Necessity by Brian Garfield Page B

home.”
    â€œYou retired as a light colonel.”
    He gives her a quick look and she realizes her mistake. No one must ever know she’s an Air Force brat. She’s not supposed to know the jargon.
    She’s relieved when he lets it pass. He says, “I was a major. Deputy squadron CO. They wanted to promote me to a desk. Said I was getting too old to keep flying. So then I took my retirement—I was thirty-eight. Maybe that is too old to fly jets. I like piston planes better anyway. They’re for fun, you know?”
    She points to the old map on the wall. “Were you a mercenary?”
    â€œI flew in Africa a few times. You like asking questions, don’t you.”
    â€œI’m curious about you.”
    He says, “I’m kind of curious too. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
    â€œI own part of a bookstore.” She’s pleased to be able to say it with such ingenuousness.
    â€œYou sure in hell don’t look it.” He’s drinking coffee; his eyes over the rim of the cup are examining her body frankly. When he puts the cup down his eyes droop with amusement and his mouth opens and he actually begins to laugh.
    â€œWhat’s funny?”
    â€œThinking about the first time you walked in here. Soaked to the skin.”
    She stands up. She remembers his lewd leer at the time. To cover her abrupt self-consciousness she says, “Why didn’t you get an airline job?”
    â€œI’m not rated for multiengine jets.”
    â€œYou could learn.”
    â€œI doubt I’d like it much.”
    â€œYou were born too late. You should have been a barnstormer.”
    â€œSleeping out under the wing of my Jenny. You think I never dreamt of that?”
    Then he says: “Let me recommend Chez Charlie Reid. One and a half stars in the Michelin guide. It’s a dump but the cook does a pretty good patio barbecue. You like rib steak?”

24 It is about half an hour’s drive from the airfield to Doyle and Marian’s bookshop in Burbank. She has made a discovery about the Valley: wherever you start from, you’re half an hour from your destination.
    That half hour conveniently is the running time of one side of a standard audio tape cassette. The car has a built-in player. (Apparently every car in California has one.) For camouflage she has tuned all the buttons of the car radio to innocuous mood music stations but the player overrides the radio as soon as you insert a tape.
    Now she carries in her handbag several cassettes—baroque music mainly, and Mozart—and she knows it’s cheating but she can’t bear the thought of giving up good music for the rest of her life. She’s made a pact to listen to it only when she’s alone.
    In the East a car was transportation. Here it is a cocoon: Californians spend half their lives in their cars; they drive everywhere with windows rolled up and air conditioners blasting even in mild weather—you see them jammed up on the freeways alone in their cars, sealed in, shouting soundlessly, gesticulating to the beat of the programs they’ve turned up to top volume. When you glimpse them it’s always startling: they’re like mime characters in an absurdist fragment of silent film, the plot of which hasn’t been revealed to you.
    At the interchange she’s looking in the mirror while she negotiates the exit ramp from the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. Two cars behind her take the same turns.
    When she merges into the eastbound traffic she uses side mirror and indicator to ease over into the far right lane. The two cars are still back there: a rust red one and a boxy black sedan. They seem to hover in the mirror.
    The traffic is clotted here, moving fitfully, backed up behind the exit for Van Nuys Boulevard, and it is only out in the far left lane that things move smoothly.
    She watches the two cars go by in the fast lane. One of them has four