by Jackson Ford
His watch—an ancient G-Shock he got at a yard sale in, where was it, Victorville?—reads 6:27. At that time on a weekend most people will still be sleeping—including, hopefully, his target.
I did it, Chuy.
He uses the same approach as before, sauntering up the walk towards the house, hands in his pockets. Just a kid coming back from a night on the town, a barista heading off to an early shift.
One more. One more task, and he gets everything he ever wanted. He finds he’s so excited that he can barely keep a thought in his head. He’s never been this close, not ever. All those dead-end towns, all those cold trails, the endless nights under highways and in fleabag motels, and he’s finally about to find out who he is. Why he can do what he does. And after that… after that he can write himself into history. He can become someone.
He’s just approaching the front door of the house, starting to eye his path around to the back, when it opens.
The woman standing there is alert, fully awake, dressed in jogging pants and an orange tank top. Her brown hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s in her late forties, and the sight of her is so startling that he stops cold, six feet from the front door.
She doesn’t notice him at first, putting a hand on the door frame to steady herself, stretching out her right leg. Getting ready for a morning run herself, maybe.
Jake freezes. It’s Saturday. The target and his wife should still be asleep—he and Chuy have spent plenty of time watching them, and she’s never gone for a run in the morning. Certainly not on a weekend.
Before he can act on the thought, she spots him. “Yes?”
He forces a smile onto his face, the same smile that got him beds on cold nights and spots on work crews. It worked then, and it had damn well better work now. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am. Is Javier here?”
A dark shadow crosses her face. “No. Sorry.”
“Do you know where I could find him? It’s important.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. “Sorry,” she says again. “I don’t know you.”
She starts to shut the door, and the drumbeat goes into double time. He takes a step towards her, unsure what he intends to do but knowing he has to do something.
She freezes, suddenly wary, the door half-closed. “I said, he’s not here.”
“Yeah, but if you could just—”
“You can try his office on Monday.”
“Mommy?”
A girl appears behind the woman’s legs. Batman pyjamas, bare feet, the same freckles as her mother. She eyes Jake, blinking away sleep.
With one last glance at him, the woman shuts the door in his face. There’s the click of a deadbolt snapping in the still air.
Jake looks around him as if expecting a neighbour to intervene, vouch for him. The stupid, dull feeling grows, threatening to overwhelm him. In that instant he has no idea what to do. Not a single one.
He starts towards the house, stops, starts again. Then he turns, moving unsteadily as if he’s drunk, and begins walking back towards his bike. Thoughts crash and collide in his head, shattering and splintering into jagged fragments.
They’d known about the wife and kid, of course they had, but he and Chuy had spent plenty of time observing their routine. They were never up this early on the weekend. And the way the woman had looked at him when he’d said her husband’s name…
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk, grinds the heel of his hand into his forehead. Turns back towards the house. Stops. Resumes the walk back to his bike.
No. No way. He has not come this far, worked this hard, to let it all end here. Not on the home stretch. He swings back towards the house a second time. He can do this. It’ll just take a little bit more effort, that’s all.
This time the door remains closed when he raps on it.
“Who is it?” The voice is muffled, coming from just behind the door, and it only stokes his anger. She must know who it is, she can see him through the peephole.
“Ma’am, I really need to talk to Javier.”
“And I said I don’t know you.” Annoyed now, her voice fracturing. “If you don’t go away I’m going to call the police.”
“Please don’t do that.” Fists clenching and unclenching. He makes himself smile, aware that he’s doing a very poor job. “It will only take a second.”
Silence. No, not quite. Muffled footsteps, heading away from the door. And was that the almost inaudible beep of a cellphone?
He’s not supposed to touch anyone else. He doesn’t want to. His three targets, including Javier, deserve to die—Chuy told him what they had done, showed him all the evidence he had. Jake is doing this because Chuy has promised to dig into his past, which he has proved he can do—but he, Jake, would never have agreed to kill anybody unless there was a very good reason for it. He would never use his Gift like that.
None of which stops him from focusing on the lock, reaching inside it, snapping it open.
He opens the door. The woman is just inside, a phone held tight in her grip. Stunned surprise gives way to fury. “What are you doing? Get away!”
He steps into the house. Her eyes are huge, panicked. She tries to scramble away, slipping to the floor, reaching up to the slim table that runs along the wall to Jake’s left. She’s going for a set of keys nestled in a small copper bowl, with the distinctive black cylinder of pepper spray attached to the ring.
Without thinking, Jake snags them with his mind, zipping them into his outstretched hand. She goes still, hand frozen in mid-air, watching him like one might watch a cobra with a flared hood. Her eyes—enormous, disbelieving, confused—meet his.
The anger takes him by surprise, roaring up from a dark pit inside him. She made him do it. She made him. If she’d just told him where Javier was, he wouldn’t have had to show her.
“You’re not Daddy,” says the little girl in the Batman pyjamas, huddled at the foot of the stairs.
The wife throws herself at him. She might not understand what he is or what he can do, but her child is enough to get her on the attack. She claws at his face, his neck, shoving him back against the wall and opening up a gash in his cheek with a nail. He growls in surprise, backhands her, sending her sprawling. The girl screams.
For a second time, he almost turns and runs. This isn’t him. He doesn’t threaten, doesn’t hurt people. He’s only killing because of a few very specific reasons. And yet, what does it matter? They know who he is now. He’s shown them his Gift. Which means he has even more reason to talk to them; they have to tell him where Javier is, and he has to make them understand that they can’t tell anybody about what they saw. Ever. He can’t run—running would mean that he’s failed.
Regret and anger and every other feeling rocketing around his mind are suddenly drowned by a flood of cold logic. This is fine. He’ll make it work.
The smile he thinks of as friendly and welcoming slips onto his face again. He reaches behind him with his mind and gently closes the door.
NINETEEN
Teagan
Three quarters left.
Hands shaking, I dial Reggie’s cell—another number I have etched on my brain. The voice on the other end this time is Hispanic, annoyed, and I hang up without even bothering to say wrong number.
I get my money back, dial Carlos’s number. That I definitely have memorised—God knows, I’ve called it plenty of times. But it rings and rings before going to voicemail, a message in Carlos’s rapid-fire Mexican-accented Spanish.
The phone spits back my two quarters, and I try Reggie again, dialling slowly. This time not only do I get a wrong number—a terse, automated, “If you wish to make a claim, our office hours are between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.”—but the phone only spits back one quarter.
I take three very deep breaths, head down, eyes closed. If it pulls that trick again, I won’t have enough to make another call.
Very slowly, I dial her number a third time.
And Reggie answers. “Hello?”
“Reg
gie!” I stand bolt upright, ignoring the queasy roll-over in my guts. “I’m in Skid Row. I got mugged or something, and—”
“Teagan?”
“—two guys with a taser, and then something happened with my PK, and I lost my phone, and—”
“Stop talking.” She’s in a car—engines and traffic hum in the background. “We’ve been compromised. Do not go back to the office.”
“Yeah, I know. I already tried calling. What the fuck are the cops doing there? Are you OK?”
Paul’s voice reaches me, the words inaudible. He must be driving.
“Skid Row?” Reggie asks.
“Yeah.”
“Go to Jojo’s Diner on Main. We’ll be there soon.” She hangs up before I can say anything else.
Jojo’s. Main. The exact opposite direction from where I came, past Winston Street. I take another three deep breaths then set out, squinting against the glaring sun. The irony is, despite everything else being stolen, I still have a pair of sunglasses; they’re just in a completely different part of the city.
This is turning out to be a fun morning.
I hate Jojo’s on sight. It’s the kind of place where the menu has a chequered border and the logo is in a half-assed 1950s font and the burger description has words like “mouth-watering” and “world-famous” in it. The kind that takes zero imagination or skill to run. On the few times Mom and Dad did take us out to eat back in Wyoming, it was usually to a place called the Rocket, which was exactly like Jojo’s, only without the level of class and refinement. It’s a place I would love to go back to, so I could burn it down.
Not that I care right now, because Jojo’s has food. So despite the fact that it smells of grease and despair, and despite the waitress giving me a skeevy look as I walk in, I sit myself down—somehow—and order the biggest breakfast on the menu, along with a massive mug of refillable coffee. Then I sit for a while, eyes closed, trying not to start bleeding out of my ears. Also trying not to think about the clock above the bar, which is probably the nicest thing in the place: a big, antique number with the little hand just past the nine.
The breakfast dropped in front of me is hot, greasy and tastes like it was cooked in sweat from Rick Ross’s ass crack. Every bite probably takes a month off my life. But by the time I’m on my second cup of coffee, I’m feeling a tiny bit more human.
Except, I’m not really human, am I?
The waitress refills my coffee. There are liver spots on her fingers, a bracelet tan on her wrist. We look the same. Have the same shape and skin tone. But I’m not like her.
This isn’t a completely new thought. I know I’m different. But up until this morning it was a difference with limits. I thought I’d reached the boundaries of my ability, and that meant I never had to work at it. Not really.
I never had to think about my PK. It was just a thing I did, and it left me free to fill up my brain with… well, human shit. People and food and restaurants and the Batmobile and rap and maybe getting a dog and new movies and just being me.
The most I’ve ever pushed my ability was during that fake kidnapping in Texas. Age nineteen. And the conclusion was that was about as powerful as I was going to get. But that isn’t true. It can’t be true. Not only is there someone out there like me, who can do shit with their PK that I could never have dreamed of, but I just did something with my PK that I could never have dreamed of.
Over the past few years, without even realising it, I’ve increased the limits of my power. Under certain circumstances—like when my body is injecting a huge whack of adrenaline and fight-or-flight chemicals into my body—I can push myself further. Like a normal woman being able to lift a car off her son.
What if I could control what I just did? Stop it from draining me the way it did this morning? What if I could enhance it?
There’s a stovetop range behind the counter, eight feet away. My PK is still very, very fuzzy, and I only just manage to reach out and wrap my mind around the metal frame. I don’t try to lift it, and it doesn’t feel like I could… but that isn’t true, isn’t it? Under the right circumstances, I could rip that range right out of the wall.
Steven Chase. Whoever killed him has some of this figured out already—how else would they have been able to bend the rebar like that? There’s a lot I don’t know here, but finding whoever did this, talking to them, is a good start.
Of course I have another motivation to find them. I am pissed.
It’s one thing to mess with me. It’s another to mess with my team. I might not get along with people like Annie and Paul a lot of the time, but—along with Reggie and Carlos—they are the closest thing to family I have.
Right now I have a slightly more pressing problem. I’ve been here for over an hour, and Reggie hasn’t shown up yet. How the hell am I going to pay?
I’m on my third cup of coffee. The waitress is giving me even more pointed looks than usual. I have twenty-five cents to my name, which in Los Angeles will buy me around an eighth of a cup of a coffee, even in this shithole. Which means I have to come up with a solution. It’d be a real shame to survive being kidnapped only to get arrested because I couldn’t pay for breakfast.
I’m just contemplating ordering a fourth cup of coffee to stall for time when the door opens and Reggie rolls in. Paul is right behind her, looking like the entire world is taking a personal dump on him.
“Hey, Regina.” The waitress strides over, bending down to embrace Reggie. I blink in astonishment.
Reggie nudges the waitress with her good arm. “Sorry I ain’t been in too long.”
“’S all good. How’s Moira doing?”
Moira? Tanner was here? The thought of her sitting in this café, eating crappy food, is weird as hell.
The waitress sees where Paul is going, frowns. “Y’all with her?”
“Yeah,” I say loudly. “They’re with me.”
The frown mutates into a smile. “I’ll get some more coffee,” she says, bustling away. “Sorry,” she says, half turning back to Reggie. “You’re tea, right?”
“Chamomile, darling. Thank you.”
“Not gonna help you with the tip,” I mutter.
Paul puts his elbows on the table, wrapping his hands around the back of his neck. “They raided the office,” he says.
“Yeah, I got that. Why?”
Reggie scoots up. “Honey, you look like you slept in a woodpile.”
“Gee, thanks. Glad we had this talk. I feel so much better now.”
“She’s not kidding. You got dirt on your…” Paul waves a hand around his face.
“No shi—” Which is when I actually catch a glimpse of myself in the metal salt shaker, something I’d been too zonked to notice before. I don’t just have some dirt; I have a massive streak of it, running from forehead to cheekbone. No wonder the waitress was giving me the stink-eye.
“What happened?” Reggie asks.
I’m about to tell them the truth, when I stop.
If they knew what I could do with my PK… wouldn’t that give them even more of a reason not to trust me? Lifting a dumpster and strangling someone with a piece of rebar must take the same amount of energy, or close to it. I can’t afford to have them turn on me. Not right now.
I don’t completely lie. I tell them about the attack, the taser. That I managed to chase them away. It doesn’t feel good, lying to them, but I don’t see what other choice I have.
“And the men who attacked you,” Reggie says. She looks both sick and angry at the same time. “Where are they?
“Gone.”
“They saw you,” Paul says hotly. “You know how Tanner feels about that.”
“Didn’t exactly get a choice,” I say, all but snarling the words. “If I didn’t use my PK, they would have—”
“Please don’t call it that. I’ve told you before, in Cantonese, it means—”
“Yeah, don’t care. Anyway, look, it doesn’t matter. We can worry about me later. What the hell happened at the office?”
/>
“We don’t know,” Paul says.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Why are there cops answering our phones?”
“Because they’ve got an arrest warrant out for you, Annie and Carlos.”
“What? Why?”
“Steven Chase.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“I only found out because the police logged the warrant on their system,” Reggie says.
I pick up the salt shaker, turning it in my hands, trying to keep my voice level. “I had nothing to do with it. Nobody had anything to do with it.”
The events of the night before run through my head, every moment of the operation, from start to terminal-velocity finish. “It must have been the security guards.” I swallow, fighting with my dry mouth. “And there was this lawyer. At least, I think he was a lawyer. We ran into him in the elevator. Would they have told the cops about us?”
“Of course they would have,” Reggie says. “But I don’t think that’s it. They’d have a description, but that wouldn’t be enough. Police these days don’t like relying on eyewitnesses. And Carlos never went inside.”
“So what, then? You’re saying we were caught on camera somewhere?”
“Maybe.”
“I thought you killed all the cameras. On every floor we—”
“I did.”
“You must have missed one. It’s the only explanation.”
“I didn’t miss any,” she says, a dangerous edge to her voice. “It had to have been a camera outside the building. Paul wasn’t on the warrant, so my guess is he was out of view.”
“Hang on. Why would the cops raid Paul’s Boutique? Even if they got us on camera’—”
“Really?” says Paul. “You’re still calling it that? Even now?”
“The fucking office, whatever. How did the cops know about China Shop?”
“If they found out who Annie was, or even you and Carlos, they’d be able to dig up the records. They’d see you worked for a company called China Shop. We do have tax returns, after all.”
A chill settles on me then. “They don’t… I mean, do the cops know who we are? Like, what we do?”