Chill Factor (14 page)

‘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 towards 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 voicemail. 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 towards the centre 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 favour. 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 colour 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 centre of the disturbance, which lay just ahead.

I was still jogging when I heard voices. Two, off in the distance. We were quite a way from civilisation, 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 honour 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-coloured 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 cut-off 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.

When I woke up, I was in darkness. My head throbbed like a high-performance engine in need of a tune-up, and I was folded into someplace cramped and hot. Blood tasted burnt copper in my mouth. It took me a few stupid seconds to remember where I’d been, what I’d seen, and I saw the man plunging the knife into the woman’s unprotected back with a shock that made me flinch.

Focus
, I told myself. My senses reported that I was probably in the trunk of a car. A nice big one, at least. Roomy. It smelt of spilt oil and hot metal. There was a wet softness underneath me, and
that
smelt like blood. Mine. My head was bleeding like a son of a bitch, and that edgy light-headedness – that came from shock.

Judging by the road vibration, we were on the highway. I reviewed my options. One, I could stay still and quiet and hope that a ruthless killer forgot he’d stored me back here. That option didn’t look
so good. Two, I could knock the car off the road with a wind strike, get out of the trunk, and rip the bastard limb from limb…that one was actually pretty attractive. I felt around and found nothing to use to pop the trunk – no tyre iron, which was unfortunate; I’d feel a hell of a lot better with a big heavy weapon in my hand. I hadn’t brought my cell phone on the run, and even if I had I doubted the coverage out here in the middle of nowhere.

The car was slowing down. I swallowed a burst of nausea and tried to put myself in the best position possible to launch myself out as soon as the trunk opened. Time to focus, get everything still and quiet inside so that I had the fine pinpoint control of the wind that I required. My pulse refused to cooperate. I’d worked under pressure before, but that had been when I was fighting nature, not a cold-blooded killer. I kept seeing the woman, the knife, the blood. I kept picturing myself face-down in the sand, digging for freedom.

A sudden application of brakes rolled me forward. We were stopping.

I gathered the threads of control together despite the sickening pain in my head. Thermals flowing high and deep, a layer of cool air sinking towards the ground. Warm air slowly circling up. The dance of a stable, quiet system. Chaz had manipulated it to drag the surveillance plane off course, but he’d put everything back, nice and neat.

A Warden had been an accomplice to murder. That made me sick to my soul.

I felt the car shudder as the driver’s-side door slammed shut. Felt, rather than heard, footsteps crunching alongside. A key scraped metal somewhere near my nose, and I braced myself…

…and, as the dark got sliced in half by a square of lemon-yellow light, I let out a warrior’s yell and lunged up, powered by feet braced against the quarter panel. I grabbed at the dark shape standing there, caught fabric, and as he flinched backward I held on and let him pull me the rest of the way out.

As my feet touched asphalt, I superheated the air above us and created the mother of all updrafts. Its power lifted us off the ground. I wrenched free of my captor and stumbled back against the trunk of the car as the man was yanked upward by the airflow, out of control.

‘Wait a minute! Joanne! Help!’ he yelled, and I froze and clawed hair back from my eyes.

Chaz Ashworth III, pale as milk, was hovering up there, on the verge of taking a trip to Oz the hard way. I had planned to express-train him right up to the freezing cold and low oxygen content of the higher regions, which would knock him out in seconds, but now I had a problem.

Chaz wasn’t the killer.
That
guy had been shorter, thinner, scarier. Chaz just looked clumsy and ridiculous.

I slowly reversed the process, calming down the wind a little at a time, balancing forces until Chaz touched down on the gravel of the shoulder of I-70. A petulant burst of wind blew past us, stinging me with sand.

‘What the hell—’ I began, but he held out both hands, palm out, to stop me.

‘I can explain. Everything. Just…don’t do that again, OK?’ He looked genuinely spooked. ‘We can’t stay here. Get in the car. Please. Hurry!’

‘Why was I in the trunk?’

‘It was the only way I could get you out of there without…’ He darted anxious looks at the empty horizon, the blank shimmering road. ‘Just get in the car, OK? Please?’

‘I saw him kill that woman.’ I don’t know why I said it; it was almost as if the words were under pressure; I couldn’t keep them in. I had to get rid of that moment, that image, that horrible silent pantomime of death. ‘He stabbed her in the back.’

Chaz’s face went even whiter, if that was possible, and his eyes had a blank, haunted look. He grabbed my arm, moved me aside, and slammed the trunk. Hustled me around to the passenger side of the car, which I now saw was his road-monster of a Seville, maroon, with pimp-gold trim and wheels. I wasn’t shocked to find he’d gone with the expensive Italian leather interior. It felt cold and stiff against me as I edged inside. Chaz ran around
the long hood and piled into the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and scratched gravel out onto the road again.

When the speedometer was pegged at eighty, he pulled a deep breath and said, ‘Look, you have a nasty bump on the head; maybe you imagined—’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Hey, give me a chance here, honey—’

I held out a shaking finger at him. ‘
Not
your honey, and the next time you give me some name like
baby
or
sweetheart
I’m going to kick your ass so hard you can read your underwear label. Got me?’

He was silent. Typed a message on the steering wheel in urgent Morse code. Finally nodded.

‘Who was he?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I hate to repeat myself, but ass? Underwear label? I know you were manipulating the weather out there to drive off aerial surveillance. Drugs, right? He was making some kind of drug deal.’

‘
I don’t know!
’

‘You get paid. You have to know his name.’

He looked really ill now. ‘Look, I just know him as Orry, OK? Orry.’

‘Know him how?’

‘Business.’

‘And again, see previous threat.’

‘No, I’m serious, we have a business
arrangement,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know he was…you know.’

‘Killing unarmed women?’ I felt sick to my stomach, but damned if I’d throw up in front of Chaz. ‘What kind of business arrangement?’

‘He pays me to keep the weather clear for his couriers, and knock police planes off course. You know, the surveillance planes, like you said. That’s—’

I interpreted. ‘He pays you to facilitate trafficking.’ Which explained Chaz’s unusual weather patterns out here in the barrens. He’d been manipulating systems to create clear paths for the planes coming in, and storm fronts to frustrate the cops. ‘Jesus, Chaz.’ I rubbed my aching head. ‘You had to know you’d get caught.’

He got a crafty look. Great. Chaz, who was monumentally stupid, actually thought he was
clever
. ‘Well, I’m not the only one, you know. Everybody gets a little something on the side. It’s how the Wardens work.’

I stared at him, lips parted. Amazed. ‘What?’

‘Oh, come on, drop the innocent act. Look, I agree, Orry’s out of control… Jesus, I freaked when I saw what he’d done to that poor girl. The only thing I could do was get you out of there. He was going to kill you!’

‘So you saved me by knocking me out and sticking me in the trunk of the car.’ Which made me wonder
how the hell he’d got a maroon pimp-trimmed Seville all the way out into the desert like that, without having it become a permanent desert monument. It wasn’t exactly an SUV. In fact, there was no way he’d driven this car all the way out there.

But there
had
been a dun-brown Jeep parked near the arroyo, which would have nicely done the job of carting my unconscious body back to the roadside.

It belonged to the killer. Orry.

I turned my face away from Chaz, afraid what it might say.

‘How’d you get me back to the car?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Did you drag me? We were a long way out in the desert. That’s a hell of a distance to carry me.’

‘Well, I couldn’t leave you out there.’ He tried to sound altruistic. It came off as ridiculous. ‘Let it go, Joanne. Look, I have money. Lots of it. Just give me a bank account number and you’re an instant millionaire, I swear. All you have to do is turn in a good report to the Wardens and take the money, right? It’s what all the others did.’ The three previous audits. He’d greased the wheels. Of course. No wonder the audits had smelt funny.

‘Did the others see a woman get killed?’ Her hands, scrabbling at the dirt, fumbling for rescue. ‘What’d she do, Chaz? Short-change the shipment? Blackmail him?’

He sighed. ‘You’re not going to take the money.’

It would be smart to tell him I would, but I wasn’t in the mood to lie. ‘No.’

‘I knew. I knew the minute I saw you. You know what you look like in Oversight? Goddamn Saint Joan the martyr. You burn real bright, Joanne, but you’re burning yourself right up.’ Chaz shook his head. ‘It’s the
way things work
. You take the money and you shut the hell up. Look, you do good things, right? We all do. We save people. Why shouldn’t we make a little—’

‘
She’s dead!
’ I shouted, and was a little shocked at the raw edge of fury in my voice. ‘And you’re finished. Understand? This is over.
Over
. Nobody else dies.’

Chaz sent me a pitying look. He reached down, picked up a cell phone that lay on the seat between us, and dialled a number. ‘Yeah, I’m on I-Seventy, coming up on the caves. Be there in a couple of minutes.’

Guess I was wrong about the cell coverage
, I thought stupidly. He hung up. I stared at him, at his neat preppy outfit, his perfect tan, his expensive manicure.

‘
You
knocked me out,’ I said. ‘
He
drove me back to your car. Why didn’t you just leave me there? The two of you already killed one woman; why not two?’

‘Look, you don’t have the slightest idea of what’s
going on,’ he said. ‘I can’t just kill you. If you disappear, I’m going to have to answer questions. Just…just take the money, OK? Take it and go. You weren’t supposed to come out here in the first place; you were supposed to stay in Las Vegas.’

‘This was where the trouble was.’

‘And you go looking for trouble. Great. Out of all the Wardens, I have to get the Lone Ranger.’

Unfortunately, I was terminally short a Tonto. We passed a flashing blur of a road sign that read C
ARLSON
C
AVES, 1
M
ILE
. So I had about forty  seconds to figure out what to do. The problem was  that I was wounded, weak from blood loss, and I  was facing another Weather Warden, which was the  worst possible match-up. We could hurt each other,  all right, but we’d hurt everybody else a hell of a lot  worse. At least neither of us had a Djinn – that  made it a little less destructive.

I eyed the cell phone. If I could call for help… No, they couldn’t get here in time. Well, if I called John Foster, he could task his Djinn to get me out of here; that was something…

I made my decision, and grabbed for it. Chaz jerked the wheel sharply to the left, tossing me against the passenger door; the phone clattered noisily against window glass and slid into the dim recesses of the back seat.
Fuck
, I was committed. Too late for caution now…

I called wind.

So did Chaz.

The car spun out, slammed from two different directions by fifty-mile-per-hour gusts. It skidded weightlessly, grabbed gravel, and tilted, and I nearly lost control of the freight-train blast of the jet stream I’d redirected. Airborne rocks pelted glass with snare-drum impacts, and something heavier hit and shuddered the frame. The glass on my side spider-webbed. I pushed harder, because Chaz was reaching over to grab me, and the Seville tilted up on its side, groaned like a living thing, and rolled.

The window shattered and fell away as gravity writhed, and I yelped and hit the car again with a roar of wind, rolling it again back over on its tyres. I squirmed out the broken window and ignored the hot drag of glass splinters against my skin, slithered out, and fell onto hot sand. The Seville was still moving, blasted by the jet stream, and I cowered as it was pushed over me. I hit it again with a gust, this one more than a hundred miles an hour, and it flipped up in the air and spun like I’d shot it out of a cannon. It travelled about twenty-five feet before slamming back down on its tyres on top of a saguaro cactus.

I killed the wind and realised that something had happened to me. A numb feeling in my leg. I twisted around and looked, and saw a piece of shiny metal embedded in the back of my thigh, big as a flatiron, sharp as a knife. I went light-headed
and grey, looked away and breathed deep.

That was when I realised that it wasn’t over.

Out in the distance, something terrible was happening. A growing roar of power, thundering out of control; he’d done this, or I had, or both of us had sparked it like a match in a powder keg. I reached for the wind but couldn’t grab it; it was slick as glass, moving too fast, too full of its own fury.

A smear on the horizon.

An ominous layer of haze.

A wave of brown, turning black. Breaking like surf. Birds were flying frantically south ahead of it, but I could see the wave overtaking them. I’d heard stories of black rollers from the dust bowl, but I’d never actually seen one; it was terrifying, awesome, uncontrollable. A sea of darkness blotting out the sun as it came, a horizontal tornado of lethal force. It was picking up everything in its path – cactus, tumbleweeds, fences, barbed wire, the shredded remains of animals unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.

Coming right at me.

I screamed and tried to grab for it again, but it was too much, too big; it would take a vast power sourced in Djinn to handle this thing.

Think
. No time to run; it was almost on me. If I stayed where I was, it would strip the flesh off my bones, scour me dead. The wind wall inside the
thing had to be upward of 150 miles per hour, maybe higher.

I did the only thing I could think of. I created a cushion of hardened air over me, locked the molecules tightly together, sealed myself in a bubble, and prayed.