fading from sight as their voices slid into silence.
I no longer sensed that alternate basement. But then came a sound like two metal fire doors falling shut, one a fraction of a second after the other, the former softer than the latter.
When I turned to Mr. Hitchcock, I found that he was watching me. As though soliciting my reaction to what had just happened, he raised his eyebrows.
Although I am not an important person by any definition, at that moment I almost felt like one. In spite of my paranormal ability, I am just a hapless out-of-work short-order cook who struggles to fry well when he has a job and, if possible, at all times to do the right thing. But now I suddenly thought of all those male leads in Mr. Hitchcock’s films, and I felt obligated to fulfill his directorial expectations, to answer his raised eyebrows with a remark witty enough to be delivered by Cary Grant.
Instead, I said, “Uh … wow … see … you know … the thing is … I don’t understand. Where were those two men? Where are they now? Was their argument something that happened here earlier? Or something that’ll happen in the future?”
He shook his head and then tapped the face of his wristwatch with one finger, perhaps to indicate that the time in both basements was the same, that what I’d seen had happened just now. Or maybe he had done a Rolex commercial during his life and felt a duty to sell the brand even after death.
“Sir, I’m confused.”
With fingers widely spread, hands framing his face, with an expression of amazement, Mr. Hitchcock mocked me, as if to say, You? Confused? Who knew? Astonishing! Impossible! It beggars belief!
If he’d been Quentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone, I might have been a bit offended—or even alarmed by the possibility of mindless violence—but in his day he’d been known for his unexpected clowning and practical jokes. His friend, the actor Gerald du Maurier, had been appearing in a play at St. James Theater, in London, when during a performance Mr. Hitchcock somehow had gotten a full-grown horse into the star’s dressing room without anyone seeing it happen. When du Maurier returned at the end of the play, he found the huge animal contentedly eating grain from a feed bag.
Now the director turned from me and glided across the basement as if he wore ice skates and the floor were a frozen pond, and I had to hurry to keep up with him. He passed through a heavy fire door, which I yanked open in his wake, wondering if this might be the door that I had heard crash shut twice in quick succession when the see-through cowboy had departed the other basement or this basement, or both.
With my confusion growing more profound, I rushed along a drab corridor to a pair of elevators—the smaller for people, the larger for freight—where Mr. Hitchcock stood. As I arrived, a bell sounded, the first set of doors slid open, he stepped into the waiting car, and I followed him.
Even if I’d been able by then to come up with a line worthy of Cary Grant, before I could have delivered it, the director soared through the roof of the elevator and disappeared. I had never known a ghost to be this exuberant, this frolicsome, and his apparent delight in his supernatural abilities flummoxed me.
Stepping out of the elevator into the hallway lined with shops on the main floor of Star Truck, I spotted Mr. Hitchcock to my right, standing by the service-map kiosk in the lobby. He raised his right arm high and waved at me, as though I might not recognize him among the dozen or so truck drivers currently entering and leaving the building.
As I approached, he winked out of existence—and then reappeared on the far side of the glass doors of the main entrance.
Exiting the building, joining Mr. Hitchcock, I sensed the cowboy nearby, although he was nowhere in sight. Then I saw the ProStar+ receding along the exit lanes from Star Truck, speeding toward the Coast Highway.
The roar of a nearer engine followed by the shrill squealing of brakes startled me backward. The superstretch Mercedes limo ran down Mr. Hitchcock and slid to a smoking-rubber stop in front of me.
He couldn’t have been roadkill, of course, because he lacked material substance. He was just gone.
Through the open window in the driver’s door, Mrs. Edie Fischer said, “Hurry, child, or we might lose him.”
In the distance, the red-and-black rig disappeared into the underpass beneath the highway.
I darted around the car, climbed in the front passenger seat, pulled my door shut, and glanced through the open privacy panel into the passenger compartment. “Where is he?”
Of course Mrs. Fischer didn’t know that I was looking for Mr. Hitchcock, who I thought must have entered the limousine through the undercarriage.
Perched on her booster pillow, barely able to see over the steering wheel, piloting the immense car around the service islands, she said, “You called him a flamboyant rhinestone cowboy, but I saw him, and there’s no honest honky-tonk in that man. He’s flam with none of the buoyant. All deceit, lies, trickery. Planning murder, is he? Child, you need to take him down.”
“I knocked him flat with apples—Red Delicious, Granny Smiths—but even as much as I hate guns, I probably need one.”
Indicating the purse on the seat between us, she said, “Take the pistol I showed you earlier.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Sweetie, that gun’s even harder to trace than apples.”
I didn’t feel that it was proper to open her purse, even though she invited me to do so. Besides, I didn’t have an immediate use for the weapon. For the time being, we were only following my enemy. I wasn’t going to shoot out his tires or leap from the speeding limo to the driver’s door of the truck. I’m not Tom Cruise. I’m not even Angelina Jolie.
Entering one of the exit lanes, Mrs. Fischer accelerated toward the underpass. “Belt up,” she advised.
By this point, I knew her well enough to take such advice without hesitation.
Coming out of the underpass, ascending the curved on-ramp to the Coast Highway, she rapidly accelerated, as if the laws of physics did not apply to her. If we’d been in an SUV or an ordinary car, we might have demonstrated the power of centrifugal force, might have rolled off the roadway at the apex of the arc. The limo was heavy, however, with a low center of gravity, and we rocketed to the top of the ramp at launch speed.
Contemptuous of the yield sign, Mrs. Fischer pressed great blasts of sound from the car horn as a warning to any motorists who might be approaching from behind her in the right-hand lane. The limo shot onto the highway, whistling south toward the targeted ProStar+.
“Take it easy,” I warned. “We don’t want to catch him.”
“But you said he’s going to murder three people. He has to be stopped.”
“We’ll stop him, but not yet. We need to see where he’s going, what he’s up to. He’s not in this alone. That reminds me, did you see another guy come out of the truck stop with him?”
“No. He was alone. So this is a conspiracy?” She lingered on the last word, as though the sound of it enchanted her.
“I don’t know what it is. This other guy—he’s wearing jeans and a black-leather jacket. Lizard-lid eyes, stocky, looks like he was into one of those martial arts where he broke cement blocks with his face but sometimes the block won.”
“This is more delicious by the moment.” She grinned broadly, and her adorable dimples were so deep that faeries might have lived in them. Having eased up on the accelerator, she said, “So we’ll just stay far back and keep the truck in sight—is that it?”
Relying on my psychic magnetism, we wouldn’t even have to keep the ProStar+ in sight, but I didn’t want to explain to her that I was like Miss Jane Marple with paranormal abilities.
“Yes, ma’am. Just keep it in sight. Nothing bad is going to happen right away. He doesn’t have the children yet.”