License to Ensorcell

by Katharine Kerr

  He growled under his breath and turned his back on me. There’s more than one kind of revenge in this world.

  By then, around three in the afternoon, Jerry had woken up enough to answer his phone, though the first thing I heard on his end of the line was a yawn.

  “It’s Nola,” I said. “Are you conscious?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Jerry said. “What’s up?”

  “I need information about that matter we discussed a couple of days ago, about the availability of a certain item.”

  He said nothing for a couple of minutes. Since both of us have talents, I could pick up a few fragments of his mental processes, a kind of shuffling through the files in his brain.

  “Oh, that,” he said at last. “The white lipstick from Iran.”

  “Yeah. Do you still have any of it left down at the salon?”

  “No, and I don’t know where to get any, either, not right now. It’s odd about that, darling. The suppliers show up in the city only now and then. You can’t count on them at all. I suppose that’s the way they do business over in those faraway places or something. The cosmetics vendors had a lot of it just recently, but they’ve sold out. They don’t know when they’ll get any more.”

  “That’s too bad. Well, so it goes.”

  “Yep.” He paused for a long yawn. “Sorry. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, but last night I finally did get to beddy-bye at a reasonable hour.”

  “Reasonable, huh? When?”

  “Four A.M. I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you, at how late it is now. I feel like someone hit me on the head with a padded mallet.”

  “Go have some coffee,” I said. “And don’t forget the orange juice.”

  Jerry laughed and hung up.

  Ari had flopped down on the small brown sofa at one end of the room—in front of the TV, of course. He put the remote down and quirked at eyebrow at me.

  “Apparently our boys have sold everything they had to sell,” I told him. “You know, something just occurred to me about those receipts for the goods in the windmill. They made their last buy just before Michael blew out their transportation. What do you bet they were planning on taking it all back home that night?”

  “That seems reasonable,” Ari said. “Huh, do you suppose they’d spent most of their profits?”

  “I just bet they did. That would explain why they aren’t hiding out in some motel somewhere or taking a plane back to some other gate. They’re broke. Well, assuming the deviant level theory is true.”

  I sat down next to him on the sofa. We both stared at the gray blank face of the TV as if we were expecting visions to appear onscreen. To be honest, I was expecting just that, but the angels refused to show up.

  “It occurs to me,” Ari said eventually, “that we’ve missed the key to their operation. The point isn’t selling heroin in and of itself. The point is getting American money to buy the sort of goods the police found in the windmill. It would be next to impossible to burglarize the stores that stock that kind of merchandise.”

  “Not and get away cleanly with so much heavy loot, no. Too many alarms, security guards, and all the rest of it.”

  “Just so.” Ari’s smile turned tigerish. “Now, if they do come from some sort of deviant world, then we can assume that batteries and chocolate and the rest of it are valuable there, enough so to make the risks of gate-hopping or whatever you want to call it worth taking.”

  I turned cold all over. “Oh, God, just what kind of a place is Michael stuck in?”

  “Not a very pleasant one, I should think.” He frowned in thought. “I wonder if odd talents like your family’s are well-known there. Judging from Johnson and Doyle’s little business venture, criminal gangs recruit the people who have them.”

  “If so, we’ve got to get Michael out of there fast.”

  “Yes, he’d be entirely too valuable to whomever’s behind this operation.”

  I thought of Aunt Eileen’s recent dreams about Michael, standing on a street in the midst of sand dunes, or going to a farmer’s market at the place where a supermarket stood in our world. And one of the farmers had a tumor that was eating his face—what had happened there, wherever it was? Some kind of plague, maybe? I shuddered. Ari put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

  “Cold?” he said.

  “No. Frightened for Mike’s sake.”

  “I can’t say I blame you. And here we are again, waiting for news.”

  “Yeah. For a little while, anyway.”

  I looked at Ari’s watch. It read a few minutes past four. The police had about eighteen hours to deliver, and I had the same amount of time to come up with my next move.

  CHAPTER 11

  WE ENDED UP WAITING FOR THE REST of that afternoon. I did some hard thinking and some more research in the Agency files. I also sent NumbersGrrl e-mail about a nagging problem and received a fast reply. It was consistent with the theories, she told me, that there could be two William Johnsons, one in our world, the other in the deviant level. Doppelgängers.

  “Fascinating, Captain.” The opening line of her e-mail branded her a geek, all right. “I just wish I could write it up into a paper for Nature. Can’t you just see the editorial faces when they read it? LOL! But there’s that little matter of the Agency contract.”

  I commiserated. Another Agency policy comes down to “silence is golden, because it keeps Congress off our backs.”

  We went out to dinner at the Boulevard again, where Ari graciously allowed me to have a salad instead of some calorie-crammed full meal. Even though he laughed at me, I was convinced that my jeans were tighter than they’d been the week before.

  “I don’t see how you can tell,” Ari said. “You wear them a size too big.”

  “I don’t see any reason to wear clothes that look painted on. Besides, this way they hide my figure flaws.”

  “You haven’t got any figure flaws.” He waved his coffee spoon at me. “What you do have is an eating disorder.”

  I scowled at him and speared a piece of tomato with my fork. He let the subject drop, or I might have speared him.

  As soon as we returned to the hotel, I called Aunt Eileen, just to check in with her. Things had been quiet at the house, oddly quiet, she said, without Michael around. She’d dreamed about him again.

  “He was talking with a dark-haired girl named Lisa,” Eileen told me. “A very pretty girl, but she had a club foot. Lisa’s the name of Michael’s new girlfriend, but Brian told me that her feet are perfectly normal, as far as he could see, anyway.”

  “Could you see where Mike was?” I said.

  “In a very shabby room. It almost looked like the walls were covered with pieces of cardboard cartons. But I only got a few glimpses of them.”

  I wondered if the Lisa she’d seen was another doppelgänger, but I decided against mentioning that to Aunt Eileen.

  “The girlfriend, by the way,” she went on, “has called here twice to see if we’ve had any news about Michael. She sounds genuinely worried, poor girl.”

  “I don’t suppose she knows anything that could be useful.”

  “I did ask her. All she knew is that Michael called her Sunday morning. He was going to stop by the park to see ‘something,’ he told her, then go on to her house.”

  “Which he never reached.”

  “She was really angry until she heard the news at school. After I called them, the principal announced that he’d disappeared in the hopes that one of his friends would know something helpful, or so she told me.” Aunt Eileen paused for a sad sigh. “In my day we wouldn’t have dreamed of calling a boy’s house, though I have to admit that the circumstances probably give her a good excuse.”

  “I’d say so, yeah.”

  After we ended the call I got out the Agency laptop again and tried to do some more research on the Web. I found nothing new and finally gave up in disgust. As usual Ari was watching soccer on TV with the sound off. I was about to suggest a better way to spend
the evening when his phone rang: Lieutenant Sanchez.

  For some minutes Ari paced around, listening more than talking, then signed off. He sat down on the edge of the bed and smiled his tiger’s smile.

  “They found the car, the blue Toyota,” he said. “Parked on Geary Boulevard. Someone’s been living in it, Sanchez told me. Dirty clothes, blankets, food scraps, the usual.”

  “Yeah, that was Johnson. Was it listed as stolen?”

  “Yes. The officers who found it were looking it over when they saw a man who more or less answered Doyle’s description come out of a shop. He took one look at them and went back in. The shop owner told them he’d run out the rear door.”

  “So he knows the cops have it.”

  “Yes, unfortunately. He won’t be going back to it. They’ve towed it.”

  “He’s going to be real desperate now. Did they find any weapons?”

  “No, which worries me. It’s possible our pair found a place to hide at least the long guns.”

  “To say nothing of a place to make silver bullets, unless they cast them back home in the deviant level.”

  “True. I was hoping it would be the windmill, but obviously not.” Ari paused, thinking. “So, what now? I can’t do much more on my own without stepping on Sanchez’s toes. I hate waiting around doing nothing, but he’s mobilized his resources well. They should pay off eventually.”

  “Eventually could be too late for the rest of the Hounds. Don’t forget, Doyle knows who they are. I’ll bet he even knows where Grampian lives. As long as those two are on the loose, Grampian’s in danger, to say nothing of the occasional innocent bystander.”

  “That’s very true.” He got up and began pacing again. “If I could only tell Sanchez the truth, we could get Grampian police protection.”

  “Until the full moon, anyway.”

  “That’s what I mean, if I could tell Sanchez. I agree that Grampian’s probably marked as their next victim. Do you think he has the sense to stay inside?”

  “Not during the full moon. As long as he’s thinking like a man, he’ll do the right thing. Once he starts thinking like a wolf, all bets are off. The rest of the pack won’t be able to stay away from their run, either.”

  “And Johnson could be waiting for them. Not my idea of a good outcome.”

  “It isn’t mine, either. Sanchez has resources, sure, but so do I. It’s time I mobilized mine. I want to go discuss things with Annie tomorrow, unless of course the cops catch Doyle and Johnson tonight.”

  They didn’t. We woke in the morning to thick fog and no news from Sanchez. Before we checked out, I called Annie to make sure she’d be home. On the way to her converted garage we stopped at a bakery. I bought more bread and pastry than we could eat in order to make sure we’d have leftovers to leave with her.

  When we arrived, she insisted on making tea and sat us down at the round table to wait for the kettle to boil. Duncan joined us and kept a worshipful canine eye on Annie while we talked.

  “Here’s the plan,” I told her. “I keep making LDRS scans and passing the tips to you. You get to be the neighborhood busybody who sees things and relay the tips to the cops. They have an anonymous tip line as well as a regular one. Use a couple of different names.”

  “Yes, I copied down the numbers from last night’s news,” Annie said. “What about Jerry?”

  “He won’t call the police, not even for Agency money. Not even with a fake name.”

  “You’re right, aren’t you?” Annie considered for a moment. “You know, I could do a few scans, too.”

  “No, it’s too dangerous. Johnson already knows who I am. He doesn’t know you, and let’s leave it that way.”

  “Yes, he does know who you are.” Annie fixed me with a gimlet eye that would have done Aunt Eileen credit. “That’s why I’m worried about him shooting you.”

  “You have a point,” I said. “But I’m not real keen on him shooting you, either.”

  “I think we can avoid that if we’re very careful. You see, I’ve been thinking about that reward. It’s up to fifty thousand according to the morning paper.”

  “It could come in handy, huh?”

  Annie smiled, but the lines around her eyes seemed to get deeper, and the eyes themselves, behind their thick glasses, wearier.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s another good point, but only if you live to spend it. Let’s see what we can come up with.”

  We drank tea, they ate pastry, and I nibbled at half a bear claw while we tossed ideas back and forth. Eventually we arrived at a few conclusions I could live with. Duncan got the rest of the bear claw, then Ari drove Annie and the dog to somewhere a good distance away from her studio. I deliberately avoided knowing the location, just in case Johnson could read it from my mind. Ari came back for me in about twenty minutes.

  So far most of the scans I’d done for Johnson and Doyle had placed them in the northwest quadrant of the city or by the portal. We drove to the park and the pond by the doorway to nowhere that might have led to somewhere. The demonstrators had done a good job of cleaning up after themselves. Although the grassy areas looked trampled and worn, I saw only one piece of trash lying on the ground. I picked that up myself, an orange handbill reading “STOP THE MILITARY MACHINE!” Ari stayed in the front seat, ready to contact the police should Johnson or Doyle drop by to test the moribund energy field. I got in back with the pad of paper and the crayons. Sometimes low tech really is the way to go.

  First I tried to locate Doyle. I could pick up enough of an impression to know that he was still alive and not all that far away, but his shielding held. He seemed perfectly calm, the bastard, for a man who’d just murdered a woman who’d trusted him.

  Johnson was a different matter. As soon as I started the LDRS, my hand began to move. The images came so fast that I was scribbling rather than drawing, laying in big areas of color. After three pieces of paper I made myself stop and examined what I’d done. A lot of blue-green water, a lot of gray lines, either concrete or stone, a lot of dark green shrubs. In one picture gray tree trunks rose out of the shrubs to the oddly flat caps of dark leaves that top California cypress trees. I made an unladylike remark.

  “What?” Ari said.

  “This could be anywhere along the California coast.”

  “But you placed him in the city earlier.”

  “Right, and thanks.” I paused to stare at the pictures and let my mind roam around the memory rooms inside my brain. “Land’s End.”

  “Has Johnson realized you’re spying on him?” Ari said.

  “No, which is puzzling. He must be asleep. Safer for him to sleep during the day and only go out at night.”

  “Sleeping where?”

  “Good question. There are motels down by the beach not far from there, but none of them up on the point itself. It’s part of a national park. Yet everything I’m seeing is outdoors.” An earlier bit of evidence occurred to me. “The windmill isn’t all that far from Land’s End.”

  “You’d better come sit up front. We need to be ready to move. I’ll figure out a way to tell Sanchez without mentioning all the psychic—” He paused briefly. “—talents.”

  I had just settled myself in the front seat, though, when Sanchez called Ari. I could hear the conversation over the car phone’s scratchy speaker.

  “We just got a solid tip,” Sanchez said. “A old woman walking her dog out at Land’s End saw someone who looks a hell of a lot like Johnson. He’s made himself a shelter in the underbrush. I’m proceeding to the location with a SWAT team.”

  “On my way.” Ari flipped on the siren.

  I refuse to relive the details of that drive out to Land’s End. Let’s just say I became intimately acquainted with the fear of death that’s the lot of every human being. Well, every sane human being. Ari seemed to lack it. At any rate, eventually the car slid screeching and wailing into the parking lot above the ruins of Sutro Baths.

  Way down at the foot of the hill the Pacific stretch
ed out, wrinkled and silver. A thick fog wreathed around Seal Rock and spread long tendrils toward the land. The incoming tide crashed over the long concrete foundations that had once supported swimming pools and glass buildings. In them I recognized the gray lines that I’d been drawing in the LDRS scans. The hill rose sharply, cut with a flight of wooden stairs, up to the terraced parking lots.

  In the lots police cars sat at odd angles. Officers with bullhorns swarmed around the ruins below and cleared the area of vulnerable innocents. In the damp, cold weather few people would have been down on the beach in the first place, I figured. Overhead a police helicopter beat the air with a thwack thwack thwack like a crazy drummer in a heavy metal band. To my left, the parking lot ended in a strip of ornamental plantings. Just beyond lay Point Lobos Avenue, running from the Great Highway up to the hill. Across the avenue lay the unkempt green mass of Sutro Gardens, a welter of shrubbery and weathered sculptures.

  When I turned to my right, I saw the cypresses of my vision, standing tall at the crest of another hill, this one a gentle curve rising from the parking lot. Beds of native plants, carefully tended to look wild, covered the lower slopes, but higher up thick swaths of brush, weeds, and shrubs, spiky junipers, mostly, grew under and around the trees. A dirt path wound down toward the parking lot.

  “There’s Sanchez,” Ari said. “Stay with the car.”

  He slid out and ran off, leaving the door open behind him. I saw him draw his handgun as he ran. I got out more slowly and shut the car doors. Sanchez, also armed, was standing and talking with Ari two terraces down. The SWAT team, or so Sanchez had told Ari in the original call, was working its way over from the other side of Land’s End, a couple of miles from the parking lot, in the hopes of getting Johnson to surrender or, at least, of flushing him out of cover. I had the grotesque thought that he was in the same trap as a grouse or partridge in those old-time hunting parties, when British lords perched on shooting sticks and let underlings chase the game right to them for the slaughter. Unlike the birds, however, Johnson had a gun of his own.