She raised her voice to compete with the whine of the tires and the whistle of wind past the open windows.
"Because the damned auto's going to tip over," she shouted.
"Not if you lean to the left," Remo said.
She forced her body toward the center of the front seat and Remo careened the car through a left-hand turn. For a moment, the car lifted up onto its two right wheels and teetered there precariously. Remo grabbed Pamela's shoulders and pulled her closer to him and the car thumped back down onto all four wheels.
"The next one I can do with my eyes closed," Remo said.
"Please slow down," she said.
"All right," Remo said agreeably. He thumped on the brake. "I don't care if we get there in time to save the world from nuclear destruction."
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," he said.
"You said something about nuclear destruction."
"I was thinking about this car," he said.
"No, you weren't. You were talking about something else."
"I forget," Remo said.
"No, you didn't forget." Pamela folded her arms across her chest. "You just won't tell me. You haven't told me anything since we left New York. You've barely said three words to me the whole trip. I don't even know how you figured out where to go in Malibu."
"Hey, look, I work for the phone company. What do I know from nuclear destruction?" Remo said. "And my office told me where to go and when Mother says go, I go."
"That's another thing. Why is the New York phone company sending you to California to find an obscene caller? Huh? Why is that?"
"It's not really the New York phone company doing it," Remo said.
"No? What is it?"
"It's part of our new phone system. If your phone is broken, you call somebody and if your telephone lines fall down and electrocute the neighbors in their swimming pool, you call somebody else. That's the way we've got it set up now. Well, I'm part of another company. It's part of Alexander Graham Ding-a-Ling. Obscene Callers Patrol Inc. A new corporate setup. You give us enough time, we'll fix it so that America's phone system is as good as Iran's."
"I still don't believe you work for the phone company," she said.
"And I don't believe you came all this way to get revenge on somebody for heavy breathing and copping a feel, so why don't we just drop it?"
"I want to talk," she said.
Remo took his hands off the wheel, put them behind his head, and leaned back in the seat.
"Go ahead then. Talk," he said. "Talk fast. There's a guardrail up there."
She grabbed his hands and put them back on the steering wheel.
"All right," she said. "Drive. Don't talk."
"Thank you," Remo said.
"You're welcome."
Remo had never seen Malibu before and he was disappointed. He had expected mansions with twisting drives and servants' quarters and what he found instead was a string of little houses packed tightly together along the oceanfront highway, their privacy guarded by high wooden fences, and he thought it didn't look much better than Belmar, New Jersey, three thousand miles away on the Atlantic.
Pamela was disappointed too. She said, "I don't see any movie stars."
"They're all out on the beach watching California erode," Remo said.
The house they were looking for was a quantum jump up in quality. It took up a full 150 feet of ocean frontage and was hidden from the roadside by a thick stone wall with a heavy solid iron gate embedded in it. There was a tiny buzzer on the side of the gate and a nameplate that bore no name, only the house's street address.
Remo reached out to ring the buzzer but Pamela grabbed his hand.
"Shouldn't we sneak in or something?" she said.
"Not if we don't have to. Why make work?" Remo said. He pressed the buzzer. There was no answer so he pressed it again.
A voice answered, coming from a small speaker hiding near the gate's top hinge.
"Who is it?" the voice asked.
"What's the owner's name of this place?" Remo asked.
"Mr. Buell," the voice said. "Who wants to know?"
"I do," Remo said.
"Who are you? What do you want?"
"I've come to kill Mr. Buell. Is he in?"
"Go away or I'll call the police," the voice answered.
"Don't be that way," Remo said. "Do you know how long I've been driving to get here?"
"I'm calling the police."
There was a sharp click as the speaker went dead.
"That was wonderful," Pamela said sarcastically. "We're still out on the street and now we're going to have the police for company." She kicked the iron gate in frustration.
"Don't worry about it," Remo said. He grabbed the handle of the locked gate, feeling the warm steel under his skin. Gently, he began to twist the handle back and forth until he could almost hear the hum of the metal as it vibrated under his hand. He speeded the twisting motion and the vibrations grew more rapid. He didn't know how he was doing what he was doing. It was a thing he had learned but it was so long ago that he had forgotten exactly what it was he had learned. But he remembered the result and how to produce it.
When he knew, by feel, that the metal was vibrating at the correct speed, he slapped out with the heel of his other hand at the steel plate just above the gate's lock and the steel plate snapped and fell, lock mechanism included, at his feet. He pushed the gate open with his right pinky.