He made a left down Main Street and waved at Eden Harwood, who was just arranging little tasteful buckets of flowers in front of her store while her black-and-white tuxedo cat, Peace and Love, wound around her ankles, and he found himself singing softly. “This is the chorus, of we’re lost in the for—”
Holyshit!
Was that aPorsche?
Hard to tell exactlywhatit was when it was doing what amounted to light speed. It was basically a blue smudge on wheels.
Eli switched on his lights, cranked the wheel hard to the left and floored it until he was practically on that Porsche’s bumper.
The Porsche slowed obediently, then practically slinked over to the verge side with such ease and grace Eli wouldn’t be surprised if it rubbed itself on a tree with self-satisfaction like a cat, and despite himself, he admired how that thing handled. If the driver was hammered or otherwise pharmacologically impaired, he probably wouldn’t be able to maneuver a speeding vehicle with that kind of delicacy. Or who knows? Maybe Google had finally invented a self-driving Porsche and set it loose on California back roads. A few Bay Area tech moguls and other outrageously wealthy types owned cabins up along the ridge, and this could be one of them.
It certainly didn’t have that fine coat of red dust that all stalwart Hellcat Canyon vehicles acquired after a few days spent here. It was beautiful and rare and too fast for this place.
All that thought did was remind him of Glory.
Maybe he ought to get a rubber band to wear around his wrist every time he thought of her.
Maybe all he had to do was train his thoughts in a different direction the way Dale Dawber trained his tomatoes up their stakes.
There were so few deputies in Hellcat Canyon they often went out alone, so he radioed his location to Owen Haggerty, standard procedure in case things got hairy, got out of his cruiser, and crunched over the graveled road to the verge.
The Porsche’s window was already lowered.
Eli bent down. “License and registration, please.”
The guy behind the wheel whipped off his sunglasses. “Was I going too fast?” He sounded contrite. “I didn’t see a speed limit posted.”
“Yeah, I imagine it’s challenging to read a speed limit sign when you’re roaring past it at seventy miles an hour down the middle of a small-town street,” Eli said evenly. “Must have just looked like a blur.”
The guy just grinned at him, at peace with the world, utterly certain of his place in it. He radiated self-satisfaction. His teeth were flawless uniform rectangles and so brilliant Eli was glad he’d kept his mirrored sunglasses on, because he didn’t need deeper squint lines. Those were definitely not Hellcat Canyon teeth. They were Los Angeles teeth.
And if that guy in the Plugged Nickel last night was what passed for dangerously handsome in Hellcat Canyon, this guy might as well be from another dimension. His face had the prismatic elegance—all hollows and angles and whatnot—of the guys who posed in their underwear on billboards.
Suddenly Eli knew exactly who this was before he even glanced at the license.
Millions of people around the world knew who this was.
“I clocked you at seventy and it’s thirty-five miles an hour through the main part of town. There are only a couple of stoplights, but we like to think they’re there for a reason. We probably have more than enough deer and squirrels in Hellcat Canyon but we still don’t like to see them turned into pancakes. We figure they got a right to go about their business, same as all of us. And at speeds like that, you can take pedestrians out, and well, we’re all kind of fond of the people who live here, too.”
Franco Francone’s smile faded gradually, evenly, as Eli spoke, as if he actually kept it on a dimmer.
Eli was aware that his tone was approaching parodic, that he sounded like a sardonic folksy kindergarten teacher, that he was doing it on purpose.
But frankly, it pissed him off that he needed to actually say any of this to a grown man. Especially to this one.
“You know who I am.” More a statement than a question. “I’m Franco Francone.”
Eli stifled a sigh. The “don’t you know who I am?” would never work in a million years on Eli. And he’d really hoped Franco Francone was above that.
“Yep,” he said neutrally.
Francone eyed Eli thoughtfully, almost encouragingly, as though he was a fellow actor who had delivered the wrong line in front of an audience of hundreds and trying to decide whether they could save the scene.
And then Eli took off his sunglasses, because he wanted Francone to remember his face and to read implacability in his eyes.
Eli did occasionally let people off with a warning. A few weeks ago, a seventeen-year-old girl had forgotten to turn the headlights of her dad’s old pickup back on after she pulled out of a brightly lit gas station, for instance, and had sobbed in distress over her mistake. Or a clearly terrified teenage boy who’d been feeling his oats speeding just a little in his dad’s old Camry when he’d been pulled over, and Eli figured he could still be sufficiently and permanently unnerved into driving the speed limit by a big granite-faced law enforcement officer. Or a harried mom with a car full of rambunctious kids having the sort of bad day that culminated in accidentally running a stop sign, then remembering to stop ten feet into the intersection. He was experienced enough to deploy discretion.
But he was going to give Franco Francone a ticket. Because Franco Francone deserved a ticket and he could afford it, and he was a grown-ass man and he’d known exactly what he was doing. Franco could wreck this Porsche and buy another one. Franco Francone could probably wreck his own face and buy another one.
