“I’ll take it.” He held out his hand. “There’s an alley out there leading up to the back steps. Anyone could get through that flimsy gate. He could wait there for you to come out.”
I handed him the bag. My SAWM was going off like a fire alarm. Although I wondered—well, all right, I desperately wanted to know if Johnson lurked nearby, I decided against doing an LDRS. He’d already shown he could swat me away, at least when he wasn’t drowning in his fear of developing lycanthropy. I doubted if I could be lucky enough to find him in the middle of a fit for a second time. Threatening him again meant giving him another link right back to me. DD, however, presented a different target. Nathan came back in and began washing his hands at the sink.
“I’m going to try scanning for the driver of that car,” I said. “If nothing else, I’ll find out how dangerous he is.”
“Do you have enough information to work from?”
“Probably not. I was thinking we could drive down to the windmill in the park where Jerry detected a Chaos force. His scent might be stronger there—if it’s the same guy, of course.”
“Worth a try, certainly. Let me get out of this suit.”
While he changed into jeans, I called Aunt Eileen. She’d had no word from the police about Michael.
“Your mother,” Aunt Eileen told me, “is hysterical, but for a change no one can blame her.”
“I can’t, either,” I said. “Any dreams?”
“I saw Michael standing on Mission Street near Thirtieth, where the big Safeway is, except it wasn’t a Safeway at all. It was some kind of farmer’s market, and some of the people selling vegetables looked like goblins. Well, like some kind of deformed creature, anyway.”
“That’s really strange.”
“So strange that I doubt if it was really Michael I was seeing. Just my anxieties, I’d say, except it was so vivid.”
Ambiguity, again. “Well, if you have any more dreams,” I said, “call me and let me know.”
“This is all so awful.” Eileen paused for a deep breath to calm herself down. “I had to call Michael’s school today and tell them why he was absent. There’s only a week or two left before spring vacation, thank heavens, so he won’t have a ton of make-up work if we get him back soon enough.”
If we get him back at all, I thought. Aloud I murmured something reassuring and ended the call. That Michael’s schoolwork might present a problem had never occurred to me. On such small details of everyday life, though, does the balance between Order and Chaos depend. My aunt and women like her serve Harmony in their own way.
Nathan, dressed in jeans and a shirt, came out of the bathroom. He was carrying his suit, which he then proceeded to drape haphazardly over my computer chair.
“Were you talking with your aunt?” he said. “I suppose she’s quite upset still.”
“I’m afraid so, yeah. Uncle Jim will help her calm down in a while, though.”
“Really? I should have thought he’d make things worse.”
“No. The Houlihans have their good qualities.”
“Don’t tell me they have talents like—”
“Some of them do, yeah. The older generation had more than Uncle Jim does or his son. Clarice is pretty sharp, though. I don’t know about Brian yet. He thinks he doesn’t have any talents, but neither did I until I was sixteen. Then they hit in force.”
“Interesting.” Nathan paused as if waiting for me to say more.
I merely smiled. That period of my life still had the power to depress me if I thought about it in any detail.
“Ready to go?” Nathan said eventually. “Do you have anything you can do to protect yourself from these, um, mental attacks, I suppose you could call them?”
“They’re just that, and I do, yeah.”
“Very well, but I need to make a few phone calls before we go to look at this windmill.”
I started to agree, then caught myself. “No,” I said. “Sorry. We need to go now, and we need to get there fast.”
Which, though true, was a stupid thing to say to Nathan. During the resulting wild ride down to the west end of the park I managed to raise a Shield Persona by sheer force of will. Even when I’m not in a car driven by a maniac, I hate doing it, because it cuts off the flow of information from all of my extra sensing mechanisms, learned and natural. On the other hand, it would also cut Johnson off from me. If I needed to, I could drop it in a couple of seconds.
Golden Gate Park contains a lot of odd things tucked away in glades and dells and little gardens. The Dutch windmill has to be one of the most spectacular of these oddments, a fully restored wooden windmill like a souvenir of the eighteenth century, set to one side of a sunken garden. A thick hedge surrounds a roughly circular area of lawn, and in the middle of the green lie geometrical flower beds which define a segmented circle.
We came screaming down Kennedy Drive and pulled to a stop near the windmill. By then my feeling of urgency had swelled to a near-physical ache. I staggered out of the car and stood hyperventilating for a moment while I waited for Nathan, then led the way down the shallow stone steps through the trees. In the flower beds tulips bloomed, a gorgeous display in various reds, purples, and golds, nodding in the breeze. The sight of the garden allowed me to relax. We’d gotten there in time—whatever that meant.
I sat down on the damp grass on the far side of the garden and took out my pad of paper and crayons. If anyone saw me, they’d assume I was drawing the windmill, which certainly would have inspired a real artist. Covered in dark wood shingles, it stood at least four stories high, crowned by the huge wooden vanes, tip-tilted into the wind. In the cool sea breeze the blades creaked like a ship under full sail. Nathan stood staring at it while I got settled.
Before I started the LDRS procedure, I dropped the Shield Persona and did a Search Mode: Chaos scan of the area as far as I could reach. The windmill itself gave me an uneasy feeling, nothing urgent, more like a drifting scent of Chaos on the wind. I picked up a stronger sensation nearby, but I couldn’t refine it into an image or a presence. I hoped the LDRS would give me more information.
Before I could start, Nathan stepped forward and considered the windmill with narrowed eyes. When I followed his gaze, I noticed a vertical row of little unglazed windows, one for each story, I assumed. On the ground floor I could see a closed door.
“Could someone get inside there?” Nathan said.
“Only with one of the Parks Department people along. They keep it locked.”
“Good, but locks can be picked.”
“You should know.”
He smiled his tiger’s smile and began prowling around behind me, his suede jacket unzipped, his hands always close to the shoulder holster.
I assembled in my mind the few things I knew about Johnson’s confederate. I had only the information from Jerry, my trance contact with the
adest daemona
ritual, Nathan’s quick glimpse of Johnson’s getaway driver at the funeral, and my deduction about his lycanthropy from Pat’s journals. I wasn’t expecting much from the scan, but I hit pay dirt, or rather, pay dirt hit me.
As soon as I started, I realized I was drawing the vanes of the windmill, poking up from a sea of surrounding trees.
“Nathan?” I said as quietly as I could. “They’re right around here somewhere. To the east, I think. Back toward the main body of the park. Maybe on the road.”
Nathan turned in that direction with a slow, casual motion and peered into the thick foliage surrounding the east end of the sunken garden. I started a new drawing. The windmill loomed over the scene and the trees. My hand began superimposing a sleek black shape—a car—on the view.
“They’re parking on Kennedy Drive,” I said. “Right near here.”
We heard a car door creak open. A figure, male, appeared at the entrance to the garden.
Nathan spun around fast, and the pistol seemed to leap into his hand. I jumped up, scattering crayons, just in time to see a youngish, dark-haired man in dark slacks and a cream-colored shirt standing on the steps and staring our way. The way that the shirt caught the light said “raw silk” to me, an expensive little number, all right. I could feel DD’s shock at seeing us. I also picked up his wave of sheer terror as he turned and ran.
“Stop!” Nathan yelled. “Police!”
Nathan took off after him, yelling, “Police!” all the way. I focused my mind and got a clear image of DD’s back and head. More to the point I could feel him gasping on the point of panic as he raced up Kennedy Drive. For a few seconds I could see out of his eyes: the black Jag, its door open—I heard a shot and the squeal of brakes. I glimpsed Johnson, bent over the steering wheel as the Jag sped off with DD safely in the passenger seat. I heard another shot before Nathan came back, out of breath and furious.
“The bastard knows how to drive, all right,” he said between quick gasps for breath. “I was aiming for his tires or gas tank. He took evasive action. Professionally trained, I’d say.”
“If it’s any comfort,” I said, “I locked onto DD’s mind. I’ll know him from now on.”
“Good.” Nathan put the gun away and took his cell phone out of his pocket with a quick flip of his wrist. He punched a speed dial key. “Nathan from Interpol here.”
I left calling Sanchez to Nathan and knelt down on the grass to pick up my crayons. I’d just gotten everything back in my tote bag when I heard a siren wailing. Someone had reported those shots to the police, I assumed, and sure enough, two uniformed cops came running down the steps toward us. Nathan held his Interpol ID up where they could see it and trotted over to meet them.
I sat back down on the lawn and let my mind roam after DD and Johnson. By then they both had raised Shield Personas. Still, I received quick little flashes of the minds behind the shields, because they were distracted by an argument. I could pick up a constant natter of recrimination and general nastiness as they traveled farther and farther away, but their shields remained strong enough to turn aside any deep probe. I could tell that they were heading more or less south but nothing more. Ordinary reason told me that they’d probably turned onto the nearby Great Highway as they fled a possible police chase.
I returned my mind to the present location just as Nathan strode up. “They’re putting an all-points out for the Jag again,” he said. “Including the Highway Patrol. One of the officers told me that there’s some kind of major road—”
“The Great Highway, so called,” I said, pointing west. “A couple of blocks that way. And we’re close to the county line, so I’m real glad the Chips are involved.”
“The who?”
“Slang for the California Highway Patrol, sorry.”
Nathan acknowledged the explanation with a nod, then set his hands on his hips and stared off to the south for a moment. With a shrug he turned back to me.
“What did Sanchez say?” I asked.
“That he’d have the windmill searched. The two officers on scene are going to stay until he and his team can get here.”
“Do they want us to stay?”
“No.” The word sounded more like a snarl.
Sanchez, I assumed, had grown tired of Nathan telling him how to do his job. Nathan shoved his hands into his pockets and glared at the windmill.
“What now?” Nathan said. “There’s nothing more I can do here.”
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to go back to the Portals of the Past. We can be sure our perps won’t be lurking there.”
The sun hung low in the sky when we reached the doorway to nowhere. Shadows striped the lake, and the ducks had settled down for the evening among the weeds at the water’s edge. Uncle Jim had taken his truck away the night before. A short length of yellow police tape still flapped from one tree. Nathan took a jackknife out of his jeans pocket and cut it off, then crumpled the tape up and stuffed it into my tote bag.
As I walked up to the marble pillars, I dropped the Shield Persona. I sent my mind out in Search Mode: Chaos again and mounted the steps to stand between them. This time I felt an odd twinge of energy, not a field, more like a stray wisp. I grabbed it—mentally, of course—and twisted it into a loop. I was hoping to track down DD. Instead I found myself thinking of Michael. I switched the Search Mode over to Personnel.
Michael! I sent the thought into the loop. Mike, can you hear me?
I felt a twitch of recognition, nothing so definite as an answer, but a twitch, as if Michael, wherever he was, had suddenly thought of me and wondered why.
“Mike’s alive, all right,” I said. “I thought so. We O’Gradys can usually tell when one of us leaves for good.”
Nathan had been watching me with his head cocked a little to one side. “When Pat was shot,” he said, “did you—”
“Yeah.” I remembered the frantic couple of hours I’d spent, calling around the family, desperate for news. “I was in Mexico at the time, but I knew. I finally got hold of Kathleen, and she confirmed.”
“I see. Mexico?”
“None of your business. But anyway, I’d know if Michael were dead.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“As certain as I can be. What worries me is how long he’ll stay alive. I don’t know where in hell he is.”
“Let’s hope it’s not hell.”
I managed to laugh. “Yeah, let’s hope.”
I spent another ten minutes or so on the steps, trying to renew the contact with Michael. Nothing. As the loop I’d made out of the energy trace slowly dissipated, I received the impression that Michael had moved beyond my range. The portal and Michael’s disappearance baffled me so badly that I realized I’d better consult with Y.
“Nathan?” I said. “I need to go into trance.”
“Very well, but do it in the car. I won’t drive off till you’re done.”
He slid in behind the wheel while I settled myself in the backseat. Since in D.C. office hours were long over, I used our emergency frequency to send out a trance message to Y. In a few minutes he responded. His blond movie-star image popped into visibility beside me in the backseat.