“That’s very true.” He got up and began pacing again. “If I could only tell Sanchez the truth, we could get Grampian police protection.”
“Until the full moon, anyway.”
“That’s what I mean,
if
I could tell Sanchez. I agree that Grampian’s probably marked as their next victim. Do you think he has the sense to stay inside?”
“Not during the full moon. As long as he’s thinking like a man, he’ll do the right thing. Once he starts thinking like a wolf, all bets are off. The rest of the pack won’t be able to stay away from their run, either.”
“And Johnson could be waiting for them. Not my idea of a good outcome.”
“It isn’t mine, either. Sanchez has resources, sure, but so do I. It’s time I mobilized mine. I want to go discuss things with Annie tomorrow, unless of course the cops catch Doyle and Johnson tonight.”
They didn’t. We woke in the morning to thick fog and no news from Sanchez. Before we checked out, I called Annie to make sure she’d be home. On the way to her converted garage we stopped at a bakery. I bought more bread and pastry than we could eat in order to make sure we’d have leftovers to leave with her.
When we arrived, she insisted on making tea and sat us down at the round table to wait for the kettle to boil. Duncan joined us and kept a worshipful canine eye on Annie while we talked.
“Here’s the plan,” I told her. “I keep making LDRS scans and passing the tips to you. You get to be the neighborhood busybody who sees things and relay the tips to the cops. They have an anonymous tip line as well as a regular one. Use a couple of different names.”
“Yes, I copied down the numbers from last night’s news,” Annie said. “What about Jerry?”
“He won’t call the police, not even for Agency money. Not even with a fake name.”
“You’re right, aren’t you?” Annie considered for a moment. “You know, I could do a few scans, too.”
“No, it’s too dangerous. Johnson already knows who I am. He doesn’t know you, and let’s leave it that way.”
“Yes, he does know who you are.” Annie fixed me with a gimlet eye that would have done Aunt Eileen credit. “That’s why I’m worried about him shooting you.”
“You have a point,” I said. “But I’m not real keen on him shooting you, either.”
“I think we can avoid that if we’re very careful. You see, I’ve been thinking about that reward. It’s up to fifty thousand according to the morning paper.”
“It could come in handy, huh?”
Annie smiled, but the lines around her eyes seemed to get deeper, and the eyes themselves, behind their thick glasses, wearier.
“Well,” I said, “that’s another good point, but only if you live to spend it. Let’s see what we can come up with.”
We drank tea, they ate pastry, and I nibbled at half a bear claw while we tossed ideas back and forth. Eventually we arrived at a few conclusions I could live with. Duncan got the rest of the bear claw, then Ari drove Annie and the dog to somewhere a good distance away from her studio. I deliberately avoided knowing the location, just in case Johnson could read it from my mind. Ari came back for me in about twenty minutes.
So far most of the scans I’d done for Johnson and Doyle had placed them in the northwest quadrant of the city or by the portal. We drove to the park and the pond by the doorway to nowhere that might have led to somewhere. The demonstrators had done a good job of cleaning up after themselves. Although the grassy areas looked trampled and worn, I saw only one piece of trash lying on the ground. I picked that up myself, an orange handbill reading “STOP THE MILITARY MACHINE!” Ari stayed in the front seat, ready to contact the police should Johnson or Doyle drop by to test the moribund energy field. I got in back with the pad of paper and the crayons. Sometimes low tech really is the way to go.
First I tried to locate Doyle. I could pick up enough of an impression to know that he was still alive and not all that far away, but his shielding held. He seemed perfectly calm, the bastard, for a man who’d just murdered a woman who’d trusted him.
Johnson was a different matter. As soon as I started the LDRS, my hand began to move. The images came so fast that I was scribbling rather than drawing, laying in big areas of color. After three pieces of paper I made myself stop and examined what I’d done. A lot of blue-green water, a lot of gray lines, either concrete or stone, a lot of dark green shrubs. In one picture gray tree trunks rose out of the shrubs to the oddly flat caps of dark leaves that top California cypress trees. I made an unladylike remark.
“What?” Ari said.
“This could be anywhere along the California coast.”
“But you placed him in the city earlier.”
“Right, and thanks.” I paused to stare at the pictures and let my mind roam around the memory rooms inside my brain. “Land’s End.”
“Has Johnson realized you’re spying on him?” Ari said.
“No, which is puzzling. He must be asleep. Safer for him to sleep during the day and only go out at night.”
“Sleeping where?”
“Good question. There are motels down by the beach not far from there, but none of them up on the point itself. It’s part of a national park. Yet everything I’m seeing is outdoors.” An earlier bit of evidence occurred to me. “The windmill isn’t all that far from Land’s End.”
“You’d better come sit up front. We need to be ready to move. I’ll figure out a way to tell Sanchez without mentioning all the psychic—” He paused briefly. “—talents.”
I had just settled myself in the front seat, though, when Sanchez called Ari. I could hear the conversation over the car phone’s scratchy speaker.
“We just got a solid tip,” Sanchez said. “A old woman walking her dog out at Land’s End saw someone who looks a hell of a lot like Johnson. He’s made himself a shelter in the underbrush. I’m proceeding to the location with a SWAT team.”
“On my way.” Ari flipped on the siren.
I refuse to relive the details of that drive out to Land’s End. Let’s just say I became intimately acquainted with the fear of death that’s the lot of every human being. Well, every sane human being. Ari seemed to lack it. At any rate, eventually the car slid screeching and wailing into the parking lot above the ruins of Sutro Baths.
Way down at the foot of the hill the Pacific stretched out, wrinkled and silver. A thick fog wreathed around Seal Rock and spread long tendrils toward the land. The incoming tide crashed over the long concrete foundations that had once supported swimming pools and glass buildings. In them I recognized the gray lines that I’d been drawing in the LDRS scans. The hill rose sharply, cut with a flight of wooden stairs, up to the terraced parking lots.
In the lots police cars sat at odd angles. Officers with bullhorns swarmed around the ruins below and cleared the area of vulnerable innocents. In the damp, cold weather few people would have been down on the beach in the first place, I figured. Overhead a police helicopter beat the air with a
thwack thwack thwack
like a crazy drummer in a heavy metal band. To my left, the parking lot ended in a strip of ornamental plantings. Just beyond lay Point Lobos Avenue, running from the Great Highway up to the hill. Across the avenue lay the unkempt green mass of Sutro Gardens, a welter of shrubbery and weathered sculptures.
When I turned to my right, I saw the cypresses of my vision, standing tall at the crest of another hill, this one a gentle curve rising from the parking lot. Beds of native plants, carefully tended to look wild, covered the lower slopes, but higher up thick swaths of brush, weeds, and shrubs, spiky junipers, mostly, grew under and around the trees. A dirt path wound down toward the parking lot.
“There’s Sanchez,” Ari said. “Stay with the car.”
He slid out and ran off, leaving the door open behind him. I saw him draw his handgun as he ran. I got out more slowly and shut the car doors. Sanchez, also armed, was standing and talking with Ari two terraces down. The SWAT team, or so Sanchez had told Ari in the original call, was working its way over from the other side of Land’s End, a couple of miles from the parking lot, in the hopes of getting Johnson to surrender or, at least, of flushing him out of cover. I had the grotesque thought that he was in the same trap as a grouse or partridge in those old-time hunting parties, when British lords perched on shooting sticks and let underlings chase the game right to them for the slaughter. Unlike the birds, however, Johnson had a gun of his own.
Distantly I heard shots. The police in the parking lot ran to crouch down and take cover behind their cars, but they had drawn handguns at the ready. I realized that they formed a cordon all the way up to the street above. I also realized that I’d be dead meat if I continued standing out in the middle of the open lot. I ran around to the other side of the car and followed the police example.
Someone fluttered down from the sky and crouched next to me—St. Maurice, I figured, judging by his Roman-style breastplate over a tunic. In one hand he carried a gladius, the short stabbing sword of the legions. His wings spread hugely to either side like the white spray of the sea breaking over the rocks.
“Ave,”
I said.
“Si vales, valeo.”
“Bene,”
he said.
“Valeo, sed maxime obstat tibi periculum.”
I could have told him that. Danger stood in everyone’s way, not just mine. I risked a glance over the hood of the car. Ari and Sanchez had moved behind Sanchez’s unmarked squad car, but they stood tall rather than crouched as they looked up toward the top of the hill. When I followed their glance, I could see something moving through the underbrush.
“Non!”
St. Maurice said.
“A tergo, stulta!”
I swung around in my crouch and saw a dark-haired man, who might have been considered good-looking if he hadn’t been so unshaven and filthy, emerging from the thickets of Sutro Gardens across the avenue. Doyle’s expensive clothes had not stood up well to sleeping in the underbrush. The cream-colored silk shirt had acquired a lot of tears and stains. He still, however, had a gun with him, a rifle of some sort. I took a deep breath and began to gather Qi.
Doyle dodged across the street. At the edge of the parking lot he paused right out in the open. He must have been trusting that the police would be looking in the other direction, toward Land’s End, but the helicopter hovered above. Suicide by blue, I thought. Chaotic that he was, he never noticed me, the warded agent of Harmony, crouched by the car. I gathered Qi, spun Qi around on itself until it formed the nucleus of a sphere, hot between my hands—fast, ever faster, felt it glowing and pulsing, pushing against my fingers. Slowly, as if he had nothing to fear in the world, Doyle raised the rifle and took aim at Ari.
I stood up fast and flung up my hands.
“Doyle!” I yelled. “Game over!”
He swung around just as I sent the energy sphere flying. It transferred with the speed of light and slammed into his face. For a brief moment an ovoid of silver light surrounded him like an aura; then the force of it knocked him sideways and off-balance. He dropped the rifle and fell twitching to the ground. His face hit the asphalt so hard that his nose spurted blood. I heard Ari yell and running footsteps.
“Bene fecis,”
St. Maurice said.
“Vale.”
The apparition disappeared just as Ari reached me. He holstered his handgun, then knelt down beside Doyle, who raised his head and smiled, an utterly mindless gape, just as if blood wasn’t flowing over his lip and dribbling onto his chin. His dark eyes looked more like a cow’s than a human’s, placid, unthinking, bizarrely happy, really.
“He’ll be that way for a couple of hours,” I said.
Ari stared at me, then stood up. When I snapped my fingers, Doyle clambered to his feet. When I put my hands behind me, so did Doyle. Ari had him cuffed before Doyle realized what had happened, but again, he showed not the slightest distress, just leaned against the hood of the squad car and smiled. Ari picked up the fallen rifle.
“This is what ensorcellment does?” Ari said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not pretty, is it?”
“No.” He swallowed heavily. “I’m beginning to understand about that license.”
Up on the hill shots rang out, these near, too near. I flinched. Doyle laughed, the gurgling sort of laugh a baby makes.
“The team’s firing into the ground,” Ari said.
“The ground?”
“Any bullets shot into the air will come down again, possibly on you, possibly on the person you’re trying to capture.” Ari gave me a look of faint disgust that reminded me of St. Maurice, calling me stupid. “The idea is to take him alive. We need information.”
“Well, we’ve got one of them, anyway.” The moment I spoke I knew I lied. The full force of a SAWM hit me like a blow. I spun around, looked behind us—nothing—spun back, looked up on the hill just as Johnson burst out between two trees. I heard shouting as Johnson stopped on the dirt path, the rifle irresolute in his hands.
“Surrender!” Sanchez grabbed a bullhorn and yelled at him. “You’ve got no hope, Johnson! Drop the damn gun, and put your hands in the air!”
“Tawsi Melek!” Johnson screamed the name, then raised the rifle and turned our way.
Ari grabbed me and dragged me to the ground a split second before Johnson fired. Doyle jerked around and took one step away from the car. He smiled out at eternity, then buckled to his knees. Blood spread across his cream-colored silk shirt as he pitched forward to lie crumpled on the asphalt.
Ari rose to one knee, swung up the rifle with an oddly casual gesture, and fired a single shot. Up on the hill Johnson flung himself—no, he fell over backward. I realized that he was dead just as the SWAT team crested the hill behind him. Ari stood up, tucked the rifle under one arm as casually as if it were an umbrella, and trotted off to join Sanchez. I had just seen him kill a man with less emotion than he showed when he kissed me.
The cold sunlight behind the fog turned much brighter, as if it were molten silver pouring down over the scene. I got up, looked at Doyle’s body and decided that I really wanted to vomit. I staggered over to the ornamental planting and did so. The crazy thought in my head was to make sure and miss the yellow tansy, an endangered species.