‘We’re in a stolen car,’ he reminded her.
They breezed past the police cruiser without slowing. Tommy twisted in his seat to look through the back window.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Del said, ‘he won’t come after us.’
The squad car had braked when they shot past it. ‘Who’s Scootie?’ Tommy asked, still watching the patrol car behind them.
‘I told you before. My dog. Don’t you ever listen?’ After a hesitation, the squad car continued to pull into the parking lot at the diner. The lure of coffee and doughnuts was apparently stronger than the call of duty.
As Tommy let out a sigh of relief and faced front again, Del said, ‘Would you shoot me if I asked you to?’
‘Absolutely.’
She smiled at him. ‘You’re so sweet.’
‘Did your mother go to jail?’
‘Only until the trial was over.’
‘The jury acquitted?’
‘Yeah. They deliberated only fourteen minutes, and they were all crying like babies when the foreman read the verdict. The judge was crying too, and the bailiff. There wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Tommy said. ‘After all it’s an extremely touching story.’ He wasn’t sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. ‘Why are you worried about Scootie?’
‘There’s some weird thing driving around in my van, you know, so maybe it knows my address now and even knows how much I love my Scootie.’
‘You really think it stopped chasing us just so it could go kill your dog?’
She frowned. ‘You’re saying that’s unlikely?’
‘It’s me that’s cursed, me that it’s been sent to get.’ Glancing at him disapprovingly, she said, ‘Well, look who’s all of a sudden turned into Mr. Ego. You’re not the centre of the universe, you know.’
‘I am as far as this demon is concerned! I’m its whole reason for existence!’
‘Whatever, I’m not taking any chances with my Scootie,’ she said stubbornly.
‘He’s safer at home than with us.’
‘He’s safest with me.’
She turned south on Harbour Boulevard. Even at that hour and in the rain, there was a steady flow of traffic.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘as far as I can see, you don’t exactly have any clever plan for survival that we have to put into action right this minute.’
‘Just keep moving, I think. When we stop, it’s easier for the thing to find us.’
‘You can’t know that for sure.’
‘I have intuition too, you know.’
‘Yeah, but it’s mostly bogus.’
‘It is not,’ he disagreed. ‘I’m very intuitive.’
‘Then why did you bring this devil doll into your house?’
‘It did make me uneasy.’
‘Later, you thought you’d gotten away from your house clean. You didn’t know the creature was hitching a ride in the Corvette’s engine compartment.’
‘No one’s intuition is totally reliable.’
‘Now, honey, face it. Back there at the bakery, you would’ve gotten in the van.’
Tommy chose not to respond. With a computer – or even a pencil and paper – and enough time, he could have crafted a reply to refute her, to humble her with logic and penetrating insights and dazzling wit. But he had neither a computer nor (with dawn rolling inexorably toward them out of the now-black east) enough time, so he would have to spare her the punishing experience of his devastating verbal virtuosity.
Placatingly, Del said, ‘We’ll stop at my place just long enough to pick up Scootie, and then we’ll hit the road again, cruise around until it’s time to call your brother and see if he’s been able to translate the note.’
Newport Harbour, home to one of the largest armadas of private yachts in the world, was enclosed on the north by the curve of the continental shoreline and on the south by a three-mile-long peninsula that extended west to east and separated the hundreds of protected boat docks and moorings from the surges of the Pacific.
The homes on the shoreline and on the five islands within the harbour were among the priciest in southern California. Del lived not in a less expensive home on one of the land-locked blocks of Balboa Peninsula, but in a sleek three-story contemporary house that faced the harbour.