“What I’m saying,” she said, “is I don’t think you could make anything up.”
“All right then. So now you know—me and Pete, our bonding experience, that night of hell. They sang ‘If I Had a Hammer’ twice.” He pointed to the traffic signal. “Light’s green.”
Crossing the intersection, she said, “You’ve been through something together, but it wasn’t just Peter Pauland Marymania.”
He decided to go on the offensive. “So what do you do for a living, besides being self-employed and working at home?”
“I’m a writer.”
“What do you write?”
“Books.”
“What kind of books?”
“Painful books. Depressing, stupid, gut-wrenching books.”
“Just the thing for the beach. Have they been published?”
“Unfortunately. And the critics love them.”
“Would I know any titles?”
“No.”
“You want to try me?”
“No. I’m not going to write them anymore, especially not if I end up dead, but even if I don’t end up dead, I’m going to write something else.”
“What’re you going to write?”
“Something that isn’t full of anger. Something in which the sentences don’t drip with bitterness.”
“Put that quote on the cover. ‘The sentences don’t drip with bitterness.’ I’d buy a book like that in a minute. Do you write under the name Linda Paquette, or do you use a pen name?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“I didn’t clam up on you.”
She glanced sideways at him, cocking one eyebrow.
For a while they rode in silence through an area where the prostitutes dressed only slightly less brazenly than Britney Spears, where the winos sat with their backs against the building walls instead of sprawling full-length on the pavement. Then they came into a less-nice precinct, where even the young gangsters didn’t venture in their low-rider street rods and glitterized Cadillac Escalades.
They passed grungy one-story buildings and fenced storage yards, scrap-metal dealers that were probably chop-shop operators, a sports bar with windows painted black and the air of a place that included cockfights in its definition of sports, before Linda pulled to the curb in front of a vacant lot.
“According to the numbers on the flanking buildings,” she said, “this is the address on the registration for that Chevy.” A chain-link fence surrounded a weed-filled empty lot.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Let’s get something to eat.”
“He said he’d find us sooner than you think,” she reminded Tim.
“Hired killers,” he said, “are so full of big talk.”
“You know about hired killers, do you?”
“They act so tough, so big-bad-wolf-here-I-come. You said you hadn’t eaten. Neither have I. Let’s have dinner.”
She drove to a middle-class area of Tustin. Here, the winos sucked down their poison in barrooms, where they belonged, and the prostitutes were not encouraged to strut half-naked in public as if they were pop-music divas.
The coffee shop was open all night. The air smelled of bacon and French fries, and good coffee.
They sat in a window booth with a view of the Explorer in the parking lot, the traffic passing in the street beyond, and the moon silently drowning in a sudden sea of clouds.
She ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries—plus a buttered muffin to eat while she was waiting for the rest of it.
After Tim ordered his bacon cheeseburger with mayonnaise and requested that the fries be well done, he said to Linda, “Trim as you are, I was sure you’d order a salad.”
“Right. I’m going to graze on arugula so I’ll feel good about myself when some terrorist vaporizes me tomorrow with a nuke.”
“Does a coffee shop like this have arugula?”
“These days, arugula is everywhere. It’s even easier to get than a venereal disease.”
The waitress returned with a root beer for Linda and a cherry Coke for Tim.
Outside, a car pulled off the street, drove past the Explorer, and parked in the farther end of the lot.
“You must exercise,” Tim said. “What do you do for exercise?”
“I brood.”
“That burns up calories, does it?”
“If you think about how the world’s coming apart, you can easily get the ticker above a hundred thirty and keep it there for hours.”
The headlights of the recently arrived car switched off. Nobody got out of the vehicle.
The buttered muffin was served, and Tim watched her eat it while he sipped his cherry Coke. He wished he were a buttered muffin.
He said, “This sort of feels like a date, doesn’t it?”
“If this feels like a date to you,” she said, “your social life is even more pathetic than mine.”
“I’m not proud. This feels nice, having dinner with a girl.”
“Don’t tell me this is how you get dates. The old a-hit-man-is-after-you-come-with-me-at-once gambit.”
Even by the time the burgers and fries arrived, no one had gotten out of the car at the farther end of the parking lot.
“Dating isn’t easy anymore,” Tim said. “Finding someone, I mean. Everybody wants to talk about American Idol and Pilates.”
She said, “And I don’t want to listen to a guy talk about his designer socks and what he’s thinking of doing with his hair.”
“Guys talk about that?” he asked dubiously.
“And about where he gets his chest waxed. When they finally make a move on you, it’s like fighting off your girlfriend.”
The distance and the shadows prevented Tim from seeing who was in the car. Maybe it was just some unhappy couple having an argument before a late dinner.
After an enjoyable conversation and a satisfying meal, Tim said, “I’m going to need your gun.”
“If you don’t have money, I’ll pay. There’s no reason to shoot our way out of here.”
“Well, there might be,” he said.
“You mean the white Chevy sedan in the parking lot.”
Surprised, he said, “I guess writers are pretty observant.”
“Not in my experience. How did he find us? Was the sonofabitch there somewhere when we stopped at that vacant lot? He must have followed us from there.”
“I can’t see the license plate. Maybe this isn’t him. Just a similar car.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe it’s Peter, Paul and Mary.”
Tim said, “I’d like you to leave ahead of me, but by the back door, through the kitchen.”
“That’s