Thin Air (19 page)

“Ditto,” I said grimly. “Oh, and you're not driving, jerk. Give me the keys.”

“But I don't
want
to go to California!” Sarah repeated, half a wail.

“Okay,” I said. “Want to stay here? Alone?”

She looked from me to Eamon, back to me. Eyes wide and still medically dilated.

And she burst into an addict's helpless tears.

“I'll take that as a no,” I said, and got her under the arm to help her up. “So let's get moving.”

 

The instant I banged open the rickety front door of the trailer and stepped down onto the cinder-block steps, Louis Vuitton suitcase in hand, I knew something was wrong out there. There was a sense of stillness, of the world not quite breathing. No birds in the sky, no wind. It was the weightless moment before the ground crumbles under your feet, and you fall, screaming.

I froze. Maybe the old me would have known what to do, but the new, not-so-improved me had no earthly idea what the right move might be. I just waited for the hammer to fall.

She's looking for me.
I held myself completely still, completely silent, until I felt the shadow drift away. Maybe this was how the rabbit felt when the shadow of the hawk moved overhead. It was humbling and horrifying, and I had no idea how I was supposed to react except that I had a deep, burning desire to get the hell
out. Come on, Venna
, I thought.
If you're not too busy braiding your hair.

I finally let myself draw in a breath, blinked, and came down the two unstable steps to the soft, sandy ground. It still felt strange, but maybe it was just me. Maybe I was just paranoid.

You're not paranoid. Somebody's out to get you, remember?
Several somebodies, maybe, but certainly including that evil doppelgänger back at the clinic. And if the Joanne back at the clinic had her way—somehow I was almost sure she was managing it—she'd have convinced Lewis of her sincerity by now. And, though it turned my stomach to think about it, she might have even fooled David. In which case it wouldn't be her getting her hands dirty, coming after me. She'd have plenty of shock troops available, and all the eyes and ears of the Wardens.

A breath of wind touched me from the west. It blew hair across my eyes, and I reached up to push it away. In the half second of partial vision, something flickered across my line of sight, and was gone.

“David?” I whispered. I felt nothing, and if it
was
David, he didn't show himself. I don't know why I wanted it to be him; he was trouble, and nothing but. Especially now.

And I still missed him, as stupid and shallow as that might be.

I stalked out the gate, dragging the designer luggage ruthlessly across gravel and sand, and popped the trunk of the black sedan. I heaved the suitcase up to dump it inside, and staggered backward, off balance, in shock. Because the trunk was already occupied.

Dead guy. Dead guy in the luggage area, and recently dead, too. There was very little blood, and just one neat hole in the center of his forehead and a thin trickle, but I didn't want to examine the exit wound, which was luckily facing away from me.

I didn't recognize him, naturally.

I was still staring at the body, frozen in shock, when Eamon reached over and slammed the trunk lid closed. “Full up. Suitcase in the backseat,” he said. “There's a love.”

I dropped the suitcase and backed away from him. He looked surprised. Well, not really surprised, but as if he
wanted
to look surprised. Eamon was a master at putting on emotions like outfits.

“Something wrong?” he asked. “You're not one to shy away from violence; I know that for a fact.”

“You killed him,” I said. “Who is he?”

“You don't know?” He studied my face, and I felt naked. Way too exposed. “I know you're not generally popular with your peers, but I'm surprised you don't at least know the ones who want you dead.”

“This isn't about me. This is about the
dead man in your trunk.
” I was clenching my teeth now, and wishing I had a weapon. A big one. Large-caliber. “What the hell is going on?”

“No idea,” Eamon said. “He was waiting for you outside of the prison with a rather nice three-eighty, which would have put a large and bloody hole in your back, shredded your lungs, and blown your heart halfway to hell. I say your back because of where he'd stationed himself. Because of the angle.”

I felt sick, and a little bit relieved.
Okay, so it's a bad guy dead in the trunk. That's better, right?
Of course it wasn't, and just because the psychopath went after other villains didn't make him any less of a psychopath, did it? Besides, I had no idea if Eamon was telling the truth. He seemed sincere, but he seemed a lot of things he wasn't—nothing if not facile.

“Oh, don't look so worried,” Eamon said, and opened the back door of the car for Sarah. She moved as if she were missing some bones, folding like wet cardboard when she was finally in the seat. I opened the other side and put her suitcase inside. She promptly used it as a pillow, and went right to sleep. “I doubt he'll be missed. Contract killers rarely have what you might call an extensive social circle.”

Eamon had brought out a cheap-looking velour blanket. He spread it over Sarah as he spoke. It was an odd gesture of kindness from a guy who thought nothing of loading up the trunk with corpses, and his contradictions were starting to make my head hurt.

“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.

“Let's just say he won't be accompanying us all the way to California,” Eamon replied. “There's plenty of desert between here and there.”

“Do you know who he is?” I asked.

“Not a fucking clue,” he said, and reached in his pocket. He took out a slim black wallet, which he flipped over the car's roof to me. I caught it, startled. “Perhaps you'll see something that rings a bell, eh?”

I opened it and checked for ID. There was a driver's license for a guy named John T. Hunter. I wondered if that was a joke of some kind:
John The Hunter.
Like, assassin. But why would I have a professional assassin on my case? Then again, why wouldn't I? Given the gigantic mountain of nothing that I knew about my life, I supposed I couldn't rule it out.

Other than the license, his wallet was empty except for a fat stash of cash, which I felt sick about taking, but hey, I needed it.

“Well?” Eamon asked, staring at me over the top of the black car. “His chances of recovery aren't improving, I assure you. So I'd suggest we roll along.”

“What if I just walk away?” I asked. “What if I go to the police?” I darted a look into the backseat. Sarah slept on peacefully.

“Well, two things will happen. First, you'll be arrested, because of course I'll have to give a statement that
you
shot this poor man and stole his money. Second, your sister will be dead, and it'll look as if you had quite a bit to do with it. Did you know that statistically most murders are committed by a person close to the victim? Shocking.” He said it flatly, without any emphasis, but I believed him. “All right, even if you've lost your memory, you know exactly who I am and what I can do, because there's ample evidence in the trunk with a bullet in his head. So let's stop dancing around the proprieties and get on with it, shall we? I need your particular talents for one thing and one thing only, and then, as far as I'm concerned, you can go to hell and take Sarah with you. Are we clear?”

His eyes glittered. There was something feral in him, something pushed into a corner. I didn't doubt he'd kill. He was right. The body in the trunk was proof enough of that.

I didn't answer him. I held his stare long enough to promise him a whole lot of things, most of them violent, and then I opened the front driver's-side door, got in, and started the engine. I considered gunning it and leaving him there in the dust, but all he had to do was make a phone call, and I was a wanted felon with a body in the trunk.

Play along. Find an opportunity. Wait for Venna.

It was risky, but it was the only card in my hand at the moment.

We buried Mr. Hunter, whatever his name might have actually been, in a shallow, sandy grave six miles from Ares, in a stretch of desert that probably hadn't had human visitors for ten years, and wouldn't again for ten more. Eamon and I buried him, that is; Sarah slept on in the backseat, the sleep of the OxyContin-coddled innocent. By the time it was done I felt sick, angry, filthy, and gritty with sweat and sand. I wanted to kill Eamon, in a figurative if not literal sense. He
had
, apparently, saved my life, even though he'd shot someone to do it. Once again, the sticky gray center with him. I wanted to be able to hate him with a whole heart.

Well, of course, there was the threat against my sister. That helped keep me from doing anything stupid.

We didn't talk, except that he directed me along Highway 95 to 160, where we turned west. He wasn't telling me the final destination.

I hated the car about as much as I hated him. The pedal was sluggish, the steering was loose, and it shimmied through curves. Looked good on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself.

I didn't draw Eamon's attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahrump we picked up a tail. Of course, it was hard to be sure—highways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies—but I did some experimenting with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with me, whether I sped up, changed lanes, or slowed down. He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror.

He hadn't been there when we'd dumped the body, though. That had been a clear road for miles, and no chance of being spotted by anything but a high-flying eagle. So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck. No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it came to that, and of course I was driving, wasn't I? And Eamon had made sure that my fingerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket. Insurance.

The weather was shifting. I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head. I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knew what I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown me. Oversight, he and Lewis had called it. And the world was different when you knew how to interpret the clues.

The car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference. Past the hood, the road glimmered flat black, sparking with little explosions of light—tiny creatures, maybe, living and dying in their own little dramas?—and in the distance the sky was a rolling, strange landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks. More like fluid than air. The orange was pushing its way through. I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was some kind of warm front, and it was creating all kinds of swirls and eddies and muted flashing chains of energy. Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water.

I'd gotten so engrossed in the strange view that I'd backed off on speed. Eamon growled in frustration. “Are we on a sightseeing tour, pet, or do you actually want to
get there
?” he snapped. I jammed the accelerator down and checked the rearview mirror. It made me light-headed to look at the world this way, but it was weirdly compelling. The van behind me looked like a scarred battlewagon. Whoever was driving that thing had an intimate knowledge of being in the thick of things. I couldn't get more than a shadowy glimpse of the interior.

Sarah sat up and yawned, and I nearly yelped. In Oversight she looked horribly distorted—puffy, sick, surrounded by a flickering black cloud edged in red.

I didn't dare look at Eamon. Some things I just didn't want to know.

I blinked, and the visions were gone. It was just a road, and those were just cars, and in the mirror my sister looked grumpy, tired, and ill. “I need a bathroom,” she said.

“You'll have to hold it,” Eamon said. “Nothing out here, love. Nothing but sand and things that sting.”

He wasn't wrong. We'd taken 372 out of Pahrump, and although there was some traffic, there were no towns. A few clusters of sun-rotted buildings, but nothing that deserved the name of
town.
We'd seen one Nevada state trooper cruising slowly in the opposite direction, but I'd held our speed to just under the legal limit. No sense in tempting fate, when fate included jail time and possibly even a death sentence.

Clouds boiled up in the west by the time we'd crossed the border into California. Sarah had whined periodically about a need for bathroom, water, and food; I felt the same needs, but I knew better than to encourage her. We raided the polyunsaturated goodness of the snack aisle of a Quik Stop on the outskirts of Tecopa, which was more or less the last call for calories, gas, and restroom facilities.

Night closed in early, and with it came rain. Blinding, silvery waves of it, glittering in the car's headlights like a downpour of diamonds. In a strange way it felt comforting.
I've done this before
, I thought. I could sense that, although I couldn't really touch the memory of it. I could sense the energy up there in the sky, feel it rippling through me in ways that I couldn't begin to understand or explain. It was soothing.

Eamon fell asleep. I kept driving.

And the white van stayed in the rearview mirror all night.

 

Ever driven all night through a rainstorm?

Tiring.

I stopped the car about dawn, or what would have been dawn if the sun had been able to pierce the cloud cover, and switched places with Eamon. We ate convenience store food, drank stale coffee, and after a while I dropped off to sleep, or at least an uneasy approximation of it, lulled by the steady drum of raindrops on the roof of the car.

I dreamed there was something staring at me from outside of the car window, something that looked like me but wasn't me, something with my smile and eyes as black and empty as space.
I can see you
, she mouthed, and grinned with razor-edged teeth.
You can't run. You don't belong here.
I woke up feeling sick and afraid and lost, and it didn't get any better when reality set in. I
was
sick and afraid and lost. I couldn't trust Eamon. I couldn't trust my sister. And I had no way of contacting anyone who might have had my best interests at heart.

Sometimes you've got to save yourself
, I told myself. It didn't make me any less afraid, but I did feel a significant improvement in my ability to keep a stiff upper lip about it.

“Where are we?” I asked. We were in the burbs of a major metropolitan area, and the landscape had definitely changed from flat desert to hilly desert. The rain had stopped, but the weather was still cloudy and—by the feel of my window glass—blood-warm. Eamon, still driving, looked tired and annoyed. Sarah was asleep again. I felt in the pocket of my jeans to be sure I still had possession of her Oxy. She was whimpering quietly to herself—bad dreams or withdrawal, I couldn't be sure.

“Doesn't matter where we are; we're not where we're going,” Eamon snapped. “Someone's following us.”

No kidding.
Well, I hadn't thought he'd miss it. “White van?”

“Yes.” He glanced at me with hard, shiny eyes like wet pebbles. “You knew.”

I shrugged and stretched. “Didn't matter,” I said. “Right? Plus, I didn't want you solving the problem with a bullet.”

“The first problem I solved for you with a bullet is buried back there in the desert, love, and if I hadn't, we'd be identifying you on a cold steel slab,” he said. I was ominously afraid he was right. “We need to find out who might have an interest in tailing us. One of your Warden friends, perhaps. Or someone from the police.”

“It's not the police. At least, not official. They wouldn't be following us across state lines. Besides, I think it's probably about you, not me. You don't strike me as the kind of guy who makes a lot of friends, Eamon.”

He evidently found that logic to be slightly persuasive. He even looked a little thoughtful. “They do tend to have a short shelf life,” he admitted. “Friends, lovers, relationships of any sort. I've often regretted that.”

Just when I thought it was possible to really work up a decent hate for him, he had to disarm me with self-deprecation.
Dead guy
, I reminded myself.
Shot in the head. Remember who you're talking to.

“Speaking of short shelf lives,” he continued in a far too casual tone, “I'm surprised you're not traveling with your beau.”

“Beau,” I repeated. Was he talking about Lewis? David? Somebody else altogether?

“How soon they forget. And I thought it was true love.” Eamon's smile became positively predatory. “Oh, come now. You
do
remember him, don't you? I wouldn't think amnesia could wipe out
that.
”

“Just because I don't want to talk about it with you doesn't mean I don't remember,” I said hotly. “Back off.”

“He made quite a production of telling me to stay away from you, once upon a time,” Eamon said. “I've got the scars to prove it. Thoughtful of him to leave them—although to be fair, he did keep me from bleeding to death. So, shall I worry about your somewhat supernatural boyfriend charging to your rescue?”

“Maybe,” I said, and smiled back at him. One good menacing pseudo-grin deserved another. “Nervous?”

“Terrified,” he said, in a way that indicated he wasn't. But I wondered. “What about the girl?”

I stayed quiet.
Girl
covered quite a lot of territory.

“Don't tell me you don't remember your own daughter.”

Imara.
He was talking about…How did he know her? What had happened between the two of them? I glared at him, trying to find a way to phrase questions that wouldn't reveal my ignorance, and failing miserably.

“Let's agree to stay off the subject of my personal life,” I said, “because I swear to God, if you mention either of them again, I'll rip your tongue out and use it for a toilet brush.
Please
tell me we're getting close to wherever it is we're going.”

“Yes,” he said. “We're getting close.”

“Then explain to me what it is you want me to do.”

“Nothing too terribly exciting,” Eamon said. “I'd like a building destroyed.”

I gaped at him. Honestly.
Gaped.
He
what
? “Are you insane?” I asked. “No, strike that; the answer's pretty obvious. What makes you think I'd do a thing like that?”

“For one thing, you've done it before—and, of course, so have more than a few of the Weather Wardens, for fun and profit. I told you I had a construction investment in Florida—it was more of a construction investment designed to experience catastrophic failure during some natural disaster or other. Florida's quite prone to them, but California…well. It's the mecca for that sort of thing, isn't it?”

“Eamon—”

“It's perfectly simple. I know you can do it without even breaking a sweat. I won't bother threatening your life, Joanne. You've amply demonstrated to me how little your own survival means to you.” Eamon shrugged slightly. “I'd almost admire that, if I didn't find it ridiculous. Sacrificing your life for others is nothing but a socially accepted version of suicide. It's just as bloody selfish.”

“You're one to talk about selfish,” I said. “You want me to
bring down a building
?”

“A small one,” he clarified. “Hardly the apocalypse you're imagining. Seven stories. An office building.”

“Why?”

“Why is not your business,” he said. “Suffice to say, money.”

“No. I'm not doing it.”

“I promise you, there will be no casualties. It'll be deserted. No chance of murder hanging heavy on your conscience.” He said it with irony, as if I already had a lot to worry about. Which I was starting to think wasn't far from the truth. “A small price to pay for your sister's life and ultimate well-being, isn't it? Not to mention your own, as little as that means to you?”

Eamon was almost—
almost
—begging. Interesting. I stared at him for a few seconds, read nothing in him but what he wanted me to read, and turned my attention outward, to the passing cars, the landscape, the weather, as Eamon kept us moving relentlessly onward. Clouds hovered close. Gray mist swept the tops of hills, and as we passed a small stock pond just off the road, I saw it was giving up wisps of vapor.

It was an eerie sort of mood out there. And I didn't think it was just me.

“Nobody in the building,” I said. “Right?”

“Cross my heart and hope to fry,” he said. “There's exactly one security guard. I'll make sure he's off the premises.”

“And how exactly do you expect me to bring down a building without destroying everything around it?”

“You're joking, surely,” he said. “I don't care, so long as it appears to be a natural phenomenon. A storm, a tornado, freak winds…use your imagination.”

“All of those are going to do more damage than just the one building.” And I wasn't capable of handling that kind of thing, anyway, not that I'd be admitting it to him anytime soon. “Unless it's an isolated location.”

“Well, if you can't do it, or won't, then I'll have to resort to my alternate plan. Sadly, that involves a quantity of C-four explosive and a daytime terrorist attack, which will cost lives and no doubt inconvenience everyone in the world for at least a few days. There's a day care facility in the building, I understand. It would be quite the tragedy.”

I blinked. “You're bluffing.”

“Am I? Can you really be completely sure of that? Because if you're not, love, I'd suggest you weigh your own moral values against the lives of the six hundred people who work in that building during the week. And the fourteen preschoolers who could end up tragic statistics.”