Forest is a crowded retail street — boutiques and galleries and restaurants and Bushard’s where he got Laurel’s Heaven Sent, and the stationers and the donut place and the jewelry stores and his art supply store. Matt flies past them all, dodging the occasional tourists and locals out with their dogs, his lungs swelling and emptying, his legs working, the damned Tibetan Book of the Dead still in one hand, its protective plastic slick with sweat.
Out ahead he sees the signal at PCH — red! He forces his young body into another gear, his highest, his fifth, to get to the light before it changes and he can catch the van and... and... do what?
Matt angles across Forest to save a few steps, gets honked at, and he’s still a hundred feet from PCH. The traffic light goes to green and the late-model hippie van — which Matt sees is a two-tone white over green — passes through.
He runs south on PCH at the light, watching the van trundle past Park with its precious cargo, taking away his last real chance to catch up. It accelerates away.
Matt stops at Park. The van is out of sight and he’s so winded he has to drop the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the sidewalk, put both hands on his stinging knees and breath as fast as he can. Two-tone white over green, he thinks, panting: two-tone white over green. The same vintage and color VW van that Joint-and-Martini Man saw down at Thalia the morning Bonnie Stratmeyer was found. Still panting, he realizes he was too addled by adrenalin and caught by the headlights to get a good look at the license plate.
You blew it, he thinks. You had her, you had her, you had her.
Matt looks up Coast Highway at the cars and the traffic coming at him. Picks up the book and runs for the cop house.
19
Hounded and haunted by images of Jasmine running for her life, and vowing never to be outrun by a hippie van again, the next morning Matt drives illegally to the DMV and passes both the written test and the actual driving test.
Now he heads toward home, his first journey as a fully licensed driver. Inwardly, he berates himself for not having done this earlier. He could have caught up with Jazz driving Julie’s van, right? But he didn’t have the guts to take the driving test until it was too late.
Back home he finally manages to get his father by phone. Matt tells him what happened and Bruce goes quiet for a long moment. Always a bad sign.
“Expect me,” Bruce says.
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’ve got a few things to nail down first,” he says.
And hangs up.
Matt helps Tommy load his papers onto the driveway behind the Westfalia. He can’t stop thinking about what he saw last night. Still can’t believe that the desk officer on duty thought he was somehow mistaken. He’d asked if Matt had been smoking dope or maybe tripping. When he had finally gotten home early in the morning, wholly unable to sleep, Matt had furiously sketched out what he’d seen with his own good eyes, in twenty-ten vision, tested by the school nurse, best in the ninth grade at LBHS.
“Now that you got your license, you want a vehicle route when one comes up?” Tommy asks.
“I’d like to make more money.”
“More papers, more money, Matt. But it means wear and tear on this old van, and insurance and gas. Up to thirty-six cents a gallon now.”
“Sign me up for a car route.”
“There’s a wait. Heard anything out of Jazz?”
“No, Tommy.”
“I worry about her. Back home in Asbury Park, Elke Meier ran away from home and never came back. And she was really clean-cut and smart. Like Jasmine. Maybe the posters will help.”
“Jasmine didn’t run away.”
Matt does not recount last night’s event for Tommy. First of all, Darnell asked him not to tell the press or anybody else about it. The cops want to work this white-on-green VW van lead quietly for now, and if the bad guys know their vehicle has been seen, they just might leave it in the garage for a good long while. Second, Matt’s exhausted after going over Jazz’s abduction with the doubtful desk officer, and later with Darnell and later again with the very skeptical Sgt. Furlong, who asked pointedly if Matt had been smoking dope with Johnny and Tim and Christian last night before he and Darnell had come in. You look a little dazed to me, Furlong had said. Matt said no, he’d tried pot months ago and didn’t like it — a half-truth only.
“You know, we’ve got a story in the paper today, about Bonnie Stratmeyer’s autopsy,” says Tommy. “They’re saying she drowned. An accident maybe. But maybe not. And she had drugs in her that the coroner could not identify. So the FBI is helping.”
Bad news is failing to surprise Matt. It’s everywhere he goes.
But his route goes without a hitch, even with the rod and tackle box strapped behind him. He just pedals harder, takes the corners easier. No dogs today, the Coiner paper perfectly porched, nice words from Miranda and Mrs. Zahara. They’re worried sick about Jazz, and Matt can tell they both feel somewhat responsible, since Jasmine’s disappearance commenced in the wake of hers and Miranda’s connivance. He actually finishes his deliveries early.
He arrives at the two-story home of Patricia Trinkle, the MAW customer on Diamond Street. The house is surrounded by walls of bougainvillea in eye-shimmering violets and hot pinks. The hedge has a cutout for a gate. When Matt opens and closes it behind him, a bell chimes brightly.
The front yard is a square of healthy green grass and three bird baths, all with gurgling fountains. Two doves in the far bath look up at him then go back to their drinking.
The walkway is brick and the house a Craftsman style, with pillars and a raised wooden porch. Matt takes one more look at the heavy, handsome Tibetan Book of the Dead and sets it in the blue milk bottle crate near the screen door.
In the blue crate, propped up on the far side to face him, is a square white envelope with the letters M.A. typed on.
Matt lifts it out and feels it, sensing a cash tip.
Inside is a once-folded twenty-dollar bill, crisp, dry, and new.
A fortune.
Too cool for words.
By five thirty Matt has caught three good calico bass off Moss Point. He’s about to land a fourth but he slips on a slick sharp rock and goes in. He feels the power of the surge and the bouyant lightness that is his body, a speck in the vast Pacific. He hangs on to his rod, though, waits for the surge to lift him up, clambers back onto the rocks and up.
That hasn’t happened in a while, he thinks.
His knees are freshly banged up now and there’s a new scratch on his shin that bleeds weakly but at least it’s a warm day.
He works out his wallet to make sure the twenty isn’t too badly soaked. Jackson is damp but fine. His new driver’s license is pretty soggy.
Later Julie makes dinner for Matt and Laurel Kalina. His mom is supercharged with energy to rescue Jazz from her tormentors. She took the day off from work to put up more posters around town, and made still another trip to the police station to convince them that Matt’s story of her abduction is true. Then spent the rest of the day cleaning the house, playing a dreadful Tom Jones album that Matt had given her last Christmas, straightening Jasmine’s room and changing the bedsheets. As if a clean house will draw Jazz home. Jazz, kidnapped not a hundred feet from where they now make dinner. Matt, unable to help her. It makes him feel sick.
In the kitchen Julie has a little trouble with the fish so Matt takes over at the skillet and gets the fillets done but not too done. He mixes the last of the dressing into the salad, puts a piece of bread on each plate.