Chapter Seventeen
They followed the sports car down the steep road past downtown. As it reached the entrance to the 101 South, its blinkers flipped on and the car accelerated onto the freeway.
“Faster,” Shawn commanded. “You’re going to lose her.”
“Yes, there is that danger,” Gus said as he steered the Echo up the on-ramp. “Because it’s much harder to spot a bright blue Porsche on four lanes of open freeway than in a maze of twisting streets.”
As the ramp leveled off onto the 101, Gus pointed out the windshield. The Porsche was a handful of car lengths ahead of them and three lanes to the left.
“Do you want to tell me now why we’re following this woman, or do you want to wait until we’re actually in Los Angeles?” Gus said, eyeing the freeway sign that said they were eighty-eight miles away from the city.
“Better yet, why don’t you tell me?” Shawn said.
“Because this is your theory, not mine,” Gus said. “So you know the reason and I don’t.”
“Which is why it will be good for me to hear it coming from you,” Shawn said. “When I tell myself something, it always sounds like a good idea. When you talk I’m much more objective.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘objection able,’ ” Gus said. But he knew that Shawn wouldn’t tell him anything until he’d taken at least one solid guess. “Okay, Ms. Phlegm claimed she lived at a house she couldn’t possibly afford, so it’s definitely a fake address. But it’s not the kind of fake address you make up, so it’s got to be a house she knows. All right so far?”
“More or less,” Shawn conceded.
“And when we got to the fake address, we met a woman who couldn’t possibly be described as a human freak show, but who does bear some similarity to the one who sticks knives in her eyeballs.”
“So far so good.”
“So you have deduced that when she was filling out the cocktail waitress job application, Ms. Phlegm put down her sister’s address,” Gus said, feeling a small thrill of triumph as he put the pieces together. “And the woman we’re following, the one who looks slightly like her, is actually her sister.”
“Which means…”
“That we’re following the sister either in hopes that she’ll lead us to our real target, or we’re going to confront her again and make her tell us where Phlegm is hiding.”
“That’s very impressive,” Shawn said. “There’s only one little piece that’s wrong.”
“Which one?”
“Remember this morning when we stopped for coffee and you told me to go ahead and get the jelly doughnut because my hips weren’t getting fat?”
“Yes.”
“Everything after that.”
Gus glared at Shawn, but before he could say anything, Shawn shouted in his ear, “Get over.”
“If she’s going to Los Angeles, isn’t it better if we aren’t right on her tail?” Gus said, sticking happily in the right lane. “This way she doesn’t see us in her rearview, and if she wants to get off, she’s got to come over to our lane.”
“That’s if she’s going to Los Angeles,” Shawn said. “Or Ventura, or San Diego or Oxnard-or even anywhere else in Santa Barbara. But it’s not the case if she’s going-” Shawn broke off as he peered up at the car ahead.
“Going where?” Gus said.
“There!”
Shawn grabbed the wheel and shoved it to the left. The Echo flew across three lanes of traffic, barely missing an Escalade and squeezing past a school bus. When the sounds of horns blaring proved to Gus that he was still alive, he cracked open his eyelids to see the Porsche slowing down to take the one left-hand exit remaining on the entire 101 freeway, Hot Springs Road in Mon tecito. The Echo was close behind.
“How did you know she was going to do that?” Gus asked, working to get his breathing back under control.
“It’s amazing what you can figure out if you keep your eyes open while you’re driving,” Shawn said. “She’s turning left up ahead, by the way.”
“Yes, I saw the signal.”
“And then she’s going to make an immediate right,” Shawn said.
“And you know that how?”
“The same way a Martian dissolves in a tank of water,” Shawn said.
The Porsche turned left half a block ahead of them. By the time the Echo followed, the sports car had disappeared. All they could see were the high stone walls that hid the local multibillionaires on one side of the street from the mere single-billionaires on the other. But when Gus found a side street leading up to the right, he took it and saw their target right in front of them.
“If you even pretend for one second you did that with magic… ,” Gus warned.
“But it is magic,” Shawn said. “The magic of social climbing.”
The road jaunted to the left, and Gus saw the Porsche driving through a set of massive wrought-iron gates. A sign over the gates read LITTLE HILLS COUNTRY CLUB.
“Little Hills?” Gus marveled. “Isn’t this the most exclusive country club in the country?”
“They like to think they’re just particular,” Shawn said. “For instance, they completely repealed their ‘No Irish need apply’ when Ronald Reagan came back to the area to live at the ranch after his presidency.”
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t Irish,” Gus said.
“No, but his great-grandparents were,” Shawn said. “And that was a matter of great concern for the membership committee.”
The Porsche stopped briefly-almost wistfully, Gus thought-at a sign that directed members toward a parking lot on the left and guests to one on the right, then slid right into the lot.
“Now what?” Gus said as the Porsche pulled into a spot.
Shawn pointed to a narrow road paralleling the guest entrance and a small sign at its mouth reading SERVICE ONLY.
“That way.”
Gus steered the Echo down the narrow gravel road. “What are we looking for?”
“We’ll know when I see it,” Shawn said.
After a couple hundred feet, the road opened up to a plaza ringed by small, Spanish-style buildings.
“Just wait here,” Shawn said, and leapt out of the car. He ran into the open bay of what looked like the service station at the never-built Spanish Conquest Land at Dis neyworld, grabbed something off a shelf above a couple of partially disassembled golf carts, then threw himself back into the Echo’s passenger seat. “Now go, go, go!”
“What was that all about?” Gus said, throwing the car into reverse and backing down the narrow road to the junction.
“Something for snakes,” Shawn said, gesturing for Gus to drive into the guest parking lot.
As the Echo made the turn into the lot, the majesty of the Little Hills Country Club spread out in front of them. The golf course ambled over acres of real estate more valuable than anything outside Midtown Man hattan. And rising out of the emerald sward was the clubhouse, a Spanish castle that looked like Papa Bear to the ursine Baby that was the Higgenbotham house. Gus pulled into a space a couple of rows behind the Porsche. “Now what?”
“That.”
Jessica Higgenbotham stood by her car, waiting as a tall, handsome man in a polo shirt and khaki shorts walked up to her. She looked up as he clasped his hands on her bare shoulders and leaned down for a quick kiss.
“Is that what this is all about?” Gus said. “Are they having an affair?”
“Is who having an affair?” Shawn said.
“I don’t know.” Gus realized he had absolutely no idea whom they had been following or whom she was meeting.
