“So you don’t care what Anthony did?” she said. “You just want to make sure I don’t use that word?”
I took a deep breath and made a special effort not to ram the car in front of me. “What did Anthony do?” I said.
“He said I wasn’t hot,” Astor said. “Because I don’t have any boobs.”
I felt my mouth open and close a few times, all by itself, and just in time I remembered that I still needed to breathe. I was clearly in far over my head, but just as clearly I had to say something. “Well, I-I, um, ah,” I said, quite distinctly. “I mean, very few of us do have boobs at ten.”
“He’s such a butt-head,” she said darkly, and then, in a very syrupy-sweet tone, she added, “Can I say butt-head, Dexter?”
I opened my mouth again to stammer something or other but before I could utter a single meaningless syllable Cody spoke up. “Somebody’s following us,” he said.
Out of reflex I glanced in the rearview mirror. In this traffic, it was impossible for me to tell if somebody was, in fact, following us. “Why do you say that, Cody?” I asked. “How can you tell?”
In the mirror I could see him shrug. “Shadow Guy,” he said.
I sighed again. First Astor with her barrage of forbidden language, and now Cody with his Shadow Guy. Obviously, I was in for one of those memorable evenings parents have now and then. “Cody, the Shadow Guy can be wrong sometimes,” I said.
He shook his head. “Same car,” he said.
“Same as what?”
“It’s the car from the hospital parking lot,” Astor interpreted. “The red one, where you said the guy wasn’t looking at us but he really was. And now he’s following us even though you think he isn’t.”
I like to think I am a reasonable man, even in unreasonable situations, like most of those involving kids. But at this point, I felt I had let unreality intrude just a little too far, and a small lesson was called for. Besides, if I was going to follow my resolve to cross over to the sunny side of the street, I had to start weaning them away from their dark imaginations at some point, and this was as good a time as any.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see if he really is following us.”
I moved into the left lane and signaled for a turn. Nobody followed us. “Do you see anybody?” I said.
“No,” Astor said, very grumpily.
I turned left down a street beside a strip mall. “Is anybody following us now?”
“No,” said Astor.
I accelerated down the street and turned right. “How about now?” I called cheerfully. “Anybody behind us?”
“Dexter,” Astor grumbled.
I pulled over in front of a small and ordinary house much like ours, putting two wheels on the grass and my foot on the brake. “And now? Anybody following us?” I said, trying not to gloat audibly at making my point so dramatically.
“No,” Astor hissed.
“Yes,” Cody said.
I turned around in the seat to scold him, and stopped dead. Because through the rear window of the car I could see that a few hundred feet away, a car was nosing slowly toward us. There was just enough light from the setting sun to see a quick flash of red color from the small car, and then it was crawling toward us through the shadows of the tree-lined str
eet. And as if awakened by those shadows, the Dark Passenger carefully uncoiled and spread out its wings and hissed a warning.
Without thinking I stepped down hard on the gas, even before I turned back around to face front, and I left a small patch of torn grass behind me and narrowly missed plowing into a mailbox as I looked forward again. The car skidded slightly as it regained the pavement. “Hold on,” I told the kids, and with some something far too close to panic I raced down the street and turned right, back toward US 1.
I could see the other car behind me, but I was well ahead by the time I got back to the highway, and I turned right quickly into heavy traffic. I began to breathe again, just once or twice, as I powered across three lanes of rapidly moving cars and into the far left lane. I gunned it through a light just as it changed to red, and sped up the street for a half mile before I saw an opening in the oncoming traffic and screeched through a left-hand turn and down another quiet residential street. I drove through two intersections and then turned left again so that I was now running parallel to US 1. The street was dark and quiet and there was no sign of anything at all behind us now, not even a bicycle.
“All right,” I said. “I think we lost him.”
In the mirror I saw Cody staring out the back window, and he turned around and caught my eye, and nodded.
“But who was it, Dexter?” Astor said.