6. Earthquake Weather Is Psychological, Not Meteorological
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER IS PSYCHOLOGICAL, NOT METEOROLOGICAL
THE MOMENT HE LEFT I bolted after him, unsure what I planned to do when or if I managed to catch up.
He was scuttling the narrow side path, where light was largely insufficient and I felt sure I was going to slip and fall.
Could I Survive It? On foot, sure, yes. There were vines, trees, branches, things to reach for and hold.
The ground was mainly rock, dirt, or mulch—there would be traction, maybe.
If I slid on loose debris and fell, I’d just have to protect my head, the back of my neck, grab onto something.
If I broke something, a bone or whatever, then I’d wait until morning and call up to one of the de Witt house’s staff.
Obviously several gardeners were employed on the property; they had to be, with landscaping this intense, though come to think of it the trees did need trimming.
No, stop it, even rich people fell behind on their trees.
Without a phone I’d skate perilously along the edge of fucked, but I wouldn’t be, not completely.
More importantly, no matter what it took, I simply refused to die like this. (A prayer: If I fail, it won’t be because I fell off the side of a cliff while chasing a man who’s obviously fine.)
There, a moment of clarity. I slowed a little, watching my step, choosing myself and my life over the veil of possible harm to my evasive new charge.
A motion light beside the garage came on, thank god.
It flooded the side access path like a Pentecostal truth.
I was relieved to see that nothing but unthreatening rubble lay before me, right up until the moment I heard the sound of an engine sputtering to life.
I caught the creaking sound of misuse as the garage door opened, and then a set of headlights flared in the direction of the hillside road.
“Fuck,” I said aloud, and changed directions.
I lunged for my car, fumbling for the key in my purse, and managed to throw myself into the driver’s seat just as a topless vintage convertible peeled out at reckless, death-licking speed.
“FUCK,” I said, and started the car.
I’d parked head-in on the landing, meaning I had to perform an approximately six-point turn to reorient myself, maneuvering back up the steep driveway I’d treacherously descended until I reached the sharp curve to traverse the hills.
I couldn’t imagine having to take this maneuver in reverse—certainly I would say this: I Could Not Survive It.
New calculations populated in my brain, information I didn’t have about how fast was appropriate to drive on the narrow, serpentine roads.
Everything was far worse under this kind of pressure—beyond the house, the streets were lit, thank you city resources, but I was taking the turns at a far higher speed than I’d done coming up, approaching each blind corner with a sense of imminent peril and only narrowly avoiding the parked cars that lined each curve.
I lost sight of Julian’s convertible several times, so thankfully it was old and distinctive enough for me to spot whenever I reached a convenient downward viewpoint.
It was cherry red and topless, hardly inconspicuous, noticeable even at this time of night.
Everything eventually funneled down to Franklin, a major avenue, and my heart thudded with the knowledge that from here on, space was limited. Eventually I’d catch up.
But then, of course, he turned.
I clocked it with disbelief—he was heading into Hollywood. Where was he going? Clubbing? Somehow, I doubted that fit with William de Witt’s rigorous demands for privacy. They’d have to wallpaper the Sunset Strip in NDAs. I gritted my teeth and followed as closely as I dared, which had its limits.
Sunset Boulevard was packed, even on a Thursday night, and more than once I chanced a rear-ending.
I lost and then spotted Julian at least three separate times, chasing him down with the casual recklessness of any other LA driver in a hurry.
I’d never heard of anyone getting a speeding ticket on city streets for anything shy of getaway driving, which I was hoping to avoid.
He took a sudden turn down an alley and again, I nearly missed him; I took an illegal U-turn, then got stuck, turning it into an illegal three-point turn.
My heart was banging in my chest, embarrassment coloring my cheeks.
Even with so many other problems I was humiliated, deeply mortified by the depths of my cringe, what other people must think of me.
I ignored the blaring sound of honking at my back (me, another young female driver who didn’t know how to drive; I could see myself from the audience’s view at all times, my inherent incompetency as typecast as always) and peeled after him, or after the place I thought he’d gone.
Right away, though, I knew I’d been too late.
The alley was dark except for neighboring streetlights, the backsides of restaurants.
I could smell food and realized that I was starving—aside from a single sip of a smoothie, I hadn’t eaten all night.
My stomach growled, and I became aware of the fact that I was openly panting from effort.
I scoured the alley as I drove, but came out on the other side none the wiser.
I could no longer see the car or hear its engine.
I’d lost him.
Fuck.
I sat there for a moment with the engine idling, my hand rising to my forehead like I was trying to extract an idea from the bones of my skull.
Some way to salvage this mess. I didn’t have my phone, which meant I didn’t know exactly where I was or how to get back—I wasn’t that familiar with my city.
I’d never lived without the convenience of GPS.
Which led me to consider that maybe there was some other way to find him, if I could just make my way back to the villa.
Didn’t Emmanuelle have Find My Friends or something?
Couldn’t she track him somehow? Why the fuck hadn’t she warned me he might try to run, or equipped me with anything I might need to keep up?
My anger fizzled out, immediately deemed irrelevant. The image of pulling Emmanuelle aside at the party and telling her I’d lost Julian was suddenly crystal clear in my mind, a recollection of the same expression she’d worn earlier. That fear that had been so hastily disambiguated by rage.
A different solution, then.
Behind me, in the rearview mirror, a motion light suddenly came on, activated by someone coming outside from the nearest restaurant kitchen.
The flash of it temporarily blinded me, and I blinked away stars before a gleam of red came into view: the car.
Julian’s convertible. It had been abandoned, double-parked, behind one of the alley’s employee parking spots, the door thrown wide open.
He’d parked it and gotten out on foot.
I felt a thrill of salvation, slamming my hand into the steering wheel with a pulse of uncompromised triumph.
I pulled into a spot reserved for the businesses on the corner, figuring I’d deal with that problem later, if at all.
We were well after hours now, with only a few businesses left open.
The YMCA was shuttered, the post office was obviously out.
But Julian was here—he was somewhere on this street, probably in one of these bars. A gust of hot wind blew my hair in my face as I darted out from my car, crunching a dead palm frond underfoot on the sidewalk.
I tried the first place, closest to where he’d parked.
A trendy restaurant where, I was informed, they were at capacity for the evening.
“The kitchen will be closed by the time you could get a table,” the hostess informed me—I suspected she was an actress, too.
She had an air of biding her time; a knowledge that she’d been given this particular gatekeeper position as a reward for her looks.
I envied her body with a low, survivable fierceness, as I often did.
I frequently wished on stars for legs that were half a foot longer.
“But if you want to wait for a spot at the bar,” she added with a hefty dose of ennui, “you could get a drink next door and come back.”
That caught my ear. “What’s next door?” As far as I could tell it looked like a warehouse, like the place Roro had taken us. Maybe another one of those places the studios were gradually gentrifying, which would explain an oasis like this.
Which was also a reminder that Julian probably wasn’t waiting for a table at a restaurant with four dollar signs on Yelp, which I was pretty sure this place was. The clientele suggested a certain degree of liquidity.
“It’s a pub.” She leaned closer. “A real dive. Probably more fun.”
“Thanks.” If I were a rich person, I’d have tipped her. Instead, I said, “I like your lipstick.”
“I like your jacket,” she told me, and thus the transaction was complete.
I took off and went next door, attempting to slip inside before I was stopped.
“ID,” said an enormous bouncer.
“Fuck,” I said, muttering it to nothing.
I reached around blindly in my purse, closing a hand around my wallet.
“I’ve got it, just a second.” The bouncer was charitably disinterested in the frenetic beat of my panicked heart.
“Is there a guy in there? Long hair? Kind of … dirty?” I felt terrible about voicing it this way and handed him my ID without further comment.
The bouncer grinned. I noticed he had a nice smile, sweeping eyelashes. “You seem like a nice girl. You should stay away from dirty boys.” He glanced at my ID—taking great care, I noticed, to check it with the blacklight, bending it a little in the center. “Rough night?”
“Very.” There was a thundering overhead, a loud noise, and I glanced up. There were multiple floors to the building and the windows above the pub were blacked out. As I looked, the wind nearly blew me sideways. “What’s up there?”