She took a breath, closed her eyes. ‘I just … Tony, it would be amazing—unbelievable, really—if I could just call up, and you could put him on the phone without giving me all this bullshit to go with it.’

She should have remembered the rules: she couldn’t do anything that would make him hang up.

Now all she had was the dial tone, flat in her ear.

TEN

TEN

His preference was a clean break, but Vincent still had his possessions at the house up on Mountain Drive. And his backpack, of course, in the trunk of the Lincoln. Worth weighing up, but ultimately a classy exit wasn’t worth the loss of property.

He walked a block north of Cabrillo and used his iPhone to book an Uber. Ninety seconds later—the promptness was astonishing, military-grade—a white Prius arrived to collect him.

His driver was an Indian guy in his thirties named Unkit. He was listening to a cricket match via earbuds—the last five overs of the T20 semi-final, or something like that. Vincent knew nothing about cricket, except that it appeared to be some kind of bastardisation of baseball. But Unkit’s passion for the game had him driving white-knuckled, and every so often he’d add his own commentary, bringing his chin over the wheel as he issued breathless instructions.

They took Old Coast Highway east for a bit, and then cut back north again, heading up through Montecito, and Vincent saw Lamar’s Lincoln five cars ahead.

The driver tore his earbuds out and shook his head. ‘Useless. Unbelievable.’

‘Bad result?’

The guy could only manage a headshake.

Vincent said, ‘You see that Lincoln up there? The old Town Car?’

It took him a moment. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘It’s going to the same address as us—Mountain Drive. Twenty bucks if you can stay with it.’

The guy whistled.

Vincent brought up Google on his phone and searched Erin Jones.

There was an article from last month about her publisher, Freedom Press. They’d threatened to cancel her book Moral War, but then ultimately decided that wouldn’t be in the interests of freedom. He flipped to the News tab. The first story was a bulletin from that morning—her Berkeley talk had been cancelled. Antifa threats, whoever Antifa was. More Googling, and he learned that Antifa was a contraction of anti-fascist, and was a group principally composed of masked men, evidently unaverse to assaulting people and damaging property. He presumed the services to irony were unintended. Back to the Erin story, and there was a quote from some official saying they were unable to guarantee Ms Jones’s security. He wasn’t surprised. By the light of that burned-down library in Claremont, keeping her safe would probably seem like a challenge.