Free The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion

bus when the loran goes down. I don’t get paid to take care of the passengers.
    Her partner, her backup, her protection.
    Her single link to the day before.
    He had flown it down and now he was flying it back.
    Per his contract.
    She did not think it possible that her father would find himself in exactly this situation, yet she had done exactly what he said he had to do. She had done exactly what her father said he had to do and she had done exactly what Barry Sedlow said to do.
    Just do it my way for a change.
    This would very soon be all right.
    She would very soon know what to do.
    She felt alert, a little light-headed. She did not yet know where she was, and the clearing in which the strip had been laid down had suddenly cleared of people, but she was ready, open to information.
    This should be Costa Rica.
    If this was Costa Rica the first thing she needed to do was get to San José.
    She did not know what she would do if she did get to San José but there would be a hotel, offices of American banks, an airport with scheduled carriers.
    Through the open door of the concrete structure off the apron she could see, intermittently, someone moving, someone walking around, a man, a man with a ponytail, a man with a ponytail wearing fatigues. She kept her eyes on this door and tried to recall lessons learned in other venues, other vocations. One thing she had learned during her four-year sojourn at the Herald Examiner was how easy it was to get into places where no one was supposed to be. The trick was to attach oneself to service personnel, people who had no particular investment in who got in and who stayed out. She had on one occasion followed a telephonecrew into a locked hangar in which an experimental stealth bomber was being readied for its first rollout. She had on more than one occasion gotten inside a house where someone did not want to talk to her by striking up conversation with the pool man, the gardener, the dog groomer who had run a cord inside the kitchen door to plug in a dryer.
    In fact she had mentioned this during the course of her Westlake Career Day workshop.
    Melissa Simon had again raised her hand. She had a point she wanted to make. The point she wanted to make was that “nobody from the media could have ever gotten into those houses if the families had normal security and their public relations people were doing their job.”
    Which had prompted Elena to raise the Westlake Career Day stakes exponentially by suggesting, in words that either did or did not include the phrase “try living in the real world for a change,” that very few families in the world outside three or four well-defined neighborhoods on the West Side of Los Angeles County had either public relations people or what one very fortunate eighth grader might call “normal security.”
    Which had caused Wynn Janklow, after this was reported to him the next day by three different people (Mort Simon’s partner, Mort Simon’s lawyer, and the young woman who was described as Mort Simon’s “issues person”), to leave half his lunch at Hillcrest uneaten in order to call Elena.
    “I hear you’ve been telling our friends’ kids their parents live in a dream world.”
    In the first place, she said, this was not an exact quotation.
    He said something else but the connection was bad.
    In the second place, she said, Mort Simon was not her friend. She didn’t even know Mort Simon.
    Wynn was calling from his Mercedes, driving east on Pico, and had turned up Robertson before his voice faded back in.
    “You want everybody in town saying you talk like a shiksa,” he had said, “you’re getting the job done.”
    “I am a shiksa,” she had said.
    “That’s your problem, not mine,” he had said.
    In fact she did know Mort Simon.
    Of course she knew Mort Simon.
    The house in Beverly Hills where she sat on the sidewalk waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser was as it happened Mort Simon’s house. She had even seen him