The Adjal of Jimmy Temple

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

I sat beside Wanda in her Lamborghini. Gloved leather hugged me with almost as much passion as she had a quarter hour earlier. Her red Lamborghini hurled us down Mulholland Drive at what seemed the speed of sound. Occasionally an approaching car's headlights swept across the windshield, etching Wanda's sculptured profile against the dark sky. Now, after our frolic in the pool, her hair was down, past her shoulders. I didn't know which way I liked it, up or down, No, whatever way she wore it was fine with me. After the pool, anything she did was. I was telling myself all this - more accurately, talking myself into it - as I watched her smooth slender fingers work the gearshift. She knew her way around a transmission, and the car seemed an extension of herself. Beautiful, fast and, if handled the wrong way, dangerous.

She snapped the clutch as we shot out of a ninety-degree curve at twice the speed we had entered. "Where'd you learn to do this?" I asked.

"Couple of crash courses at Le Mans," she said.

Crash courses. Very funny.

The road rushed underneath us. Halfway through the next curve, with the tires yelping and screaming, the oncoming glare of headlights transformed the inside of the car to stark high noon. And at the same instant our lights flooded the interior of the approaching black-and-white.

I always thought time standing still was nonsense but an eon passed in a couple of milliseconds as that Highway Patrol officer looked at me and I looked at him. His car shot past, then did a screeching U turn, and on came his flashing red lights and sirens. The Lamborghini was blasting through the night with such speed that it pinned the back of my head against the seat. My face was scrunched against a roll bar I hoped we didn't have to depend on before the night was over. The speedometer needle had edged past 100.

"Pull over," I said.

"I don't have a license."

"I think you'll have a problem."

"I get it back next fall."

"By then, your only problem will be your probation officer, " I said. "Pull over, for Christ's sake!"

"Hang on!" she said, and floored the accelerator. Pink pulses from the police car's revolving red light shot through our windows. The cop wasn't getting any closer but he wasn't falling behind. He'd be on his radio and within seconds roadblocks would be set up ahead. Dead ahead, I thought. If we were lucky enough to get through, we'd never out-distance the choppers that would soon swoop down at us.

We skidded into another curve at a speed which should have rolled us but only two of the Lamborghini's wheels left the ground. "L.A. takes on a special aura this time of night," Wanda said dreamily. "I call it soft time."

"I care about the hard time we'll do when that cop nails us," I said.

"Soft time is when the city sleeps," Wanda said. "The safest time to get around. A city built for cars with no traffic. Heaven. And all the criminals are asleep."

"Crime never sleeps, as J. Edgar H. once said." I couldn't believe that a time like this we were actually having such a conversation.

"California's crooks are as peculiar as the rest of Californians," she said. "They come to California for the weather."

"Could you please drive with both hands?" Straight to prison, I thought, to share a cell with some guy who thinks O.J. is innocent and Donald Trump is a misunderstood philanthropist.

"...all the criminals come here for the beach and sun," Wanda was saying. "They've got to sleep sometime. They zonk out at night, knowing there are people waiting with guns and alarms and dogs. No, for us, this is the right time to be up."

The police car skidded into a ditch, then bounced back onto the road, careening wildly, and kept coming like a heart attack. To keep my mind off my impending four consecutive life sentences I said, "What about those guys who paint graffiti all over everything?"

"Take your average tagger," said Wanda. "He's just a frustrated artist. He wants you to admire his work, not kill you or steal your car."

"What about your average driver who hits" -- I peered at the dash. "Ninety-five on Mulholland at three in the morning while being pursued by a pissed-off cop?"

"Driving a Lamborghini is like surfing," said Wanda. "All nerves and reflexes. Hold on!"

It felt as though the curving road ahead had vanished. Tires shrieked as we fishtailed around the corner and shot into the straightaway. I turned and watched the police car slide through the curve. Halfway through, centrifugal force - which Italian car designers have learned how to neutralize, and Americans have not - took over and dragged him into the bushes. He spun out, the front bumper hanging over the edge of the road.

"Yes! Yes!" Wanda said, watching in the rear view mirror. "Better than sex, right?"

"Wrong," I said.

She peeled off Mulholland and headed south for Hollywood. We had gone less than a half milehalf-mile when we heard sirens approaching. Wanda spun the wheel, accelerated into a dead end, then slammed on the brakes. "Down," she said. We crouched, our heads touching. A stand of jacaranda trees with periwinkle flowers screened us as three black-and-whites flashed up the hill toward Mulholland.

She gave me a look. "I like you, maybe too much, and I'm not easy."

I decided not to comment on that one, and just nodded as though this was beyond question.

"I believe in safe sex," she said.

"You'll set the parking brake?"

"It's nothing to joke about. I'm careful who my partners are. There haven't been many."

I tried to look as though I believed this.

"I know a lot about you," she said. "I know you don't have any diseases."

"Oh, you spoke to my doctor?"

"I saw your autopsy report."

Now, again, this was original. "Autopsy?"

"Autopsy."

"Well, now that I know I'm going to die a perfectly healthy person, do you mind telling me when?"

"You don't want to know."

The transmission guy's exact words. This annoyed me. The paranormal stuff, being almost seduced by a woman who could have any man she wanted instead of me, and with no idea why she chose me. Physical exhaustion, a terrifying drive on a dark road pursued by police, on the way to a funeral home. And now my alleged death.

I said, "Don't hocus-pocus me with seeing the future and mind-reading crap. If you're going to try to pull off that kind of fakery, at least throw in some convincing detail to make the gullible tinhorn happy."

"Five days."

Such a precise answer was unexpected, not to say chilling. But I figured she was talking about future wild rides in her Lamborghini. On the other hand, if she wanted to play games, I'd sure as hell play. "I have less than a week to live?"

"Yes."

"You know this and come to my office, asking me to spend my last days on earth helping you prove your stepmother killed your father?"

"You'll be doing something worthwhile."

"Right now I can think of something a lot more worthwhile."

"Keep thinking about it," she said. She backed the car up onto the road and looked at me. The promise in her eyes blended with the roar of the engine.