Mind Games (12 page)

Jordan folds her hands. “We were just having a nice chat.”

“Can you excuse us, Jordan?” Packard says.

Jordan smiles wide and pushes out the door.

“Watch out for her,” he says as soon as she’s gone. “She’s the most dangerous disillusionist that you’re going to meet.”

“I thought the Monk was the most dangerous.”

“You’ll never meet the Monk.” Packard kneels in front of me. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“No,” I whisper, because I have this overwhelming urge to touch him.

“Don’t let Simon undermine you. Some disillusionists have aversions to some energetic dimensions, that’s all. Simon guessed you’d have an aversion to his. He set you up.”

“What if I get an aversion when I’m with a dangerous target?”

“You’ll handle it or we’ll move you to another case.”

“What if I fail with all of them?”

“You won’t.”

“How do you know? You can’t see the future.”

“No, I can’t,” he says. “But I can see you.”

My stomach feels funny. I don’t know what to say.

“Trust me.” Packard stands. “Simon’s jealous. He sees me fast-tracking you with all this training—”

“You’re fast-tracking my training?”

“That’s not important. You have the Silver Widow next week and you’ll do brilliantly. You’re more than ready.”

“Great.” I go to the sink and splash water onto my face. “A cheater on Cubby. Brilliant at attacking vulnerable old ladies.” I turn to Packard, blotting the drips on my face and neck, thankful he can’t hear my pounding heart.

“The Silver Widow brutally murdered her husband,” he says.

“So you say, but maybe she killed him in self-defense.”

“It was a torture kill.”

“How do you know?”

“I was going to go through all this out there. …” Packard looks at my eyes, one and then another, the way a man will when he’s near. “According to the chronology the coroner established, the Silver Widow drugged her husband into unconsciousness, gagged him, and dragged him to a secluded part of their backyard. Near an anthill. She somehow managed to dig a vertical hole, burying him up to his neck so that he was completely immobilized.”

My pulse jumps as Packard touches my cheek where a droplet of water was tickling.

“The Silver Widow then proceeded to fill his ears with honey, and the ants swarmed out of the anthill and crawled up into his ears to eat it. When they’d consumed all the honey, they continued on, as ants will do, to consume his brain. Ants were crawling through his nearly empty cranial cavity by the time his body was found.”

It takes me a while to comprehend the many dimensions of horror here. “Oh my God.”

“Once she had him drugged, it would’ve been far less trouble to drown him in the pool, or even bury him alive. The ants were a great deal of extra effort. She’s crazy and dangerous, but we’ll turn her around. In disillusionment begins reform.”

“So did he wake up? Was he conscious when … uh!”

“He was probably conscious for part of it,” Packard says. “He seems to have struggled. As much as a man buried to his neck can struggle.”

I slap my hands over my ears.

He draws nearer, wraps his hands around my fingers, pulls them gently from my ears. “You’re okay.” He presses my palms together inside his. “The trick is to not let yourself picture it.”

I breathe in his spicy curry scent. “Ants ate his
brain
, Packard.”

“I know they did.”

“How long was he conscious? How much of his brain would they have eaten before—”

“Hey, look at me.”

I look up into his pale green eyes, acutely aware of his hands enclosing mine, and of our physical nearness in this private space, and the heavy rise and fall of his chest. The charge between us thickens.

“There is no end to the darkness of the human heart,” he says. “But Justine, you are part of a powerful squad that’s changing things in a real way. You’ll destabilize her, and other disillusionists will strip her of her illusions, and she’ll crash into the horror of who she is, and she will come out the other side. That is what we do.”

“It’s all just overwhelming,” I say. Though it’s not the Silver Widow that’s overwhelming now. It’s the warmth of Packard’s hands. It’s the urge to pull him to me,
breathe him in, press my lips to his neck, press my body to his.

He tightens his hands around mine. “You’ll be brilliant, Justine, I know it. You are perfect for this. You’ll take your time, and when you’re finally there …” He pauses, and the heat between us grows fierce and luxurious. “God, it’ll be glorious,” he whispers.

Shivers sparkle through me—good shivers—and nothing seems real anymore. And God help me, I push out with my awareness to touch his energy dimension.

A sharp intake of breath; Packard looks at me intently.

My heart pounds, and I’m teetering on the edge, drawn to him. Our lips meet.

A click. A creak. We pull away from each other and I turn to see a big freckled face in the door—Lana, the day cook.

“Oh,” I say.

She mumbles and backs out, pulling the door shut.

“Oh.” Packard steps back. “I didn’t come in here for this.”

“I didn’t either.”

There’s this silence where it seems like one of us ought to utter a sentence that begins with the word
yet
.

          Ten

I
STEP OUT
onto the stoop of my building and nod to Mr. K., who’s looking squarish and sweaty in his shirtsleeves, having one last smoke before his shop opens. He nods back. For the first time ever, he’s wearing a bike helmet.

I find myself wishing we could go after the Brick Slinger and Henji and the rest of his criminal highcap buddies, even though I’m frightened out of my wits just going after this one human woman.

I wind my hair into a ponytail. My red shirt has a chest patch that says
KENNEDY POOL CLEANING;
I wear it over shorts, my black one-piece bathing suit, and my shoulder holster, which holds my stun gun. My fashion magazine—we finally found an old one that has a vein star syndrome article—is rolled up in my fanny pack.

Carter pulls up to the curb in a silver van, and I swing into the passenger seat.

“Hey hey hey.” He’s grinning. “Gonna be a hot one.”

“You had a zing?”

“Yesterday.” He speeds off. “So what’s new?”

“What’s new? Well, I’m fairly nervous, because this Silver Widow is my first live target, and she sounds like, oh”—I whisper dramatically—
“a bit of a maniac.”

He laughs. “It’ll be fine.”

Of course there’s a lot more new than that. Like, I
kissed Packard and I wanted to again. It’s not fair to Cubby. I’ve avoided him for over ten days now.

We review pool-cleaning techniques and our family backstory, which involves us growing up in a desert town, which I find to be an odd touch. “Did the fact that we grew up in a desert town contribute to our great love of water and pool cleanliness?”

“Why not?” he says. I’m to pose as the pool boy’s sister who sometimes helps out, and I’m to befriend Aggie—that’s the Silver Widow’s real name. He takes the tangle and spins off southbound, toward the horsey suburbs.

Carter feels it will be easy for me to make friends with her for two reasons. One, the disillusionists who had her first effectively isolated her, so her social life mostly consists of workers and servants now. Two, she really wants to have sex with him, and he’s somehow implied that he does nothing without his sister’s approval.

“You wouldn’t, though, right? Have sex with a target?”

“It won’t come to that,” he says.

“But you wouldn’t, right?”

“Packard saved my life. I would do anything for that man. But it won’t come to that here, thank God. Aggie is the single most frightening female I’ve ever met. Everybody’s a plaything to her. She’s like a mean little girl with dolls, and you’re the new doll.”

Instinctively I run my hand through my long blonde hair. It took two and a half years to grow it this long.

“Say, are you wearing your stun gun?”

“Yup.” I flip up my shirt.

“Stow it. I don’t like those things around when we’re working in a pool.”

Carter and I pull buckets and implements out of the van and haul them around to the back of the Silver Widow’s white stucco mansion to her pool, which is the
shape of a peanut. Lushly landscaped acres unfold beyond it, complete with gazebo, babbling brook, and clusters of flowered trees. It would be beautiful if I didn’t know that ants ate a man’s brain out there.

“Howdy, ma’am.” Carter tips his pool-boy cap to a forty-something woman in a wavy blonde movie star bob. She clicks slowly across the veranda, lovely and leggy in a silvery swim cover-up. Aggie, a.k.a. the Silver Widow.

Aggie is one of those women who never lost their baby cheeks. Hers are covered with a thick application of shimmer powder. It’s the kind of make up choice that would cast her entire mental landscape into question if the business with the ants hadn’t already accomplished this. Her fingernails and toenails are polished silver, and her platinum earrings and bracelets jangle brightly.

I hold my breath, praying I’ll be able to touch her energy dimension and not screw up like I did with Simon. Unfortunately, she doesn’t offer her hand when Carter introduces us.

“Perhaps you’ll both join me for snacks in the conservatory after you’re finished up.”

“That would be lovely,” I say.

Carter grunts, and then we head to the far end of the pool with our equipment. Aggie positions herself on a lounge chair under a cabana near the house.

“What’s up with the gruff act?” I whisper.

“It’s my act for this job, that’s what’s up.”

“It suits you,” I say. The pool-boy shirt and shorts suit him, too. He hands me the parts of a long-handled net and I fit them together.

“I’ll have you work a little; then you’ll go to the conservatory first, without me. This may just be the ground-laying day. Don’t introduce a skin disease if it’s not natural.”

“Don’t worry.”

Aggie’s phone rings shrilly across the pool. She answers, placing the back of her hand over her forehead—a tragic pose.

“I don’t know if this is helpful,” Carter says, “but the last two times I was here, I saw her inspecting her arm, some pimple or something.” He taps the back of his arm to show where it is.

“That could be very helpful,” I say.

Carter moves some plants; then he opens a door and attaches a hose to a nozzle. “This is a vacuum cleaner,” he explains, “except it sucks water instead of air. I’ll vacuum while you net out the leaves.”

I wipe the sweat out of my eyes. “I wish we could just jump in.”

“If you make it look like part of the job, you can.”

“Nah, I don’t want to be wet.”

Netting out the leaves is not as easy as it looks, and it doesn’t help that I’m feeling so nervous about touching Aggie’s energy dimension. I start a measly pile at the corner, watching Aggie from time to time. I’m working on getting a pesky leaf when Carter comes over.

“I find this job sort of calming,” he says. The sound of a door. Aggie’s gone. “Act natural. She watches from that big circle window upstairs.”

I look up, wondering if she watched her husband from that window. Did he jerk his head around, trying to shake off the ants as they gnawed away at his brain?

“Is that who hired us to disillusion her? The husband’s family?”

“Packard wouldn’t tell me.” Carter gazes out at the lawn. “It’s sort of strange, because usually he tells us the client. In fact, he always tells us.”

“Did he say why he couldn’t?”

“Nah,” Carter says. “Maybe the client wants to be confidential. Anyway, you don’t have to rush with
Aggie. Simon’s scheduled for her after you, and he’s pretty busy right now.”

“Simon’s after us?”

“Yeah. Eventually you’ll have to think of a way to work him in.”

   An hour later I’m sitting in a white loveseat in Aggie’s glass-walled conservatory, a sort of terrarium for the wealthy, listening to Aggie talk about the revoltingness of infrequently cleaned pools.

I’ve never hunted, but I wonder if this is how the hunter feels—the anticipation, the uneasy thrill. The power of the weapon. Flashes of fear, flashes of pity.

She tells me how once at a five-star hotel she’d felt slime on a pool tile. “What was that? What was I touching?”

I sip my champagne and consider the question. “I’d say it was a thin skin of algae.”

She shudders. “Disgusting. The whole place was slimy. Even the people who worked there. No offense.”

“None taken,” I say. Though being that she said ‘No offense,’ I’m pretty sure some was in there.

Aggie stretches her arm across the seat back in a pose of dissolute glamour I rather like. The conservatory doors are wide open, providing an unobstructed view of the expanse of the grounds, the expanse of the pool, and the expanse of Carter’s muscular shoulders.

Aggie stares at him as she gives her opinions on the revolting rubberiness of mushrooms, the revolting sliminess of dogs’ noses, and the disturbing three-fingered hands of Disney characters. After each anecdote, she raises her shoulders practically to her ears: “Guh!”