Fury and the Power

by Farris, John

  "Good night, baby duck."

  "Love you, Frank."

  "Love you too."

  Chapter 19

  SAN FRANCISCO

  OCTOBER 16

  11:00 A.M. PDT

  Megan Pardo's uncle and aunt lived on Russian Hill, half a block from that famous part of Lombard Street that made its brick-paved, serpentine way downhill between Hyde and Leavenworth. Eden Waring and Chauncey McLain left the house where they had spent the night and caught the Powell-Hyde cable car for the precipitous drop down the bay side of Russian Hill to the end of the line.

  It had been gray-blue skies and pale sun atop Russian Hill; halfway down there was fog and the sun disappeared.

  When they left the car at the Hyde turntable, visibility was fifty feet. Car and truck fog lights tinted the gloom a hellish saffron shade; fuming neon faded away along the street. The temperature here on Frisco Bay was ten degrees cooler—in the high fifties—than it had been a few minutes ago.

  Eden was wearing the red sweater and Masai headband, articles of identification for Mr. Edmund Ruddy, Betts's former flame, about whom Danny Cheng, the Information Man, had provided Eden the basics of his life. Ruddy had attended USF when Betts was a student there, later worked for a Bay Area corporation. Twenty-three years and out the door, early retirement and his pension. For the past two years he had lived in a duplex condo in an East Bay community but was seldom around, according to the neighbors. A lifelong bachelor, he spent a great deal of time traveling in his Winnebago and indulging a passion for fly-fishing. According to the photo on his driver's license, he looked like ten other men you could expect to run into during any week of the year. On the nerdy side, with gray bangs and a shaggy gray mustache (nerdy men never seemed to realize that the mustaches they grew only emphasized their nerdiness). He wore glasses with heavy black rims. Those, at least, were making a comeback within the literary/intellectual set. He was fifty-six, a year older than Betts. There seemed to be nothing about Edmund Ruddy that would have sustained Betts's (secret) interest in him all these years. But you just never could tell, Eden thought, looking around in the soup. Her teeth chattered; her face felt clammy. She hadn't been able to manage breakfast, and ice seemed to be forming inside the hollow of her stomach.

  "I c-could have done without this," she said, tucking Tom Sherard's lion's-head walking stick under her right arm.

  "Which way to Ghirardelli Square?" Chauncey asked with a canary-like tilt of her pert blond head.

  "Opposite direction from the Cannery, which is over there," Eden said, pointing. "I think Ghirardelli's only a block or two."

  Traffic was moderately heavy, mostly delivery trucks and vans. There were not many tourists about on this Wednesday morning. Only half a dozen people had left the cable car with them: a young Chinese couple who had been waiting at their stop on Russian Hill, and a family of four. All of them, including a girl who looked to be about eight years old, had New York accents and that aggressive chumminess of family groups who communicate largely through bickering.

  The New Yorkers headed for the Cannery, large old buildings converted in the sixties to a mall and a museum. The Chinese couple looked around as if they were lost. She was wearing a purple breakfast orchid pinned to the lapel of her pinstriped suit jacket. They talked in low voices—their language—sorting out a mild disagreement with the politesse of newlyweds on a new and still precarious level of intimacy. Eden and Chauncey walked ahead of them to Ghirardelli Square.

  There was something invigorating about a good fog. Waterside chill, droplets of moisture on Eden's hair, the tips of her eyelashes. Pigeons materializing in glum nearly motionless groups as the Square opened up to them. Seagulls glided at the upper limits of visibility. There were more people now, congregated around the welcoming burnished lights of shops and cafés across Fountain Plaza in the old red-brick buildings of a former chocolate factory. Bronze mermaids sat back-to-back with the modest fountain plume between them. There were, on a fogbound morning, fountain-sitters, most of them solitary and as still as the mermaids, others eating from paper bags as pigeons waddled close to check for handouts.

  Eden looked around at bodies half realized in the fuming grayness, faces dim as saintly frescoes in a medieval church. She felt like a wildfire in her red turtleneck sweater. Against her better judgment she was about to trust someone she'd never seen before.

  "I smell coffee," Chauncey said.

  "Good a place as any to wait," Eden agreed, shuddering.

  They were crossing the plaza when one of the fountain-sitters, wearing a hooded cape and holding a shopping bag, raised her head to look at them.

  "Eden," she said, in a frail but recognizable voice, "I'm here."

  Eden stopped as if she'd come within an inch of walking off a cliff.

  "Betts?"

  "Yes, dear one."

  They were about thirty feet apart. Betts made an attempt to rise as Eden sprinted across the bricks toward her, scattering pigeons in a brisk flurry. One of the pigeons flew close to Betts's head and she tottered, the shopping bag falling from her hand. The loose hood fell back from her face. Betts's short gray haircut was unfamiliar, but not her hazel eyes nor the rest of her features, such as the tiny mole high on her upper lip.

  Eden lunged to help her, but Betts recovered her balance rather easily and faced Eden with a peculiar slanted smile, right hand coming out from under the short cape.

  "Hello, lovey." This time the voice was not at all recognizable. Eden only knew that it wasn't Betts talking.

  Eden! Knife!

  Eden reacted to the telepathic warning with the reflexes of a gifted athlete, jerking her head aside a fraction of a second before she saw the blade in the Assassin's hand slicing in a short arc toward her throat. Instead of slitting the carotid artery, the sharp blade glanced off the gold lion's head of the walking stick in Eden's left hand. Before the Assassin, exceptionally quick himself, could reverse his initial thrust with the knife, Eden hit him in the padded breast with her lowered right shoulder, sending him sprawling over the fountain's ledge into the water.

  She looked down in a moment of horrified incomprehension at Betts's cunningly duplicated face underwater, at a contact lens that had popped out of one eye and clung to mascara'd lower lashes like a worn penny, at the gray wig now askew from the collision of the Assassin's head with the coin-strewn bottom of the fountain. Then he scrambled up and was coming for her again.

  "Simba!" Eden said.

  The plenipotent walking stick leaped from her hand, the lion's head coming to life. It met the knife thrust in midair as Eden stood her ground and snapped the blade in its jaws. The stout stick flashed like a propeller and struck the Assassin under the chin, snapping his head back. The soggy wig flew off, leaving strips of tape fluttering, a line of glued-down latex visible across his scarred head. He would have been in the fountain again, but the lion's head had grasped him and was holding him erect, feet dangling several inches above the fountain's ledge. Dazed, he stared down at Eden with mismatched eyes.

  Six seconds had elapsed since Eden had heard the telepathic warning. They had attracted some attention from the fountain-sitters, but devoutly minding your own business in a city like San Francisco was always the wisest course.

  "Wow," Chauncey said behind Eden. "Where can I get one of those?"

  A sixteen-passenger van crossed the plaza and stopped close to them. Eden turned and looked past Chauncey at the young Chinese couple who had followed them to Ghirardelli Square. He had a gun in his hand. The girl was smiling.

  "Hi," she said. "I'm Lu Ping. This is Ted; he's a private detective." She looked up at the suspended Assassin leaking blood from a corner of the mouth he had redrawn to more closely resemble Betts Waring's. "Guess you got my message okay" the Psi-active Lu Ping said to Eden, no longer smiling. She regarded the hung-up Assassin, who was half conscious and had a broken jaw, with martial sternness. "I never expected to run into this sack of pig offal again. Our ride is here. Do you need
help getting him into the van?"

  "Why should I go anywhere with you?" Eden said.

  "I forgot to mention, Danny Cheng is my uncle? He thought there was something, you know, fishy about all this, so that's why—"

  "I have to find Betts! Do you know this bastard?" Eden's shakes had returned. "What's going on? Why is he made-up to look like Betts? Why did he try to kill me?"

  "We'll find out. Don't worry. Right now we had better get the lead out, Eden."

  Chapter 20

  MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

  OCTOBER 1

  3:40 P.M. PDT

  Unaware as a daydreaming child of time passing, Eden silently watched thoroughbred horses and colts, ten of them in shades of ebony, chestnut, or bay, in a fenced pasture of an astonishing green that brimmed and flowed with glossy light when the sun returned, powerfully, from behind clouds piled like a gilt-edged snow-bank above the Mann Peninsula. The horse farm belonged to Danny Cheng and his elderly father Chien-Chi; it was, Danny's niece Lu Ping had confided to Eden, one of his several enterprises, like antiques, that were visible on the surface of Danny's complex business affairs.

  Chauncey McLain kept Eden company and observed her need for silence. Chauncey liked the horses, their every liquid, elegant movement evidence of important speed, but none of them would come near her, no matter how she coaxed or attempted bribes with treats she had appropriated from the kitchen of the low white farmhouse with its overhanging roof of blood red quarry tile. Sugar cubes, carrots, apple sections—nothing lured the horses to the fence. Possibly they all sensed what was alien in her. In both girls, perhaps: the other with her closely held African walking stick of mysterious properties and, when called for, occult force.

  Finally Chauncey gave up her efforts and tossed the fruit and carrots into the pasture. She unclipped the pager Danny Cheng had given her from her belt and glanced at the message.

  "They want us at the house. Maybe Lu Ping was able to get something out of—him."

  Eden looked at Chauncey, folded her lower lip tight between her teeth but still said nothing. Worry was like a fever in her eyes. They got into a golf cart and Chauncey drove them the quarter mile up to the house.

  Lu Ping sat with her uncle on a small patio outside of Danny's office, which was dominated by a mainframe computer. He wore dark glasses, the third pair Eden had seen today. The lenses of these glasses tightly fitted the sockets of his eyes. Lu Ping looked as if she were getting a few minutes of fresh air following a lengthy illness. Her skin color a cloudy shade of brass.

  She looked at Eden and shook her head slowly, wincing as if in apology.

  "Is Betts dead?"

  "I don't know, Eden. Couldn't find out."

  "Let me try, then," Eden said with quiet savagery. The gold head of the charmed walking stick flashed above her clenched fist.

  "We could steam his balls in a sauna," Danny Cheng said thoughtfully, "then stab them with a fork. But even that probably wouldn't get a reaction. He's in a state of tonic immobility. He sits where you put him, doesn't move for hours. Raise one of his arms, even into an awkward position; it stays suspended in the air. Mind's in lockdown. Extreme dementia."

  "He's faking!" Eden cried.

  Lu Ping shook her head again.

  "But I would know. You can't deceive a Peeper. There's no mind left. I was in there. It's like an old empty movie house. Projector's running, flickety-flick, but all that's on the screen is a single repetitious memory of—" She paused. Her glossy black hair that she wore tightly pulled back into a single elaborate braid reminded Eden of a playmate she'd once envied, because her own hair as a child had been too lax and flyaway for supple braiding. Lu Ping tugged mnemonically at her braid, which was draped over one shoulder like a Victorian bell pull. "—A terrible thing that happened to him, probably when he was very young."

  "An accident? Is that how he got that face?"

  "No. The incident he's totally focused on, that he has ritualized as part of his trauma, had an even more drastic effect on his psyche. I saw him taking these... things out of a bloody feed sack. Slowly. One by one. Kittens, puppies, who knows, they were destroyed to the point they're unrecognizable. Just lumps of flesh and mashed bone. He sits with his scabby little legs crossed and the sack between them, removing, holding each little body, laying them in a neat row in front of him. Tears? No tears, he's too deep in shock. He goes to a great deal of trouble to be sure the row is perfectly straight, the bodies evenly spaced." Lu Ping's own eyes watered; she wiped her lower eyelashes. "Devastating. Once the sack is empty, there's almost a total void in his—adult—mind. He's aware of lights, voices. Doesn't know where he is. External stimuli have no coherence. Then the childhood memory repeats. It's chilling."

  "I couldn't care less about his crummy childhood." Eden looked at Danny Cheng. "You said he was a professional assassin."

  "Yes."

  "Working for the FBI."

  "No, not recently. My information is that Impact Sector was purged along with some other rotten elements at the Bureau when Nick Grella was appointed director a few months ago."

  "Not all of the rotten elements, apparently. I almost had my throat cut this morning."

  With thumb and forefinger Danny massaged a somewhat cruel-looking but sensual mouth. He was a handsome man in spite of weak eyes he hid behind the several changes of dark glasses and an occasional bout of shakes and sweats Danny amiably identified as his "three-minute ague."

  "I think the Assassin was acting for someone else."

  "Doesn't matter right now. He used Betts to get at me. If he took her place in Ghirardelli Square, means he didn't need Betts anymore—doesn't it?" she added with aggressive anxiety. Her eyes flashed to Lu Ping. "Where is she? Alive? Dead? I have to know!"

  "I'm sorry, Eden. I tried. It won't come from him."

  "Do you mean today? When will he get over this 'immobility' bullshit? Next week? Next year? Never?"

  Danny shrugged slightly. Lu Ping looked at the patio floor. Eden walked away from everyone, shouldering her oppressive burden of fears, getting her face under fragile control.

  "Yeah, okay" she said in a quieter voice. "Thanks for trying to help. Coming to my rescue. What are you going to do with that head case you've got in the barn loft?"

  "Waste disposal," Danny said after a few moments, "is another business I'm invested in. Meanwhile Teddy is keeping an eye on him, and a finger on the trigger of his Bull-pup."

  Eden nodded grimly, and turned back to them.

  "Does anyone remember what happened to the Assassin's knife?"

  Danny looked at Lu Ping, who shook her head. Chauncey said, "Your friendly lion bit the blade in half.

  The Assassin dropped the rest when his jaw was broken." Eden said, "It could still be there, by the fountain. Who would want to pick up a knife with a busted blade? Chauncey, I need to find it."

  "Why?" Danny asked her.

  "If Betts is dead, and he, that sorry shit, killed her with the knife he was going to use on me, I'll know. Just by touching it."

  "Telekinesis," Lu Ping explained to her uncle Danny.

  "Doesn't always work for me," Eden said. "I need to have a lot of emotional energy invested in order to get feedback." Her lips were chalky. "Like now. But if it happened, I'll be able to see—when. Where."

  Danny was already on his feet. "Let's get going," he said.

  Chapter 21

  PLEASANT HILL, CALIFORNIA

  OCTOBER 16

  4:25 P.M. PDT

  The weather north of Missoula had turned, with snow squalls accompanying plunging temperatures for the second day, so Edmund Ruddy returned ahead of time from his two-week fishing trip to Montana to find someone else's Winnebago motor home jutting out into the drive from one of his allotted parking spaces beside his snugly covered BMW convertible.

  The elaborate covenants of the Heather Ridge garden condos complex in the East Bay community of Pleasant Hill prohibited residents from leaving motor homes, boats, or trailers
anywhere but in the fenced, key-entry lot in a far corner of the thirty-six-acre grounds, out of sight behind a tall screen of Italian cypress.

  Ed's reaction was irritation and indignation. He checked with those neighbors he could find at home, but they didn't know who the unwelcome Winnebago belonged to. It was late on Sunday. There were a couple of relief handymen in Maintenance, neither of whom spoke good English. No help there.

  After unloading his gear and leaving it in the foyer of his two-bedroom unit, he drove to the out-of-the-way parking lot and left his own twenty-one-foot motor home there. Trudged back past the north tennis courts and the indoor pool pavilion with its tall windows opaque from condensation. Brooded about the intrusion on his space. They were probably weekend visitors unfamiliar with the rules, but they could be anywhere. There were four hundred condos situated for maximum privacy along the winding, hilly drives.

  Or, just possibly, someone was inside. The Winnebago's engine wasn't running, but the sun had been in and out of clouds and the temperature was only in the high fifties.

  Before leaving a firmly worded note taped to the door, he knocked and called, "Excuse me? Anyone here?"

  No reply. Ed shrugged; it was all he could do, but there was still that tiny kernel of indignation bobbing around in his heart. He was a man of order in a disorderly world. He left the reprimanding note and went into his house, closing the door firmly. Here he was in control. He had no wife and kept no pets. He enjoyed his library, his old shellac recordings of Irish tenors, and his coin collection of early American issues, worth a tidy sum, recession-proof.

  He turned on a lamp in the front room where he watched television and had his solitary meals on a tray. Then he crossed the parquet hail floor to the kitchen to make coffee.

  The coffee was already on.

  Ed stared at the coffeemaker, at a used cup and saucer and crumpled paper napkin on the counter. Beside the coffeemaker there was half a bag of a specialty blend he knew about but never would have bought for his own pleasure because it was both hard to locate and damned expensive.