that Druid jumping-around stuff they do.”
“Don’t be such a cynic. It’s not jumping around. They dance and celebrate summer and light bonfires,” I said. “What’s in Italy?”
“Good food, great wine … and Italian men.”
“Then I’d
He grinned. “Yeah, I bet you would.”
We were zipping down vertigo-inducing streets—Quinn somehow timed it so he hit all the green lights—with the wind riffing my hair and cutting in behind my sunglasses. Since yesterday I’d been trying to put my finger on what felt so different about San Francisco—aside from its obvious unique geography—why it was unlike anyplace on the East Coast or even all the European cities I knew.
As we drove past Union Square, with its startling tropical palm trees amid skyscrapers, and continued down Mason Street, Quinn rattled off names of the bubbling ethnic stew of neighborhoods, waving an arm to indicate roughly where they were—the Tender-loin, Japantown, Little Saigon—and I finally realized what it was: that despite the old-world roots and history of the city, it looked east to Asia, not west to Europe. Now I understood why Quinn loved it, why he belonged here. It was the perfect foil for his personality; San Francisco still thrummed with the gold rush brashness that grew it big, and the Russian roulette edginess of being built on earthquake fault lines where everyone knew it was a matter of when, not if. Even yesterday, I’d felt an odd little shifting when I’d been in the hotel, finally realizing that it wasn’t traffic thundering along Nob Hill.
Quinn caught me staring at him and said, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just that I like San Francisco.”
He grinned and reached over to squeeze my hand. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, honey. There’s a map of California in the glove compartment. Get it out and I’ll give you a geography lesson.”
I found the map, opened it, and refolded it to show San Francisco and the Bay Area.
“The marine layer’s pretty intense this morning,” he said. “So we’ll head up the Bay side of the Peninsula and go by Sunnyvale, Cupertino—that’s Silicon Valley to you. Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, is beautiful, but it takes longer and it’s dangerous in the fog.”
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“Santa Cruz.” He reached over and stabbed the map. “Sits at the top of Monterey Bay. Beautiful little town— fabulous beaches for surfing, very laid back, very mellow. You’re gonna love it.”
“What’s in Santa Cruz?”
“You mean who is in Santa Cruz.” He corrected me. “Allen Cantor. We’re meeting him on the Boardwalk. His choice.”
“You tell him why you want to see him?”
“Nope. Just that I wanted to ask him a few questions.” We exchanged sideways glances. “He didn’t even ask what they were. Allen owes me and he knows it.”
“I wonder if he knows anything about Teddy Fargo,” I said.
“If there’s anything to know,” Quinn said, “he does.”
The traffic was heavier as we picked up 101, the Bayshore Freeway, and left San Francisco behind. Quinn punched a button on the satellite radio. I read the display. Sixties on Six. Probably one of Harmony’s presets. Right now it was adrenaline-pumping rush-hour stuff, slipping from Jefferson Airplane into the Rolling Stones.
“I found out about Mel Racine.” He had to raise his voice above Mick Jagger and the traffic so I could hear him.
“What did you find out?” I shouted back.
“Had a series of car dealerships near Santa Cruz. Then he moved up the coast to Half Moon Bay.” His finger skittered over the map again. “See, right there? The bank he bought to turn into a wine storage vault is up for sale.”
“Oh, yeah?” I studied the map. “By the time we leave Santa Cruz, won’t the marine layer have burned off enough that we can take the coast road north to San Francisco? Looks like it goes right through Half Moon Bay. Maybe we could stop and check out that bank.”
He turned to me and grinned, singing in a loud, off-key voice, imitating Mick and telling me he didn’t get no satisfaction.
“’Cause I try … and I try,” he said, leering at me.
“I guess that’s a yes.”
He nodded and kept singing as we wove through traffic. Usually I would have joined in. But this morning as the Porsche dodged in and out of the pea-soup marine layer, I couldn’t stop wondering what was in store for us when we got to Santa Cruz and, later, Half Moon Bay.
Chapter 13
Once we passed the high-tech Silicon Valley corridor, Quinn turned south at Los Gatos onto Highway 17 and we began climbing through the Santa Cruz Mountains. He knew the road well enough, but the sharp zigzag turns with their blind curves as we sliced through pine and redwood fog-shrouded hills meant he needed to pay attention to his driving. Our conversation ground to a halt. When we passed a sign warning motorists to turn off the air- conditioning to prevent engine boil over, I finally asked if the road was as treacherous as it seemed.
He nodded. “Lots of accidents, especially at one underpass where drivers are so busy navigating the steep curves they don’t expect a nearly horizontal switchback turn until it’s too late. It’s called the Valley Surprise.”
My own surprise was Santa Cruz itself. Quinn started talking about it, reminiscing, actually, after we left 17 where it joined Highway 1, which ran north-south along the coast. I don’t know what it was—the jaunty tilt to his chin or the sentimental softness in his voice—but I could easily imagine him as he used to be, growing up in this place that had been his idea of paradise, a well-muscled, good-looking sun god with windblown blond-flecked curls, a surf-board under one arm and a cute girl in a bikini named Tammy or Kimberly hanging on the other. The Byrds were singing “Turn, Turn, Turn” on the radio and I felt a queer tug of nostalgia for a time and place I never knew, the sun-drenched, free-spirited, live-andlet-live California of all the era-defining, generation-shaping songs that caused Penelope to become Harmony nearly half a century ago and never go back.
We’d left the mountains and the swirling marine layer behind and now were on flatter terrain, a palm- and cypress-lined street of low-rise sand-colored motels advertising cheap beach weekend rates and cable television. Quinn pulled over and reached for his phone.
I raised an eyebrow and he said, “Allen told me to call him when we were about ten minutes away from the Boardwalk.”
Their conversation lasted all of ten seconds. “Why the Boardwalk?” I asked. “Does he work there?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know where he works. The Boardwalk’s where the amusement park is located, too. I guess that’s his way of making a joke.”
I saw the looped silhouette of a roller coaster framed between a couple of palm trees and set against a hazy, blue-white sky as we drove closer to the water.
“That’s the Hurricane,” Quinn said. “At the other end of the park by the San Lorenzo River is the Giant Dipper, the oldest wooden roller coaster on the West Coast. It’s a historic landmark now.”
“How old is it?” I asked. “If it’s a historic landmark.”
“Old, 1907,” he said. “The Boardwalk had its centenary a few years ago. The roller coaster was built in 1924. The Looff Carousel is even older—1911.”
“It looks like something from an old postcard or a sepia photograph.”
He smiled. “They’ve done a good job of keeping the vintage feel about the place. Brings in lots of families looking for something wholesome to do.”
He pulled into a municipal parking lot across the street from a gaudy Moorish-style building with a toothy shark and bright red octopus painted on either side of the arched entrance and NEPTUNE’S KINGDOM written above it.
“That’s the arcade,” Quinn said. “We’re meeting Allen at the burger place under the colonnade. I had to promise him breakfast and a beer.”
