The doorman was enthusiastically telling Jackie about his nephew, a really good-looking kid who could really act and sang like an angel, not like these hip-hop guys nowadays but really sing, and Jackie was smiling and nodding and trying to keep her eyes from crossing with the strain of enduring the doorman’s blather without slapping him.
I took pity on her and interrupted without waiting for the end of the story. “We’re running late, Miss Forrest,” I said, sounding as Official as I could.
Jackie gave me a grateful smile and then nodded at the doorman. “Tell him not to give up,” she told the man. “Always follow the dream.”
He beamed at her like she had knighted him. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell him; thank you, Miss Forrest.” And he leaped ahead of us and held the door as I led Jackie out to the waiting car.
As we came out into the sunlight I heard a sort of murmur of excitement from the handful of people waiting there, and I turned to see that they were all looking at me with bright and mindless smiles on their faces. Not actually Me, of course, which became crystal clear when someone called out, “Yo, Jackie!” She smiled and waved and I led her on past the minicrowd to the waiting Town Car. I felt the eyes following us, and I wondered why that didn’t make me nervous. I checked the Dark Passenger; far from being anxious, he actually seemed to be purring. Someone in the throng yelled, “Whoo!” and I felt myself smiling with pleasure. I knew it was for Jackie—but I was with her, part of her entourage, and in a moment of truly bizarre insight, I realized I liked it. I enjoyed having idiot smiles following in my wake. It was totally unthinkable, of course; Dexter must maintain a low profile or cease to be Dexter. Still, I found that I felt larger, more handsome, certain that great wit fell from my lips every time I parted them to speak. It was invigorating, intoxicating, and I enjoyed it so much that I did not hear the rising rattle of warning from the watch-tower of Castle Dexter until I opened the car’s door.
But then I did hear it, loud and insistent, and I put two protective arms around Jackie and turned to survey the area.
“What?” she said, and she pushed up close against me, suddenly as edgy as I felt.
“I don’t know,” I said. I scanned; the people at the hotel’s entrance were doing no more than beaming at us. No danger there. But I felt a sharp tickle of something, a kind of intense focus on Us, over to the right somewhere. I turned to look.
Down at the end of the drive, a man stood beside one of the two cars pulled over and parked at the mouth of the hotel’s driveway. The man raised something up, pointed it at us—and just before I could fling Jackie to the hard uneven bricks of the driveway, I recognized it: a camera, with a large telephoto lens.
Click. Click. Click.
“Paparazzi,” Jackie said. “They’re everywhere.” She looked at me with a strange expression of puzzled concern. “How did you know he was there?”
“Um, I didn’t really,” I said. The thought of describing my Passenger’s Distant Early Warning
System was unthinkable. “I just, um, I saw him move out of the corner of my eye.”
She kept looking. “Uh-huh,” she said, sounding very much unconvinced.
I held the back door of the car open for her. “Shall we go?” I said.
She finally nodded, turned away, and climbed into the car, and I turned to look at our audience one last time. The photographer clicked a few more shots, and as I turned away, I heard the sound of a motorcycle starting up.
Around the hotel’s front door, the people were still smiling. Even the doorman was still watching and waving as I put Jackie into the backseat, but to be fair, everybody else in the area was watching her, too, watching with a kind of lustful adoration, as if Jackie was a cross between a pinup and the pope. They did not actually applaud as she slid onto the seat and I closed the door, but I got the idea that they would have if this wasn’t such a classy hotel.
I got in on the other side, feeling another surge of that strange satisfaction at being the center of attention. I pushed it away halfheartedly, but it didn’t want to go, and I was still feeling beautiful and important as the car started down the drive, across the bridge, and into the happy mayhem of morning traffic in Miami.
I tried to lean back and enjoy the ride, but I found it a very odd experience to creep through the havoc in the backseat of the Town Car. For the first time I was a spectator instead of a participant, and although the horns blared and the middle fingers went up just as much as ever, it was almost like it was happening in another time and place as I watched it all go by in a movie.
Jackie looked out the window and, when she felt me looking at her, turned and smiled.
“The traffic is pretty bad this morning,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. “This?” she said. “You call this traffic?” She shook her head. “Don’t ever drive in Los Angeles. It makes this look like a sunny day in the park.”
“Really,” I said.
“Really,” she told me. And she gave me a condescending smile and said, “You get used to it.”
I’ve noticed before that people from New York and L.A. tend to have an attitude about their cities, a kind of survivor’s confidence that says, I’m from Real Life, and if you live in this hick town, you’re not even in the game. Always before I’d found this kind of amusing; Miami natives, after all, are just as rude and aggressive as New Yorkers, and just as sun-drenched and vacuous as Angelenos, and the combination is a unique and lethal challenge every time you drive. But something about the way Jackie said it made me feel a little bit provincial, and I wanted to say something to defend the ferocity of Miami traffic.
Happily for my city’s reputation, I didn’t need to say a thing. As we finally made it up onto the Dolphin Expressway and came to a stop in the bumper-to-bumper snarl, a large and shiny Cadillac Escalade went rocketing by us on the shoulder. It was going at least fifty miles per hour, and there was no more than two inches of room between it and the line of cars it hurtled past. Jackie flinched away from it and watched it go by with her mouth slightly open in surprise, and I felt a small warm glow of pride.
This was my city; these were my people.
“Oh,” she said. “Does that sort of thing happen a lot?”
“Almost constantly,” I said. And because I can be just as condescending as any Angeleno, I added, “You get used to it.”
Jackie stared at me, and then smiled, shaking her head. “Point for the home team,” she said. But before I could do a victory dance, her cell phone began to chirp. “Shit,” she said. “My first interview, and I can’t remember who it is.” She fumbled out her phone and tossed it to me. “Please?” she said. “Just find out who it is so I don’t look like a dope?”