Sole Survivor (29 page)

Not a ghost.

Rest in peace, Henry James.

As he progressed through Santa Monica toward the ocean, Joe’s brief embrace of superstition loosened, lost all passion. Reason returned.

Nevertheless, something about the
concept
of a ghost continued to seem significant to him. He had a hunch that eventually he would arrive at a rational explanation derived from this consideration of the supernatural, a provable theory that would be as logical as the meticulously structured prose of Henry James.

A needle of ice. Piercing to the gray matter in the center of the spine. An injection, a quick cold squirt of…something.

Did Nora Vadance feel that ghost needle an instant before she got up from the breakfast table to fetch the camcorder?

Did the Delmanns feel it?

And Lisa?

Did Captain Delroy Blane feel it too, before he disengaged the autopilot, clubbed his first officer in the face, and calmly piloted Flight 353 straight into the earth?

Not a ghost, perhaps, but something fully as terrifying and as malevolent as any evil spirit returned from the abyss of the damned… something
akin
to a ghost.

When Joe was two blocks from the Pacific, the cell phone rang for the third time.

The caller said, “Okay, turn right on the Coast Highway and keep driving until you hear from us again.”

To Joe’s left, less than two hours of sunlight lay over the ocean, like lemon sauce cooking in a pan, gradually thickening to a deeper yellow.

In Malibu, the phone rang again. He was directed to a turnoff that would take him to Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea, a Southwest restaurant on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

“Leave the phone on the passenger’s seat and give the car to the valet. He knows who you are. The reservation is in your name,” said the caller, and he hung up for the last time.

The big restaurant looked like an adobe lodge transported from New Mexico, with turquoise window trim, turquoise doors, and walkways of red-clay tiles. The landscaping consisted of cactus gardens in beds of white pebbles—and two large sorrel trees with dark-green foliage and sprays of white flowers.

The Hispanic valet was more handsome by far than any current or past Latin movie star, affecting a moody and smoldering stare that he had surely practiced in front of a mirror for eventual use in front of a camera. As the man on the phone had promised, the valet was expecting Joe and didn’t give him a claim check for the Mustang.

Inside, Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea featured massive lodgepole-pine ceiling beams, vanilla-colored plaster, and more red-clay pavers. The chairs and tables and other furnishings, which fortunately didn’t push the Southwest theme to extremes, were J. Robert Scott knockoffs though not inexpensive, and the decorator’s palette was restricted to pastels used to interpret classic Navajo motifs.

A fortune had been spent here; and Joe was acutely aware that by comparison to the decor, he was a scruffy specimen. He hadn’t shaved since leaving for Colorado more than twelve hours ago. Because most contemporary male movie stars and directors indulged in a perpetually adolescent lifestyle, blue jeans were acceptable attire even at many tony establishments in Los Angeles. But his new corduroy jacket was wrinkled and baggy from having been rain-soaked earlier, and he had the rumpled look of a traveler—or a lush coming off a bender.

The young hostess, as beautiful as any famous actress and no doubt passing time in food service while waiting for the role that would win her an Oscar, seemed to find nothing about his appearance to disdain. She led him to a window table set for two.

Glass formed the entire west wall of the building. Tinted plastic blinds softened the power of the declining sun. The view of the coastline was spectacular as it curved outward to both the north and the south—and the sea was the sea.

“Your associate has been delayed,” the hostess said, evidently referring to Demi. “She’s asked that you have dinner without her, and she’ll join you afterwards.”

Joe didn’t like this development. Didn’t like it at all. He was eager to make the connection with Rose, eager to learn what she had to tell him—eager to find Nina.

He was playing by their rules, however. “All right. Thanks.”

If Tom Cruise had undergone cosmetic surgery to improve his appearance, he might have been as handsome as Joe’s waiter. His name was Gene, and he seemed to have had a twinkle surgically inserted in each of his gas-flame-blue eyes.

After ordering a Corona, Joe went to the men’s room and winced at the mirror. With his beard stubble, he resembled one of the criminal Beagle Boys in old Scrooge McDuck comics. He washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and smoothed his jacket. He still looked like he should be seated at not a window table but a Dumpster.

Back at his table, sipping ice-cold beer, he surveyed the other patrons. Several were famous.

An action-movie hero three tables away was even more stubbled than Joe, and his hair was matted and tousled like that of a small boy just awakened from a nap. He was dressed in tattered black jeans and a pleated tuxedo shirt.

Nearer was an Oscar-nominated actor and well-known heroin addict in an eccentric outfit fumbled from the closet in a state of chemical bliss: black loafers without socks, green-plaid golf pants, a brown-checkered sports jacket, and a pale-blue denim shirt. In spite of his ensemble, the most colorful things about him were his bloodshot eyes and his swollen, flame-red eyelids.

Joe relaxed and enjoyed dinner. Puréed corn and black-bean soup were poured into the same dish in such a way as to form a yellow and black yin-and-yang pattern. The mesquite-grilled salmon was on a bed of mango-and-red-pepper salsa. Everything was delicious.

While he ate, he spent as much time watching the customers as he did staring at the sea. Even those who were not famous were colorful, frequently ravishing, and generally engaged in one sort of performance or another.

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.

By the time he was finishing dinner with mango bread pudding and jalapeño ice cream, Joe was surprised to realize how much he enjoyed this people-watching. He and Michelle had spent afternoons strolling places as disparate as Rodeo Drive and City Walk, checking out the “two-footed entertainment,” but he had not been interested in other people for the past year, interested only in himself and his pain.

The realization that Nina was alive and the prospect of finding her were slowly bringing Joe out of himself and back to life.

A heavyset black woman in a red and gold muumuu and two pounds of jewelry had been spelling the hostess. Now she escorted two men to a nearby table.

Both of these new patrons were dressed in black slacks, white silk shirts, and black leather jackets as supple as silk. The older of the two, approximately forty, had enormous sad eyes and a mouth sufficiently sensuous to assure him a contract to star in Revlon lipstick advertisements. He would have been handsome enough to be a waiter—except that his nose was red and misshapen from years of heavy drinking, and he never quite closed his mouth, which gave him a vacuous look. His blue-eyed companion, ten years younger, was as pink-faced as if he had been boiled—and plagued by a nervous smile that he couldn’t control, as if chronically unsure of himself.

The willowy brunette having dinner with the movie star-slash-heroin addict developed an instant attraction for the guy with the Mick Jagger mouth, in spite of his rose-bloom nose. She stared at him so hard and so insistently that he responded to her as quickly as a trout would respond to a fat bug bobbing on the surface of a stream—though it was difficult to say which of these two was the trout and which the tender morsel.

The actor-addict became aware of his companion’s infatuation, and he, too, began to stare at the man with the melancholy eyes—though he was glaring rather than flirting. Suddenly he rose from the table, almost knocking over his chair, and weaved across the restaurant, as if intending either to strike or regurgitate upon his rival. Instead, he curved away from the two men’s table and disappeared into the hall that led to the rest rooms.

By this time, the sad-eyed man was eating baby shrimps on a bed of polenta. He speared each tiny crustacean on the point of his fork and studied it appreciatively before sucking it off the tines with obscene relish. As he leisurely savored each bite, he looked toward the brunette as if to say that if he ever got a chance to bed her, she could rest assured that she would wind up as thoroughly shelled and de-veined as the shrimps.

The brunette was aroused or repulsed. Hard to tell which. With some Angelenos, those two emotions were as inextricably entwined as the viscera of inoperable Siamese twins. Anyway, she departed the actor-addict’s table and drew up a chair to sit with the two men in leather jackets.

Joe wondered how interesting things would get when the wasted actor returned—no doubt with a white dust glowing around the rims of his nostrils, since current heroin was sufficiently pure to snort. Before events could develop, the waiter, Gene of the twinkling eyes, stopped by to tell him there would be no charge for dinner and that Demi was waiting for him in the kitchen

Surprised, he left a tip and followed Gene’s directions toward the hallway that served the rest rooms and the cookery.

The late-summer twilight had finally arrived. On the griddle-flat horizon, a sun like a bloody yolk cooked toward a darker hue.

As Joe crossed the restaurant, where all of the tables were now occupied, something about that three-person tableau—the brunette, the two men in leather jackets—teased his memory. By the time that he reached the hallway to the kitchen, he was puzzled by a full-blown case of déjà vu.

Before stepping into the hall, Joe turned for one look back. He saw the seducer with fork raised, savoring a speared shrimp with his sad eyes, while the brunette murmured something and the nervous pink-faced man watched.

Joe’s puzzlement turned to alarm.

For an instant, he could not understand why his mouth went dry or why his heart began to race. Then in his mind’s eye he saw the fork metamorphose into a stiletto, and the shrimp became a sliver of Gouda cheese.

Two men and a woman. Not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. Not this brunette but Barbara Christman. If not these two men, then two astonishingly similar to them.

Of course Joe had never seen them, only listened to Barbara’s brief but vivid descriptions. The hound-dog eyes, the nose that was “bashed red by…decades of drink,” the thick-lipped mouth. The younger of the two: pink-faced, with the ceaselessly flickering smile.

Joe was more than twenty-four hours past the ability ever to believe in coincidence again.

Impossibly, Teknologik was
here
.

He hurried along the hallway, through one of two swinging doors, and into a roomy antechamber used as a salad-prep area. Two white-uniformed men, artfully and rapidly arranging plates of greenery, never even glanced at him.

Beyond, in the main kitchen, the heavyset black woman in the voluminous muumuu was waiting for him. Even her bright dress and the cascades of glittering jewelry could not disguise her anxiety. Her big-mama, jazz-singer face was pretty and lively and made for mirth, but there was no song or laughter in her now.

“My name’s Mahalia. Real sorry I couldn’t have dinner with you, Presentable Joe. That would’ve been a treat.” Her sexy-smoky voice pegged her as the woman whom he had named Demi. “But there’s been a change of plans. Follow me, honey.”

With the formidable majesty of a great ship leaving its dock, Mahalia set out across the busy and immaculate kitchen crowded with chefs, cooks, and assistants, past cooktops and ovens and griddles and grills, through steam and meat smoke and the eye-watering fragrance of sautéing onions.