was a pixie. Standing, she might have been an inch short of five feet. She could see over the steering wheel only because she was perched on a firm pillow. Elderly, slight but not frail, she wore her white hair in a Peter Pan cut.
“Child,” she said, “you look in need of something. Are you in need of something?”
I could see nothing to be gained and all kinds of complications that might arise if I mentioned the thoroughly wrecked Ford Explorer on the beach below.
“Well, ma’am, I need to get south in a hurry.”
“South where?”
“I’m not quite sure.”
“You don’t know where you need to go?”
“I’ll know it when I get there, ma’am.”
She cocked her head and regarded me in silence for a moment, and I thought of a cockatoo, perhaps because of her white hair and the birdlike brightness of her stare.
“Are you a cut-throat murderer?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
I chose not to say that I had sometimes killed in self-defense and to protect the innocent. Killing is different from murder, though most people tend to get nervous when you try to explain why one might be acceptable but never the other.
“Are you a rapist?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You don’t look like a rapist.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t look drug-crazed, either.”
“People often tell me that, ma’am.”
She squinted at me but then smiled, apparently having decided that I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass.
“Do you have a job, child?”
“I’m a fry-cook, currently unemployed.”
“I don’t need a fry-cook.”
“I think everyone does, ma’am, they just don’t know it.”
A Peterbilt, a motor home, and a Cadillac Escalade roared past, and we waited for silence.
She said, “What I need is a chauffeur.”
“I thought you were the chauffeur.”
“Isn’t anybody in this big old boat but me. Four days ago, up in Moonlight Bay, Oscar Dunningham, my best friend and my driver for twenty-two years, dropped dead of a massive heart attack.”
“That’s terrible, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it would be a tragedy if Oscar wasn’t ninety-two years old. He had a good life. Now he’s ashes in an urn, flying back to Georgia where the truly sad thing is his mother will see him buried.”
“His mother is still alive?”
“She’s not some walking-dead zombie, child. Of course she’s alive. Or was this morning. You never know. None of us does. If it matters at all, I’m eighty-six.”
“You don’t look it, ma’am.”
“The hell I don’t. When I see myself in a mirror, I scream.”
In fact, she had one of those fine-boned, perfectly symmetrical faces that time could little distort, and her soft skin was not so much wrinkled as precisely pleated to sweet effect.
She said, “Can you drive?”
“Yes. But I can’t take a job right now.”
“You don’t look like a shiftless good-for-nothing.”
“That’s kind of you to say. But the problem is, I have this thing I’ve got to do.”
“Somewhere south of here, you don’t know where, but you’ll know the place when you get there.”
“That’s right, ma’am.”
Her blue eyes were neither clouded nor sorrowed by age, but were alert, quick, and clear. “This thing you’ve got to do—have you any idea what it is?”
“More or less,” I said. “But I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Okay, then,” she said, putting the limo in park and applying the emergency brake, but leaving the engine running, “you be my chauffeur and just drive us where you need to go.”
“You can’t mean that, ma’am. What kind of chauffeur would that be?”
“The kind I can live with. A lot of the time, I don’t much care where I go, just so I go somewhere.”
She got out of the limousine and came around to the passenger side. She was wearing a yellow pantsuit with a white blouse that featured frilly lace-trimmed collar and cuffs, and a gold brooch with little diamonds and rubies arranged to form a glittering exclamation point.
When she looked up at me, I felt extraordinarily tall, like Alice after consuming a piece of cake labeled EAT ME.
“As my chauffeur,” she said, “you need to open the door for me.”
“I can’t be your chauffeur, ma’am.”
“I’ll ride up front with you to get to know you better.”
“I’m sorry, but I really can’t be your—”
“I’m Edie Fischer. I don’t hold with formalities, so you can just call me Edie.”
“Thank you, ma’am. But—”
“I was named after St. Eadgyth. She was a virgin and martyr. I can’t claim to be a virgin, but the way the world is sliding into darkness, I might yet be a martyr, even though I don’t aspire to it. What’s your name, child—or are you as unsure of that as you are of where you’re going?”
I have in the past used aliases. Using one now made sense, if only to avoid having to explain the origin of my first name for the ten thousandth time. Instead, I said, “My name’s Odd Thomas.”
“Of course, it is,” Mrs. Fischer said. “And if you need to be paid in cash, I am entirely comfortable with that arrangement. Please open the door for me, Oddie.”
Oddie and Edie. I had seen and enjoyed Driving Miss Daisy, but I was neither as reliable nor as noble as Morgan Freeman’s character, Hoke. “Ma’am—”
“Call me Edie.”
“Yes, ma’am. The problem is, I’m looking for a dangerous man, this trucker who dresses like a rhinestone cowboy, and maybe he’s looking for me.”
Without hesitation, she zippered open her large purse to show me the pistol nestled among all the lady things. “I can take care of myself, Oddie. Don’t you worry about me.”
“But, ma’am, in all good conscience—”
“Now that you’ve gotten me intrigued,” she said, “there’s no way you’re going to shake loose of me. Child, I need a little danger to keep the blood creeping through my veins. Last time I had some major fun was Elko, Nevada, four months ago, when Oscar and I outfoxed those government fools and helped that poor creature get home again.”
“Poor creature?” I asked.
“Never you mind.” She zippered shut her purse. “Let’s find your rhinestone cowboy if that’s what you want.”
I opened the door. She got into the limousine.
THE MERCEDES LIMO HAD A TWELVE-CYLINDER engine and two fuel tanks, providing both speed and range.