She considers getting out and trying to flag a passing trucker. You never know who might be in a car or SUV. You might be calling trouble to your side. However, truckers are known to be largely reliable—aren’t they?—and willing to help a stranded motorist.
But the weather is atrocious. She’ll be soaked in two minutes. And there’s no guarantee that anyone will stop, not in these days of few Samaritans. Anyway, because of the weather, there’s a lot less traffic than usual, less likelihood that some helpful soul will pass and take notice of her. Better to wait for a highway patrol officer to see the dark car and possibly stop to check it out. Yeah. That’s what any CHP trooper will do, and one will pass sooner than later. She has faith in the police. Her mom likes police-procedural novels, and Emily has read at least two hundred of them to Calista over the years. The cops don’t always get their man in real life, the way they do in books, because there’s no writer setting up the chain of clues for them, but most of them try their best. She’s sure that they try their best and that one will be coming along shortly.
Inland, lights glimmer high in the hills, too far to walk to them. Through the screening storm, she can see no lights to the west and assumes there aren’t any homes in the vicinity. If you’ve got to break down, always do it in the equivalent of the Hindu Kush or the Australian outback, where it’s so much more adventurous.
“There’s a horse ranch to the south, along the coast,” David tells her from the back seat of the car. “Go to the horse ranch, go now, quick,” but she does not hear him. A sudden coldness on his forehead steals his voice from him, and he is no longer in the back seat, but once more behind Emily’s eyes.
The lack of a heater isn’t a problem. She’s warm enough. She wouldn’t mind some music, but there’s no way to get any. She has a bottle of water and a PowerBar. She’ll be all right. Tough it out. It’s not like being shipwrecked on a desert island, not going to have to live on coconuts and raw rats for a year, not going to have to drink her own urine or anything like that. Suck it up, Carlino.
Maybe it’s premonition or perhaps the fierce and unrelenting storm is getting on her nerves, but slowly her sense of isolation becomes a sense of danger. She’s a stranger to paranoia, an eternal optimist. When she was a child, her mother called her Little Miss Sunshine. Fortunately never in front of other kids. Little Miss Sunshine could use some sunshine now. But she’s okay. She’s been through worse. She’s not a fragile snowflake. By the time an hour passes, however, she is deeply uneasy. There’s seldom lightning in storms along this coast, but of course tonight the sky crackles with fireworks, layering on the atmospherics, so the damsel in distress will be sure to feel adequately distressed. There’s zero chance that a bolt will strike the car. Zero point zero. Isn’t that right? What does your degree in American literature tell you on that subject? Did Twain or Hemingway or Philip Roth have anything instructive to say about the perils of lightning? Anyway, she’s sitting on four rubber tires, well insulated from shock. Yet she feels increasingly threatened. She’s seriously annoyed by this apprehension. It’s not who she is. She’s pissed off at herself for being a nervous Nellie. However, there’s nothing she can do about it. It is what it is. No point spanking herself. Spanking never worked when her mom did it back in the day. Psychologically, she is spankproof.
She plucks the key from the ignition, throws open the door, scrambles out into the rain. She hurries around to the back of the Buick and pops the trunk lid and retrieves the tire iron: a lug wrench on one end, pry bar on the other. When she gets back into the driver’s seat, she’s seriously wet, although not soaked to the skin.
Now she has a weapon. It’s not exactly Thor’s hammer, but it’s something.
She slides low in the seat. Better that someone passing doesn’t get a glimpse of her and realize she’s a woman alone. Unless he’s a highway patrolman, of course. A patrolman will stop whether he sees someone in the car or not. In fact, where is Mr. CHiP? He’s overdue.
For a while, she shivers, but gradually her body heat dries some of the rain from her clothes. Anyway, it’s a chilly night, but it’s not really, really cold.
As forty minutes pass without incident and as her shivering subsides, she begins to be mildly amused by her moment of alarm. The tire iron resting against her seat and angled into the footwell is an awkward weapon. She was never good at softball, can’t imagine swinging hard enough to knock a would-be assailant out of the park.