Entangled Read Free Page A

beep.
Ah, there it was. She crawled in behind the wheel and started up the engine. Better. Much better. Now all she had to do was find her way out. She flicked the control to put the top down. Whirr … hiss … click. Then it was Jimmy Choos off, full beams on, right foot down on the gas, and a satisfying spinning of wheels and splatter of gravel. She drove a couple of times round the big house to get her bearings, then tore down the maindriveway and pulled to a screeching halt in front of the tall iron gates that barred her exit.
    Leoni was beginning to feel thwarted. All she wanted to do was go home and sleep for, like, three days. But she couldn’t get out. She put her palm on the car’s horn, pressed hard and revved the engine. Deafening din. Then she backed up and charged at the gates, skidding to a stop just before hitting them. She backed up and charged again. On the third attempt her lover of the night must have pressed a button somewhere because the gates swung open and she shot out onto the road in her little blue car like a cork from a bottle, weaving from left to right before regaining control.
    Pacific Coast Highway coming up. With the wind in her hair, struggling to light a cigarette, Leoni executed a spectacular left turn at about a hundred miles an hour towards Santa Monica, cutting sharply across the path of a shitty-looking black-and-white Ford travelling in the opposite direction. She made eye contact with two startled faces – both male, one with a moustache – staring out at her from behind the windshield. Then she saw the seven-pointed gold star painted on the Ford’s door beneath the words CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL, also in gold.
    Leoni floored the gas pedal and was soon skimming along at around a hundred and forty, but in seconds the black-and-white loomed up in her rear-view mirror with its sirens blaring and its lights flashing.
Jesus, those boys had turned fast.
And their shitty Ford was
hot.
Accepting that she wasn’t going to get away, Leoni cut her speed, pulled into the emergency lane and stopped. Her heart was pounding and she had stomach cramps.
Jesus!
    The officer with the moustache appeared at her side, scowled down at her and demanded to see her licence. He was in his mid-twenties, with short black hair and a Latino look, and he had a big Smith & Wesson strapped to his butt. Fumbling for her ID, Leoni spilled the contents of her purse all over the passenger seat and burst into tears to create a distraction when she saw, under the unforgiving glare of the street lights, not only her driving licence, credit cards, money, tampons, condoms and lipstick but also a dozen bulging wraps of cocaine.
    ‘Ma’am,’ said the officer, ‘I need you to step out of the car NOW.’
    Her father’s attorney posted bail for her in the morning and whisked her out of a side door with a blanket over her head to avoid the pressand camera crews waiting at the front. By lunchtime Leoni was back in Beverly Hills, slouching in the palatial kitchen of the parental home.
    She had never hated mom and dad with such intense and personal revulsion as she did right here, right now. Her flesh was actually
creeping
with disgust.
    Dad was a short, stocky middle-aged guy, running to flab, wearing a ten-thousand-dollar suit and a buffed Beverly Hills tan. He had blond hair, cut short, receding sharply at the temples, the cold blank eyes of a fraud investigator, and a long, suspicious nose that didn’t seem to belong on the same face as his wet, fleshy, very red lips. He was a bully, the loudest voice in the room, but this morning his wife was doing all the talking and he stood near the door searching his teeth with his tongue as though trying to dig out morsels of food.
    Mom was the taller of the two by four inches, skinny, hatchet-faced and mean as a rattlesnake. ‘We’ve been fielding calls all morning from the rival channels and press,’ she spat at Leoni. ‘Even the
National Enquirer
, for Christ’s sake.’