Chill Factor

FIVE

Some rescue.

When it became clear I wasn't the damsel in distress-or at least not the kind Quinn could save me from with his heroic.45-he grabbed me by the elbow and hustled me down the hall, into the elevator, and out through the casino in record time.

I was getting tired of being hustled.

As we stepped outside onto the wide portico, with its huge sweep of overhang and constant stream of limos and taxis dropping off money, I yanked myself loose and stepped back, hands in fists at my sides. At last. Out in the open-more or less-and breathing natural air.

"Hey!" I snarled. Quinn's eyebrows did a funny little up-and-down jerk, and then his face went reflectively impassive. "Pal! Back off, will you? I don't need your damn help! I had things under control!"

"Yeah, it really looked like it," Quinn said. He calmly reached into his pocket and took out the gun again, in full view of the uniformed doormen. One of them looked alarmed and reached for a phone; Quinn also moved his coat and revealed an official-looking gold badge in a black holder snapped over his belt.

Quinn was a cop.

"Let's take a drive, sunshine," he told me, and steered me out into a holding pen reserved for taxis and cars for hire. A dark brown Ford Taurus sat among them, shiny as a roach, and Quinn popped open doors and put me in like a criminal with a hand on my head, into the backseat. I immediately tried the door, but of course it didn't open. Childproof locks had a lot to answer for.

Quinn's driver's-side door opened, and he bent over to fix me with a look out of those light toffee-brown eyes. "Play nice," he said. "Don't make me cuff you."

I put my hands pointedly in my lap. The car's upholstery groaned slightly as he got in, and then the engine fired and we were moving down the long driveway into blinding Las Vegas sun, heading for a huge sign that spelled out the current Bellagio attractions in glowing starlike lights.

"I'm under arrest?" I asked. "What's the charge?"

"Criminal stupidity," Quinn said.

"And you're full of shit. I told you, I didn't need rescuing, and if I'm not under arrest, Detective Quinn-"

"Consider yourself a material witness in an ongoing investigation."

"An investigation of what, exactly?"

He took a right turn onto Flamingo Road, negotiated with a Lexus for a lane change, and headed the car down Las Vegas Boulevard. "Murder," he said. "I had a guy pitched out of that window about a week ago, you know. Messed up my sidewalk something terrible. I guess you know that nobody else can see those knuckleheads up there. You must be a Warden, right? Wardens can see them."

Now that the panic was starting to subside, I felt tired and achy. Groggy with leftover adrenaline. "And you? You're a Warden?"

He held up his right hand. I made a pass in the air, concentrated, and saw the telltale sparkle of wards reflected on his skin. Quinn's aetheric tattoo was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life. Which didn't match the stylized sunburst I'd expected to see.

"Not a Warden. What the hell are you?"

"Need to know, sunshine."

"As in, I don't need to?"

"I know you thought you were being all clever and shit, but the kid wasn't giving you Jonathan's bottle. Oh, he was going to give you a bottle, but it was one with a nasty toy surprise inside. He already pulled that on one other poor bastard." Quinn's glance in the rearview mirror was grim and assessing. "I take it you have some experience with Demon Marks."

Where the hell had he heard that? Not even the Wardens knew much about it. The Djinn knew, but this guy wasn't Djinn; I'd have been able to tell that much. Not a Warden, not Djinn, but something.

And yet, when I took a look at him in Oversight, he was just a guy. Nothing special. Not even any powers to speak of.

Quinn could tell I wasn't going to offer any color commentary. "If he'd given you the bottle, you'd have uncorked it to order Jonathan in," he said. "Only problem is, that would have let something else out, and we've got quite enough of that kind of problem going around right now. So sorry, but I had to stop you."

I felt a flush of cold through my veins. It was possible Quinn was right; Kevin's brain worked that way. If he could have found a way to screw things up, he'd have done it. And giving up… it wasn't really his style, was it? Taking out the enemy in the most horrifically violent way possible, that was his style. And if there really had been a booby-trapped bottle…

During Kevin's escape in New York three weeks ago, he and Jonathan had released from their bottles at least three Djinn who were infected with Demon Marks, which meant that they were clinically insane, at the mildest interpretation; I knew that two of them had been located and recaptured, safely labeled as hazardous materials, and stored in some underground vault in Colorado. The third remained on the loose. It figured that Kevin might have grabbed up one of the other unbroken bottles as insurance. He could have passed one of those to me, and that would have meant passing me the Demon Mark when I opened up the bottle. Yippee. Been there, done that. Really didn't care for a return engagement.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked. Useless question. He didn't even bother to glance in the rearview. There was no plastic divider between me and Quinn, and I was starting to wonder what the effects of a decent wind gust would be inside the passenger area of a Taurus, but then Quinn took an abrupt right turn, up a long, wide drive.

Toward the gleaming glass pyramid of the Luxor Hotel, guarded by the massive golden bulk of the Sphinx.

"Oh," I said. "Cool. I always wanted to stay there."

The Luxor was like the Bellagio, only different. I kind of liked the Egyptian theme better, but then I've always been pretty ostentatious in my fashion sense, and besides, in the cluster of high-end shops by the entrance I spotted evidence of Jimmy Choo, Prada, and Kate Spade. That plus all the ornamental gold and enamel… well, I almost forgot about Quinn's gun and badge and hand on my arm.

For a minute.

The gaming area was virtually identical to the Bellagio's; only the wallpaper and carpeting and uniforms were different. The money was universal, and so was the mingled, vibrating sense of euphoria and desperation. I couldn't resist; I let myself slip the leash of the material world a little and rose up into the aetheric, just enough to catch a peek.

When I was a Djinn, the aetheric had registered in patterns and wavelengths of light. These days, human senses limited me to the surfaces of things, and a kind of broad psychological interpretation of auras. On the aetheric plane, the casino was almost a photonegative of how it appeared on earth. Instead of brilliant and glittering, it was dark, shadowy, peopled by ghosts whose auras fired in flares of manic excitement or despair. I don't mean that everybody there was addicted… far from it. But there was a shine to it that reminded me unsettlingly of the way the blue sparklies had looked, up on the aetheric, when the route had been open from the Demon Realms into our own.

I wasn't sure what that meant, but I decided I didn't have time to solve the world's problems, anyway. One problem at a time, and mine was towing me through the casino at a relentless pace.

"Hey, you're not going to take me back to your presidential suite and hang me out a window, are you? Because that's so last half hour ago…"

"Quiet," Quinn said absently. He strong-armed me up to one of those areas labeled private, guarded by not one but two strong-looking guys in discreet blazers with not-so-discreet bulges under their arms. They nodded to him. He nodded back. One of them jerked a chin at me. They all gave me the once-over.

All in silence.

I gave myself the once-over, too. Clingy shirt, short skirt, high heels that were just short of being quality…

"In your dreams, guys," I said. "It's not what it looks like."

"She's with me," Quinn said.

"Watch it, Quinn," one of them warned. They were virtually identical-Buzz Cut Number One, Buzz Cut Number Two. Number Two had a slightly thicker neck. Number One had cool, chilly gray eyes. "Don't make us come in there."

Quinn fixed them each with a look, and I mean a look. Whatever he'd been using with me had been his friendly-puppy act, because that look was outright scary, promising evil and death in man-sized portions.

"Gentlemen," he said, and Buzz Cut Number One slid a key card through a slot and opened the door for us.

Beyond was a small, smoky room. In another setting it might have been labeled intimate, but in this one it was just small. Low lighting in the faux-Egyptian sconces along the wall, plush dark carpeting underfoot. A full bar at one end, with a uniformed bartender on duty.

In the center of the room, a round table, and five men sitting around it.

Playing cards.

The cards were floating in midair in front of each player; as I watched, an older gentleman who looked like he'd been made a CPA in the days of the pharaohs decided to fold, and lowered his hand facedown to the green baize surface. The room smelled of cigar smoke and sweat-soaked money. I didn't know how much the pile of chips on the table represented, but it was a lot. A lot. I didn't dare peek into the aetheric this time. Some things-I knew this instinctively- really shouldn't be seen.

"Quinn," the accountant grunted, and the rest of the players looked up. I was staring at the hand of the man directly in front of me; the floating cards showed he had eights over queens.

"Sir." Quinn's demeanor had changed again, this time to the respectful public servant. He let go of my arm. "Joanne Baldwin. Joanne, this is Myron Lazlo."

"Charmed," the accountant said, and nodded in my direction without getting up. "You're a Warden, correct?"

"Weather," I said. "You?"

He had a lived-in face, lined around the eyes. High cheekbones that made him look like he'd stored a couple of tight, small apples in them for the winter. The suit-what I could see of it-was easily a four-grand tailored job, probably from Saville Row or Rome. Beautiful gray wool. The tie was a Villa Bolgheri silk, knotted to perfection.

I revised my estimate of his total net worth up by seven figures.

"I'm not a Warden," Myron Lazlo said. "Neither are these other gentlemen, I assure you."

"So you're what, ankh guys? What's up with that?"

He gave me an unamused, unwelcoming smile. "Quinn, you're being unmannerly. Bring a chair for the lady, please."

Quinn moved without comment, came up with a straight-backed chair, and moved it into position away from the table.

"If you'd be so kind as to wait a moment," Lazlo said. "We're almost finished with this hand."

I sat down, crossed my legs, folded my hands, and waited. Quinn and his gun and his dead-eyed stare kept me honest, as did the idea of the Buzz Cut twins outside the door. Plus, whether they wanted to call themselves Wardens or not, these guys had something… defying gravity wasn't something that most people, not even my people, casually went around doing. I had the unsettling feeling this was just a parlor trick, so far as they were concerned. I spent my time trying to figure out how they did it. No Djinn in evidence. I concentrated on the air, but it was following the normal flow patterns dictated by the forces of the room-the silent current of the air-conditioning coming from the top left-hand corner, swirling into corkscrew eddies as it was drawn down by gravity toward the floor. The hotter flow was a shimmer of yellow, filtering the opposite direction. Some kind of filter system in operation, technology I didn't recognize that attracted the chemical chains of the smoke in the air and funneled it away. As smoky as this room was, I realized it could have been much worse. Five men, each puffing away on cigarettes or twenty-dollar cigars for hours on end… made me gag nicotine to think of it.

I didn't see any signal, but a sigh went through the four remaining players, and three folded and one raked in chips. Lazlo gathered the cards and neatly shuffled them back together before handing them off to a Luxor-uniformed factotum. The dealer put the cards into an envelope, pulled a self-seal, and labeled the outside of the envelope with the date, time, and some kind of code number. So there could be analysis done later, I assumed, in case of an allegation of cheating. Nice.

He put a fresh, unbroken deck on the table and stepped away to stand like a statue in the corner, near the bartender.

"Now," Myron said, and gave me that parsimonious smile again, "let's talk about you, Ms. Baldwin. What brings you to Las Vegas?"

If he could ante up that fake a smile, I could see it and raise him on wattage. "Sun, fun, shopping…"

"Could it be that you're here to make a deal with Mr. Prentiss on behalf of the Wardens?"

I looked at Quinn. He was leaning up against the wall, arms folded, watching me with bright, uninformative eyes.

"Could be," I said. "Could be I'm here to kill him. Could be I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That happens more than you'd think."

Myron laughed. "My dear lady, I can also see into the aetheric, you know. And while you are intemperate and occasionally unwise, you lack the necessary ruthless detachment to be able to execute young boys. Even in pursuit of the greater good. And besides that, the Djinn would stop you, you know. However, I think you actually believe you might do it, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and not consider it a lie." The laughter faded out of his eyes and left them chilled and scary. "You do not want to lie to me, my dear. Really, you do not."

Okay, now I had a creepy bad feeling. They knew about the Wardens. They knew about Kevin. They knew about Jonathan. Was there anything these guys didn't know?

"Your attempt to stop him is foolish," one of the others continued. He was a short, gnarly-looking little man, approaching middle age but not yet arrived: slicked-back black hair, rimless glasses, eyes of no immediate impact behind them. "The Wardens need to stay out of this. They caused this mess, just as they've caused hundreds more in the past thousand years."

"Oh, okay. We'll just pick up our toys and go home." I smiled at Gnarly Guy, saw a faint flush spark high in his cheeks. "You do know about the temperature rise, don't you? Global warming? Impending ice age? Earthquakes? You do think we should do something to stop that, right?"

Silence. They all looked at me, and then Myron Lazlo said gently, "Actually, my dear, no. We don't. And that is our difficulty. The Wardens long ago exceeded their authority when they began to enslave the Djinn and force the world to their own uses. The system has long been out of balance, which is why you have to work so hard to keep it going. What you're speaking of is simply the logical result of so many mistakes. It can't be corrected by working even harder to control it."

"Then how can it be corrected?" I asked.

"By letting go," he said. "By giving up the illusion of control and allowing the world to right itself. That is the only way we can find our balance again."

"And how many millions is that brilliant strategy going to kill?"

"As many as it takes, my dear. If the Wardens had followed the right course a thousand years ago, we'd not be facing this kind of apocalypse now, but they refused to believe. More power, they said. More power will fix what's broken. But it won't, and you know that on some level, don't you?"

Things started to fall into place. "You've been fighting us."

"No," Myron said. "We've been correcting you. We stand on the side of the Mother. On the side of balance. We are Ma'at."

I stared at them, blank. They stared back. After a long moment, Myron smiled beautifully and nodded at the bartender.

"I believe our guest might require a drink," he said. "You favor whiskey, I believe? Although I find a gin and tonic to be quite refreshing at moments like these."

I ordered something, no idea what it was even as I was saying it, because my whole attention was fixed on what was opening up before me. Another world. The answer to the difficulties the Wardens had been facing, the reason the damn world didn't cooperate.

I was looking at an enemy the Wardens didn't even know they had. And dammit, they didn't even register as Wardens. As anything at all. How the hell could they do anything against us?

Silence reigned until the uniformed bartender pressed something into hand. I sipped. Not whiskey. Something bitter and bracing, cool as limes on my tongue.

Myron said, "We are the keepers of the balance, Miss Baldwin. I trust you have some understanding of what I'm saying?"

"I don't care if you call yourself the Justice League of America, you're screwed up," I said. "Don't you realize that you're playing with lives? People are dying out there. Millions will die."

"And that is a very natural thing," put in another player. "Sentimentality should have no place in an analysis of the environment. Things die. It's the nature of the world. You acknowledge that sometimes fires must burn so that the forests may be renewed. Surely you apply the same standard to the entire world."

"So now humanity is a forest and you're going to let a fire burn us out? Kill to cure?" I gripped the sweating glass hard in my hands and strove to keep my voice steady. "I stand corrected. You're not screwed up; you're insane."

"We have a long view," Myron admitted. "To you, it might seem cruel, but I promise you, my dear, it's the best thing in the end. The more power you expend preventing the Mother from correcting the balance, the more violent the correction will be when it comes. And even the Wardens understand that you can't stop everything you identify as a disaster. Far from it."

"Yeah, thanks to you guys, I'll bet." I took another fast drink. The stuff was strong, judging by the numbed feeling in the back of my throat; I set the rest of it back down on the floor, but before it touched down another uniformed flunky was there to grab it and carry it safely back to the bar.

"It was the Wardens who forced things out of alignment thousands of years ago," Myron said. "The system began to fail the moment that they discovered they could force the Djinn to their service, instead of asking for their cooperation. Which brings us to the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in. Djinn no longer act for us; they act against us, in constant subtle ways. The earth itself struggles to throw off the chains. And the Wardens are so oblivious, they simply tighten their grip around their own throats."

"Wow. That's poetic," I said. "So you brought me here to lecture on the evils of the Wardens?"

Myron looked amused. So did the rest of them, even Gnarly Guy, who looked like he wasn't amused by much this side of the grave. Myron passed the unbroken deck of cards to his left and nodded to the table. As if he'd given some signal, the rest of them scooted around, leaving space for another chair.

"No. We brought you here to play cards," he said. "Join us, Miss Baldwin. We could use a bit of feminine strategy in this room. Don't worry. We'll play it the normal way, out of courtesy to you."

I shot a look at Quinn, who was a statue against the wall; he had a long-distance stare that didn't seem to see me anymore. I stood up and instantly one of those suit-coated big men picked up my chair and carried it to the card table.

Myron indicated the place with an open hand. I tried another pleading look at Quinn. It was like pleading with a statue of Stalin.

I took the seat, and the new dealer-an elegantly put together little man with big Coke-bottle glasses- expertly snapped the seal on the deck, fanned the cards for inspection, shuffled, and began the deal. I was about to say that I had nothing but my shoes to bet with, but before I could draw the breath someone-I looked up and saw it was Quinn-had put a rack of chips down in front of me.

"I trust you know how to play," Myron said.

I gave him my very best innocent smile. "I went to a couple of casino nights in college." I fanned the hand I'd been dealt. It sucked, naturally. That didn't matter. I was about to teach these masters of balance something about tipping the scales in your own favor. "I'm in."

We played Texas Hold 'Em, and they cleaned my clock.

Two hours later I was sweating, broke, back down to betting my shoes, and out of the game. Quinn politely carried my chair back to its proper interrogation distance; when I looked mutinous about sitting down, he put a hand on my shoulder. Not that he pushed, exactly. Just put a hand on my shoulder, with authority.

I sat. Besides, my feet were starting to hurt, and my pride was bruised.

The old men played another three hands, silent except for raising and calling, folding and grunting in satisfaction when they won. It looked to me like Coke-bottle Glasses was winning. Nobody seemed bothered.

At some invisible signal, they just stopped playing. Myron gestured to the Luxor-uniformed factotum, who came around, counted chips, and handed over handwritten notes. Once the green baize table was clear, they passed their slips of paper around to Myron, who read each one and put them in some kind of order. Then he folded his hands on top of them.

"The vote is concluded," he said. "Mr. Ashworth holds the right of decision in this matter."

Vote? Vote? They voted by playing poker?

It hit me two seconds later what name he'd used.

Ashworth.

That could be a coincidence. There were lots of people named Ashworth.

Coke-bottle Glasses stood up to his lofty height of about five feet, straightened his nondescript but highly expensive gray suit, and took off his glasses. Without them, he had a dignified if sharp-featured face. He fixed a fierce gaze on me.

And I knew. There was a family resemblance, no question about it.

"I believe you knew my son," he said. "Charles Spenser Ashworth the third. I am Charles Spenser Ashworth the second. You may call me Mr. Ashworth."

I opened my mouth to say something, no idea what, but he stopped me with one upthrust finger and an intensely unpleasant look.

"Joanne Baldwin," he said, "I have won the right to decide what is done with you. Do you understand that?"

I managed to nod. I was too busy looking over his shoulder at Quinn, who'd come to full alert. Quinn had some features about him that reminded me of Carl, back in the desert. Adaptable to the situation, even if the situation called for death and mayhem.

I was unexpectedly nostalgic for the Bellagio hotel room, and the hair-trigger tension of Jonathan and Kevin. At least I'd been among friends.

Ashworth was talking. "… avoided telling the truth six years ago. You will not avoid it this time."

I wet my lips. "May I say something?" I got a terse, jerky nod from Ashworth. "I was cleared of charges by the Wardens."

"By the Wardens, yes." His contempt was clear. "We do not acknowledge the-how shall I put it?- impartiality of the Wardens. The venally corrupt should not be judging the guilty."

"Hey! Did we miss the part where I was not guilty!"

"I'm sorry, my dear, but you see that we may not necessarily agree with the decision," Myron said. "You were responsible for the death of one of our own. And now you must answer for it."

"To his father? Call me crazy, but what's impartial about that?"

Myron spread his hands in an elegantly helpless gesture. "You saw the game, my dear. He won the vote. In fact, you even participated. You had the opportunity to win your freedom. You failed."

These guys were insane. "I didn't know I was playing for it!"

"Would you have played more skillfully if you'd known?" He studied me for a long moment, then reached in his pocket and withdrew a white-gold cigarette case, tapped out a cancer stick, and lit up. "Continue, Charles."

"You will tell me," Ashworth said. "You will tell me how my son died. Now."

Oh, I so didn't want to do this, especially not now. "Look, this is six years old, and we have a real problem, don't you get it? That kid over at the Bellagio has the power to-"

Somebody electrocuted me.

A charge zipped up from the carpet, the metal leg of the chair, into my flesh and bones. I lost control. My body convulsed in a galvanic response, frozen by the current. Electrocution doesn't hurt, in the strictest sense of the word; there's no way to feel pain when every nerve in your body is frying into carbon.

It isn't until it stops that your brain gets the signal and you feel the pain.

The second the current cut out I pitched forward, gasping in great whoops of air, shuddering, feeling as if I'd dived into a lake of fire. Someone's hands kept me from sliding out of the chair. Not Quinn's. He was still across the room, doing an imitation of a statue. I felt a bright sting of panic inside at the thought that they might do that to me again, but I kept myself from babbling. Somehow. I just panted and shuddered and tried to keep my muscles from twitching.

Myron blew out smoke, took another leisurely drag on his cigarette, and said, "I really don't think you should concern yourself with Kevin Prentiss just now, my dear. Please attend to the matter at hand. Charles really has very little patience."

"Tell me how you killed my son." Ashworth's voice had dropped lower, gone gravelly.

I looked at him from underneath tear-matted lashes. "Trust me when I say you don't want to know."

They were going to do it again. No problem. All I had to do was control the situation… disrupt the particle chains as they formed, kill the electric charge and dissipate it, preferably through the carpeting so that it would shock the crap out of all these self-righteous little-

I thought I was prepared for it, but I wasn't. The hands on my shoulders released, and before I could get hold of the whip-fast chain of linking charges the banquet chair became ol’ Sparky again, and I was riding the lightning. I wish I could say that my mind whited out but it wasn't like that. When it was over, I felt every frying nerve and misfiring cell. I couldn't hold back the tears and the sharp-edged whimpers, any more than I could stop the involuntary convulsions that continued in my back, legs, and arms. I smelled something burning. It was probably me. They held me upright in the chair.

And in my ringing ears, Charles Ashworth's calm order came like the voice of doom. "Tell me how you killed my son."

"I'm not a fucking Djinn; the Rule of Three won't work. And I'm not telling you a thing, you son of a bitch," I managed to gasp.

Quinn spoke from across the room. "Joanne, just tell the man. He really will kill you."

"It would be a shame," Lazlo said. He'd stubbed out his cigarette sometime during the last eternity, and was staring down at his clasped hands.

The others around the table looked to be in various stages of discomfort, but nobody was banging a fist and demanding for my torture to be stopped. Even the bartender was still as a ghost in the corner. The duties of the silent employees might even cover body disposal.

I tried to bring myself under control, and reached for wind…

… and slammed hard into a barrier that was as complete as anything I'd ever encountered. Somebody had this place locked down. Tight. It had the smell of Djinn to it.

"Please," Lazlo said. "There is no need for this unpleasantness. All you have to do is tell us what happened. Surely there's nothing you object to in that. I'm certain you already told the story to the Wardens. Why not to us?"

Because I didn't want to remember it.

There was a warning zap through the chair, just enough to sting and make the tears in my eyes break free. I gasped in shallow breaths. Hell, they probably already knew the story, I told myself. They knew everything else. Clearly, fighting wasn't getting me anywhere except a fast trip to a largely hypothetical afterlife. I wasn't ready to die again. Not yet.

I sucked in a deep breath, managed to straighten myself up, and tried my voice. It sounded weak, but steady.

"I'll tell you," I said. "But don't blame me if you don't like it."

I hated Chaz from the first moment I laid eyes on him, and I couldn't really say why. Ever have that happen? Makes you feel ridiculous and prejudicial, but it's nothing you can help. It's some cellular process of repulsion that you have no control over.

That was me and Chaz. Repulsion at first sight. The act of being pleasant to him for more than a minute at a time made me ache like I'd been mining granite with a teaspoon. After an entire day of poking through the chaotic mess of Chaz's confiscated records, enduring enough paper cuts that it constituted human rights violations, I called back to the office and complained about the assignment. I wasn't trying to get out of it, exactly, but I had myself a good whine and begged for help. My boss, John Foster, gave me reassurances and platitudes in his warm Southern voice and told me not to kill the bastard.

One thing I did figure out, from the mess of recycling piled on my bed. Chaz had too much money. Way too much money. I'm not talking about personal funds, like being born rich, although he probably had been; I'm talking about income. I knew how much a Warden of his pay grade should make-I had the pay tables with me. He had five times that coming in and going right back out again, to not-very-well-concealed Cayman Island accounts.

Chaz was definitely dirty. It was just a matter of determining the kind of dirt it was. After mapping the weather patterns, over and over, I decided it had to do with smuggling. Somebody was paying him to make adjustments at specific times, on specific dates. Recurring patterns, too. Classic.

I needed to catch him in the act, though. The Wardens were notoriously forgiving, unless you were caught red-handed; I intended for Chaz to be dead to rights.

Mainly because, as previously stated, I just couldn't stand the little prick. He kept showing up at my motel room, trying to sleaze me into bed, as if that would somehow magically convince me not to hang him out to dry.

On the fourth day, I threw back the curtains and discovered that morning had dawned early and cold, the way it does in the desert; there was something inviting about the emptiness stretching toward the blue blur of mountains.

According to the patterns I'd been mapping, today would be a day Chaz would be trying some manipulation. No use looking in the direction the storm would be blowing; you had to track it upstream, to the point at which it provided cover and protection. It was a good three miles out in the desert, as the vulture flew. No way the Jaguar was made for off-roading, so it was going to be a hike.

I could do with burning off some frustration, I decided, not to mention the carb load I'd built up while chowing down on tuna-fish sandwiches and fries. I had bikini season to worry about. Plus, going on foot would give me an advantage of stealth.

I changed into a jog bra and sweatpants, threw on a thin white T-shirt, and laced up running shoes. There was coffee down in the chilly lobby; the fountain was still tinkling madly away. Somebody-probably a late-night partier-had added a floating Budweiser cup to the extravaganza of dusty silk plants and spray-on stone. I chugged down some heavy-duty caffeine, liberally diluted with fake creamer, and waved to the desk clerk on the way out.

I paused inside the glass doors to adjust my shoes, and as I did, I felt weather shifting. I looked up and found the sky clear, laced with a few high-riding cirrus clouds and reflected orange sunrise. Chaz was already starting up, amazingly enough; I'd honestly thought that he might postpone things, considering he had an auditor sitting right in a ringside seat.

He thought he was good enough that I wouldn't notice. Idiot.

The wind was shifting to the east. I could clearly feel the tug of power from that direction. I braced myself with one hand on the wall and drifted up to the aetheric. Chaz was working quietly to slow a high, fast-moving airflow, creating a cool air mass to the north. That was what caused the wind shift… warm air flowing into the downdrafts. Subtle, and effective. He was creating a hell of a lot of chop that extended in about a five-square-mile radius over my little patch of desert.

I went back to the desk and called Chaz's home office. No answer. I tried his cell phone, too, and got voice mail. He was out there, all right, working on site. Good. I'd be able to get a look at what was going on.

I walked outside, braced myself against the building, and stretched my tendons. Overhead, a small plane buzzed the blue, making erratic circles; it gave up and headed off to the south. Away from the interdicted area affected by the weather shift. I couldn't tell what kind of plane it was, but traffic patrols were common over this expanse; it saved the cost of keeping too many state cruisers on the highways. Aerial surveillance…

… and maybe somebody had something that they didn't want that plane to see. Which explained the chop that Chaz had created a few thousand feet up.

I finished stretching and jogged out onto the shoulder of the road, heading toward the center of the problem area. It was a diagonal line from the hotel and the road, straight out into the middle of God knew where; I oriented myself by the aetheric, not line-of-sight. Getting lost wasn't going to be a problem.

The first half mile was hard as my body adjusted to the new climate; the air was sharp and brisk going down, thinner than I was used to. It tasted sweet, full of subtle dry perfume. No sign of the surveillance plane, which had evidently decided to go surveil somewhere more comfortable. Up on the aetheric, Chaz was still making changes to keep things balanced, but balanced in his favor. I could undo that with a little judicious application of force, but until I knew better what I was up against, there was no reason. Besides, there was no advantage to letting him know that I'd even noticed.

Running in sand was twice as tiring as on a flat surface, but I relished the burn. Sunrise came in a slow, glorious explosion of color as I jogged-layers of gold, tangerine, mauve, dark blue. Nothing moved out in the emptiness; no breeze stirred the sand, and it was too early for snakes and too late for owls. Overhead, an early-rising hawk rode thermals, and out to the far eastern horizon a cloudbank brushed its heavy skirts across mountains.

God, it was beautiful. Even knowing it was being manipulated to look this way, it was heartbreakingly gorgeous.

I stopped when my tendons began screaming for relief, and walked off the cramp, stopping to marvel at the delicate little cacti, the scuttling desert beetles, a wavy line of ants marching up a dune.

I ran on and felt my body settle into a deep, satisfying rhythm. Pulse, lungs, muscles, all working in perfect harmony. I didn't think about running; I just ran. My whole attention was fixed on the center of the disturbance, which lay just ahead.

I was still jogging when I heard voices. Two, off in the distance. We were quite a ways from civilization, at least such as was represented by the Holiday Inn.

I'd finally located Chaz. I had the feeling he wouldn't be happy to see me, which gave me a little burn of contentment; the faster I could get this assignment over with, the better. I'd packed a camera with me. Nothing like Kodak memories to roast him over an open fire back at Warden HQ. I slowed to a walk, keeping mostly to the cover of bushes, ducking when I had to.

I heard two voices. Man and woman. Arguing, by the tone, but the words were smeared on the still desert air. Chaz, you dog. No honor among thieves, is that it?

I hadn't yet reached the top of a little hill when I heard the woman scream. A full-throated shriek of terror, cut off so suddenly it left me cold inside. I dug in and sprinted up the loose sand, topped the dune in a spray of dust, and skidded to a halt.

There was a sun-faded dust-colored Jeep parked in the arroyo below, and the man next to it wasn't Chaz after all. Different body type-middle height, angular, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker with a black baseball cap. Aviator sunglasses. Pale skin, I thought, but that was just an impression, too fast to be reliable. As I came to a stop at the top of the hill, I saw that there was a woman with long black hair lying in the sand at his feet.

She'd fallen or been pushed down on the sand on her belly.

Funny how much you notice in moments like that, with the air so clear and still. The woman had on a faded pair of cutoff jeans and a white tank tee. Long tanned legs and white running shoes.

She was struggling as he knelt down beside her.

He was holding something that glinted hard steel in the morning sun for part of its length, dull red for the rest. As I watched, he plunged the knife overhand into the woman's back, and her reaching hands scratched at the sand, digging, digging, trying to dig her way to freedom.

I heard the high-pitched breathless screams.

I heard them stop.

Shock rolled over me, freezing me in place, and then it was pushed aside by an incoming storm of rage. I lifted up my arms and called the wind, felt it sigh and answer, as if it had been waiting for the chance. You bastard, you're not getting away with this… .

The man down in the arroyo looked up, and the aviator glasses flashed red in the rising sun. There was a bag on the ground next to the woman. Bottles spilling out of it, a confusion of glass winking in the dawn light.

It was a goddamn drug deal gone bad. This was what Chaz had been protecting. Murder.

"You bastard," I whispered, and gathered the wind in my hands to take him down.

Didn't work out that way.

Something hard hit me in the back of the head, and I remember falling, sliding weightlessly on cool dry sand down the hill, into darkness.