License to Ensorcell (31 page)

Ari continued talking, pausing often to let his auditor take notes. I looked at the second drawing and saw two letters and a number scrawled across the blue shape. When I turned back to the first page, I realized that the gray line and the black scribble defined, roughly of course, a rifle. When thieves fall out, it’s bad, I thought. When Chaos thieves do, it’s worse.

“Armed and dangerous, yes,” Ari said. “I’ll check in with you later.” He hung up.

“That was clever.” I laid a fingertip on my scribble of the blue car’s license plate. “Letting Sanchez think this came from a satellite or whatever they use these days.”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course not. Ari, I know what I know real well. Beyond that—” I shrugged and spread empty hands.

“And your agency lets you out on your own?”

“Out of what?”

“The asylum, of course.” He was smiling at me.

“Oh,” I said. “You’re joking with me for a change.”

“Trying, anyway. You were looking rather grim.”

“I’m feeling rather grim. If it weren’t against my principles, I’d say I’m in the mood for revenge, and I don’t care if it’s served warm or cold.”

He looked at me with his gorgeous dark eyes narrowed in puzzlement.

“It’s a
Star Trek
reference,” I said. “A Klingon proverb.”

“A Klingon—” Ari paused for a deep breath. “If you’re done here, I’ll drive on.”

“Please do.”

Whether it was a case of revenge or justice, I’d done enough probing for the moment. If the police could bring them in, so much the better. They had until tomorrow morning, I decided, before I ran out of patience.

“Has Sanchez told you anything about the Persian white angle?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Only that they’re still pursuing it.”

“Okay, then I’ll call Jerry again.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s only two o’clock. He should be awake in another hour or so.”

Ari knew where he wanted to go next; he started the car and drove off without asking for directions. I realized that once he’d visited a given area, he could remember it without prompting. We ended up back in Daly City, at the same motor inn we’d stayed in before, though we did get a different, somewhat larger room. While Ari stowed the luggage in the closet, I looked out of the window at the long downhill view to the police station.

“Why here again?” I said.

“I wanted to get you away from that corner of the city and somewhere close to the police if we needed them.” Ari walked over and leaned on the windowsill next to me. “I don’t want those killers near you, Nola. Our fine pair must be getting desperate by now. They know that the police have thrown a net over the city. They can’t leave, they can’t stay—and they’re both armed.”

“Yeah. So? It’s my job to—”

“It’s the police force’s job. Leave it to them.”

“If I thought they could bring our maniacs in, I would. They haven’t so far.”

“These things take time.”

“Yeah, and while they take time, people get killed.”

Ari crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me. I decided that arguing would only waste our time and my energy, since I had every intention of doing what I wanted no matter what he thought.

“I’m going to call Jerry,” I said. “Okay?”

“Of course.” The glare softened. “No harm in that, is there? I don’t mean to act like a tyrant.”

“Of course you do. You love acting like a tyrant. It’s kind of cute, really.”

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.”