She rolled her eyes heavenward but also smiled.
Under her duster Karina was wearing a matching blue dress with a sweetheart neckline. Under the dress, I assumed, she wore the mother of all corsets, because she had a small waist but the most formidable pair of breasts I’d ever seen. Double F’s, maybe. Be that as it may, she reached into the architectural support and pulled out a small velvet clasp bag. She opened it and gave us a look at a wad of twenty-buck bills, then delicately reinserted the bag into her décolletage.
Rasmussen took a cardboard shoebox from the shelf under the counter. With a flourish he opened it and set it down in front of Madame Karina. I craned my neck and saw two yellow-green orbs gleaming on a bed of cotton batting. She picked one up and ran a manicured finger over the surface. She held it in front of the light from the gooseneck lamp and peered at it like a farmwife candling an egg, then did the same with the second orb.
“Nice,” she said, “nice and real. I hear there are bad ones on the market now.”
“You gotta be careful, yeah,” Rasmussen said. “This guy wouldn’t scam us. He knows what I’d do to him if he tried.”
Karina grinned and looked my way. “You’ve got a good boyfriend there,” she said. “But if you get tired of him, remember my offer.” She paused, and I felt the touch of an SPP. “I bet you like being tamed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I get enough of that at home.”
She returned the orb to the shoebox and closed it. The velvet bag made a reappearance. When she counted the bills out onto the counter, Dave scooped them up and slipped them into his jeans pocket. Madame Karina handed the box to one of her escorts to carry. In procession, she and the two chauffeur-goons marched out of the store. I waited till they’d driven away, then ditched the bubble gum. My jaws were tired.
Ari and Jan strode out of the back room.
“Well done,” Ari said to Rasmussen.
“Very well done,” Jan chimed in. “I’ll give the liaison captain a good report.”
“Well, thank you, sir,” Rasmussen said.
I got the impression that Jan was hoping to push the job of TWIXT observer in SanFran onto Rasmussen. From the way Ari swallowed a smile, I guessed he was thinking something similar. Dave’s setup as Wagner’s nephew would work, I figured, especially since Mitch was too afraid of TWIXT to refuse to cooperate.
“I know where Ash gets her talents,” I said. “Her mom has at least one. It’s no wonder she’s the richest madam in town. One look, and she knows just what her customers want. Better than they do themselves, I bet.”
Both Rasmussen and Hendriks let their faces drift into a misty-eyed distant expression, as if perhaps they were wondering how much one of her girls would cost. Ari cleared his throat. Loudly.
“Time for the next step,” Ari said. “We’ve got to get out to the gate point, but we’ll be back once it’s good and dark to pick up the goon. See if you can get more ice for Wagner’s face while we’re gone.”
“Will do, sir,” Rasmussen said.
Before any of us left the store, I ditched the slutty top and put on my sensible blue-and-white blouse again. I also ran scans. No one who meant us harm lingered in the neighborhood except, of course, for the goon trussed like a turkey in the back room. Madame Karina was heading over Nob Hill toward Union Street. When Jan brought the car around, Ari and I piled in for the drive out to Sutro Heights, version 3.0. In a head-to-head race, Madame Karina’s car would have beaten Jan’s rattletrap by a mile, but she needed to give the orbs to the Axeman. For all we knew, he’d have some other means of reaching the statue and its nonfunctional gate.
“I hope,” Ari said, “that he’s planning to go through to Six today. I’m not looking forward to hiding in the underbrush overnight.”
“I bet she makes him go whether he wants to or not,” I said. “And he probably does want. The vibes I picked up from her? Fierce.”
During the drive through the sand dunes of the Sunset district, Ari got out his communicator and made a number of calls. I found them mostly cryptic because he used the TWIXT code, a lot of numbers held together with fragments of English, statements like: “Seventy four to three one, we have a ninety-nine go.” I did manage to figure out that someone would be meeting us out on Sutro Heights. When we reached the narrow dirt road that would have been the wide and well-paved Point Lobos Avenue back home, we continued past the destroyed mansion and its grounds rather than parking nearby. The car plunged downhill so sharply that I nearly shrieked. We rattled, shook, and jounced all the way down the steep, bone-rattling road to the beach and another narrow road that ran past the remains of the Sutro Baths.
Jan parked behind a straggling clump of half-grown cypress trees, bent double by the constant wind. I staggered out of the car, resisted the impulse to kiss the solid if sandy ground beneath my feet, and shivered in a cool wind that promised fog on the way. The ocean rumbled at low tide about twenty yards to the west. To the east loomed the weed-covered cliffs that led up to a stone retaining wall, as thick and high as any castle’s. It held the dirt of the actual gardens in place. Some ten yards away from our impromptu parking spot a wooden door into the cliff stood open. A red-haired man I recognized stepped out and beckoned to us.
He was about four feet tall, a classic little person, as those people suffering from hereditary dwarfism prefer to be called, and come to think of it, the colony on Three probably would dislike being told they were “suffering,” too. They’d worked out a halfway decent scavengers’ life on the edge of San Fran, better in some ways than the so-called normal people had down in the slums. This particular guy, James Sheaffer, had helped us trap a criminal before. When we joined him, he told us that he and his commune were ready to do so again.
“Come in,” he said to Ari. “The others are already here. It was awfully good of Agent Spare to bring us a load of blankets, I must say. It gets chilly out here in the winter.”
“It’s chilly enough now,” I said.
Sheaffer laughed and agreed. We joined him in an open space cut out of the cliff side and reinforced with hunks of driftwood. Ahead, a long, rough flight of stairs led up toward the surface. I groaned. Once before I’d gone down those stairs, hard enough on my knees, but going up was going to be a lot worse.
“You’re got to start working out,” Ari remarked.
“Oh, shut up!”
I managed to struggle and pant my way up with only two rest breaks. The stairs debouched on the other side of the retaining wall, which sat on the lowest of several terraces. We came out onto a path between the rows of a vegetable garden. Marble fragments of statuary marked out its perimeter—a white hand by the carrots, a head of Apollo at the end of the spinach row. While I caught my breath, Ari talked into his communicator. I could just hear Spare14’s familiar voice answering him.
Ari led us north by a path that skirted the retaining wall until we reached a stand of trees, all second-growth, the remains of Sutro’s elegant plantings, now swallowed by underbrush and weeds. We made our way through on a narrow path that led up from terrace to terrace until we reached a small clearing. Spare14 stood waiting for us with Willa Danvers-Jones, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her usual tatters, though she carried her shopping bag of orbs. Next to Willa stood a very tall person in dark slacks, a blue shirt, and a flak jacket; as her main fashion accessory, she carried a rifle with a sniper scope. She had steel-gray hair cut short, ice-blue eyes, and high Russian cheekbones. Jan introduced her as the liaison captain for SanFran, Anna Kerenskya.
“You are our police psychic, yes?” she said to me.
“Yes,” I said. “Nola O’Grady, on loan from the Agency on Four.”
“Good. We need you to scan the area. Warn of approaching vehicles.”
I nearly saluted but caught myself in time. A quick scan showed me no vehicles moving in the vicinity. When I told Kerenskya this, she nodded in my direction and went to huddle with Ari, Jan, and Spare14. I turned to Willa.
“Why the crowd?” I said.
“No one’s sure how many goons the Axeman will bring with him,” Willa said. “I’m here to bring the perps back to One as soon as they’re cuffed.”
“This gate never led there, did it?”
“No, but there’s one that does not all that far from here. The sooner we can hustle Axe Moore off this level, the sooner we can stop worrying about him getting away from us. HQ was furious over that last escape of his.”
While she’d been waiting for the rest of us to arrive, Kerenskya had consulted with Sheaffer about the terrain around the statue. We all trooped farther uphill toward Diana and her leaping hound. Since the statue stood in the midst of open ground, positioning the gunmen presented problems. She set Spare14 off to the north in thick cover, and Jan to the south, ditto. When she turned to Ari, he spoke to her in Russian. They argued briefly, but I could tell from his shrug that she won.
“Stay alert,” he said to me. “You won’t have a bodyguard during the arrest.” He turned and stalked off southward, gun in hand, to disappear into the trees somewhere west of Jan’s position. Kerenskya strode over to Willa and me.
“Move farther downhill,” Kerenskya said. “See the trees by the broken plinth?”
We looked; we saw.
“You should be safe there, out of the line of fire if something goes wrong. O’Grady, run scan now.”
I did and felt the Axeman’s presence, moving fast on Geary Street in our direction. I zeroed in with an SM:P.
“He’s on his way,” I said. “Three people with him, all men, one driving the vehicle.”
“Very good. Now go. Hide.” She started to walk off, then turned to look back with a smile. “Agent Nathan? His Russian is very good. Is surprising.”
I smiled in answer, and she jogged off to disappear into the ruins of the old mansion, which lay among high grass and weeds uphill and eastward from the statue. Willa and I followed orders and hurried to the thicket one terrace down, which I hoped was out of the reach of a pistol shot. We made our way into the trees through a weed patch, where a tall plant with tiny purple flowers grew tangled with the feathery leaves of wild fennel, stinking of licorice. In the shade of the thicket only a few low weeds grew.
“I hope,” Willa said, “that there isn’t any poison oak in here.”
“Me, too,” I said. “But I bet the commune gets rid of it whenever they find it. I can sense children in the tunnels. They won’t want them getting sick.”
Still, I examined my patch of ground carefully before I knelt down. Willa did the same and settled her shopping bag beside her. By peering between the trees we could just see the Diana statue. I hoped that neither the Axeman nor his goons would look our way, though we certainly wouldn’t be visible to someone glancing casually in our direction. I ran another scan: the Axeman and his crew had reached the dirt path that would have been 25th Avenue back home.
“Almost here,” I murmured.
I sent my mind out and read scans of the aura field. The closer that the Axeman came, the more danger I sensed. He and his companions would be armed, maybe heavily so. Would they drop their weapons and accept arrest, or was there going to be a shoot-out? The scans could only give me possibilities, not answers. I began to gather Qi and wind it, ready for an ensorcellment if need be.
In a few minutes we heard a car rattling and coughing its way toward the site. I felt relieved that Madame Karina and her elegant vehicle had stayed away—for our sake, not hers. I suspected that she was a lot more dangerous than the Axeman. I ran an SM: Location and sensed that the car was stopping up at the eastern edge of the grounds. Three men got out. The Axeman I could recognize; he was a big bear of a man with thinning tufts of curly gray hair and a wispy beard. I’d never seen the others before. I could hear with my physical ears that the car started up again. Instead of heading back toward town, however, it drove around the edge of the grounds to Point Lobos and down. It stopped on the other side of the trees just about level with our position.
“Damn!” Willa murmured.
I nodded and readied the Qi I held. We heard no creak of a car door opening, heard no footsteps, either, but I stayed on the alert. I looked uphill toward the Diana statue and saw the Axeman and a skinny Cal-African man walking clear of the trees. Even at my distance I could sense their anger, a grim growling resentment. Behind them came a paunchy white guy with a drawn gun, herding them downhill. Him, I read as smug. The Axeman apparently was reluctant to go through the gate, and from what I knew, he had the right idea. I could guess that Madame Karina had sent a little motivation along with him. The Axeman reached into his jacket and pulled out one of the yellow-green orbs, then turned to speak to the gunman. The gunman gestured at the statue with his gun. The Axeman took two steps toward Diana and paused to argue.
Off to the side of my thicket, I heard the sound I’d been dreading. The car door opened, footsteps crunched on the road, came closer, swished through the tall weeds. I counted his footsteps, waited as he came closer, closer—I stood up and threw just as he appeared between two trees.
The sphere of Qi hit him full in the face with a flash of silver light. He made a muffled noise that amounted to about a third of a scream and went down. The gun he’d been holding dropped from his hand. Willa leaped to her feet and darted over to snatch it from the ground. The ensorcelled goon giggled and lifted a hand to waggle his forefinger in her direction as if to say “no no no.” She stood staring at him.
“Get down!” I snapped and did so myself.
She dropped to her knees just as a bullet zipped in our direction.
“Oh, shit!” She sat down and clutched her bag of orbs to her chest.
I took this statement as meaning she was okay. The ensorcelled goon began humming a little tune and rocking from side to side. I turned and looked uphill. By shooting at us, the gunman had distracted himself from the real danger. The Cal-African guy pounced and knocked him down. They wrestled, yelling and swearing, but the gunman kept the pistol clutched in one hand. The Axeman hovered over them, looking for an opportunity to grab the weapon.
“Police!” Kerenskya’s voice boomed out. “Drop your weapons!” She fired the rifle into the ground. “Are being under arrest!”
The TWIXT men burst out of cover, guns in hand. The Cal-African guy twisted free and scrambled up. The pistol went flying onto the ground. When the gunman dove for it, the Cal-African guy grabbed him by both arms and hurled him against the statue. The Axeman threw the orb. Yellow-green smoke billowed into a perfect sphere. For a moment the sphere stayed whole. I heard a scream, a drawn-out horrible scream of terror that seemed to live apart from the screamer. It wailed in agony, then faded as the fog wind grabbed and tore the smoke away. Without thinking, I got to my feet for a better look. The Cal-African guy and the Axeman were both standing with their hands high in the air. The TWIXT team came running to surround them. The gunman had vanished.
“He’s gone,” I whispered.
“Way gone,” Willa said. “The orb opened something, all right. Too bad the bridge was broken, like your invisible friend told us.” She shuddered. “Guess he had time to realize what was happening to him. I’ll hear that scream in my nightmares for a long time.”
“Me, too.” My stomach clenched. “A real long time.”
CHAPTER 16
GUN IN HAND, Ari came running down the hill. I left the shelter of the trees and met him just outside the thicket. He skidded to a stop and smiled at me in profound relief.
“That shot from above missed,” I said.
“But I saw a flash of light down here,” he said. “Who fired at you?”
“No one.” I turned and pointed into the thicket. “I never gave him the chance.”
Ari took a few steps forward just as Willa emerged.
“I put the gun we took from him back down,” she said to Ari. “Fingerprints, you know.”
“Yes.” Ari sighed with a puff of breath. “I’m glad to see I worried for nothing.”
&nb
sp; I followed Ari as he pushed weeds aside and made his way into the thicket. The ensorcelled goon was still singing and rocking. The gun lay on the ground some ten feet to the goon’s right. Now that I had a moment to think, I recognized him.
“That’s one of Madame Karina’s bodyguards,” I said. “Do we dare take him into custody?”
“Probably not. Hendriks told me that she pays the chief a lot of protection money.” Ari frowned at the man at the ground. “Will he remember what happened?”
“No.”
“Fine. We’ll put him back into his car and leave him.”
Ari picked up the gun, emptied out the bullets, and put them into his shirt pocket. “Just in case and all that. Here, let’s see if I can get him to his feet.”
Ari could and did with a little help from me. We walked him out to the rattletrap of a car and poured him into the front seat, where he began to punctuate his songs with car noises of the vroom-vroom kind. Ari wiped the gun clean of fingerprints on his shirt, then tossed it in after him. We returned to Willa, and the three of us walked back up the hill to the Diana statue and the TWIXT team. When I started to shiver, I looked up and saw tendrils of gray sea fog driving the yellow clouds of dust inland.
“You should have worn a jacket,” Ari said.
“Gosh, gee, thanks,” I said. “I never would have thought of that myself.”
He ignored the remark.
The Axeman and the Cal-African guy sat, already cuffed, on the ground. Kerenskya and Spare14 were talking on their respective communicators while Jan stood guard over the prisoners. When I ran an SPP on the two perps, I found them subdued, to use the Agency’s official term, though scared half to death would be more accurate. They’d heard the scream, too. When he noticed me studying him, the Cal-African guy held my gaze.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know what would happen. That scream! I mean, shit, lady! I didn’t mean to do that. I thought we’d just bounce him somewhere else so we could make a run for it.”
Love on the Run Page 29