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another glance.

 
    *

 
    The last thing she
needed was a man interested in her.   Annie was convinced of that even before she cleared San Francisco
proper.
    Her Honda sped north up
Highway 101, Marin and then Sonoma counties flying past in a blur of suburbia
beautified by more trees and rolling hills than that usually described.   Eventually she exited onto a narrow road
that led toward the coast.
    As she careened up one
incline and down another, she decided that Reid Gardner might be an interesting
man—he certainly was a good-looking one—but she was in a phase of
her life when she wanted to be unencumbered by male needs and desires.   Selfish though other people might find
it, she wanted to focus on herself: her writing, her workouts, her parents, her
friends.   She’d spent a lot of
time—all of her twenties—trying to make Philip happy, and that would
have been wonderful if he’d returned the favor.   But instead he found fault with so much,
and it got really wearing.   They
always had to live spitting distance from the hospital in deference to his long
and unpredictable hours, regardless how grotty the
neighborhood was.   She had to
understand how much pressure he was under, and how fatigued he was, and so
forgive his moods and tirades.   She
had to stifle any complaint about her own unsatisfying work as a legal
secretary, even though it was helping put him through his medical training, as
he declared he “shouldn’t have to listen to it.”
    She often wondered
where her passionate college lover had gone.   It took her some time to realize that
she must have conjured him in her imagination.
    The one consolation of
those troubled years was that Annie had time to write mysteries on the
side.   She wrote almost as a guilty
pleasure because she knew Philip disapproved of the genre.   Even after a big-name publisher scooped
up one of her manuscripts, Philip poked fun.   Later, she wondered if he preferred the
old arrangement: when he was much the brighter light.
    Now all she wanted was
to reclaim the Annie she used to be, when she was as courageous and full of
spirit as any fictional hero, when her future seemed boundless and
exciting.   That Annie was still
there, buried under layers of hurt and disillusion.   Slowly, slowly, she was rising again to
the surface.   Annie did not want her
progress hampered by a new man, regardless of how attractive he might be.
    She reached into the
handbag she’d thrown on the passenger seat and pulled out her cell phone.   One thing she could count on: her mother
would bolster her resolve.
    She listened to her
parents’ phone ring off the hook.   She could imagine it on the Formica kitchen counter of their Berkeley
bungalow, atop a pile of phone books and next to the pots of marijuana plants
they’d been growing all her life.   There was an outdoor crop as well, larger and just as well-tended.
    Traditional, they were
not.
    She disconnected the
call and made the final turn that led to her house.   Most likely her parents were at a
protest.   Like other people went to
movies, they went to protests.   It
wasn’t a practice that had endeared them to her ex.
    About a block away from
her house, she frowned.   A cop car
was parked at the curb.   Helms was
leaning against the front fender, his beefy arms crossed over his chest.   His sidekick Pincus stood on the sidewalk talking to two men in dark suits, a heavyset fiftyish
black man and an Asian man fifteen years his junior.   They all looked toward her car as she
slowed and stopped.
    She exited the car and
collected her things, less than pleased with this development.   She suspected she knew who the men in
suits were, and in seconds she received confirmation.
    The African-American
approached and flipped open a leather case to reveal his ID.   He looked like a cross between a
preacher and an NFL coach, someone who could tame either Satan or a prima donna
wide receiver.   “FBI.   San Francisco field