by Crowe, Stan
So inviting were the thoughts that she almost missed seeing the Asian woman leaning casually against the driver’s door until she was within forty feet of it. She was pretty, slender and very petite—like a porcelain China doll come to life. Tight, cowboy-style leathers added an interesting edge to her otherwise fragile appearance, and Lindsay thought the woman actually wore the bizarre fashion quite well.
Lindsay began making her way toward the woman. Surely, she was only there relaxing for a minute, waiting for a ride. A simple “Please,” and the woman would apologize and move to another car while she waited. Still, the way she was resting on Clint’s car made the hairs on Lindsay’s neck stand up. It was as if the girl owned the car. Lindsay’s investigator instinct suggested caution. Lindsay agreed.
Instead of walking directly to the Corolla, she made as though to move past it, jangling her keys idly. The Asian girl shot a quick look her way, but Lindsay pretended not to see it. If it bothered the other woman, she didn’t show it, instead turning to stare intently at her phone and mash buttons with her thumbs. The phone rang, and she held it to her ears, speaking short, clipped sentences in what Lindsay was sure was Mandarin. Then the woman smiled a smile that chilled Lindsay’s blood; a moment later, she sprinted for the stairwell.
Lindsay watched her go, grateful for the unexpected good luck of not having to find a way to lure her away from the car. When the woman was out of sight, Lindsay slipped into the driver’s seat, and fixated on buckling her seat belt. Then she focused on putting the key in the ignition, and turning it. Reminding herself that she was in a car, and not a girlish fantasy, she shifted firmly into drive and eased out of the stall. It was time to get Clint. Most definitely time to get him.
Clint was lost. Or maybe dead. Or if he wasn’t dead, Lindsay would fix that as soon as she found him. He hadn’t appeared when she’d gone to collect him from the rendezvous spot. She’d searched the building to no avail, and then raced over to Graphitti only to find they had no record of him being there.
Had he lied to her again? Then, men were known to do that. Like her first college boyfriend, Tyler for instance. Cute guy, smart enough to not bore her—he had real potential. He swore he was going to give Lindsay that big, white wedding she’d dreamed of since she was six. That is, until he graduated and fled for a business school back east, the name of which Lindsay had promptly put out of her mind. She never heard from him again.
Mike, her second boyfriend, wasn’t any better. Only he didn’t have Tyler’s brains, and he was so committed to making his dad’s car wash a success that the few times he actually got around to spending time with Lindsay, they usually ended up talking about detailing sports cars. That could have been okay had Mike not turned every chat into a personal monologue, complete with tours through car magazines. His comments about the women modeling on the various cars didn’t help, either. Lindsay dumped him in a spectacular and fitting fashion, leaving him to be laughed at by a small crowd of customers, holding the very bucket she’d poured over his head. He looked better in foam anyway.
And now Clint. Once upon a time, Lindsay had pored over Clint’s letters, sighing every time he described the girl that was on his mind, and in his dreams. Then came the final letter. In it, Clint had built his dream woman up as a goddess on earth. More so, he’d built up Lindsay’s dream of love in an amazing way.
And then shattered it by saying, “And her name is Katherine.”
Lindsay refused to do her hair for a week, though she still showered out of habit. She spent most of the next six months in her room when she wasn’t in school. Unfortunately, her parents never quit pestering her about whether she needed to talk about it, and she found herself being dragged into stupid counseling sessions until the counselor finally informed Mom and Dad that no progress was likely to be made, and that Lindsay was going through “a phase.” After that, her parents would mutter and groan, but otherwise mostly left her alone about it. Mostly.
The few date invitations that came her way that year were either declined curtly, or ignored entirely. They stopped coming altogether not long after that.
Her family moved to a new town when her dad took a new job at a hospital across the bay. With the move, any attachment to Clint was banished from her mind. She still ignored requests for dates until the night after graduation when she agreed to double with one of her new besties from the new school. The date had been bland and unmemorable, but at least the guy had been decently polite, and reasonably handsome. That was all she could recall.
College was a fresh start, and Lindsay found herself willing to love again. A single semester showed her how immature she had been as a young teen. Eager to embrace her new and improved self, Lindsay had dated like a whirlwind all the way through her freshman year. That was how she had found Tyler—through a friend of a friend of a friend at a Greek bash. Within weeks, she had convinced herself that she would marry him. The rest was history.
And Clint was not a part of that history.
A honking horn jerked her out of her bad daydream, and she looked up, startled to realize that she had stopped at a light she had no memory of. It was an insistent, prodding shade of green now. Lindsay blushed, and then moved forward again, rolling across O’Farrell Street.
“Why am I going this way?” she wondered aloud. Then she remembered that she had decided to do a standard grid search pattern, inasmuch as San Francisco’s streets allowed. Maybe he got confused and lost—it would have been easy enough for him— when he unilaterally decided to go ahead without her.
She stopped at the light controlling the intersection of Stockton and Ellis and signaled for a left turn onto Market Street. A laugh bubbled out of her throat as she realized that barely two hours ago, she’d been racing through these very streets at a ridiculous pace. She was happy to still be alive, now that she thought about it. As she waited, she glanced around, almost begging for any glimpse of her prey. Instead, she got the consolation prize of downtown scenery. The old-fashioned, decorative lamps stood sentry at the street corners, guarding turreted, Victorian buildings behind them. A stream of people brought the sidewalks alive, while electric buses, delivery trucks, and compact cars ruled the streets. The odor of car exhaust mingled with restaurant food in an oddly pleasant way, and Lindsay was grateful to have found a reasonably-priced office in the area. Honestly, she always loved San Francisco’s vibrancy and flavor. To her right, she saw a trio of men fighting over something. Other pedestrians were giving the tussle a wide berth, calmly acting as though nothing were amiss. Something about one of the men caught her attention, and she peered closer.
“No…”
At a break in the pedestrian traffic, Lindsay caught sight of Clint for a moment, each arm restrained by a beefy Asian man. He was clearly struggling against them.
Amid insults and angry horns, Lindsay ignored the red light and edged quickly into the off-kilter intersection, cutting onto Ellis. She jerked to a stop in the red zone behind a beverage delivery truck, and stared as the drama unfolded before her. Moments later, a woman in western-style leathers burst around the corner, and stopped in front of Clint, and pointed imperiously at him.
“No way,” Lindsay whispered. “She covered that distance that fast?”
Clint shook his head at whatever the woman was saying, and lashed out at one of his captors with a foot, taking the man directly in the shin. The man grunted loudly, and dropped to a knee. The other man struck Clint across the face, and Lindsay saw blood appear on Clint’s nose. She gasped despite herself. But what to do? She should call her Uncle Tom. There were patrol cars in the area, certainly. They could be here in under a minute.
She pulled her cell phone from her bag, cringing at the thought of using it. Still, this was an emergency as far as she was concerned; her privacy could be set aside for this. She cursed quietly as she waited for the phone to power up. As soon as she could she mashed the speed dial number for the San Francisco PD dispatch office. It rang once, then twice. The moment the
operator picked up, Lindsay saw the little Asian woman seize Clint’s collar and drag him down toward her. She kissed him hard.
Lindsay dropped her phone, hardly aware of the confused operator saying “Hello?” on the other end. Without warning, the world turned red. A big, fat bull’s eye appeared in Lindsay’s mind, centered right on the little tramp’s head. How dare she try to steal her Clint!
Lindsay’s hand crushed the horn into the steering wheel, and passersby jumped or flinched. Clint looked up with a start, and the short woman and her minions did the same. The petite tart drew a pistol seemingly from nowhere, and Lindsay screamed in surprise, her foot accidentally ramming the accelerator. Clint mostly managed to leap aside as Lindsay plowed his former vehicle over the curb and into his assailants. The pistol flew as the Asian girl folded up and over the hood of the car and smacked into the windshield.
Lindsay looked over to Clint, and for a long moment, they stared in shock at one another.
Then the reality of striking three human beings with a car set in next. She suddenly felt sick, even knowing it was in self-defense. Well, sort of. An arm appeared over the hood, and one of the thugs staggered to his feet. Lindsay yelped again, and hit the gas, flinching at the hard bump as the car connected with the man a second time.
With an impressively smooth slide across the hood, Clint yanked the passenger door open and dove in. “GO, GO, GO!” The car lurched backward off the curb, and then raced away from yet another crowd.
TWELVE
Clint wondered if the day would have gone better if Jane had actually managed to put a bullet through his brain. His job prospects were now as good as dead. His love life was too much like the less pleasant scenes from Dante’s Inferno for him to look forward to either. Why not kill everything else?
The ride north across the Golden Gate was pleasantly quiet. It had to be. Every time Clint attempted to get some tunes, Sullivan’s hand was on the radio’s off switch before he could blink. He switched to drumming a tune on the dashboard and got a hot glare for his troubles. When he gazed out the window to take in the view, she switched to an inside lane, and then drove neck-and-neck with a moving van as traffic rolled north across the bridge.
“Hey, I said I’m sorry,” he said quietly as soon as they were over the bridge. “Heck, I even said we could go to Seattle.”
Lindsay said nothing.
“What? Do you want me to spell it all out? You’re the reason things are weird now. I really shouldn’t even be within a block of you, let alone riding alone in the same car. Though, it might work if we had a strait jacket your size…”
He watched her for a reaction. Nothing. That she was infected was almost certain. He learned early that any kind of contact was enough to initiate the infection. Even thick clothing hadn’t prevented it the several experiments he’d done. The last time he experimented with the Touch had involved heavy-duty rubber gloves, and he still nearly lost his arm. Contact with hair was as effective as touching skin. The only things that seemed to work were items not specifically connected to his person, and more than a few millimeters thick. Like his portfolio; and, thankfully, he managed to not lose it in the mess.
Carrying some sort of shield around seemed like a good idea after the first month, but it was impractical, a tad embarrassing, and very, very difficult to explain. He’d passed himself off as one of those weird “live-action-role-play” people for a while, but that excuse didn’t wash with family and close friends, and it didn’t fly at work, either. Thankfully, he was usually alone on his shift, and the only other person he was likely to come in contact with during a typical shift was Gary, the night watchman. Gary might have a thing for the color chartreuse, but he was hardly a woman.
So what was up with Sullivan? Her initial reaction—acting as if she had instant rigor mortis, dilated pupils, hyperventilating—happened every other time a woman had succumbed to the Touch. When she looked at him, during those first few moments after she grabbed his shoulder, that same, wild-eyed expression dominated her face. That was when he had run.
He’d reached a bus stop without any further incident. Still, the idea that Sullivan was now on his long-and-growing list of psychotic women likely to stalk him had him on his toes. He’d kept his back to a wall, and crouched on the sidewalk as he dialed the number for Graphitti’s human resources department; he wasn’t about to let her take him unawares.
The secretary picked up on the third ring, and Clint quickly explained that he’d run into some delays, and that he could be there in half an hour if they were still willing to let him interview. The polite voice asked him to hold for a minute (which felt like ten), and then returned to kindly say, “We’re sorry, sir, but the position has already been filled.” Yes, Graphitti was grateful he’d applied. Yes, they’d keep his paperwork on file for consideration if any future positions opened up that matched his skill set. Yes, they still welcomed his interest. They just didn’t want him in their employ.
At that point, Clint decided it was Santa Monica or bust. He’d make his way back to his hotel, give Molly a call, and convince her that he’d be safer out of town. It was a perfectly reasonable request. His friend Steve was a bachelor for life who, for reasons Clint could guess at, preferred to keep his business with the ladies beyond the walls of his castle. Apartment. Dump. Whatever. Let the man dream.
Steve had a pair of trained Dobermans, an alarm system, and lived in a gated complex with the standard “rent-a-cop” patrol. Sure, it wasn’t like being in the Witness Protection Program (but then, Clint didn’t feel he qualified as any kind of “witness”), but all in all, it was perfectly safe.
In the middle of his call to Molly, some guy had tapped him on the shoulder, and asked for directions to Union Square. Clint thought nothing of it until another man immediately stepped up on his other side, gripped his arm and shoved something hard into his back. The second man had whispered in his ear that it was best not to struggle, and told him to smile and act normal. Clint complied halfheartedly as the toughs hustled him across the street, one of them gargling something unintelligible into his cell phone. This was probably some weird, daylight mugging. They’d take him to a dark alley, demand his valuables, probably rough him up, and then leave him lying in pain. Nothing to look forward to, but he was certain he’d survive.
Enter Jane, stage left. For a second time in a day, Clint’s life flashed before his eyes. He wasn’t sure he really liked some of the replay, but part of him wished he had it on DVD so he could select the better scenes; that one with him, Greg Holt and four cans of rotten tuna fish was still a gut buster.
Jane’s ability to track Clint without obvious ties was most worrisome. Almost supernatural. Facts were facts, and the next fact he faced was her lips trying to shove his through his gums while her tongue simultaneously assaulted his clenched teeth. As expected, she reacted the same way she had every other time she’d succumbed to the Touch, each instance seeming to compound upon the first; she’d already left the deep end way behind.
And then the cavalry had arrived in a beat up Corolla. Who’d have thought?
Thankfully, the cavalry hadn’t turned around and killed him anyway. No, it had metaphorically tied him up, thrown him on the back of a horse, and silently galloped off into the sunset. Looking at Sullivan, Clint wondered just how deeply impacted she had been. Her driving was rigid, but he wasn’t sure whether that was normal for her. Despite her nervous face, she appeared to be hyper-focused on driving safely at the moment; Clint checked that worry from his list. He only wished she would talk to him a little and give him at least some sign of intelligent life lurking beneath the magical rage of Fey’s curse—some glimmer of hope that Clint would live to see the next sunrise, and be free to walk the streets instead of being chained in some dark basement awaiting Sullivan’s evil designs. But there was still nothing. He sighed heavily, and with a wide yawn turned to look back out his window. Might as well count the rivets in the side panels of that moving truck.
Whe
n his stomach bellowed its hunger, he jerked upright, startled to find he’d fallen asleep. A rush of panic enveloped him at the realization that he’d been unconscious next to romance’s equivalent of a psychopathic killer. A quick once-over revealed he was still dressed, was not bound or gagged, and (as best he could tell) not drugged. Sullivan looked the same as she had before he’d drifted off, and took no apparent notice of his return to consciousness. For reassurance, he took a deep breath, reveling in the Corolla’s familiar scent—as well as Sullivan’s perfume. Come to think about it, it was actually quite nice. He breathed deeply again for the effect, and then listened to the whir of the engine for a while. Yep. Sounded fine for freeway speeds. Feeling safe for the moment, Clint yawned and stretched. He hadn’t realized how drained the morning had left him; he vaguely recalled tallying fifteen rivets on the truck before the world fast-forwarded to the moment of his waking.
Blinking in the early afternoon sunlight, he gazed out his window to see if he could get his bearings. Outside, a row of roadside trees gave way to a vine-covered sound wall, and then resumed their sentry positions at the other end of the wall before being shaped into man-made, freeway landscaping. Eventually, even that fell behind them, allowing a view of wide fields crawling toward the eastern horizon. A fading section of suburbia sat calmly to his left, a gas station its last hurrah before it relinquished its hold on the terrain to agriculture’s caress. As an exit ramp became a memory, Clint spotted an interstate sign that read “North 5.”
He turned to Sullivan. “We’re on the Five? Geez, how long was I out?”
More silence. At least she was consistent. Consistent was becoming annoying. It was time to bring out the heavy guns.
“You know this is all your fault. Right, Self?”
The next instant, his seat belt was strangling him to the tune of screaming brakes. And then they were headed back up to sixty-five miles per hour.