“I suppose it’s got to end some day,” Joe said.
“Not some day. Soon. Doesn’t it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don’t even half know the difference any more?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?”
“Yes,” Joe said softly and truthfully. “Yes, I’ve often felt just that in the middle of the night.”
The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often longed to be swept away by it.
He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.
The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.
“Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”
With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Suburu.
Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.
The engine of the Suburu turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.
Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.
The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.
When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.
In the rear-view mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover—which they thought they still enjoyed.
Within four miles Joe lost them at a major intersection when he sped through a yellow traffic signal that was changing to red. When the camper tried to follow him, it was thwarted by the surging cross-traffic. Even over the whine and rattle of the Suburu engine, he heard the sharp bark of their brakes as they slid to a halt inches short of a collision.
Twenty minutes later he abandoned the Suburu on Hilgarde Street near the UCLA campus, as far as he dared from the address where he was to meet Demi. He walked fast to Westwood Boulevard, trying not to break into a run and draw attention to himself.
Not long ago Westwood Village had been an island of quaint charm in the more turbulent sea of the city around it, a mecca for shoppers and theatregoers. Midst some of the most interesting small-scale architecture of any Los Angeles commercial district and along the tree-lined streets had thrived trendy clothing stores, galleries, restaurants, prosperous theatres featuring the latest cutting-edge dramas and comedies, and popular movie houses. It was a place to have fun, people-watch, and be seen.
Then, during a time when the city’s ruling elite was in one of its periodic moods to view certain forms of sociopathic behaviour as a legitimate protest, vagrancy increased, gang members began to loiter in groups, and open drug dealing commenced. A few shootings occurred in turf disputes, and many of the fun lovers and shoppers decided that the scene was too colourful and that to be seen here was to be marked as a victim.