“Hey, Lola, how about a blow job?” Frank asked.
Lola replied, “I am sorry, but that does not fall within the parameters of my functions.”
Frank grinned at Cheryl. “Okay, in that respect, Lola’s exactly like my ex.”
The car slowed. The turn signal came on by itself as the car moved onto the shoulder. On the touch screen that spanned the entire dash, several video images captured what was around the car in all directions. Lola, confident the road was clear, executed a U-turn and began to head back they way they’d come.
Frank leaned in and planted his lips on Cheryl’s. “Just getting my own motor running before we get back.”
She reached down and stroked the front of his linen slacks. “If we get a flat, I seem to have located the jack handle.”
The car, in addition to being a self-driving machine, was also fully electric, and whisked along the Pacific Coast Highway almost noiselessly.
Minutes later, they felt the car decelerating.
“Must be here,” Frank said without looking up. “If you feel the car turn right, then—”
The car turned, and began to climb.
Frank nodded. “Yup. We’re back.”
His beach house was, as the name suggested, right on the beach. But it sat at the base of a sixty-foot-high cliff. At the top was a concrete parking pad that overlooked the ocean. Silvio’s other vehicle, a Porsche Panamera, and Cheryl’s Hyundai were already sitting there.
Christ, Silvio had thought when he’d first seen what she drove. Broad needs an upgrade.
He could feel the car making the gradual climb. As it reached the peak, it would slow. Once the Gandalf was parked, they’d have to walk down the nearly fifty steps to his place.
“Hear the surf?” he asked the actress.
“Um, yeah, I think?”
“That’s because the engine hardly makes a sound,” he said proudly.
Cheryl did not look as impressed as he’d hoped she would.
Perhaps if the Gandalf’s engine were noisier, it would have been more immediately apparent that the car was not slowing. It was, in fact, accelerating as it reached the top of the hill.
Silvio sensed something was not right. He rose up and looked through the windshield. Up ahead were his car and Cheryl’s, parked nose-in at the cliff’s edge on the far side of the concrete apron. There was enough space between the two for the Gandalf.
Lola’s going to hit the brakes just in time, he thought.
But they were closing the distance too quickly. The Gandalf was not slowing.
“Lola!” Silvio shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Lola, calmly, replied. “Back to the beach house and crash.”
“Wait, what? I didn’t mean—”
The car slipped between the parked cars as cleanly as the Millennium Falcon zipping sideways between two asteroids. And then it was airborne.
Cheryl screamed as the car sailed out into the air. Straight, for about two seconds, and then gravity kicked in, the car’s front end tipping downward, offering her and Silvio a moonlit glimpse of the rocks and the rolling waves below.
In the instant before impact, before the windshield shattered and the car filled with water and Frank Silvio and Cheryl Garland were no more, Lola had one final thing to say:
“You have reached your destination.”
One
Sandra Montrose was already awake when the alarm went off at six.
She’d been staring at the ceiling since shortly after three. Had she prepared enough media packets? Would the catering company come through? Media types, she knew from her work back on the mainland, went wild when they saw free snacks. They were locusts. You’d think they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Give them some take-out containers and they’d carry it home with them.
But it wasn’t just the catering that had her worried. Was the ferry running on time? How high were the winds? Was there rain in the forecast? Fog? That’d be all she’d need. A thick blanket of fog that would keep the ferry on the mainland. Before she’d gone to bed she’d checked her app and things looked good, but anything could happen overnight. What was it they said about weather forecasters? Was there any job where you could be wrong fifty percent of the time and not get fired? But if the ferry was on time, Sandra believed everything would fall into place. A delay would screw up the entire day.
And so would half a dozen other things, now that she thought about it. Would the audio-visual tech stuff come off without a hitch? The computer stuff scared her because she had to trust it all to someone else. She’d hired a Garrett Island AV firm to set things up and they’d done half a dozen run-throughs to make sure everything worked. Still... Sandra was the first to admit she was something of a techno-moron. Sure, she could wield her iPhone like she was Billy the Kid and the phone was a six-shooter, but setting up a big screen and making sure it was going to interface or whatever the hell the word was with the presentation on the laptop, well, that was not her area of expertise. Putting blind faith in others went against her nature. It was one of the reasons she didn’t like to fly. If she had no idea how to operate a 747, how could she determine with any certainty that the pilot knew what to do? Fortunately, when it came to finding people with talents she lacked, the island was not a bad place to be. It catered to the well-off — even if plenty of the people who lived here year-round were not exactly in the top one percent — and it was pretty common for organizations like Apple or Google or Amazon to hold conferences and retreats here. So, over the years, the island had attracted and developed a support system for that kind of clientele.
Sandra’s public relations firm — which consisted of, well, Sandra — was doing just fine, thank you very much. She’d done promotions for local hotels and fishing tours and organized plenty of conferences for midsized firms. But she’d never taken on something this big. A multinational company? Whose stock price was going through the roof? Whose CEO had made the cover of Fortune?
Welcome to the major leagues.
She’d had to pull together a team for this one. Not that her client hadn’t been looking over her shoulder the whole time. That Albert Ruskin guy, assistant to the president of Arrival Inc., was phoning, texting, and emailing her twenty times a day to make sure things came off without a hitch. She knew why he didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust her because she wasn’t attached to some big-name firm in New York or Chicago or LA. Sandra was not exactly Edelman, or Weber Shandwick, or Hill+Knowlton.
She was Montrose Strategies.
She was a local. A two-bit player, so far as Ruskin was concerned.
But Arrival Inc. had the political savvy to know it would score points by involving as many of the island businesses as possible. If they’d brought in caterers and techies and PR people from Manhattan — or, even closer, Boston — sure as shit that would have pissed off the islanders. And if there was one thing the Arrival people needed on their side, it was the islanders.
And as if all this were not enough to worry about, there was Archie.
God, Archie.
If he was this much trouble at twelve, what would he be like at fifteen? Eighteen? What the hell was he thinking, sneaking onto one of those historic tall ships in the harbor and scaling the mast on a rope ladder? Getting caught by the owner, having the cops called? Sandra had defied nature and given birth to a monkey who would fearlessly climb anything he could. Before the tall ship, it had been the local high school. Archie and his buddies, exploring rooftops.