The lightspill from the window was lime colored, as though the sun had been hitchhiking in the rain and splashed by mud from a pickup truck and then three rednecks had jumped off the truck and beat him and left him bleeding in the ditch, and the sun was really angry about the whole incident.
The first thing Kimrean felt, long before seeing it, was their right hand, bloodied and grill-marked and polka-dotted with patches of exposed flesh.
They scrambled up, hissing, shielding the wound from floating particles.
“Ow! Pain! Pain pain pain pain pain.”
With the help of what could pass for a clean piece of cloth, they improvised a bandage. There was not any liquor in the house (liquor having a life span of minutes whenever it entered the house), so they finally decided that their natural blood alcohol level would probably be enough to prevent infection. They swallowed a couple painkillers, washed them down with tap water, and finally scanned the tiger-striped office: living area, desk, chessboard.
“Right. Right!” shouted Zooey, stumbling back to her corner, fists up. “Okay, what were we fighting about again? I’m gonna kick your ass so far your turds will have jet lag.”
She completed a full spin around their axis—a full day on planet Kimrean.
“Adrian?”
She stopped. Then she described a full circle again, counterclockwise, without looking outside.
“Ade?”
(She stops, tilts her head.)
“Adie Adie Adie?” (Beat.) “Dickhead?”
Something cracked under her sole when she stepped forward. She lifted her foot. It had been a syringe.
She touched her left shoulder. The pain in her right hand had pushed the mildly annoying needlestings way to the back, but the spots where the syringes had stabbed her arm stood out in plain sight. Five, six, seven of them.
Her green eye glinted and nudged the brown one to follow.
“Oh, you poor thing—you never knew how to do drugs. You overdosed on Diarctorol!”
She hollered at the ceiling, stretching her arms like someone seizing a double bed all for themself.
“Ooooh, yeah, baby! This calls for celebration! (Takes a bottle of whiskey from the waste bin, confirms it’s empty enough to belong there, tosses it again.) Sleep tight, little boy. Mama will come home late tonight, oh yeah she will!”
She Hammer-timed all the way to the coat stand for her hat and waistcoat, put her business/party accessories on, and skipped back to the chessboard, where the remaining black pieces stood witness to the astonishing resurrection of their commander in chief.
“Ding-dong, motherfuckers. The witch is dead.” (Knocks down the white king; it crashes with an echoing boom among its jaw-dropped soldiers.) “And I didn’t need no He-Man this time. Tough luck, bro.”
She cavorted out, grabbed the door handle, smiling at the fresh shiny vinyl letters, and stopped.
“Oooh. Wait.”
(Right hand raised, because, you know—wait!)
“There was something else. A case. A mystery killer. ‘No reason. Only passion.’ A right-brainer. (Strikes out a word on an imaginary blackboard.) No executions. (Circles one.) Torture! He tortures the father. Kills his offspring. Offspring. ‘And all the girls say I’m pretty fly, for a rabbi.’ Ha! No, wait, that was Yankovic’s take. Another prime example of a cover improving on the original. This could be a theme for a mix tape! (Runs to the desk for paper and pencil, stops after two strides.) No, wait wait wait wait. Right-brainer. Someone irrational. Someone sadistic. Someone unbalanced, taking on the whole cartel. Not business. Personal. Someone aggravated. A casual victim. Collateral damage.”
She stared at the wall, arms akimbo, like a quantum physicist at a buzzing blackboard. Only the wall featured nothing but bullet holes.
(Scoff.) “Gosh, collateral damage from a drug cartel? That could be anyone. I mean, it could be—”
Every trace of a smirk left the building.
Outside the window, the universe stopped expanding.
“Holy Gandolfini.”
The left hand clutched the skull, tried to squeeze it. Inside, Matrix source code was spilling in an avalanche of data.
“Oh, fuckity-fuck. Ursula!”
She dashed outside and forgot to close the door.
The corpse of the white king rolled off the chessboard and fell to the floor as Zooey’s steps vanished down the stairwell.
Hotel Bohème was a ten-minute walk from A.Z.’s office or a three-minute sprint: Zooey ran all the way down Columbus Avenue, barely dodging the street musicians and tourists waiting for the trolley, and veered sharply into the narrow front door under the marquee. The air over the Bay Area was heavy with the apocalyptic gloom of any given Sunday evening.
She galloped up the red-carpeted stairs and hesitated on the landing, just long enough for a Michael Caine–type receptionist to pop out.
“Oh, Adrian! Is your friend in 210 staying another night?”
“No! She’s checking out!”
She ran up another flight of stairs and bounced off two corridor corners. The lock on room 210 stopped her for good; she pounded on the door.
“Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula!”
She had to wait almost a full second, pondering whether kicking down the door would put much of a strain on her friendship with the Michael Caine–type receptionist, before she heard the bolt click.
The door opened an inch, enough for Zooey to crash through, grab the child, and drag her like a football to the goal line.
“Ursy! I solved it! I think I solved it—maybe not for sure but let’s say ninety percent with a fifty percent error margin or something but you gotta come with me you’re in danger!”
Ursula processed the message, mentally adding the missing punctuation. She was wearing her second T-shirt and cradled a Kerouac book in her arms. The exiguous contents of her backpack and a couple shopping bags were spread over the quilt—paperbacks and enough soft drinks and snacks to kill a type-1 diabetic from long range. By the time Kimrean had taken in all those atmospheric details, the child was still reading into her eyes.
“Where’s Adrian?” she asked.
“Dead. Or sleeping. Maybe. Doesn’t matter. Come on, we gotta go.”
She grabbed her arm; Ursula gaped at the ugly, badly dressed burns.
“Oh my God, Zooey, your hand!”
“Not my hand, don’t worry; come on!”
She tugged again, but Ursula resisted. In fact, Zooey realized, Ursula did not seem overjoyed to see her. That was inconceivable.
“Is something wrong?”
The gap before the next line of dialogue immediately nodded: There is. A gossamer rustle from the bed canopy shushed down the room.
Ursula, an eleven-year-old in her own check-paid hotel room, lowered her head and said, “What do you care.”
San Francisco had somehow gone silent.
Zooey knelt down, craned to make eye contact. “Of course I care. How could I not care? You’re the femme fatale, remember?”
“No, I am not a femme fatale!” Ursula objected. “Adrian was right; I do nothing but wait around for my rescuer to save me, and then what? They’ll take my parents, I’ll have nothing left, but I guess it’s okay because somehow you and I will just live happily ever after?”
She allowed a gap for snarky replies, knowing that she would get none.
“I’m just the girl. A girl. And as soon as you solve the case you’ll discard me and forget all about me. You might as well drop me off now.”
Zooey listened intently, brain visibly accommodating to follow the logic of the argument.
ZOOEY: Couldn’t you just hold on a bit longer? ’Cause it’s gonna be tricky to replace you now that the third act started; I could always ask Demoines, but—
URSULA: No, I don’t want to be replaced!
ZOOEY: Then what do you want?!
“I just—” she false-started, and then she looked away, pressing Kerouac against her chest, and said, “I want a happy ending! I want to not be left on the curb by the end! I want to mean something to you, but I’m stuck in this role, and I hate being the girl!”
“Ursula, I am a girl!” Zooey proclaimed, pointing at herself, challenging anything in the room to contest her. “I am a girl, and I’m the detective! I have my office and my hat and my vinyl letters on the door, and I’m solving the shit out of this case! You can be anything you want—not the girl, not the femme fatale—anything! Besides, femme fatale is a bullshit cliché—it’s a plot device that male genre writers use to ultimately blame all the violence and conflict on some outside force, because somehow in their manly mind-set it’s more forgivable to make stupid decisions for the sake of a beautiful woman.”
Ursula almost felt the pain of that offhand slam.
“You never said that the other day.”
“I know,” Zooey admitted. “I would never tear down something while you like it.”
She closed up, one knee still on the carpet, lipless mouth in a sweet angle of a smile.
“Listen, I know you feel like a kite in a storm now. That’s not because you’re the girl, it’s because you’re a kid, and that’s what being a kid is. But it gets better. You will take the reins. You’ll write your own story. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world, okay? I’m not leaving you on the curb. I am hooked. I care.”
Ursula snorted, made sure not to sound weak when she ordered, “Promise.”
“I promise,” Zooey said, like it was the easiest dare in the world. “Right now I’m just trying to keep you alive long enough, okay?”
The hotel room held a respectful silence, and then waited to watch the kid’s reaction.
Jack Kerouac on the back of the book against Ursula’s chest breathed a little easier.
“Okay,” she whispered, drying the last tear. “Good.”
“Good,” Zooey said, standing back up. “Fine.”
She puffed out, glanced around the room, satisfied with her point.
And then she said, “Come on—my car is parked around the corner!” and clasped the off-guard kid’s wrist and pulled her off her feet and out of the room like a flying kite.
The book fell on the carpet and Jack Kerouac heard them disappear down the corridor, Ursula yelling, “Zooey, wait! You are driving?!”
She was driving indeed, since there was no guarantee that Ursula could do it any better and it was actually likely she would not reach the pedals, but the trip was fairly uneventful. Perhaps one or two little life-before-your-eyes flashes while Steve McQueening down Nob Hill, and during a couple shortcuts through roads under construction where there weren’t any workers anyway, but once they rushed through the last yellow lights out of the metro area, it was a smooth ride. Except for that tiny near-brush with that biker gang on the highway, of course, but that was really their fault for hogging all the lanes and for being such douchebags, as Zooey made sure to point out to each and every one of them while leaning out her window and replacing -bag with another suffix for each member. And that was pretty much it. It would be difficult to fit any more remarkable incidents into the thirty minutes it took Zooey to drive eighty miles, really.
It was still a long way to San Carnal when Zooey steered left like a heat-seeking ICBM, leaped off a curb that barely lifted the pony car six feet off the ground, and landed it onto the parking lot of a diner. The diner.
Zooey jumped out while Ursula, tangled in her seat belt, struggled to sit back upside up. Behind the diner’s double doors, the few truckers ruminating in front of their coffee didn’t have time to appreciate the dramatic fedoraed silhouette framed by the western sky; it strode in right away and confronted the violet-haired waitress who was mopping the floor.
“You, Frenchy! The girl you’re filling in for, where is she?”
The woman with the name Cecilia embroidered on her uniform didn’t seem to recognize her.
Zooey expanded: “I was here on Friday, asked you about the girl you’re replacing. You said the surgery had gone well. She was shot. A stray bullet through that window hit her in the boob—I’m seeing the darn in your uniform right now. Where is Cecilia?”
“Wh-what?” she stammered. “Who are you?”
“Yeah, that happened,” another waitress assisted from the counter. “One of the Lyon kids was here; they met with some Japanese gang outside and started shooting each other.” She pointed at the brand-new panoramic window.
“Where is she now?”
“I guess she’s still in the hospital.”
“Right,” Zooey said, asking over her shoulder on her way out, “Who responds to 911 calls from here—San Carnal Medical?”
“Yes, but she didn’t take an ambulance—what’s-her-name took her. Her girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?!”
“Yeah, she was here when it happened, saw the whole thing. She wouldn’t wait for the ambulance—carried Cecilia to her van and they drove off.”
“A flower delivery van?” Zooey guessed, turning back to the doors that Ursula was just coming through. “Thanks!”
And she snatched the child by the collar and tugged her back to the car.
Half an hour and seventeen serious violations later, the Camaro parked in front of the emergency entrance of San Carnal Medical Center on 12th Street under the Palm Expressway. This time around, Ursula was quick enough to jump out of the car, close both doors, and follow Zooey into the main building only ten seconds behind her. They raced past the waiting room filled with ghostly eyed citizens passing the evening there, all holding alien objects lodged inside their bodies or having accidentally run into bullets too fast, and Zooey flashed her badge in the general direction of the admissions desk.
“I’m looking for a patient, name Cecilia, came in Monday night with a bullet wound.”
The avian clerk put the glasses on her beak and started typing away with annoying meticulousness, but another girl who was just leaving the nurses’ station with a coat and handbag was faster. “Cecilia the redhead? Are you family?”
“Am I?” Zooey gaped, consulting with Ursula. “Wow, that would be some twist, wouldn’t it? Well, a little too forced maybe. Let’s say no.”
“They released her about an hour ago,” the nurse said. She was Latina, around thirty, with thirty-five-year-old eye bags—the kind of professional whose attitude says, I am a very nice person but also the one who decides where to give you your injections, so don’t try me. “We told her to stay another day, but she insisted on leaving.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. But they left some stuff in the room.”
“Number?”
“You can’t go in outside visiting hours,” the avian clerk nagged.
“Can you show me?” Zooey rephrased.
The nurse sighed and started taking off her coat.
They exited the elevator on the seventh floor, the nurse leading the way, followed by Zooey, followed by Ursula. Zooey caught the scent of chlorophenol as soon as she stepped on the corridor.
“We couldn’t reach her family,” the nurse narrated. “Only the girl who brought her came to see her. More like never left, really. You don’t see that often.”
“You mean, between friends?” Zooey queried.
“ ‘Friends,’ ” she repeated, amused. “More like between humans. You see devout wives, desperate mothers…but this girl…God forgive me, she was like a dog. You know, that kind of purely instinctive loyalty? She stood outside the surgery room while they removed the bullet. She lived here on this floor all week. She washed the patient, she helped her to the toilet, she barely spoke to anyone else. And every time she popped downstairs, even for a half hour, she always came back running out of breath and bringing a gift. We all thought it was weird—like psychological abuse or something.”
“Did you report it?”
“No. I did bring it up to the patient, though, once. She waved it away. In fact said she’d do the same for her.”
“This friend, did she leave Monday night?”
“Uh…yes, that was after the surgery; patient was in ICU, so they kicked her out.”
“Friday night?”
“Yes.”
“How about this morning, eight to ten?”
“Yes! Maybe she went to work; she drove a delivery van.”
“Did she look okay after Friday, or more like she’d been grazed by a bullet to the ribs?” The nurse seemed taken aback by the slightly loaded question, but Zooey found the answer on her own. “Yeah, right—and she had bandages and painkillers readily available, so…Did you catch her name?”
“Yeah,” the nurse searched. “Something with J…Joanne…No, Juno!”
“Five-five, light build? Could she pass for an Asian boy?”
“Yes, totally. Except for the blue eyes. Actually, I think she was Asian, like, Siberian, you know? Like an Eskimo.”
“Eskimo!” Zooey yowled, startling both Ursula and a woman pushing a cart of linen. “Damn, Native Alaskan was my third option!”
“Right, Cecilia mentioned her family was back in Alaska. Anyway, here, this is it.” She pushed the door numbered 714 and waved them in. “I’m glad I’m back, actually. I meant to take a picture before they clean it out.”
Zooey stepped in, absorbed the atmosphere, and felt almost like she could cry with joy at the sight of the glowing red room.
Roses. Roses on the bedside table. Roses on the windowsill. Roses concealing the armchair and smothering the oxygen supply. Roses haloing the headboard and spilling over the pillows, slithering along the rails and swooning off the foot of the mattress like a flowery waterfall; roses climbing over the switchboards and creeping up the tubes; three out of four walls colonized by roses. Roses bleeding out of the bathroom; roses stamping on roses; roses raped by roses. An orgy of roses, a biblical plague of roses, the Wars of the Roses of roses. Every scar-textured, blood-colored petal glaring at the temple raiders from every corolla in every bunch in a hive-minded swarm of roses.
An unmitigated, unreproducible curse word came out of Ursula’s mouth.
Zooey, clutching her head in amazement, green and brown eyes gleaming with bliss, could utter nothing but a sportive, honestly admiring, one-mad-person-to-another chuckle.
After a new ellipsis, Zooey and Ursula were back on the road, testing the indulgence of traffic laws in downtown San Carnal.
“I knew it!” Zooey chanted, banging on the wheel. “She’s the perfect match! Introverted, invisible, cut off from mankind except for one person, one soulmate that she can communicate with and goes on to fill every role: sister, friend, lover—her only mediator with the outside world. I tell you, I’ve seen guys like this before; there’s one in every nuthouse. They usually end up smothering their mediators or killing them out of jealousy, but these two—oh, they make the perfect storm! Just picture Juno: young gay native girl raised in a rural godforsaken state? The amount of shit she must have taken, the anger she’s holding inside! But this Cecilia knows how to tame her! Did you hear the nurse? Didn’t that strike you as very zen? ‘Someone shot me in the tit, my girlfriend’s going crazy, but it’s okay?’ That’s a chillingly cool head. (Understanding.) That is Juno’s left brain, right there. And Mikey and his men almost removed it from her.”
“I don’t get it,” said Ursula, trying to ignore the speed at which they were stealing off the expressway, under an ovation of eighteen-wheelers. “So she killed Mikey because he shot her girlfriend by mistake? Why did she kill the others?”
“Because one body’s not enough!” Zooey raved over the roar of a fire truck they were overtaking. “You and I would kill Mikey and move on—we’re easygoing like that. But for Juno, it doesn’t equate. It’s not a life for a life, because Cecilia is not just a person, she’s her voice of reason, her god! Did you see that room? That wasn’t a room; it was a shrine! And Mikey is nothing, he’s less than a person; to Juno, he’s a by-product. Her own past determines her view of the problem: it’s not just Mikey, it’s the system that made Mikey, it’s the communities that raise bullies, it’s Victor Lyon’s fault! So she takes out the spawn first, just to show him, and then she’ll kill him last!” She continued to slap the steering wheel like she would a horse, ignoring the Camaro’s pleas for clemency. “Oh, it’s so good! Everyone was thinking of cartels and power struggles, they thought we were in a Mafia movie, but we’re not! We’re in a one-woman-against-the-world movie—it’s a crossover! She’s Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence! Denzel Washington in The Equalizer! Liam Neeson in Taken! But you had to think in genre principles to see the pattern, see? That was me! Remember this: Adrian didn’t solve this one—I did! I detected this one!”
URSULA: Wait a minute—so now that she’s done with my brothers, she’s gonna take out my father?
ZOOEY: Sure, now that Cecilia’s safely home? I bet she’s heading to Villa Leona right now!
URSULA: And you’re driving me there?!
(Zooey’s mouth vanishes from her face in the blink of an eye.)
(Pause.)
ZOOEY: Okay. See? This is the kind of thing that Adrian is good at.
Too few minutes later, the screeching Camaro swerved out of Palm Drive at a speed never seen outside the Fast & Furious franchise, bowling through a set of poorly placed trash cans, and revved onto a dirt road that stretched through a modest grove of inbred pines and then a corrugated desert flanked by cacti, heading for the tender cyan shadow of yet another moody Sunday night.
Danny Mojave, sitting atop the sentry booth in Villa Leona, registered the incoming yellow-striped blue car through his binoculars. He put them down and gazed naked-eyed at the sunset. He felt the angst of Sunday evening in his bones. The undone top buttons in his shirt exposed a crimson mark around his neck, where a nylon rope had almost choked him to death that morning. The day might die, but this souvenir from it was a stayer.
Tiredly, he stood up and signaled the sentries to open the gate. The blockade of gangsters wielding $250K worth of black market military-grade weaponry moved aside to allow Kimrean and Ursula into the last bastion of the Lyon family.
Zooey drove up the slope to the garage, but veered off the first curve and ruined some thirty yards of lawn and two flocks of petunias before pulling up near the outer brick wall, behind a hedge and a small kiosk, hidden from both the front gate and the main building. She keyed off the engine, exited the vehicle, and pointed a dictatorial finger at Ursula before she could follow.
“Get in the backseat, lie down, and whatever happens, do not leave the car. Ever. You’re trying to stay off the clichés, so don’t become the child who leaves the shelter to stroll right into the epicenter of the disaster, because that’s the absolute worst.”
“How do you know the killer won’t come for my father, then steal this car to escape and take me along?” Ursula asked.
Zooey granted the scenario a full second, then answered: “Because now that you said it aloud, it’s unlikely to happen.”
She slammed the driver’s door and ran back to the front gate, where the soldiers had retaken their positions, watchful of the bleeding western horizon.
“Okay, listen everybody,” Zooey called. “Bad news is it’s not the yakuza—it’s something worse. Good news is…(Thinks.) Sorry, there is no good news. I was just trying to give positive reinforcement.”
The few soldiers who had seemed to care resumed their duties while Zooey nodded to herself reassuringly: “Good pep talk.”
Danny came to join her in the back lines.
“You know who it is?”
“Yes. Remember the civilian Mikey shot in the diner in neutral land? Congrats, you angered a lesbian in love. It’s okay—it’s a common mistake.”
Danny frowned.
“What are you talking about?”
“The waitress whose tit you blew off on Monday? Her name is Cecilia. It’s her girlfriend, Juno.”
“What…How’s she connected to this?!”
Zooey paused, considered reordering the words. “She’s Cecilia’s girlfriend.”
“You said this was personal!”
“It is. You guys shot Cecilia.”
“And the girlfriend happens to be a trained assassin?!”
“No, nothing that interesting. She’s from Alaska.”
“Are you telling me a random woman just waltzed into Villa Leona to kill Mikey Lyon?”
“No, you showed her the way in,” Zooey said. “Every time you need to make a private call or smoke one of your hand-rolled specials, instead of the Newports you smoke when you’re in business mode, you go to the north side of the fence, because it’s private and has phone signal. How many times did you go there the day after the shooting? All she had to do was watch: you showed her the safest route in and out.”
Danny listened, took a minute to gain control of his mouth again for the follow-up: “What about the cameras at the club?”
“She passed two out of four in rotation. Her odds were good: she had a…56.25 percent chance of missing both. (Shakes her head.) Oh, wow. Is this what the left brain is for? (Checks again.) Holy shit. Math is fun!”
“But what about the chrysanthemum?!”
“It’s a rose! She delivers flowers and she likes those roses a lot. It was a coincidence; this was all about revenge.”
“Revenge?!” cried Danny. “She gunned down six men because one stray bullet killed her girlfriend?!”
“Oh, no, it didn’t kill her—she was just released from the hospital.”
Danny wandered away from the conversation, rubbing his forehead, his mien like that of a man who is ready to walk out of the theater and ask for his money back.
“But…” he tried, turning to give the narrator a last chance. “I mean, now she’s gonna come and kill the crime lord of Southern California because some asshole shot her girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Zooey said. She was perfectly at peace with the simplicity of the whole plot. “I mean, she came here once already, and she’s better equipped this time, so…I don’t know, it’s what I would do.”
“All right,” Danny puffed. “Tell me, what can we do to stop her?”
“Well, it’s a little late to send her chocolates and a get well card, so—”
“Zooey, shut up! Adrian, what can we do?”
“Uh…Adrian’s not home. Care to leave him a message?”
“What…what do you mean ‘not home’?”
“Yeah, we had a fight, and…I won!”
“Zooey, where is Adrian?”
“I’m glad you asked, because the answer calls for many beautiful, symbol-rich analogies: remember that episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy goes catatonic or something and Willow has to get inside her head and in her memories Buffy is just placing the same book on a shelf over and over again? Okay, well, it’s not like that at all.”
“ZOOEY!”
“Listen, we don’t need Adrian, okay?” Zooey appeased him. “I found out who the killer is, I know how she thinks, and I’m the one who knows what she’s going to do next. So, where is the Lyon?”
“In the mansion, with four other men and two more by the door.”
“Move him to the pool house. This time she’s taking the mansion.”
“How? I thought she only brought what weapons she found from the previous scene.”
“Yeah, that’s my point: in the previous scene she got a tank.”
She pointed west, right before the sentries spotted the lone white dot against the purple farewell of the day. The camera shot off Kimrean’s index finger and zoomed across .74 miles of desert into Xander’s bulletproof Jaguar in the middle of the dirt road, just as the driver in a balaclava rolled back her electric-blue eyes with the last scent from the Erithra lunis caressing her nose, then tossed the flower on the seat to her right, next to the Taurus BA-44, cracked her knuckles, gripped the steering wheel, and floored the gas.
A Tokyo-razing roar burst from the engine and the tires kicked up a ballpark’s worth of dirt in dust-cloud form the second before the 1.7-ton luxury missile gunned straight into Villa Leona.
“Go!” shouted Zooey, bumping Danny off the front row, over the chorus of clicking guns and gritting teeth. “Get the kingpin out of there, now!”
Among the horde of the badly shaved, badly suited, sunglassed men forming the army, a late ’70s beach bully with sideburns and in brown corduroys, acting as second-in-command, stepped in as soon as Danny left running for the mansion and barked a commendably simple order: “Stop that car!”
A cloud of parrots scampered off the palm trees at the break of thunder: every rock, every pebble, every grain of sand of the desert shook with the rumbling orchestra of machine guns being fired at the one-woman cavalry half a mile ahead and incoming, like a louder, meaner version of the credits shot for Knight Rider. Just as fast. Just as fearless. Just as symbolic of the end of all things.
“My money’s on the car,” Zooey confided to Sideburns. “No offense.”
“None taken,” the commander answered, before he shouted over his shoulder: “Bring the jalapeños!”
The back row of the blockade gave way to a big, long-haired goon with the kind of mustache that automatically bans you from working within five hundred feet of a school, dragging a large khaki suitcase with Cyrillic characters stenciled on it. Kimrean could not contain an excited “ooh” and some clapping when she identified the Russian RPG-7 the grunt was now bringing into the battle. Two other men helped him support the six-foot rocket launcher between the bars of the front gate, while Big ’Stache loaded an anti-tank grenade and propped himself on one knee, ready to fire.
Juno, flying against the bulletstorm clinking off the Jaguar’s bodywork like horizontal hail, shifted to fifth and lowered her side window. The thunderous noise of the 140 mph desert wind flooded in.
“On my signal,” Sideburns ordered. “Hold it…”
Juno pulled the key out of the starter.
“Hold it…!”
She stuck her hand out the window, 7.6-caliber rounds whizzing by her exposed, skinny arm.
“Hold…!”
Even at that rapidly abridging distance, Zooey could tell she wasn’t holding a gun.
That point was confirmed when an unattended green LED flared up on the security gate’s control board, and the hinges clacked and squeaked to life.
“…Ffffffuck!”
Sideburns aborted the order as the gates swung inward, forcing the gunmen to move back, dragging the rocket launcher stuck between the bars, causing the operator to tip off-balance and sway the weapon to aim into friendly lines. Lyon’s troops scattered, bumping against the moving gates and surrendering to chaos.
Zooey checked the car again, which she had averted her eyes from for exactly one second. It had come so much closer!
An instinct she’d forgotten she possessed made her scram instead of staying in the first row.
Amid Sideburns’s hysteric cries as he stood right in the RPG’s line of fire, Big ’Stache was still struggling to pry the weapon from the moving gate, until with a final teeth-gritting yank he pulled it out, and in the same movement fell on his ass, and the weapon discharged.
With a basilisk hiss, the rocket launcher spat a grenade in a perfect vertical, followed by a twirling trail of blue smoke that Sideburns watched ascend and disappear into the remote twilight sky.
And just as he looked back to ground level, the Jaguar knocked him into the stratosphere. Juno hardly caught a glimpse of him flying way above the hood like a bumped mailbox as she swerved up the slope to the main building, not even dreaming of tapping the brake.
The rest of the scattered sentries regrouped and resumed firing at the car’s tail, while the artillery guy, lying faceup on the ground, wiped the gravel from his eyes and scrutinized the sky.
Up there, in the starry silence above the gunfire, the rocket-propelled grenade coughed up the last fumes of fuel, reached the zenith of its trajectory—wings spread out, tail still smoking—and came to a glorious stop at the top of its parabola. Then it gracefully bowed back, gently rotating around its axis, and let gravity pull it back to earth, hardly a couple yards from its takeoff point—actually very close to the khaki army case where it came from and the remaining grenades waiting for their turn, which, incidentally, would never come.
The explosion swallowed and regurgitated in the same hundredth of a second the gate and the entry booth, much of the fence, two lime trees, and fourteen people.
From the mansion, the view of the west side of the villa going up in a Superdome of flames, hurling chunks of fence out of the state, made the sight of the Jaguar swerving off the garden path and charging at the building almost pale in comparison.
The guards at the front door barely had time to appreciate the homicidal maniac’s cyan eyes before a reflex act, as symptomatic of their inclement childhoods on the streets as it was stupid in practice, made them fire instead of jumping out of the luxury tank’s path.
Look up from this page and imagine a car in the room where you are right now. Imagine how close to the ceiling it would stand. Picture it in frontal view (a big, boastful, midlife-crisis-palliating luxury sedan), try to frame it in the doorway, and imagine the technical difficulties that simply allowing that monstrosity into the room would pose and how little space you would have left. And now imagine it moving. Imagine it coming through that inconvenient, non-customized door, at the speed you reach when overtaking a trailer truck on the highway. Imagine the momentum of that steel-and-aluminum mammoth entering the room where you are, whether there’s a doorway or not.
That happened in Villa Leona.
And it took the house three whole partitions to stop it.
In its wake lay a razed foyer, the living room from Chapter 3, ten hunting trophies, a minibar, a full bar, a dining room for twenty people, four people, and the best part of a $200,000 titanium kitchen.
The dust had not even considered settling, and in fact boulders of concrete were still flumping from the ceiling onto the hood of the vehicle, when Juno popped through the sunroof, shot the thug taking shelter in the meeting room, fired several rounds toward the spiral stairs (which were not typically visible from there) until she hit the kneecaps of a second thug she’d heard coming, then spun at the noise of cracking glass behind her to find a maid stumbling out of the ruins of a pantry and shouted her own trigger finger to stay put.
She puffed—more like gasped—then stayed there, every single muscle tensed, panting like she’d just washed up on the beaches of Normandy, a similar landscape of ruin and destruction surrounding her brittle figure sticking out the top of the tank. She shook the adrenaline and the mortar from her shoulders and shooed the maid away like a fly off a cake. The woman scuttled away through what was left of the service door.
Another figure crashed in through the devastated dining room, gun in hand, catching the assailant unaware.
“FREEZE!”
Juno turned anyway. Kimrean was coming around the car, pointing a gun at her while skipping between fragments of ceiling. Suddenly, she seemed to notice the semiautomatic she had borrowed from one of the corpses outside. She peeped down inside the barrel.
“Is this loaded?”
She pulled the trigger; there was a click.
“Okay.” She tossed the weapon and grinned at the astonished enemy. “Imagine if I didn’t check and found out it’s empty when I meant to fire—I’d feel pretty stupid then, right?”
Juno hopped out of the car, shoved Zooey against a pillar, and inserted three inches of Brazilian gun barrel into her mouth. Zooey could feel the burning steel tip grazing her uvula as she stared into the same electric-blue eyes she had confronted earlier in Xander’s penthouse. Her balaclava needed fixing; Juno chose to tear it off altogether. The eyes matched a clay-colored, indecisive face, spectacularly young. Short oil-black hair. Five-foot-five—considerably shorter than A.Z. Her feet did look small.
“Who are you?” she inquired.
“Eyheekiwea,” Zooey tried, before standing on her toes to distance herself from the gun. “I said A. Z. Kimrean, private eyes. You can call me Zooey.”
“I will.” She pushed the gun half an inch farther up her throat: “Where’s Victor Lyon, Zooey?”
Zooey humbly requested some room for phonation, gagged out some spit, then answered.
“Okay, first off, let me tell you I’m super impressed with your m.o.; you—” She aborted the praise when Juno pressed the barrel tip against her lower jaw. “Right, right, okay, look, I’m usually not this easygoing but you caught me on a particularly positive day, and since I see you and I are a lot alike, I thought maybe we could agree to solve this peacefully if I tell you that Mr. Lyon is hiding in the pool h—”
Juno cut her off again, this time by striking her with the butt of the gun. Kimrean dropped knocked out on the ruins.
Then the killer gazed through the shattered windows, toward the swimming pool and the little path that led to the bungalow. Some ninety yards away, she reckoned.
Better take the car.
From the pool house, a box hedge partially blocked the view of the mansion. The last thing they had clearly spied from there was the explosion at the gates; the rising pyrocumulus was probably visible from Nevada. News of the Jaguar sodomizing the main building they had inferred only from a humongous dust cloud from that direction—accompanied by a similar sound to that of Genghis Khan riding into Samarkand.
They were three people listening, technically hiding: Victor Lyon, Danny Mojave, and a bodyguard who does not merit a name because he will most likely be dead in the next page.
Victor sat in a dull armchair, a gun on his lap and his sight wandering around a bowl of fruit. A pear stared back at him.
“Where is my daughter?” he asked softly.
Danny, on the lookout by the north window wielding a submachine gun, was caught unprepared by the tone of his voice: still solemn, but nonetheless surrendering.
“She’s safe,” he answered.
The Lyon sighed, pitifully. “Do you think there will be anything left to leave her?”
Danny bit his tongue: he was just remembering a minor plot twist in the penthouse, minutes before Xander was shot. The distant revving of the Jaguar beyond the double glass doors absolved him from answering.
“Are they coming?”
Danny tried the radio again. “Mendes. What’s your status?”
The hedge was blocking the garden path, but he heard again the sound of debris stirring and a car pulling back.
“Mendes?” he insisted. “Somebody! What is happening out there?”
There was no answer. No other noise from the outside.
But then, beneath the pregnant silence, Danny felt a timid trepidation, like the first warning tremor household pets sense before a big earthquake.
The car purred again, far away. Danny turned and faced the bodyguard standing in front of the fireplace. He saw the mirror over the mantelpiece. He saw his reflection’s weapon, aiming at him. He saw, in the line of fire, Mikey’s red rose trembling in its vase on the mantelpiece.
He saw the rose and the vase and the mirror and the fireplace and the bodyguard blown into smithereens, and while the shock wave slapped him off his feet and toward the bedroom, he even caught sight of the Jaguar that had just appeared in the middle of the room.
Victor Lyon was gripping his pistol at that moment, but the entrance had caught him by surprise anyway: he stumbled up so fast he didn’t hear his spine reminding him to grab his cane. He gripped his pistol at the same exact moment that Juno squiggled through the sunroof and pointed her Taurus at him, shouting at the top of her lungs. “Put it down!”
“You put it down!”
“I’ll fucking kill you!”
“Do you think I give a fuck anymore?!”
“Do you think I ever did?!”
Danny groaned up to his feet, found himself in the middle of the standoff with way too many fucks to give. His weapon was lost to the ruins like a five-year-old in a mall. He timidly raised his hands.
A breeze came in through the newly opened hole, sweeping the brick dust to the whistling of an Ennio Morricone tune.
Juno, holding the Taurus with one hand, reached inside the car, retrieved something from the dashboard and lifted it to her face for the audience to see. The red petals exalted the blue of her Neptune eyes.
The Lyon’s gun didn’t quiver. His mouth did. To Danny, the legendary Victor Lyon, the man behind the ’74 Takeover, looked like a plain old man—another pink, Bismarck-mustached senior citizen from Florida in a Panama hat and unforgivable shirt, miscast in a gangster role.
He pronounced one word, painfully close to a whimper: “Why?”
The girl scoffed with something that didn’t remotely pass for amusement.
“Why, you ask? ‘Oh, why did this happen to me?’ ” she mocked, with the flimsy voice of a coal-smudged orphan in Dickens’s London. “ ‘I worked so hard to get here. Fought so long to build this. How can my story of struggle and success end this way?’ ” She snorted. “You think it’s unfair, don’t you?”
She was breathing faster now; she noticed and steadied the gun with both hands.
“Do you want a real story? I met…”
False start. She swallowed, started again.
“I met Cecilia when we were eleven. I was a dirty commie immigrant to a Christian community in Alaska. She was the reverend’s daughter. The second we locked eyes, we knew the rest of the universe was context. I endured their daily insults, for her. I stopped punching back, for her. I left my family for her. They caught us kissing in a barn. I was beaten. By teenagers. She was flown to North Carolina and put in a torture chamber masquerading as a Christian boarding school for deviant children. I rose from my ashes for her. I set their farms on fire for her. I hiked across the winter tundra for her. I lost toes for her! The day I rescued her and she made love to me, I knew neither of us would ever long for anything else, that we could live without warmth and food and air as long as we had each other. I worked a strip club for her. I wrestled hobos for her. I have crawled coast to coast through the sewers of this kingdom of bigots, bullies, and bipedal maggots, this place you anuses call the land of opportunity, to carry her in my arms to San Francisco, so we could be left alone. And we made it.
“And then one night, after my twelve-hour shift carrying dirt in a garden center, I drive to the diner where she works to give her a rose and drive her home, as I always do…and out of nowhere comes this coked-up punk. He orders a hamburger, insults her, points a gun at me, and then leaves, and ten minutes later he starts shooting at the diner from the parking lot like it’s a stall in a carnival. They gun her down! Just like that! And no one even notices! They don’t give a shit! Not him, not any of your spoiled children, not you! Do you think your business is the main plot of the universe, and the rest of us are just sitting here like disposable extras to add a splash of color when you blow off our heads?! Well, I’M FUCKING NOT!! You, and your family of amoral cunts, are accessories in my story, and I’m weeding you out! Do you hear me?! I killed all three shitstains that were your sons! I shot them down like the damaged animals they were! I razed in one week what it took you a life to build, so weep! Weep like a man for what a woman stole from you, you weak, disgusting, laughable old shit!”
A stone that was, against all odds, still sitting on top of another one tumbled down, announcing a new entrance.
ZOOEY: Okay! I heard enough!
Kimrean, a blue-purple bruise blooming around her left cheekbone, stepped in through the front door, preceded by a new gun to join the standoff. She chose a nice unobstructed spot, equidistant to the other two weapons and close to Danny, who asked her, “How long have you been here?”
“Awhile,” she answered, keeping Juno in her crosshairs. “She was at the bit with the kiss in the barn when I arrived, so I stood by in case the story got saucy.”
JUNO: (Smiles.) Hey, Zooey. Did you check the gun this time?
ZOOEY: No. I realized it’s stupid to waste a round to check, so from now on I’ll just trust my luck.
DANNY: (At the top of his lungs.) But why don’t you just release the magazine and look?!
(Pause.)
ZOOEY: Oh. Okay, I’ll try that next time. (To Juno.) Easy there, honey. You still need to look after Cecilia.
Juno had not yet had the courtesy to aim back at Kimrean, although she was showing definite interest now.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I used my imagination,” Zooey replied. “The little things just fit. Like the fact that Mikey recognized you when you climbed through his window. Or the fact that you hesitated when you were running out of the club after Frankie, because your instinct was to stand in line for the ladies’ room. By the way, the lost toes thing?” she said, aside to Danny. “That explains the shoe being too big for her foot size.”
“Yeah, I got that, thank you.”
“Okay. Just making sure.” She returned to Juno. “It was a nice puzzle, all in all. But since you’re so adamant on giving your stories a happy ending, you ought to know that the good guys must always win.”
“These people aren’t the good guys.”
“The old one isn’t.” She head-signaled at Danny. “This one is.”
That line made a couple guns waver and a few eyebrows rise. Juno’s Taurus slowly shifted toward the unarmed man with the curly hair.
“I know him,” Juno said, not bothering to hide the quiver in her voice anymore. “He was there, in the diner. He was with that asshole while he harassed Cecilia.”
“You might remember I was trying to calm him down,” Danny tried.
“Not fucking hard enough!” Juno yelled. “You are all the same scum!”
“Actually, he’s nothing like them,” Zooey said. “He’s a cop.”
She took a moment then to watch the reactions. Juno said nothing. Danny said nothing. Victor Lyon said nothing. But the Jaguar with its Rocky-at-the-end-of-each-movie countenance seemed to gape at the revelation.
“What?” said Juno in a soft voice.
“What?” Victor echoed, very loudly.
Danny whispered, “Zooey, why don’t you go to sleep?”
“I’m serious,” Zooey resumed. “He’s been undercover for eighteen months!”
“San Carnal cops are no better than the mob,” Juno retorted, gun dangerously shivering in her hands.
“He’s not with San Carnal. He’s from San Francisco. Just like you girls.”
That line, for some strange reason, made the Lyon boil up.
“YOU!” His gun had swerved ninety degrees and was aiming at Danny’s skull—if shoving two inches of barrel into the target’s hair counts as aiming.
DANNY: Zooey…
ZOOEY: C’mon, we were stuck! Let’s stir it up a little more, see where it takes us.
VICTOR: (Shouting, into Danny’s ear.) I trusted you with my son’s life! You traitor!
JUNO: You are both lying!
“Juno,” Zooey called. “Listen to me. They’ve been working the Lyon family for a year. They’re purging San Carnal too. But they need the old man alive, so you can’t kill him. And Danny is a good guy, so you can’t kill him either.”
“You’re lying!”
“I don’t lie. Even this room is bugged.”
VICTOR: WHAT?!
Zooey ignored him, her attention and her gun on the girl atop the car. “I’m serious. You can check yourself. There’s a framed portrait under your front left tire; there’s a hidden mike in it. The FBI’s listening right now from a paint store on 10th Street. Good agents, Marlow and Dawes. They must be on their way right now, if they’re not too busy making passionate love on the desk. (Shouting at the portrait on the floor.) And if you are, I’m so happy for you guys, but come here anyway!”
Juno swallowed something the size of a golf ball.
“Show me,” she ordered.
Zooey lowered her gun, picked up the picture of nine-year-old Mikey and his mom, and took some pleasure in carelessly smashing the glass against the car hood. From behind the photograph she scraped off a black plastic circle, half an inch across, and showed it to the audience. No one needed any more clues.
There is a first time for everything: Zooey was, unbelievably, the coolest head in the room at that moment.
Danny, on the other hand, could feel a zero Kelvin drop of sweat freeze his spine. Victor’s hands as he gripped his own gun showed symptoms of imminent heart failure. Juno had trouble breathing again. Her breast heaved with every intake of air. Tears were building up in her eyes. She compelled herself to take a deep breath—and hold it. Her pulse steadied.
Then she turned the gun ten degrees to the right and shot Victor Lyon.
By the time the drug lord fell to the floor, everyone in the room had comprehended the strategy behind that move: the shot wasn’t lethal, but it would be in a few minutes. She had avoided the vital organs, but not the main arteries; he would bleed to death.
Juno then aimed at Zooey, blue irises sparkling, brimming with pride, a demented smile distorting her gentle traits.
“You need him alive? Then run!”
Zooey didn’t argue; she tossed the gun and ran to attend to the old man. The cleanness of the wound didn’t stop it from hurting like hell; the Lyon had not ceased yelping since he’d hit the floor. It intensified when Zooey used a tablecloth lying around to apply a tourniquet.
The next move was a little harder to follow but still masterful: Juno got off the car and shot Danny in the leg.
Danny screamed only once, more out of surprise than actual pain, and fell down as Juno rushed to grab him and put the gun to his temple. Zooey lurched for Victor’s gun, but Juno uh-uh-uh’ed her out of it.
“Just kick it away,” Juno ordered.
Zooey obeyed, staring with renewed admiration. The hostage—were he able to stand—had at least ten inches on his kidnapper. The difference showed even now. Juno noticed it; she thought it was funny.
“Since there are real cops after me now, I’ll have to hold on to this one until we’re in the clear,” she explained. Her eyes shone free of any trace of caution.
“Seems fair,” Zooey said.
Juno helped/dragged Danny to the Jaguar and kicked him onto the backseat.
“On the floor, facedown!”
Zooey nodded in acknowledgment: he would be as good as hogtied trapped there on the floorboard between the seats. Juno slammed his door, climbed in front, and as she sat down at the wheel she remembered about the present she was bringing.
She leaned out the window and tossed the last Erithra lunis. It landed gently on Victor Lyon’s stomach.
“Pleasure meeting you, Zooey.”
“Same here,” said Zooey. She meant it.
The engine wheezed through the first two tries of the ignition key, but on the third it finally harrumphed to a triumphant start. Juno smiled through the chickenpoxed windscreen, winking at Kimrean like, Hey, fuck plausibility, right?
Zooey gave her an admiring thumbs-up.
The car reversed into the garden like a stuffed elephant head on a wall would, leaving an astonishing gaping hole opening onto the starry night. It pulled a U-turn on the lawn, ruining the azaleas, and it rolled away, speeding down the garden path toward the beautiful smoking wildfire in the general area of what had once been the front gate.
The aroma of blood made Zooey pop back from her amazement to more pressing matters: she tightened the tourniquet around Victor’s shoulder, whose screaming had long ago remitted into a raspy gasp. A large red stain mitigated his Hawaiian shirt.
“FBI will get here in ten minutes. Try and hang in there,” Zooey told him. “I know I should stay, but I really like Danny better than you.”
She showed the courtesy of leaving properly through the front door and disappeared.
Lying on the ashes of his empire, the Lyon reined in his breathing. He attempted some movement: his right arm was out of discussion. And he would definitely require the strength of both arms to sit up.
His left one, scanning the rubble, bumped into a gun. The one the crazy P.I. girl had carried in.
That feeling, the loyal touch of steel, granted him some peace.
There wasn’t much left to deliberate. The FBI was on its way. A soft melody of fires crackling and crickets singing between the azaleas would serve as background to the curtain fall.
Victor Lyon thanked the moment with a tear.
He put the gun to his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.
Zooey popped her head back in through the hole in the west wall.
“Oh, by the way—I can tell whether a gun’s empty by its weight. I’m not stupid, you know.”
And she scurried off.
Victor dropped the gun by his side a few seconds later and stared at the remains of the ceiling. A teeming firmament spied between the roof beams, following the whole story that was developing down on Earth, and as the stars looked at the old man lying there in the wrecked pool house, they said, Look at that extra.
Kimrean reached the front gate in time to catch a glimpse of a single red taillight shrinking into the western horizon. That was far beyond the warped metal and stumps of pillars that constituted the gate proper, dotted here and there with burning bodies.
Kimrean ran on toward the dark end of the garden, hopped inside the parked Camaro, and keyed the engine to life. Ursula jack-in-the-boxed between the front seats:
“What happened?”
“Shit!” Zooey jolted. “The fuck are you doing here?!”
“You told me to stay!”
“Right. I knew that.” She reversed the car onto the driveway, offering Ursula her first view of what she’d had only red glows and booming sounds to hint at.
“Oh my God, what happened here?” she cried at the sight of the desolation. “Why is everything on fire?! What happened to my dad?!”
“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll live. (Shifts gears.) In prison, that is.”
And she gunned the car down the slope, rolling over debris that had probably been alive some minutes ago.
They hit the desert, and in far less time than the car manufacturer claimed they were doing 120 on the dirt road toward downtown San Carnal. By the time Ursula had fastened her seat belt, they were back on asphalt, traversing a residential neighborhood and flowing onto a neon avenue, causing much sensation among the bystanders and the many other vehicles that swiftly made room for them by climbing onto the sidewalks and head-butting the parked cars. At that point, feeling at ease on the wide, well-paved roads of downtown, Zooey deemed it safe to speed up.
Ursula didn’t see much of the race through her own fingers, but she was confident she would read about it in tomorrow’s newspapers anyway, provided she still had the ability to read. Zooey drove considerably well for someone who kept one hand on the horn all the time, and she even seized a tranquil stretch between unanimously red lights to check the radio for a decent station, although she desisted when she had to steer left for the expressway so hard that she goaled a newspaper vending box right into a bar and grill. After that, it was just a minute’s worth of dangerous overtakes and a couple of chain collisions on the junction before leaving behind the last skyscraper and hurtling onto the empty road to the coast.
Far ahead, where the dark earth and the last blue sigh of yesterday met, Zooey saw the single red taillight again.
“Do you have Danny’s number?”
“Yes,” Ursula uttered.
“Call him.”
Ursula glanced through her hands, found some reassurance in the scarcity of objects with which they could collide head-on in the desert, and pulled out her cell phone.
In the Jaguar, Danny, wedged facedown on the backseat floor, felt a new kind of vibration on his chest, besides that of the 464-horsepower engine reverberating through the chassis directly beneath him. The tune to Dora the Explorer also came out of his breast pocket.
“Is that you?” Juno asked, distractedly aiming the pistol at him while she steered with her left. “Please, pick it up. No problem.”
It took him a while to roll over on his injured leg, but the caller did not desist before he was able to draw a hand to his pocket and take the call.
“Yeah?”
“Hi!” Zooey greeted. “Put me on speaker.”
Danny obeyed and strained to prop the cell phone in the drink compartment.
“Juno!”
“Zooey!” the killer answered. “I’m driving, talking to you, and aiming a gun at this guy’s brain. Try and make it quick.”
“Let me take some of your load: give me Danny.”
“No way.” Juno queried her mirror. “In fact, I might shoot his other leg if you don’t keep your distance.”
“We can make a deal.”
“I don’t make deals.”
“Come on, not even with your old friend Zooey? I’m as nuts as you.”
“I’m not nuts. I’m thorough.”
“Not that much. You missed a spot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were trying to get rid of the spawn of Victor Lyon, weren’t you? Well, you forgot one. There’s a tween Lyon. She’s adorable! Say hi, Ursy.”
URSULA: What are you doing?
“Good girl. So, what do you think, Jay? My hostage for yours?”
Juno, frowning, checked with her hostage. Danny looked just as confused.
“Is that really a kid there with you?” Juno wondered. “Where did she come from?”
“Glad you asked! Theoretically, she’s Victor’s daughter from his second wife, but actually she’s Xander’s daughter.”
URSULA: I’m what?!
“Shit. Sorry, I meant to tell you in private. Whatever. The thing is, Juno Mars, she’s a pure-blooded Lyon.”
DANNY: Zooey, what the fuck?!
“That can’t be true,” Juno said. “You’re playing me. There’s no little girl.”
“Oh, don’t be silly—just look at your phone screen.”
Juno let go of the gun or the steering wheel (both options were considerably reckless) and picked up the cell phone.
A little girl in a Bulbasaur costume grinned at her from a profile picture above the name: Ursula Lyon.
Juno floored the brake into the ninth circle of hell. The Jaguar skidded a full U-turn after one O-turn along a hundred-yard stretch, ripping flames off the tarmac.
In the Camaro, Zooey saw the lonely red light far ahead become two whites and pulled up.
“She’s here with me, Juno,” she lured into Ursula’s phone. “Come and get her.”
Then she hung up.
She turned to the terrified little girl in the backseat. “Right side, seat belt, head between your knees.”
The kid stared back, black teary eyes undecided between brown and green, like a broken compass. Her mind ached with a thousand thoughts put on hold; too many things had happened in the last five minutes.
“Ursy, look at me,” Zooey ordered.
Ursula’s eyes found hers, startled. Zooey’s unusual gravitas garnered the attention of the purring car and the desert itself.
“I know what I’m doing. I can play this game. Better than Adrian. But you have to do exactly as I say: right side, seat belt, head between your knees. Now.”
Ursula breathed in and out twice, then tightened up her seat belt and pulled her legs up.
Juno studied the Jaguar’s steering wheel, concluded that if her entrance in Villa Leona had not caused the airbags to deploy it was surely because there were none, sighed, and then casually glanced at Danny.
“You might want to hold on to something.”
The tires scraped another inch-thick layer of asphalt before firing the luxury sedan from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds.
Zooey made out the other car’s lights approaching and dedicated Juno a smug smirk.
“Right-brainer.”
She gripped the wheel, pressed the accelerator, and let the needle on the speedometer get acquainted with the right end of the dial.
Juno shifted two gears up at a time, the engine’s roar wandering out of tune due to the excitement.
Kimrean shifted to third, fixed her waistcoat, smoothed her tank top, pursed her lips at the mirror, shifted to fourth.
A dung beetle roaming in the middle of the road suddenly became aware of the air pressure on both sides rising slightly, foreshadowing the confluence of two four-wheeled horizontal rockets at jet fighter speed.
Gritted teeth.
White knuckles turned whiter.
Electric-blue eyes charging up.
Brown and green ones’ pupils shrinking under the opposing lights.
Two racing hearts counting the thousandths of a second available for the sudden steer that spares both from the impending catastrophe, and Zooey glances out her side window.
“Oh, look! Roadrunner!”
The crash sent a circular shock wave rippling across the tarmac, undulating the road and the desert like the surface of a pond after the drop of a meteor. The momentum was way too much for either car to stop the other: the vintage muscle car simply bounced over the larger, heavier sedan like it was a speed bump, made a full corkscrew in the air, and landed far away in the ditch.
A. Z. Kimrean stayed on the road, though. They flew straight through the Camaro’s windscreen on impact, glided some fifty yards through the air, then skidded fifty more on the coarse pavement.
They stopped, eventually, at the end of a trail of blood and glass powder parallel to the yellow dashed line.
The wind carried their tattered fedora a few seconds later.
Some minutes of unsuspected quietude followed.
Inside the yellow-striped blue wreck, Ursula regained consciousness to the sound of someone struggling with the warped door to her right. The seat belt had held her, at the cost of a burning red abrasion on her neck and a painful whiplash. She smelled blood in her nose from booping against the front seat. She couldn’t see anything: the stars had flicked off.
In fact, it took her quite a while to notice she was upside down.
The door opened, or came clanking off its hinges, and Ursula caught the gleam of a moonlit gun.
Juno, covered in glittery bulletproof glass, a broken arm hanging dead by her side with a piece of ulna sticking out to stargaze, allowed the desert night to adumbrate the face of the surviving child. Ursula never made out the killer’s features against the full moon.
Their breathing was heavy again, but not frantic. Juno’s hand was steady.
She murmured over the handcannon: “You could have just gotten out of the car, you know.”
Ursula thought about it. It had never occurred to her.
Or to Zooey.
She felt a tear blossom in her eye and roll down her forehead.
“That would have meant leaving me on the curb,” she whispered.
The killer clicked the gun’s safety off.
Or maybe on.
“I know a little girl in love when I see one,” she said.
And that was all.
She pocketed the gun and left on foot, heading west. The diner and the parking lot could not be that far.
Danny, wrapped inside a luxury twisted steel-and-aluminum cocoon, was already grazing his phone with his fingertip when he heard the first sirens.