A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

half of one; the throbbing in my face was starting to ramp up again.

But then Maurais came hurrying out of the building, looking quickly over his shoulder—maybe for me?—and then he disappeared behind the building into the parking lot.

Julie, when I first called, said he’d be in all afternoon, but now, just a few minutes after meeting me, he was rushing out, heading somewhere with urgency.

Then an old black two-door Mercedes emerged from the parking lot and Maurais was behind the wheel. He made a right and headed up to Los Feliz Boulevard. I got the Caprice in gear, swung a U-turn on Hillhurst, and fell in a few cars behind Maurais. The throbbing in my face was still there, but with adrenaline in my system the pain was noticeably less.

Maurais turned right on Los Feliz and was driving fast, but I didn’t lose him, and George, looking brave and sensing something, stood up and put his paws on the dash. He knew the hunt was on.

15.

After Los Feliz, the little Mercedes got on the 5, a ten-lane freeway, heading north. Traffic was heavy but moving, and there was no way Maurais would know I was on his tail, though it was important to keep a nice distance and that he not see me. Not too many drivers had big white bandages on their faces or dogs, like sentinels, with their paws on the dashboard.

From the 5, he took the 134, and I thought maybe he was going to Burbank, but then he got onto the 101 North, heading into the Valley, and I started wondering what the hell he was up to. Then we hit some truly nightmarish traffic and George lay down on the front seat; boredom had quickly set in.

It was bumper to bumper, thousands of cars jammed together, going nowhere and somewhere, reaching speeds as high as five miles per hour, ten if we were lucky, and even with the recent rain, the white smog, which we live in all the time, was especially thick, and you would never know that just a few miles to the east the whole valley basin was ringed by beautiful mountains, the San Gabriels.

But they were obscured by the white filth, and it’s old news, of course, but we are forced, in this modern life, to always hold two ideas in our mind at once: one, the natural world is beautiful, and two, we are destroying it.

When we passed through Woodland Hills, I had been tailing Maurais for nearly an hour because of the traffic and was growing increasingly worried that wherever he was going had nothing to do with Lou or Dodgers Hat or dead men in a house on Belden and that this was all a big waste of time.

But at least my driving was satisfactory.

I could operate the Caprice without killing anyone.

On the downside, though, my face was being difficult. The adrenaline of the chase had more than worn off, and it was like there were fire ants in my wound, and I said to George, who was half asleep, curled up like a croissant: “Where the hell is this asshole going? My face is killing me!”

In response, George turned and looked at me over his shoulder, and there was a bland sympathy in his eyes; he was in his own bored hell.

Then, finally, as we got closer to the Agoura Hills and Malibu exits, the traffic thinned considerably and the white smog cleared away and the 101 began to roll up and down through beautiful low foothills, empty of man-made structures.

In the fall and early winter, there had been catastrophic fires, wiping out thousands of acres all along here, but this had been followed by weeks of rain and so the landscape was now a mix of blackened trees and swaying grass so green and bright it was almost neon. Birth had followed death.

Then Maurais exited the 101 at Kanan Road, which he took in the direction of the coast. At first, there were a few cars separating my Caprice and his Mercedes, but Kanan quickly becomes a country road, and the cars between us kept going off onto side roads one by one, and it was getting trickier to follow Maurais and not be seen.

So I hung back as best I could and nearly missed him turning right, at a blind curve, onto the Mulholland Highway—I flew right past the intersection—but luckily I caught sight of the Mercedes, out of the corner of my eye, and changed course.

Between us now there was only one car, a white BMW with its top down, and I stayed about a quarter of a mile back.

The Mulholland Highway, despite its name, has only two lanes, and it comes equipped with dark tunnels through mountainsides, hairpin turns, and guardrails you don’t want to drive through, unless you’re feeling tragic, and all the while, it climbs steadily up its portion of the Santa Monica Mountains for about ten miles.

As we ascended, I would lose sight of Maurais and then spot him for a second when the road evened out momentarily, and behind my sunglasses, I was squinting.

The light, as we got closer to the ocean, was becoming more severe in its clarity, and all around us was beautiful, empty country, the neon grass an inland sea.

But also on the green hills and along the ridges were more and more fire-burned trees, with their blackened, skeletal arms reaching for the sky, frozen in supplication.

Then Maurais and the BMW both turned onto another winding road, Encinal Canyon, which steadily climbed for at least two miles until we crested, and then suddenly the Pacific loomed ahead, planetary in its immensity, and it was breathtaking in the bright sunlight, sparkling like a sea of stolen diamonds.

Then the road began to descend, hugging the mountain on the right, which had outcroppings of boulders and pink rock formations that wouldn’t have been out of place in Arizona, and on the left-hand side of the road was