Mindbenders (8 page)

“To an extent, yes. Dave was my friend.”

“—and you’re going to make amends? By deciding the old team is in danger—based on what, you’ve no idea—and taking it upon yourself to be noble and save us?” Sarcasm dripped from her voice; the words seemed to hit him like blows.

But something must have struck him funny, too, because his head rose and he was watching Fine now the same way Tauber had been watching him, sizing her up as though he’d never seen her before. “Dave left a trail,” he said. “Based on the trail and the way it was presented and the feelings I got from it, I’m here. You know as well as I do that we can’t rationalize everything we know. I didn’t take
anything
on myself—Dave left me the list.”

“It seems to me he left
Greg
the list,” Fine said and Max turned immediately to Tauber, accusing.

“She got that out of
your
head,” he glared.

Tauber raised his arms in protest. “She’s my teammate,” he said. “I don’t block her.”

“So Greg’s the list,” Fine repeated and suddenly I felt that warm feeling in the back of my head again, though it wasn’t as sharp as before, more of a mellow, sympathetic feeling. It would be so nice to have someone looking out for me. She was looking at me in a way that was more than sympathetic. I’d never thought much about older women but she probably had a good TV and really nice sheets. “The list led you to me, is that it?” she continued. “So maybe
I’m
supposed to make some decisions now.”

“It’s supposed to help us get the old team together, so we can fight the killers,” I said.

“That’s
his
interpretation,” Fine said. “How do you know? Maybe the list needs to be heard by other people. Maybe it needs to be thought about and examined in a peaceful setting, instead of running all over creation like chickens with your heads cut off. Doesn’t that make sense?” With the look she was throwing me, it made lots of sense.

“Greg,” Max said, “when you gave me the first name, we both knew we had to go find him. I didn’t force you—you knew it was the answer. You felt it like I did.”

“Based on what?” Fine asked. “What facts do you have for that decision?”

“We don’t work on
facts
!” Max spat. “We know what we know! Intuition, embedded emotion and experience.”

“He’s powerful, Miriam,” Tauber told her. “He’s not a conscript. He’s a natural.”

“Oh, no question about it,” she said. “He’s
the
natural. The greatest there ever was.” And now Max looked distinctly uncomfortable again.

“You
know
him?” Tauber said, sitting up in his chair.

“Of course I do. I’ve seen his picture a thousand times. It’s Renn!”

“Renn?!!” Tauber sat up like the name had attacked his spine. The look on his face mixed awe and horror. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, the alien wanderer, the visitor who didn’t speak the language anymore.

“Renn,” Fine repeated, holding the name on the end of her tongue. “The cream of the crop, the man who knows
everything
. Look at him now—tired, poor, hiding from the world. So paranoid he didn’t even realize old Dave Monaghan had enemies of his own. Because everything’s about him,
has
to be about him.”

Renn—I was just getting used to Max—stared at her, sullen but not denying anything she said. Not even trying.

“Renn—all the stories we heard! And now here you are, not even powerful enough to get whatever Dave left in this one’s head.” Fine’s voice was ringing, commanding, hypnotic. It had been that way, I realized, for several minutes.

 “I came in good faith,” Renn said after a long moment. “If I had bad intent, I could have dumped them on the front lawn and left them for you to deal with, couldn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you?” Fine asked.

“I don’t know,” Renn muttered, looking around the room as though he was lost. “It would have been pretty easy.” Then he stopped, staring at me. “Because I had to
know
,” he said all at once, his voice gaining strength, gaining its usual power back. “Dave was murdered. I have to know why. And whoever did it has to pay.”

“Right,” I said immediately. “That’s right.” It’s why I’d come, despite all my doubts about him, about everyone around me, despite all the fucked-up things that had happened. We were going to rally the old team, whoever they were, and go after the bad guys, whoever
they
were. It was as though the sun had just popped through the clouds, as though my head had suddenly cleared.

I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting
you
,” Fine continued. She looked older all of a sudden, her put-together coming slightly apart. “If you’d come from the North, we’d have foreseen…but, no matter.”

Suddenly it seemed like Max’s head had cleared too. He leapt from his chair to the window. I saw nothing going on outside, but he was ramrod straight with that miles-away expression I’d seen in the car. I knew all at once that, whatever had grabbed his attention, it wasn’t miles away.

“The great Max Renn,” Fine narrated, “not even powerful enough to see what was right in front of his nose.”

Max jumped from the window and grabbed my arm. “They’re coming!” he called. “We have to go!”

“Too late,” Fine clucked.

“
Now
!” Renn yelled, hurtling toward the back door. I turned—Tauber stood next to Fine, an apologetic look on his face but not moving.

“You don’t have to go,” Fine told me pointedly. “You’re not wanted for anything. We can get that unwanted information out of your head.”

I wavered for a moment—all those feelings I’d had a moment earlier flashed through my head.
She had every reason to feel good about herself
. So organized. So put-together. I could see her lying rumpled and naked on those nice thousand-threadcount sheets—boy, I saw that real clear all of a sudden.
What
unwanted information? Get it out of my head
how
?

Fine’s face was a look of triumph and that tipped the balance for me. Every time I’d ever seen triumph on somebody’s face, it always seemed to involve marching
toward
the machine guns.

I ran for the back of the house. Max threw the door open and we bounced across the short lawn and into the woods, just ahead of the sound of cars screeching to a halt, doors slamming, voices shouting and footsteps coming up fast behind us.

~~~~

Five

We plunged into the thick brush, the boots pounding out the back door and tearing through Fine’s yard, trampling all the neat greenery while voices barked orders from every direction. Max was running really hard—I was puffing just trying to keep up with him. I’d spent a year in the Everglades, where even tree branches get lazy. But the undergrowth was so thick here under the trees that it was dim as dusk at nine in the morning. In such a place, a couple yards might be enough for us to get away.

The footsteps behind were so close, I didn’t even dare look back at first. But we started to pull away and I realized that, as Max—Renn—approached bushes and trees, they were actually bending out of his way, like he was projecting some invisible shell ahead of him—and whipped back with a vengeance once we passed, which really helped gain us some space. I heard angry voices cursing and shouting behind my back. And then I was startled by a whooshing sound and turned to see, just a few feet away, a twister sprung right up out of the ground. It was a little one, not one of those Hollywood ones that swallow gymnasiums, but it was enough, sucking up the forest floor and whipping the whole mess—leaves, twigs, bark, branches, pine cones, berries, vines, dust and moss—into a smoky column skittering interference between us and them.

Renn’s voice said
Follow me
and he peeled off to the left. I obeyed and then realized he hadn’t said anything aloud—I’d heard his voice in my head. The whirlwind continued in our original direction, and I heard what sounded like fifteen sets of footsteps following. “Fan Out!” yelled a deep voice and I peeked through the trees at the leader, a bulky guy in a dark nylon jumpsuit pointing in the wrong direction. “Get around it!” The posse fought through the bracken and uproar into the distance while we sprinted, puffing hard, uphill—I could make out a cluster of houses ahead, somewhere beyond the construction cranes.

And then the hill came to a sudden end, dropping off abruptly to a sunken roadbed cleared to bare earth and huge piles of dirt and stone held back by thick-tied cable netting. Empty bulldozers and earthmovers completed the picture.

The long-finished houses we’d glimpsed over the treetops were just across the roadbed, on the other side of the piles. We slid down the incline and right into two men in dark blue nylon, coming up the other direction between an artificial hill and a high pile of encased stone. They greeted us immediately by pulling out their Glocks. Why did everyone but us have big guns?

“Stand still!” the taller, bearded one ordered Max. “You stay right where you are. You’re not touching me.” He touched his earpiece. “We’ve got ‘em.” He tried it a few times, then turned to the younger man next to him. “Contact them. Let them know.”

The younger man touched his earpiece several times. “I’m not getting anything,” he said.

“
He’s
jamming it,” Beardman said. He gestured with his gun. “Okay—cross your hands behind your backs and stand still. G here will wrap your wrists and put on your headpieces. Then we’ll go down and meet the others.”

The younger man pulled two black plastic bundles from his pocket. When he opened them, they turned out to be wrap-around goggles with prominent earpieces and blinking LCD’s at the temples. I had no idea what they were but they didn’t look friendly.

“Your bosses won’t promote you,” Renn told him coolly. “You’re too ambitious. They like employees who are grateful.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Beardman returned. “Try harder.”

As G came toward us, Max actually leaned forward and threw a punch. I was shocked—I’d never seen him react in a physical way to anything and, what with the guns and all, it didn’t even make sense. He wasn’t much good at it either—he completely missed, succeeding only at knocking the goggles out of G’s hands. Beardman kicked Max’s legs out from under him and, as soon as he hit the ground, shoved the Glock to his temple. “Okay, if that’s how you want it,” he said. “Tie him first,” he told the younger man, who put the ties around Max’s wrists and pulled them really tight. Then he lifted him up again and propped him against me while he turned to get another plastic tie for me off the ground.

I felt the vibrations coming off of Max as soon as he leaned against me. I could feel the hum sweeping from his shoulders and feet into the trunk of his body, intensifying and deepening until he somehow was a tone, a deep bass note that overwhelmed all other sound as long as he was touching me.

“Okay,” he called out as the vibration built—I could feel the effort it took for him to talk, “how about this? You’ve got a spot on your lung. Cancer. You need to have it looked at. It’s not big; if they act quickly—”

 “Shut up!” Beardman shouted. “I need a diagnosis, I’ll call a doctor!” He turned to his companion. “What are
you
waiting for?”

“Are you going to hold his arms?” the kid asked, nervous, looking at me.

“I‘m busy pointing a gun at the dangerous one, okay?
That
one should be easy.” I guess it was kind of an insult at me, but I’d lost all interest by that point in anything anybody was saying.

Because I could see, all at once, what Renn was up to.

Behind Beardman and G stood the pile of stone—twelve or thirteen feet high, held in place by a web of steel cable. While they were talking, the threads of the cable were unraveling themselves. I could hear Renn humming next to me, his body radiating a tone so powerful, I couldn’t believe the Glock boys didn’t hear it. The steel threads were separating faster and faster, until all at once, as G grabbed the second plastic tie off the ground, the netting right behind him groaned and split fifty little fissures and then tore open in five or six places, sending twelve or thirteen feet of stone rushing suddenly down the incline at him—at all of us.

Because I saw it coming, I gained a few precious steps head start and that’s what saved us. At my first step, I felt Max slump, helpless, behind me—his eyes were open but he was lost in some kind of trance, pumping out his bass note. I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him up the slope in front of us. G was hit by the first couple stones that flew out of the pile—they knocked him down and he was buried in seconds. Beardman yelled after me, pointing his gun at my head but he was two seconds worth of indecisive pulling the trigger and that was one second more than he had. He was hit several times around the legs and feet and then a huge shard hit him full on the side of the head and he went down under the deluge. By the time we reached the rim, the entire trench was a dust-billowing pile of rock. I can’t account in any way for how we got out. I heard Max’s voice in my head saying
Head for the house on the left
and I dragged him in that direction.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Not this one—to the left,” he muttered. “I’ll be okay.” He was starting to use his own legs, still wobbly but beginning to support himself a bit while I steered.

I heard shouting down the hill—some of the stone had improvised its way down the roadbed to where it apparently met some of our other pursuers. As I headed for the house on the left, more blue jumpsuits appeared between the other houses on the block, staring down on the avalanche and calling into their earpieces for instructions. How the hell many people were after us?

We scrambled through the back yard, past a shed, several thick trees, lounge chairs and a portable bar. “Around the house,” Max ordered and I obeyed. He was limping and stumbling but at least he was talking normally now—I was ticking off milestones. I needed him full-strength—surely, we had a big fight just ahead. I could see a street just beyond the house but if they had that many guys, how far could we get before they caught us? If this was a movie, we’d hotwire a car but I had no clue how to do that and Max wasn’t in shape to do much of anything. Shouts from down below were being answered by others close by—they’d be on us in a minute. What if he needed a doctor?