“And you want to help them to a snack.”
He sagged and looked disappointed. “No, Ray. I’m trying to save everyone from …” He stopped and looked around the room. The woman with the book had left, and no one had taken her place. In fact, the diner was only half as full as it was when I entered.
Wally sighed again. “Never mind. I had to try, okay? I owed you that. I know the Twenty Palace Society has brainwashed you, but I still think of you as the guy who stood between me and Rocky Downing at the edge of the basketball court. I know you have your heart in the right place, you just need to get your head there, too. Keep your eyes open, Ray. That’s all I’m saying. You can’t trust those society people. And you may decide soon that you want to stand between me and the bullies again.”
Wally swallowed the remaining two eggs, again without peeling them. Then he folded his soggy bacon, speared it with his fork, and gulped it down, too.
“Don’t get up,” he said as he stood. “I’m serious. You’re a great guy, but the truce only lasts while we’re here. I’m skipping town now anyway, so you should deal with the, uh, drapes. We’ll see each other again.” He laid a couple of bills on the table. It was more than enough to cover the check. “And I wish Curly-Head had waited on us. That was supposed to be part of the plan.”
Damn. He was leaving, and I hadn’t gotten anything truly useful out of him. “Wally, at least tell me how to stop the drapes.”
He snorted. “Is that how you’ve been doing it? Please please tell me what to do? Come on, I want to see some of your mad skills.”
I stood out of my chair and turned toward him. He stepped back, looking up at me in surprise and delight as though I was a plot twist in an exciting TV show. I reached into my pocket for my ghost knife.
But Wally had already placed his fingers in his mouth. He pulled out something small, wet, and red as blood. It was round like a Ping-Pong ball and gleamed like metal. Then it unfolded legs as long and slender as needles.
Wally tossed it over the counter into the kitchen. “Choices, choices,” he said and took one step backward. He passed through the wall like a phantom.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Damn. I was tempted to run out the front door after him, but a scream from the kitchen changed my mind. I vaulted over the counter.
The tile on the other side hadn’t been mopped recently. I landed on grease and nearly fell on my ass. I heard a clatter of shell on stone and a man’s cry of fear and disgust from the kitchen. I pushed through the door into the back.
It was a kitchen much like any restaurant kitchen. Everything was stainless steel, and the three Hispanic men at the stove were dressed in white with black hairnets. The tallest of them shrieked like a little girl and staggered back, away from the creature that was scuttling across the floor at him.
A short man snatched a huge pot of water off the stove and dropped it onto the creature. Boiling water splashed into the air, and the heavy pot clanged like a muffled bell.
Then it fell on its side. Steaming water rushed at me, and I jumped back too slowly. It sloshed through the fabric of my shoes, scalding my feet.
The little predator wasn’t affected. It charged at the man who’d dropped a pot on it and jumped onto his leg. Then it began to dig.
The man screamed and grabbed a ladle. He hit the predator with all his strength, trying to knock it away, but the ladle crumpled and the predator didn’t move an inch.
Blood splashed onto the floor and the predator burrowed deep into his flesh. The man fell, screaming full-throated now. His co-workers backed away in terror, screaming themselves.
I charged through the scalding water, grabbed the cook’s torn pants, and ripped them up to his thigh. The predator was visible as a bulge moving under his skin. I took my ghost knife and slashed through it.
My spell passed through the man’s flesh without damaging it, but the creature inside him was another matter. It exploded into a fireball as large as a basketball.
The cook, mercifully, fainted. I snatched a pot off a hook and filled it at the sink. Then I poured it over his burning clothes. The other cooks stared at me, dumbfounded. I said: “What do you think? Ambulance?” One of them blinked and lunged for a phone.
Wally’s waitress was standing at the edge of the kitchen, her body hunched in shock, her mouth hanging open. Behind her, also dressed in a waitress uniform, was Violet. “Vi, check your voice mail!”
I didn’t wait for a response. I ran out the back door into the parking lot, desperate to find Wally again.
I sprinted to the side of the building where Wally would have come through the wall, but there was no sign of him. I scanned the area, looking for a blob of a man in green. Nothing. The predator he’d thrown into the kitchen had distracted me, but not for more than a minute or so. I didn’t think he’d had enough time to get into a car and get away.
Unless he’d brought a driver. That would have been a smart play, but I didn’t believe for a moment that Wally had a friend in the whole world. Which would mean he was still on foot. Was he in one of the other stores, watching me? Was he walking through them, building after building, wall after wall, down the entire block in a place I couldn’t see him?
Did you know that some outsiders don’t use light to see? Now I’m sharing that gift, too, and it’s wild. Maybe he was watching me through a brick wall, waiting to see what I’d do. My skin tingled at the thought of it.
Violet came outside and edged toward me. She looked afraid of me. “Ray, what the hell is going on?”
“How well do you know the guy I was sitting with?”
Under other circumstances, she would have snapped at me for answering a question with another question. I wondered what my expression looked like. “Not at all,” she said. “He’s just a creep who’s been coming around lately.”
She was lying again, but I didn’t have time to press her on it. “All right. Listen: I think he’s still nearby, watching. I think he’s going to make sure he lost me before he goes back to wherever he’s staying. So I’m going to walk away, and you’re going to stand in the window of the café and watch for him. Understand? I’ll be back in five minutes or so.”
“What happened to my apartment, Ray?”
“I’ll explain what I know later, but I can’t let this guy get away.” She didn’t look convinced. “Vi, all you have to do is stand in the window and watch.”
I could see she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want anything to do with Wally King at all, and I didn’t blame her. But then she nodded and looked away from me. Thank God.
I ran to the sidewalk. If Wally had kept going in a straight line, he would have gone back toward Vi’s apartment and my car. After one quick look around, just in case I got lucky, I headed in the opposite direction.
I wasn’t sure how far I should go. I wanted Wally to have enough time to feel safe and hit the sidewalk again, but not so long that I couldn’t catch up to him. As long as he didn’t have a car stashed nearby … I didn’t want to think about that.
I’d planned to jog two blocks, but I’d only gone a block and a half before I felt too anxious and tense to continue. I hurried toward the Sugar Shaker, sweat prickling my back.
Violet met me at the door. “He was just here, not a minute ago,” she said. “The creep walked by the window and winked at me.” She shuddered a little and pointed down the street toward her apartment. “Then he took off that way and turned right at the corner. Ray—”
I ran off before she could finish that thought. Whatever she had to tell me, it would have to wait until after I’d found Wally. Found him and killed him.
“Ray!” Vi followed me onto the street. “Ray! You wait for me!”
“Vi, dammit, he’s going to hear you.”
“Don’t you tell me to shut up! You’re going to tell me what’s going on!” So much for being afraid of me.
“If Wally hears you, he’ll come back here and kill us both.”
“You don’t play that shit
with me! You’re going to tell me who this asshole is, or you’re going to regret it.”
We couldn’t stand out on the sidewalk hashing this out while Wally walked away. “Come on, and keep your voice down.”
I led her down the sidewalk. In the distance, I could see a column of black smoke stretching into the sky. It gave me a weird, jangly feeling to see the destruction that was following me around.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“Wally is from Seattle.”
“Duh.”
I remember this mood very well. She wanted me to talk to her, and she wanted to be nasty about it. If I let her turn it into a fight, I’d lose my shot at Wally. “Don’t, okay? Just let me finish. I knew Wally from school. We weren’t friends, but I made a couple of bullies leave him alone, so now he likes me. But we’re not friends,” I added quickly, because I could see she was about to talk.
“That’s not what he says.”
“Fuck him.” We reached the corner and I peeked around it. Wally was almost to the end of the block, walking with a strange, stiff-legged limp on the other side of the street. He wasn’t moving very fast, and I figured he’d be easy to catch on foot.
And I was ready. I was ready to kill him right there on the sidewalk, if I could. But not in front of Vi.
“He did something to a friend of mine,” I said. I didn’t want to explain further, but I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with that. “He hurt the oldest, best friend I had in this world. Understand? Nobody in my whole life ever meant as much to me as that friend did.”
She seemed taken aback, but I pressed on. “Wally …” Wally put a predator inside him. “Wally poisoned him. He gave him some kind of experimental drug that drove him crazy—”
“And he ate people. Right? That was all over the news.”
Of course. “I tried to save my friend …” From the Twenty Palace Society. “I tried to bring back the old him, the guy I knew. I protected him. But in the end, he wouldn’t stop, so …” I killed him.
No. I couldn’t say that. I didn’t believe in confession.
She didn’t need me to say it. Something in my voice had blunted her anger. “So Wally’s after you and you’re after him, and me and my daughter are caught in the middle.”
“At least you’re still alive,” I said. “So far.”
She turned her back on me and walked away. Finally. I peered back around the corner and saw Wally farther up the street, close to the intersection. Maybe I’d do something for Vi later, if I survived, but I couldn’t imagine what. I couldn’t think about her, not when Wally was right there.
I took out my ghost knife. Wally didn’t change his pace or turn around as I crossed the street and fell in behind him. Whatever X-ray vision he might have had, he still couldn’t see behind him. Good. If he was as full of predators as he said, I was going to need to ambush him.
And God, it felt so good to have that clarity. It was calming, almost, even as I felt my heartbeat quicken and my body grow warm. I was going to rush at this bastard, and I was finally going to kill him.
I walked faster. My spell would hit whatever I wanted it to hit, but I’d have to call it back between each attack, and the distance between us meant there would be a lot of time between hits. I had to get closer.
He crossed the street and slumped up the next block. Suddenly, all the doors of a 4Runner opened just as Wally came near it. Five guys piled out and stepped up to him, blocking the sidewalk. Wally didn’t seem startled by them at all.
I had been about to cross the street, but I ducked into the loading dock of an appliance store at the last moment. I peeked at them from behind a stack of pallets.
One of the men who’d stepped out of the 4Runner looked up and down the street warily. I recognized him immediately as the shortest and most muscular of Fidel’s cousins. Then I immediately recognized the others, including Fidel himself.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying at this distance, but I could see their body language. Fidel was smiling and making broad gestures with his hands—he was trying to look like a magnanimous gangster, the guy who asked for things in a friendly way while the gunmen around him made sure you knew what the correct answer was supposed to be.
Something Fidel said made Wally throw back his head and laugh. He didn’t seem nervous or intimidated at all.
They were standing in front of a hotel, and Wally waved for them to follow him up the walkway. They did, glancing around warily as they went.
“Hey! What are you doing there?” a voice behind me said.
The man who’d challenged me had a belly like a wine barrel, a wiry beard, and tiny round glasses. He’d just come out of the back door onto the loading dock. “Duh,” I said. “I’m spying on someone.”
He opened his mouth to respond, then shrugged and went back inside.
Wally, Fidel, and all his people were gone. I crossed the street, approaching the building slowly. There was an arched opening in the middle of the building and a driveway for cars to pull through. On one side of the arch was the lobby and reception area, and on the other was a diner.
The building was stucco, with tall sliding glass doors, and even from the street I could see how dirty it was. The little diner was mostly deserted, with a few scattered people-watchers on plastic furniture eating out of red plastic baskets. None of them looked like Fidel’s crew.
A sliding glass door opened somewhere above me, and I glanced up. The stoned guy from the alley last night stepped onto a balcony. It was the lowest floor and nearly at the north end of the building. I quickly turned my back.
I walked away from him until I heard the door close again, then risked a glance back and saw that the balcony was empty. Thank God for a criminal’s paranoia. I’d never have found them otherwise.
The windows and balconies alternated along the length of the building—window, balcony, balcony, window, window, balcony, balcony, window. That meant there were four units on each floor in opposing pairs that let the architects set their bathrooms back-to-back.
How to get there was the problem. I wasn’t keen on the idea of kicking the door down, and no one had left a ladder conveniently leaning against the building. I went into the office.
The man behind the desk was small, dark, and narrow-shouldered; he had a thin mustache like a movie star from the thirties. “How may I help you?” He had a slight British accent.
“I need a room.”
“Of course, sir. Do you have luggage?”
“In my car,” I said. “I’m looking for something specific. I need the lowest room you have, and I need it to be in the northeast corner of the building.”
“Ah. Are you concerned about feng shui?”
“No, I’m interested in the flow of energy in my living space.” He couldn’t quite suppress a smile, and I was happy to let him laugh at me. Being underestimated has saved my life more than once.
“We do have such a room.” He brought out the paperwork.
“Can I check it out first? For a few minutes alone? I’d like to meditate on it.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. I wasn’t that amusing. I paid for the room and promised to get my luggage after I checked out the flow. He gave me a plastic card to unlock the door.
I went up the stairs, gambling that if Fidel didn’t place a guy in the diner, he wouldn’t have one in the hall. And I was right. I paused at the door to Wally’s room and heard Fidel say that he couldn’t use that place anymore and they needed a new place. His voice was raised, as though he was arguing.
I didn’t listen for long. Getting caught with my ear at the door would be a bad thing. I walked quietly down the hall, feeling the sweat prickle on my back. The gold-painted walls and wine-colored carpet made me feel stifled, even if it was cooler inside than out.
I let myself into my room. It was two steps above utilitarian, with a floral print on the covers.
My hands started shaking. I clenched them into fists and pressed them against the dead fles
h over my heart to control them. Wally was just on the other side of that wall, and my chance to kill him was coming soon. I had no idea what he was capable of, aside from walking through walls and puking a tiny monster onto me. I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. It would have been nice to have a better plan than Move fast hit hard, but what the hell. I would give it a shot, and if I failed, so be it. I just hoped I wouldn’t see any more of his tricks, if he had them.
I went to the balcony and looked across at the adjacent one. I could jump it and be close enough to eavesdrop, but I knew someone would catch me.
The ground was about fifteen feet below. If I missed the jump, I’d land just outside the manager’s office. I think he’d find me much less amusing after that.
I hurried into the bathroom to splash water on my face, then grabbed a glass off the sink and returned to the main room.
By my standards, the room was comfortable, but the walls were not terribly thick. I laid the glass against the wall and pressed my ear to it.
I’d seen this work on TV, but it wasn’t doing me a bit of good here. The voices in the next room were too muffled to understand, although I could tell that the argument was over.
“Seriously, Ray? A glass against the wall?”
I pivoted in surprise, dropping the glass onto the carpet. Arne was standing just behind me. He sat on the edge of the bed. “If you want to spy on people, you ought to order the right tool for the job. On the Internet you can get a pretty good listening device for a hundred bucks.”
My heart was racing, but I did my best to act calm. “Sure, but can you drink iced tea out of it, too?”
“You got me there.”
“I guess you finished your job?”
He rubbed his hands on his thighs. “No. This is just a quiet moment while I wait for the stupid people to catch up, so I thought I’d check on other things. What happened with that big guy?”
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