The Fourth Sense

by Kat Parrish

  “Get me closer,” Brush-cut ordered. Everyone turned their attention back to the drone POV.

  Wilson looked like he wanted to object, but he typed some commands on what looked like a Skype interface and the remote drone operator took the drone lower.

  At which point, park patrons started noticing it and pointing.

  We could see the upturned faces. Nobody was particularly alarmed by the sight of the craft whizzing by them just over their heads. Maybe they thought it was part of the show, like the Jazz band performances and the firework displays.

  “Sir,” PJ said, pulling everyone’s attention away from the drone cam, “I’ve got visuals from the team.”

  “Switch it over,” he ordered and suddenly we were looking at a jerky helmet cam view as men rushed toward the entrance to the attraction.

  We could see park attendants escorting tourists away from the entrance to the attraction and I wondered what sort of story they were telling them.

  Somehow, I didn’t think “gas leak” was going to be very believable. Especially not if investigative news teams were sniffing around. Especially not after the attacks in Europe.

  Thomas was glued to the streaming footage. And the sight of him and his obvious enjoyment was starting to get to Brush-cut.

  “I can’t sit in the same room with him,” he finally said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  He left the room and everyone’s attention turned back to the screen as the first man on the Pendleton team entered the ride and started splashing his way toward the mechanical displays.

  “Any idea which ‘country’ we’re looking for?” Eliades asked as the team fanned out to search each of the themed displays in the ride, splashing through water that smelled of electricity and chlorine.

  I looked at Thomas, who avoided my gaze but still I caught his thought in the shape of a memory of green tea and cherry blossoms.

  “Japan,” I said. “He thought it would be ironic to plant it under the Japanese dolls.”

  Thomas smiled like a super-villain. “Your country started it,” he said. “One bomb would have worked, but you had to drop two.”

  “Fuck me,” PJ said, and relayed the message to the team leader.

  Eliades was watching the screen, but I was watching Thomas.

  And it was weird. There was absolutely no sense of frustration coming off him. No sense that we were about to thwart his plan.

  “Found it,” PJ said an instant before we saw the device on the screen, lit up with flashlights and the ride’s own work lights.

  “Thank God,” Wilson said.

  Eliades didn’t say anything and I realized he was also looking at Thomas.

  He felt it too, that sense that something was wrong.

  “Good work Cervantes,” PJ said into his phone and I could smell the sharp scent of his sweat.

  One bomb would have worked, Thomas had said, but you dropped two.

  And that’s when I caught it. The faintest whiff of something coming off the kid.

  It smelled like a sneer. I looked at him and his face was blank. But as we watched the agents extract the device planted in the water beneath one of the boats in “It’s a Small World,” the scent got stronger. Oh my God, I thought, there’s another bomb.

  “Agent Eliades,” I began.

  “There’s another device,” he finished, his voice flat as he looked at Thomas.

  CHAPTER 3: Failure is not an option

  “Fuck me,” PJ said again, and this time it sounded like a prayer.

  Thomas tore his attention away from the screen and faced Eliades. This time the sneer was visible in his face as well as present in his voice. “You are too late,” he said. “You’ll never find the other bomb in time.”

  At least now we know there’s only one other one for sure, I thought as I got a nose full of the smell of fresh dog shit. “It’s outdoors,” I said. “It’s been smeared with dog shit.”

  Thomas was looking at me with fear. And now I could smell the excrement coming off his hands. He’d been the one to plant the second device as well, so I concentrated harder, trying to access the place where he’d been. I caught scents of dry creosote and dusty land and old dried wood. There was a faint breeze carrying salt from the west.

  There was the faint mentholated cat piss smell of eucalyptus blended with citrus and olive wood and pepper. The leather of hiking boots and the smell of human sweat. Roses. Coffee.

  Someplace wild but close to urban.

  Had to be one of the canyons. But which one?

  “You chose Disneyland for a reason,” I said to Thomas but more like I was thinking out loud “Because it represents something particularly American.”

  He looked at me stone-faced. “What else represents America?” I asked out loud. “What do tourists come to Los Angeles to see?”

  “Dodger Stadium?” Wilson suggested.

  No reaction from Thomas. “The Santa Monica Pier,” PJ said. Thomas chuckled at that.

  “Ah, you’ve figured it out,” Thomas said. “California girls. Surfers. The poofters at Muscle Beach.” Thomas was relaxed. He was just toying with us. I caught a scent of coconut-banana-flavored sunscreen.

  “Hollywood,” I said suddenly, and I knew I was right.

  And as I said the words, the image of the Hollywood sign emerged from Thomas’ memory. The scent of dusty scrub live oak trees, and saltbush. “Beachwood Canyon,” I said, “somewhere along the trail heading to the Hollywood sign.”

  At that Thomas launched himself at me again, howling like a dog. Wilson grabbed him ungently and practically choked him out before he got him subdued.

  “Eliades was already halfway out the door as PJ pulled out his phone and made a call.

  “It’s a long trail,” I said. “You’re going to need me.”

  “Come on,” he said. As we left the room, I could sense Thomas’ rage but beneath it I could also sense his grief for the woman with the soft hands and gentle voice who had died of cancer. He’d found a purpose to ease his pain, filling the void left by her death with a plan to make others pay. I almost felt sorry for him.

  * * *

  By the time we got from the office building to the Van Nuys airport there was already a helicopter on the tarmac with its rotors spinning. The entry door was a little bit too high for me to step in, so Eliades unceremoniously grabbed my butt and shoved me up and in. I scooted over so he could buckle in beside me. PJ clambered in to sit next to the pilot.

  It’s roughly fifteen miles from the airport to Hollywood. We made it in less than a minute.

  Eliades was on the phone the whole time we were in the air, relaying orders to yet another tactical team and checking in with PJ. “N.E.S.T. is on its way,” he told me. “They monitor malevolent radiological incidents.”

  I almost reminded him I watch Homeland, but decided it wasn’t the time.

  Sooner than I expected, we were hovering over the sign a few feet off the ground.

  Eliades jumped out of the copter and turned to help me out.

  “Jump,” he said and added, “I’ll catch you,” as he saw my hesitation.

  “Aren’t we going to land?” I asked, knowing it was a foolish question.

  “Bend your knees when you jump,” he said. So, I did.

  I stumbled as I landed and more or less fell onto Agent Eliades. For a moment all I wanted to do in life was stand there with his arms around me because I was terrified at the thought of what was about to happen if I couldn’t find the bomb the man calling himself Thomas Blake had planted.

  “You can do this Vetiver,” Eliades said. I could hear the assurance in his voice, and I could see it in his eyes. He believed it, so I guess I had to too.

  I took a deep breath and stepped back.

  “This way,” I said, and started down the trail. I was pretty sure that Thomas had stuck to the trail because the vegetation in the area was really dense and all of it was thorny. His arms would have been sliced to ribbons if he’d been beating around the
bushes.

  It was a really hot day so there weren’t that many hikers out, but the heat intensified all the smells, so it was hard to tell what was fresh and what had been there a while.

  “Can you disarm it?” I asked. “If we find it, and the N.E.S.T. guys don’t get here in time, can you stop it from going off?”

  He looked grim and didn’t answer.

  The sun-soaked scents of the canyon surrounded me, and I couldn’t get a fix on anything. I closed my eyes, tried to center myself.

  And there, just a tickle in the hot, dry wind, I smelled it.

  They’ll tell you that you can’t smell radiation, but “they” are wrong. It’s something like the smell of ozone after a lightning strike if that strike took place in a coal mine. There’s also a distinct tinge of iodine in it.

  It’s a smell with texture and it prickles.

  And it had a hot smell, like the metal of a car hood when the engine overheats.

  “This way,” I said and took off down the canyon, nearly stumbling in my haste.

  It was like following the scent of fresh-brewed coffee from your bedroom to the kitchen before you’re not really all the way awake.

  And I knew I’d found the place when I started to sneeze violently, as if my body was trying to reject the scent that only my mind could smell.

  “It’s here,” I wheezed.

  Eliades pulled out his phone.

  “You got an E.T.A.?” he asked without preamble.

  The answer didn’t please him.

  He closed the phone and turned to me.

  “You need to get out of here right now,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. “Get going now, Vetiver.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “Like running will do me any good if this thing goes off,” I said. I looked down at the device. It was about the size of a camping cooler. It was hard to believe that something so small could do so much damage.

  “What can I do to help?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t like the movies,” he said. “We can’t just cut the red wire and it’ll be over.”

  “The blue wire,” I said. “They always cut the blue wire.”

  He pulled out his phone again and hit redial. “You’re going to have to talk me through it,” he said into the phone.

  And for the next few minutes he did nothing but listen and study the device.

  I didn’t want to distract him, but I was having a hard time just standing still.

  And we were starting to attract attention, crouching over something in the dirt just off the path. Hikers were giving us looks. One guy even snapped a picture of us as he passed. “I love your work,” he yelled out and I don’t know who he thought we were, but I was glad he moved on without further interaction.

  “Good luck keeping this contained,” I murmured.

  “Hey, what are you guys doing?” a kid walking a pomsky asked as he went by.

  “We’re prepping a stunt for a film,” Eliades said, still kneeling over the device. The metal box was rusty, but the corners were sharp, and there were tool marks that had scraped through the rust to expose bright metal below.

  “That prop looks kind of cheesy bro,” the kid said.

  “We don’t have much of a budget,” I said. “So please don’t bust us. If the park rangers find out, they’ll shut us down and we don’t have production insurance. We get shut down; we won’t be able to finish.”

  “Oh man, said the kid. “That would suck.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Is it fully cast?” he asked. “I don’t have my SAG card but I’m always looking to get more film for my reel.”

  “Get rid of this guy Vetiver,” Agent Eliades said under his breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s an all-female cast.”

  “I can play femme,” he said without missing a beat.

  “You got a card?” I said, standing up and dusting off my hands. And of course, he did, digging it out of his fanny pack and handing it over.

  “Jayson Prence,” I said, running my finger over the teeny headshot on the card. “I can see it on a poster.” He smiled at that. He could see it on a poster too.

  “Listen,” I said. “I promise I’ll get this to our casting director, but you can’t hang with us. We’ve already been here and hour and ...”

  “Say no more,” he said and juggled the leash. The little dog danced around, eager to be off. Pomskies are adorable and I wondered idly how Jayson had managed to score one of the pricey pups. Maybe he was a dog walker in between gigs.

  “Thanks Jayson,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Good luck.”

  I watched until Jayson and the dog were out of sight and then walked back to where Eliades had the bomb’s case cracked open. He was fiddling with circuit boards and tiny switches, his cell phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear.

  I could smell his anxiety and I could smell the bomb and the tiny little radioactive core at its heart. I hoped what I was smelling wasn’t plutonium because if you inhale plutonium, you die.

  Below us, I could hear the hum of traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. You can hear the urban white noise of traffic almost anywhere in the city, most any time of the day or night. My mother is a native Californian, but my father had grown up in a small town in Washington State. He still finds it hard to sleep at night without ear plugs.

  I really wanted to call my parents. Just to hear their voices. Maybe just to say goodbye. They lived on the valley side of the mountain. If the nuke did go off, the winds might push the radiation right past them. I could only hope so.

  I didn’t know where to look so I studied Peter’s hands. They were strong and capable. His fingernails were clipped and his cuticles neat. His fingers were long and slender, his hand big enough to have palmed my ass cheek like a peach. I’d liked the way his hands had felt on me. I wondered where else he might want to put his hands sometime.

  If there was a sometime after this. My mind skittered away from that thought. It was such a beautiful day. I really didn’t feel like dying with the smell of hot-baked dog shit in my nostrils.

  Suddenly he leaned back.

  “Okay,” he said and in those two syllables I could hear an enormous amount of relief and not a little satisfaction.

  “Okay?” I echoed.

  He looked at me and smiled. “We just saved the world Vetiver.”

  “Let’s not do this again any time soon,” I said. And then I threw my arms around him and hugged him so tightly I thought I might just meld with him like Brundlefly in The Fly.

  “You are amazing,” he said, and his words smelt like honey and black coffee and strong red wine. But the sensations running through my body as he responded to my hug by clasping me even tighter had nothing at all to do with my sense of smell. His touch was ... radioactive…and every nerve end felt like it was fizzing like a Fourth of July sparkler. When we eventually separated, it felt like I was being split in half and leaving part of my self behind. And I had actually, because that embrace had imprinted my scent on him the way cats mark their owners by rubbing their cheeks against them. And that had never happened with a man before. Never.

  I am in so much trouble, I thought. So, so much trouble.

  Eventually the N.E.S.T. people showed up and I met Berkeley Flynn, the expert who’d talked Eliades through disarming the device. He was a tall, gruff man who smelled of cinnamon gum and cigarettes.

  He looked at the bomb and grinned. “Good thing it wasn’t booby-trapped,” he said. “You would have been fucked.”

  “Good thing,” Eliades agreed calmly.

  In just a few minutes the place was swarming with people. N.E.S.T. had brought a medic and a portable decontamination unit where our clothes were taken away and we were hosed down in separate cubicles. Someone gave me a set of scrubs to wear and cheap disposable flip-flops.

  “I’m not going to get those clothes back, am I?” I asked one of the N.E.S
.T. agents. He shook his head.

  Damn. I’d been wearing one of my mom’s vintage rock T-shirts. It was going to be hard to explain how I’d lost it.

  Eventually, a young female agent who looked about eighteen showed up at my elbow. She was wearing a black tactical uniform that set off her unicorn hair. I wondered what undercover assignment she’d been on that required hair in multiple pastel colors as camouflage.

  “Ready to go Ms. Quinn?” she asked.

  I looked around but couldn’t see Eliades anywhere.

  Had he just walked away? After sharing such an intense moment with me. “Sure,” I said.

  The car she led me to looked more like a government car than the one PJ and Peter had been driving. We were halfway to my apartment before I realized I hadn’t given her my address.

  At this point, the agents of Triple-Ess probably had a dossier on me. I decided not to ask. Instead, I stuck to small talk.

  “Have you worked with the Department long?” I asked.

  “No ma’am,” she said.

  “Call me Vetiver,” I said.

  “Vetiver,” she repeated but she didn’t ask me where I’d gotten such an unusual name which usually what people is do when I introduce myself.

  It could have been a lot worse. My name, I mean. Sure, I was born and raised in Los Angeles where a name like “Vetiver” doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, but still, it’s not a name you hear every day. Sometimes someone will ask me what it means and when they do, I usually just smile mysteriously. Because the truth is, they’d be disappointed by the answer. Vetiver’s an Indian grass that’s used in making perfume, and that’s not nearly as sexy as “an herb to protect against witchcraft” or something, which it is not.

  Nor is the scent of vetiver anything particularly special either. It has an earthy smell, like the roots of an old oak tree. I often substitute it for patchouli oil in my concoctions because I hate the smell of patchouli oil. The thought of patchouli made me think of Kyle for the first time since I’d left my shop. Up there on that hillside trail I hadn’t thought about calling him. And I certainly hadn’t been thinking about him when Agent Eliades had his arms around me.