fell asleep around dawn, though with the rain, dawn wasn’t much more than a whisper of light in the sky. A couple of hours later, the phone rang. I couldn’t rouse myself to answer it, but Billy did, and a moment later stuck his head in my room.
“Mirplo called,” he said. “He needs a lift.”
“Hines done with him already?” I mumbled into my pillow.
“So it would seem.” Billy threw a piece of paper down on my bed. “Here’s where.”
I left Billy to button up the last of the skim code and headed out. The rain was still pouring down, turning the roads of my hillside neighborhood into rivers of water and mud. Out on the main streets it was even worse, as L.A. drivers underwent their predictable first-storm-of-the-season freakout. Some sped up, as if by driving fast they could dodge the raindrops. Others slowed down, fearful that eight months of accumulated crap on the road surface would turn to glare ice beneath their tires. In the ensuing mismatch of fast and slow, accidents broke out like acne, and getting from point A to point B became an obnoxious waiting game. Worse, point B for me was the FBI resident agency at LAX. It made sense that Vic would be there, for it was a federal hold, likely the same one Vic had visited on his return from Louisiana last year.
But it was hell to get to, a slow grind through gridlocked surface streets and up onto a freeway that was just a joke. Honest to God, L.A. learn to drive in the damn rain, will you? I tried to stay patient, but it was hard. I felt I was losing control.
Then I did lose control, and slammed into an SUV.
27.
slickery when wet
T here’s nothing like a car accident to knock the arrogance out of you. One minute you’re driving along, listening to some radio traffic guy describing road surfaces as “slickery,” and wondering whether it’s a portmanteau word or a mistake—admirable if the former, laughable if the latter—and the next thing you know, you’re looking out your front windshield at the astonished face of the driver in the next lane, and you know that can’t be right, so you crank hard on the wheel, but the harder you crank on the wheel, the more you seem to spin. You recall advice you once heard, when you go into a skid, turn in the direction of the skid, but it was counterintuitive then, and it’s counterintuitive now, so you continue with your stupid panic response of crank the wheel, stomp the brakes, while your car resembles nothing so much as a whirling teacup on that ride at that place. Then you’re sailing exactly backward down the freeway, and you look in your rearview (now your frontview) mirror, and see this great black wall of a Ford Destroyer or something, stopped dead ahead, and there’s just no way you’re not going to hit it, so you close your eyes and brace yourself and wait for the sound that everyone always describes as a sickening crunch, but it’s not sickening, really, you know, it’s just annoying. Because the minute your car slid sideways, your day slid sideways, too.
Bang! My car ass-ended into the SUV. My neck snapped back, then forward, and I hit my head on something, I don’t know what. I immediately felt a welt rising, and my first thought was, if there’s blood, I’m screwed, because they’re going to want me to get treatment, and I do not have time for that right now. I glanced at myself in the mirror and saw an angry red third eye already rising in the middle of my forehead, but no break in the skin, thank God. I groped around in the space between the seats and found a baseball cap bearing the logo and slogan for Dog’s Nose Beer (“When I want something cold and wet, I reach for a Dog’s Nose”). Jamming it down low on my head, I stumbled out of the car and stood blinking in the downpour. I figured that the best role for me to play right now was befuddled, wet L.A. driver. It seemed like the right choice, since I was, in fact, both befuddled and wet.
I did an adequate job of holding it together as I and the other driver waited for the cops. She was a soccer mom–looking gal, with a fresh Shroud of Turin coffee stain down the front of her white cable-knit. I