Ill Wind (18 page)

Oh. Now that my heart rate was slowing to under two hundred, I realized that Bad Bob was trying to make a connection with me, not just ruin my afternoon. Had he ever done this before? Probably, but the stories of Bad Bob that play well are the confrontations, not the conciliations. Nobody would buy me a drink to hear that Bad Bob patted me on the back.

But it still felt good.

“I've been looking for somebody with steady nerves,” he said. “Special project. You interested?”

There was only one sane answer. “No offense, sir, but no. I'm not.”

“No?” He seemed honestly puzzled. “Why the hell not?”

“Because you'd crush me like a bug, sir. It was all
I could do to get through an afternoon with you staring down my shirt. I don't think I could handle a full eight hours of it a day.”

And had I said that out loud? Yes, I had. And he
had
been checking out my boobs all morning there at the Coral Gables office. So there. Let the charming old bastard chew on it.

He stared at me steadily, with those eyes like pale blue glass, and said, “Oh, it wouldn't be eight hours a day. Twelve, minimum. Possibly as much as eighteen. Though I will give you time off for good behavior, if you keep wearing that bikini.”

“No.” I settled back on the sand and closed my eyes. “If you're going to keep sexually harassing me, could you do it from about three feet to your left and quit blocking my sun?”

He didn't move, of course. He stayed solidly in my light. After a few dead moments, when I didn't open my eyes or try to fill the silence, he said, “You're still six months away from qualifying for a Djinn. I can make that happen in two weeks. Or I can make sure it never happens. Your choice, sweetness.”

I threw an arm over my eyes and groaned in frustration. Of course, it would come to this. Blackmail. Perfect.

“Come on, Baldwin, you're an ambitious little ladder-climber. We both know you'll work for me just for the bragging rights. Quit playing coy. Here's the address.”

He dropped a business card on the bare skin of my stomach. When I opened my eyes, he was walking away, a bandy-legged white-haired man still broad in the chest, muscular in his arms and legs.
An aging tough guy. A hero of the kind they don't make anymore.

On the back of the business card was his home address. On the front was his name,
Robert G. Biringanine,
and in very small letters below it,
Miracles Provided
.

I held the card in my hand for the next thirty minutes as I tried to empty my head and concentrate on sunshine, but the cold, pitiless blue of his eyes kept intruding. By four o'clock I'd had enough, and trudged back to my car, lugging beach bag and beach umbrella. Two hunks in Speedos—six-pack abs and all—tried to convince me to do some snorkeling in one of their beach houses, but I had things to think about. Big things.

At six, I called Bad Bob's, got his answering machine and left a message that I'd be at his house at 7
A
.
M
.

See, I'd like to blame it on Bob's cynical little threat-and-reward strategy, but the fact of the matter was, I found him interesting. More than twice my age, white-haired, wrinkled, bad-tempered, notoriously difficult . . . and there was something intensely
alive
behind his eyes that I'd never seen before. Well, not since Lewis, anyway.

Power calls to power—always has, always will.

 

Two minutes before seven the next morning, I was standing on Bad Bob's porch, which had a stunning view of the blue-green ocean. It rippled like blown silk and flowed up on sand as white as snow. He had a private beach. It was a measure of who—and what—Bad Bob really was. As was the house, a post-modern sweeping dome with lines that reminded me of wind tunnels and race cars.

“No bikini?” Bob asked me when he opened the door. That was his version of good morning, apparently. He had a coffee cup in his hand as big as a soup bowl. His striped bathrobe that made him look like a disreputable version of Hugh Hefner, and he had the moist, red-rimmed eyes of a morning-after drunk.

I hesitated over choices of responses. “Do I have to be polite?”

“
Polite
isn't a word people often use to describe me,” he answered. “I don't suppose I can expect it from you, either.”

“Then no more cracks about the bikini, or I turn around and walk. Seriously.”

He shrugged, swung the door wide, and turned away. I followed him into a short hall that opened up into a truly breathtaking room. It must have gone up thirty feet in a curve, with windows overlooking the ocean all along one side. Carpet so deep I wondered if he hired a lawn service to maintain it. Leather couch, chairs, furniture that combined style and comfort. All unmistakably masculine, but with a finer taste than I would have expected from somebody of Bad Bob's reputation.

“Nice,” I said. People expect that kind of thing when you first see their home.

“Ought to be,” he said. “I paid a fortune to some unspeakably horrible woman named Patsy to make it that way. Through here. Coffee?”

“Sure.”

He led me into a vast kitchen that could have catered dinner for a hundred without breaking a sweat, poured me a cup, and handed it over. I sipped and
found it had the rich, unmistakable taste of Jamaican Blue Mountain, fifty dollars a pound. Not the kind of thing
I'd
give away cups of to marginally welcome guests. I took as big a mouthful as I could get away with, savoring that smooth caramel aftertaste. I could get used to all of this . . . fancy house, ocean view, fine imported beverages. I had no doubt his collection of whiskey was first-rate, too. And he struck me as the kind of guy with a killer DVD collection.

“So,” I said. Bad Bob leaned against a counter, sipping coffee, watching me. “Staying off the subject of the bikini, what exactly am I here to do?”

“You're here to work as my assistant. I need a good, solid hand in manipulating some small-scale weather patterns for an experiment. Nothing I couldn't do myself, but it would save time to have another pair of hands.”

“Hands?”

“Metaphorically speaking. You've worked with Djinn before?”

“Sure. Well, not closely. But I've been linked to them.” Man, the coffee was
excellent
. He'd poured a pretty generous cup; I wondered how open he'd be to the concept of refills. I was going through this mug pretty quickly. “I can handle it.”

“I'm sure you can,” he said. “You know, I have the feeling you're going to be absolutely essential to the success of this project. It's groundbreaking. I think you'll be truly impressed by the scope of what we can accomplish together, Joanne. By the way, how's the coffee?”

“Fabulous. It's—” My eyes blurred. I blinked, felt
the world slip sideways, and reached out to brace myself against the counter. I could hear my heart beating, suddenly. “—it's Jamaican Blue—”

I must have dropped the cup, but I didn't hear it shatter on the ceramic tile. I remember my knees letting loose, I remember sliding down with my back to the cabinets, I remember Bad Bob taking another long drink from his cup and looking down at me with those pitiless blue eyes.

He smiled at me. His voice sounded slow and wrong and far too friendly. “We're going to do great things together, you and I.”

 

I woke up on the edge of panic, fighting nausea, with no idea where I was or what the hell had happened to me. It took a full minute for my brain to start connecting chemical chains long enough to remember Bad Bob, the tainted coffee, the collapse. Jesus, what kind of a bastard ruins
Jamaican Blue Mountain
with knockout drops?

I was lying on the leather couch, and my hands were tied behind my back. I could barely feel them, but I knew it was going to be painful if—when—I worked my way free. I blinked shadows from my eyes, shook my head to get hair out of my way, and found Bad Bob sitting in the leather armchair just about five feet away. The bathrobe was gone, replaced by a pair of khaki pants and a loud Hawaiian print shirt. He was holding a half-empty glass of something on the rocks, which might have been apple juice but probably had a lot more punch.

“Don't struggle,” he said. “You'll just dislocate a shoulder, and I'm not much on the medical stuff.”

My tongue felt thick as a sausage, but I managed to fit it around words. “Fuck you, you bastard. Let me go.”

His bushy white eyebrows rose. They curled up and out, and reminded me of a lynx. The eyes were predatory, too.

“Ah, ah, be nice,” he said. “My offer to you was absolutely valid. We're going to do some great work together.”

“What in the
hell
do you think you're doing? You think you can just abduct me and—” My brain caught up with my mouth and told it to shut up, because he
had
abducted me, and chances were he was going to get away with it, too. Nobody knew I'd come here. I had no close friends, no confidants. I hadn't spoken to my sister or my mother in a month. John Foster might wonder where I'd gotten off to, but like most Wardens, I wasn't a slave to the nine-to-five. Could take weeks for anybody to begin to worry.

“You'll be fine,” he said. He took a long slug of his drink, made a face, and put the crystal tumbler on a glass table next to him. There was no sound of anybody else in the house, just the usual everyday hum of electrics and air circulation. The surf hitting the shore came as a dull, unceasing drum. “I have something important for you to take part in, and I want your word that you're going to take this responsibility seriously. You're going to change the world.”

I had a lot of ambition, but changing the world was a little outside the scope. I tried the ropes again, felt sharp pain dig into my shoulder, and decided to
work on things a little less directly. I couldn't go head-to-head with Bad Bob Biringanine . . . few people on the planet could. But maybe I could take him from behind.

I started slowly, slowly working the oxygen out of the mixture in the room. Nothing obvious, because obvious would get me swatted like a fly. At the fastest rate I dared to work, I needed to buy at least ten minutes for the O
₂
levels to drop far enough to put him to sleep.
If
he didn't realize what I was doing. The alcohol would help that, slow his perceptions and make him more susceptible to nodding off.

“I—I came here to work for you,” I said. “Really. You didn't have to drug me. You could have just explained it to me.”

“Sweetheart, I couldn't really take the chance you wouldn't agree. I need you. It's more of a draft than a volunteer army.” His eyes skipped away from me, toward the windows, where the Atlantic rolled endlessly toward the Pacific. “Stop fucking with the air in here or I'll knock you out and do this while you're unconscious. It doesn't really matter, either way. I just thought you'd like to be a witness.”

I swallowed hard and let my manipulations of the oxygen drop. “To what?”

“To your transformation. I'm about to transform you from some second-rate, arrogant little weatherworker to a world-class talent. And in return, you're going to save my life.” He got up, stretched, and went to refill his glass from a crystal-stoppered decanter on the sideboard, near something that looked like an authentic Chinese terra-cotta solider, like the ones
found in the emperor's tomb. It almost looked real enough to walk across the room.

“Sir, please, I have no idea what you're—”

“Shut up.” He didn't raise his voice, but there was something dark and violent in it that made me instantly seal my lips. Liquor splashed ice in his glass, and he took a drink. “How do you think all this works, Baldwin? You think the Wardens Association is just some not-for-profit do-gooder fraternity, like the Lions Club or the Shriners? We
run the world
. That takes power. More power than you can even imagine.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but so long as he was talking, I had breathing time. I worked on the knots with numbed fingers. It was all I could think of to do.

“When Hurricane Andrew hit the shore in ‘92, it was a killer of the worst kind. It was all set to destroy us, singly or in groups. Somebody had to take on the responsibility to stop it.” He snorted and tossed back the rest of the liquor. “Some poor bastard like me. But humans aren't built that way, Baldwin. They're built to come apart under that kind of pressure.”

He was talking. I decided I should be cooperating. “That's why we have the Djinn. To take the stress.”

“What crap. You don't know dick about Djinn, girl. They have power, but they dole it out in little bits and pieces, always looking for ways to screw us—they hate us. They'd kill us if they could.” He rattled the ice in his glass and tried to suck the last drops of his drink from between the cubes. “Rely on the goddamn Djinn, you get killed. No, to stop Andrew I needed something else. Something bigger.”

He was insane. Bad Bob was literally insane. There wasn't anything bigger than the Djinn except . . .

I bit my lip and felt a fingernail rip off against rope, but that was nothing compared with what I was afraid he was about to do to me. It was all falling together now, and it made a hideous kind of sense.

“A Demon,” I whispered. “You took on a Demon.”

“Smart girl,” he answered. “Too bad, really. I can't afford to put my Djinn out of commission with this thing—level of Demon this is, it'd probably eat him alive, but it'd damn sure poison him past usefulness—so it has to go somewhere. My heart's going. Can't die with this bastard in me.”

“Wait—”

“Sorry, time's up.” Bad Bob put his drink down, walked over to me, and put his hand on my forehead. His skin felt ice cold. It might have been a compassionate gesture, but he put some strength into it and forced my head down, pinning me against the leather couch. I kicked out at him, writhed, wriggled like an eel regardless of how much pain tore at my arms and wrists. “Don't worry. This'll be quick. Demon goes in, and then I burn you. You probably won't feel much pain at all.”