“I can’t go home?” Todd said, knowing even as he floated the idea that it was out of the question. That would be the first place the journalists and the paparazzi would come looking for him.
“Maybe we should fly you out of state when you’re feeling a little better. I’ll call John; see if I can get him to fly you up to Montana.”
“I don’t want to go to Montana.”
“You’d be a lot more secure up there than here. We could arrange for round-the-clock nursing — ”
“I said no. I don’t want to be that far away from everything.”
“All right, we’ll find some place here in the city. What about your new lady-friend? Miss Bosch? She’s going to be asking questions too. What do you want me to tell her?”
“She’s gone. She’s shooting something in the Cayman Islands.”
“She was fired,” Maxine said. “‘Creative differences’ apparently. The director wanted her to show her tits and she said no. Though God knows some of her runway work has left little to the imagination. I don’t know why she’s got coy all of a sudden. Anyway, she wants to talk to you. What do I say?”
“Anything you like.”
“So you don’t want her in on this?”
“Fuck no. I don’t want anybody to know.”
“Okay. It’s going to be difficult, but okay. I’ve got to go. Do you want me to send a nurse in to give you something to help you sleep?”
“Yeah … ”
“We’ll find a place for you, until you mend. I’ll ask Jerry Brahms. He knows the city back to front. All we need’s a little hideaway. It needn’t be fancy.”
“Just make sure he doesn’t get wind of what’s going on,” Todd said. “Jerry talks.”
“Give me a little credit,” Maxine replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning. You get some sleep. And don’t worry, nobody’s going to find out where you are or what’s happened. I’ll kill ’em first.”
“Promise.”
“With my bare hands.”
So saying, she was out of the room, leaving Todd alone and in the dark.
Donnie was right, of course. This was undoubtedly the stupidest thing he had ever done. But there was no going back on it. Life, like a movie, only made sense running in one direction. What could he do but go with the flow, and hope to hell there was a happy ending waiting for him in the last reel?
A storm moved in off the Pacific in the middle of the night; the seventh storm of that winter, and the worst. Over the next forty-eight hours it would dump several inches of rain along the coast from Monterey to San Diego, creating a catalogue of minor disasters. Storm-drains overflowed and turned the streets of Santa Barbara into white-water rivers; two citizens and seven street-people were swept away and drowned. Power-lines were brought down by the furious winds, the most badly struck area being Orange County, where a number of communities remained without power for the next three days. Along the Pacific Coast Highway, where the wildfires of the previous autumn had stripped the hillsides of vegetation, the naked earth, no longer knitted together by roots, turned into mud and slid down onto the road. There were countless accidents; fourteen people perished, including a family of seven Mexicans, who’d only been in the promised land four hours, having skipped over the border illegally. All burned up together, trapped in their overturned truck. In the Pacific Palisades, the deluge carried away several million dollar homes; in Topanga Canyon, the same.
Of course all this made the business of getting Todd from the hospital to Maxine’s beach-house both more lengthy and frustrating than it would have been otherwise, but it may have helped to keep the endeavor secret. Certainly there were no photographers at the hospital door when they left; nor anybody waiting for them in the vicinity of the beach-house. But that didn’t mean they were out of danger. Calls to Maxine’s offices inquiring about Todd’s condition had multiplied exponentially, and they were now coming in from further afield — several from Japan, where Gallows had just opened-as the rumors spread. One of the German reporters had even had the temerity to suggest that Todd was undergoing plastic surgery.