She reached down and stroked the front of his linen slacks. “If we get a flat, I seem to have located the jack handle.”

The car, in addition to being a self-driving machine, was also fully electric, and whisked along the Pacific Coast Highway almost noiselessly.

Minutes later, they felt the car decelerating.

“Must be here,” Frank said without looking up. “If you feel the car turn right, then—”

The car turned, and began to climb.

Frank nodded. “Yup. We’re back.”

His beach house was, as the name suggested, right on the beach. But it sat at the base of a sixty-foot-high cliff. At the top was a concrete parking pad that overlooked the ocean. Silvio’s other vehicle, a Porsche Panamera, and Cheryl’s Hyundai were already sitting there.

Christ, Silvio had thought when he’d first seen what she drove. Broad needs an upgrade.

He could feel the car making the gradual climb. As it reached the peak, it would slow. Once the Gandalf was parked, they’d have to walk down the nearly fifty steps to his place.

“Hear the surf?” he asked the actress.

“Um, yeah, I think?”

“That’s because the engine hardly makes a sound,” he said proudly.

Cheryl did not look as impressed as he’d hoped she would.

Perhaps if the Gandalf’s engine were noisier, it would have been more immediately apparent that the car was not slowing. It was, in fact, accelerating as it reached the top of the hill.

Silvio sensed something was not right. He rose up and looked through the windshield. Up ahead were his car and Cheryl’s, parked nose-in at the cliff’s edge on the far side of the concrete apron. There was enough space between the two for the Gandalf.

Lola’s going to hit the brakes just in time, he thought.

But they were closing the distance too quickly. The Gandalf was not slowing.

“Lola!” Silvio shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Lola, calmly, replied. “Back to the beach house and crash.”

“Wait, what? I didn’t mean—”

The car slipped between the parked cars as cleanly as the Millennium Falcon zipping sideways between two asteroids. And then it was airborne.

Cheryl screamed as the car sailed out into the air. Straight, for about two seconds, and then gravity kicked in, the car’s front end tipping downward, offering her and Silvio a moonlit glimpse of the rocks and the rolling waves below.

In the instant before impact, before the windshield shattered and the car filled with water and Frank Silvio and Cheryl Garland were no more, Lola had one final thing to say:

“You have reached your destination.”

One

Sandra Montrose was already awake when the alarm went off at six.