.
“Could I, uh—” And I stopped dead, looking into her golden eyes. It had never been this hard the first time around, when I was a teenager.
“Call me sometime? Absolutely. Here.” She rummaged in her shoulder bag and tore a deposit slip out of her checkbook. “My number’s on here,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t wait too long, Billy.”
And she was gone into the shuttle. Before I could even take another breath of acid brown bus fumes, the shuttle driver slammed the side door shut, ran around and hopped in the driver’s seat, and the shuttle was gone in traffic.
I stood there and watched the spot where it had gone for a good ten minutes before it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was going. I had been so concerned with Nancy that I hadn’t thought about what happened next. It hadn’t even hit me yet that I was here, back in this place I said I’d never see again.
But here I was. And now I had to figure out what to do with me.
I walked back into the terminal.
Chapter Nine
Somebody once said Los Angeles isn’t really a city but a hundred suburbs looking for a city. Every suburb has a different flavor to it, and every Angeleno thinks he knows all about you when he knows which one you live in. But that’s mostly important because of the freeways.
Life in L.A. is centered on the freeway system. Which freeway you live nearest is crucial to your whole life. It determines where you can work, eat, shop, what dentist you go to, and who you can be seen with.
I needed a freeway that could take me between the two murder sites, get me downtown fast, or up to the Hollywood substation to see Ed Beasley.
I’d been thinking about the Hollywood Freeway. It went everywhere I needed to go, and it was centrally located, which meant it connected to a lot of other freeways. Besides, I knew a hotel just a block off the freeway that was cheap and within walking distance of the World News, where Roscoe had been cut down. I wanted to look at the spot where it happened. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t learn anything, but it was a starting place.
And sometimes just looking at the place where a murder happened can give you ideas about it; cops are probably a little more levelheaded than average, but most of them will agree there’s something around a murder scene that, if they weren’t cops, they would call vibes.
So Hollywood it was. I flagged down one of the vans that take you to the rental car offices.
By the time I got fitted out with a brand new matchbox—no, thank you, I did not want a special this-week-only deal on a Cadillac convertible; that’s right, cash, I didn’t like credit cards; no, thank you, I did not want an upgrade of any kind for only a few dollars more; no, thank you, I didn’t want the extra insurance—it was dark and I was tired. I drove north on the San Diego Freeway slowly, slowly enough to have at least one maniac per mile yell obscenities at me. Imagine the nerve of me, going only sixty in a fifty-five zone.
The traffic was light. Pretty soon I made my turn east on the Santa Monica. I was getting used to being in L.A. again, getting back into the rhythm of the freeways. I felt a twinge of dread as I passed the exit for Sepulveda Boulevard, but I left it behind with the lights of Westwood.
The city always looks like quiet countryside from the Santa Monica Freeway. Once you are beyond Santa Monica and Westwood, you hit a stretch that is isolated from the areas it passes through. You could be driving through inner-city neighborhoods or country-club suburbs, but you’ll never know from the freeway.
That all changes as you approach downtown. Suddenly there is a skyline of tall buildings, and if you time it just right, there are two moons in the sky. The second one is only a round and brightly lit corporate logo on a skyscraper, but if it’s your first time through you can pass some anxious moments before you figure that out. After all, if any city in the world had two moons, wouldn’t it be L.A.?
And suddenly you are in one of the greatest driving nightmares of all recorded history. As you arc down a slow curve through the buildings and join the Harbor Freeway you are flung into the legendary Four-Level. The name is misleading, a slight understatement. It really seems like a lot more than four levels.
