Ashley Bell: A Novel (35 page)

The vast acreage of the parking lot was sometimes insufficient for the crowds drawn to Fashion Island, but this time Bibi had many choices. Near Neiman Marcus, she tucked Pogo’s pride between a red Ferrari and a silver Maserati, accomplishing two things at once: by contrast calling attention to the Honda and thereby making it appear that its driver had no reason to want it to pass unnoticed; and at the same time giving the owners of the flanking vehicles a reality check, in the event they needed one.

She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and secured it with a rubber band that she carried in her purse for that purpose. After she put on the sunglasses, she wished that she had a more complex disguise. Like a burka. No one would profile and bother a woman in a burka, even if she was radioactive and ticking.

The photograph of Ashley Bell lay on the passenger seat. Rather than just turn it facedown, she rolled it loosely to make it fit in the glove compartment.

When she got out of the car, she couldn’t see the helicopter, but she could hear it in the distance. She needed only a three-second listen to be certain that it was approaching. Glancing at her watch, she saw they had required barely five minutes to determine that their quarry was not aboard the landscaper’s truck and that they had been bamboozled. Coming at once in this direction instead of buzzing off on a random route, they must be tracking another transponder signal in addition to the one emitted by the laptop.

St. Croix’s purse. Nothing left in it had been of interest to Bibi, but perhaps it contained a transponder; maybe the professor had been a subject of interest to them, in which case anything she carried, including the purse itself, might have been switched out with a wired version.

Remarkable, how smoothly the butter of paranoia spread across the bread of life.

Bibi snatched St. Croix’s purse out of the car, eager to be rid of it. At the nearest entrance to the open-air part of the mall, a FedEx driver transferred packages from the back of his truck to the equivalent of a laundry cart, for delivery to various stores. As Bibi passed, his attention was on the cargo in the vehicle. She shoved the handbag out of sight between the boxes in the cart, and she kept moving.

When the noise made by the helicopter abruptly spiked, she glanced back and saw it a couple hundred yards to the northeast, so low that it passed between two of the office towers and hotels that ringed the immense retail island at the heart of the complex. In the open, crossing Newport Center Drive toward the mall, the aircraft began to drift to port, to starboard, to port, as if the searchers aboard were trying to get a final fix on whatever signal they were tracking.

She could see no name or corporate logo on the fuselage, only a registration number on the engine cowling. Whoever they might be, either they were law-enforcement authorities exempt from air-traffic regulations or they were people of such wealth and influence that they felt immune from prosecution.

Having locked his truck, the FedEx driver pushed the cart toward Bibi, whistling a happy tune. Reaching into her purse, she wondered if she should get rid of the electronic key with the wasp encased in the Lucite fob. Even as small as it was, perhaps it, not the purse, emitted the signal that drew the helicopter toward her. Everything could be miniaturized these days. She was loath to throw it away unnecessarily. It meant something. A clue. A key. Eventually she might need it. The deliveryman rolled the cart past her, into the labyrinth of radiating shop-lined avenues where a few thousand people busied from store to store.

She kept the key, zippered her purse shut, and set off in a different direction from that taken by the FedEx guy. The chopper, racketing low over the mall, had a distinctly wasplike quality.

In addition to the department stores that were integrated into the acres of single-story shops, Fashion Island offered a three-story indoor mall, Atrium Court, where the large Barnes & Noble outlet was located. Brooding over a few things that Chubb Coy had said after shooting Dr. St. Croix, Bibi purchased three collections of stories by Flannery O’Connor, Thornton Wilder, and Jack London.

While searching for the London, she shared the aisle with two teenage girls. One was of Asian extraction, with thick, silky black hair and eyes as large as those of a child in a Keane painting; the other was a blonde, wearing eyeglasses with red-plastic frames; both were leggy, as physically awkward as they were attractive. She could not help but hear their conversation, which after a while took an ominous turn.

“What about this one?”

“The movie sucked.”

“Movies usually suck.”

“I like John Green.”

“But his movie sucked.”

“It wasn’t his fault. Hollywood cooked it with crap.”

“Here. What about Alice Hoffman?”

“I get off on Alice Hoffman.”

“Everybody likes Alice Hoffman, except the robots-and-aliens digit-head losers.”

“My sister’s slaving through Herman Melville in college. She says it’s like passing a kidney stone.”

“She ever pass a kidney stone?”

“She
is
a kidney stone. So who do you think they are?”

“The men in black? Maybe the president’s going shopping.”

“These aren’t cop guys. They’re butthole spiders.”

“So is something bad going down?”

“No. They’re not shoot-and-shout-Allah types. What about Salinger?”

“Holden Caulfield is such a babbling depressive.”

“He’s not a depressive. He’s a screwed-up child of privilege. Anyway, you’re sometimes a depressive.”

“I’m not sometimes a depressive. I’m sometimes a realist. So if they aren’t going to kill everyone for God, what’re they doing?”

“They’re looking for somebody.”

“Who?”

“Whoever. The one with the earring could be looking for me, and I truly wouldn’t mind.”

“Like that’s going to happen. When he saw you undressing him with your eyes, he gave you this look like,
Go away, little girl. I’ve got someone to beat up.
”

Holding her three books, Bibi turned to the teenagers. “You want to know who they’re looking for? They’re looking for me.”

They regarded her like two baby night owls surprised by a light.

“How many of them are there?” Bibi asked.

The blonde said, “For real, they’re looking for you?”

“Or,” Bibi said, “this is some brain-dead YouTube joke show, and I’ve got a camera up my nose. Can you help me? How many are there?”

“At least twenty,” the brunette whispered, though there was no need to whisper. “They’re everywhere.”

“Way more than twenty,” the blonde said. “They’ve all got these little phones in their ears. There’s a freakin’ swarm of them.”

“Men in black—you mean like the movie, suits and sunglasses?”

“No,” the brunette said, graduating from a whisper to a stage whisper, “they’re all dressed different, but they’re still the same. They have a look. You know, like they’ve all got somebody’s boot up their ass.”

“How’s everyone reacting to them?”

“Everyone who?”

“The other shoppers, mall security, everyone.”

The blonde shrugged. “We’re maybe the only ones who noticed.”

Her companion agreed. “We notice things. We’re super-observant, because we’re among the one percent, brainwise.”

“We’re super-observant,” the blonde amended, “because basically we don’t have a life of our own.”

“We have a life, but it sucks like a movie.”

The blonde said, “One thing we’ve noticed is these days people see all kinds of things they don’t want to see, so they go blind.”

“Selectively blind.” The brunette had stopped whispering, but her huge dark eyes were bright with a spirit of adventure.

Bibi said, “You know where the term
butthole spiders
comes from?” They shook their heads. “In the days before indoor plumbing, outhouses had wooden seats with holes cut in them. Spiders loved to build their nests and breed down in all the crap.”

“Gross,” the brunette said.

“Gross but cool,” her companion decided.

As a plan occurred to Bibi, she said, “What’re your names?”

In a bit of practiced theater, the brunette pointed to the blonde and said, “She’s Hermione,” as simultaneously the blonde returned the gesture, saying, “She’s Hermione.”

“Two Hermiones?”

The brunette said, “Our mothers were fangirls of a certain age.”

When Bibi still didn’t get it, the blonde said, “They were über-impressionable high-school seniors with middle-school tastes when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. They still haven’t gotten over them. Hermione Granger is Harry’s friend.”

“We’ve read the series, of course,” the brunette Hermione said. “It’s a daughterly obligation.”

“It’s a gun-to-the-head thing,” blond Hermione said. “Read ’em or die. But they were okay.”

“Listen,” Bibi said, “I need help. After I buy these”—she put the three books on a browser’s chair, unzipped her purse, reached into it—“I need you to walk with me to my car. They’re looking for a woman alone.” She handed five hundred dollars of Dr. St. Croix’s money to one Hermione. “They won’t look twice at a woman with two teenage daughters.” She handed five hundred to the other Hermione, who squinted and chewed her lip as though she might try to negotiate a higher price, but then accepted the cash.

“You don’t look old enough to be our mother.”

“Then let’s pretend I’m your sister—the one who
isn’t
a kidney stone.”

Wearing her baseball cap and sunglasses, one Hermione on each side, Bibi came out of the ground floor of Atrium Court, into the open-air mall. Keeping a leisurely pace. Head up, not tucked down as if trying to hide something. Twenty feet ahead of them, holding a large paper cup of Starbucks coffee, stood a formidable man with a hands-free phone looped around one ear, trying to look like a patient husband killing time while he waited for a tardy wife.

The blond Hermione whispered, “Butthole spider,” and then continued in the excited voice of a thirteen-year-old girl. “All I’m
saying
is a boy band should have
boys
in it, not old guys with hair growing out their ears.”

The other Hermione was affronted on behalf of her idols. “It’s a freakin’
reunion
tour, they can’t be nineteen on a
reunion
tour.”

“Jo,” said the blond Hermione, for they had decided to use the name of the sister they most admired in
Little Women,
Josephine, as Bibi’s fake-sister name. The Louisa May Alcott novel was a little corny, but it was beautiful, too, and you couldn’t help but love it, and of course cry buckets, in fact rivers, Niagaras of tears; all that Bibi learned while in line with them at the cashier’s station. “Jo, Jo, Josephine—do you see?—Meg here is getting old-lady hormones, panting after a bunch of geezers.”

“They were cute then, and they’re cute now,” Bibi said as they walked by the thug with the Starbucks. “Anyway, they’re only thirty.”

“Well, I want
boys
in my boy bands, that’s all. Hey, before we go, let’s stop at that cool place, get some espresso and beignets.”

The other Hermione said, “I totally adore beignets.”

They were passing the large koi pond, where people gathered to watch the brilliantly colored torsional beauties glide through the water, delicate fins wimpling.

The blond Hermione said, “We
both
totally adore beignets and espresso. You do, too, Jo. I know you do.”

A man with a hands-free phone sat on a bench beside the koi pond, watching not the fish but the people moving along the main promenade.

“If I stuff you with beignets not even three hours before dinner,” Bibi said, “Mom will skin me alive.”

“Oh, yes, your beastly mother, the human-skinning devil,” said the brunette Hermione. “Jeez, when did you become a grown-up all of a sudden?”

“It happens to the best of us,” Bibi assured her as they turned a corner, onto the last few hundred feet of promenade, toward Neiman Marcus and the parking lot where the Honda waited.

From behind her sunglasses, she scanned the crowd of shoppers and spotted other men like the first two, all dressed casually but each wearing a sport coat or another jacket that could conceal a shoulder rig and a weapon. The girls had been right. Some of the thugs were lean and sleek, with slicked-back hair like gigolos in silent movies, some were bulls with shaved heads, and others were former high-school football stars with clean-cut faces and styled hair, but something about them was so adamantly the same that she could have drawn a line from one to the other as easily as connecting the stars of well-known constellations. Maybe it was their alertness, their pent-up energy as apparent as that of wolves poised to pounce, or just an evil aura. A lot of people would laugh at the idea of an evil aura, because they didn’t believe in evil, only in problematic psychologies, and if Bibi had once been one of those who would have laughed, she wasn’t anymore. The girls were also right that these hatchet men were everywhere.

“I want to get a pair of those new jeans,” said blond Hermione, “the ones with the decorative stitching on the side seams and the hot words on the butt pockets.”

Brunette Hermione said, “Like your mom is ever gonna let you wear them before you’re thirty.”

“I’m gonna wear them, all right. A guy has to read your pockets, he’s looking at your butt, which is how it starts.”

“How what starts? Getting hit on by a pervert?”

As if the swarm of trigger men wasn’t a gauntlet hard enough to negotiate, Bibi spotted a serious complication forty or fifty feet ahead. Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack, former eleventh-grade English teacher, remade woman married to a multimillionaire, self-appointed enforcer of the concealed-carry laws, apparently spent the day going from one shopping experience to another, acquiring until the trunk of her café-au-lait Bentley couldn’t hold another item. She stood at a display window, coveting whatever it offered, holding two shopping bags from upscale stores.

Bibi thought they might be able to pass behind the woman and away while she remained mesmerized by the merchandise. But the risk was too great. If Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack turned from the display window and came face-to-face with her former student, she would see through the sunglasses and the baseball cap. No disguise short of a gorilla suit would deceive the bitch.

“Wait,” Bibi said, halting the girls. “You see that woman ahead, she’s expensively but inappropriately dressed, the one with the two shopping bags? I know her. She’s louder than a Mack truck. She’ll blow my cover. I’m going to duck into this store and pretend to look at a dress. You stay out here, chatter with each other—you’re doing great, by the way, really super-great—and when she’s gone, come inside and tell me. But I mean really gone, off where we won’t run into her.”

“This so kicks it,” brunette Hermione said with evident delight.

Blond Hermione agreed, “It kicks the crap out of it.”

Her arrival signified by a five-note set of electronic chimes, Bibi pushed through the glass door into the store before which they had halted. Two well-dressed thirty-something female salesclerks were conferring at the back, though they probably were required to call themselves fashion consultants or style assistants, or something equally high-end and lowbrow. Bibi went to a rack of dresses on the left, turned away from the windows, and fingered the merchandise with apparent interest. She hoped this was one of those places where the style assistants were trained never to approach a newly arrived customer too quickly, lest it appear that the store needed to sell its wares rather than fight off an excess of customers.

One of the salesclerks had meandered a third of the way from the back, pausing here and there to adjust an item on one of the display tables, when the five notes of the chimes announced the entrance of another customer. If the clerk was a missile locked on to Bibi’s cash potential, she had an instantaneous retargeting capability, because she declared with what sounded like genuine delight, “Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack, what a lovely surprise,” and moved toward the newcomer.