Athena Force 8: Contact

I
t was sensory overload. Especially for her.

“You been here before?” shouted the bartender over the noise. He was a gruff old Vietnam-vet type with a long cowboy moustache and tattoos, but Faith didn’t sense any threat off him. Of course, in this chaos, he’d have to come at her with a switchblade before she sensed a threat.

Maybe noise created its own kind of pseudo-silence—a benefit to partying with her new roommates that she hadn’t expected.

“Here, New Orleans?” she shouted back from the sanctuary he’d allowed her on his side of the bar, out of the worst of the crowd. “Or here, DeLoup’s?”

With a bottle of tequila he pointed at her green crop top which read,
Tulane University.
Ah, proof of her previous life. He could see she’d been in New Orleans awhile now. He grinned. “DeLoup’s.”

Faith shook her head and grinned back while, ever in motion, the bartender set some tourists up with shot glasses, lemon and salt. She usually avoided places like DeLoup’s. She wouldn’t be here now except that she hated to back down from a challenge.

Like she’d told her mom in that last, ugly argument before she’d moved out, she was through hiding in the shadows. Faith wanted people in her life, even if only people on the margins of society could really accept her. And people—social people—went dancing. And drinking. And…

And other things she’d avoided.

On that determination, she said, “It’s fun!”

And despite her enhanced senses, inexplicably keen for as long as she could remember, it
was.
Fun. In a throw-you-in-a-blender-and-hit-puree kind of way.

Jazz music bounced off walls hung with crooked neon beer signs and dented license plates. It mixed with laughter and shouted conversation—and heartbeats, the vibration of dozens of thudding heartbeats. Bare, multicolored bulbs dangled from ceiling fixtures, not quite reaching some of the bar’s intense shadows, but Faith could see in the dark almost as clearly as she could in the light. Frigid air-conditioning fought a losing battle against the hot, humid Louisiana night that poured into the bar every time the doors opened, not to mention the heat rolling off of its gyrating patrons. The aromas of beer and rum, sweet fruit drinks and fried appetizers mingled with colognes, breath mints and sweating, pressing humanity.

Faith could also smell the emotions, almost like perfume, could hear them on intermingled heartbeats. Currents of attraction. Patches of jealousy. Pockets of lust. From more than one area she smelled the decay of unhappiness and uncertainty.

And a whiff of…fear?

Faith frowned. Surely she’d imagined that amidst all the confusion. But real fear had its own scent, cold and acrid like metal. She did a quick head count of the roommates who’d brought her here.

Absinthe, a kohl-eyed Goth, dirty-dancing with a frat boy.

Evan, the unassuming, sandy-haired boy-next-door type, dancing with the kind of wiry, sharp-eyed guy who never pledged a fraternity.

Innocent Moonsong, hair dyed far lighter than her brown skin, rings and necklaces and piercings glistening as she belly danced in solo circles, with at least three admirers looking on.

And Krystal…

Where was Krystal?

The bartender’s hand settling onto Faith’s bare shoulder might as well have been an exposed power line. But instead of electricity she got a hard shock of concern, curiosity, wary attraction. Now she sensed that he smoked more than cigarettes…took pain pills for old pains…
had pins in his knees from that wreck, shrapnel from when he saw some buddy blown up—

She stumbled back, away from the uninvited information dump, away from her own freakishness. She caught herself with an elbow on the bar’s sticky wooden surface. Jazz music swirled back in around her.

When the bartender reached for her again—“You okay, kid?”—Faith ducked quickly back, avoiding contact.

“I’m—” But what could she say? She was a freak, strange enough that even her mom couldn’t explain it, strange enough that the most accepting friends she’d found so far were French Quarter psychic readers, not exactly mainstreamers themselves. That wasn’t new. But tonight, she was a freak with a missing roommate. “I have to go find my friend. I haven’t seen her come back from the restroom.”

Which lay across a sea of dancing, mixing, pressing people.

Not that Faith had a choice. Something was wrong.

Like a swimmer taking one last breath before diving into freezing water, she braced herself, then stepped into the dancing crowd.

Every person who brushed or bumped her brought a static jolt, a blare of fragmented sound, a blast of intense scent. Like being in a pinball machine. She was the metal ball, drawn by a force as sure as gravity in one direction while too many uncaring obstacles knocked her everywhere else.
Zap. Ring.
In the confusion, she got only flashes of real or imagined information.

This one told her husband she was at a girlfriend’s house. That one lost out on a raise. Another just tried E for the first time.

Faith gritted her teeth as she waded through them all, finally pushing into the moderately quieter back hallway with the pay phone and the bathrooms. The door marked
Filles
was closed, so she knocked. “Krystal?”

Nothing. Certainly nothing good. If she concentrated, Faith could hear a heartbeat, but there was something strange about it. Something…
off.

She tried the doorknob. If she wound up invading someone’s privacy, she could always claim to be drunk. The door opened barely half an inch before catching, latched with an old-fashioned hook-and-eye to go with the Old N’awlins flavor.

It was enough for Faith’s gaze to track three things.

The back of Krystal’s pale-blond head, where it lay still on the linoleum.

The faucet, pouring water into the pedestal sink.

And a booted foot seeming to levitate upward off of that sink to vanish, ghostlike, into the ceiling.

Faith jammed her hand into the crack and sliced upward, hard. The hook snapped free. Then she was in the room, skidding to her bare knees onto the gritty linoleum beside…

Beside a human shape that used to be her friend, one of her new roommates.
No.

Faith didn’t have to feel for a pulse. She could hear Krystal’s lifelessness in her silence—no heartbeat, no breath. She could see the purpling stripe, like a gory scarf, around her friend’s throat, could smell death amidst the usual toilet smells, a stagnant scent, along with the remnants of that cold, metallic fear and…

And something that turned her stomach even more harshly than this violent death. That scent was also an emotion, but one she’d never caught before. And it came from—

She looked up at where the booted foot had vanished—presumably with a killer attached—and at a white ceiling panel that hadn’t been replaced quite straight in its channel.

No time to think. If she stalled on the enormity of what must have just happened in here, like a normal human would, any chance she had of identifying Krystal’s killer would vanish.

Good thing Faith wasn’t normal.

Springing to her feet, she kicked the door shut and jammed the hook back into place—protect the evidence, right? Then she scrambled onto the sink’s edge and rose, stretching upward for the metal runner that supported the drop ceiling. She had to go on tiptoe, precariously balanced on porcelain, to wedge her fingers around the metal bar. The I-shaped runner gouged cruelly into the flesh of her hands. Wishing she’d done more chin-ups at the gym, Faith had to make do with swinging herself once, twice.

On her third try, she kicked a second panel loose and caught that runner behind her knees. Now she hung like a scantily dressed
U,
shoulders straining, but it was enough. Stepping her feet closer to her hands with awkward lurches, glad she’d worn running shoes instead of heels, she edged her knees close enough to give her leverage.

She wedged her head and arms up past the wood-fiber panel into the narrow crawlspace of the drop ceiling.

She heard a slither of movement, rapidly retreating.

Crawl
was the right word for this suspended space, Faith thought, wriggling quickly in after the fleeing suspect. The drop ceiling, a precarious collection of acoustical tiles balanced on an exposed framework of metal channels, lay barely a foot below the wooden joists of the upper roof. Her view up here was obstructed not just by the darkness, which she could handle, but by lengths of taut hanger wire and aluminum air-conditioning ducts swathed in paper-wrapped, pink fiberglass insulation. But she could hear him—statistics told her it would be a
him,
as surely as did instinct and smell. She twisted in the direction of the telltale scuffling and caught a glimpse of retreating boot soles, barely ten feet ahead of her.

Faith launched herself after them, not on hands and knees but on thighs and forearms, her bare tummy and legs rasping across years of accumulated dirt. Her neck ached with the strain of keeping an eye on her quarry as she wriggled after him. The ceiling panels felt horribly unstable beneath her. They probably were—those yard-by-yard squares—barely an inch thick, suspended from the joists by mere wire. From beneath her she caught wafts of jazz music, shouted conversation, blurred heartbeats and breaths and mingling emotions. But ahead of her…

She heard the distinct rhythm of her quarry’s pounding heart and breathed in his smell as it faded from that strange, stomach-turning scent to surprise and distress at her pursuit.

Not surprisingly, he was bigger than her. The crawlspace was even tighter for him. It was slowing him down.

Faith was maybe eight feet behind him now. She dragged herself closer, digging with her elbows, scrabbling with her arched feet.

One of his shoulders glanced off a metal duct.

Now she was barely six feet behind him, putting her hips into it.

He had to flatten onto his stomach to avoid a low-hanging swag of electric wiring that had pulled free of its staples.

Now she was barely four feet behind him. She caught her hand on an exposed nail and barely noticed the slice of pain. She kept crawling.

He stopped. Why? Three feet, two…

Faith reached out her hand, ready to grab the killer by the ankle if that’s what it took. She doubted she could capture him alone, but she’d come to know evidence. She could damn well tear some vital clue off him.

But with the appearance of a sudden square of light, he vanished.

At least, that’s what it looked like. Even as she gaped, Faith realized that the man had punched out another ceiling tile and dived, headfirst, into whatever lay below.

Wriggling closer, she peered over the edge of the runner and saw metal racks, industrial-size bottles, cardboard boxes.
Storeroom.
She pivoted onto her hip, her shoulder brushing a joist above her as she rolled on her side and dropped her feet down first. Then she levered herself the rest of the way through the ceiling and let go.

With a light thud, she landed in a crouch on the floor below.

The storeroom was empty—of everything but storage, anyway. Faith shouldered quickly out the door….

And found herself behind the bar again. The man she’d been after could be anybody amidst the milling, churning crowd now. And the bartender wasn’t there to say who’d just appeared from the storeroom.

Like everyone else, he’d apparently been drawn away by the shrill screaming coming from the bathrooms.

With a deep breath, Faith dived back into the crowd, an overly aware pinball trying to go in one inexorable direction.

“You touch anything?” demanded the first officer on the scene, a tall brown patrolman named Lee. He’d responded not to the bartender’s 9-1-1 call but to one of DeLoup’s customers rushing out onto Bourbon Street to fetch help.

“Of course I did,” admitted Faith. “But I’ve contained the scene since.”

The shrieking CPA who’d found Krystal had not pushed the door hard enough to force the hook-and-eye latch a second time. Apparently, when she’d looked in, she hadn’t wanted to.

Faith had gotten there just as the bartender shouldered his way through—in time to keep him from compromising evidence.

The patrolman, after an unsteady look at poor Krystal’s blue-tinged face and a grateful check of Faith’s ID badge, agreed to leave the bathroom to her while he worked crowd control.

“Not like you can go anywhere,” he said, as if the ceiling panels weren’t gaping like missing teeth above the still-running sink.

One down.
But Faith wasn’t worried about patrolmen.

“Did you throw up?” asked a kindly EMT not ten minutes later, about the running water. A good-looking guy named Steadman, he was careful to step only where Faith had indicated he should. The likelihood that the crime-scene investigators could pick up a single distinct boot print off the chaos of a bathroom floor were low, especially with something gritty, like sand, crunching underfoot. Faith should know. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.

“No. I found the water that way.”

“Did you check for the victim’s pulse?”

“She was already dead when I felt her wrist.” And she hadn’t needed to check for a pulse to know that. But Faith had wanted to leave a fingerprint, just in case. Her mother had stressed the need for paranoia about Faith’s freakishly acute senses since childhood. Leaving proof of an unnecessary assessment had seemed a better idea than trying to explain that she could hear the absence of her roommate’s heartbeat.

Steadman crouched easily beside Krystal’s body and eyed the straight-line bruising around the neck and the welts where, if Faith had to guess, Krystal had gouged her own throat trying to dig away the killer’s garrote. Steadman, too, seemed to check for the absent pulse more out of procedure than practicality. “She looks familiar. Didn’t she read tarot in Jackson Square?”

Faith stiffened, concerned he would recognize more than Krystal. Not that Faith had been on the Square for a while. She’d only been…experimenting. It had been a failed experiment.