The four men and four women sit in a circle on small, plentiful Afghan prayer rugs that MAW sells by the pallet load, perfect for meditating, decorating cribs, your dog. Matt has heard that the rugs are used in smuggling by the BEL daredevils who risk prison or beheading for importing the powerful opium-laced hashish dragon balls. He believes it, based on the numbers of rugs, and of street dealers who have recently tried to peddle him those balls. If Matt is seeing things correctly, even his mom has gotten herself hooked — or almost hooked — on them. Now she’s thinking of moving out to Dodge City? What if she gets into acid?
They pass the hookah stuffed with hashish around but Matt declines. As he passes the billowing contraption to Rosemary — Tim’s wife — he wonders exactly why Grail has invited him here. He’s too young, not BEL or prospective BEL, just an untalented minor with a volunteer “job” helping Christian run the art gallery.
Leary looks through the smoke at him. Grins at Matt with an unlikely combination of guile and candor. He has smile lines that radiate from his eyes like a cat’s whiskers.
“What did you think?” Leary asks Matt.
“Good program.”
“That’s what I needed to hear. You are everything, you know. You young. The hope of the world and its future.”
Matt’s high hasn’t worn off yet, and he feels its grip of suspicion. Everybody’s eyes are all pupil now and he wonders how much LSD they’ve taken.
“Has your lovely sister come back home?” Leary asks.
Matt senses unanimous attention on him. “No, sir.”
Even through the smoke Matt can see the small flinch of disappointment on Leary’s face. No cat whiskers now.
“My own son is about her age,” he says. “Matt, I have to say that Jazz is one of the most beautiful young people I’ve ever known. Her consciousness is high, even though her ego is very strong. I hope she’s become a pilgrim, not a victim.”
“She didn’t run away, if that’s what you mean,” says Matt.
Leary asks Rosemary if she agrees.
Matt looks to Rosemary, seated to his left. She’s wholesomely elegant, dark haired, and has a winning smile. Beautiful for someone over thirty, Matt sees. She’s got to be almost as old as his mother.
“Anyone can be born with a lovely exterior,” says Rosemary, setting her hand on his knee. “But you have to be skeptical in this age of brainwashing and Establishment lies.”
“Right on,” says Johnny.
“I saw her two weeks ago here in the store,” says Tim. “She was packing up a big box of books to take to a customer too ill to come here on his own. I admired her generosity.”
“She was getting paid for it,” Matt says.
“In books,” says Grail.
“Beautiful,” says the former Harvard psychologist. “She’ll be back, Matt. She will be back.”
Shades of Mahajad, thinks Matt. All these wise old men who think they can predict the future. And old women saying she’ll be back, but thinking that maybe she ran away on purpose.
Matt stands. Wobbles. He’s higher now, after another jolt of secondhand smoke. “Thanks. It’s late.”
Grail rises to walk him out, steers him through the main part of the store, the door key jangling on a piece of driftwood in his hand. Stops at the main cash register and picks up a book from a stack of books with notes rubber-banded to them. Sold copies, Matt surmises. Hold-for notes or delivery addresses attached.
“I’d like to ask you a favor, Matt. We have a very good but very ill customer up on Diamond — Patricia Trinkle. She’s ordered a book, but with Jazz not around, it’s just sitting here. You wouldn’t mind, would you, on your paper route tomorrow? Just set it on the porch? She leaves a box outside for deliveries.”
Matt studies Grail’s happy, trusting face.
“Diamond isn’t on my route, Johnny.”
“Oh man, I thought it was! I totally spaced. So sorry. I’ll deliver it myself. But look at this thing!”
He pulls the note off and hands the book to Matt. It’s a black leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead, with gold foil filigree on the cover and beautiful embossed gold letters. It’s wrapped in thick clear plastic.
The idea comes to Matt — maybe because he’s stoned — that this favor might, in some cosmic way, bring him closer to Jasmine. Bring him onto her plane. He, doing something that she herself has done. He might even ask the sick woman about her. Maybe Jazz had disclosed something important to her...
“I’ll do it.”
Grail takes the book with an impish smile, slides the index card under the rubber band and gives the heavy volume back to Matt. Gives Matt a grinding little laugh that sounds conspiratorial.
“I really dig this, Matt. Thanks and bitchen. I’ll give you some store credit as payment. You’re helping out Jazz, too. Sending some good Karma her way.”
“Okay, cool.”
“Anytime tomorrow is good. You’ll see a blue plastic milk crate on the porch. That’s it. Just knock three times on the screen door and she’ll know the book is there.”
Matt walks north on PCH in the foggy night. Stops at Fade in the Shade to look at Jasmine’s MISSING poster in the window. He thinks she looks afraid, but he knows it’s just himself. He tries to clear his fear but the hash smoke packs a wallop. He still can’t believe that he can see pictures of her all over town but he can’t see her actual, breathing, present self.
Third Street is just a few blocks from Mystic Arts World. So he takes the shortcut, Park to Mermaid.
Where, as he approaches the base of the Third Street hill, he sees the girl running up Third toward him.
She reminds him of Jasmine, but a lot of girls remind him of her.
It can’t be.
It’s the damned hash.
But really, it could be.
Then he knows it’s her, zig-zagging weakly up the middle of the street, breathing hard, barefoot, in a billowing orange dress. Her blond hair is flying.
“Jazz!”
She looks in his direction, stumbling and searching for him as if she’s blind or confused or not sure where to look.
Suddenly: headlights in pursuit behind her, catching up fast. The high-rev whine of a small engine. Matt squints into the brights, sprinting for Jazz. But the vehicle overtakes and passes her, then skids to a stop.
Jasmine is almost to their house when two men barge from the car and into the headlamp beams. Within a bright cloud of the tire smoke and fog, one of them lifts Jazz off her feet, as if she’s no heavier than a scarecrow, and locks his free hand over her mouth. The vehicle idles in the exhaust and fog and the two men carry struggling Jazz back into the darkness.
Matt hears a door slide open and slam shut, then the high-pitched scream of acceleration.
He dodges hard to his left as the car comes at him, the headlights nearly blinding him. He leaps onto the sidewalk in front of the phone company building. Suddenly, the vehicle carves a U-turn across Third and goes whining away from him, toward Laguna Canyon Road.
Matt sees that it’s not a car at all but a late-model Volkswagen van.
He pushes off from the building and runs after it with all his adrenalin-crazed might. Long strides, fists up. But the van doesn’t putter like his mom’s. Matt can see as it passes the cop house streetlamp that it’s a newer model, with probably twice the horsepower as the Westfalia. You can’t kidnap Jazz Anthony in front of the cop station, he thinks: you cannot do this.
The van goes left on Ocean, toward Pacific Coast Highway. So Matt cuts left at Forest, which runs parallel with Ocean and will hit PCH at a signal a hundred yards up, where it will have to stop if the light is red.