Water to Burn (46 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
I realized in the midst of all this brooding that Aunt Rose had walked over to watch me, her smile gone, her eyes heavy with thought.
“Many a mickle maks a muckle,” she said, then smiled. “You gonna finish that piece of pie?”
“Nope.” I held the plate out. “Here.”
She grinned and scooped the plate up, then turned to glance at Ari, who was listening to Brian tell some involved anecdote about a basketball game. She pursed her lips and let out a loud, sharp imitation of a British police whistle. Ari spun around, and his right hand grabbed air about halfway to his gun before he stopped himself.
“A whiter shade of pale,” Aunt Rose said. “Take her home, but not to West Virginia.”
“Right you are,” Ari said. “Nola, you need to rest.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
When we got into the car, Ari sighed, a long drawn-out sigh as if he’d been holding his breath for hours.
“Well,” I said, “now you know that not everyone in my family is glamorous.”
“Yes,” Ari said. “But you have to take the rough with the smooth.”
I laughed, but the joke made me remember “Many a mickle maks a muckle.” I suddenly realized why that particular proverb had floated to the surface of Aunt Frog’s mind. Alone, I could never defeat Belial. But what if Annie and Jerry melded their minds with mine and loaned me Qi? I remembered Annie talking about her grandmother’s séances, and how the Qi had flowed around the circle. Together, we could give this so-called master more of a fight than he could handle.
Even though Ari did the driving, I arrived home happy. There is nothing like seeing your way out of a trap to elevate your mood.
Before we could deal with Belial, however, I needed to get Caleb into the hands of the police. As I told Ari, we could never prove his complicity in Bill Evers’ murder, but at least we could get him back into jail on the extortion and firearm charges.
“That will have to do,” Ari said. “Pity. You’re sure, then, that he was involved in the murder? We don’t want to let some other guilty party go free by focusing on him if he’s innocent.”
“That’s true, yeah,” I said, “but I’ve never run across anyone else with the close connections to both Evers and Belial except for the two women who were in the coven. Do you agree that we can leave La Rosa and Burnside off our suspect list?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Look, let me run this down for you. See if it sounds reasonable.”
“Very well.” He sat down next to me on the couch. “Go on.”
“Here’s the likely scenario. Caleb bought Evers a drink or two to soften him up, then ensorcelled him so that Belial could fill his mind with evil thoughts. Evers was an addict. His law practice was failing. He’d taken part in some really silly fake occult stuff. He’d given a blackmailer information, which means he’d violated attorney confidentiality. He would have been reviled by the best names in San Francisco society if they had ever learned the truth. He might even have gone to jail.”
“For the drugs if nothing else,” Ari said. “He certainly would have lost his practice.”
“Right, and he’d have been disbarred. Belial could have planted the idea that suicide would solve everything while Caleb escorted Evers outside for his run to the bay. That young lifeguard, the good Samaritan we saw on the news?”
“I remember him, yes.”
“Well, he ruined the plan. When he tried to save Evers, it forced Brother Belial to take a direct hand in the murder with the rogue wave. And that’s what tipped me off. If Evers had just drowned himself the way they’d planned, I might have just accepted the whole thing as suicide. They knew about us, because we’d just interviewed Evers. I felt someone watching us when we left, but I couldn’t see anyone. They had to know I was a psychic, because Caleb told me that he’d picked Jack as a partner in order to get to know me. I’ll bet Belial put him up to that. So Old Bro took a big gamble when he drowned Evers, and he lost.”
Ari nodded, thinking it over. “What about that poor girl down at the beach?” he said.
“Her death might have been an accident. I’m sure as I can be that I saw Caleb and his fancy white car that day, so I’m placing him near the scene. Did Caleb mean to kill someone? Maybe not. It would have taken him a while to learn how to control the waves. We’ll probably never know for sure why those two kids got swept into the water.”
“What I’m wondering is if Belial wanted something to hold over Caleb.”
“By involving him in a death? It could be, all right. The blackmailer blackmailed. Chaotics never really can trust each other.”
“I see. You’ve certainly put together a plausible case.”
My case would never stand up in any court, of course. Even if by some bizarre turn the police issued a warrant, how would anyone capture Belial to bring him to justice? His body—whatever that was like—existed safely tucked away on some other deviant level or even on some other planet. I had no idea of what was carrying his consciousness to our world, except that it had to be an energy field of some kind that would register on Ari’s special sunglasses.
“It really bothers me, thinking of Caleb getting off so easy,” I said. “Even if he gets twenty years, he’ll be out of prison one day, while Evers and that child are dead forever.”
“True,” Ari said, “but the law can only do what it may do. If the law recognized psychic talents, we could at least file an accessory to murder charge on the basis of what you’ve just told me. But it doesn’t, so blackmail and gun violations are the best we can do. Besides.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “Who knows what will happen to him in prison?”
Sure, if we catch him, I thought. We had a decent chance so long as Belial stayed out of the picture. Because my scans had come so easily, I was tempted to assume that Belial had deserted his alleged ally. It was also possible that he was pretending to stay away in the hopes of catching me offguard. At the moment I had no way of testing either assumption.
As long as Caleb stayed holed up in whatever motel he’d chosen and kept his car out of sight, the local police would never find him. They simply didn’t have the manpower to search every motel and hotel in the Bay Area, which has hundreds of them, for a nonviolent criminal like a blackmailer. With Caleb’s own talents, he would probably receive an ASTA if they were getting close to him or a SAWM at least. Warned, he could just skip out ahead of them.
Spotting him, therefore, was my job. Since I was officially a cross-agency government operative in the eyes of the police, Ari could call in any information I might garner. I began running regular SM:P and LDRS scans that evening, every hour or so. I saw Caleb reading, eating junk food, and making marks on a map of Northern California. The scans lacked the focus for me to identify his marks, although I could tell he was putting them on the coastline.
“My guess was right,” I told Ari. “The treasure’s keeping him here.”
“Good. By the way, it’s after midnight. You really need to get some sleep.”
“I wish you wouldn’t nag me.”
“I’m your bodyguard.” He gave me a smug smile. “And you’re endangering your health.”
I realized that my talents were beginning to fade out of sheer exhaustion. “Oh, all right,” I said. “I’ll go to bed.”
That night I dreamed a kaleidoscope of images from the past few weeks. The last image woke me early on Tuesday morning. I opened my eyes in a bedroom filled with pale gray fog light. The clock read 6:15. Ari was sound asleep and snoring next to me. I elbowed him awake.
“Oof,” he said. “What?”
“Caleb’s on the move,” I said. “Let’s get up.”
I threw on a pair of jeans and the same shirt I’d worn the night before. While Ari took a quick shower, I sat down at the kitchen table with my pad of paper and crayons. The minute I thought of Caleb, my hand grabbed a blue-green crayon and began to draw. The water and the tide line came effortlessly, followed by beige scribbles for sand. Clear enough, but exactly where on the thousand miles of California coast Sumner was remained a mystery. Most likely his location lay somewhere near the Bay Area, where Drake supposedly buried his gold, but that only narrowed the area down to a hundred and fifty miles.
I switched to an SM:P. I got glimpses of Caleb, burdened by a backpack, walking along the firm sand at the water’s edge. He carried a long narrow object over one shoulder. A rifle? Not a good sign, if so. Again, he could have been anywhere on the coast of the greater Bay Area. Inspiration struck. I ran a Scan Mode:Object for his white sedan. While objects rarely provide the starting point for a scan, I had a deep emotional connection to that car because Caleb had used it during the attack. Nearly getting killed tends to set the vibrations in your mind.
The sedan showed up as a misty white blob, touched with glints of gold, roughly car-shaped, parked in a small lot surrounded by beach grass and weeds. I let myself drift into a light trance, which clarified the scan on my inner monitor. I could move only a few feet within the image, but that was enough to see the landmark I needed.
I left the trance state and ended the scan just as a damp Ari strode into the kitchen. He was wearing his gray suit slacks, a white shirt, and the Beretta in its shoulder holster.
“Got him!” I said. “He’s on the beach near Mussel Rock in Pacifica.”
“I’ll call in the location.” Ari took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “Get ready to go.”
I put on a pair of running shoes and a sweater. I owned a black anorak with the initials of my supposed government agency prominent on the front and back. I used it as little as possible since I didn’t really work for that group, but it seemed appropriate for this particular occasion. I grabbed my shoulder bag. Ari shrugged into his leather jacket. We trotted down the stairs and ran for the car. I pulled on the anorak before we got in.
“I’ll drive,” I said. “You keep in touch with the cops.”
Those extra buttons on the Saturn’s steering column proved their worth. Every time we drove along the Great Highway toward a red light, I pressed one, and the light turned green. Once we connected with Skyline, there were no more red lights, and I let the car show me her speed. Close to Pacifica, we had to leave the good roads behind and turn onto narrow access roads that led straight past the corporation yard of the local garbage company.
The cliff across the water from Mussel Rock, part of a county park, launches plenty of hang gliders on weekends and summer days. Under a cold gray sky, with a west wind driving in from the ocean, the only cars were Caleb’s white sedan and a police cruiser. We parked on the far side of the cruiser. When Ari got out, a uniformed officer jogged over to confer with him.
I left my shoulder bag under the front seat but took the car keys with me when I got out. I walked over to the edge of the lot. Far below, the ocean murmured and swelled onto the sand. The tide, I realized was coming in fast. The rock itself, which is shaped like a mussel rather than harboring a lot of them, loomed black and spiky some distance from the beach.
The sea has eroded this stretch of coast into an alteration of deep inlets and jutting fingers of land. After our stormy winter, nothing but bare dirt and rock covered the faces of the cliffs, all of them unstable formations, especially with the tide rushing into the coves and foaming out again. Off to the south from where I stood, I saw a small figure. He had his back to the ocean and was staring at the jut of dark brown dirt directly above him. When I ran an SM:P for Caleb, it matched. I trotted back to the parking lot.
“He’s down on the sand a couple hundred yards off,” I said. “We’d better hurry. The tide’s turned.”
“I’ve already called in backup,” the police officer said. “I’ll call again and get a rescue unit out here.”
“Brilliant,” Ari said. “O’Grady, give me the keys.”
I handed them over. Ari unlocked the trunk and grabbed a coil of bright yellow nylon rope. I noticed a neat arrangement of boxes and bundles before he slammed the trunk shut. He threw me the keys, and I put them in my jeans pocket. I could feel my heart pounding. Was Belial out there in the waves, sucking up Qi for an attack? I reminded myself that if he was, I could draw from the same source. Ari slung the coil of rope over one shoulder like a mountaineer.
“Ready,” Ari said.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s go, Nathan.”
We jogged along a dirt road that ran parallel to the cliff top, then cut over to the grassy flat. At the edge, I looked down and saw Caleb directly below us, holding a shovel, not a rifle. Grooves and holes on the cliff face indicated he’d already done some digging. He might have thought he’d found the location of the treasure. He’d also trapped himself inside one of the coves. He stood at the narrow point of a dangerous V of cliffs. Beyond the wide mouth of the V, the beach had already disappeared under water, which was growing deeper by the minute. As we watched, a wave came foaming into the inlet. The white line of water stopped barely two feet behind him. He seemed utterly unaware of it.
“Caleb!” I yelled down. “Start climbing! The tide’s coming in.”
At the sound of my voice, he looked up and shaded his eyes with one hand against the glare of sun through fog. The morning sun hung low behind us to the east. He may not have seen us. He may not have recognized us if he did.
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