The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [15]
He went down to the gift shop in the hotel basement and picked up a guidebook to the Bay Area. The index told him that he could read about Mill Valley on page sixty-four, where he learned that Mill Valley was a charming little village in Marin County, nestled on the southern base of Mount Tamalpais, just a few minutes’ drive from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Neal bought a copy of the book and a bright blue vinyl tube bag that proclaimed “I Left My ♥ in San Francisco,” and headed back to his room.
He ordered a cheeseburger from room service and started to pack the tube bag. The last bus back from Mill Valley left at 9:00 P.M. and seeing as he didn’t have any idea what he was going to do, he didn’t know if he’d be done doing it by then, so he packed for an overnight: a black sweater, black jeans, black tennis shoes, gloves, burglary kit, and two thousand dollars in cash. He took a quick shower, changed into a fresh shirt, and put his khaki slacks and all-purpose blue blazer, rep tie, and loafers back on.
The costume made him more forgettable than he was already. With his medium build, medium height, brown hair, and brown eyes, he could have been the poster boy for Anonymous Anonymous.
He wolfed down the eight-dollar cheeseburger, then took his tube bag, his paperback copy of Ferdinand Count Fathom, and his unremarkable looks and headed out to catch the two-twenty.
Like a lot of voyages, this one was born of desperation. There was no reason for him to expect that Pendleton and Lila should be in Mill Valley, and no way for him to locate them even if they were. But the tickets to Mill Valley were the only leads he had, so he might as well pursue them. The only other option was to put a call in to Friends and tell them he had blown it, and that was no option at all.
So he figured he’d just take the ride to Mill Valley, snoop around a little, and see what he could see. Maybe he’d have one of those rare instances of dumb luck and run into Pendleton on the bus. Maybe find him at the Terminal Bookstore, poring over the latest issue of Chickenshit Illustrated Maybe he’d waste an afternoon chasing a wild goose.
But there were worse fates than cruising across the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny California afternoon. After six months in the rain and fog of a Yorkshire moor, the blue sky and open vista made Neal a little giddy. His cynical heart raced a bit, his jaded New York eyes widened, and his sardonic agent-for-hire leer opened into a smile as he rolled across the bridge, the Pacific on the left, the Bay on the right.
Just a natural-born tourist on an outing, he thought as the bus pulled into Mill Valley. A chameleon, a mere ripple in the shadows: the unobserved observer.
He stood out like a hard-on in a harem.
Nobody in Mill Valley wore a tie, Neal saw, and if anyone wore a jacket, it had leather fringe on it. Everyone was wearing plaid cotton shirts with denim overalls, or denim workshirts and painter’s pants, or actual robes. And a lot of sandals, running shoes, and biker boots.
Neal, on the other hand, looked like a Young Republican in need of an enema. Like a Ronald Reagan delegate at a communist party meeting. Like a rookie insurance agent going to sell term-life to Abbie Hoffman.
As he stepped off the bus, the locals gathered around the Terminal Bookstore actually stared at him. He couldn’t have been any more conspicuous if he had been wearing a sandwich board reading, UPTIGHT, UNCOOL, NON-JOGGING, MEAT-EATING, EAST COAST, URBAN NEOFASCIST WHO DOESN’T MEDITATE. Even the mellow dogs lying under the benches pricked up their ears and started to whine with unaccustomed anxiety, as if expecting Neal to slip