Shift: A Novel (28 page)

“Melchior’s no amateur. Neither are the people he works for. They’ll experiment on Chandler till they find out how his power works, how they can duplicate it. Once they’ve created willing subjects, they’ll dispose of him. Believe me, you risk more for Chandler, as well as yourself, by waiting.”

“There are risks no matter what we do. That’s what happens when these people start to meddle in your lives. Believe me when I tell you, it will be easier for Chandler to find me than for me to find him.”

“I spoke to Dr. Leary, Miss Haverman,” BC whispered. “I know about Persia. About your parents and Mr. Haverman and the way Eddie Logan blackmailed you into giving people LSD. But you can get away from them. You can take them down, if you go public with your story, rather than try to beat them at their own game.”

Naz gasped, and had to bury her face in BC’s chest to conceal it. He felt her breath through the mercerized Egyptian cotton of his shirt. For a long moment there was just the soft croon of a saxophone, the cool thump of an upright bass. Then Naz stepped back from BC, holding on to his hands, and offered him a full view of her body.

“This way, Mr. Gamin.”

BC instinctively went toward the door, but she pulled him in the direction of the bed.

“Miss—Nancy?” BC did his best to keep the confusion off his face.

Naz walked backward into the bedroom, leading BC as though he were a toddler.

“The camera is directly behind me,” she whispered. “In the clock on the mantel. You’re going to take your jacket off, then your shirt, then your pants. Toss them any which way. Then take my dress off me, and toss it over the clock.”

“Why—”

“If you covered the camera with the first thing you took off, it would look too convenient. And please. Try to look lustful rather than constipated.”

She released his hands and twirled across the floor as lightly as a music-box ballerina. Her beauty made it easier. Her beauty and her laughter and the way the dress spun away from her when she moved, only to settle all the more tightly over her curves when she stilled. BC almost believed she really was trying to arouse him. When he licked his lips, he wasn’t acting.

He loosened the button on his jacket, let it fall from his shoulders, and tossed it across the room (he couldn’t bring himself to toss it on the floor, however, and aimed for the wingback chair instead). Naz shimmied forward to loosen his tie, then pulled it off his neck as she shimmied backward. She ran the silk over her cheek and tossed it aside.

The look on her face was pure, the sexual energy palpable from five feet away. BC’s fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. He’d never undressed in front of a woman besides his mother, and not even that since he was three years old and his mother taught him that his private parts included everything between his neck and his knees. The only thing that made it possible was the look on Naz’s face. The
parted lips, the open stare. It was obvious that this beautiful creature knew everything he didn’t. That she could give him the things he’d always been too embarrassed to ask for.

His shirt slipped from his shoulders. He flicked it with his wrist and it glided like an owl for a few feet before pouncing on one of his shoes. He didn’t remember kicking the shoe off, but there it was. He kicked the other one off now. Italian leather, hand-stitched, with hard soles that thumped on the floors like drumsticks. They’d cost him the equivalent of a month’s salary, and here he was tossing them off like sweaty sneakers.

It seemed necessary to remove his belt before he took off his pants. It slid out of the loops like a snake from its hole, the thin silver buckle glinting like a flickering tongue. Then the buttons of his fly. There were five of them, and he undid them all. Naz’s eyes never left his, yet somehow he felt that her attention was focused on his groin, slowly coming into view.

Naz nodded. BC let go of his pants and they fell like a stage curtain. He felt the cool air of the room on his legs, felt the hair horripilate from calves to the nape of his neck.

For the first time another look entered Naz’s eyes.

“Beau?” she whispered—she was using his alias, but what he heard was Melchior’s mocking “Beau” on the train between DC and New York, and the disjunction enflamed BC. He took Naz by her bare, cool, thin shoulders, pressed her against his body in an embrace that was equal parts lust and power and contempt. He smashed her lips with his own, forced his tongue into her mouth. For a moment there was nothing, and then she was kissing him back, pulling him to her as hard as he was pulling her to him, and that’s all there was for a minute or a lifetime, BC had no idea, until Naz’s hands loosened on his shoulders, her mouth softened, her tongue retreated. Her sudden lassitude seemed to infect him, and he let go of her in confusion. Her eyes were looking down, at his feet, a pair of half-inflated circus balloons in their gaudy silk socks, at his crotch, equally painted in bright silk boxers, and equally flaccid.

“I—I didn’t know.”

BC wanted to hit her then, to wipe the look of pity off her face,
but he wanted to hit himself even more. Wanted to turn and run from the room with his clothes clutched to his chest like a spurned lover. But it wasn’t Naz who had rejected him. It was he who had rejected Naz. At any rate, his body had. His body, which never failed him in any other situation—be it boxing or gathering evidence at a crime scene or holding up a suit of clothes and making them look like a man—this body had rejected Naz’s flesh like a finicky cat turning up its nose at a saucer of cream. Before he could do anything, though, Naz turned around. Oh, she was a consummate professional. She could make the bones of her skull and shoulders seem as soft and alluring as her cheeks, her lips, her breasts. But even BC knew it was all just for show now.

“If you would help me with my zipper, Mr. Gamin.”

It could have been the zipper on a body bag for all the tenderness BC showed. The violet fabric parted, revealing the white silk desert of her slip. Naz turned, steadied herself with one hand on his implacable shoulder, and stepped out of the dress, which BC held by both collar and hem, as though it were a flag that couldn’t touch the ground.

She was clothed only in her slip and stockings now. BC held the dress in his arms for a moment more, then, without looking, he tossed it over the camera.

In a flash Naz was on him.

“I’m going to press the trouble button.” The coldness of her hiss shocked him, but it also brought him back to his senses. “They’re supposed to send up both men. Chul-moo, the majordomo, and Garrison, who works—”

“The surveillance booth,” BC finished for her. “And the third man?”

“I didn’t know there was a third man.”

BC scanned the room, then, still in his skivvies, headed toward the bed.

“What are you—”

A faint
crack
cut Naz off as BC wrested the ball off the top of one of the bedposts. He tossed it to Naz, then wrenched off a second for himself. It was about the size of a croquet ball and made of solid walnut, but using it would mean getting close to Chul-moo’s sinewy arms, not to
mention Garrison’s gun. That left the mysterious third man, if he showed himself. And Song, of course.

“I don’t know if I can hit a woman,” BC said to Naz.

“Leave her to me,” Naz said. Her knuckles were so white around the ball that BC was surprised it didn’t shatter in her grasp.

The arrayed faces in the filling station stared at Chandler with
a combination of fear and revulsion. He stared back, unsure of what to do. He glanced at his car. It was farther away than he’d realized. Somehow he thought running would only make things worse.

“M-mister,” Emily said. “Did you do that?” She pointed to the empty air over the intersection.

Without thinking, Chandler changed his face. It was an instinct. He didn’t know where it came from. But in the fraction of a second that it took him to turn back to Emily, a stranger’s features floated up from the depths of his mind and covered his own. He couldn’t see it himself, of course. But he could see it in the eyes of everyone looking at him: the sharp chin, the tiny smirk, the eyes, amused and scared at the same time.

Melchior’s friend from the orphanage. Caspar.

Chandler pushed the image into the minds of everyone in front of him in the hope that it would erase his own face from their memories. He saw them wince, and thought he could probably do more damage if he wanted to, but he had no desire to hurt them.
Leave!
he told them, pushing the word into their minds as hard as he could.
Go away!

Instead of leaving, Jared Steinke got out of his old Dodge pickup and opened the handmade toolbox straddling the bed. Chandler saw what Jared was going for even before he pulled it out: a double-barreled shotgun, fully loaded. Jared had been planning on getting a head start on pheasant season, which officially opened Thanksgiving Day.

“Jared,” his mother screamed from the passenger seat—he’d been taking her to the hospital in Wichita Falls to get her diabetes checked—“Jared, get back in this car right now!”

Joe Gonzalez, seeing the shotgun in Steinke’s hands, turned and trotted toward the filling station office. It might’ve looked like he was running for cover, but the pistol beneath the cash register burned brightly in his mind.

Jared Steinke raised the shotgun to his shoulder.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want—”

He was squeezing the trigger when the ravens swooped down on him and he jerked the rifle up just as it fired. The glass of the Phillips sign exploded in a shower of sparks.

Chandler hadn’t seen the new Hitchcock movie, but Emily had, and it was her mind that gave him the ravens. He made just a pair at first, but then he added a dozen, two dozen more. A cloud of birds spiraled down on Jared Steinke like an avian tornado and Jared stumbled backward but refused to drop the shotgun. The pain as the ravens’ daggerlike beaks and razor-sharp talons slashed his skin felt so real that Chandler was surprised Jared wasn’t actually bleeding.

Now Joe Gonzalez was running back out of the office, pistol in hand. He fired at the ravens attacking Jared Steinke, who was standing right next to the number three pump. On the third shot he nicked the hose and dark gas began spewing over the concrete.

“Mae,” Emily said to her sister, “if you want your baby to live to be baptized, you best drive
now.”

Jared Steinke, as frightened by Joe Gonzalez’s shots as he was by the ravens, began firing wildly. The first shot caught Dan Karnovsky full in the chest as he was getting out of his Buick. The second shot blew apart the number one pump, and more gas began spewing onto the concrete. Already an area the size of a backyard swimming pool had been transformed into a black mirror, reflecting Joe and Jared and Jared’s mother ducking out the driver’s side door of Jared’s truck and scampering across the glassy surface of the gasoline like Jesus walking on the water. Chandler saw none of this. He was concentrating on the ravens, trying to drive the crowd away. His head ached with the effort, and he could feel the sweat running down his spine.

There was a cough and a backfire as the engine of Mae Watson’s Chrysler caught. Gasoline sprayed from beneath her tires as she sped toward the filling station’s exit.

“Go, sis!” Emily hissed at her sister. She had seen
The Birds
seventeen times. She knew how this scene ended. “Go, go, go!”

Chandler felt her panic, pushed it into everyone’s mind even as he felt his own mind wavering. It was too much. Energy was draining from him like the gas pouring from the pumps—not just the power to
conjure and hold his hallucinations, but the simple strength to stand. The ravens were flickering in and out like a rolling picture on an old TV, and he knew he couldn’t keep them going for much longer. He could feel the chemicals burning up in his body like a V8 with the pedal pushed to the floor. It was a matter of seconds, not minutes, before he ran out of gas, and who knew how long after that he’d be able to stay conscious.

Janet Steinke was halfway across the parking lot when Mae Watson’s Chrysler, still spitting up a fine mist of gasoline, passed underneath the shattered Phillips sign, which was shooting out the occasional spark like a dud firecracker. A moment later the air turned orange as the mist ignited. In another moment the gas on the concrete caught, and the pool was transformed into a lake of fire.

Joe Gonzalez was just out of reach of the flames, and he turned and ran for the shelter of the office. The Steinkes weren’t so lucky. Mother and son caught fire almost instantly. Janet Steinke tripped and fell and lost consciousness, thus saved the horror of feeling the flesh burned off her bones like the charred husks of barbecued corn, but Jared was too hopped up on adrenaline to pass out. The flames engulfed his gasoline-saturated clothing, and in seconds he’d been transformed into the living manifestation of the image that Chandler had placed in the sky less than a minute before. Only then did Jared start to run.

He ran straight for Chandler, the shotgun still in his hands. When he was halfway across the burning gas the last two bullets in his gun exploded, but by then all the nerves in his skin were dead and he didn’t feel it. His lips were gone, his nose, his eyelids. His eyes had started to melt, so he couldn’t see anything. Not with his eyes. But in his mind—in what was left of it—the image of Satan’s demon burned brighter than the flames engulfing his body, and he ran straight for it.

Chandler stood there and watched him come. All he’d wanted to do was test his power, and now—now two people were dead, and a third about to join them. And him, too—he was going to die if the flaming form of Jared Steinke managed to reach him. But all he could do was stand there and watch death hurtle toward him just as BC had.

BC? Who was BC?

He was saved by the explosion. The flames seeped into the underground tanks, and a fireball blew the pumps and the four cars and the
canopy that covered them fifty feet into the air. The shock wave picked up Jared Steinke’s body and threw him over Chandler like the angel of death he so resembled, and knocked Chandler ten feet back on his ass. The column of fire shot more than a hundred feet in the air, looking for all the world like a miniature atomic explosion. Red flames and black smoke etched concentric rings in the colorless Plains sky.